by Fiona Neill
He was standing in a circle with Mum, Dad, Lisa and Rex, listening to a story Dad was telling about when Barney had invited him on a press trip with him to cover The Rolling Stones tour in Japan. I’d heard this story so many times before that I knew exactly what Dad was going to say five seconds before he said it.
‘I didn’t realize Barney had this cult following in Japan and when we went to press conferences the journalists were more interested in speaking to him than Mick Jagger. I had no idea he was such a player.’ Everyone laughed and Dad poured Barney another glass of red wine. ‘He even made the cover of The Japan Times.’
‘You missed out the bit where you have to share a double bed and Barney puts sushi in your mouth to stop you snoring,’ I pointed out, but I must have been wearing my invisibility cloak because no one took any notice.
Dad enthusiastically asked everyone to vote on whether we wanted to eat his crab pasta outside and I was the only one who opposed the motion. I tried to argue that the benches and chairs were soggy and the terrace slippery with green algae but no one wanted to listen because they were so desperate to find something they could all finally agree on.
Parents make a big thing about children being honest but actually spend a lot of time pretending and telling untruths themselves. So when we sat down and Mum kept saying what a great week it had been, I knew what she really meant was that she was relieved we had all survived six days together without anyone killing each other. And when Dad said we and the Drapers were like family, what he really meant was that we would be trapped in a relationship with them for the rest of our lives.
11
Nick
I’m not going to pretend. To my complete surprise the best day of the holiday was the last because I spent most of it in Cromer with Lisa. Although we had known each other off and on for the best part of sixteen years, I couldn’t remember when we had ever spent any length of time so intensively alone together.
You have to understand that by this stage in the week the atmosphere in the house was toxic. Although I could understand how a couple could infect a marriage with words, I hadn’t grasped how they could also contaminate the air the rest of us breathed. All relationships require a certain degree of make-believe to dilute their reality but Barney and Lisa had stopped pretending. Unlike Rosie, I didn’t believe there was anything that we could usefully do to interrupt their death spiral and I just wanted them to leave.
The house reflected the mood. Everything reeked of decay. I went to sleep to the sound of woodworm doing shifts drilling the ugly mahogany wardrobe in our bedroom and woke up to find dead ladybirds beneath the damp duvet. One night a dying ladybird weevilled its way up my left nostril and I almost choked in my sleep. Damp had peeled layers off the walls between the bedrooms and Barney’s mad rants and Lisa’s tears became the muffled soundtrack to the hours of doom between two and four in the morning.
As soon as I had breakfast I sought sanctuary in the garden, tearing out bindweed that was strangling the shrubs that Rosie’s parents had once lovingly tended, worrying about how quickly bonds dissolve and things fall apart when unity of purpose disappears.
That Thursday I woke up alone in bed for the second day in a row. Rosie had got the train to London on Tuesday night and my heart sank as I remembered I was stuck with Lisa and Barney again. I had grumpily tried to persuade Rosie to swap holidays with a colleague, using the feeble argument that they were more her friends than mine, but she was adamant. Work always came first with her. How could it not? It was so humid that my body was covered in a slippery, salty layer of sweat. My head throbbed from the heavy atmosphere and I couldn’t even arouse myself with one of my favourite fantasies about the woman in charge of research grants at work.
So when I stumbled into the kitchen and Lisa suggested going to the shops with her after breakfast, I was more than happy to escape, even though I knew I was most likely being used as a pawn in her propaganda war against Barney. This wasn’t due to any great psychological insight on my part: Rosie gave me nightly bulletins on the state of play between Barney and Lisa and so I had recently learnt that the same qualities that once made me boring in Lisa’s eyes were now being used to compare me favourably to Barney and he understandably didn’t appreciate this sudden devaluing of his currency. So everything from my ‘pedantic’ cooking techniques, ‘unfashionable’ job and ‘fascist’ exercise regime were held up by Lisa as a mirror to reflect his inadequacies. Such was the alchemy of misery.
Frankly, although I was a bit hurt to discover after all these years that Lisa found me boring, even though Rosie insisted it was ‘in a good way’, I wasn’t totally surprised. If I hadn’t been married to Lisa’s oldest friend, neither she nor Barney would have had any interest in me at all.
Rosie also informed me that Barney’s recent broken knuckle wasn’t really the result of a cycle accident – in fact, he had punched a hole through their bathroom wall – and he no longer had sex with Lisa because he could only get half an erection. I winced when she told me that, mostly because I felt sorry for Barney but also because like most men I was worried it might be contagious if I thought about it too much.
After this, I warned Rosie not to tell me any more, arguing that in a couple of months they would be fine again and we would have to look them in the eye, smile and pretend we knew nothing. Forgetting is one of the most important tasks undertaken by the human brain but I know from my work that sensationalist details have a tendency to linger way beyond their sell-by date. Thought suppression is very hard. I once assisted on a research project which showed that male participants who were instructed to inhibit erections as they watched erotic films were less successful than those who weren’t told to do anything. So the chances of me letting something slip were pretty high.
I spent a lot of time that week wishing that Barney and Lisa hadn’t come to stay. I still do in some ways. Although Daisy was a little subdued, everything had been fine before they arrived but by the time they left, their shame was a stain that had spread over us all. More than anything I wished things could go back to how they used to be, with Barney playing the ringmaster and us his willing audience.
I smiled as I remembered how last year he had made us all get out of bed in the middle of the night to examine the seabed during the lowest tide of the year. Lit by the full moon, we had lifted rocks to discover prehistoric creatures that none of us had ever seen before. There was a blenny, covered in slime, so it could survive out of water for up to an hour, short-snouted sea horses and weird and wonderful molluscs that looked like woodlice. Max even captured a spiny sea scorpion with a mouth so wide it looked like it was grinning at us. They were good times.
Then I remembered the first time I met Barney, when he and I both auditioned for the same role in a play our final year at university in London. Our paths had never crossed until then. It was something French and philosophical. He got the main part and I had a non-speaking role, which probably tells you everything you need to know about him and me. The director turned out to be a psychopath who insisted we remain in character all the time so Barney decided we should loosen up before the first night by taking magic mushrooms. When he came onstage, the drug had taken effect and instead of Barney, a pink unicorn stood in front of me. It was marvellous. Barney had an uncanny ability to take people out of their comfort zone to places he knew they wanted to be before they realized it themselves.
Even more significantly, he was responsible for introducing me to Rosie. He had just started going out with Lisa and she brought her old school friend to see the play the weekend it opened. Pure serendipity. It only lasted one night after the director was arrested for public affray for punching Barney at the after party. Rosie was three years into her medical degree and came back to my flat with Barney and Lisa. She held my hand and talked to me for six hours until I came out the other side of the trip. I think I would have gone mad without her. She had an air of calm authority that vanquished the demons in my head. When it was over we went to bed and had the ki
nd of hallucinatory sex where orgasm has colours. That was the first and last time that I ever took drugs. I didn’t see much of Barney and Lisa for a few years after that. We went to each other’s weddings and parties, and Rosie and Lisa occasionally saw each other. But it wasn’t until Rosie and Lisa discovered they were pregnant with Daisy and Ava that we began to spend significant time all together. We tried to outdo each other with stories of sleep deprivation; we shared a nanny, went on holiday, and bound ourselves together with experiences that camouflaged the differences between us.
I had quarried into a rich seam of memories. I reminded myself they were stories of what had happened. They didn’t reflect exact events, just how I felt about them. And it made me sad to think that not so long ago we used to look forward to seeing Barney and Lisa. Their bickering, their edginess, their glamour, their ability to live in the moment made our own life seem a little less drab. Even better, whenever we left them, Rosie and I were always relieved that we weren’t them.
‘We need to take bags,’ I reminded Lisa, wondering if this was the sort of trait that she found boring.
‘Where are you going, Dad?’ Max looked up, his face hamster-cheeked with toast. ‘You promised to help me pick up the ladybirds.’
‘I’ll do it when I get back,’ I said.
Max shook his head so vigorously that globs of peanut butter sprayed out of his mouth. He might be very good-natured but he knew when he was being fobbed off. He started explaining how he needed to pick up the dead bodies at the same time every day for the experiment to be true and how there were too many that day to collect within the time frame. I felt a complete affinity with his logic and knew I was letting him down.
‘I’ll step in for you, if you like, Nick,’ Ava intervened.
‘Thanks, that’s very nice of you,’ I said, trying to sound more enthusiastic than I felt because I didn’t trust her motivation.
Ava was all hard edges and posture that week, trapped with her child’s mind in her adult body, trying to work out how to respond to what was going on with her parents. Everyone tip-toed around her like a sleeping lion.
‘I thought you were doing something with Daisy?’ Lisa questioned Ava.
‘Don’t worry. I’ve got my own plans,’ said Daisy quickly.
I noticed how Ava raised an eyebrow but fortunately Daisy didn’t see.
As far as I could tell we were the only customers at the supermarket in Cromer. There was one person at the till, a young woman with a snake tatoo that wound from the top of her shoulder to her wrist, but she was reading a magazine. Everyone else had sensibly gone to the beach on what was to be the hottest day of the summer.
Lisa had ground to a halt in front of hundreds of cans of tinned peaches in the aisle that seemed most likely to deliver a positive result on some of our more demanding ingredients, like saffron and cayenne pepper. She stared at them for ages, dead-eyed, like a sleepwalker. They were strangely compelling, a voluptuous relic from a forgotten past where trifles and sponge fingers ruled the shelves, but even so they didn’t warrant quite so much attention.
I looked at Lisa, wondering how I could get her to move on. The shop was badly lit from above and even the dark rings under her eyes had a queasy orange hue. I glanced down her body and saw her hipbones jutting out through her black leggings. She had lost a lot of weight since we last saw her. Unsure what to do, I picked up a can to check its sell-by date. How many recipes involved tinned peaches? I wondered. I could only think of one. Peach cobbler. I handed her the tin and she dreamily put it back on the shelf in the tomato soup section.
I tried to entertain her with a story about a woman I had seen at work the previous week who had a rare condition that meant she could remember exactly where she was and what she was doing every single day of her life since she was about five years old. It was one of the most fascinating cases I had seen in my career.
‘She spends more time in the past than the present,’ I said.
Lisa didn’t respond.
‘Are you okay?’
‘Sorry I’m so out of it. I’m finding it difficult to sleep, Nick,’ she said finally. ‘I try to forget myself, forget the loose spring creaking under the pillow, forget Barney beside me, forget the tree scratching the bedroom window, forget that tap dripping in the bathroom sink next door. But the more I try to forget the harder it is.’
She gave a quick unconvincing grin that faded before it reached her eyes. Her fingers gripped the handle of the trolley as if it was a Zimmer frame and she kept staring at the tins. She sounded exhausted, as if crafting all these words into sentences required energy that she didn’t possess.
‘That’s because sleep is a distraction from the world. You can’t remove yourself from what’s going on with Barney. So you can’t switch off. You’ve got too much on your mind,’ I said, wanting to weave sentences that would sweeten everything for her. Barney was the poetic one. Not me.
‘Everything feels so fuzzy and out of focus. I can see the children are struggling but I don’t know what to say to them. I’m leaning on Rex too much and he’s trying to be the responsible adult when he should be out having a good time. Ava’s got a boyfriend who we haven’t met but I suspect he’s older than her and I think they’re having sex. When I get home from work instead of looking after the children, I have to deal with Barney, who’s spent the whole day drinking, smoking and doing Sudoku. I haven’t told anyone this, but the night he broke his fist, he wet the bed and Ava had to help me get him out of his clothes and change the sheets. The next day he claimed he couldn’t remember anything about it and when I tried to talk to Ava she left the house.’
‘He’s having blackouts,’ I said, my shock at what Lisa was telling me muted by the pleasure of being chosen as her confidant. ‘Alcohol blocks the neural signals that create short-term memories. It’s a complicated process but a simple result of drinking too much. He genuinely can’t remember. How long do you think he’s been like this?’
‘I think he hid it for a long time. I mean he’s always drunk a lot, and then when he started writing about music it seemed like part of the job description. His boss let him put mojitos on expenses because Barney always ended up getting a great interview out of an all-nighter. His other friends won’t admit it because drunk Barney is much more fun to be around than sober Barney, but “party animal” is just a polite way of saying functioning alcoholic, isn’t it?’
‘Is he drinking on his own?’
She nodded. ‘I’d like to do a four-day week, just to catch breath, but I can’t because we need the money.’ Her head dropped as if it was too heavy for her body and she stared at the worn linoleum floor. ‘Have you ever gone through something like this and got out the other side?’
I was taken aback by the disarming honesty of her question. The air was sticky and tiny beads of sweat bubbled up in the channels either side of her nose and across her brow. She licked her upper lip with her tongue and looked up. Her hair was scraped off her face in a ponytail and a small strand stuck to her forehead, obscuring the tiny scar from when she had fallen off Rosie’s bunk bed as a teenager. The same bunk bed that Daisy now slept in. I watched as my hand moved towards her face to remove the strand of hair and tuck it behind her ear. She didn’t flinch. Her eyes narrowed as she stared at me. There was a searching honesty that I had never seen before during all the years we had known each other. It would be impossible to lie to her.
Unable to hold her gaze, I pushed the trolley forwards and fortunately it nudged the edge of a bumper pack of pale-pink toilet rolls at the end of the aisle, bringing down the whole display. They tumbled to the ground and by the time we had rebuilt it, Lisa had forgotten her question. I pushed on towards the trifle sponges and Angel Delight, noticing how our trolley was still completely empty.
‘You’re right that I can’t switch off,’ she continued, ‘but the irony is that Barney finds it so easy to remove himself. Have you noticed how much he sleeps? How his morning nap merges into his afternoon nap
? It’s like he’s gone into hibernation just at the point when he needs to wake up. The only time he’s fully awake is when he’s about to start drinking or when he starts one of his two a.m. rants.’
‘He can’t face up to the situation. That’s what happens when people are depressed,’ I said.
‘That’s what happens when people start drinking at midday,’ retorted Lisa, bitterly. ‘You can’t separate one from the other. He’s such a loser.’
‘He’s been made redundant. He needs our sympathy not our judgement.’
‘It’s not losing his job that’s the problem, it’s his reaction to the situation.’
‘Maybe he needs to get some professional help? I can ask my colleagues at work for some recommendations if you like.’
‘That’s so kind of you, Nick.’ She exhaled and the tension momentarily drained from her body. ‘He used to be so funny and entertaining, didn’t he?’
‘And he will be again,’ I said confidently.
‘I think he loves the alcohol more than he loves me.’
I was feeling virtuous about my sudden display of empathy after days of low-grade resentment at the way Barney’s mood had hijacked our summer holiday and upset the equilibrium between us all. I felt like a good person for having these feelings towards an old friend. At that moment in the supermarket I was truly sorry for him. I could see how his identity and self-worth were bound up in his work and how it was easier to sit at his computer and pretend to work, rather than face the reality that he was unemployed and, in his current state, utterly unemployable. The golden era of the rock critic was well and truly over. Curiously, I wasn’t even that angry about the glass-throwing incident. In some ways I had deserved that. I had been treating Barney in the same way as I might Daisy or Max when they used to have tantrums. He was right to call me a patronizing wanker.
I looked at my watch and realized we had already been gone for almost two hours. If I wanted to fit in a run after the ladybirds I needed to speed things up. At least we had gravitated towards the ‘three-for-diabetes-two section’, as Rosie referred to the offers section of supermarkets, but it most definitely wouldn’t deliver on the ingredients for the crab linguine I wanted to cook.