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  ‘Ah, thanks, Holly. I feel the same about you,’ she says, firmly taking my hand, to my surprise, and squeezing it. ‘Thank you for everything. You did more than any of us ever asked you to.’ She looks at the door and her face changes. She lets go of my hand. ‘Fuck it, they’re here and I look a mess.’

  ‘You don’t.’ I grab another tissue and dry her face.

  She straightens her turban, smooths down the bed blankets and slowly, painfully adjusts her position. She reaches to the drawer in the locker beside her and retrieves an envelope. I recognise it as the one she and Jewel chose on the day I set up the stationery in Joy’s home. My eyes fill again, I cannot control my emotions. She hands it to me and our eyes lock.

  ‘Now you have to go. Go, leave, goodbye,’ she says, shooing me away.

  ‘Good luck,’ I whisper.

  I have to remember, for every goodbye, there’s been a hello. And there’s nothing more wonderful than a hello from one person to another. The sound of Gerry’s voice each time he picked up the phone. When he opened his eyes in the morning. When I came home from work. When he watched me walking to meet him and made me feel like I was everything. So many beautiful hellos, only one real goodbye.

  Ginika is busy today, fixing what she can, preparing the world for the gap she will leave, preparing for the biggest goodbye to the most important person in the world to her.

  Jewel’s foster mother has arrived with Jewel, and Ginika has asked for Denise and Tom to attend. They wait outside the room with their solicitor. Ginika has a will to write, with Jewel’s guardians to add. The rules usually only allow two visitors at a time but for Ginika, in these circumstances, they allow for all necessary parties to be present. For their privacy, I step out of the room as soon as they all arrive, but I do procrastinate. I stay to watch as Ginika uses every bit of the dying energy from her body to take Jewel from Betty’s arms, and place her in Tom’s arms. A great hello.

  If only Gerry knew what he’d started.

  Of course I’ll never know what Gerry was thinking when he wrote his ten letters for me, but I am learning one thing. It wasn’t all for me as I’d believed at the time, it was his own way of trying to continue his life when life had exhausted all avenues, and death was moving closer to catch his fall. It was his way of saying not just to me but to the world, remember me. Because ultimately, it’s all anyone wants. Not to get lost, or left behind, not to be forgotten, to always be a part of the moments they know they’ll miss. To leave their stamp. To be remembered.

  34

  ‘You’ve got to crack a few eggs to make an omelette,’ I say aloud, surveying the disaster site that is my bedroom as I try to pack up for my move.

  ‘Eggs give me the squirts,’ Ciara shouts from further away than I thought. She’s in the spare bedroom next door.

  ‘Ciara!’ I warn.

  She appears at my bedroom door, wearing a peculiar collection of clothes that I just bagged for the shop. All at once, together, mismatched.

  ‘You’re supposed to be helping me fill the bags, not empty them for dress-up.’

  ‘But if I did that, I wouldn’t look like this.’ She poses provocatively against the doorframe. ‘I think I’ll wear this outfit on Friday night.’

  ‘Which one?’ I ask. ‘You’re wearing about three.’

  Putting ten years of clutter into refuse bags, or boxing them to create further clutter in my new home, is taking longer than expected as each letter, receipt and bottom of every pocket of every pair of jeans or coat tells a story and draws me into a memory. I’m used to doing this with great efficiency at work, and yet because it’s personal, every single item is a wormhole and sucks me into another time of my life. Despite feeling suspended in time, one hour becomes two, daylight becomes night. I’m more ruthless with clothes, shoes, handbags and books that don’t hold any sentimental value. Anything I haven’t worn in the past year and can’t believe I ever bought in the first place goes straight into charity bags.

  It’s stressful at first. Everything scattered in piles around me, I’m making more of a mess than I had in the first place, every item is being pulled out of its hiding place, its unnecessariness revealed.

  Triage, Ciara had called it.

  ‘I don’t know how anything actually makes it to the shelves of your shop.’

  ‘That’s why it’s your job to empty the bags and boxes. I have a habit of wanting the things that people don’t want,’ she says cheekily, ‘which Mathew says is a curse but I know it’s a gift, because that’s exactly how I married him and I told him so.’

  I laugh. I sit on the floor, back against the wall. Time for a break.

  ‘I’m so glad you’re doing this,’ she says, relaxing on the floor, legs out, pop socks over a pair of tights. She puts a pair of strappy sandals over the socks and tights. ‘I’m proud of you. We all are.’

  ‘Everybody must have very low expectations of me if selling a house induces pride.’

  ‘It’s more than that and you know it.’

  I do know it. ‘What if I told you it was less about an emotional willingness to mature and more about the fact my kitchen needs an overhaul, the windows need to be replaced, there’s something wrong with the heating and the floors are lifting in the dining room so I hid it with a rug so house viewers wouldn’t notice.’

  ‘I’d say I’m proud of you for not going down with the ship.’ She smiles, and she tries to hold it but it wobbles. ‘I’ve been so scared for you over the past few months.’

  ‘I’m OK.’

  ‘Now all you have to do is find a place to stay,’ Ciara says, singing, twirling a tulle scarf around, as though she’s doing ribbon acrobatics.

  ‘Everything I’ve looked at is so bleh. The last one I looked at had an avocado-coloured bathroom suite from the seventies.’

  ‘Retro is cool.’

  ‘Forty years without other people’s bum bacteria is cooler.’

  She chuckles. ‘I think you’re making excuses. I think you know where you want to live.’

  I feel the torn part of my heart letting me know it’s still there, it’s not going away. No matter how much I try to focus on everything else, it has no intention of healing without my attention. I look around my bedroom. ‘I’ll miss the memories.’

  ‘Gross,’ she says, teasing.

  ‘I don’t want to forget everything, or anything really, but I want …’ I close my eyes. ‘I want to go to sleep in a room where I don’t have an aching longing for someone who’s gone and will never come back. And I want to wake up in a room where I haven’t had the same nightmares.’

  Ciara doesn’t reply and I open my eyes. She’s rummaging through another bag.

  ‘Ciara! I’m baring my soul here.’

  ‘Sorry, but,’ she whips out an old pair of knickers, ‘I’m beginning to get a sense of the painful memories you need to forget. How old are these and please tell me nobody ever saw them.’

  I laugh and try to grab them from her. ‘That bag is for the trash.’

  ‘I don’t know, I think I could fashion these into a new hat.’ She squeezes them onto her head and poses. I pull them off her head.

  ‘Roots and wings,’ Ciara says, suddenly serious. ‘I was listening to you, by the way. Mathew and I went to collect some things for the shop from a woman who was selling her childhood home. Her mother passed away and it was difficult for her to sell. She asked me if it was possible for something to have both roots and wings. Keeping it helped her to hold on to her mother and their memories, selling it was giving her financial security and other possibilities. Roots and wings.’

  ‘Roots and wings,’ I repeat, liking it. ‘I hate goodbyes,’ I say with a sigh, and then add more as a mantra to myself, ‘But hating goodbyes is not a justification for staying.’

  ‘And fearing goodbyes is also not a justification for leaving first,’ Ciara finishes.

  I look at her in surprise.

  She shrugs. ‘Just saying.’

  As we’re hauling the
bags into the van, my phone rings inside the house. I run inside but still miss a call from Denise which makes my stomach churn with dread. I take a moment to calm myself and I call her back. She answers immediately.

  ‘I think you should come over.’

  ‘OK. God.’ My throat tightens.

  ‘Her parents just left. She wasn’t responsive but I think she knew they were there.’

  ‘I’ll be there as fast as I can.’

  Denise’s home is calm. The main lights are off, lamps and candles light the hallways and rooms. It feels hushed, but calm, no urgency or sense of immediacy, and we all keep our voice down. Now that Denise and Tom are the official guardians for Jewel, Ginika and Jewel have been living with Tom and Denise for the past four weeks, receiving care in their home, and it has been good for Ginika, even in the condition she is in, to be in the space where her daughter will grow up, to be breathing the same air. Holding on and letting go. Tom guides me to Ginika’s bedroom, where Denise is by her side, holding her hand.

  Her breathing is slow, barely there. She hasn’t been conscious for days.

  I sit at her bedside and take her other hand, her right hand, her writing hand. I kiss it.

  ‘Hello, sweet girl.’

  A mother, a daughter, a striker, a fighter. An inspiring young woman who only got a fraction of the whole, but gave me and us so very much. It doesn’t seem fair because it isn’t fair. I held Gerry’s hand as he left the world and here I am again, saying goodbye to somebody I love, and I love this girl, she got inside my heart. Witnessing this transition, saying goodbye, never gets easier, but preparing myself and helping her to feel prepared has eased the suffering, the anger, the rage that spikes when confronted with the brutal reality. They say easy come, easy go, but not in this instance. Arrival into this world is a marathon for both mother and child, life pushes to get into this world, and leaving it is a fight to stay.

  Denise and I stay by Ginika’s side for the remaining hours, a gentle departure from this world as she knows it. After hanging on to her breath for so long, she takes a final inhale, and there’s no exhale as life lets go and death catches her. Though the illness was a painful one, the passing is peaceful as I promised her it would be, and as she lays still on the bed, no more fluttering eyelids, no more rise and fall of her chest, no more laboured breathing, I imagine, I hope, I wish, that the fun-filled soul that inhabited her body now has the freedom to drift and dance, swirl and soar. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, but my God, fly Ginika, fly.

  A moment like this, as tragic and overwhelming as it is, is an honour to witness and, perhaps selfishly, in time it will help that I was with her for the end. I will always remember how Ginika and I met, I will always remember how we parted.

  As if she knows, as if she senses her own greatest loss, from the other room, Jewel awakes from her sleep with a cry.

  Around the kitchen table, red-eyed and exhausted, Tom, Denise and I regroup. I retrieve a keepsake box from my bag and place it on the table.

  Ginika’s letter.

  ‘This is for you, Jewel. From Mama.’

  ‘Mama,’ she says, grinning. She grabs her pudgy toes and pulls at them.

  ‘Yes, Mama,’ I try to smile, wiping a tear. ‘Mama loves you so much.’ I turn to Denise. ‘This is your responsibility now.’

  Denise lifts it and runs her fingers across the lid. ‘Beautiful box.’

  It’s the mirrored jewellery box I found at the shop. I glued the loose crystals found inside back to the lid, and I slid out the inside so it is perfect as a keepsake box, which contains the envelope, Jewel’s first pair of socks, babygro and mitts, and a lock of hair, both Jewel’s and Ginika’s first cuts braided together.

  ‘She wrote the letter herself,’ I explain. ‘I didn’t read it and she didn’t tell me what she was going to say. She did it all by herself.’

  ‘Brave girl,’ Denise says softly.

  ‘Open it.’ Tom encourages her.

  ‘Now?’ Denise asks, looking from him to me.

  ‘I’m sure Jewel would love to hear it, wouldn’t you?’ he says, kissing her head.

  Denise opens the box, takes out the letter. Unfolds it. The sight of her handwriting, her hard work and effort makes me cry again.

  Dear Jewel,

  You are thirteen months old.

  You love sweet potato and stewed apples.

  Your favourit book is the hungry caterpillar and you chew the cornurs.

  The map song from Dora the Ixplorir makes you laugh more than anything.

  You love popping bubbles.

  Your favourit teddy is Bop Bop the bunny.

  Sneezeing makes you laugh.

  Paper being ript makes you cry.

  You love dogs.

  You point at clouds.

  You get hickups when you drink too fast.

  You love the song ABC by The Jackson 5.

  Wunce you put a snail in your mouth and sucked it out of its shell. Yuk. You don’t like snails.

  You love sitting on my knee and don’t like to be put down. I think you are skared of being left alone. You are never alone. You will never be alone.

  You can’t see the wind but you hold your hands out to catch it. It makes you confyoused.

  You call me mama. That’s my favourite sound.

  We dance every day. We sing incey wincy spider in the bath.

  I wish I could see you grow up. I wish I could be beside you all the time forever. I love you more than anyone or anything in the hole world.

  Be kind. Be smart. Be brave. Be happy. Be careful. Be strong. Don’t be afraid of being afraid. Sum times we are all afraid.

  I love you forever.

  I hope you remember me forever.

  You are the best thing I have ever done.

  I love you Jewel.

  Mama

  35

  I lean my bicycle against the red-bricked wall and take the few steps to the front door, my legs heavy and my trainers feeling like lead. I’ve had a long cycle to clear my head but I can barely remember the route here. I press the doorbell.

  Gabriel answers and looks at me in surprise.

  ‘Hi,’ I say, quietly, shyly.

  ‘Hi,’ he says. ‘Come in.’

  I step inside and follow him down the narrow corridor to the internal main room, the familiar smells intensifying the butterflies in my stomach. He checks behind him to make sure I’m still there, in case I’ve changed my mind and left, or I’m not real. He has something jazzy playing on his record player, and there’s a large plasma screen on the wall.

  ‘You’re healed,’ he says, noting my boot-free foot.

  ‘You got a TV,’ I note. ‘A big one.’

  ‘I bought it for you. I had it stored in the shed for months,’ he says, a little awkwardly, nervously. ‘I was going to surprise you when you moved in. Surprise,’ he says weakly, joking, and I laugh.

  ‘Tea? Coffee?’

  ‘Coffee please.’ I’ve been up all night with Denise and Tom, crying, sharing stories of Ginika, discussing her funeral arrangements, wondering when in Jewel’s future would be an appropriate time to contact Jewel’s biological father. The big conversations and the small rolling softly into, over and under each other. All the ifs and buts. We were all exhausted but none of us could sleep. I don’t envy them the busy day ahead with Jewel, but I know that they will treasure every second of the gift Ginika gave them.

  Coffee vapours fill the room as Gabriel pours water over the ground coffee. I wander away and into the conservatory, drawn by the morning light. Nothing has drastically changed, apart from the home office in the corner, which used to be in the spare bedroom, now Ava’s. I wouldn’t have thought it, but surprisingly it fits; buildings bending effortlessly to owners’ desires. I should take a leaf out of this house’s book. I look out at the cherry blossom tree, green leaves turning to gold. I recall last year waiting impatiently for it to bloom in spring, only for its petals to blow away practically overnight in a storm, at first coating
the stones with a plush pink carpet before turning to slippery slush. How I’d like to watch it flower again.

  Gabriel joins me and hands me a mug of coffee. Our fingers touch.

  ‘Thanks for fixing my mug,’ I say. Instead of sitting, he stands. Mug in one hand, the other pushed into the pocket of his jeans.

  He shrugs it off, embarrassed perhaps at having done it. ‘You mean Gerry’s mug. I know you’re not a Star Wars fan. You said you’d throw it out, but I know you’re more inclined to keep things that are broken. Maybe I should have left it as it was. Maybe you wanted to fix it yourself. Maybe I was overthinking the mug.’

  I smile. He’s right, I do keep things that are broken, but I also never fix them. I kept it there in the cupboard, a self-inflicted punishment, a reminder of what I had and what I’d lost. People not things, that’s what I should hold on to.

  ‘Are you still involved with the club? he asks.

  I nod.

  ‘How are you doing?’ his blue eyes search me intensely, like an X-ray of my soul.

  All of a sudden I want to cry. He sees it coming and puts the mug down, comes round to me, down on his knees and hugs me tightly, rubs his fingers through my hair as I let it all out and let it all go. The utter exhaustion takes over me and the months of work, worry, highs and lows, unleash themselves through my tears.

  ‘I was so afraid of this happening, Holly,’ he says, whispering into my hair.

  ‘It has been one of the best experiences of my life,’ I say, in an unnatural high-pitch, through my badly timed sob.

  He lets go, pulls back and studies me, fingers still running hypnotically through my hair. ‘Seriously?’

  I nod emphatically, through tears, though the sentiments may be hard to believe while he’s looking at me in this state.

  ‘I lost a friend yesterday. Ginika. She was seventeen years old. Her daughter is one. Denise and Tom are her guardians. I taught Ginika how to read and write.’

  ‘Wow, Holly,’ he says, wiping my tears. ‘You did that?’

  I nod. Bert is gone. Ginika is gone. My time is finished with a diminishing Paul, I’m lingering with Joy despite her scrapbook of secrets for Joe being complete. ‘I don’t want it to end.’