by Emily Dean
I tried to ignore the knot of pain in my stomach when he arrived at the door, one that had stiffened since our reunion. We talked about friends, he complimented us on our clothes and asked Rach about her boyfriend. Was that it? Was he not going to tell us he regretted everything?
He dropped in FHW’s children again, telling us something funny the golden son had said.
Rach smirked at me knowingly. I didn’t smirk back. Instead I glared at my father and said, ‘Nice of you to tell us all about your new kids, Dad.’
Rach looked at me appalled. Are you out of your actual mind? My father paused, breathing heavily through his nose like a thoroughbred about to burst into a canter. He started to yell. In a way he never had before. The missiles flew. He was glad he didn’t have to live with me. He didn’t know how Rach put up with me.
He shouldn’t have mentioned Rach. Not unless he wanted me to go nuclear.
‘Shall we talk about Anita, Dad? And how Rach “put up with” that? Let’s discuss her!’
This was dangerous terrain I had hurtled us into. I smothered my fear with petulance, stormed out of the living room and headed for the bathroom, banging the door shut. But my hands were shaking.
My dad was a benign man who rarely lost it. He snapped at sloppy thinking, got irritated by life admin and sometimes raised his voice when his opinions were challenged. So I wasn’t prepared for what happened next.
I heard his footsteps marching across the kitchen towards the bathroom. He thumped on the door. It vibrated with bangs and kicks, and the noise of him throwing his entire bodyweight at it. The tiny lock pinged off as the door cracked off its hinges and crashed into the sink, colliding with bottles and toothbrushes, before hitting the floor with a thud.
I crouched in the bath and stared at him in silence.
His breathing slowed down. He gazed at the shattered door, then at me. He looked horrified at what he’d done.
‘What the hell?’ Rach shouted, rushing to restore order, clearing up the disaster scene, talking about everyone needing to ‘calm the fuck down.’
He seemed almost shell-shocked, mutely seating himself in the living room before finally apologising for his ‘unforgivable loss of control.’ And by the end of the evening we had gently begun to refer to it with black humour, reframing it as a comic episode. ‘The one where Dad kicked the door down.’
Part of me felt guilty that I’d provoked my father into such lawless fury. Another part of me felt relieved, as if this blind rage had somehow proved that he cared.
‘Door-gate’ became a family joke but the reason behind the incident was never spoken of again. The past, we collectively decided, was a country best avoided.
My dad returned to New Zealand with FHW, but keen for fresh adventure, he came back to live in England on his own a year later.
My mother attempted to reintegrate him into our lives with occasional Sunday lunches and guest appearances at birthday dinners. He began to trouble-shoot documentaries for former BBC colleagues and write TV reviews for The Times, which I showed off to friends at my new sixth-form college. It allowed them to think of me as just another person with divorced parents. They didn’t need to know about ‘the two YOU blackmailed him with’ and Colonel Gaddafi. It was probably easier that way.
Our female gang moved into a new house in a quiet suburban street in Muswell Hill. Rach and I finally had our own rooms. ‘Great timing, just as we’re about to leave for university,’ she said, laughing. Treacle dutifully tagged along with our crew, glad to leave the street gangs behind.
I was secretly proud of my defiant moment with my dad. I had confronted him. It was what Lynsey would have done. What my grandmother would have done. Everyone bought my indestructible, fearless warrior schtick – even my mother, who had started to say, ‘You remind me of your grandmother!’ But even that indestructible warrior couldn’t live forever.
It was Nan’s neighbour who called to tell us the news. Rach and I entered the scene of our childhood weekends for the last time, followed by Mum. There was the familiar scent of cat food, stale cigarettes and Charlie perfume. Simon and Lucky emerged from the shadows and scuttled away, their glassy-eyed terror even more palpable than usual.
I heard the low murmur of laughter from the TV through the closed sitting room door. It felt grotesque, unseemly. I turned the door handle, with its decades of layered paint. Everything was exactly as it always had been. The brass ashtray on a stand. The African paintings. A copy of the TV Times open on the table. A half drunk cup of tea. And lying on the sofa, in her emerald-green nylon nightie, mouth wide open and black with finality, was Nan. Her brow was furrowed, caught forever in the anxiety of sudden pain.
I hugged her voluptuous frame. The grey roots at the temples of her pink hair were coated in hairspray.
We spent the next few days sorting through my grandmother’s turbans and cigarette holders, her Weightwatchers booklets, a box of old diet candy called ‘Ayds’ withdrawn from shops due to the connotations with a deadly new disease, photos documenting her adventures. We deposited the remnants of her extraordinary life into bin liners.
I realised there were probably people we still hadn’t told. Her life had spanned so many continents and re-starts, we would never grasp the entirety of it.
‘Maybe we should try and track down Grandpa Bayo in Nigeria,’ I said.
‘In fairness,’ said Rach, ‘bigamists can’t be expected to go to the funeral of every single wife. Have a heart, Em.’
There’s an easy way to tell if someone’s lying: they repeat your question back to you. It’s because they’re caught off guard and are trying to buy time. Here’s an example.
Rach: Dad, what is going on? Is Treacle still alive?
Dad: What do you mean ‘what’s going on?’ You’re asking me if Treacle’s still alive?
I didn’t know about that tell for lying when my dad said that. Which is a shame as it would have saved us an awful lot of time.
It had been four years since ‘the one where Dad kicked down the bathroom door’. He was still in England, renting a bachelor flat in Chiswick from a male colleague who had left its chrome and black interiors for family life.
Rach and I, now twenty-four and twenty-two, were sharing an apartment just up the road from our childhood home, Holly Village. Funny how we’d been drawn back to it. Our ambitious new colleagues at our graduate media jobs had all left behind their history, baffled at the idea of staying tethered to your past. But I knew why we had both gravitated to this place.
My mother was returning to work in Australia for a year but had remembered the small matter of Treacle. Rach and I were told that our landlord wouldn’t budge on his ‘no pets’ rule (a wish we decided to respect given that he was a drugs kingpin doing time for trafficking), so Treacle went to live with my father.
Treacle was fourteen and entering the geriatric phase of life. He dribbled permanently, was doubly incontinent and his once glossy fur had taken on the uneven texture of a velvet sofa subjected to multiple spillages. His breath smelt, his eyes were gunky, his breathing was laboured, but he was still the good-natured reliable guy of old.
A few months after my mother left, Rach suggested we pop over to my father’s one afternoon, for a visit. But it seemed to be awfully difficult for Treacle to find an available diary slot. Arrangements were cancelled, messages were swerved, excuses stacked up. We began to feel like pushy journalists hounding a publicist about their client’s recent problem with ‘exhaustion’.
Treacle was, according to my dad, spending some time at the family vet’s, but his mini-break went on for weeks. So we called the vet for a progress report. Mr Hill informed us that he ‘hadn’t seen Treacle for over a year now.’ He sounded a bit like the innkeeper in a horror film who triumphantly reveals that the person you’d just bumped into has been dead ‘nigh fifteen summers’.
Armed with this evidence, we decided it was time for some entrapment.
‘Dad, is Treacle at Mr Hill’s, the vet
in Park Road?’ Rach asked. We waited for him to plunge into the trap we’d laid.
He fell in headfirst.
‘That’s odd,’ she replied, ‘because I called Mr Hill. He hasn’t seen Treacle since last year.’
Dad paused. Cleared his throat. Stuttered a bit.
‘Did you say Mr HILL? Sorry, I misheard, thought you said Mr MILLS. Another vet, much better this chap Mills.’
Strangely, we could find no record of a vet whose name differed by two consonants in exactly the same road. But the comedy conceit of Mr Mills became our eternal shorthand for my father’s tendency to be economical with the actualité.
I knew that our indirect attempt to catch him red-handed in untruths was perhaps not the right way. But after Door-gate I’d decided to revert to colluding in laughter behind his back. By not confronting him over the small things, we were losing any hope of accessing the truth of the big things. Perhaps there were some doors we wanted to keep closed, fearful of the impact when they came crashing down.
We eventually worked out that my father had handed Treacle over to an actress friend straight after my mother left. A fortnight later she’d buried him in the garden with a blanket that ‘matched his fur, lovely chestnut brown. I think he’d had enough of all the moving in the end,’ she added, keen to rule herself out as a potential murder suspect.
I felt guilty at our collective abandonment of poor old Treac baby, leaving him to end his days with a stranger in an unfamiliar house.
Sometimes Rach and I walked down the hill from our Highgate flat and peered into the gates of our childhood home. I remembered our dusk visits to retrieve Treacle from the cemetery. Looking up at our old bedroom window, I would be plunged into our past – the noisy actors, the smoke, the bubbling casserole dish, the Shakespeare quotes on the walls, Lynsey holding court while Treac baby settled in James’ lap. I missed it.
We never had got our dog, that thing which made people stay.
My mother’s elderly neighbour had a sign hanging up in her hall written in curly italics on a wooden heart. ‘Home is not a place – it’s a feeling!’ It was the kind of tacky mass-produced high-street sentiment that I enjoyed sneering at. ‘Great. Where exactly are you going to sleep?’ But secretly, I was drawn to its bland, simplistic folksiness. Whatever we’d had back then, in those Holly Village days, perhaps it did feel like home.
Home for me now was a person rather than a place. The person who had always been at the centre of my world: my lighthouse, enveloping everything in a reassuring glow. As long as Rach was with me, everything would be okay.
Part Two
Giggle
Chapter Seven
It’s a bit strange, the day you wake up to find forty has sneakily entered the room without even having the decency to knock. Especially when you have watched your sister’s life play out like a romcom directed by Richard Curtis, the kind of movie that makes 250 million at the box office and cloaks people in a warm aura as they emerge into the street, re-living the sunny exchanges and snug closure.
My life felt like Mike Leigh had agreed to direct an episode of Sex and the City. (But got fired for being too British and gritty. And depressing.) Mine was the kind of story more suited to midnight viewings on a subscriber-only arts channel with five thousand viewers if the wind was blowing in the right direction. It would have polarised opinion in east London cafés and left people asking, ‘What exactly has the central character learned, though?’1
RACHAEL – THE MOVIE
INT. MOVING TRAIN – MORNING
Autumn 1989. Scenes of picturesque countryside roll past a speeding train window. A passenger, RACHAEL, is wearing a Free Nelson Mandela T-shirt and blue hoodie, lost in the soundtrack of Morrissey’s ‘EVERY DAY IS LIKE SUNDAY’ on a CD Walkman.
The train slows and we see a station sign, ‘WINCHESTER’. She struggles to lug her large case off the train. It opens, scattering her possessions everywhere.
RACHAEL
(Laughing despite herself)
Great fucking start, Rach.
INT. ART COLLEGE – DAY
RACHAEL in white jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt with a kitsch Virgin Mary motif, sketching fashion designs by a sunlit window before a group of students in Nineties-style coloured jeans and Timberlands enter and carry her, giggling, out to the pub.
EXT. LONDON – DAY
THREE YEARS LATER
RACHAEL looking slightly uncomfortable in a peak-Nineties navy trouser suit and Monica-from-Friends bob, outside a smart building in London that says FREUD COMMUNICATIONS. She smooths her peplum jacket down, and immediately treads in dog poo.
RACHAEL
Another fucking great start, Rach.
INT. LONDON – NIGHT
RACHAEL and her younger sister EMILY in a loud Soho bar wearing strappy vest tops, combat trousers and hoop earrings. ‘CIGARETTES AND ALCOHOL plays in the background. Two men, ADAM and AUSSIE PAL, approach them.
ADAM
What are you drinking?
RACHAEL smiles, sees EMILY chatting animatedly to AUSSIE PAL.
ADAM and RACHAEL exchange grins.
EXT. CHURCH – DAY
FOUR YEARS LATER
RACHAEL, the beaming bride, walks out into the sunshine holding hands with a jubilant ADAM to the soundtrack of Kylie’s ‘Spinning Around’. EMILY, a bridesmaid in a pale pink dress with a Rachel-from-Friends haircut, is chain-smoking and giving AUSSIE PAL, the best man, fierce looks.
INT. HOSPITAL – DAY
RACHAEL is in labour, gripping the bed for support. CHRISTINE and ADAM are close by. EMILY enters the room in kitten heels and a pink T-shirt with ‘I DIDN’T FANCY HIM ANYWAY’ on it.
RACHAEL
(Reaching for a hospital sick bowl)
Great shoes, Em.
(She vomits into the bowl)
INT, NORTH LONDON HOUSE – DAY
RACHAEL, MIMI (AGE 9) and ADAM are in the living room of their home, with its Farrow and Ball colours and mid-century modern furniture. They are opening a crate, and out runs the newest family member, a biscuit-coloured puppy.
MIMI
(earnestly)
I know what I’m calling him – this is Giggle.
INT. HOSPITAL – DAY
RACHAEL in a hospital bed surrounded by ADAM, MIMI, CHRISTINE and EMILY. A baby wrapped in a pink blanket sleeps on her chest.
MIMI
(earnestly)
I know what I’m calling her – this is Beyoncé.
EXT. NORTH LONDON GARDEN – DAY
A sunny June weekend morning. RACHAEL is sat on a garden chair posing with ALBERTA, ADAM, MIMI and GIGGLE while EMILY takes a picture of the family scene. GIGGLE leaps up suddenly and grabs a dummy out of ALBERTA’S mouth.
ALL
(simultaneously)
GIGGLE!
We freeze-frame on this moment of domestic playfulness that captures the spirit of joyful family life, as we …
FADE OUT TO JOURNEY’s ‘DON’T STOP BELIEVIN’
Meanwhile, playing in screen two …
EMILY – THE MOVIE
EXT. BRIGHTON – DAY
Autumn, 1989, Brighton. We hear mournful cellos, over scenes of seaside detritus. A battered yellow Ford Fiesta, its exhaust pipe dangling off, turns into a university campus. A young woman, EMILY, dressed in denim jacket, gets out of the car followed by CHRISTINE and RACHAEL carrying plants, and an anglepoise lamp. EMILY looks up at a banner. ‘SUSSEX WELCOMES CLASS OF 1989.’ Somebody has crossed out the ‘SUS’ so it reads, ‘SEX’.
EMILY
(V/O)
I couldn’t help but wonder …
how long would it take before
I was wearing tie-dye and saying,
‘There are three of us in this
relationship. You, me and your bong.’
EXT. BRIGHTON STREET – NIGHT
EMILY
They say that college life is
hard to leave and impossible to
forget. What if today
’s traffic
offence is tomorrow’s beautiful
moment?
EMILY and her pal POLLY watch appalled as their peers drunkenly use a traffic cone as a megaphone to the sounds of EMF’s ‘UNBELIEVABLE’.
EXT. EAST LONDON – DAY
EMILY is coming out of a London tube, the sound of cars honking competing with a depressing acoustic violin version of ‘I’M EVERY WOMAN’ as we take in city landmarks. She is struggling to walk in high heels and a black skirt suit.
INT. SUNDAY TIMES OFFICES – DAY
EMILY is sitting by giant bags of letters on the dirty floor of a mailroom, her heels off, her skirt riding up.
This is not the glossy role she had dressed for. The EDITOR’S ASSISTANT walks in.
EDITOR’S ASSISTANT
Are you Emily?
EMILY is relieved, the terrible mistake has been rectified. She smooths her skirt down.
EMILY
Yes! I’m a graduate, actually,
so I think there’s been some—
EDITOR’S ASSISTANT
Yes, you shouldn’t be doing
this at all. The editor needs
you to wrap his Christmas presents.
And choose them. And write the cards
as well.
INT. LONDON – DAY
A small LONDON apartment. A stripped down, haunting strings version of ‘INDEPENDENT WOMAN’ plays. The empowering lyrics are undermined by the scene in EMILY’S living room. A discarded packet of prawn cocktail crisps. An overflowing ashtray. A stack of unpaid parking tickets.
EMILY
(V/O)
You don’t choose a city like
London, it chooses you … In this case,
it chose me a flat containing a family
of mice and a fridge with two
bottles of champagne and one eyeliner.
The first face I saw every morning was
the old man upstairs, whose kink
was asking me to tie his shoelaces.
EMILY answers the door to RACHAEL and CHRISTINE, armed with flowers and gifts for her new flat. They enter the kitchen together.