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He continued to fill the cupcake casings, but his jaw lost the hard line.
She worked next to him, the silence comforting in its simplicity.
‘I got a tattoo because my mum hated them.’
She hadn’t really expected an answer. Especially not one that made her feel that rare burst of kinship. ‘You did it to annoy your mum? That’s hilarious. That’s exactly why I got mine.’
‘It’s not quite the same. I didn’t get it to annoy her. I got it to make her feel better.’
‘I don’t get it,’ she said, the bubble of excitement bursting to be replaced by something richer and more compelling than curiosity.
‘She was ill,’ he murmured, the words flat. ‘We both knew it was terminal. I had to care for her. And she felt bad that I couldn’t be a normal teenager. So I got a tattoo, to show her I was.’
His eyes met hers, the fathomless brown opaque and unreadable. She supposed the correct thing to do now would be to say sorry. But the word hung in the air, feeling inadequate and dismissive.
She touched his arm, felt the pull of the muscles as they bunched beneath her fingers. ‘When did your mother die?’ Sympathy wasn’t hard to find now, the thought horrifying her.
What would she do if anything ever happened to her own mum? It felt so remote, so unlikely, not something she’d ever considered before, but, now she did, she knew the first thing she’d feel—other than loss—was guilt. At all the things she had said and done over the past few years to annoy or upset her. Deliberately.
She hadn’t even said goodbye to her mum properly before she’d left to go on her book tour. And every time her mum had phoned since, she’d been really stroppy with her.
But what if that was the last time she ever got to speak to her? Or the last time she ever got to see her again?
She couldn’t even remember now why she had been so mad with her.
Trey could see shock and horror in Lizzie’s face; what he couldn’t see was pity.
He should correct her. And tell her the truth. His mum wasn’t dead. She was just sick. Much sicker than she had been four years ago when he’d got that dopey tattoo.
The nurse at the hospice had told him yesterday they didn’t think she had much longer. He didn’t think so, either. As he held her hand, the papery skin so thin it was translucent, her breathing had sounded tortured, each new breath a titanic struggle to defeat the inevitable.
The nurse had told him the last of the senses to go was hearing, so all he could do now was read her the girly novels she loved. He’d been embarrassed to read them when her sight had first started to go, especially all the sexy bits. He wasn’t embarrassed by them any more. The stories took him to foreign lands in times past, with lots of action and adventure and all the sexy bits in between, in the company of characters who were young and fit and able-bodied and didn’t need a catheter or a drip. Transporting him out of the sunny cubicle, where the scent of bleach and bodily fluids could always be detected beneath the masking scent of air freshener; away from the sound of rasping breaths and the sight of the thin grey hair spread out on the pillow, which belonged to a frail husk of a human being who looked nothing like his mum.
Maybe he could have shared all that with Lizzie, the reality of his life outside his job. And the truth about his mum.
She’s had multiple sclerosis since I was thirteen. But she’s not dead. Not yet.
But he didn’t want to tell Lizzie the truth. Because the reality had isolated him so often as a kid. When he was his mum’s primary carer. The truth had made him weird, a freak, and different from everyone he knew.
His responsibilities as her carer had never bothered him—cleaning her teeth, washing her hair, helping her with the bedpan, feeding her when she got too weak to eat. It had all just been a growing part of his daily routine. But as the responsibilities grew, other people became aware of them, and that was what had made him uncomfortable: the social workers who were forever encouraging him to join some stupid club; the kids at school who thought he was a loser because he could never hang out after class; the teachers who didn’t give him a detention when he didn’t do his homework, even though they gave everyone else one.
He didn’t want Lizzie to look at him like that, as if he were different, or, worse, pitiful. He wasn’t sure she would, because she had always seemed pretty direct—not to mention self-absorbed—but he wasn’t going to chance it. Better to take the easy route and tell Lizzie half the truth.
‘She died a few years ago.’
‘That sucks.’
He smiled at the pithy comment. The honest anger on his behalf so much better than the apology he usually got.
Why did people even say sorry to you when someone died, or got so sick they might as well be dead? Did they think it was their fault? And what was he supposed to say back? ‘Don’t worry, it’s OK’ or ‘It’s not that bad’, as if you were comforting them? Or just ‘Thanks’? As if them saying sorry was actually going to help.
‘Yeah, it does suck,’ he replied.
‘Do you have any brothers or sisters?’ she asked, slipping the tray of cupcakes into the oven.
‘No, it was just me and my mum.’
She threw the oven mitt down. ‘That’s even suckier, then.’
