Make or Break

ONE YEAR LATER

‘You big bloody rock; you didn’t get the better of me! I’m showing you. I’m showing you right now! Take that you hunk of—’

‘Are you talking to yourself?’ Jimmy said between great gasps of air.

‘Nope,’ I said, heaving in another breath. ‘I’m talking to Mr Thinks He’s So Big and Fancy Table Mountain.’

‘I always thought Table Mountain was a girl,’ Jimmy panted. ‘They call Cape Town the Mother City, so her mountain is probably a girl.’

‘Shhh, I’m concentrating on climbing this bitch or bastard.’

After sixty-seven minutes of climbing upwards in roasting heat I scaled the final few rocks, reached the summit and spun around to watch Jimmy claw himself over the last rock, his T-shirt removed and tucked into the waistband of his shorts (thank you Cape Town for being so hot).

‘I made it! I made it! I made it!’ I bounced from one rock to the other, ignoring the bemused looks from other climbers collapsing on rocks and gasping for breath like spent marathon runners. ‘I made it and I didn’t die of snake!’

‘Where do you get the energy to leap about like a flea after a climb like that?’ Jimmy flumped on a rock in the shade of a scrubby bush and necked a bottle of water.

‘I fricking made it!’ I said, springing over to him. ‘I want to take a photo.’ I held up my phone in selfie position. ‘Get up.’

‘Shall we wait for the others?’ Jimmy said, hefting himself off his rock and standing next to me in the sun.

‘I want one of you and me. The winners.’

‘Your lack of humbleness is grossly unattractive.’ Jimmy pressed his sweaty cheek to mine and we beamed at the camera.

I checked the photo with a grimace. ‘I look disgusting,’ I said, and I was being kind to myself.

We took a series of photos, all beetroot red with hair a-fluff, and all equally horrible. While Jimmy collapsed back on his shady rock I sent one off to Pete with the caption ‘Told you I’d climb it!’ He sent a text back immediately saying, ‘I’m glad. You look happy.’ And then followed it with a picture of Giselle and her teeny-tiny baby bump that they were annoyingly calling Poppy Seed because it was a girl and would most likely come out with French braids. I said ‘Awwww’ then pressed delete with a little scowl that made Jimmy laugh. I slipped the phone into my pocket just as Mum’s German complaining sounded from behind a rock.

‘Nie und nimmer . . . wer klettert den auf so einen berg? Das ist doch folter! Verdammte scheisse, sind wir endlich da?!’

‘Don’t swear, Grandma!’ Hunter’s voice echoed through the opening in the rocks.

I skipped across the dusty ground and peered down the rocky path that was more like a rocky ladder and saw Mum’s clammy, pained face followed by a tomato-red Annabelle, a determined Hunter and Marcus taking up the rear in a cricket hat and chino shorts, his pale legs thickly plastered with factor fifty.

‘I won! I won! I won!’ I proclaimed as I pulled Mum up the last few steps by her hand.

‘Of course you did,’ Mum puffed and wheezed. ‘I’m seventy-one.’

‘And you left while we were still getting out of the car,’ Annabelle said as she put one dainty foot in front of the other and reached the top.

She turned and helped Hunter scramble over the final rock, followed by Marcus, his pasty skin sizzling like pork crackling, and I did the little winning routine with them too. Nobody gave a crap.

We drained our drink bottles, took a million commemorative selfies then commenced the walk across the top of the behemoth towards the cable car that would take us back down.

Jimmy sent Ian a text saying we were on our way back and received a photo in return of Diego and Katie sitting amid the mountain of toys they’d bought in preparation for our stay.

The cable car descended and blew a cool breeze through the open windows. Annabelle told Hunter not to lean so far out and Marcus, turning a sickly shade of green, looked like he might suffer from motion sickness. I watched Mum at the open window of the cable car, Jimmy next to her pointing out landmarks, and thought of how far we’d all come since that difficult time a year ago.

After the party Mum and Dad told a few close friends everything and asked them to discreetly tell others. I can only imagine how busy the phone lines must have been in the ensuing days. Like us, our friends had struggled to deal with the truth. They too had been lied to for a very long time. Most were supportive. A handful took moral umbrage and sent sternly worded letters before cutting contact, but on the whole people had been sympathetic. And we’d got through the worst of it. As a family. Like Dad had said we would. Albeit a broken one.

Annabelle and I still saw Dad when he came to London, but one of his wife’s stipulations if they were to remain together was that he didn’t see Mum. Ever. The loss I’d felt when realising the four of us might never be in the same room again was like a death. And Mum’s grief was awful to witness. The worst part was removing Dad’s belongings from the family home like he no longer existed. Or we no longer wanted him around. I was angry at first and hated Annika for breaking up our family. But like Ian had said about Jimmy and his dad: ‘a knee-jerk reaction is understandable. It just needs to be readdressed’, I realised that her reaction was probably perfectly justified. But I hoped that in time she would see that we were a family also and ‘readdress’ the decision. So, for now, we saw our parents separately. We hadn’t had any big events like births or weddings but I didn’t think Annabelle and Marcus were far off wanting to and I knew she would never get married without both Mum and Dad there.

Mum was now on the fourth draft of her ridiculous self-help book on how to navigate being the second family, complete with diet tips and recipes that help ‘heal the guilt in your gut’. Apparently ghee works wonders if you’re harbouring a deception. She was spending some time with Patrick, and while she would probably never have the sparkle in her eye she had when she and Dad were together, she seemed relatively content to go on long walks or take trips to the organic garden centre with him.

Dad was still going through counselling with his original family. Maryna had initially cut contact with him and stopped him seeing his grandchildren, but with therapy they were now on more cordial terms. There was vague talk of Annabelle and me meeting our half-sister, but I don’t think any of us were ready yet. Often, in quiet moments, I’d think of Maryna and wonder how she had felt when she found out. Maybe her self-worth had plummeted too. I felt terrible. I didn’t want her hurting. I didn’t want her to think she wasn’t enough for Dad. And as an only child she didn’t have a sister to turn to like I had. But I didn’t contact her. For some reason I thought that should be her decision.

Annika’s interiors business kept her travelling and Dad was attending a lot of the counselling sessions alone. She was still very, very hostile, apparently. It made me sad to think that Dad was so busy loving everybody that he might end up with nobody. Although, despite Annika’s ban on Mum and Dad seeing each other, I knew they still communicated. Sometimes Annabelle and I would walk into a room and hear them on the phone together. Mum would quickly get off and say, ‘Oh, that was just your father ringing to ask after Katie’, or ‘to see how Hunter did in his relay race’. She’d tap the phone with a wistful look then take a bracing breath and carry on.

Jimmy had finished his three-month course and was offered a job in the writer’s room. It was a junior role, yet highly sought after. But in the meantime his tutor had shown his script to a well-connected animator friend of his in LA, and the friend had shown it to a producer. The producer had asked if Jimmy was prepared to work on another couple of drafts because he thought he could get some investors interested. So Jimmy had turned down the writer’s room job, gone back to Cape Town, back to Sylvie’s restaurant and knocked out those other drafts. It was now with some execs in LA who were very excited about it.

And me? Well, I’ve been doing OK. I can still vacillate between total acceptance and total dismay. But I mostly settle with acceptance because it’s an easier place to live. My therapist says I’m doing really well and, surprisingly, my paranoia and anxiety have lessened, which makes me think on some subconscious level that I knew something was up. The three months Jimmy was in London were the happiest three months of my life. He’d pretty much lived at my flat. His SA tan had faded but none of his innate sparkle had, thank goodness. When he went back to Cape Town I’d stayed in London to continue with my producer training and we did the long-distance thing. I was keenly aware of the parallels with my parents’ relationship. Except we had FaceTime. And honesty.

I love Jimmy. I really do. I love his attitude to life and I love who I am when I’m with him. And I love that our children will have at least a 50 per cent chance of being able to sing in tune. Yes, I am talking about children. No HSBC sperm bank or millions of one-night stands with hot guys trying to get a sperm donor for me! Which was a real shame, but we all make sacrifices for the ones we love.

I’ve finished my training and have produced a handful of music videos by myself. Lana was very pleased and so was I. I loved my new role. But I wanted to be with Jimmy.

‘I always knew you weren’t going to be mine forever,’ Lana had said as we’d sat in her office and she pressed send on an introductory email to a contact of hers in LA.

‘Thank you,’ I’d said with proper fat tears rolling down my cheeks.

‘We’re going now,’ I called down to the beach, an hour after we’d returned from climbing Table Bastard Mountain.

Jimmy, freshly showered and with his SA tan restored, joined me on the balcony. On the white sand below Hunter and Katie were building a sandcastle with Pamela, who was wearing a giant multi-coloured sun hat and had already learnt a handful of baby sign words. Flora sat on her own deck chair under a brolly and Lucy lay next to her in a patchy bit of shade, half-covered in sand. Annabelle, Mum and Marcus sat in deck chairs nearby, drinking iced tea, luxuriating in the late-morning sun and listening to Diego and Ian explain the next day’s proceedings. They were getting married, and as Jimmy had predicted, Diego was having his loud, proud, ostentatious, colourful affair. Jimmy and I were heading to the airport to pick up his father. It had been hard at the beginning but in the end, Jimmy and his father had found a solid foundation to start from. And they’d built that new relationship from the ground up.

‘BYE!’ Hunter stood and waved, tripped on the sandcastle, knocked Marcus’s drink out of his hands and lost his grip on his plastic spade, which went flying and hit Mum on the head, coating her in a tsunami of fine white sand.

‘Kruzifix, verdammt und zugenaeht!’ she shrieked.

‘Grandma!’ Hunter said, getting up from his tangle of limbs and buckets with a stern look on his sand-covered face. ‘Wash your mouth out!’

Everybody cracked up. Mum scowled and pulled her sun hat lower. She had stopped mono-mealing and the night before had been quite happy to knock back one too many of Diego’s vodkas, once he’d told her the garnish was a local medicinal herb.

I laughed and turned away from Annabelle dabbing at a soaked Marcus with her towel, Katie clapping, Hunter telling Mum off, and Diego and Ian watching on in fascination. ‘Ready?’ I said, putting a hand on Jimmy’s chest, the sun catching the diamond on my left ring finger.

He’d given it to me in his bedroom five minutes earlier. Nobody on the beach knew yet; Jimmy wanted to tell his father first.

He looked at the diamond, then at me and he grinned. ‘Yep,’ he said, then put a tanned arm around my shoulders. ‘Back soon!’ he said to the rumpus on the beach.

As we walked away from the balcony I saw Diego and Ian exchange an extremely knowing look. My family on the other hand, and as per usual, had no freaking idea.