by Flynn Berry
“You have to go to A and E.”
“I have a seminar tonight.” He was in a postdoctoral program at Bristol University, studying mechanical engineering. He wanted to design robotics for prosthetic limbs.
“You can make up the work.”
I drove over to Bristol that night. He’d torn a cruciate ligament in his right knee and would need surgery. The earliest surgery appointment was in six days. I remember standing in his bathroom, brushing my teeth, and saying, “What have they given you for the pain?”
“Tramadol,” he said.
I asked him to show me the box. His doctor had prescribed fifty milligrams a day. It’s an opioid painkiller, like codeine or fentanyl, and as addictive. I asked Robbie if he’d read the safety information, if he understood the risks, then—and this is the part I’ll never understand, or forgive myself for—I handed him back the box.
• • •
It should be simple. He was prescribed the medication for pain, he’s not in pain anymore, he should be able to stop taking it.
He’s tried. When he stops taking tramadol, he has withdrawal. His ears start to ring, and the ringing gets louder and louder. He has pins and needles in his legs and arms. He can’t sleep. He has nausea, like motion sickness, which doesn’t get better even after he vomits until he’s spitting up bile. He becomes dizzy, his nose runs, his skin sweats. A persistent voice in his ear says that, actually, he’s not a good person, that he’s pathetic, and he doesn’t want to listen, but he’s tired.
He’s tried to quit four times, that I know of. There have probably been more. I’ve made appointments for him at detoxes and rehabs, and he’s come close, but every time he balks.
I can’t believe now how casual both of us were at his house in Bristol the night of his injury. Robbie, I remember, was disappointed about not being able to play football in the summer, and I was worried about asking for the days off work to help after his surgery. We chatted, started the dishwasher, and went to sleep, while the box of tramadol sat on his kitchen counter.
I should have known. He’d never been very good to himself. He’d forget to eat, stay up all night studying, not use his inhaler even when his asthma made it hard to breathe.
Robbie looks like our father. Sometimes I wonder if that’s why he mistreats himself. It’s the only act of revenge he can take.
It’s been three years. He buys tramadol online now, and he’s at six hundred milligrams a day. He’ll have more seizures if he doesn’t stop, or it will be something worse.
I bought him a naloxone auto-injector last year. If he overdoses, he has to hold the auto-injector against his thigh and press down, and the naloxone will keep his breath from collapsing. I carry one too, even though the chances are so small that I’ll be there when he overdoses.
• • •
When I return to the hospital in the morning, Robbie is in bed, drinking juice from a cup with a foil lid.
“I brought some books.” He likes graphic novels, he has since he was little. I asked the clerk at the bookshop for recommendations.
“Thanks,” he says, sifting through them. “Oh, I wanted to read this one. It had good reviews.”
I look at his leg under the blanket. He’s done physical therapy for his knee, it’s healed properly. He can walk and run without trouble from it. This injury should have barely affected his life.
“They want you to stay for seventy-two hours.”
“I know,” he says. I hand him the pamphlet for Penbridge and wait as he opens it. This one’s a twenty-eight-day program in an old brick house in Oxfordshire. It has a large garden, and good meals. I know those things don’t really matter with this, but maybe they will help convince him.
“Will you think about it?”
“Yes.”
My brother was only fourteen months old at the time of the murder. He didn’t remember any of it, we told him when he turned sixteen. I think that must be worse. He’s so angry. We both are, but you can see it in him more.
13
ALICE ACCEPTED the request while I was visiting Robbie. She doesn’t post often, maybe once or twice a week, but she’s had the account for four years. I don’t know how to record all the information, the contents of the pictures, the locations, her captions, the comments, her replies. I open a spreadsheet, label different columns, and start to fill them in. Soon a dozen rows are full, and I’ve only gone through her first two weeks of pictures.
Alice was twenty-eight when she opened the account. She was still living in San Francisco and working at a restaurant in the Presidio. Most of her pictures then were taken outdoors, on hikes and camping trips in Big Sur, Point Reyes, Bolinas. There’s a picture of her swimming in Mirror Lake in Yosemite. The next one shows her friend—her closest, I think, a woman named Amelia—on the far side of a campfire. Then the same friend at a wedding. Alice is invited to a lot of weddings. One in Cumbria, one in Provence, one at Ashdown for her cousin.
Her picture from Ashdown shows lambs grazing on the lawn behind the ceremony. All of the lambs are wearing green wreaths, which someone made and slipped onto them for the wedding. What a completely mad use of money, though it does look nice.
Two years ago, she posted a picture of a man named Matthew in ski boots and a thermal shirt. He’s in her pictures often from then on. She posted one of them at a night market in Hong Kong. It must have been hot, she’s wearing a short white dress and sandals, smiling at him with his arm around her shoulders. There’s a picture of him on a sofa a few months later, with a Christmas tree behind him and piles of wrapping paper on the floor. I can’t see much else, but enough to know that it’s the drawing room at Ashdown. In the last picture of him, he’s holding a bottle of sherry with a handwritten tag that says, “Drink me.”
Alice moved back to England about a year ago. She posted a picture of her new keys, and of the Chinese food she ordered while unpacking, but nothing about why she moved or why Matthew didn’t come with her. She started the catering company soon after returning to London, and began posting more pictures of food. Langoustines and butter, linguine alle vongole, a cauldron of paella. A wooden table in a meadow with a laptop, a notebook, and a slice of olive oil cake. “My office,” says the caption. She’s done this before, she posted a picture from southern France of her computer, a glass of rosé, and a silver tray of ice and oysters. The caption said, “Working lunch.”
Her friend Amelia appears rarely after the move, though there’s a picture of her baby, Alice’s godson, in a striped romper, with closed, wrinkled eyes and a tiny snub nose.
Last summer, Alice posted a photo of two of her friends on the terrace at Ashdown, in leggings and jumpers, with cups of tea and newspapers around them. They all look like they’ve just woken up. I study the picture and my pulse speeds. She invites friends to her parents’ house, then.
At four, I take a break to walk Jasper. I turn onto the main road. Piles of rubbish spill out of the bins, and flyers for a delivery service are scattered on the doorsteps or trodden into the ground. There’s a flattened takeaway carton in the road, and a chicken bone with a bit of gristle.
When I see my reflection on a pub window, I think, Look at the state of you. My raincoat is bunched over my jumper, my jeans are too tight, my hair is frizzing in the rain. I try to straighten my coat and hair. I walk past the people under the pub awning without meeting any of their eyes.
I know what Alice would photograph here—the row of old wrought-iron streetlamps on Clerkenwell Green. She probably wouldn’t post it, though.
We keep walking for almost an hour in the drizzle, and slowly the effect wears off. It’s like coming out of the cinema in the afternoon.
• • •
On Sunday morning, I go back to the hospital to see Robbie. He looks better, though he didn’t have a good night, even with the sleep medication they gave him. Every so often, a tremor runs down his
face. This is the longest he’s gone without tramadol for months.
We talk, watch an Arsenal match, play cards. I want to tell him about Alice, about this plan that’s taking shape, but it would be selfish, it’s not what he should be thinking about now. He’s agreed to go into Penbridge after the seventy-two hours. This might be almost over, he might be almost through.
The founder of one of the companies that sells tramadol has a mansion in Maida Vale. Last spring, the mother of a boy in Northern Ireland who died of a tramadol overdose sat outside his mansion for three weeks in protest. I brought her a flask of tea and sandwiches, though she said she didn’t need them, people had been bringing her more cooked meals than she could eat.
• • •
I send Alice an email on Monday morning after rewriting it in my head a dozen times over the weekend. I say that we met at the Royal Court event and ask if she would be available to cater a party at the end of the summer for my parents’ anniversary.
I don’t have any time between patients to check my phone until two. Alice has answered, a short, polite reply that thanks me for my note and asks if we can speak on the phone about my event. I send back times, then write, “Or I can come by your office?”
“We don’t have an office yet,” she says. “I do all the recipe testing from home. I’m in Chelsea, would that work for you?”
We agree on Thursday at seven thirty, and she gives me her home address.
After work, I buy a tin of black shoe polish and listen to the radio while cleaning my boots. There’s one picture from Alice’s account that I keep thinking about. I don’t know why it makes me so angry, it’s no worse than any of the others.
It shows a bathtub at Ashdown with a wooden board across it. There’s a thick novel on the board and a cup of green tea. The bath faces a window with its shutters pulled back. Outside is a long view of a winter afternoon, with scratched trees and dark clouds. You can just make out a few sheep on the lawn. She must have taken the picture from the bath, though you can’t see her body. “How long are you there?” a friend asked, and Alice wrote, “Just down for the day.”
Not angry, exactly. Jealous. She can see her mum whenever she wants.
14
MUM WAS WAITING for me at the school gates, with Robbie in his pram. She was wearing a wool coat and stockings. The pram was a Silver Cross, lofted and heavy and “completely idiotic,” Mum often said, “in a city.” After we turned onto our road, Robbie started crying, and she said, “Almost there.” I walked beside them in my uniform, a navy skirt and blazer, down the row of tall white houses with black numbers.
Mum lifted Robbie and hurried up our steps. She set him down in the front hall, wailing, and I crouched next to him until she came back into view, bumping the pram up the stairs. Once the door was closed, she smashed the pram into the wall. Not for the first time, there were dents in the plaster all along the front hall.
Mum carried Robbie upstairs, and I went down to the kitchen to find Emma. “Hello,” she said, and gave me a kiss. “Do you want to help me cook?”
Emma was our nanny, though she looked enough like Mum that most people assumed she was our aunt, which I liked.
“I’m making a tarte tatin,” said Emma. She was wearing a navy pinafore with a white shirt underneath. The pinafore was hers and the shirt Mum’s.
Emma often borrowed Mum’s clothes and cassettes. She helped herself to the wine in the cellar and the books on the shelves and the contents of the fridge. Whenever she asked, Mum shrugged and said, “Go ahead. I didn’t pay for it.” She seemed to like the idea of her and Emma scavenging the contents of the house, which had been paid for by my father, or my grandmother.
Emma had arrived nine months before, soon after our father left, and they’d become very close in that time. “Living under one roof,” said Mum, “is an accelerant.” “Like university,” said Emma, and Mum agreed, though neither of them had been.
They fought often, shouting up the stairs, sighing loudly, muttering, “She’s being impossible,” and they often laughed so hard they had to hold on to the kitchen counter, wheezing, their eyes streaming.
Emma cooked and Mum cleaned. They took turns taking out the bins. Emma was better than Mum at getting Robbie down for a nap, but he still reached for Mum whenever she came into a room, or followed her with his eyes.
During the week, when she wasn’t watching us, Emma went to auditions and rehearsals and sometimes bought rush tickets for shows. Her favorite writer was Caryl Churchill, she’d seen Fen twelve times at the Almeida. She left bound scripts around the house, and sometimes read parts of them aloud to me.
That night, Emma was waiting to hear about an audition. She always cooked a lot when she was waiting. The producers were deciding between her and one other actress, and would announce their decision by the end of the week.
“They certainly take their time, don’t they?” said Emma. I nodded. She sighed and wiped the back of her hand over her forehead, mussing her hair. Her eyes were hazel with a black ring around the iris.
She’d spent weeks before the audition on the character’s accent. She always prepared a lot for every role, and had learned to play the piano for one character. “Do you have to play piano onstage?” asked Mum.
“No,” said Emma. “It’s for me. I’m building behind the role.”
At the far end of the room, glass doors opened onto the rear garden and the dull gray sky. I stood with my face to the cold glass. Someone moved past the gate in the rear wall. It faced onto an alley, which was usually empty. I watched for a while, but there was no more movement.
“Can you wash the apples for the tart?” asked Emma, and I moved to the sink. I set the dripping apples on the cutting board and Emma sliced them with a weighted carving knife. Soon Mum came downstairs with Robbie and strapped him into his high chair. He twisted under the straps and jerked his head from side to side as she tried to spoon baby food into his mouth. She gave him pasta, which he threw to the floor, then some banana. He began crying, his small, fat body leaning over the shelf, mashing his hands in the banana. Mum said, “Right,” and lifted him from the high chair to carry him back upstairs. A few minutes later, we heard water thudding into the bath.
I ran a tea towel under the tap and wiped down the high chair. While the pastry cooled in the fridge, Emma heated the chicken soup she’d made earlier. As the pot warmed, the kitchen filled with the smell of broth. We ate at the long oak refectory table. It could fit eight people, though it never did, not since our father had moved out.
He lived in a flat a few minutes’ walk away, and we saw him on the weekends. Mum always left the house before he arrived to collect us. Sometimes she asked me what we’d done or talked about, and listened with a calm face and her nails working at the skin around her thumbs.
Mum came back downstairs in a dress patched with wet, and Emma pointed at the pot on the hob. “There’s some left,” she said. Mum said, “Thanks,” but she didn’t serve herself any, or join us at the table. She filled a glass with white wine and carried it outside. The garden was dark, but I could see her by the light from the kitchen, standing with her arms around herself. Our spoons clinked against the bowls while Emma and I talked about my school’s winter concert, and a friend of hers who was shooting a short film in Battersea Park over the weekend, and if we should go watch. We heard crying from the nursery, and then it stopped. “He must be worn out,” said Emma. She blew out the candle and a crooked ladder of smoke rose from the wick.
While the tarte tatin cooked, I did my homework and Emma read The Birthday Party with her stockinged feet crossed on the table. The bottoms of the stockings were dusty, their soles gray. She had left the oven light on, and inside the metal rack and scorched wall glowed. Next to us the egg timer clicked down. When the timer sounded, Emma put on a Nick Cave record and we ate the tart while he sang.
Daisy hopped down the stairs. She
had been a gift from my father, a Netherland dwarf rabbit, white with brown spots. The day before, Emma had come up from the garden with the rabbit cradled against her chest. Someone had left the gate open, she’d been in the alley. Daisy stood on her hind legs with her small front paws folded at her chest, her whiskers twitching. I put a drop of vanilla extract on my finger and she licked it off.
“It’s starting,” Mum called down, and we went upstairs to watch House of Eliott. I leaned against Mum on the sofa. When she yawned, her ribs expanded into me. She put her arm around me, bracelets clinking, and I slid down against her. With my ear to her chest, I listened to her swallow and clear her throat. She smelled like white wine and oranges.
I lay with my head on Mum’s lap and she smoothed my hair. On screen, Charles followed Bea onto the hotel roof. Mum’s hand stalled, then started up again.
• • •
Two hours later, Emma was reading a script at the kitchen counter. Everyone else had gone to bed, and the room was dim, the only light coming from a pendant lamp. A man came into the room. He was wearing gloves and holding a steel pipe.
When Emma saw him, she reached across the counter for the heavy carving knife on the draining rack. It was just beyond her grasp. She tried to pull the draining rack closer, but it tilted and crashed to the floor on the far side of the counter, the knife skittering out of reach.
He brought the pipe down on her head, and her legs buckled. She kicked and clawed at him, pushing him back until she wasn’t pinned against the counter anymore. The door to the garden was still open behind them, and she struggled against him. The floor grew slick under her feet. She almost made it to the door. Then she was fighting in place, trying to block the blows. He hit her again, and she kept fighting him even as her skull began to flood.
When Mum heard the sounds from the basement, she came down from her room and met him on the landing. She tried to run past him to the front door, but he grabbed her arm and scraped the sharp edge of the pipe across her chest. She shoved him away, but he cracked her head against the wall. When she came to, he was holding her up against the wall and punching her.