Chapter 1
My watch was fast. I tapped a nail against the glass, but it kept moving. The second hand was jumping ahead, I was sure of it, over-eager, hyperactive. Pause, flick. Pause, flick, like a goose-step, legs kicked forward too smartly, charging forward too quickly.
I looked around the university car park, at all the interchangeable 4x4s with their interchangeable boots open just like ours, all unloading their suitcases and boxes of pots and pans, vital lifelines in the halls of residence, supplied by heartbroken parents sending their beloved children off into the world, and I wondered if they all felt the same pain that I did. The same sense of everything coming to an end with the final sweep of a stopwatch.
Did Dylan, my daughter, feel it too? Probably not. My only child loitering at the kerb, hooded eyes looking down at her suitcase, bruised and scuffed, with a tufted pink wool pom-pom tied around the handle, a relic of our family holiday to Ibiza a few weeks earlier.
And from ten paces, I could almost read her mind: ‘why is my suitcase so scruffy?’ That was what she was thinking. ‘Why did Mum not buy me a new one for such a big day?’ And, as my husband Robert paced and muttered into his phone across the road, ‘why are my parents so embarrassing?’
‘We should have hired a van,’ said Robert, pocketing his phone, then hoisting another bag from the car, dropping it on the tarmac. Dylan winced; that one was important. It had her laptop and a magpie’s nest of chargers and dongles inside. Twenty-first-century magic. Oh, and the handwritten diary she thought I didn’t know about.
‘Dad, be careful,’ said Dylan. It was meant as a complaint, the casual way teenagers express their constant displeasure with their ‘lame’ elders, but today it was different. Softer, more affectionate. Gentle eye-rolling, feigned irritation. Maybe even Dylan, armour-plated by hormones, still felt the tug of that wire-taut cord as it stretched between us.
‘Come on,’ said Robert, all gruff bonhomie, ‘let’s get you inside. It looks like rain.’
We all looked up at the sky, each hunching our shoulders against weather yet to come.
Dylan smiled but I could hear her breath stutter as my husband locked the car. It felt strange to watch my daughter in the final moments of our family life. People tended to remember their days at uni as fun, carefree and hedonistic, a brief, perfect shadow world between being a child and the realities of responsibility, mortgages and wrinkles. But today, on the cusp of this idealized adult life, no one looked like they were having any fun. The new students drifting through the corridors looked awkward, anxious, torn between wanting us to leave so they could get on with being adults and not wanting us to go because then they would finally be on their own. A gold-plated portcullis poised to drop.
Her room was on the second floor. It was small, but at least she didn’t have to share it with anyone, and it had a view of the lake which was the centrepiece of the university’s sprawling halls of residence campus. As Dylan unpacked the assortment of bags and cases that had made the journey from home, I helped her put them away.
‘Are you sure you know how to use that?’ I said as she pulled a new steam iron out of a banker’s box.
‘Mum, it’s not my first time with an electrical appliance,’ she sighed. ‘Besides, I can’t imagine I’ll be doing much ironing.’
‘Not when there’s so much partying to do,’ said Robert, nudging her, always playing good cop.
‘Exactly. I’m a student now,’ she grinned.
‘So that’s what we’re paying thirty thousand pounds in tuition for,’ I said, also trying to be light-hearted, but I was afraid it came across as a telling-off.
‘Where do you want these posters putting up?’ Robert added, tapping the end of a cardboard tube.
‘It’s fine, Dad. Leave it. I’ll do it later.’
I wanted it to go on forever, the banter and the small-talk, but a knock at the door told me it wouldn’t.
A soap-pink face framed by a mop of curls peered into the room.
‘Hello,’ said the girl. ‘I’m Amy. I’ve just moved in next door.’
Amy was from Shrewsbury, doing ‘Mech Eng’, whatever that was. She reported that ‘a group of them’ were heading down to the bar, then shrugged apologetically, realizing too late that perhaps her new neighbour’s parents might not approve. Amy was the jolly, sensible sort you hoped would be your daughter’s next-door pal, but I still couldn’t help feeling a pang of resentment that Amy was cutting in on our party of three. The door closed and Dylan gave a shy grin.
‘I should probably go and check it out before everyone makes lifelong friends and I’m left in the cold.’
My eyes met Robert’s and he gave a quick nod. This was it then. The moment. The one thing I had been dreading for the past twelve months.
‘We don’t want you getting left out,’ said Robert, slipping his hand into mine. Reassurance, or restraint.
Tears pooled in my eyes and I wasn’t sure a stubborn blink could get rid of them. Instead, I stepped forward and hugged Dylan. Robert, still attached, joined in like a family chain gang.
‘Guys …’ said Dylan, wriggling under us. ‘This is Birmingham. I’m not going to the moon. I’ll be back most weekends.’
I caught my husband’s eye again. We both knew that wasn’t true. We were close as a family, but Dylan had always been independent. Even at seven, she had been asking how old she had to be before she could get her own flat.
Robert’s phone rang.
He swore, scrabbling in his pocket for his phone. ‘Sorry, got to take this,’ he said, holding up a finger. ‘Back in a mo.’
I was grateful for my moment alone with Dylan and pulled my daughter close again, taking a deep breath through my nose and holding it in. I’ve always known my daughter’s smell: a faint smell of cotton fabric softener I’d always used for our laundry and that pear shampoo she likes. But now – suddenly – it didn’t feel quite so familiar. My daughter smelled new, different, as if she had suddenly shed a skin. I wanted to learn it, drink it in, never let go. Just a tick, just another, hold onto my baby just another minute longer.
‘We’re going to miss you so much,’ I said. ‘So, so much.’
I’d spent half the previous night awake, crying silently into my pillow, but I was determined not to let my daughter see how upset I was now.
Dylan pulled back, putting on that half-adult scolding face.
‘You can Skype and WhatsApp me.’
‘I hate WhatsApp.’
‘You are such a dinosaur.’
I tried to smile.
‘Maybe, but I do remember uni. It’s tough.’
I was talking about myself, of course. I hadn’t found university easy at all. I was earnest, intense and, I thought, poetic. I was, in hindsight, just annoying and lonely. I found the coursework difficult too, just managing to keep my head above water, scraping across the finishing line of Finals with a low 2:2 and an inferiority complex.
But Dylan wasn’t like me. She had a fierce mind and despite her health problems, had breezed through her A levels with a string of As.
‘I know you’ll be fine, but if anything’s wrong, just call – okay?’
‘I’m more worried about you,’ said Dylan, looking at me directly.
I looked at her, taken aback.
‘Me?’
‘You do know there’s more to life than Zumba and reading about other people’s children on Facebook, don’t you?’
I managed a weak laugh.
‘I do, yes.’
‘Just make sure you keep busy, okay?’
‘Aren’t I the one supposed to be giving you advice?’
Robert walked back in and touched my shoulder.
‘I can hear the noise from the bar from the corridor. I think it’s our cue to leave.’
I looked back at Dylan.
‘Are you sure you don’t want us to take you out for dinner?’
‘Mum …’
She flashed a look at her father for support.
‘We’re going,’ he smiled. ‘Just text us later to let us know things are okay?’
‘I will. And don’t worry, I’ll be fine.’
And it was only then, in that moment, I realized that was exactly what I feared the most.
Chapter 2
A late shower made the road black, wet and shiny, reflecting the moon’s face back at us. We sat in silence, no cars passing, apparently alone; just us and the haze of the slip road.
‘Why didn’t we sort out staying over?’ I said, finally glancing across at Robert as we slid onto the M6. ‘I mean, there are plenty of nice boutique hotels in Birmingham. We could have made a night of it.’
My voice sounded glassy, like the treble had been turned up too far.
‘You mean we should have stayed in the area in case Dylan needed us,’ said Robert, glancing over, his smile teasing me.
‘You’re suggesting we’re above spying on our only child.’
Robert laughed.
‘Despite that being a bit creepy, how do you propose we do that?’
‘Can’t we track her phone or something?’
‘Ignoring the fact that Dylan is about a hundred times more tech-savvy than us, I’m not sure it would help. She’d only have to be within fifty feet of a nightclub and you’d be panicking she’s on drugs.’
I returned a soft snort. After twenty years of marriage, he could read my internal Autocue.
‘She needs to stand on her own two feet, Rachel,’ said Robert more softly. ‘If there’s anything wrong, she knows where we are and by now, I’m sure about a dozen new friends are hanging on her every word. She’s probably forgotten about us already. Dilly’s never had trouble getting stuck in, remember her first day at nursery?’
I did. Dylan was four and I’d left her for half an hour – twenty-nine minutes longer than we had ever been apart before. I’d gone to the new joiners’ coffee morning in the school dining hall, but before I went home, I’d returned to the nursery block, pressed my face up against the glass, expecting to see my daughter shuffling aimlessly around the classroom. Instead, she was sitting on a plastic chair in the Wendy House, with a queue of tiny children lined up in front of her. When I’d asked her about it later, she had said they’d all been waiting for the chance to ‘meet the queen’.
I nodded, feeling teary again. To the outside world, Dylan was a leader, the life and soul of the party. So much so, it was easy to forget the wobble in our lives just a couple of years earlier.
Anorexia. Even now I couldn’t even say the word, let alone admit it had once consumed our life. I had put Dylan’s meagre appetite down to the stress of GCSEs. I didn’t know that her periods had stopped or that she’d lost over a stone in weight from her already slim frame. I still woke up in the middle of the night, asking myself how could I not have noticed any of it: the baggy jumpers in summer, the excessive chewing, all that crap about how ‘I stuffed myself at lunch’, the significance of her long daily runs.
And although it could have been worse – officially she had an OSFED, or ‘other specified feeding or eating disorder’, rather than full-blown anorexia – it still felt too difficult for me to let her go, to let her slip away from my watch.
Robert reached across and squeezed my hand. He knew what I was thinking; how could he not?
‘Rach, she’s okay.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘She’s fine. She looks great, she eats more than we do, she’s happy …’
‘How do you ever really know that?’
He turned back to the road. There was no answer to that question.
‘It’s just us now, huh?’
We’d been talking about it for years, that mythical point in time ‘when Dylan leaves home’. All the things we’d do, all the places we would go: a summer in Africa, the sabbatical in Rome. We were going to travel, and learn new things – sculpture, Mandarin, Tai Chi. But now it was here, I didn’t want anything other than our old routine.
‘It’s not too late, you know,’ he said.
‘For what?’ My voice lifted a notch. Was my husband actually proposing we had another child? I’d thought about it a lot lately. At forty-seven I was technically not too old, the window for being a mum again was ajar, just a sliver, just enough to let the wind stir the dust. But still, I felt a quiver of panic.
‘Finding a hotel, getting some dinner …’
I was tired just thinking about an impromptu mini-break and everything that ...
