When I First Held You by Anstey Harris

Author:Anstey Harris [Harris, Anstey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-01-23T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

RUBY

I’m beyond excited. For the last two weeks, I have been waking up at three o’clock in the morning wondering, wondering all kinds of things. In the quiet bits, in the dark, I wonder about Mum and what she would make of it all and I wonder if she’d be excited too. She would have been cross at first and I would have gone off on one instantly in retaliation. Bang, yelling that I was only trying to help, that I was doing my best – we’ve been there a million times, about a million things. I’d give anything to tell her that I’m different now. It makes the skin on my face go hot just thinking about it, about all the things I’d change if I could turn back time.

I know it’s true that Mum and me wouldn’t still be shouting at each other now I’m twenty-two. But that doesn’t actually change anything – that’s the absolute shittiest thing about the past: you can’t change it.

Dad says he thinks Mum would actually be glad about Judith and James – despite everything she said about it.

‘I think the context would be different,’ he told me when I phoned to say that Judith and James are going to meet me, that we’re all three going to have lunch. ‘She was determined not to do it while Granny was alive – which is very understandable. I wonder if she’d have come round to it a bit more in the last few years, you know, with all the TV programmes and so on.’

I snap the dead leaves from the edges of my spider plant: there are a disgraceful amount of them, poor thing. Those adoption reunion programmes are my guilty pleasure. I’ve watched them since they started, mush though they are, and I’ve always been hoping to see Mum’s baby photo, hear a story that I know is actually her.

Every now and then I’d hear one and think it was her, and by extension of that – of course – me. Then they’d go a bit further into the story and it would reveal that it was the wrong end of Britain or – and this has happened more than once – right at the oh-my-God-that’s-my-mum-moment, it turns out the baby was a boy.

My dad absolutely sneers at those programmes – not because of the adoption thing: he feels the same about ‘all reality television’, quote, because he is a Very Lofty Academic. One day he will find out that those endless cookery programmes to find the best high-end chef in Britain are also reality TV and then his brain will implode.

Anyway, Carmen, a girl I did my first degree with – that still feels so good to say, even if I never do get round to finishing the second – works for one of those television production companies. Carmen says they’re all pretending, all those people who burst into tears or go off on one onscreen: not pretending that they’re overwhelmed

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