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‘I wish I could ask Paula the same way I can you,’ said Roberta. ‘I think I cursed her calling her that name. Your dad’s mother. Can you remember her?’
‘She died before I was born, Mum.’
‘Did she?’ Roberta seemed surprised by that. ‘You were saved that ordeal then. Paula Corrigan wasn’t just cold, she was frozen solid. He didn’t have any love growing up, your dad – yet he cried like a baby at her funeral. I still, to this day, think he was crying for the mother he wished she’d been rather than the one she was. Poor Harry.’
Her dad had said to Shay once, when they were in an empty hospital waiting room, that he’d wanted to be a better parent than his own but he hadn’t been. He’d got himself in a proper loop about being a rotten dad. And Shay had told him that she’d grown up warm and safe and well fed and happy. And that when she needed him most, he was there for her and he’d brightened to hear that. She said she loved him and he’d said he loved her but he had a block about telling her because he’d been brought up never hearing those words. Then he’d been called into the consulting room and that was the first and last conversation they’d ever had on the subject, the first and last time he said he loved her.
‘I’ve been thinking about before a lot recently,’ Roberta said then.
Shay knew what she meant bybefore. They never talked about it; there was no point in moving away from it only to revisit it.
‘It was that skip next door, Shay. I felt it was trying to tell me something, as if it had been put there for a reason. It’s taken me a long time to work out what it was.’
‘I’m all ears.’
‘That I was wrong and your father was right,’ said Roberta.
This was turning into one of her mum’s puzzles, which made sense to her but meant nothing to anyone else.
‘We shouldn’t have come here. Harry said we needed to stay and I said we had to go and I won. We both wanted to protect you in our own ways, but I thought my way was better. I tried to pretend it hadn’t happened, you see, but you can’t rewrite the past just because it’s easier. Not when you see people getting hurt by the lies.’
Shay clicked off the hotbrush and sat down at the table, let her mum talk uninterrupted.
‘I thought of that boy, the one who died. You brought him for tea, do you remember? He ate as if he’d not eaten for months. His little face came out of nowhere into my head, covered in buttercream he was.’ She smiled and Shay felt a flare of pain deep inside her, a dormant scar reminding her of its presence.
‘We left because I didn’t want them to hurt you any more but you never properly healed, did you? I saw that over the years, even though I tried not to. We should have stayed and braved it out like Harry said. But a part of me at the time was scared… because… I wasn’t sure what the truth really was, Shay. I’m ashamed of that, because Harry never doubted you.’
‘It was the absolute truth,’ replied Shay, feeling the rate of her heartbeat increase, the blood heating her cheeks.
‘I’m sorry. When I got that letter I realised I was wrong, I should—’
Shay’s head jerked. ‘What letter?’
‘From the Smith boy.’
‘A letter from Denny?’
‘Yes, I’m sure…’ Roberta’s voice tailed off into a groan. ‘But I can’t have got a letter from him, can I, Shay?’
Shay shook her head. ‘No, Mum. Denny was long gone by the time we moved here.’
‘Oh, I wish I’d written this down when it came to me.’
‘Mum, don’t get yourself in a state. It doesn’t matter.’
‘It does matter, Shay.’
Roberta knew what she wanted to say mattered a lot and she foraged deep into her brain to try and recall the letter, because it had to be real, it came with too many feelings of confusion and guilt and regret to be a mere trick of the mind. She tried to keep hold of the memory and pull ittowards her because it was important, but she felt it slipping away into the fog and she growled, frustrated at herself, pressing her fingertips into her forehead. ‘Oh, I don’t know what I’m saying. It’s gone.’ The shards of glass in her head, which the sight of the big orange skip had briefly brought together to form a whole clear picture, crashed down to the ground into an indecipherable jumble.
‘I called my daughter Shay because it was his mother’s name,’ she said then.
‘Who, Mum?’
‘Omar Sharif,’ said Roberta.
Shay stayed longer than usual with her mum, until she was settled, until the only thing she was nattering about was making sure that she didn’t miss the feature lengthPoirotthat was coming on TV. Shay left her calm, warm, content with a pot of tea and a plate of biscuits on her coffee table. After she’d closed the front door behind her, she stalled for no discernible reason, turned on the step, went back inside and gave her mother an extra kiss, although Roberta was too engrossed in David Suchet by then to even notice.
When she got home, Shay checked Omar Sharif’s mother’s name only to discover it was, in fact, Claire. She wasn’t quite sure why she’d bothered or what it would have meant had she found that she and Mrs Sharif shared a name. But there was an end to it anyway; let her mother remember her affair with Omar Sharif and the ice creams they’d had strolling down the prom for the manufactured truth it was.
