‘But once a week.’ I tried to keep the panic out of my voice. ‘That feels very – infrequent?’
Joe shrugged. ‘It’s all our parents got,’ he said. ‘Do you remember queuing up at the payphone with a handful of coins on a Sunday afternoon?’
‘God, it was always in some draughty stairwell, wasn’t it? No privacy and you’d have like five people waiting, standing about a foot away from you. And none of them would give a shit whether you were bawling your eyes out due to homesickness or being informed about a death in the family.’
‘My parents never got much information out of me,’ said Joe. ‘I was only really ringing to tell them I was alive. And if there was sport on, or I was really hungover, I just wouldn’t call them. They’d have to wait a fortnight.’
I inhaled sharply as we walked into the kitchen. ‘We were monsters,’ I said. ‘They must have been worried sick most of the time.’
‘I don’t think so. It was normal, wasn’t it? They didn’t expect to hear from us every day. It just wouldn’t have been realistic.’ He lifted Margaret off the worksurface giving her his best stern expression.
‘What was normal?’ Layla asked as she walked through from the sitting room where she’d been cueing up this evening’s film on the television.
‘Oh, just me and your mother, reminiscing about the olden days,’ said Joe, Margaret still tucked under his arm, looking faintly aggrieved. ‘Come on. Let’s go check your room for anything you might suddenly decide you can’t live without. Which reminds me. We need to discuss Sideshow Bob…’
Later, once the film was over, the dishwasher on, and the cats shut in the utility room, Joe and I lay in bed, him fast asleep, me wide awake, blinking at the ceiling. I realised that this was the final night that our family unit would spend in this format of ‘parents with a child at home’. As of tomorrow, Joe and I would be ‘parents of a child at university’, and although the distinction sounded arbitrary it really did feel quite momentous. This wouldn’t be the same as having a child leave to go travelling for a gap year (although that would bring its own perils and stresses). And it wasn’t the same as a child returning to live under yourroof once they’d hit their twenties and realised there was no such thing as affordable housing, because this was always seen as a temporary solution, even if they’d been back home for years.
There aren’t many hard markers in parenting. There’s becoming a parent, obviously, when your child first arrives in the delivery room, although my mind was more occupied with concerns about my perineum than the magic of childbirth or the beauty of creation at that point. And there are the developmental milestones as your child learns to crawl and then walk unaided, learns to speak, to read, to feed themselves. There are educational markers – starting nursery and then school, the exams, the results days. And the life skills – learning to drive, catching a train unaccompanied, first kiss, first date, first girls’ holiday abroad. But these were less about parenting and more about the progression of an individual life. The markers of parenthood were few and they were distinct; your child is born, they grow up, they leave home, find a partner, and maybe have children of their own. The timing may be flexible, but the significance of each moment is huge, with a clear before and after. And we were at one of those junctures. A fork in the road. Once we dropped Layla off at university tomorrow, we would have crossed over from the before to the after.
And so, no, I didn’t get a bloody wink of sleep.
Chapter Five
The big day
‘I think I may have just received my firstdick-pic,’ my mother said, her voice brimming with excitement through the car speaker as Joe almost veered off course into the path of an oncoming lorry.
‘Mum,’ I shouted from the back seat. I’d been relegated here due to concerns about Layla feeling carsick and was now buried beneath a mountain of saucepans, pillows and the spiky foliage of Sideshow Bob who was balanced on my lap – of course he was. ‘Don’t make me regret my policy of automatically answering whenever you call. We’re in the car and you’re on speaker, so just be aware that Joe and Layla can hear everything you’re saying too.’
‘Oh, hello darlings!’ She sounded greatly cheered by this news. ‘Well, I’m glad I’ve got the full Harper team on board. Maybe you can help explain this curious situation.’
‘I’m not sure that I’m going to be an enormous amount of help, Meredith,’ Joe said, having righted his steering and settled back into the correct lane.
‘Nonsense,’ Mum said. ‘At least you’ve got one. A penis, I mean. Perhaps you can explain why someone would want to share a photo of it?’
‘Mum,’ I interjected, seeing my husband looking a little panicked. ‘Who did you get this photo from? Was it one of the Silver Surfers?’
‘Showing off his longboard,’ said Joe, tittering to himself.
‘It’s SilverSoulmates, darling. Anyway, I think it was Brian. It’s most peculiar. A little bit out of the blue, you might say.’
‘Youthinkit’s Brian?’
‘Well, I don’t exactly recognise him from the photo, but yes, I think so.’
‘And who is Brian? Have you ever seen him or met him in person? Do you know that he’s who he says he is?’
‘Sounds like she’s seen plenty of him this morning,’ said Joe quietly to Layla, who was also laughing.
I glared at the back of them both. ‘This is serious,’ I hissed. ‘Granmerry is a vulnerable senior citizen. She could be being groomed by some sexual predator.’
Joe snorted. ‘Vulnerable, my arse,’ he said under his breath.
‘I haven’t met him in person, no,’ Mum continued, oblivious to our conversation within the car. ‘He messaged me last week and we’d just been discussing gardening things really. Whether I should plant my spring bulbs yet, the best shrubs for a clay soil, that sort of thing. And then this.’
‘He’s gone straight for the hardy perennial,’ said Joe, smirking away with the self-satisfied air of a man who has stumbled upon a rich source of terrible puns.
‘Are you sure it is one?’ I said. ‘Are you sure it’s a photograph of his… genitals?’ I realised I sounded like an elderly biology teacher.
