The Generation Game by Sophie Duffy

blood, tingeing my milk with a nasty taste so that I am petrified you will never want it.
    To have and to hold. Where was he when I was pushing you out? To love and to cherish. Where was he when he was supposed to be with me? Till death us do part. I feel like
killing him right now. Forsaking all others. Yeah, right.
    “Tell him to go home,” I bark at the nurse the next time she dodges in, and I get an angelic sympathetic smile in return.
    “Are you sure?”
    “Quite sure.”
    So he leaves, my husband, quietly. A squeak that grows faint and then the distant thud of a door closing. He doesn’t even bother to kick up a fuss.
    I don’t know where he’s gone. Not to our home. But I have you and your home is with me.

Chapter Seven: 1972
The Apprentice
    These days I would be taken in by Social Services and fostered out to a family with a clutch of other abandoned children. But at this moment in time there is no question of
that; I stay on at the shop with Bob. Neither of us really believes this arrangement will continue forever. Surely Helena will come back and resume her rightful place at the counter at some point
in the near future? Maybe she’s just gone on holiday and forgotten to mention it in all the dizzy rush of packing and organising a foreign trip. Maybe she’ll send me a postcard of a
Mountie sitting proudly on his horse and bring me back a racoon’s tail hat (á la Davy Crockett) as a souvenir.
    But it isn’t a postcard that flutters through the shop letterbox onto the Embassy doormat. It is an airmail letter with a row of stamps Lucas would have spent his pocket money on. It
arrives one Saturday morning a few weeks after Helena’s departure. I am on my way to Auntie Sheila’s when the postman hands it over to me in such a gingerly fashion that I wonder if it
is one of those letter bombs. My name is on the front in Helena’s school girl handwriting (which is much neater than my school girl handwriting as she spent several hours a day practising it
in her boarding school in Wales and Miss Mothball isn’t particularly bothered how neat our writing is as long as we ‘get on with it quietly’). I peel open the seal very carefully
and unfold the tissue-thin letter, catching the faintest whiff of Helena’s perfume-mixed-with-cigarettes.
    My reading has suffered without the benefit of Lucas’ tuition. So I hand the letter over to Bob, lurking nearby, shuffling some packets of tic tacs on their stand. He coughs dramatically
(for this is most definitely a dramatic moment, my future hanging there amongst the Sherbet Dib Dabs and Daily Mails ) and then begins:
    Dear Philippa
    I hope you are well and being a good girl for Bob. I am sorry I didn’t say goodbye. Orville asked me to marry him and I said yes. There is no room for you at the moment in his
    condominium (flat) in Toronto. He is very busy with his work and I am also busy looking for work so that we can buy a bigger condominium and there will be room for you. I think you are better off
    at the shop for now. You can go to school and see your old friends and Bob is the best father you could ever hope for.
    (At this point Bob chokes up and has to blow his nose.)
    Please don’t be cross with Mummy.
    All my love
    Helena.
    And there it is: the truth of it, there in that name, Helena. I see that she is as confused as I am. She has never been a fully-fledged Mummy. There has always been such a strong part that has
remained Helena. And that is the part she is now embracing in Orville Tupper’s small condominium (flat) in Toronto, while the Mummy part is kept at arms’ length. Kept over the
ocean.
    Bob smiles at me with that smile which completely passed my mother by.
    ‘She thought she was doing the right thing by you,’ he says. ‘She thought you’d be better off here, with me.’
    He looks as bemused as I feel, his hands searching inside the pockets of his baggy cardigan as if he’ll find the answer in there. But somewhere deep down, that