by Fiona Neill
I didn’t believe her. But later that same day, after speaking to Lal, Mr McPherson phoned me to confirm that Daisy was telling the truth. Lal had even shown him the website. There were lists of hundreds of drugs and even reviews. ‘How can this be?’ Mr McPherson kept asking. We were all out of our depth.
‘When we were in the park Lal gave everyone a full cap. But I poured mine into my water bottle. I didn’t want to take it because none of them wanted me to be there. They left me behind.’ Her voice had lowered to a whisper.
‘I appreciate your honesty,’ said Mr McPherson. ‘And I’m sorry about what happened to you in the park but I’m still going to have to suspend you from school for two weeks because it was you that brought the drugs into school.’
Frankly, I was grateful for his kindness. For the first time since we had sat down on the hard wooden chairs in front of his desk, I felt my shoulders relax slightly.
‘So can you explain what happened to Ava?’ Mr McPherson asked Daisy, as if it was an afterthought.
‘I was angry with her. She was thirsty and so I gave her the water with my share.’
We went home. Daisy leant her cheek against the passenger window of the car and closed her eyes against the winter sun. I glanced over at her and frowned as I noticed her lips moving soundlessly. If you had asked me to describe Daisy’s face to you I could have told you the exact position of the small mole on the left side of her chin, the chickenpox scar hidden behind her right eyebrow, the dimples in her cheeks and the gap in her front teeth. Her features were almost more familiar to me than my own. And yet there was something utterly impenetrable about her that made her seem like a stranger.
‘I understand why you did it,’ I said.
‘No you don’t, Mum,’ she said softly. There was no challenge in her tone. She sounded defeated. ‘You’ll never understand.’
I remembered the exact moment after giving birth when the midwife passed Daisy to me and my sense of loss and wonder that she had become a separate being from me. It had been a long hard labour, as if Daisy wasn’t quite ready for the world, and sometimes I still had that sense with her. I realized that I had always mistaken her reticence for certainty. Her stillness for calm. And her containment for confidence. She only spoke once more on that trip home.
‘Does this mean you won’t go on your trip, Mum?’
It took a moment for me to understand what she was talking about. ‘I’m not sure,’ I said cautiously.
‘That would be good in a way, though, wouldn’t it? Because of all those illnesses that get spread through the air conditioning on planes. It would be a shame to get sick over Christmas.’
‘We’ll discuss it all when Dad gets back,’ I told her, checking my phone for the hundredth time that afternoon to see if Nick had messaged me. I guessed he was still interviewing the volunteers participating in his research on false memory.
When I got home I went straight to our next-door neighbour’s house to pick up Max. Daisy usually collected him from after-school club and he protested about the unexpected change to his usual routine. He kept asking if Daisy was okay and why she had fallen out with Ava and whether she was in trouble – and if she was, was it large trouble or medium-sized trouble.
‘I’m guessing it’s not small trouble, is it?’
I told him that Daisy had to stay at home for a couple of weeks to sort out a few problems, and although he remained pensive at least he stopped asking questions. Then I called work and postponed my trip to the States.
We didn’t spend New Year in Norfolk with Lisa and Barney that year. By this time Daisy and Ava were completely estranged and, as Nick pointed out, hanging out with Lisa and Barney would be like being trapped in an extended version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but without the laughs. So we stayed in London and invited over Deborah and her husband.
As the month unfolded Daisy seemed to retreat further and further into herself. At mealtimes she got more and more fidgety, plucking woolly bobbles from her sweater, fiddling with cutlery and rearranging food on her plate. She left the table two or three times during a meal to lock herself in the toilet and drove Nick mad by incessantly jiggling her leg, a habit that Max copied, thereby doubling the spillages from the water jug at dinner. Her weight slowly dropped but she was getting taller and I assumed she was just losing the puppy fat she hated.
She fixated more on my appearance – worrying about the tiny network of thread veins on the right side of my nose, the few dark hairs above my lip, the barely visible loose skin under my chin – and dropped heavy hints about highlights, makeovers and wearing the right clothes for your body shape, which suggested she thought mine was wrong.
‘Are you trying to turn me into Lisa?’ I joked, after she tried to persuade me to get a bob and paint my nails black. I explained that I didn’t have much time for self-improvement because I had just been given an extra ward round after we lost yet another junior doctor to a biotech firm.
Although we didn’t realize until much later, Ava had been tormenting her on social media. Daisy was blamed for Lal’s expulsion from school and a Facebook group had been set up with unflattering photos of her taken at the party, in classes and the playground. There were even some taken in Norfolk wearing her blue swimsuit, gazing adoringly at Rex. Boys and girls from her year posted horrible comments and then one of them added Daisy to the group so that she saw everything that had been said about her.
I tried to tackle Max, to see if he had any idea what was going on, and he responded with long-winded questions about his current preoccupations such as whether it was bad to have bearskin rugs in his virtual Club Penguin igloo because it might look like he approved of hunting, or whether it would be better to clone a stormtrooper with Sith or a Jedi to create the optimum super fighter. ‘Optimum’ was one of Max’s favourite new words that autumn and winter. The other was ‘susceptible’.
He had been chosen to play centre midfield for his local football team and spent hours rehearsing scissor kicks in the garden. His first match was scheduled for late afternoon on the last Tuesday of January but the evening before, he announced that he couldn’t find one of his football boots. I delivered my usual lecture about putting his stuff in the same place and not leaving things until the last minute, and abandoned my work to track down the missing boot.
I went upstairs to search in his bedroom. Daisy’s door was ajar and I glanced through the gap to see her sitting on her bed with her eyes closed talking to herself. I stopped to listen even though I would be accused of being stalky if she caught me. ‘Three is a good and safe number,’ she muttered and then paused. ‘Three is a good and safe number.’ As soon as I located the boot, I would go and speak to her.
Max’s bedroom was a predictable mess. It would take days to put everything in the right place. I got down on my hands and knees to search under his bed and found his Norfolk notebook, spine down, hidden beneath an unsavoury hoard of dirty pants, old sweet wrappers, and the filthy missing football boot. This was where he had recorded all the results of his ladybird experiment during our summer holiday in Norfolk five months earlier and I didn’t want it to get lost or ruined. The cover was stuck shut with a filthy piece of chewing gum embedded with what looked like the remnants of a ladybird’s wing and cat hair.
I loved Max for his uncomplicated nature. I smiled as I opened the notebook. Every page was covered with big complex tables. On the right side was a long handwritten list – curtains, knife drawer, taps, windows – that I initially assumed were the various places in Norfolk where he had found ladybirds. Along the top were the days of the week. The level of detail made me smile.
There were carefully ruled horizontal and vertical lines that must have been drawn by Daisy, judging by their precision, creating dozens of boxes that were filled with incomprehensible hieroglyphics, a blend of lines and crosses. Daisy’s initials were at the end of each column and while part of me wished Max didn’t crave Daisy’s approval so much, the other was happy that she toler
ated his hero worship and they got on so well in spite of the three years between them. They were closer than ever.
I flicked through to the middle, noting new categories that appeared: sockets, gas, front door. This caught my attention because there was no gas in Norfolk. I looked at the date. The last recorded time was yesterday at 22.13, an hour and a half after Max was meant to be asleep. I flicked backwards a couple of pages and saw the sign-off time was around about the same every night for the previous month. I forgot about the boot and hid the book inside my cardigan. I would wait till Nick came home and we would speak to Daisy together.
Except Nick never came home.
The end of my marriage wasn’t worthy of its beginning. Later that evening, after Daisy and Max had gone to bed, I was in the sitting room with the light turned low, drinking a glass of Barney and Lisa’s wine, trying to assemble my thoughts. The notebook lay open in my lap. I was certain there must be a connection between the box marked switches and the way Daisy had to turn off all the sockets at night, but I could find no meaningful explanation. I was desperate for Nick to arrive but he had texted again to say he wanted to write up his interviews without anyone else around.
There was a muffled thumping on the front door. For someone so proud of his memory, my husband was very good at forgetting his keys. When I opened the door, however, it wasn’t Nick standing there, but Barney. It was cold enough outside that I could see his breath when he spoke and yet he was drenched in sweat. He leant against the wall of the house as if it was too much effort to stand upright.
‘I think your doorbell needs fixing,’ he said breathlessly. He pressed it to prove it was broken and I noticed his hands were shaking.
‘Is that why you’ve come round?’ I said, making a futile attempt at levity.
‘Can I come in?’ he asked.
I could smell stale alcohol on his breath. I felt so sorry for him at that moment but I didn’t have the energy to deal with his problems and I certainly didn’t trust myself to discuss what had happened between Daisy and Ava. One of the few pressing conclusions I had that day was the urgent need to create some distance between our family and the Drapers before they took us down with them.
‘Please,’ said Barney, sensing my reticence.
‘Nick’s not here.’
‘I know. It’s you I want to see, Rosie, or do you not have any time for one of your old friends?’
I gestured for him to come in. He gave me a sticky hug and we headed into the kitchen. I offered him leftovers from dinner and he turned me down, making a tired joke about being on a purely liquid diet. After a few minutes he asked for a glass of wine and when I refused he gripped my arm and said that he needed Dutch courage. I ignored him and found water and a packet of dry-roasted peanuts that I split open on the kitchen table for us to share. He sat down opposite me and started telling me a convoluted story about how he had bumped into Liam Gallagher on the street in North London and managed to secure an exclusive interview that would soon make the cover of a weekend supplement.
‘That’s great,’ I said, too exhausted to challenge his version of events.
He asked about the children and described what had happened to Ava as ‘a bad business’. He blamed Lal for everything and said he had hoped that Daisy and Ava would be friends again because Daisy was such a good influence on her. Unlike Lal. ‘Especially when things are so difficult,’ he said.
I took this as a sign that he was finally acknowledging the toll his drinking was having on his family. He poured himself another glass of water and gulped it down. He sucked his teeth and I noticed how yellow they had become. His head was bowed and his hair was thinning on the top of his head and it made me feel unexpectedly tender towards him.
‘You know what’s going on, don’t you, Rosie?’ he suddenly said. ‘I mean it’s happening in plain sight. And you’re a doctor so you’re always on the lookout for symptoms, aren’t you?’
‘I’m not sure I follow you,’ I said.
‘Nick and Lisa.’ He paused. ‘You must see it. They’ve fallen in love. Which is worse than lust, because you can get over desire.’
‘Stop it, Barney,’ I ordered him, remembering how a patient once said this to me, as if words made her illness real. I could understand now what she had been going through. Because I now felt the same bewildering disjunction between how I believed my life was and how I was being told it was.
‘Please don’t tell me this comes as a complete surprise,’ he said quietly.
There was a catch in his voice that made me scared.
He got up from the table and went over to the kitchen light and fiddled with the dimmer. Then he came back to the table and sat, palms facing down, fingers splayed. He looked up at me and fixed me with his watery blue eyes.
‘This is one of the most difficult things I have ever had to say to anyone. I’ve debated whether to tell you for weeks and weeks. I kept thinking you would notice something or Nick would cock up. But he’s good at deception, knows how to talk the talk. Better than Lisa. She’s so transparent. But I can’t live like this any more. I need to sort myself out, and to do that I need to acknowledge what’s going on. We all do. For the sake of ourselves and our children.’
I felt sorrier for Barney than I did for myself because I knew how difficult it was to deliver bad news to people: the fumble for the right words; the need to make sure there was no room for misinterpretation; the self-critique later because there was never a right way. The tendency to keep talking because the other person is speechless with shock. And yet I don’t think I have ever hated anyone more.
When he finished he wiped his brow with the sleeve of his shirt and looked up at me. He blinked away tears but there was no stemming their flow. I had spent much of my life thinking that most bad things that happen aren’t as bad as irreversible cancer. But even with the worst diagnosis there is that chink of hope that you could be the one in a million who survives. I have occasionally seen it with my own patients. But he gave me no hope.
‘It’s not true,’ I said in total shock. ‘They wouldn’t do that to us and our children.’
‘Do you know where Nick is right now?’
‘He’s at work.’
Barney shook his head. ‘My guess is they’re at the Travelodge in Farringdon.’
He pulled a receipt out of his pocket. I could hardly read it because my hands were trembling so much but I recognized the last four digits of Nick’s credit card. It was dated earlier in the month. Barney put his hand on my arm and squeezed it.
‘You don’t deserve this, Rosie. You really don’t. I do. I blame myself for becoming so unlovable. Lisa hates me, or at least she hates what I’ve become, so I’ve played my part. And none of us are immune to the itch, are we? God knows, I’ve had a few slip-ups in my time.’
‘But we’re not like you and Lisa,’ I said hopelessly.
‘We’re all animals, Rosie,’ he shrugged.
It was so easy for Nick to fall out of love with me. That was the hardest part. There had been no fights fought, no hateful words exchanged, no emotional grandstanding. Nick later said this reflected the lack of passion in our relationship. I argued that we were still tethered by a thread of desire. I wanted to make lists of everything he thought was wrong so that we could come up with solutions. Nick didn’t want to put up a struggle because he didn’t think our relationship was worth fighting for. He had lost the faith. Or rather he had gained a new faith.
13
Daisy
Dad told Mum it was for the best when he left, although he still tries to make out she was the one who threw him out so people feel sorry for him. He has a limitless capacity for self-pity. Theoretically at least, I guess he was correct, because by the time he came home the evening of Barney’s surprise visit to Mum, she had packed two bags of clothes for him (dirty) and left them outside the front door, which was locked from the inside so he couldn’t get in. After Barney delivered his news and left, Mum had immediately called Lisa.
Three words. Not always a good and safe number. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, these would be the last words they ever spoke to each other. I went into the kitchen. Mum put down the phone and poured herself another glass of wine but she was shaking so much that she could only take baby sips. Trying to be brave, I put my arms around her and ignored her instructions that I should go back to bed.
‘How could he? How could she? How could they?’ she said, over and over again, as if she was conjugating verbs.
I wrapped a coat around her shoulders but she didn’t stop trembling. At least I could go through my tapping routine unnoticed: one, two, three, toe; one, two, three, heel; one, two, three, right side of foot; one, two, three, left side of foot. Shoulder, shoulder. The choreography was as perfectly intricate as anything you might see at Sadler’s Wells. It didn’t dissolve the anxiety but at least it kept it at bay until I could go upstairs and do everything properly.
‘I’ll look after you, Mum.’
She let me hug her but seemed unaware that I was there. In my head I recited the words to keep her safe, over and over again. I wanted to tell her I understood the pain of rejection but then I would have had to explain what I saw when Rex failed to turn up at the pillbox.
Mum didn’t cry that night. I mistook this for courage at the time but now I realize she was in shock. Not long after Mum phoned Lisa, Dad started banging on the door, relentlessly calling on the landline and Mum’s mobile until she turned them off. He even tried to beep her using the hospital emergency paging system. At one point I went to the front door and knelt down to shout at him through the letter box.
‘Go away, Dad! You’ve done enough damage.’ I must have sounded like a character from a histrionic television soap. The truth was I lacked the emotional hinterland to respond to the situation. My reference points back then were all films and pop songs. I saw the neighbours opposite nervously peering out of their front door to see what all the noise was about.