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NINE
Love can’t be purchased. Affection has no price.
A candy-pink Post-it note written in gold marker pen.
For the first year, my mother’s relationship with Matty was picture perfect, a fairy tale. He’d dance her around the living room, the two of them singing along to ‘Love You Inside Out’. Surprise her with flowers. Bring her breakfast in bed– Because you looked too pretty to wake.
But then things started to change; gradually, the way the tide comes in. Inching closer so you don’t notice it until your shorts are wet and your sandcastle’s a shrinking mound.
The building tension advanced in increments up the shoreline. Silence where there used to be conversation. Frowns where there had been smiles.
Matty and I still played the Prisoner Game, but whereas before my mother had watched us with sparkly-eyed approval, now she was twitchy. Matty’s sense of fun seeming to destroy hers, to bring out the worst in her.
‘You’re a bit old for that,’ she’d snap. Or, ‘That’s enough now.’ And when that didn’t work, ‘Time to set the table, Sophie. I’m not going to ask you again.’
‘Not going to ask again? Sounds like a result to me, eh pumpkin.’
‘You’re not helping, Matty. Sophie, come and do what you’re told.’
Why did she have to nag so much, to be such cold water? What had changed? Since when had she become so stern, so like Nanna G?
You’ll drive him away, I thought. Can’t you see?
Is that why my father had left? Did she drive him away too?
Matty stopped coming over as much as he used to. He’d make plans to see us and not show up. Then when we were together, it was as though a light inside him had gone out. If he smiled, it looked like he was working at it. If he laughed, it sounded hollow.
I blamed Nanna G as much as my mother. I’d listened in on enough phone calls to tell the damage she was doing with her dust-bowl discontent.
‘It’s been over a year. What are you waiting for, Amelia-Rose? Don’t you want a normal life?’
‘You’re not suggesting I propose to him?’
‘Of course not. But you could nudge things along. Does he even know you’d like to get married?’
‘I think so.’
‘“I think so”, isn’t good enough. You need to be clear about what you need.’
‘I don’t want to pressurise him.’
‘So what, you’d rather sit around playing house without a ring on your finger?’ She clucked her tongue on the roof of her mouth, a knock of disapproval. ‘You’re sleeping with him, I suppose.’
‘Mom!’
‘What I’m saying is, where’s his incentive to tie the knot? You’re already giving away everything for free.’
‘I—’
‘And what about Sophie? Do you really think it’s a good idea for you to be parenting on your own?’
It wasn’t just about what was good for me though. Or Nanna’s notions of respectability. Truth is, she had wedding fever. Same as pretty much everyone on Planet Earth right then.
My grandmother didn’t own a passport and had never ventured further from home than New York City. But that didn’t stop her being a massive fan of the royals. And with Charles and Diana about to get hitched, she was fizzing over like the baking soda volcano I’d made for the school science fair.
‘Your father and I are getting up to watch it live on TV,’ she told my mother, voice crackling over the speaker phone.
‘Five in the morning,’ Grandad grumbled in the background. ‘It’ll still be dark.’
