The Men in her Life

was a rite of passage as significant as the day Ella had her first period.
    ‘It was only a kind of protest,’ Ella said, adding with a short laugh, ‘I’m not even sure what I was protesting about.’
    Outside, Matt’s father sounded the horn of his car.
    ‘You will write,’ Clare said, feeling their time had run out and she had wasted it.
    ‘I’ll call,’ Ella said, standing up.
    ‘And write. There won’t be time on a call to tell me what it’s really like...’ She knew the words were too eager as she said them.
    ‘I will if I have time. It’ll take me a while to settle in. You mustn’t worry about me.’
    ‘No.’ I don’t want you to go, Clare wanted to scream. Please don’t leave me.
    ‘I love you very much,’ she said, fighting back tears.
    ‘I love you too, Mum,’ Ella said, and then as the horn sounded again outside she shouted, ‘I’m outta here!’ punching the air.
    At the station, they simply hugged. Ella held on for a long time, and Clare felt each second of her pressed warmth as a gift. Finally she let go and climbed onto the train. Clare forced herself to smile. She did not want Ella’s last image to be of her crying.
    ‘It’s OK, Mum,’ Ella pulled down the window and leaned out, ‘I’m only going away for a year...’ and then the train pulled out and Clare ran down the platform wanting to see her right up to the last millionth of a glimpse. And when she had gone, she exhaled, as if she had been holding her breath for an hour.
    ‘As she says, she’s only going for a year,’ Matt’s father said cheerfully.
    Oh shut up, Clare thought.
    ‘Matthew will miss her,’ he continued. His tone implied that Matt was the only person in town who would. They didn’t know each other very well. Just the occasional nod of recognition at parents’ evenings. He was the assistant bank manager and didn’t have a very high opinion of what he called artistic types.
    ‘Not as much as I will,’ Clare told him, brightly, trying to achieve a sort of closure by the time they got into the car. She didn’t think she would be able to bear the strain of polite conversation all the journey back to Penderric.
    The house was empty. She went upstairs to Ella’s room and lay on her bed, trying to remember all the happy moments they had shared, but only able to see her daughter’s waving arm going further and further away down the track until the point where she didn’t know whether she was seeing or imagining it. As she lay staring blindly at the ceiling tears dripped from her eyes and down both sides of her face, filling her ears, then overflowing on to Ella’s pillowcase.
    ‘MAR ME!’
    She didn’t know how long she had been lying crying before Tom and Joss arrived home. She sat up quickly and wiped her eyes with Ella’s duvet cover, then looked at herself in the mirror on the wall. She looked as if she had a bad cold, she thought, practising a smile for Tom.

    ‘It’s a kind of Cyrano de Bergerac of the Internet,’ Jeff said.
    Holly’s heart sank. It was a very good idea, but she couldn’t see Jeff having the finesse to pull it off. It was late on a hot summer’s Friday afternoon. As she looked out of the window trying to think of a suitable response, he leant towards her and she caught a faint whiff of stale deodorant and sweat.
    ‘Have you got a light?’ he asked her.
    She saw there was a cigarette in his mouth.
    ‘I thought you’d given up,’ she said, leaning casually back in her chair, fumbling as unobtrusively as she could in her desk drawer for her cigarette packet. With relief her blind fingers discovered that she had one left.
    ‘My father died, so I took it up again,’ Jeff said between sucks as she lit a match under his cigarette.
    ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
    She lit up too and blew the match out.
    ‘Yeah. It’s a bit illogical since he died of lung cancer, but there we are.’
    She meant she was sorry about his father, not his relapse, but it seemed too cruel to say so. Anyway, she reminded herself, there were no right and wrong ways to grieve.
    ‘My father died recently too,’ she offered, trying to show she understood.
    ‘Right. Did he smoke?’
    ‘Yes.’
    They sat silently and gloomily filling the room with fumes.
    ‘So tell me about Cyrano of the Internet ,’ she said with fake enthusiasm, wondering how this slightly unsavoury man always managed to make her feel guilty.
    ‘There’s this girl, woman, right, who puts out an advert for a