We Are All Made of Stars by Rowan Coleman Page A

uncomfortable.’
    â€˜No, I’m sorry,’ she says, and I am taken by surprise.
    â€˜Oh.’ I don’t really know where the conversation can go from here, so I simply wait, holding on to the door.
    â€˜About before …’ She gestures at her doorstep. ‘I’m sorry about that. I didn’t meant to be rude and that, it’s just, you know, where I lived before, people always had an opinion, and thought if you are on your own with a kid, living in a housing association place, you have to be either sponging off benefits or neglecting the kid. I work. I pay rent. I love my son. I guess I’m touchy about it, but I know you were trying to be nice and that.’
    â€˜Well,’ I say inadequately. ‘Not to worry … Cheerio, then!’ Cheerio?
    â€˜I do take good care of him, though,’ she says before I can close the door. ‘Just so you know. I do, and he should have told me he didn’t have a friend’s house to go round, but he tries to take care of me too, and he didn’t want me to have to leave work early, because he knows that I struggle to pay the bills. Normally, I’m home an hour after school finishes. But today there was some overtime, cleaning at this hospice up the road, and I heard they might be looking for permanent staff … and if you say no, you don’t get offered it again …’
    â€˜You don’t have to explain it to me,’ I say, finding my voice at last, and frankly feeling like the world’s biggest shit for making this young woman feel that way, even if it was by accident. ‘I’m glad he’s OK. I’m glad you’re OK. I don’t have an opinion about your skills as a mother, except that I am sure they are very good – I mean, to come round here … I wouldn’t have done it.’
    â€˜Really?’ She looks relieved. ‘So we’re OK, then?’
    â€˜Sure,’ I say, sort of touched that she should care what I think about her or her kid. There’s something heartening about it.
    â€˜Great.’ She gives me two thumbs up, which hover there in tableau for a few awkward seconds, neither of us sure of what comes next. ‘I’ll be getting back, then.’
    â€˜Me too, I’ve got stuff,’ I say, as if spag bol and beer counts as stuff.
    As I close the door I see that Jake has slinked in from the garden again.
    â€˜You’re all meow and no claws,’ I tell him. ‘She seemed all right, to me.’
    But, as I pierce the cover of my ready meal and whack it in the microwave, I wonder if the blinking of the phone message and the knock on the door tonight are ways the universe is reminding me that this perfect, carefree, no-strings life I’ve made for myself can be kind of disappointing sometimes.

Dearest Lizzie,
    This is a to-do, isn’t it? Here I am about to be carried off into the wide blue yonder and, well, to say the way that fate is taking me is a bit of a joke is to say the least!
    You have been a remarkable daughter, a remarkable person, actually, and I know you don’t get your patience or tolerance from me. I was never so selfless, kind or forgiving as you.
    You were fifteen on the day I said I was leaving home to become a singer on a cruise ship. I suppose that had something to do with my age – approaching forty and still I felt like a stranger in my own skin. You do see that, don’t you, darling? You see that it was never you I was running away from? It was me I was running to. Oh dear, and now I sound like that awful song about having never been to me. God save us from hippies.
    You could have hated me then; you had every right to, but I told you what was happening and why, and you listened and you – well, you’ve always been wise beyond your years – you decided to understand. I don’t know if you really understood then, or if it was years later, but it hardly matters, because you were there,