Page 3 of The Trip of a Lifetime

‘“With very best wishes, Sharon Sawyer, Executive Producer, Arcade TV.”’

Erin looked down at me, her eyes wide, a look of disbelief on her face.

‘Are you going to do it, Nana?’ she asked me.

‘No, of course I’m not,’ I said quickly – perhaps a little too quickly.

‘Why not? You should. It’s fifty grand!’

‘That first race was… well, it was a lot. I’m not sure I would want to put myself through that again. I’m seventy years old now. I was only twenty when I raced before.’

‘You never really told me about it. I mean, I know you were in that first race but I’ve never seen the original. You didn’t win it, did you?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I did pretty well for a while, but another contestant tripped me up on the last leg.’

‘What, literally?’

‘No, he… Harrison… well, he tricked me and I missed the train.’

‘What a bastard,’ she said, and I smiled at her solidarity.

‘Quite.’

I hadn’t thought about this in a while. It always left a sour taste in my mouth. To think that Harrison could have done that to me after the wonderful time we had spent together… and this was exactly why I didn’t think about it. It made me feel a bit angry and hurt – probably most of all, hurt.

I got back up to make the tea and left Erin rereading the letter.

‘I really do think you should do it,’ she said. ‘You’ve always been so daring; I admire that. You put me to shame with your endeavours: doing the three-peak challenge, wild swimming, that time you got that group at work to run the half-marathon.’

She sighed as I handed her the mug. These were all things I’d done years ago, mostly while I was still working at the building society. We both knew that I had limited my world over the last couple of years. This flat, my local shops and one book group once a month were my challenges now. Not really challenges at all. I had arthritis in my knee and used that as the perfect excuse to be comfortable at home.

‘Hamish says I’m not adventurous at all,’ Erin said despondently.

Hamish, the boyfriend that I wasn’t at all keen on. So, that sigh wasn’t directed at me then; it was at herself.

‘I wouldn’t believe everything that man has to say.’

‘Why? Do you think I’m adventurous?’ she asked, and I nearly laughed.

Erin played it safe, all the time. To be fair to her, she had always been a cautious child and completely opposite to her fear-loving mother. Clare had been the adventurous one in the family. Her father always said, If she could have been born on a unicycle, she would have, which made me wince at the very thought, but he wasn’t wrong. That girl came out cartwheeling and didn’t stop until her cancer diagnosis forty-three years later.

Motherhood had made me careful but Clare’s spirited call to arms in every aspect of her life eventually rubbed off on me and I began to live a little less vigilantly. I became that twenty-year-old girl again for a while, the one that said yes to the trip of a lifetime.

Erin was born when Clare was only eighteen but she embraced motherhood in the same way she embraced every other aspect of her life. She considered being a young mother as an opportunity, certainly when Erin was a young child, perhaps less so as she got older and reached her teens.

I wanted to be a grandmother Erin could be proud of and I think I have been. But even I have to recognise I have given up a bit recently. How can I scoff at Erin’s question when I’m not at all adventurous now. I have limited my world and I wouldn’t admit it, but Erin’s lack of bravery sometimes comforts me a little. I wouldn’t want to lose her too.

‘I think you are very careful,’ I said. ‘And there is nothing wrong with that.’

She looked at me doubtfully and I felt a tug of shame. I should be encouraging Erin, not wrapping her in a safety net. Clare would be appalled.

‘Well,’ she said, placing the letter on the table, ‘I think you should, at least, go and watch the old series. I’m going to.’

She made a note of the passcode and the website on her phone and then drank her tea.

2

ERIN