It is not the answer she wants but she hasn’t the will to challenge him. Instead she turns her head away and blinks against the tears.
Daniel begins to speak again, his words tripping over each other in order to deliver quickly the news he knows she will not want to hear.
Pregnancy. Risks. Advised not to try again.
She hears the words but will not absorb their meaning. Turning to look at him, she cannot read his expression, cannot tell whether it is the frown or the smile he means her to see.
“We don’t need to try again, do we, Lil? Three times, that’s enough, surely? We have Phoebe. Shouldn’t we just be grateful for her? Let’s not put ourselves through all this again. I don’t feel the need for another child to complete our family. We’re fine just the way we are, aren’t we?”
Lily neither dissents nor agrees.
Later, she thinks. Later she will be able to change his mind. It is not a conversation for now. She can wait. She can be patient.
She lays her head back on the pillow, closes her eyes, and invites in sleep. She just needs to give him time. He will, she feels sure, want to try for another baby eventually.
Chapter 8
Jess
Jess glanced at the clock on the dashboard as she edged over the speed limit along the Westway. Her jaw tightened as a queue of traffic ahead of her forced her to brake. Thirteen hours after arriving on set, all she wanted to do was head home, but instead she was having to clear up Lily’s mess yet again.
Irritation needled her skin. Even when she had no direct contact with her, Lily still managed to inveigle her way into Jess’s life, still managed to cause disruption. Even after all these years of avoiding her, Jess was still covering up Lily’s mistakes.
Her mum had said she’d get a cab home from the audition, but Jess couldn’t let her do that. Lily might be able to cancel arrangements at the last minute and leave their mum in the lurch, but Jess couldn’t.
A dull throb pinched at Jess’s temples as she thought about how different things might have been had her mum moved in with Lily instead of her. Lily had asked first—she had a habit of making grand gestures without any thought for the consequences—and in truth it hadn’t occurred to Jess to offer until then. But as soon as her mum had said she was contemplating moving in with Lily, Jess had been forced to intervene. She couldn’t have let her mum do that. She’d never have forgiven herself. The thought of it even now—even when the possibility no longer posed a threat—made Jess squeeze the steering wheel until her knuckles ached.
Stuck in stationary traffic as another minute ticked by, Jess silently cursed work for having made her so late. She thought about all the times when Mia was younger that her mum had collected her from school and taken her to ballet, gymnastics, or swimming classes because Jess had been at work. All the times she had fetched Mia from childcare, playdates, school outings, and delivered her home safely and on time.
Jess breathed deeply, an automatic barrier slamming down on the thought that one day, in the not-too-distant future, her mum would no longer be alive.
Turning her head sideways to look into the adjacent car, Jess’s eyes sharpened their focus. The hairline, the jaw, the shape of the ears: the profile of the man in the driver’s seat teased open the lid on a box of her memories.
“What’s black and white and read all over?”
Jess is curled up on her father’s lap, wrapped in an oversized bath towel, water dripping down her neck from her freshly washed hair. She squints with concentration, can feel her forehead creasing.
“I don’t know, Daddy. That’s too hard!”
“Come on, you can do this one, I know you can. What’s black and white and read all over?”
Jess repeats the riddle in her head, determined to prove that her dad isn’t mistaken in believing she can solve it, even though just thinking about it is beginning to hurt her five-year-old brain.
“That’s easy. It’s a newspaper.” Her sister sashays into the bathroom only long enough to collect her hairbrush and answer the conundrum before swishing out.
Jess doesn’t have time to compose an appropriate retort, but she feels humiliation bleed into her cheeks and buries her face in the towel.
“OK, how about a joke instead? How does a monkey make toast?”
Jess lifts her head and smiles. She knows there is no expectation to work out the answer to a joke. “I don’t know, Daddy. How does a monkey make toast?”
“He puts it under the gorilla.”
It takes a split second for the punchline to unfold in Jess’s head and she collapses into satisfied giggles. “Tell me another one!”
“OK. Why did the lobster blush?”
Jess pretends to think, playing her role in a charade she knows makes the joke more fun for the teller. “I don’t know. Why did the lobster blush?”
“Because the sea weed.”
Jess’s hand shoots up over her mouth, her eyes widening with delight that her dad has told her a joke her mum probably wouldn’t approve of. She commits it to memory, ready to share with her classmates tomorrow.
“Come on, petal. Time to dry that hair and get you to bed.”
He bundles the towel around her so that her body is cocooned in thick cotton, picks her up as if she were a baby, and carries her toward her bedroom, where her mum will blow-dry her hair and put her to bed.
Jess nuzzles against her father’s neck, her nose filling with the familiar smell of grown-up offices, salted peanuts, and the last residue of aftershave her dad puts on every morning. On the short walk from the bathroom to her bedroom, she burrows into his shoulder and thinks—as she so often does—that when she’s older she is going to live in the house next door so that she can always stay close to her mum and dad.
Jess blinked and shook her head, conscious that she was staring at the driver in the next car. As he turned toward her and smiled she saw that his eyes were too deep-set, his chin too large, his lips too full. Jess turned away, her cheeks hot, as though that man must know she did this all the time: that she was always seeing traces of her dad where there were none.
The traffic began to move and Jess eased her foot off the brake. Overtaking the car in front, she swerved into the outside lane and put her foot down hard on the accelerator, only slowing down each time a yellow speed camera loomed into view. When she finally pulled up outside the Notting Hill address her mum had given her, a sign informed her that it was residents’ parking until 10:00 p.m. Jess peered up and down the street but could see neither meters nor traffic wardens. She wouldn’t be more than a couple of minutes anyway.
Pulling down the sun visor, Jess looked at herself in the mirror, running a finger across her eyelid where the remnants of that morning’s eyeliner had collected into small, soot-like particles. She turned her head sideways, studied her long nose—the one part of her body that made her understand why rich people resorted to plastic surgery—and practiced smiling at herself, wondering if it was true that you could alter your mood just by changing your expression. But the smile reflecting back at her was like a window onto the past through which Jess didn’t want to look.
It was her sister’s smile, always had been. For years, when she was little, Jess had taken such pride in her smile being a facsimile of her sister’s. She had loved how strangers’ heads had turned in the street to stare at the similarity between them, how she had felt the world to be a less frightening place with her sister by her side. And then, one day, the resemblance had disappeared, as though a wizard had slunk in during the night and cast a spell over them both. Jess had known—even then—that it hadn’t really been that swift, that the change had occurred over days, weeks, months. But to her it had felt sudden, abrupt. Now she had no idea if she and her sister would still look similar if they stood side by side, no longer knew if strangers’ heads would turn if they walked down the street together.
Jess stared at herself in the mirror and something about her reflection—perhaps the unkempt hair or the smud
ged makeup, or perhaps just the look of weary uncertainty—caused a shutter to open on a memory she rarely dared view.
Chapter 9
October 1987
Her hand is hot and clammy, squeezed tightly inside her mum’s. They walk briskly, side by side, her mum’s stride too wide for Jess to keep pace with, so that every other step she has to improvise a small half-skip, an unintended jauntiness she knows is inappropriate given the circumstances. Her mum looks down at her and smiles as if to say that everything will be OK and Jess tries to smile back but her attention is focused on the ward three floors above where the two of them are heading, just as they do almost every day after school.
It seems to Jess that they have been coming to the hospital forever even though she knows, really, that it is only a matter of months since these visits began. She can still remember when the time between the end of school and the beginning of dinner was filled with chocolate Nesquik and bourbon biscuits, Hartbeat and The Really Wild Show, games of Connect 4 and Guess Who?, which Jess would invariably have lost had her sister not occasionally let her win.
Now Jess no longer knows which is preferable: to be at home in a house filled with anxiety or to be here, where the collective fear is so great that she sometimes imagines it gobbling her up—head, shoulders, knees, and toes—until there is nothing left.
They hurry along the corridor toward the elevator, Jess unsure whether she wants to rush or not. She both wants to be there and yet wishes she weren’t. It is a familiar feeling but one she still hasn’t got used to: the wanting and not wanting at the same time.
The smell clings to the hairs in Jess’s nose, a smell of counterfeit healthiness. Jess knows it to be a sham. There is no healthiness here. This is where people come when they are really sick. This is where some people come to die.
The thought knocks inside Jess’s head, trying to get out, but she knows there is no escape.
They wait for the elevator to arrive, Jess watching the illuminated digits signal its slow descent. She glances up at her mum, who smiles at her again, the pad of her thumb running along the back of Jess’s hand. Jess senses her mum’s need to reassure her but can’t decide whether it makes her feel better or worse.
The elevator doors open and Jess catches sight of them both in the mirror on the far wall. There are dark rings under her mum’s eyes and strands of hair sticking out from Jess’s two plaits: they look to Jess like a messy version of the people they once were, before this all began.
The elevator ascends and when the doors open at the third floor they are greeted by the sound of “Never Gonna Give You Up” drifting from the nurses’ station along the corridor. The tune attaches itself to Jess’s ears and she knows she will be unable to shake Rick Astley’s voice from her head for the rest of the day.
Walking onto the ward, Jess feels hope burning in her chest, the same hope she has every time she comes to visit: that perhaps today they will discover that a full recovery has been made and that everything can go back to normal.
And then they are there, standing at the end of the bed, looking down at a body so familiar and yet so disturbingly changed that Jess has to fight the urge to scrunch her eyes shut: sallow skin, closed eyes, bones rising from hollow cheeks to greet them. Hope plummets in Jess’s stomach, the muscles in her tummy shriveling to greet it.
It is the tubes that distress her every time. One tube in the nose, the very thought of which makes Jess want to gag. Another tube in the back of the hand, which makes Jess scratch herself as though it is her own flesh that is being pierced. A third tube emerges from underneath the sheets into a see-through bag of mustard-yellow liquid that Jess knows is darker than it ought to be and which she would rather not think about at all.
As Jess stands by the bed, trying to remember what the face in front of her looked like before the flesh began to melt away from the body, before the bones jutted out from beneath the skin, she thinks about all the weeks they have been going through this cycle of hospital admissions, temporary recoveries, discharges back home. This carousel of fear, limbo, and relief that has become the emotional rhythm by which they live their lives.
Mostly what Jess thinks, as she stands at the foot of the hospital bed, is that if only life can go back to normal she will never ask for anything again.
Then the sunken eyes flutter open and a face Jess loves more than any other in the world smiles at her and she feels, all at once, that her prayers are being answered.
Chapter 10
Jess
Jess snapped the sun visor shut, got out of the car, and ran into the building, following black-and-white signs up the stairs to a large square room that might have seemed welcoming were it not for the metal bars across the windows. Inside, her mum stood by a piano next to a tall, curly-haired man about the same age as Jess in the otherwise empty room.
“I’m sorry I’m so late, Mum. The shoot ran on forever and when we finally wrapped, the owner of the house accused us of scratching the floorboards in the hallway, which I knew for a fact we hadn’t, but it took ages to find the photographs I’d taken on reconnaissance to prove him wrong. I’m really sorry.” Her voice was breathless and she could hear herself rambling.
“Don’t worry, darling. You should have let me get a cab. Anyway, Ben’s been keeping me entertained with stories of his various travels. Ben, this is my younger daughter, Jess. Jess, this is Ben, who’s running the choir.”
Jess shook Ben’s outstretched hand, only half reciprocating his broad smile.
“Hey, Jess. It’s good to meet you.”
“Yep, you too. So did it all go OK, Mum? Do you want to tell me about it in the car? I don’t want to hurry you but I’m in a residents’ parking bay and I don’t want to get a ticket.”
Her mum hesitated, and Jess glanced down at her watch, wondering whether Mia had eaten dinner already, wishing she’d had time to phone her before she’d left work.
“Yes, of course. But Ben was just telling me about his travels in South America. He’s been to so many interesting places—Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil. You’ve always wanted to go to Patagonia, haven’t you?”
Jess swiveled her key ring around her finger, felt it dig into her flesh. “Yes, but I don’t think that’s very likely in the near future. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude but I’ve still got a mountain of work to do for tomorrow’s shoot and I do need to get back to the car. Do you think we could get going?”
“You know, Audrey, I could always run you home from rehearsals, if that’s helpful? You’re Shepherd’s Bush, right? I’m Chiswick. It seems silly to drag your daughter here when I could easily drop you back.”
“Oh, I couldn’t possibly impose on you like that. It’s really very kind, but I can easily get a cab.”
“Honestly, it’s no trouble at all. Saturdays would be tricky as I have private piano students straight after but Wednesday nights really aren’t a problem. Seriously, it’s crazy you paying for a cab or getting your family to collect you when I’m practically driving past your door.”
“Mum, just say yes, for goodness’ sake. He’s obviously very happy to do it.”
An echo of impatience lingered in the air. Jess noticed a tinge of pink heat her mum’s cheeks, saw Ben look down at the piano keys as though he might have left something on top of them. She watched as her mum pulled a tissue from her handbag, coughed into it, and rolled it into a ball before slipping it back inside.
“Well, if you’re sure, Ben, that really is very kind of you. Jess, I’m sorry to be a pain but I just need to use the bathroom quickly. You go ahead and I’ll see you at the car.”
Standing next to Jess’s car, looking at her license plate, and tapping digits into a handheld device was a short, stout middle-aged man in a notorious bottle-green uniform.
“You’ve got to be kidding me. I’ve only been gone a couple of minutes.”
The traffic warden glanced at Jess and then back at his machine, continuing to fill in the details of her parking ti
cket even as he replied. “You saw the sign? Then you shouldn’t be surprised you got a ticket.”
“I only left the car for a moment while I ran inside to collect my mum. Isn’t there some rule about five minutes’ grace?”
The warden pulled a small digital camera from his pocket, turned it on, and revealed a photograph of Jess’s car. “See the time there, in the bottom left-hand corner? What does that say? Twenty-one thirteen. And what time is it now? Twenty-one nineteen. By my calculation that’s six minutes.”
He jabbed a finger one last time at his machine and it whirred into life, a ticket rolling out of the top. He held it toward Jess, eyebrows raised as if daring her to challenge him.
“Really? You really want to give me a ticket? For God’s sake, you people. How do you sleep at night?” She snatched the piece of paper from his hand and got into the car, slamming the door behind her before he had a chance to respond. She watched as he sauntered off down the street, glancing at each windshield he passed.
Her eyes skimmed over the ticket to assess the damage. Forty pounds. Or double that if she failed to pay within fourteen days.
Jess did a quick mental calculation. Her tax was due but she had the money set aside for that. Mia needed fifty pounds for a school theater trip to Stratford-upon-Avon, and the shower in the bathroom still needed fixing three months after it had been reduced to a light drizzle. And she was still paying off her credit card for the laptop she’d bought Mia for her birthday in January. Where another forty pounds would come from she had no idea.
Folding the ticket in two, she shoved it into the bottom of her bag. She couldn’t face the awkward tussle that would ensue if her mum saw it: her mum would insist on paying it and Jess would refuse, both knowing that Jess couldn’t afford it but that she would rather forgo breakfast and lunch for a month than accept charity. There’d been enough contention about money when her mum had agreed to move in. She’d wanted to contribute toward food, bills, and even the mortgage but Jess had refused. She’d told her then what she’d said repeatedly over the years: she had no intention of accepting handouts. Ever since Iain had walked out, just before Mia’s first birthday, offering only minimal contributions since, Jess had supported herself and Mia. She hadn’t been prepared to forgo her independence just because her mum was moving in with them.
If Only I Could Tell You Page 6