The Happy Family by Jackie Kabler (electric book reader txt) 📕

I take a breath and the tension in my chest dissipates as quickly as it arrived.

‘Of course. I’ve got a spare room. You’re more than welcome, of course you are. Come on, I’ll show you up now if you like. I’ll give you a tour on the way.’

‘I’d love that, Beth. Your house looks … well, it’s beautiful.’

She stands up, takes a step towards me, and reaches for my hand. I feel a surge of happiness. But even as I lead her from the room I start to worry again, my brain beginning to process what I’ve just learned. Processing the fact that my mother used a private detective to find me. Mike, a man who must surely, by now, know an awful lot about me. Does he know what I did, all those years ago?

And has he told her? If he doesn’t, and hasn’t, I have to stop her ever finding out, don’t I? Because if she does, I’ll lose her again. There’s absolutely no doubt about that.

Chapter 9

Her name was Lucy Allen. We were in the same class at secondary school, but for the first year I barely noticed her. Our school, Fairbridge High in Bristol, was a big one, each year having about sixty pupils divided into two streams. Lucy and I were in different streams, so for that first year we were only together for morning assembly and annual events like sports day and the Christmas concert. It was only when we went back after the summer holidays to start Year 9 that she came to my attention, and even now, so many years later, I’m still not sure how it all started. The timetable was different that year; the two streams merged for some lessons, and the two of us ended up in the same Maths, History, and Biology classes.

Lucy was one of those quiet girls, clever and studious, mouse-like in her demeanour. She did have friends though; I remember a small group of similar girls, five or six of them, girls who spent their lunchbreaks at chess club instead of out by the tuckshop flirting with the boys like me and my mates. We had little in common. Before my mother walked out, three years prior to me going into Year 9, I’d been a hard worker at school too, but bit by bit all that had changed. Dad, struggling to juggle his job and me and housework and everything else, trusted me to keep my grades up with little intervention from him. At first, wanting to please him and terrified that he’d leave me too if I didn’t, I obliged. But gradually, the anger and sadness inside me grew and by the time I was thirteen and hormones came into the mix too, I’d pretty much stopped caring.

When my body began to change, when my periods started one dreadful day in the school changing rooms and I thought I was bleeding to death until the kindly school nurse explained what was happening, the pain of the loss of my mother became even more acute. I loved my dad, of course I did, but how does a thirteen-year-old girl talk to her father about needing a bra, about buying sanitary towels? Friends’ mothers were always offering to help, but it got to the point that year when I couldn’t even bear to visit their houses anymore, to see those mothers fussing and cooking and hugging and just … just being there. It hurt too much. And that was when it all started. I suppose, in retrospect, I was searching for a way to handle the pain. If only – dangerous though it might have been – I’d gone down the route that so many young people go down: alcohol, drugs, substances to take the edge off, to lessen the constant, aching sorrow. If only, if only.

But I didn’t.

I didn’t choose alcohol, or drugs, or even underage sex.

I chose something else.

And it all started the day I first sat next to Lucy Allen in Maths class.

I wish, so much now, that I hadn’t.

I wish I’d never met her.

Chapter 10

‘What a pretty churchyard. It’s so nice here, Beth.’

‘It is. I love it.’

I squeeze the hand Mum’s looped through my arm. We’ve come out for a Sunday stroll around the village, stopping at the little shop on the High Street for a bag of mints and then wandering across the road to cut through the graveyard. The honey-coloured stone walls of the thirteenth-century church glow softly in the afternoon sunshine and a grey squirrel scampers across the gravel in front of us as we follow the path that winds its way among the headstones, pausing for a moment to admire the stained glass in the east window. As we walk on in companionable silence, I marvel once again at how bizarre all this is.

I’m walking around Prestbury with my mother. If anyone had told me yesterday, when I was up on Cleeve Hill with Ruth and Deborah, that I’d be doing this today I’d have laughed my head off. My mother …

There’s a bouquet resting on one of the new graves, blush-pink tulips and sunshine-yellow daffodils bound together with a blue ribbon, the colours vivid against the dark earth. The flowers and their bright hues bring back a memory: me and Mum walking in a park – Brandon Hill, maybe, near where we lived in Bristol? I can’t remember – when I was about five years old. I remember buttercups, vast swathes of them in the grass. Mum crouching down to pick handfuls and then skilfully weaving them into a necklace, draping it around my neck, keeping one tiny bloom aside to hold under my chin and telling me I definitely liked butter.

‘Look at that glow!’ she laughed, and I’d laughed back, loving being with her, my beautiful mother. Loving that today, she was happy. Aware, even at such a young age, that Mummy wasn’t always