The Betrayals: The Richard & Judy Book Club pick 2017

by Fiona Neill

  ‘Dad! Stop it!’ I felt the hot glare of Daisy’s disapproval and blushed red. ‘That noise is driving me crazy.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  I needed to get some air.

  ‘Where are you going, Dad?’ Max asked.

  ‘I’ve got to lock the garden shed before we leave,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll do it for you,’ Max offered.

  ‘Don’t worry, Maxi, you help Mum.’

  Rosie was taking dirty plates into the kitchen and Barney was opening the third bottle of wine that would soon curdle his mood. I got up from the table and wandered barefoot deeper into the garden, ignoring the soggy grass and the sharp twigs blown in by the storm. I could hear Lisa telling glory stories about Barney in a futile effort to pull him back from the darkness: how he was nominated for an award for a piece he wrote about Leonard Cohen for Rolling Stone; his star turn playing jazz piano at the Christmas party of some TV show host that I hadn’t heard of; the surprise party a DJ threw for Lisa’s thirtieth birthday at someone’s house in Marrakech. We hadn’t been invited to that, I noted.

  The padlock on the garden shed was undone. I frowned because I was almost certain that I had left it locked. I pulled open the creaky door and went inside, and found the torch hidden on the shelf in the same place where Rosie’s mum always kept it. I switched it on and scanned the shelves with the beam. There was nothing of value inside, apart from the ancient sit-on lawn mower, which I was strangely attached to. I heard something scratching in the corner and wondered if an animal had got trapped inside or whether there were rats again. I remembered a packet of poison in a tin on the top shelf. But when I put up my hand to pull it down six pairs of black lacy knickers flew off the top on to the ground. For a moment I thought that someone, most likely Barney, was playing a not particularly funny trick on Lisa. I picked up a pair and unfurled them in my hand, feeling faintly deviant, and put the palm of my hand on the flimsy piece of material that would nestle closest to Lisa’s cunt. But it was pockmarked with holes. I shone a torch and saw that it had been completely lacerated. It must have been done with a knife, not scissors, because the cuts were too ragged and irregular. It was the same with the rest of them. I quickly gathered them up, screwed them into a tight ball, then got down on my hands and knees and used my bare hands to bury them in the soil in the corner of the hut where no one would ever discover them. Who would have done this?

  I came out of the shed feeling nauseous. I couldn’t go back to the terrace until I had regained composure so I turned left and headed to the end of the garden where the crumbling flint wall marked the boundary between the house and the beach beyond. When I reached the end of the garden I took a couple of deep breaths and felt the sea air fill my lungs. As my eyes adjusted to the dusky light I noticed that Ava was sitting on the wall. I quickly turned to leave before she saw me and tripped on a pile of stones, stubbing my toe painfully on the edge of a flint. Ava turned round. She was wearing one of her impossibly tight T-shirts and I could see the warm orange glow of a cigarette in her hand. I decided to ignore it. If I told Lisa and Barney they would use it as ammunition against each other. As I drew closer I realized from the heavy sweet smell that it was grass. I cleared my throat to give Ava time to get rid of the evidence but she didn’t make any attempt to hide what she was doing. Even worse, as I drew closer, she took a deep drag and had the audacity to offer it to me.

  ‘Hi, Nick,’ she said, sucking in smoke.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked, trying to sound more composed than I felt.

  ‘Chilling out. You?’

  She had always had this very direct way of addressing adults. When she was a child it had seemed amusing and charming but now the challenge in her tone made me feel uneasy.

  ‘I wanted to see the sun slip down below the horizon,’ I said, pointing at the sky behind her, hoping she would turn away again. I badly wanted to avoid her gaze. I had a creeping suspicion that it could have been her who had disfigured her mother’s underwear. ‘Sometimes it helps to be reminded that the sun sets and rises every day, no matter what’s going on around you. I realize it can’t be easy for you right now.’

  I sounded ridiculous, like the confused, drunken middle-aged man that I was. And I was standing in front of the most unforgiving audience in the house.

  ‘Are you going into motivational speaker mode?’ she asked.

  She stubbed out the roll-up, which should have been a relief except her hands had moved to the hem of her T-shirt. She slowly curled it up to reveal her bare breasts.

  ‘Do you want to see my tits, Nick?’

  ‘Don’t do that, Ava,’ I commanded, glancing back to the house to check no one else was watching.

  ‘Or would you rather see Mum’s? Don’t think I haven’t noticed the way you look at her.’

  She pulled down her top, jumped off the wall and headed back to the house, laughing, before I could think of anything to say.

  12

  Rosie

  Cancer can be a disease of awful retrospectives: the lump that wasn’t biopsied; the cough that was ignored; the mole that was overlooked. I pride myself on my ability to detect tiny changes in my patients, yet when it came to my own daughter I failed. It shames me to admit this, but Nick and I saw little to alarm us in the run-up to the seismic events that occurred in the months after our holiday. We had no idea how ill Daisy was and, unbeknownst to us, Max, the only person who might have come clean about what was going on, had been recruited by his sister to help cover her tracks.

  There were vague idiosyncrasies, but they were the sweet kind that could easily be turned into family folklore. I remember her dropping a knife on my foot when we went out for pizza on her fourteenth birthday at the end of August. There was a tiny scratch where the blade grazed my toe but she worried for days that I might contract a fatal infection or have internal bleeding, which could lead to a blood clot.

  She also developed strong opinions on how things should be done around the house, insisting bath towels should be washed at 60 degrees to prevent them from going scaly and switches turned off at the socket because anything – from the microwave to the mobile phone charger – could give Max and me cancer. Curiously she didn’t worry about Nick, even though his mother had died of leukaemia.

  ‘It won’t make us ill because the radiation used isn’t powerful enough to damage DNA and microwaves are non-ionizing, which means they don’t contain cancer-causing agents,’ I patiently explained, wishing Daisy would get on with the small stuff like putting her dirty plates in the dishwasher. ‘But it will give me a nervous breakdown because my phone isn’t charged when I go to work in the morning.’

  To be honest, I was more alarmed by her pseudo science than the way she crept around the house checking the sockets after we had gone to bed. When I mentioned these misconceptions to Lisa she laughed and told me that Ava believed the microwave would make her infertile by frying her ovaries and blamed Facebook for peddling fiction as fact. She also listed her current preoccupations with Ava – smoking weed, having sex with her much older boyfriend, coming home late or not at all – which made my concerns about Daisy seem anaemic by comparison. As Nick always liked to say, the only certainties in life were death, taxes and the fact that Lisa’s problems would always trump my own.

  In hindsight I could see that Ava was at the more extreme end of the spectrum of normal teenage behaviour, whereas Daisy had gone completely off grid. I could tell from the way her usual paraphernalia had gravitated from the kitchen to her bedroom that she was spending more and more time alone upstairs in her room. Her carpet was scabby with wax from the tea lights she arranged in symmetrical patterns on every available surface. Her books, pencil case and calculator sat in a triangular pattern on her desk and she got annoyed if anyone touched them. But I assumed she was doing the normal teenage shift from the public to the private.

  She didn’t go out much at weekends or hang out with the same friends any more. When I asked her why she no longer saw Ava, Da
isy said she needed to concentrate on her work and that Ava had ‘gone weird’. I didn’t pursue this because in some ways I was relieved the intensity of that lopsided friendship had waned and that she didn’t see Barney in his current dilapidated state.

  ‘So let’s get this straight,’ said Nick languidly, when I mentioned my concerns to him in bed late one night. ‘You’re worried about Daisy because she’s stopped hanging out with a friend who makes her feel bad about herself, she’s working too hard for exams and doesn’t want to go to a school Halloween party?’

  I laughed at my own absurdity and he ran his finger up my arm and across my chest where it lingered on my right breast. I started to tell him some of the things he needed to know before I went on my trip to the US in a couple of weeks: two supermarket orders would arrive on consecutive Tuesdays; the neighbours would have a spare set of keys; sanitary towels and Tampax had been bought and placed in the upstairs cupboard for Daisy. As his finger began circling my breast I lost focus and gave in to the pleasure.

  ‘You always were an easy lay, Rosie Rankin,’ he whispered in my ear, hooking his thigh over mine.

  I realize people will call me a fool, but I remember that period as one of the happiest in our marriage.

  Lisa and Barney continued to distract us with their problems through October, although we were much better friends to Lisa than we were to Barney. I tried to keep in touch with him but he took days to respond and cancelled plans at the last minute, whereas Lisa came by once or twice a week to update us on his lack of progress. She often fetched a bottle from the crates of expensive wine she was storing in our garden shed to prevent Barney from consuming them all. It hadn’t stopped him drinking because he still went to the off-licence when she was at work to buy cheap alcohol that he decanted into anything he could lay his hands on. Lisa had discovered this when she tried to wash her hair and realized the reason the shampoo wouldn’t lather was because it was vodka. I admired her ability to magic a good story out of misery.

  By late October I was working flat out, finessing the presentation for my trip. On the UK side we had almost got as far as we could with the protocol for the trial: the details had been thrashed out and endorsed by the steering committee, the dose agreed, toxicity levels approved, and we had identified more than a thousand patients who wanted to take part. But the euphoria of my appointment had ebbed as I faced the reality of heading up an international team with four different hospitals on three different continents involving thousands of patients.

  I had to combine this with my usual outpatient clinics, a weekly multi-disciplinary team meeting and ward rounds. Although my afternoon clinics were meant to start at two and finish at five, more often than not I was still seeing people at eight o’clock at night. The hospital manager had reduced patient time to fifteen minutes to deal with a backlog of appointments but it wasn’t long enough to explain complex treatment plans or deliver the worst kind of news. So increasingly when Lisa came round I went upstairs to get on with my work and left her with Nick. It sounds ridiculous, given what happened later, but I was grateful to him for helping my friend.

  According to Nick, he gave her all sorts of advice on how to manage her vertiginous finances. Barney and Lisa were equally hopeless with money because neither of them had ever had to worry about it before. He instructed her to cut up her credit card, cancel her gym membership, shop at Aldi, ditch her plan to remortgage their house to raise cash, and set up her own bank account so she had control of their cash flow. To her credit Lisa followed all Nick’s advice but his calm reliability fuelled her resentment of Barney, which in turn eroded the last vestiges of any respect she’d once had for him. Poor Barney. He didn’t stand a chance.

  ‘Guess where he hid it this time?’ I heard her ask Nick as I headed upstairs to make the final touches to my presentation. I paused on the steps, waiting to be entertained by Lisa’s answer.

  ‘He kept insisting that he wanted Ava’s hot-water bottle with the furry penguin cover in bed with him, even though he’s such a rainforest of sweat that I have to change his sheets when I get home from work every night. I got suspicious so I undid the stopper and took a swig.’

  ‘It must taste disgusting, even to him,’ Nick said.

  I noticed how he had stopped referring to Barney by name but deployed Lisa’s at any opportunity.

  ‘It was a little rubbery,’ said Lisa. ‘But the worst thing was he’d mixed it with orange juice so it tasted like a flavoured condom.’

  ‘Un-fucking believable,’ said Nick.

  ‘Un-fucking believable,’ agreed Lisa.

  ‘The good thing about an intolerable marriage is that it’s easier to leave,’ said Nick. ‘You’re lucky in some ways.’

  I couldn’t hear Lisa’s response but I remember being a little taken aback by their easy intimacy and how Nick knew that Lisa was considering leaving Barney before I did.

  I tried to conceal my enthusiasm when Daisy casually told me that Ava had invited her to go to the Year Ten Halloween disco with her the first Saturday of November. We were in the kitchen and I was hunting for the bread knife, which had gone missing again. I could tell Daisy was excited from the flurry of activity: TICKET!!! COSTUME!!! GREEN MAKE-UP!!! The exclamation marks on her list caught my eye because they reminded me that Max had asked a question about the significance of the number three that I had forgotten to answer amidst the early-morning mayhem.

  Everyone going to the party had to come up with ten songs with a spooky theme for a playlist. Even Barney got involved, sending Ava and Daisy left-field suggestions: ‘Bad Moon Rising’ by Creedence Clearwater Revival, ‘Zombie’ by The Cranberries, ‘Time Warp’ from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And although they ignored his suggestions I was pleased because it allowed us to feel the sweet caress of shared history between us all again.

  Ava arrived late at our house that evening to get ready. She brought Molly, which surprised me a little, because she had never been one of their friends. Molly was loud and self-confident, old before her time, and talked incessantly about the characters in a new show called Outnumbered. Ava gave me a quick hug, her skin-tight lurex catsuit slipping between my fingers like butter.

  ‘Great wings,’ I said.

  ‘I’m a fallen angel,’ she laughed.

  There were two other girls who I didn’t recognize and a couple of boys in identical Count Dracula costumes, hair dyed white, with fangs stuck on top of their eye teeth and a trickle of red food colouring coming out of their mouths. Nick made snide comments about Halloween being a cynical marketing ploy, but if it got Daisy away from her books then I was satisfied.

  Shouts and screams and Amy Winehouse filtered down from the upstairs bathroom as they all finished getting ready. We dispatched Max to report back to us, but Ava pounced on him and insisted he help apply her make-up. When she came down I could tell she had been as good as her word. The bluntly applied eyeliner, the green lipstick smeared above the outline of her upper lip and the blurry asymmetrical stars on her cheeks were grotesque. But the imperfections only highlighted her natural beauty. It was difficult not to stare.

  Daisy followed close behind, round-shouldered, wearing a witch’s costume from last year that clung to the puppy fat on her stomach like cellophane. She kept trying to pull the dress down over her knees. I felt a wave of pity for her. Sometimes I wished I could edit her behaviour. Ava slid down the bannister from the top to the bottom of the stairs as she had done in our house since she was a small child, legs flailing. I was grateful to her for the distraction so that the others didn’t notice Daisy’s self-consciousness. Ava accidentally toppled a pile of my papers and they drifted down the stairs. Daisy apologized for her. Please don’t make excuses for Ava, I wanted to say. A memory drifted back from Reception when Ava bit a boy in their class and Daisy tried to convince the teacher she was the aggressor, even though the teacher had witnessed Ava sinking her teeth into the boy’s thigh. Daisy was always too nice for this world. A thread of anxiety wound aro
und me and then was dissolved by the commotion of Daisy and her friends making their way downstairs.

  ‘This is why I’m hot!’ Ava rapped, as she propelled herself down the bannister, the slippery catsuit helping her pick up speed.

  It was inappropriate and absurd but it was difficult not to be drawn into the force field of energy she radiated. Everyone laughed long and loud. My gaze lingered on Max’s face and I saw he was anxiously looking at Daisy to shore up his reaction. Daisy’s face was covered with thick white make-up and her eyes were painted Zombie black so it was difficult to read anything in her expression beyond the fact that she didn’t share the joke. Or maybe she wasn’t even listening.

  They left the house in a mass, hot bodies jostling against each other. Daisy hugged me for a beat too long and I knew she was being brave in the same way she used to be during her first year at school. She didn’t want to go. Stay here, I should have said. Daisy clearly didn’t feel comfortable with Ava and her new friends. But I remembered myself at the same age, turning down invitations to parties until eventually everyone stopped inviting me. One of the Draculas told Daisy to hurry up. I was pleased he had waited for her.

  ‘Coming, Lal,’ she told him.

  ‘Have you got your stuff?’ he smiled.

  Daisy patted her bag.

  ‘It’ll be great,’ I reassured her.

  Daisy didn’t reply and I felt bad in case I had embarrassed her in front of her friends.

  It still isn’t clear to me what occurred that night. There were no adults who witnessed what happened. The blurry sequence of events had to be pieced together in the days that followed by shocked parents and teachers dealing with the aftermath until a clearer picture emerged. And the teenagers involved were unreliable, their accounts either exaggerated beyond all credibility or blurred by everything they had consumed, and even that was never completely clear.