‘I …’
I stumble over what to say.
‘Stop it, just stop that now,’ says Laura, but not to me.
‘She’s so jumpy. She seems frustrated. She doesn’t know what happened to her. You really don’t know who this could be?’
Of course I know who this could be.
I look at Laura, look at the chair. The air in the room feels heavy, weighted, or perhaps it is just me under the blanket.
‘I think it might be my sister,’ I say. ‘She liked sweets. She died suddenly when she was nine years old. We were on holiday in Tunisia. She contracted a virus, a very rare one, only one child in Europe gets it every year, on average. It shut down all her vital organs. When she went to sleep she was fine, but when she woke up in the middle of the night she was very unwell and she died.’
It is the story I tell when I have to, when someone asks me if I have any siblings and I don’t have the heart to say no, or they aren’t satisfied with ‘It’s complicated’. It’s the story I’m able to tell without my voice cracking. I don’t know if the rarity thing is true, but it was something my mother told me, probably because I was so scared. What she was really telling me was that it was impossible for what happened to my sister to happen to me; and so that is what I tell other people when the subject comes up, which it does not often. I am trying to stop them feeling afraid, for themselves and for their children, just as my mother did with me. The story is an act of kindness, and now here I am being kind to Laura.
She inserts a needle in my forehead.
‘You need to tell her what happened. You need to talk to her.’
I think about this for a moment. It sounds very strange. But not dangerous.
‘Do I need to talk to her out loud?’ I ask, feeling self-conscious.
‘In your head is fine, if that is how you want to do it. But I can’t be in this room any more. I’m really sorry; it’s too much for me. I feel like I can’t breathe.’
Laura turns down the lights and leaves quickly.
The thought that this is very irregular does cross my mind. But I trust Laura, I like her, and it is kind of incredible. Laura had no idea that I had a dead sister, and yet here she is telling me that Candy is in the room and is upset because she doesn’t know what happened to her.
I make myself comfortable.
‘Come here, Candy, come on, let me hug you. I am here. I am so sorry that I haven’t been, but I am here now. Come to me. I know you are scared and confused – it all happened so suddenly, didn’t it, out of the blue, none of us knew what was happening, we were all scared.’
I don’t know if I am doing it right, but I keep going. I try to imagine a child sitting on the chair, kicking legs that do not reach the floor. I imagine her biting the tip of her thumb and then sliding off the chair, walking towards me, climbing up on to the bed and into my arms. I imagine the weight of a child on my body, the way my own children feel when they lie on me, sprawling and heavy.
‘It’s OK, calm down.’
I imagine stroking her silky hair.
‘I’ll tell you what I know. You caught a virus, a virus is a thing that attacks your body from the inside, and that’s what it was doing all that time we were on holiday, but we didn’t know it. While you were playing in the pool it was growing, and then that night it grew so big and strong that it was able to start attacking. It attacked all the important things inside you, your lungs, your liver, so you couldn’t breathe and then your heart stopped, and that is how it killed you. You died in that hotel bedroom with me and Dad. I am so sorry there was nothing I could do. I am so sorry I could not save you.’
And I find that I am crying and I hug her even tighter.
‘We loved you so much. We still do. And we needed you so much. We all fell apart after you died.’
And something inside me shifts and relaxes, or perhaps it is Candy who relaxes, because now she knows what happened, because now her sister, whom she always looked up to, who has been ignoring her all these years, has spoken to her once more, hugged her, remembered her, told her she loves her.
‘I am so sorry,’ I say inside my head and I stroke her hair.
I hear footsteps. Laura re-enters the room.
‘That’s better,’ she says, and she takes the needles from my feet, my ankles, my forehead.
24
1991, London
Putney was not far away from Battersea, but I had never been there before and it felt very foreign to me that afternoon, street after street of boring Victorian redbrick houses. I couldn’t quite believe that he’d ended up here. I couldn’t quite believe any of it. The pavement underfoot felt soft when it should have been hard; the buildings shimmered as though they might disintegrate; nothing seemed real.
Somewhere inside I was anxious, excited, scared, sad. But those feelings seemed very faint, and mostly I just felt blank, I was here now, I might as well get on with it, one foot in front of the other, yes, here it is, number 39, flat 2, ring the bell, wait for him to answer, wait to hear his voice again.
‘G, is that you? Come on up.’
It had been four weeks since Mum had thrown him out. I’d told him I never wanted to see him again. But the hate bloomed in me, full and furious, and then it dispersed and I found I still loved him, after everything. I couldn’t help it.
I walked up the stairs, feet heavy, not thinking about anything, thinking about everything. I stood outside the door. It was painted dark red. I lifted my hand, made a fist, knocked once. He must have been waiting on the other side, because he opened it straightaway.
‘Hello, my darling!’ he said.
He was bouncing on the balls of his feet. I leant forward to kiss him on the cheek and he grabbed me, hugged me. My face was squashed against his soft cashmere jumper and I couldn’t breathe.
‘You’ve lost weight, girl, you feel all bony,’ he said as he released me.
‘You don’t,’ I said, and I walked around him like an angry cat, through the hallway and into the living room.
So this was where our home had gone.
Here were all the things he had taken. The terracotta bowl in the shape of a hand where he kept his change, the brass Moroccan plate, the video recorder and the videos, some of them my recordings with my handwriting on the labels, Time Bandits, Excalibur, The Man Who Fell to Earth. I had been there when he had taken these items, sitting in my room with ‘Stay Free’ by the Clash turned up loud so that I wouldn’t be able to hear what was happening outside my door, Dad walking around the flat filling black bin liners with the things he had decided belonged to him. When I came out to go to the loo he was back in his bedroom, filling more bags. I walked around the living room and saw the exposed spaces where ornaments had been, squares and circles in the dust, the empty rectangle on the mantelpiece where Candy’s ashes had been. I peeked around the door into his room, the room that had once been Candy’s, her red pencil scrawls still on the walls. The fabrics had been pulled from the ceiling, his Bedouin tent interior had been dismantled, was now just piles of dusty rugs and cushions and dead incense sticks. Dad was sitting on the carpet, his legs outstretched, body floppy, like a rag doll. He was wearing faded blue tracksuit bottoms and his Run the World T-shirt with the arms snipped off so it was more of a vest. He was still tanned from the holiday. He was crying, his body shaking with tears. I hated seeing him cry, a full-grown man. He used to sit on the sofa wearing Candy’s pink coat, her ashes on his lap, crying.
I did not go to him, hug him, try to comfort him, I just watched him.
He saw me, his eyes bloodshot, his mouth tragic, snot everywhere.
‘She was my best friend, G.’
And for a moment I didn’t understand whom he was talking about. Candy? Julia? And then I realized he was talking about Mum.
SO WHY DID YOU FUCKING DO IT THEN? I wanted to shout. But I did not.
Dad’s new flat wasn’t totally like home, though; there were interesting differences. There was a nasty blue velour sofa an
d on the windowsill was a window box overflowing with tiny blue, yellow and pink flowers which tumbled and glistened with the water that he was now spraying with a water gun.
I had never known him grow anything.
‘Those are nice,’ I said, although I didn’t mean it.
‘I know. Aren’t they great? The first thing I did when I moved in was to get myself down to the garden centre.’
He sprayed a plume of water in my direction. I did not smile.
He’d only been here four weeks and already he seemed so relaxed, so at home, so fucking happy. I stood in the centre of the room not knowing whether to sit or to go to where he was. What I really wanted to do was look around the flat, investigate every inch of it, work out in what ways he had made it similar to our home and in what ways it was different. But I didn’t do that, because it would have seemed like a compliment and I didn’t want him to think I admired his place, or what he had done, in any way.
‘Sit down. I’ll get you a drink.’
I lowered myself into the sofa. It was deep and the springs had gone, so my bottom sunk lower than my knees in a way I did not find comfortable or relaxing and it took some effort to remain rigidly upright. I heard a fridge opening, glasses clinking. I heard him humming. I stood up, took the chance to have a closer look about. He must have tidied very recently, I thought. There was no grime on any of the surfaces; the carpet had been hoovered. Was this how he had always wanted to live, or had he just made an effort because I was coming round?
He walked back into the room dangling two glasses upside down and holding an opened bottle of wine. He was wearing jeans that had been ironed, socks, a clean shirt, a belt. He looked smart. He put the glasses on a wooden coffee table and poured the wine. It was white. I went back to sit on the sofa.
‘It’s all right, here, isn’t it?’ he said, sounding nonchalant, even though it was such a big question.
I drank the wine, looked around; the evening sun was casting a soft, orange glow over everything, the light hazy and indulgent.
‘Yeah,’ I said and I took a cigarette from the packet on the table, lit it, inhaled deeply. I felt a bit better for that. He lit a joint that had been waiting, ready-rolled, in the ashtray.
He used to blow the smoke from his joint into my face to stop me crying and put a tot of whisky in my bottle to help me sleep.
‘I’ve been thinking, imagine if you hadn’t blown dope smoke in my face when I was a baby, imagine that. I’d be so clever, with all those extra brain cells, I’d be like Stephen Hawking.’
He looked at me, his cheeks ballooned; then he opened his lips and blew a thick plume of smoke in my direction.
‘Why would you want to be in a fucking wheelchair?’
He laughed at his joke. But I was being serious. Imagine what I would have been like if you weren’t my dad. The life I would have. The person I would be. None of this bullshit.
He swallowed his laughter when he realized that I was not joining in.
‘How are the girls?’ he asked.
‘Fine,’ I replied.
‘And how’s your mum?’
‘She’s well,’ I said. ‘She’s started doing dancing classes.’ I didn’t tell him about how much weight she’d lost, or her new plan to do an access course so that she could finally go to university, or the Italian man with a big moustache whom she’d had a couple of dinners with. I didn’t want Dad to just make a joke out of it all, the way he always did.
‘Bloody hell. Not ballet, I hope?’
‘No, not ballet.’
There was silence between us. I listened to the familiar crackle of the Rizla paper as his joint burned down. I listened to the birdsong coming in through the window, which he had opened as wide as possible. He offered me the soggy joint. He had already smoked nearly half of it. I shook my head. He took another drag, holding his mouth shut, not breathing for as long as he could stand it, then coughing out the smoke and leaving the joint in the ashtray.
‘Let’s go out. My treat,’ he said, his voice croaky.
It was better almost as soon as we left the flat. It felt good to be outside, with him, walking to a restaurant, a thing we had done together so many times. I began to talk, about how Mum was going to get a lodger, about how Anya had a new boyfriend and he was a DJ at the Fridge nightclub in Brixton. Dad laughed and smoked and when we walked through the door of the Indian restaurant they greeted him like a regular. The waiters all knew him by name, knew where he liked to sit, what he liked to drink, what he liked to eat. When the manager came by to say hello he looked at me for a moment in confusion.
‘This is my daughter,’ Dad said quickly.
‘Hi,’ I said.
How many times had he brought her here, what did people think, did they think she was his daughter, how did he explain it?
I ate popadoms and the spinach and lamb curry I always had at Indian restaurants. I let Dad steal a bit because he liked it too, we had some beers, and the simple acts of eating, drinking and smoking made me feel happy, and not just in a superficial, in-the-moment kind of way, but the pleasure I found in these things gave me a deeper sort of contentment, because I understood that it did not take much to make me happy, even when life was awful, and that was a relief.
‘How’s school? You working hard?’
I laughed. It was amazing that he still thought he had the right to ask me questions like that.
‘Fuck off,’ I said.
‘Come on. You’re so bright, you don’t want to throw it away. You don’t want to end up like me. I never passed an exam in my life.’
Dyslexic, left-handed, blew up the science block, left school at fourteen, virtually illiterate. I was never going to end up like him.
‘Yes, I am working hard,’ I said.
‘Good girl.’
He waved his hand in the air, making a little signing motion to get the bill. He got me to sign the credit card slip for him because I had been copying his signature for years, and this was a fun thing that we had always done. We walked back to the flat. He told me he was planning to get a moped because the commute from Putney to Knightsbridge was such a nightmare. He pointed out the pub and the corner shop and the leisure centre. He said he had started swimming. I had never known him to do any exercise before.
It was night by the time we got back to the flat.
‘You can stay over whenever you want,’ he was saying as we walked back up the stairs. ‘I could make you a great little bed on the floor in the sitting room. I tried it out last night, with the sofa cushions and a few pillows and stuff.’
‘OK,’ I said, wondering if I ever would stay here. I had missed him at home, especially when it was late and my thoughts turned dark. It seemed weird and sad that he wasn’t in the flat, where he had always been, just a door away. His absence made the shape of the place feel different, so that it didn’t feel like where I had grown up, so that it didn’t feel like home.
He opened the door and I followed him in. But would this place ever feel like home? Could it? It had just as much right to; Dad was here, as were so many of the familiar things from my childhood. Could I run away here if I needed to, even though there was no space for me, even though I would have to sleep on two sofa cushions on the floor?
Dad kicked off his Converse trainers. ‘I’m going for a crap,’ he said.
I waited until he had shut the door to the loo before I went into his bedroom.
It was dark in there; the curtains were pulled across, so not even the bright moonlight could get through. I stood near the entrance to the room, not sure how much further I wanted to go. It smelt of him, like his bedroom had always smelt, of sweat and sleep, but there was something new, and that was sex.
A large picture was propped up on the chest of drawers. There was enough light coming in from the hall that I could just about make it out. At first I thought it was an Indian thing, a postcard of a mythical female; Dad liked little statues of Ganesh and laughing fat-bellied Buddhas. But this was too w
eird for that, the creature’s upper body was white and where its legs should have been there was a black, tangled confusion, as though it was half-woman, half-octopus.
It took seconds for me to have these thoughts, for me to work out what I was looking at.
It was her.
It was Julia. Idiot. Of course that’s who it was. In bed. The blackness was the duvet; underneath were her human legs, not tentacles. Dad had taken this photograph before they’d had sex? After they’d had sex? Then, days later, he’d gone to the shop to get the picture developed, blown up.
I moved closer to the photo, to see it better, even though it made me feel sick, lamb and spinach curry travelling back up my throat. Julia had something around her waist. It was a gold chain, his gold chain, the one he had worn around his neck all my life, the one with Candy’s bite marks in it, so much a part of him, like his hair or his eyes, so much a part of us. And it was around her waist.
I heard the loo flush. I stepped out of the bedroom and into the hall.
He opened the door. He was not wearing his chain, it was not around his neck, which meant that she had it, wherever she was right now, the soft gold against her pink skin. He was hers and she was his. That was it. I didn’t belong here.
‘I’ve got to go,’ I said.
‘What are you talking about? I thought you were going to stay the night.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Let me call you a cab, at least.’
‘No.’
No, no, no.
I ran down the steps and out of the door so I wouldn’t have time to change my mind. It had suddenly got cold outside and the shock of this made me breathe again, a big gulp of air, as if I had been drowning. I started walking, away from that building, from him, from that photograph. I only stopped when I got to the end of the street and turned the corner. I knew Dad. I knew what he would do. He would stand there for a moment, shocked, angry, upset. Then he would remember what he ought to do, as a father, so he would grab his keys, stumble down the stairs, hoping to find me still there. He would open the front door, imagining that I would be outside on the doorstep and it would be easy and he would only have to say, ‘Come back up.’ And I would reply, ‘Oh, all right then.’
The Consequences of Love Page 14