by Fiona Neill
‘Anything would be better than this,’ said Lisa. ‘One of us might as well be happy.’
‘God, I’d kill Nick if he was unfaithful,’ said Mum.
‘Everyone is susceptible,’ said Lisa.
‘At least if he was having sex I guess his mood might improve,’ said Mum.
She giggled wickedly and so did Lisa and I admired Mum’s ability to always make people feel better in any situation, although I was also wondering what susceptible meant. Was I susceptible? Was Rex? Was Mum? Were we all susceptible? She made it sound dangerous, like a transmittable disease.
‘He blames me for everything. He says that if I was kinder to him then he wouldn’t feel the need to kill his feelings with alcohol but I’m not good at infinite patience, Rosie. He falls asleep on the sofa most nights. The other morning I had to hold up a mirror in front of his mouth to see if he was still alive, and then when it steamed up I almost felt gutted. This is not what I signed up for.’
‘You’ll get through this,’ said Mum gently. ‘You guys have always had a great relationship. The foundations are strong.’
‘Things haven’t been right for a while,’ said Lisa. ‘The drinking has crept up on him.’
‘Do you think it would help if Nick spoke to him?’
‘I don’t think so.’ There was a long pause. ‘Barney’s got a problem with Nick.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I didn’t want to say anything. I feel so bad bringing all our problems on holiday. But Nick makes Barney feel inadequate. Nick represents everything that Barney isn’t. He’s the king of self-restraint whereas Barney has no willpower whatsoever. Nick has a great job. He takes exercise. He exudes a sense of responsibility. Barney feels like a loser beside him.’
‘That’s awful,’ said Mum.
I couldn’t believe Lisa was talking about my dad like this. I felt proud of my parents at this moment.
‘Will you be all right when I’m gone?’ Mum asked Lisa.
A few days ago Mum’s absence would have made me so anxious that I would have had to go through an intensive bout of magical thinking to protect her while she was away. Now I felt almost liberated at the thought of her leaving.
‘I’ll be fine,’ said Lisa. ‘If anything goes wrong, Nick will help.’
The back door slammed and they were gone. I picked up the T-shirt, lay down on the floor, stuffed it between my legs and rocked back and forth until I was a hot soggy mess.
When I got to the beach no one seemed to notice I had even been missing. Ava was lying on her back on a boogie board, flicking through one of those magazines that promise better versions of yourself, as if every part requires constant self-improvement. Max was encircling her with a wall of sandcastles.
‘I’m building them in groups of three, to protect Ava,’ he explained, searching for my approval and then looking confused when I blushed. ‘I know you think three is a good and safe number.’
‘Why three?’ Ava asked languidly, without opening her eyes.
She hardly spoke to me on that holiday and, when she did, it was only to emphasize the distance between us. I willed myself not to glance at her breasts and remembered how, just the previous Christmas, we had put satsumas in our trainer bras to try to imagine what they might feel like.
‘Is it because Rex’s name only has three letters?’
‘Stop it, Ava,’ said Lisa, who was lying on her front beside Mum.
I get she was trying to be kind but you lose even more dignity when people feel sorry for you. I couldn’t help noticing the way Mum looked so soft and doughy beside Lisa, her swimsuit all baggy. She didn’t stir from her medical journal.
‘There’s room beside me,’ said Rex, patting the sand. ‘Come on, Small.’
I carefully laid out my towel beside his, sucking in my tummy as I got on all fours to iron out the wrinkles before sitting in the furthest corner with my back to him, knees pulled up against my chest. How was it possible to feel so self-conscious and so invisible at the same time? I stared at the sea, watching out for seals, and wondered if Ava’s magazine contained a cure for fatty knees.
Dad had lit the barbecue and was aggressively fanning the flames with a paper plate. Barney was sitting in a deckchair, legs splayed, with a bottle of beer in one hand while the other possessively rested on the cool box. An empty bottle lay tipped on its side in the sand beside him.
‘Do you want a beer, Ava?’ Barney asked.
Ava shook her head.
‘She’s fourteen, Barney,’ said Lisa in exasperation.
‘It’s good to build up tolerance,’ Barney said.
No one laughed. Even his jokes had gone off.
‘Don’t be angry with me, Lisa,’ said Barney, resting his cold bottle of beer on Lisa’s bum. She jumped. ‘I can’t bear it when you’re angry with me.’
‘Give it a rest, Barney,’ said Dad.
‘Don’t you think my wife looks beautiful?’ Barney turned to Dad. Dad ignored him. ‘She’s hardly got a wrinkle on her face.’
‘That’s because I don’t have anything to smile about,’ muttered Lisa. When she saw Rex and Ava were listening she tried to do that thing where you turn something that is truer than anything else you have ever said into a joke.
Barney flipped the lid of the beer into Lisa’s face.
She flinched. ‘Barney, it’s not even midday.’
‘We’re on holiday,’ said Barney. ‘Why so uptight?’
‘Why don’t you go and have a swim before lunch, Barney?’ suggested Mum.
Lisa shot her a grateful glance.
‘Good idea, Rosie,’ said Barney, his shoulders immediately relaxing.
I felt a foot poke me in the small of my back.
‘Come on, Small,’ Rex said. ‘I’ll race you and Dad.’
The three of us ran towards the sea and I didn’t worry whether my tummy was jiggling or my flesh was the worst shade of pale pink because as long as Rex wanted to be with me it didn’t matter. I threw myself into the water and felt my body pincushion with goosebumps as I dived into the middle of a wave that was about to break on top of me. I kept swimming underwater until I couldn’t hold my breath any more.
When I came up I flipped gracefully on to my back, closed my eyes against the glare of the sun and porpoised, over and over again, pretending I was a seal. When I finished I looked back at the beach. Barney was lying in the shallows, like a beached whale. Ava was still stretched out on the boogie board. Her loss, being too cool to swim on such a hot day. Mum was reading. Dad and Lisa were crouched down over the frying pan, cooking tortillas for wraps. Their heads were bowed, foreheads almost touching as if they were praying. They are susceptible, I said out loud with absolute certainty, without understanding what I even meant. Rex chose that moment to grab my leg underwater and I shrieked so loudly that even Ava stirred to see what was going on.
‘Time for the death roll,’ Rex grinned.
We had done this a thousand times before. I took a breath so deep it hurt my lungs. Rex slid his arms under mine and wrapped them around the front of my chest from behind so I was pinned tightly against his body. Then he pulled me under. We twisted and turned along the seabed for what seemed like ages before surfacing together, breathless with exhilaration. He didn’t let go. I pressed the back of my head into his chest, feeling the hair tickling my cheek, and let my legs float to the surface as he pulled me through the water.
‘You’re so sweet, Small,’ he whispered in my ear.
I didn’t trust myself to say anything because for once my head was blissfully empty of all thoughts.
We stuck to our resolution to be the last people on the beach, not even shifting when the tide had consumed so much of the sand that we were left sitting on a narrow ribbon with the sea lapping at our feet. Max frantically dug a moat around Ava, vowing to protect her, as if willpower alone could hold back the tide. But eventually he had to admit defeat. We were all subject to forces of nature stronger than ourselves that week.
I don’t remember exactly how the row started after dinner. It was the hottest day of the year but we couldn’t eat outside because we had reached peak ladybird infestation. They flew into our eyes, our ears, our hair and the drinks we tried to sip on the weed-infested terrace. In the end we had to close all the doors and windows, and even then they came up through the plug in the sink and crawled in through keyholes. Max couldn’t keep up with the scale of the invasion but when he tried to enlist Ava’s help she refused.
Every surface of the house felt sticky, even the parts that shouldn’t, like the old velvet sofa and the television controls. Dad said it smelt of domestic rot, which upset Mum because he was talking about the house she had grown up in. Lisa defused the situation by finding an old CD by a band called The Stranglers that turned out to be Dad’s favourite album of all time. But this seemed to irritate Barney, who said he was fed up with Lisa’s ‘possessive insights’ about Dad and the way she was undermining his role as resident music expert. It seemed even more pathetic than the arguments Max and I had.
It was Barney’s turn to cook dinner but apparently he had suddenly been asked to write a review of the album that he had been playing in the car. So instead of making Bolognese sauce he took his computer up to the bedroom to work. Clubby beats thumped through the sitting-room ceiling but when Lisa went to check on progress he was asleep, which meant that Dad, the only person in the house capable of rustling up a decent meal involving three ingredients (a packet of pasta, olive oil and a few cloves of garlic), had to step in at the last minute. Lisa’s gratitude was only matched by Barney’s resentment. He came down to dinner long after we had finished. No one mentioned his absence. He tripped and fell down the last three stairs and when he poured into the sitting room, I wondered if he had drunk so much that he had actually changed state and become liquid. ‘Let’s get this party started!’ Barney croaked. He got up, turned off The Stranglers and put on a dance track that even Max could tell didn’t match the mood.
He headed towards the sofa and landed clumsily beside Rex and me and began ruffling Rex’s hair with his hand in a way that I could tell was both irritating and uncomfortable.
‘You’re a good son, Rex,’ he said, over and over again, panting gently, all droopy-mouthed.
Rex shifted away from him towards me and lifted my legs on to his lap to create more room. He put his hand on my knee and the sensation was so pleasurable that I didn’t trust myself to speak. I wondered if anyone else had noticed because the air around us must have changed at a molecular level but everyone else’s attention was focused on trying to ignore Barney.
‘Dad. Please,’ Rex said gently. ‘Why don’t you go back to bed?’
‘Contrary to what some people might have said, I wasn’t in bed, son. I was working. Putting food on the table. Trying to keep your mother happy. Not an easy task. She’s a very demanding woman. Has high standards.’ The more he spoke, the more he slowed and slurred his words until they were as sticky as treacle.
‘Not here. Not now,’ said Rex in a low voice. ‘Please.’ He sounded like a little boy.
I glanced over at Ava. She was wearing headphones and humming, painting her toenails with black nail varnish, impervious to what was going on around her.
‘Get me a glass of wine, Rex,’ said Barney.
Even my thirteen-year-old self could tell he was as thirsty for conflict as he was for wine. His face had darkened and his eyes narrowed to tiny slits. Lisa got up from the arm of the chair where Mum was sitting. She knelt down in front of Barney and put her hands on his knees. His hands were clenched so tightly that his knuckles were completely white.
‘Please, I think you’ve had enough,’ whispered Lisa. ‘Let’s go upstairs together.’
‘Has anyone told you that sometimes you can be the tiniest bit really fucking boring, Lisa?’ said Barney.
‘That’s enough, Barney,’ Mum intervened. ‘Max is here.’
She got up and removed the bottle of wine from the table beside him. He didn’t protest. I realized that Mum was probably the only person in the room capable of turning this around.
‘What do you think, Nick?’ Barney turned to Dad, who was sitting at the kitchen table holding his head in his hands. ‘Do you think I’ve had enough? Because you seem to be the big man around here.’
I put my hand on top of Rex’s and squeezed it.
‘Barney, please,’ pleaded Lisa. ‘These are our friends. All they want is for us to have a nice time together.’
‘Are you sure about that, Lisa? Are you sure that’s all they want? What empirical evidence do you have for that statement?’
‘Barney, you’ve been coming on holiday here for years and whenever you leave you say it’s the best week of your life. You’re with people who love you more than anyone else in the world. Why don’t you sit down at the table and eat some spaghetti?’ Mum tried to reason with him. ‘Get him some water, Nick,’ she said.
Dad got up and went over to the sink. He slowly sliced a lemon and took some ice from the freezer and eventually brought the glass over to Barney. Barney stood up from the sofa to take the water from Dad. Swaying back and forth, he took a sip, gave a sudden smile and for a couple of seconds I thought everything was going to be fine.
But instead he wordlessly threw the water, ice and lemon in Dad’s face, smashed the glass on the floor and stomped upstairs, slamming the door behind him. Mum got up to follow him.
‘Leave him, Rosie. No one can do anything with him when he’s like this,’ said Lisa, her voice a whisper. She fetched kitchen roll and began soaking up water from Dad’s drenched T-shirt.
‘I’m so sorry, Nick’ she said. ‘We shouldn’t have come. It’s my fault for persuading him.’
I found the note from Rex a couple of days later, after Mum had gone to London. It was buried in a confetti of dead ladybirds inside one of Max’s matchboxes hidden underneath my pillow. I carefully unfolded the piece of paper. Bunker 3 p.m., read the tiny black writing in the middle. Hands trembling, I turned it over to read the other side. You make me hard. The matchbox slipped through my fingers and hundreds of dead ladybirds floated past on to the floor. I was alone in the bedroom but I felt the heat rise to my face and course through the rest of my body, until even the inside of my mouth, nostrils and ears burned. Although no one had ever come close to saying something like this to me, I knew exactly what it meant. It was the sort of thing the boys in my year dared themselves to whisper to girls like Ava, knowing she would laugh in their face.
I don’t know why I was so surprised. Although it was the logical climax of everything that had occurred between us over the past week, it most definitely wasn’t how Ross spoke to Rachel and it didn’t conform to the romantic narrative I had imagined. A phrase from a sex ed class at school last term danced into my head. The penis is made of spongy tissue filled with thousands of blood vessels. Afterwards Ava and I had sung this line to the tune of a song by the Scissor Sisters and laughed until we cried.
I had always imagined that losing my virginity would be the culmination of a long-drawn-out process with endless footnotes along the way that I would discuss with Ava. I had anticipated weeks of preparation, involving exercise focused on what magazines identify as problem areas, the exact amount of depilation for someone who had only recently grown pubic hair and, most importantly, the purchase of appropriate underwear. Not this sudden explicit proposal. Even in my altered state I knew I was completely out of my depth. But it didn’t occur to me for one second that I shouldn’t turn up. Rex’s lust was surely a measure of his love.
After finding the note I stayed upstairs for a couple of hours, trying to read the new Harry Potter. When I couldn’t concentrate, I experimented with outfits, finally opting for my denim miniskirt with buttons down the front, a plain white T-shirt, bikini top and a pair of white knickers that were the wrong side of sexy but the right side of clean.
When I went down to the kitchen everyone apart from Barney was milling around
. No one mentioned his absence. Max was still wearing his pyjamas. Unwashed saucepans from lunch, breakfast and the night before sat on the cooker and kitchen worktop. Someone had put dirty dishes into the dishwasher without checking whether the rest were clean but no one had bothered to sort out the muddle. This was what happened when Mum went away. All the boundaries got blurred. Clean and dirty, breakfast and lunch, loyalty and treachery.
‘Hello, Small,’ said Rex, patting the seat beside him.
I tried to avoid looking at him and blushed. Of course he wanted us to behave normally together so no one else would be suspicious but unlike him I was a complete amateur. I looked at the space and worried that if he found me so irresistibly attractive he might get an erection and Ava might notice. She would most definitely say something.
‘He’s not going to bite you,’ Ava teased.
She would be ruthless if she sensed my fragility so I sat down at the end of the table and pretended to read my book again. ‘Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?’ I read the same line over and over again, wondering if I had the same problem.
‘Maybe she’d like him to,’ said Max, who was playing Connect 4 with her. ‘Did you know that ladybirds bite, Ava?’
Lisa was writing a shopping list and Dad was insisting she didn’t need to because he could remember everything off by heart using memory cues he had devised to help people with dementia. He showed off by reciting every team in the Premier League, the names and addresses of all the parents on the class list and the ingredients of the crab pasta we were planning to cook together that night. It occurred to me that by then my world would have turned on its axis. Would I even be able to eat afterwards? I wondered.
‘Why don’t you come with me and then you can see the empirical evidence for yourself?’ said Dad. ‘That’s what a good scientist does.’
‘I’m a lawyer,’ said Lisa.
‘It’s still an evidence-based profession,’ he teased.
I was pleased he was being so kind to Lisa, because she would be missing Mum.