Blue Sky July Page 10

  Marc Quinn’s statue of Alison Lapper will grace Trafalgar Square and will be twelve feet high and made of white marble among all the bronzed generals there.

  There was a card from Alex. It said: I could say nice things about you until the cows come home, with a bunch of cows and Welcome Home inside.

  There was a card from Joe which had two giant arms flung open wide, and said: This is how I love you.

  Joe woke that day to a brand-new mother spooned up beside him on his bed.

  “I’m home,” I said.

  And when I opened his blind, the sun came up daffodil yellow, and

  the gardens glistened

  like the freshly baptized.

  WE GROW between things, Joeski and I.

  Between the sun and the moon, the earth, winds and sky,

  between the places and faces passing by,

  we grow like spring,

  between a thousand things, Joeski and I.

  Between the physio, and the special shoes and the Lycra suit, Joe learns to stand on his own two feet this spring. I watch him in the school hall at the end of each day, holding on, quite alone, to a ladder-back chair, with a smile on his face and the sun in his hair.

  Between the teachers, the drivers and Alex and me, his name is taken off the list for a communication aid, and the speech therapist finally calls him “a talker.”

  Between the fixing of glasses and the RNIB, he has started to recognize letters.

  And, between a virgin pathway in his brain and the muscles in his left hand, he can now use a joystick and two buttons to access the Internet. Suddenly he has access to a billion worlds we never thought he would.

  We grow between worlds, Joeski and I, and for every day he grows in mine, there are countless times I grow in his.

  I grow each time he adds more blessings to my tree,

  the day we buy his first CD,

  and the day we spend hours in the rain

  outside Waterstone’s

  listening to buskers.

  I grow when we play pop stars, cowboys, kings and queens,

  enjoying so much that might never have been.

  These days I grow enough to know,

  that nothing stays the same for long

  and I grow enough to know,

  that life is what we make it,

  with a child like Joe.

  Between the Botox appointments for his legs and the plaster casts on his feet, one pink, one blue, is the day he starts to ride a pony at a local farm, and between his “whoa” and “walk on,” I feel my whole world slow down and look forward to the buttercups.

  Between his wheelchair, and his special bike and walking frame, is the time we grow used to being noticed, and quite enjoy our certain kind of fame.

  Between the free sweets from Sam, and the money the traffic warden gives him each time she passes, I grow to see all little acts of pity, as little acts of kindness all the same.

  And between the stars and the moon and the sea and the sky, and

  the thousands of faces and places passing by.

  I know I’ll always remember the waiter, who had time to wait and

  wait, in that busy restaurant in Cardiff Bay,

  for Joe to get his words out,

  without once hurrying him,

  or even looking in my direction.

  And I’ll remember the little boy we met at Butlins in half-term. His is the face in the thousand faces that watched us walk through the cafeteria each day, Joe in his bright blue frame by my side.

  The one in that thousand that moved to sit next to us, the one that offered to carry his pudding, the one that brought all the other faces closer.

  We grow between things

  Joeski and I.

  Like the spring,

  and sometimes I think it’s a remarkable thing,

  the way humans grow,

  and heal,

  each other.

  It’s the week after my birthday that she comes. April.

  I’m looking better than before. I’ve had new clothes for my birthday, gifts of books and perfume—no one’s sent flowers. I’ve actually been out and bought my own, and for the first time in six years, I’ve had my hair done.

  It was the hairdresser, in fact, that had asked me if I’d see this woman at my kitchen table, and if I didn’t already know I wouldn’t have guessed she’d been a career woman. She looks a mess. Tracksuit bottoms and dirty hair; pale grey eyes that stare into nowhere, and a baby in her arms, freshly diagnosed.

  The hairdresser thought it might help her to talk to me, but I can tell she doesn’t really want to. She’s already made up her mind not to keep her.

  It was a complicated birth, she says. Her daughter lost a minute here, a couple there—and with a husband and two kids at home, she can’t afford a complicated life. “There’s only so many times you can shake a rattle and not get a response,” she tells me.

  I’m not sure what to say to this woman who doesn’t appear to hear me. Her gray eyes look right through me as she rambles on and on about the high-powered career girl she used to be.

  She’s a go-getter, she says. A certain type of woman who still has plans, and though, of course, she truly admires mothers like me, she could not aspire to do it. She tells me she’s read a story that compares life with kids with special needs, to being “a bit like Holland. ” Plodding on, admiring the occasional tulip, while the rest of the world flies past, living it up with the roses. She never was, she says, “a tulip kind of girl.”

  When we’re sitting in my kitchen and the flaky sunlight’s casting shadows between us on the table, I can see everything in my life the way this woman’s pale gray eyes can see it.

  Such a little life, such little victories,

  my single parent status

  and little kid with special needs,

  who’d never get to university.

  I can see it in the way she looks at me

  that my little color photos,

  in among the black and white,

  look cheap to her,

  like small change.

  She is a cloud passing through me.

  It’s only when she’s gone,

  and I’m looking in the mirror,

  carefully putting my lipstick on,

  that the room returns to color.

  On cold and rainy weekend afternoons, I light the fire in Market Road. When the parks are like wastelands and the jazzy jungles and cafés are crammed with kids dancing about like time bombs, we lie down on the floor by our fire, Joeski and I.

  We lie on our backs on an old Indian rug, watching the people rush past the window holding umbrellas and newspapers over their heads. They’re all different shapes and sizes, upside down.

  When I lived with Alex I’d never have lit fires on rainy afternoons in May. We’d have found a hundred other things to do. We used to go to the cinema when it rained and watch films about love—full of justice and reason and payback—where it seemed everything worked out. By the time we emerged, the rain had always stopped and the sun was back out.

  Lighting fires has become part of my life now I live with Joe.

  Part of the black and part of the blue,

  part of the old and the things that we create anew,

  between us.

  And these firelit days with Joe,

  are all I need to know,

  that I am more in love

  than ever.

  Sometimes, by the fire on rainy afternoons, when I’m lying here

  watching his eyes drift and wander round the room,

  he can bring them to rest on mine,

  for seconds at a time,

  and I know that

  this is the most intimate connection I have ever made,

  and that it is possible to make.

  I want to call the woman I met in April on these May afternoons, but she didn’t leave a number.

  I want to tell her my life with Joe is nothing at all like Holland.

 
I want her to know that these are not the smaller things.

  Usually summer arrives around the back in Market Road, over the rooftops and along the drystone walls, slithering in through the windows like a runaway from somewhere else. Quite sheepish, quite shy, never quite sure whether to come or go—an altogether quietish affair.

  It doesn’t this year. It comes round the front, all at once, at half past twelve on a Friday afternoon, and has the touch of a drama queen about it, a touch of the moment.

  Joe is just arriving home, being wheeled across the street, waving his message book and shouting about the holidays, and just as he gets here, right at this moment, the sun pours out its golden heart, all over our doorstep.

  It comes in one personal, floodlit moment, this summer, something just between us, and the two hardy buttercups that have pushed their way up through a crack in the concrete.

  Maybe all summers have something to say, even the quiet ones, but this one, more than most, talks to me. Walking past the office girls on lunch break with their skirts rolled up above their knees, and office boys in windows with their mouths curved down, walking past the stay-at-homes and shopkeepers in darkened doorways, I see so many people missing out on things, all wanting to surrender.

  This is the summer I cancel appointments, send back the rocking chair and cut down on therapies, so that we can feed the birds instead. The summer the walking, feeding and standing frames become part of the furniture, part of life, without a flowered tablecloth in sight. As for the wheelchair, I sometimes wonder what on earth we’d do without it.

  This is the summer Superman defies the impossible by moving his little finger and the summer the sunflower I planted for Ffion is at its height.

  We get up early to see the sunrise, Joe and I, and eat strawberry ice cream for breakfast watching the boats bobbing up and down in Cardiff Bay. I ride my bike again round the parks, towing him behind me in a carriage with his friend, in and out of the aspen trees, listening to them laughing loudly.

  This is the summer my parents move to a cottage in the country which has two peacocks, a meadow and a stream and I walk up and down it in my wellies, towing him behind me in a small blue dinghy that swirls under the sky. The summer we have picnics with the sheep and the cows and the happy sun.

  This is the summer we go to Provence and ride round faster than we should in golf buggies with the wind in our hair, and the summer that Joe hangs out with a gang of kids, who wheel him with them everywhere.

  There are times when life feels enough this summer, how it used to feel, when it was silver and nothing was broken, and there are times, just for moments, when silver turns gold.

  Christine, next door, says it’s been “a run-of-the-mill kind of summer” in Market Road while we’ve been away. Late flowering, she says. Nothing much has changed.

  The sky is milky blue here with the usual goings-on beneath it; Ray pottering in his shed, Elvis drifting out of the window at Number 14, Derek passing on his way to the cricket.

  There were no miracle cures and no acts of God, as the sun took its course this summer.

  Just some gentle reminders of the stuff that makes the world go round,

  and a few personal moments of

  surrender.

  When Joe turns six, I realize that only five of the twenty-five who

  came to his last party, invited him back,

  and I realize they’re the five that matter,

  the five that we like most.

  When Joe turns six, he doesn’t want to party. He says he wants to go out to a concert wearing his spacesuit, and so we spend the evening mesmerized by Madame Butterfly.

  There are no fanfares, no Paddy the Clown and no bottles of wine around to drown out sorrow, when Joe turns six.

  Life feels good enough to celebrate,

  exactly as it is.

  I see the counselor one last time at the end of the summer. He’s been away on a course in America, “getting closer to God.”

  I am in the same little room at the back of his house, looking out through the very same window, when he tells me the road trip’s over, and that I have arrived at a place called Acceptance.

  When I come back home, I lie on the swing seat in the garden and watch the clouds rush past.

  The saxophone student plays tunes I haven’t heard before. I think they’re his own compositions.

  Stronger.

  It’s like his soul’s returned.

  YEAR SEVEN

  SAM AT the corner shop says it takes ages to accept things. He says he once knew a woman who lost her teenage daughter to cancer and when she finally took her daughter’s clothes down to the charity shop, she spent the next six months in cafés, imagining every teenager who passed the window had them on.

  It takes time,

  and generally I’m doing fine.

  Generally I’ve stopped buying the latest miracle cure, though one day this autumn, as the days are getting shorter I drive 250 miles along the rain-drenched motorways to Cambridge to see a healer off the telly that I’ve convinced myself is “top of the range.” My mother comes with me and watches me sign another chunky check from Joe’s trust fund to the man with the golden Bentley in his drive.

  She sang songs on the way home, Joe on her knee in the back—for five and a half hours in the driving rain—and didn’t tell me once how foolish I had been.

  But, on the whole, I don’t do that anymore. These moments are the rare ones now, these are the ones in between.

  Generally the weather’s fair, more sunny spells than scattered showers, and the more I stop looking for things to happen, the more they seem to come our way. A track for the disabled takes root through the woods at Coed Hills, and the opera house opens in Cardiff Bay, with free classical concerts on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We spend hours there, Joeski and me, and when we’re listening quietly, side by side, life is reaffirmed. Generally the bad days don’t floor me like they used to. Even on rainy days in the café in Pontcanna, we seem to muddle through.

  “Mummy, I want to walk,” he says, as the children rush about us, and I tell him something about kids that can’t see, not half as well as him, and kids that can’t hear, not even music, I say, not even a note of it. I tell him some are hungry or poor and others have no parents. “You’re lucky,” I say, “because you have two that love you, and to be loved is better than anything.”

  “But, Mummy,” he says, looking back to the room, “I just want to walk.”

  My eyes prick small, hard tears like hailstones in the café, but then I find a Milky Way in my pocket and he brightens up and we find something else to do, and the moment is shrunk into a lump in my throat.

  Generally I don’t cry at all these days and I’m not like the woman Sam knew. I don’t get stuck in cafés, I don’t look back, and life, it seems, flows on.

  Joanna’s moved to Stroud, where Callum, Jude and Amy run round the rosy apple trees and feed horses at the top of the garden. Julie tells me that Clara does roly-polies and jumping jacks while Freya curls up on the sofa reading Enid Blyton. Gratia says that Iona’s starting at the Jal School in Brighton, the first of its kind, where she’ll sing and dance, and always be allowed to be that little bit wilder.

  My sister’s buying a château with a swimming pool in France and wants Joe to grace it next summer, and in Chester, William, Lesley, Hari, LiIli and Isabelle clap together furiously as Anna takes her first steps. He sends me the photos on e-mail.

  Marchant is made class representative at his mainstream school in Bristol, and in Llanelli, Jac taps out his very first sentence on a computer, using two buttons on either side of his forehead. His mother says she cried when it appeared: My name is Jac, it flickered back: I love you, Mum.

  With all its precious moments, life flows on.

  In Cardiff, I sort out the house and tidy up the garden, taking bulging

  black bags down to the Scope shop on Cowbridge Road. And

  when I pass from time to time,

  I se
e a glitter stick, an unused toy or bright red wig,

  up on the shelves for two pounds fifty,

  or one pound ninety nine.

  Things are much better than they used to be. I find new things to do—I keep myself busy.

  I even go out from time to time

  with a businessman called Jamie Divine.

  Generally my head is fine,

  though my heart retains memories of other things.

  Superman dies this autumn.

  He had only managed to lift his little finger when he died, but still,

  it was enough

  to give hope to millions.

  My dreams have changed. I don’t know why. They’re filled with water, filled with sky and people I met only once and thought I had forgotten. The blind man I interviewed in Conwy, who counted the lampposts to get home, and the woman in Penmaenmawr, who couldn’t have children after several attempts at IVF. I see the details of their faces and all the places where I met them.

  Acceptance once seemed like the saddest place to me. A place where people who had fought and lost gave up on miracles. But as Joe settles into his seventh year in Market Road, he brings another sense of it.

  It is October 25 when he swims out of my arms for the very first time.

  A clear, crisp day, the leaves are falling and I am standing in a warm pool at a hotel in Cowbridge. Joe, in his orange armbands, is glued to my chest.

  It is as it has always been.

  And then suddenly,

  it is not.

  He swims out of my arms for the very first time.

  Moments like this have no sense of time. There is a sudden catch of breath, a sudden sense of weightlessness that runs through the veins.

  This is the moment, when I can suddenly play chase with him, just like everyone else does, and I can shout, “Come back, you’re getting away,” just like the regular mums.

  But I guess it can never be, for these other mums, what it is to me.

  Because this moment,

  when this child swims out of my arms for the very first time, is a

  rite of passage

  to a whole new consciousness.