by Fiona Neill
‘But you’re a publicity whore,’ observes Max. ‘Why would you worry about that?’
His honesty cuts through the bullshit of the rest of the day. I laugh properly for the first time in ages. Daisy seems distracted. She takes out little cartons of UHT milk from a plastic container on the table and starts building three small towers. It’s completely irritating but I need her co-operation over the reading so I pick up a carton and add it to one of the towers.
‘They each have to have nine, Dad,’ she says, immediately removing it.
‘How’s your course going?’ I turn to Max. He has turned down my offer of a beer and opted for tap water.
‘I’m in the middle of exams, Dad.’
There’s no reproach in his tone. Max never was a guilt tripper in the way that Daisy was. But I feel an immediate pang of conscience that I didn’t realize. Lisa would have organized a card at least. She’s very good at things like that. She keeps a drawer full at home in Norfolk, ready for any event – births, deaths, marriages, good luck, congratulations – life is a series of occasions, really. I’m reminded again of Lisa’s letter to Rosie. ‘There’s something I need to tell you …’
‘How are they going?’ I ask Max, dragging myself away from these uneasy thoughts.
‘Good. I think.’
I wince as one of Daisy’s milk towers collapses and a carton falls to the ground.
‘Next year should be exciting, you’ll get to see patients, won’t you?’
‘I’m intercalating, Dad,’ says Max. ‘I’m spending a year doing an MSc specializing in dementia. I discussed it all with Mum and she thinks it’s a good idea because it adds extra points to my final result.’
His tone is unerringly patient and polite, as if he’s speaking to an elderly stranger. I know nothing of what is going on in my son’s life. A wave of resentment towards Lisa washes over me for denying me the opportunity to explain to my beloved children why I have been so distracted of late. I glance at my watch and realize that the train is due to leave in less than twenty minutes.
‘Lisa and I were wondering if you would do a reading at our wedding. She’s very fond of the piece on marriage from The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran, unless you can think of something else that you’d prefer? You might have a much better idea.’
It all comes out too quickly. Daisy finally looks up. I have her attention now.
‘How many verses does it have?’
I’m heartened by her question. ‘Three.’
‘Three is a good and safe number, Dad,’ she says. ‘You know that.’
It’s something she used to say all the time when she was ill and the fact she can joke about it now shows how far she has come.
I laugh. ‘You can even do the third verse if you like, darling.’ It feels good to tease her.
‘Daisy,’ warns Max. He nudges her with his foot underneath the table. ‘Stop.’
I have to say that I’m amazed that Max is the one who is reticent.
‘Lisa and I would like to ask Rex and Ava to read some of it too,’ I say. I wasn’t planning to introduce this idea today but Daisy’s positive reaction has given me confidence. Besides, who knows when I’ll have another chance to discuss this possibility with them?
‘But that’s two plus two people for a poem with three verses,’ says Daisy.
She’s got a point.
‘Won’t it be a bit odd?’ asks Max.
I assume he’s talking about the prospect of reading at my second wedding, which is the reaction I had anticipated.
‘I mean we haven’t seen Rex and Ava for years, not since –’
‘The Incident,’ chips in Daisy, finishing the sentence for him in the same way she used to when he was little. ‘That’s what Max is getting at.’
‘Water under the bridge, water under the bridge,’ I say, wishing I had Rosie’s ability to soothe a situation with calm logic.
‘Water under the bridge,’ Daisy concurs.
I’m grateful for this unexpected emollience.
‘Perhaps Rex and Ava should read a different poem. Weddings always have at least three, don’t they?’ Daisy suggests.
‘Good plan,’ I say, trying to sound jovial even though I don’t feel it.
Max’s phone beeps. He picks it up, looks at the message and smiles as his fingers flutter over the keyboard.
‘Girlfriend?’ I ask.
‘Not sure,’ he says.
I wait for Daisy to fill in the gaps as she usually does with Max but she’s focused on building the little towers of milk again. I’m so relieved that we have resolved the issue of the readings that I no longer find it irritating.
‘I’m really into her but I’m not sure if she’s into me. When I’m not with her all I can think about is when I’m next going to see her, and then when we’re together I can’t enjoy the moment because I know soon she’s going to leave –’
‘You met on Tinder – what do you expect?’ Daisy interrupts. ‘It’s not exactly an exclusive relationship.’
‘Why do you need to meet girls on Tinder?’ I ask. ‘I thought it was for older people.’
‘There are a lot of sad middle-aged people like you, Dad, but I don’t match with them, although my girlfriend sometimes does,’ says Max. He apologizes when he realizes how this sounds.
Daisy giggles.
‘Why don’t you make yourself less available?’ I suggest. ‘Or invite her to go away somewhere for the weekend. Bring her to the wedding if you like.’
‘It might be a bit weird,’ says Max. ‘I haven’t met any of her friends or family. And she’d be the only person who wasn’t connected to you or Lisa.’
‘No, she won’t. I’ve already invited Kit,’ Daisy announces.
‘Who’s Kit?’ I ask. I hear the ache in my voice. I hate the way I’m always playing catch-up with my children’s lives. Why hasn’t Rosie mentioned him to me?
‘My boyfriend of nine months,’ says Daisy. ‘We’re living at Mum’s together. He’s a statistician, he writes algorithms.’
I swear she’s enjoying my discomfort. ‘It would be nice if you could let me know when there’s someone important in your life, Daisy,’ I say, doing my best to curb my exasperation.
It reminds me of the time when she ‘forgot’ to tell me that she had won an English Prize at school so that I looked like a bad parent for not turning up at the award ceremony. There’s a special place reserved in Hell for someone who goes off with their wife’s best friend and I always felt Daisy did her best to confirm people’s worst prejudices about me.
‘Just like you did, Dad,’ says Daisy in an acid tone.
She knocks down the little towers of milk cartons and they fly on to the floor. I see the people at the next table watching us. There are so many layers of sarcasm wrapped around each word that I feel winded by them. I can’t understand why, after all this time, she suddenly feels so venomous again. Just minutes earlier she was completely relaxed. I put it down to the wedding and wonder if it’s too late to call it off. But what kind of man jilts his dying wife at the altar? The kind that fucks his wife’s best friend, I hear you answer.
‘Daisy,’ warns Max. ‘It’s not the moment.’
‘When did you first tell Mum there was someone special in your life?’ asks Daisy.
I have expected this question for years and have rehearsed my response well but it still sounds pathetic. ‘I realize that it isn’t good that I fell in love with Lisa after Mum left me, and I’m truly sorry for the pain it caused both of you, but as I’m sure both of you now understand, love is nearly always wrong-headed.’
‘Dad, you don’t need to talk about this,’ says Max. There is a desperate edge to his tone.
‘You are a liar, Dad. Just admit that you are a liar. Tell Max what you did,’ commands Daisy.
And we are back where we began. Maybe this is what Gregorio means when he talks about life being circular.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I say.
; The train screeches into platform nine. I would rather wait in the carriage than be turned to stone under Daisy’s cool gaze so I give them both a hug and get up to leave. When I get into the carriage I lock myself in the toilet like Daisy used to do, switch on the tap and splash water on my face. I look in the mirror but I hardly recognize the person looking back.
9
Eight years earlier
Daisy
We waited six long days for them to arrive. I remember this because it was the summer of the ladybirds. Thousands appeared each day, as if they were attending a summit on the North Norfolk coast to discuss the Drapers’ absence. At my grandparents’ house, they turned up everywhere: inside the fridge, the toes of my socks, the sealed cockpit of Max’s Star Wars Millennium Falcon, even in the ear of the next-door neighbour’s dog. They only lived for a few days and the ground crunched beneath our feet with the husks of their dried-up corpses.
Every afternoon Max collected up the bodies from around the house in small matchboxes that he labelled with the exact time and location where he had found them, to monitor the scale of the epidemic before stacking them into neat piles according to the date. It was the sort of productive scientific activity that Mum and Dad approved of, whereas moping around complaining about Ava’s failure to show and even bigger failure to communicate with me was not.
By the end of the week there were six piles of matchboxes on the bookshelf in the bedroom we shared at the top of the house and still no sign of Barney and Lisa. A routine of sorts was established whereby the phone in the kitchen rang at the same time as Max’s afternoon collection. Mum would give it a sad look before disappearing into the larder, pulling the cord as far as it could stretch and closing the door so she could speak to Lisa in private. And every afternoon Dad would come in after another failed attempt to tame the overgrown garden, forget about the tripwire across the kitchen, crash into the table and swear under his breath about the heat, the dust and everything that was broken, including the dishwasher and the downstairs toilet. But in reality he was angry with Barney and Lisa, his ‘alleged best friends’, as Max referred to them.
Sometime later Mum would emerge, like a mole blinking into the light, with an excuse that was proportionate to the amount of time she had spent in the larder. She would fix Dad with a meaningful stare, although the latest explanation for what they called ‘the no-show’ was clearly directed at us. The first rule of lying is keep it simple, I had once heard Dad tell Mum. She was never a good liar.
That was the summer I finally understood the grammatical use of the colon. Nothing was obvious: everything required an explanation.
Day One. ‘Rex has an inner ear infection and needs to get antibiotics: they might leave later today, as long as they can get an emergency appointment at the doctor’s but that depends on how busy the surgery is.’
Day Two. ‘Lisa is waiting for some legal files to be biked over, then they can leave: there’s some deal at work and she’s hoping it will be postponed so she can go tomorrow morning.’
Day Three. ‘Barney has to finish a piece he’s writing for The Times about a new Radiohead album: he’s waiting for some background from the manager and those music types don’t get out of bed till the afternoon.’
Day Four. ‘The brake pads on their car need fixing: the mechanic said he had never seen one as worn down on the back-left side of the car and it was a miracle someone hadn’t died.’
‘Lived: lived: lived,’ I muttered under my breath. By Day Five I didn’t even listen to Mum’s excuses. I was furious with her for not being honest with us when she set such store by always telling the truth, but really I was angry with Ava.
At night, lying on the top bunk, with Max below, I tried to get him to guess what might be going on but all he wanted to talk about were the ladybirds. Apparently they were fatally lured to the coast by an epidemic of aphids. If this was true, why did we only see the Coccinellidae (he insisted on calling them by their scientific name) and not the aphids? Max kept asking Mum and Dad. They would usually have lapped up a question like this but they were too wrapped up in hushed conversations about Lisa and Barney to pay us much attention.
‘Stop obsessing about the ladybirds,’ I shouted from the top bunk on the fifth night after Max started telling me that their spots were to show predators they were poisonous. ‘You’re not a bloody expert.’
‘Stop obsessing about Ava,’ he shouted back. ‘You’re not bloody married.’
But the truth was that we had been best friends for almost fourteen years, which is longer than most relationships. We were born four months apart; we learnt to walk at the same time; we wore identical French plaits our first day at nursery and measured our skirts to make sure they were exactly the same length on our first day at secondary school. This was the first summer holiday that we hadn’t communicated at least every other day, and it didn’t take much insight to realize something was wrong.
I continued to help Max collect the papery ladybird wings that littered the house like pieces of giant dandruff. I hated the way they turned to dust between my fingers but I kept going because I didn’t want to jeopardize Max’s new non-speaking role in my magic rituals that had begun that summer. Each time I picked up a pair I had to whisper, ‘I love you, brother of mine,’ under my breath three times to protect him from bad stuff happening.
I still don’t fully understand why I got him involved. Probably because we were sharing a room and he wanted to know why I kept getting out of bed to make sure the curtains touched each other in the middle. I decided that the best way to shut him up was to get him to help me with some of the less important tasks, like checking the windows and curtains were closed and making sure the tap in the bathroom was switched off.
He seemed to enjoy it. Maybe because it seemed like a continuation of the games we used to play together when we were little. I never told the therapist but Max is the only person I have ever fully involved in my illness. I’m not sure if this is significant. But it seems worth mentioning.
I can’t remember what triggered the magical thinking that summer. The first therapist made a link between my fears over something happening to Mum and the dying ladybirds. She was so pleased by her insight that I didn’t want to disappoint her by saying that by the time we went on holiday to Norfolk, I was already like a stand-up comedian who had got together a pretty smooth routine that I ran through when the anxiety about Mum got too much.
Of course there was always room for improvisation and I added a few original flourishes to the evening schedule in light of Max’s participation. I won’t get into all the details. Compulsions are only interesting for about three seconds, but mine involved six repetitions of actions that included checking the bedroom windows were shut, making sure there was no gap in the curtains, and tapping the wall in a triangular pattern in multiples of three. There was a raised wallpaper pattern involving creepy oversized foliage that helped me plot these points with complete accuracy.
When this was finished I had to say the following nine times:
‘Please watch over our family.
Please don’t let me die in my sleep, but if anyone has to die let it be me.
I am a good person who hasn’t killed or harmed anyone.
Mum is strong and healthy and will live a long and happy life.
Max is strong and healthy and will live a long and happy life.
Three is a good and safe number.’
If I made a mistake or it felt wrong I had to start all over again. Then I had to wait until Max was asleep so I could climb down the ladder of the bunk bed, put my hand on his hot little chest to feel it rise and fall six times. Only then could I relax. I had to lie on my back with the duvet no higher than my hips, even if I was too cold, and set the alarm to make sure that I didn’t sleep more than nine hours. Max asked why just once and I explained quite simply that Mum was in danger and this was a way of protecting her. Later it transpired that I was right about Mum being in danger, just not the nature of t
he threat.
I probably missed vital clues through lack of sleep. My nerves were frayed from exhaustion and the effort of keeping watch over my family. Dad wasn’t included. I knew he could look after himself. I was right about that too.
I hadn’t seen Ava much that summer and the more she didn’t arrive the more nervous I became that she hadn’t been in touch with me. Mum had finally allowed me to get a Facebook account at the beginning of the holidays but Ava hadn’t even responded to my friend request.
This wasn’t completely unusual. I had noticed recently that, for Ava, life was increasingly whoever she was with that day, which made me a prisoner of a friendship that no longer delivered the intimacy I craved. I knew she and Rex had been sent to stay with her grandmother and her French husband somewhere in the South of France for a month so that Lisa and Barney could get on with their work. Although, when I think about this now, I realize the excuse about work was probably another untruth.
When their old blue Vauxhall finally wound its way up the drive at the weekend, music blaring and horn beeping, to shatter the relative peace of that holiday, instead of elation I remember for a brief moment violently wishing they had never come at all. We had got into a good family routine with comforting short cuts like eating cheese toasties in damp swimsuits on the sofa while we watched DVDs of Friday Night Lights in the evening and playing endless card games where Dad would let Mum win so she would keep going. I had enough time to tend my unwanted thoughts without anyone interrupting and was worried how I was going to run through my evening routines when we had to share the same sleeping space as Rex and Ava in the attic.
‘Hello, people!’ Barney shouted over the music when he got out of the car on the passenger side, as if he was the lead singer in a rock band addressing the audience from the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury. He was wearing a pair of baggy floral swimming shorts, a Hawaiian shirt buttoned up the wrong way and round mirrored sunglasses. He held out his arms in a dramatic embrace waiting for someone to step forward and when we were slow to respond he lurched towards us, shirt billowing in the breeze to reveal a wobbly stomach pouring over the waistline of his trunks. I shrank back behind Dad.