she’d become part of a team and realise that the best bodies weren’t the 5’ 11”, size six ones but the ones that were fit and strong and capable. That she’d direct her fierce energy into something worthwhile, get her highs from exercise rather than drinking and drugs. A shamefully larger part of me was doubtful, burnt by the brand new guitar discarded after a few weeks, by the self-defence classes which turned out to be for ‘losers’, by the latest, newest, must-haves that were urgent, that she could no longer survive without, that if she could ‘just have’, she’d never want anything else again. Until the next time.
I hoped that I’d be proved wrong.
Chapter Twenty-Three
As the days led into December, a month I always hated, carrying as it did the anniversary of my dad’s death, I felt a wash of grief as strong as when he’d first died. The last few years I’d registered the date, but the rawness had faded. I’d been able to take a few moments to think about him, invent an imaginary commentary from him about my life – ‘You’ve got a lovely little family there, pet’ – and almost be glad that I had him, rather than devastated that I’d lost him. But this year, my sadness was back with a vengeance. He’d have understood all my complex feelings. Unusually for a man of his era, he was so good at talking things through, telling his stories of how he reacted to losing his brother, to being made redundant, to discovering that my mum was pregnant with me after six years of dashed hopes. This year, try as I might, I couldn’t feel grateful. My heartbreak at losing Ginny seemed to compound the death of Dad, as though my losses were accumulating and crushing the life out of me. And that was before I allowed myself to enter into the lion’s den of associating Patrick and Ginny together with when Dad died.
Every time Patrick said, ‘Shall I get the tree out of the attic?’ I snapped that I couldn’t think about Christmas yet. What I really meant was that I didn’t want to contemplate a Christmas where Patrick would be sitting in the middle of his family, with his shiny new son, but I would be on the fringe of it without my dad, who would have urged me to be generous. I tried to tune out his voice in my head saying, ‘Be the one to give someone a hand up when they’re down.’ If he’d been here, I could have explained, had him listen and hear me, unlike Patrick who’d now reached a point of greeting every comment with, ‘What do you want me to say?’
The rows about how/if/when to tell Victor recurred with depressing frequency. Usually I’d have talked this over ad nauseam with Ginny, though goodness knows how this particular issue would have resolved itself if she’d still been alive. I sidestepped Faye’s curious questions and kept saying we were working things through. Which, as truths went, was rather flimsy: I was stuck in a never-ending loop of jealousy and betrayal sitting on one side of the scales with protectiveness on the other. Not just for Phoebe but also for Victor, who shouldered none of the blame and all of the consequences.
I couldn’t walk through the village without being asked, ‘How’s it working out with the lad?’ Never ‘Is Victor doing okay?’ No one ever seemed to spare a thought for the fact that he’d lost his mum in his teenage years, so much to process so young. All the attention centred around how we had coped with the trauma of having a teenager come to live with us.
Patrick alternated between ‘I understand this isn’t easy for you, Jo, but we can’t keep it a secret forever’ and ‘I can’t regret it. I’m glad to have Victor in my life,’ which made me want to lash out, book Victor a ticket to Australia, pass the misery baton over to Patrick for a bit and see how much he didn’t regret it then.
In the second week of December, Patrick was called to Cardiff on a training course. I heard him say to Victor, ‘Shame you’ve got school and can’t come with me. Never mind. I’ll take you up there in the holidays.’ The thought of them driving along the motorway, debating which music to listen to, creating memories, should have filled me with happiness, but I had a petty urge to