me to take him back and says that he’s made the most terrible mistake…
I’m approaching the hospital and I remember another one.
I was in a coma – there was a car accident on my way back from a week at a health farm where I’d gone to shed those pesky last two pounds. I’d had loads of massages and treatments and things, so I was fortunately looking amazing when the accident happened. My Coma Buddy has made sure that I stay smooth skinned and without visible roots, just as I have promised to do for her. I don’t have any visible injuries. There’s not a mark on me, apart from a slight bruise above my eye. As I lie there his finger touches it and he thinks I can’t hear him, but I’m in one of those comas where you can hear - tee hee hee. I lie there all pale and dying as he pleads with me to just live. He shouts to Lucy to get the hell out and then he returns to me. He tells me how he can’t go on without me, how sorry he is, what a terrible mistake he made leaving me for her.
I could never decide how the fantasy ended though - if I woke up enough to see him weeping in a chair beside me, or if Marcel walked in and there was a fight.
So, that’s why it’s brilliant that today I’m looking fantastic.
I don’t care if you think that I’m vain.
I know what that bitch did to my life.
I know what she says about me.
I park in the staff car park and I race over to Emergency. It’s starting to be real – I haven’t rung the other girls, it’s the middle of the night there. I really need to get to Eleanor; she’s having a terrible time of it right now. Noel walked out on her a couple of weeks ago and she won’t tell me what it’s about – I can guess. He’s a nice guy, Noel, if a bit boring and it would have to be something big for him to walk out on his heavily pregnant wife.
I can’t think about it right now.
No one tells you when you sign the divorce papers that, even though it's over, it never really ends - not even today, not even on the day he dies. In fact, it gets a whole lot worse, because I now have to walk in there to comfort my daughter and Lucy will be there and maybe their daughter too.
Rose comes up to me as soon as I get there and she gives me a hug. ‘Gloria, I am so sorry.’ But I’m not sure if I’m deserving of condolences. I’m here for Eleanor, that’s all. ‘She’s in Interview Room 3,’ Rose explains. ‘But I need to have a word with you before you go in.’
‘Who’s with her?’
I see Rose’s slight grimace and I guess that means Lucy is in there.
‘His whole family is here.’
‘I’ll wait here,’ I tell Rose. ‘Just let Eleanor know that I'm here.’ My fantasies have faded. I’m in the real world now and I don’t want to see Lucy. I don’t want to face her; I don’t want this to be real because I don’t want the pain for my girls. ‘I’ll wait outside.’
Except this is my life, so it’s not quite that simple.
It never is.
‘She’s gone into labour, Gloria.’
It never sodding is.
‘We’re just arranging to move her up to maternity,’ Rose tells me.
I don't care if Lucy and the whole Jameson clan are in there, I have to be there for Eleanor. I walk into the interview room where Eleanor is sitting shaking and crying and I put my arms around her. I want to comfort her, to tell her it will all be all right, but how can it be?
‘Noel won’t come.’
‘I’m here,’ I say and then a midwife arrives and tells me that they’re going to wheel her up to maternity, they’re just waiting for a porter and a wheelchair. I look up and there’s Luke.
He’s like a son to me.
To what once was us.
He lived next door and I was friends with his mum and when she died Luke had six months of school left. He had some aunties in Ireland but he moved in with us so that he could finish school. Apart from the kids, he’s the only mutual one left from my old life. He’s the only one who kept in touch, who