It’s Carolyn, squealing away as she batters her betrothed. Slung over Piers’ shoulder in an ungainly fireman’s lift, Carolyn is pummelling away at his back as he strides towards the bonfire. Surely he isn’t going to toss her onto the flames for dissing his marshmallows?
‘Oh my God.’ I sit up straighter in my deckchair – not easy, FYI – as Piers continues to stride towards the fire, Carolyn’s squeals getting higher and longer as she bashes away at his spine. But then she’s on the ground – a safe enough distance from the flames – and they’re both doubled over laughing. She lunges at Piers, ruffling his hair while he picks her up and twirls her round. It’s the most playful I’ve seen Piers, including the times we’ve played actual games.
‘What do you think about those two?’ Tom nods at the pair, who are now snogging like a pair of teenagers. ‘Do you think they’re suited?’
‘I didn’t.’ I place my mug down on the ground and settle back down into my deckchair. ‘But now I think they could make a good match. I mean, they’re like chalk and cheese, obviously.’
‘Right?’ Tom nods. ‘I thought that too. I know I haven’t been in contact with Carolyn for a while, but she was never the type for a big flashy wedding. Her dad had all that money, but she was so down to earth. I never felt like the poor kid next to them.’
I flinch at the term. Tom probably has no idea what it’s really like to be the ‘poor kid’.
‘I think they’re more suited than it first appears. On the surface, they’re completely different, but Piers can be caring.’ I think about yesterday, when Carolyn was in the midst of a killer hangover, and instead of ranting and raving like I suspected he would, he’d been soothing and kind, finding solutions for the tricky situation Carolyn had found herself in. He’d even washed her hair because she didn’t feel up to it, for goodness’ sake. And then there’s the fact that they’re moving away to begin their married life in Denmark to enhance Carolyn’s career. That I wasn’t expecting at all.
‘And just look at them now.’ They’ve stopped snogging now, but Carolyn is resting her head on his chest while he pulls her in close, his arms shielding her from the cold.
‘I guess I just have a warped view of relationships,’ Tom says.
Join the club, I think, but I don’t want to open that particular can of worms and decide to change the subject.
‘What was your nickname? When you were kids?’
Tom’s eyes widen momentarily, but he recovers quickly, giving off an air of nonchalance. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Yes, you do.’ I’m trying not to crack a smile, but it’s hard. ‘Archie told me about the nicknames: Archie the Great, Alice in Wonderland, Queen Carolyn. But he never told me what yours was.’
Tom scratches the back of his neck. ‘I, er, didn’t have one.’
‘You did!’ I try to jump out of my deckchair, but it doesn’t happen quite as efficiently as I’d have liked, and I end up toppling out of it onto the grass. Tom is laughing at me, but I don’t let it get to me. Brushing my hair off my face, I sit up on my knees, leaning over so I can look Tom right in the eye. ‘Come on, tell me what it is. I promise not to laugh.’
Tom shakes his head. ‘You can’t make a promise like that.’
‘So, it’s bad?’
Tom cringes. ‘It isn’t good.’
‘Come on.’ I give him a playful nudge. ‘Tell me what it is, otherwise I’ll just go and ask Alice.’
Tom drops his face into his hands with a groan before peeping up at me. ‘Fine. It was Tom Thumb.’
My first instinct is to laugh, obviously, but I made a promise. Besides, it’s quite cute.
‘Cute?’ Tom asks when I tell him so. ‘Ugh. Just what every man wants to hear. Not manly. Not heroic. Cute.’
‘Not just cute.’ I reach for Tom’s cheeks and give them a squeeze. ‘Utterly adorable.’
‘Oi, gerrof!’ Tom is laughing as he tries to bat me away. When that doesn’t work, he grabs hold of my wrists, and I’m reminded of earlier today, after the water balloon dodgeball when he’d held my hand. There’s that frisson of electricity again, appearing so suddenly it makes me gasp. Tom releases my wrists and I leap away, dropping back down into my deckchair.
‘Right.’ Tom clears his throat as I rearrange my blanket so it’s covering as much of my body as possible. As though I can shield myself with it. ‘Your turn.’
‘My turn?’ I frown. ‘I never had a nickname.’ Not one I would ever admit to, anyway. They were never given in friendship or even jest.
‘I’ve told you all the gory details about my childhood.’ Tom grins at me. ‘Now it’s your turn.’
My gaze flits around the field. Would it be rude if I excused myself to go and grab a toasted marshmallow, mid-conversation?
‘There isn’t much to tell. I didn’t grow up around a fairy-tale castle, though I suppose I always wished for it. I had a fantasy of being rescued by the handsome prince and being carried away to his fairy-tale kingdom.’ I sigh theatrically in a bid to mask my discomfort. ‘And I’m still waiting.’
‘I’m afraid old Wallace is the closest we’ve got to a prince around here,’ Tom says. ‘And I don’t think he’d be able to carry you far – he’s a bit rusty.’
I give a dismissive wave of my hand. ‘Who needs a prince anyway? I soon learned you can’t rely on some fantasy hero to pick you up and whisk you away to your happily ever after. You’ve got to carve your own path in life. That’s why, at the age of seven, I tossed my fairy tales book on the bonfire and started believing in reality.’
Tom folds his arms across his chest and shifts so he can observe me. I squirm under his scrutiny but try not to let my discomfort show. ‘You stopped believing in fairy tales when you were seven?’
‘Yes.’ I can still remember that feeling of freedom as the book sailed through the air and landed on the flames, the way it quickly started to char as though it had even less substance to it than I’d assumed. I’d been dragged away from the bonfire – it had started to engulf the fencing between our garden and the neighbour’s by then, so somebody must have rescued the book as I was ushered inside. It wasn’t Mum; she was dancing next to the flaming fence.
She’d kept hold of the book, though, for all these years. Kept it hidden away for Aunt Dorothy to discover while she was clearing out Mum’s house after the funeral. It was like a bad penny, that book, turning up when I least expected it to.
‘What made you stop believing so young?’
I draw my knees up to my chest (not an easy task while being swallowed by a deckchair) and hug the blanket closer to my body. ‘I guess I realised happily ever afters don’t happen. Not in real life, anyway.’
Tom sits up in his deckchair, leaning towards me. ‘You realised that at seven though?’ He shakes his head. ‘It took me thirty-two years to come to reach that conclusion. Why so young?’
I shrug, though I know exactly why. Seeing the string of failed relationships my mum had, seeing her devastated time after time, put a negative spin on falling in love even when I was a little girl. Tom remains in his leaning-forward position, waiting for me to elaborate. Maybe it’s the smoke billowing from the bonfire scrambling my brain, or the effect of all that sugar in my hot chocolate, or maybe there’s just something overwhelmingly trustworthy about Tom, but I roll my eyes and allow the sorry tale of Emily Atkinson to tumble out.
‘My dad left a couple of months after my sixth birthday. I didn’t know it at the time, but he’d found someone else and decided to play happy families with her instead. All I knew was that one morning he left for work and never came home again, though I suppose he did because all his stuff was missing from the wardrobe when I got home from school. I checked, when Mum said he’d left and wasn’t coming home again. I checked every day for two weeks, but I never really wished for him to come back – I suppose even then I knew he couldn’t fix Mum.’
‘Fix her?’ Tom’s voice is gentle, almost not there at all.
‘She had… issues. With drugs at first, and then men too, after Dad left. She couldn’t always keep either of them under control. She used them both as a prop, to give her confidence and self-worth. All her relationships were disastrous, and I swore I’d never follow in her footsteps. If you don’t have relationships, you don’t get hurt, right?’
‘I guess I can understand that.’
Finally! It’s so refreshing to find someone who doesn’t dismiss my feelings, or think they can fix me by shoving their own opinions down my throat.
‘So your mum really put you off men – for life?’
‘I’m afraid so. She was pretty screwed up. She’d do anything to keep hold of a man – no matter how badly he treated her – and she was inconsolable every time she was dumped. Which was a lot. She’d spiral out of control and I’d end up being packed off to stay with my great aunt until she’d managed to sort herself out. We didn’t have much family around us, just Mum’s aunt, so I spent a lot of time with her. Aunt Dorothy was the wicked witch in my fairy-tale fantasy.’
‘She’s the one you wanted rescuing from?’
‘Actually, no, not always. It was mostly Mum. I know that makes me sound like a terrible person, but it was tough. I didn’t have a regular mum like my friends did. She never picked me up from school on time – if at all – and I could never invite my friends round for tea. Not because I was embarrassed by Mum – I was, she was a mess – but because there wouldn’t be tea for us to eat together. If I was lucky there was cereal or toast or chocolate biscuits, but not the home-cooked meals my friends had. Sometimes, there wouldn’t be any food at all in the house for days. Funnily enough, there was always enough money for Mum to get off her face.’ I grab my mug of hot chocolate, but find there’s no way I can drink it as my stomach is in knots, so return it to the ground. ‘I went away on an overnight trip when I was about nine, but when we got back to school, it wasn’t Mum waiting for me but Aunt Dorothy, looking most put out that her afternoon quiz shows were being interrupted. That was the first time I had to go and stay with her. I asked where Mum was, but she wouldn’t tell me. Just said she was “away” and she’d be “home soon”.’
‘It must have been confusing.’
‘It was, but it was also a relief. Mum had really gone downhill. She was erratic – one minute dancing around the living room to music so loud the neighbours banged on the wall, the next sobbing in her bed and refusing to get up.’
And the vomit. I can still smell it, as if I’m cleaning it from Mum’s grubby dressing gown even now. And I can still hear her choking in the night, paralysed with fear and not knowing what to do. Finally bursting out into the cold winter night in my flimsy nightie, screaming for help. The relief as a neighbour rushed past me. Relief that she was no longer my problem, my responsibility, at least for a little while.
‘Aunt Dorothy was strict. There was no telly during the week – for me, at least. She loved her quiz shows and sitcoms, but there’d be no cartoons – and toys were limited, so I had to entertain myself with the books crammed on her shelves. They were mostly history books, which must have rubbed off on me, despite my reluctance.’ I smile wryly. ‘I wasn’t used to rules at home. But I felt safer within the confines of Aunt Dorothy’s house and her boundaries. I had a bedtime and I had to wash my face and brush my teeth every day, which I hated, but I also had proper, regular meals. I did miss the chocolate biscuits a bit though.’
‘Did your mum get help?’
I nod as I let the melted marshmallow drop from my fingers onto the grass. ‘Lots of it, time and time again, but she was never sober for more than a few months at a time. I sort of got used to the cycle, if I’m honest. I learned to predict her moods, so I knew when to start packing for another trip to Aunt Dorothy’s.’
‘You must have missed your mum during those times.’
‘I did, but I only missed my real mum, not the monster she became when the drugs took hold. And I got to see her sometimes. Aunt Dorothy would take me to visit her and we’d sit in this big room filled with lots of different families, all crying because they missed their loved ones or because they hated them. Mum would sometimes scream at me and tell me I’d ruined her life, that Dad would have stayed if I hadn’t been around.’
‘Blimey. That’s horrible.’ Tom sits up as straight as he can in the deckchair and I feel my hand being tugged gently with his movement. When I look down, our fingers are intertwined. When did that happen?
‘It wasn’t as bad as the times she stared vacantly at the wall opposite, her eyes dead. If she did look at me, it was like she didn’t even know who I was or why I was there.’ I shrug. ‘At least if she was screaming at me, she was there, you know?’
‘I’m sorry you had to go through all that.’ Tom’s hand feels warm in mine. Comforting. I’d normally snatch it away, but find I can’t.
‘I suppose it was a normal way for me to grow up. I didn’t know any different. It did teach me I can only rely on myself though, that I shouldn’t rely so heavily on a man that I can’t function without him. Because that’s what she did, over and over again, and I had to deal with the consequences when they left. I never want to end up like that. Out of control. Lost.’
‘What about your ex? Edward?’
I smile wryly. ‘Edward was an anomaly. He’s the only one who ever managed to break through the wall I’d built around myself. But even when I was with him, I held myself back. I couldn’t give everything to him. Could never truly let go.’ I shake my head and give a humourless laugh. ‘I never even told him half of what I just told you.’
Tom’s eyebrows lift. ‘You didn’t?’
‘Nope. He never even met Mum – I wouldn’t let him, no matter how much he pestered to meet my family – and I never told him about any of her problems. I could pretend, you see. I could pretend to be a normal person, with a normal family, if he didn’t know. But when Mum died last year, he wanted to come to the funeral. To support me. But how could I let him be there? How could I let him see the real me?’
‘I can see the real you.’ Tom’s eyes are fixed on mine, and I want to look away, want my stomach to stop churning under his intense gaze, but I can’t move. ‘The real you is beautiful and strong. Don’t ever hide her away.’
I finally break the eye contact. I feel too raw. Too exposed. I should go. I should find Alice and eat toasted marshmallows and pretend this conversation never took place.
But I remain seated, my hand still in Tom’s. I know he’s still watching me, but I’m afraid to lift my gaze and meet his again. Afraid of what he will see. Afraid of what I may say or do.
It’s all too much. I’ve said too much, given too much away. Panic starts to rise, taking my breath away, choking me, but I’m rooted to the spot, anchored down by the horror of what I’ve done. I’ve never felt as vulnerable as I do right now, and I realise this is why I’ve always pushed people away, to protect myself from this utter powerlessness.
My breath is ragged. I’m too hot, clammy. The blanket is shed, tossed to the ground.
Why did I spew the secrets I’ve worked so hard to guard all these years? Why now? Why Tom?
Because I wanted him to see the real Emily instead of the woman I present to the world. The Emily who cried herself to sleep as a child, lonely and confused and afraid. The Emily I push deep down inside in case she accidentally reveals herself. The Emily I could never give to Edward.
What have I done?
Tom’s fingers are tight against my own. I squeeze back, but I can’t look at him.
‘I’m fine,’ I say, but as the first firework shoots up into the inky sky and bursts into a rainbow of colour and sparkle, I burst into tears.