‘Where? Where are we going to live?’ persisted the child. His dark brows came together in a frown and he glared mistrustfully at the lush green hills overlooking Ballyfergus Lough, oblivious, it seemed, to the breathtaking beauty surrounding them.
‘There,’ said Louise pointing at the town, which had served as a port and gateway to the rest of the province for over one thousand years. She remembered that Oli had last visited when he was two and would not recall the trip. ‘See those houses there. Not up on the hill. Down there.’ She pointed at the sprawling cluster of grey and brown buildings on the flat plain. ‘They look really tiny, don’t they?’
Oli nodded.
‘That’s because we’re so far away. We’re going to live in a house down there.’ She pointed roughly in the direction of the indoor swimming pool, a grey block of a building, which sat only metres from the shore.
‘With Nana and Papa?’
‘No, Oli,’ said Louise and he plopped down suddenly onto his bottom. ‘Just you and me. Like always,’ she added, careful to deliver this news in a neutral tone and eradicate any hint of disappointment or anxiety from her voice. She brushed his straight brown fringe, so different from her fine fair hair, off his forehead. He swatted her hand away absent-mindedly.
‘Why?’ said Oli.
‘Oh,’ said Louise, not expecting this question, not here, not now. ‘Well,’ she said carefully and took a deep breath. ‘Because your daddy doesn’t live with us, does he? He lives in Scotland. But of course it might not always be just the two of us. One day Mummy might meet a nice man and …’
Suddenly, Oli slid onto the floor and disappeared under the table. Mischievous brown eyes, the same colour as his father’s, stared up at her. ‘But why can’t we live with Nana and Papa?’
Louise put a hand over her heart and let out a silent sigh of relief. In her zeal to ensure Oli understood, she had yet again answered the question she thought Oli had asked, rather than the one he actually had. It was a fundamental pitfall she’d read about more than once in the library of parenting books that now lay in storage, boxed up in some Edinburgh warehouse.
‘Come on out of there, Oli,’ she said, pulling him gently out from under the table. ‘You don’t know what’s on that floor.’
Louise extracted a bottle of antibacterial gel from her bag. ‘We can’t live with Nana and Papa because they haven’t got enough room for us. Their house is very small.’
But Oli was now more interested in the gel than pursuing this topic of conversation. Louise held his hand by the wrist and squeezed a translucent green blob onto the centre of his palm. ‘This’ll kill all the nasty germs. Now, rub your hands together like this,’ she said, squirting some of the gel onto her own palm and rubbing her hands briskly together.
Oli held his hand inches from his face, stared at the gel and said, ‘It’s got bubbles in it, Mummy.’
‘Yes, I know, darling.’
‘Why?’
‘It just has.’
He extended his hand towards her face, his chubby fingers spread like the fat arms of the starfish that Cameron, her former husband, had once fished out of Tayvallich Bay on the west coast of Scotland. Together they’d knelt on the pebbly beach and wondered at its pale lilac beauty, heads bent together like children. Oli smeared a blob of gel, wet and surprisingly cold, on Louise’s nose. She blinked, surprised, and he let out a squeal of delight.
She laughed then, coming back to the moment, to her perfect boy, and he said, ‘I love you, Mummy.’
She swallowed, fought back the tears of joy. ‘I love you too, my sweet angel.’ She beamed at him and added, ‘Now, hurry up. It goes runny if you don’t do it quickly.’
‘Okay, Mummy.’ Oli slapped his hands together, sending splatters across the Formica table. He let out a cry and looked up at her, slightly shocked-looking, for reassurance.
Louise smiled. ‘That’s it. Now rub them together,’ she said and Oli complied.
She loved the unquestioning trust her son placed in her. She was the epicentre of his world, his everything. And he was hers – she craved his neediness and the fulfilment it gave her as a mother. And for the last three years – no, from the moment of his conception – he had been her obsession.
Her decision to relocate from Edinburgh to Ballyfergus had been taken entirely with Oli’s welfare at the forefront of her mind. Though it was also true that, after many years in Edinburgh, she now primarily associated the city with disappointment and heartache. She had been glad to leave. Her only regret was leaving her best friend, Cindy, behind. But this, she told herself bravely, was a new chapter for her and Oli, though coming back to the town of her birth induced an odd feeling. It was a fresh start but it also felt like she was returning to an old, familiar life. A life she had carelessly left behind as an eighteen-year-old without so much as a backwards glance.
A voice over the tannoy told them to return to their car and Louise gathered up their possessions – colouring books and crayons, books, snacks, a copy of Marie Claire magazine (an optimistic purchase from the shop on the ferry) and her mobile phone. She stuffed them into the stylish, capacious patent leather bag that had become her constant companion since Oli’s birth. Not that she cared much for fashion – not any more. She liked to look her best, of course, and she had not, like some other mums she knew, let herself ‘go’.
Louise descended the first lethal flight down to the car deck, gripping Oli’s hand like a vice. Twice he slipped on the steep metal steps and she hauled him back to his feet. Her left shoulder ached with the weight of the bag and her heartbeat accelerated, her brow beaded with sweat. Her stomach flipped with nerves and excitement. She squeezed Oli’s hand even tighter. He glanced up at her.
‘Watch where you’re going, pet!’ she said, as his foot slipped again and he almost landed on his bottom on the ribbed metal floor at the foot of the stairs. Doors led off from this landing to the top level car deck.
A portly middle-aged man, a member of the ship’s crew, stood on the landing dressed in a short-sleeved pale blue shirt and navy polyester trousers with a perma-press crease down the front of each leg. ‘Do you want a hand, love?’ he said, in the hard-edged, down-to-earth accent of North-East Antrim, and stepped forward with one hand outstretched. ‘If you carry the wee man, I’ll help with your bag.’
‘No, thanks. I’m fine,’ bristled Louise automatically. She missed no opportunity to demonstrate to the world in general that she could cope alone. ‘I can manage.’
The pleasant smile fell from the man’s face. He said nothing more, stepped back and adopted his guard-like stance once again, hands behind his back, and nodded in a tight-lipped manner to the person behind Louise. Realising how rude she had sounded, Louise ducked her head and proceeded quickly to the top of the next flight of stairs, her face flaming with embarrassment.
She told herself she was tired and emotional. The drive across Scotland to the port of Cairnryan had taken the best part of four hours, including a stop for lunch. And she’d not slept well the night before, her sleep disturbed by dreams of Cameron. In the dream she was following him in a storm along a narrow cliff pathway on the southern side of the Firth of Forth – a path they had once walked together in happier times. He wore a bright red jacket, his dark hair plastered to his scalp by the driving rain, his face dripping with water. It was high tide and she could hear the ferocious crash of waves on the treacherous rocks below. She stopped and called out to him that it was too dangerous, that they should turn back. And then, right at that moment, without any warning at all, the coastal path crumbled and Cameron plunged over the edge of the cliff, lost to her forever.
They had been divorced for three years –