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I nodded. ‘My daughter’s on a zero-hours. Except with her, it’s literally zero; she spends most of her time in bed.’
And then Jo did something. She laughed. And my God, it felt so good to have someone laugh at something I’d said on purpose to be funny and not at something I’d got wrong. It felt so good to have someonehear.
‘I don’t like to be too hard on her,’ I said. ‘The world’s a tough place for you young ones, what with Instagram lifestyles and all that. Our K— Polly can’t go out the door until she’s got her eyebrows on. Honest to God, full make-up when she goes for milk.’ I thought I’d managed a light-hearted mickey-take. I didn’t feel too guilty sending Katie up like that, because Katie’s a pain in the neck.
Jo laughed again. She was thinking I was a nice lady. She was starting to trust me. It’s easy to trust a nondescript middle-aged woman in a cagoule in a way it isn’t to trust a middle-aged man in a dirty mackintosh rooting for something in his pockets, if you know what I mean. As for me, I was finding my sense of humour again. All I’d needed was a little encouragement to get it out of the box and dust it off. A bit of connection.
‘Do you go in for those lifestyle accounts?’ I said. ‘YouTube and Twitface and all that? An influencer, that’s what our Polly wants to be, whatever that is. Do you do that? You know, take a photo of some mushed-up avocado on toast and say hashtag healthy eating hashtag avocado?’
Jo giggled. ‘Sometimes. My friends all do it, so…’
‘Oh, I remember that. When I was younger, if my mates wore wellies on their heads, I’d be up that shed looking for mine before you could sayLast of the Summer Wine.’
Jo laughed a lot at that. She shook her head. ‘You’re hilarious.’
She’d never heard ofLast of the Summer Wine, couldn’t have done, she was way too young. It was the way I spoke that tickled her, my funny local accent, but I didn’t care. I have quite good delivery. Deadpan is something you earn the right to once you’ve been around the block a few times, another scarce advantage in the shitstorm of the cruel ravages of time.
By the time we reached the end of Norman Road, we were chatting like best friends. It was the first time in years I’d felt confident talking to someone new. I think it was because she was so much younger. And of course, by the way she reacted I could tell she thought I was the bee’s knees. She rattled on and on and on, the way shy people often do once you’ve pressed the right buttons. Wealthy family, judging by the voice, the casual references to holidays in France, the way she said Mummy and Daddy not Mum and Dad, and the village in Hampshire she called home.
We headed down Heath Road to the mini-roundabout, where the town hall stands white and proud in its gardens. We’d been walking for about twenty minutes by then. From the town-hall walls, soft floods bathed the gardens in vanilla light.
‘That’s where I got married,’ I said, pointing to it.
‘Aw,’ she said. ‘Are you still married?’
‘Can’t you tell? Look at the state of me – of course I’m bloody still married.’
Well, she laughed so much I thought she was going to stop breathing or start crying or both. Must be dry as parchment in your house, I wanted to say but didn’t obviously. That would have stopped the connection we were feeling, the connection I’d set out to find. She was hungry, was Jo. I felt the pit of her starvation in my own stomach, the nasty taste of it in my mouth. We were conjoining like those twins you see on the news sometimes; I could feel it.
‘You could feel her hunger?’ Blue Eyes, popping up on me again. Honest to God, I get so lost in what I’m saying, I forget she’s there.
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘And do you believe that’s possible? To feel someone else’s hunger in your own belly?’
I think for a second. ‘I thought I could feel it, but yes, I might have been over-empathising, what with her being so thin. And all I’d had since my tea was some chewing gum, which I suppose had set my gastric juices off, hadn’t it?’
Mouth twitch. I think that’s a good sign. ‘I think you’re probably right. But you mentioned your magazine quiz telling you that you were highly empathic, and if you’re too empathic, that can be a problem. You’re not differentiating sufficiently between yourself and others. You’re suffering on everyone else’s behalf, which can leave you exhausted, as you’ve described. So it could well be that the young girl’s thinness upset you, as a mother or as an empath, or both. Do you have experience of being hungry? Very hungry, I mean.’
I almost snort. ‘I tell you what, I’ve been on more diets than Gwyneth Paltrow’s had colonic irrigations. I’m always on some diet or other, starving myself, and of course by late afternoon I’m snatching chocolate bars from passing toddlers. So yes.’
She raises her eyebrows and presses her mouth tight, a slight nod: there you go, then – it was your association of the vivid experience of hunger after all. We read so much in the expressions of others, don’t we? Like that, just now, actual words in the simple realignment of a few facial muscles. It can be less, much less – the smallest twitch of the ears, an all-too-hasty nod, and you still understand, you still hear the words that were never said. Jo communicated her hunger to me in the high set of her shoulders, the way she held her arm across her belly, her hand a soft fist. It’s possible I smelled hunger on her breath along with the wine. That halitosis models get from starving themselves, I read about it in… oh, some magazine or other. What a world we live in. And there we were, Jo and I, stopped at the perimeter fence to the town hall.
‘My secret place is in there,’ I said, nodding towards the dark gardens.
‘Up there?’ Jo pointed to the trees that hide my special bench. Her sleeve fell back to reveal a criss-cross of thin pink scars. A cutter. Suicidal thoughts sometimes, I bet.
‘I go there when I’m stressed or angry or whatever. When I feel like the world doesn’t understand me.’ World doesn’t understand me? World doesn’t bloody see me, I thought. It has no interest in understanding me what-so-bloody-ever.
She peered into the darkness. She was thinking about how the world didn’t understand her either but that I did. There was a longing in her. You could feel it in the air. She was pining for connection too. She was so lonely inside the walls she’d built around herself. She needed a mother, but not the one she had. She needed a mother like me.
‘I can’t see anything,’ she said.
‘It’s up at the top of that grass verge,’ I said. ‘Behind the trees. You can’t see it from here.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s just a bench beside a little pond. In the summer, it’s very pretty, and you can feed the ducks. I used to take our Polly and our Kie… vin there. But in the evenings no one ever goes there. Well, except me, of course. And the dog.’
