CHAPTER 63
It was still a huge thing to me, though. Tony could rationalise all he wanted, but after everything was done, would he really be able to handle having two children, or more, so far away and effectively out of reach for their early years?

It had to be his decision, though, not mine. I had kept my promise to the girls, and brought them together, but he needed to make his own mind up. Then there were the issues with the Child Support Agency. Not the simplest of games to play.

The long Summer break, for Jim, went on and on, and Alice and Enid worked a shuttle game looking after him while we worked, and taking him on trips to places he liked so much he couldn’t stop telling us about them, such as the local zoo, and the museums at Kensington. Small boys, dinosaurs, and that wasn’t a reference to Enid and Alice.

The latter was blooming now. The more her small breasts developed, the happier she became, only really getting maudlin about the male pattern baldness that cursed her. I would sometimes catch her without her hair, as Jim put it, gazing sadly into a mirror, but she always shook herself and smiled at me.

“I am counting my blessings, dear. I have my freedom now, after so long, and a little cosmetic problem is not going to be allowed centre stage. My shrink is already counting down the months of my real life test, we are just having a little argument about when it started!”

“That is something I meant to talk to you about, Alice. How far are you going with this?”

She seemed a little put out at that. “Sorry? I thought you understood this is final, this is me!”

“Sorry, love, I didn’t mean it like that. I know this is you, and we all love ‘you’ to bits, I just meant….well, are you looking at surgery? I will be blunt, love, I worry about the risks at your age. It’s very, very invasive, you can trust me on that one!”

She looked pensive. “To be honest, my dear, I don’t know, Every so often, I have a real moment of hatred for certain…areas of my body, but then I say to myself, how important is this, really? I mean, I am not exactly going to go looking for that Great Dark Man, am I, so apart from losing a couple of small bits, do I need anything more?”

I laughed. “Uncle Arwel?”

She blushed. “Well, yes, the thought had sort of crossed my mind, but I think he would run a mile. He is a mate, that’s how we connect, and I value that more than some fantasy.”

She paused, gathering herself. “Look, Sar, I’m not a virgin, not really. I had a couple of, well, flings as a youth, and they were a bit messy. I tried to connect with some girls I knew, and one, well, we sort of ended up in bed at her instigation, and it was not exactly satisfactory. She couldn’t see what I wanted, really, and I couldn’t tell her, and then I wondered if I might be gay. I couldn’t admit to myself what my heart was telling me, and I had a couple of…liaisons.”

She grinned, wryly. “Yes, they were fun, and yes I did lie with my legs n the air and dream, but it still felt wrong. I felt wrong.”

Now there was a surprise. Alice had always led me to believe that she had hidden all her life, terrified of letting things slip out, and now she was admitting to a lot more. She saw my mind ticking away, and smiled.

“It was always difficult with the girls, you know. I just wanted to be with them, to be one of them, and all they saw was a boy, and boys only want one thing, it seems, so that is what one of them gave me. You know, really, I suppose I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, and, well, in the end I did. We’d had a bit to drink, so I blamed that, and sort of avoided getting into that position again”

“You didn’t just tell them, Alice?”

“Could you have done so? I mean, to someone other than Elaine, or your two friends at college?”

No, I supposed not. I had been so lucky, especially with the three friends who had cared for me. They knew, they understood, they didn’t judge. Alice continued.

“Please understand this, Sar, I have never seen myself as a gay man, I just wanted to have something, some tenderness, some joy, yes, with a man, and that was the only reason, but they all wanted to play with what I didn’t want to have, and, well….unsatisfactory isn’t the word.

“Can you understand….can you understand there were moments, fleeting moments when I thought I hated you, in my jealousy? I really thought you had it all so easy, but then I remembered that shit who beat you, and then the lovely policemen who were so kind to you, and I knew that you had suffered just as much as me, and, well, each time I wanted to hate you, you would be there in front of me, and no, I never could. You save lives, Sar, it’s just a pity you left it so long to save your own”

She was crying now, and of course I held her. She kept talking into my shoulder, her voice muffled and shaky.

“You know how low I got, and some of that was because you were there in front of me, and nobody else in the shop ever suspected we were the same, but I knew, and it hurt”

She lifted her head to look me in the eyes. “You have nothing to be ashamed of, you were just the image of everything I could have had if I had had the courage that you had, when I was that age”

I stared hard at her. “This IS about Uncle Arwel, isn’t it?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, yes. We get on so well, and he is just my sort of man, if only he would get rid of those awful rings”

I started to laugh. She frowned at me.

“What’s funny?”

“Oh Alice, you are such a bloody woman. A man worries about getting a woman undressed, a woman about getting a man dressed better!”

She snorted. “Arwel is someone, if I were different….well, I wouldn’t have looked past the mullet and the jewellery. You let me see the man inside, and your family doesn’t seem to produce idiots”

“He’s my father’s brother. That’s all that needs to be said”

“Well, let’s just say that I have been having a lot of childish thoughts. ‘It’s not fair’ sums it up”

“Would you like me to talk to him, love?”

“Sarah, my sweet girl, if you do, it must be a general thing. I have my fantasies, but I have also got a good friend who has that rarest of qualities. We can communicate…if nothing else is possible, I want to keep that. Can you promise me that? Please?”

I could. I did.

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We worked and played our way through Summer, and managed to fit in a couple of rallies to let the Norvin breathe and Jim get his fix of camping. He was really into his little road bike, though, and one week, when Tony was on a string of late shifts, we rode down to the docks with camping gear on our racks and rode East from Calais towards Gravelines. There is a little camp site just outside the town, so we set up our tent, by some strange coincidence not far from a bird reserve, and spent a few days exploring the quiet lanes of that part of Flanders and searching for another perfect mousse au chocolat. Well, it’s a hard job, but someone has to do it.

I showed Jim his first ever crested tits, near Guines, and when we weren’t eating Nice Things, or riding, we were on the beach, and I was so bloody happy, it was all that Alice had envied.

I was a mother. “There is more than one way of being a mum”, how fucking true. Being away from Tony brought that home to me, and each time Jim treated me like that, honoured me with that name, I almost wanted to freeze frame my life. Keep your three, Arris, I have mine. I lay awake in the tent just to hear him breathing next to me, and I understood how much I was hurting Alice, Elaine, Siá¢n.

Life can be an utter bastard, and then it shows you what it s for, which is simply to be lived. I had almost given up after Joe, and the love of my friends had dragged me back. If, IF, I could do something for my sisters, and for Alice, then my easy ride in life meant I owed them payback.