by AJ Taft
Tears start to pour down Fiona’s face and Lily is struck by how young she looks.
“What’s up, titch? Did you girls fall out?” He looks at Lily now, acknowledging her for the first time this evening. “That’s what happens with sisters, you know. Think about Hannah. She’s always fighting tooth and nail with Kate. It drives Auntie Sue mad.”
Fiona leans her head against her father’s chest as he strokes her hair. “Do you want to tell me about it?” Fiona doesn’t answer. David turns to his eldest daughter. “Lily?”
Lily shakes her head and Fiona looks up. “You can bet she doesn’t want to tell you.” Lily sees the bottle of vodka by Fiona’s feet. She picks it up. “Where’d you get this?”
“I bought it.”
Lily shakes her head. “You didn’t have any money on you.”
“What do you care?”
“What’s going on?” David asks, the relief that had made his voice soft, melting into something more akin to anger. “Come on, someone’s got to tell me.”
Fiona tries to focus on Lily. “Go on, you tell him.”
Lily closes her eyes and wishes to be anywhere else but here. For the first time she regrets finding her father; wishes she’d left it alone. Wishes her mother wasn’t dead. She opens her eyes. Fiona and her father are still there, looking at her, waiting for her to speak. “It was only a kiss for Christ’s sake.”
The ‘for Christ’s sake’ comes out too loud and reverberates around the church. The choirboy turns his head for a moment before continuing with his task. The smell of extinguished candles has filled the front of the church.
A puzzled frown crosses David’s face. “I know, I told you that.”
“No, I kissed Stuart under the mistletoe. Just a Christmas kiss, but Fiona saw us and…” she raises her hands, trying to pass it off as a gross overreaction from the kid sister.
“He says he loves her,” Fiona interrupts, her words slurred and her head lolling as she speaks. “He doesn’t just love her, he’s ‘in love’ with her.”
Lily feels her stomach turn over with excitement. She squashes the feelings down. “No he’s not. That’s not my fault. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is you. Honestly, Fiona.” Lily slides down the back of the pew in front, so she is sitting on the floor at Fiona’s feet. Her voice shakes as she speaks, “Finding you has changed my life. You have no idea. Before I met you, family was a word I didn’t understand. There’s been no one else in my whole life, ever. He shouldn’t have said that because it doesn’t matter. Nothing’s going to happen, Fiona, please.”
“Do you love him?” says Fiona in a small voice.
Lily doesn’t answer.
“Do you?” asks David.
“It doesn’t matter,” Lily half whispers.
“It matters to me,” says Fiona.
“It doesn’t matter, because I love you.” Lily’s voice rises so that the last three words ring out in the church. Never having said, ‘I love you’ to anyone before, it now feels like a curse, a prison sentence. She stands up, her nose running. “I shouldn’t have kissed him. I’m sorry, I wanted to know what it felt like to have someone who cared.”
“Look, let’s talk about this some other time. Please,” David begs. “Things will look different in the morning.”
“Please, Fi.” Lily’s touches Fiona’s arm.
“I always said he wasn’t good enough-”
“Shut up!” Both sisters turn on their father at the same time.
“I want to go home.” Fiona sways as she stands up. As soon as she hits the fresh night air she vomits. The sick hurtles to the pavement, splashing half way down David’s trousers. Fiona’s legs buckle beneath her. She groans and says, “I don’t feel very well,” before collapsing at her father’s feet.
Chapter 36
’Tis the season to be jolly, and violent and drunk. Casualties of the festive spirit lurch around the streets. Lily watches a window being boarded up, sees the broken pint glass that smashed it lying in the middle of the street. Fiona is slumped, barely conscious. Lily and David try to march her up and down the church path, but her legs trail along the floor. David calls 999 three times, the third time yelling, “My wife’s a lawyer” into the phone. The ambulance takes nearly forty minutes to arrive.
Fiona is admitted straight away. Because Accident and Emergency is full of drunks with cut heads and broken limbs, Fiona is taken to the paediatric ward and Lily and David have to pace it out in an empty waiting room with stencils of Winnie the Pooh on the wall. David strides up and down the centre of the room, under the fluorescent lights, while Lily sits in a blue plastic chair, her arms folded across her chest.
Half an hour of pacing later, David turns to his eldest daughter. “You’ve really gone and fucked up my life haven’t you?” he says through clenched teeth.
Lily continues to stare at the floor.
“You kidnap my daughter, blackmail me, take my money, renege on your promises, destroy my marriage, and now my daughter’s in hospital, having overdosed on vodka. All because you were jealous.”
“It’s not my fault. If you’d just written me a letter, instead of having no fucking wish to communicate-”
“I’ve explained that.”
“Yeah, well explaining it doesn’t make it any better. I live with the consequences every day.” Lily stands up. “I am what I am because of you. Same way Fiona is. She’s bright and well adjusted and lovely, and I’m fucked up, hopeless, a mess. That’s what you get when you did what you did to me.”
“Do you ever take any responsibility for your own life? I fail to see how having an affair with your sister’s boyfriend can be construed as my fault.”
“It was just a kiss,” Lily shouts.
“Yes. Well. Maybe that makes us even.”
“How dare you compare... I’m not married. I haven’t got a pregnant wife. I’m not about to have a baby.”
“Kissing your sister’s boyfriend is the moral high ground?”
A nurse appears around the door. “Could you keep it down in here please? Or I’m going to have to ask you to leave. There’s a ward full of children right next door.”
“Sorry,” says David, not meeting the nurse’s eye.
“I should think so. Now, don’t let me have to come in here again.” The nurse turns on her heel and leaves the room.
“I’m sorry,” says Lily after some time. She sits down again and puts her hands over her face. “I didn’t ever mean it to be like this. You know it was Fiona who first told me we were sisters. I hadn’t even realised being your daughter meant she was my sister.”
David sits down in a chair on the other side of the room, facing Lily. He looks at his watch and groans. “I should ring Ruth.”
“We spent weeks watching you, you know, before the kidnap. Watching Fiona in her pigtails and knee socks, glowing like the Ready Brek kid. You’re right. I was so jealous. I didn’t see her as a person; I just saw a way to get at you. And then we kidnapped her and she was so indignant, so absolutely sure we’d got the wrong man ‘Daddy would never do that’. And I loved showing her the wedding album, the pictures of you and Mum. You should have seen the look on her face.”
Lily can’t help a small smile at the memory. She stands and walks over to the window, lays her head against the glass. “She was more pissed off with you than I was. She wanted to make you pay and I thought great, this is going to be a piece of cake. But then she said she’d always wanted a sister, and that was the first time I realised.” Lily looks over to David. “She never held it against me, you know, that I’d kidnapped her. She was so cross and so outraged by the injustice of it all, that I started thinking, if she’s this good a person then you couldn’t be all that bad, because you’d raised her. She thinks the world of you.”
Lily becomes aware that David has followed her across the room. She turns to face him. “In her eyes you’re like Father Christmas and Superman all rolled into one.”
David is standing in front
of her. He reaches out to her and takes her hand. He pulls her to him, so firmly Lily’s nose gets squashed against his chest. He smells of soap and pine needles. Lily bites down on her lip until she can taste the blood, but the pain doesn’t help. A wave of sickness rises up inside her; her eyes are hurting and she tries to stop herself crying out, by holding her fist against her mouth. Her father strokes her hair and says, “I’m sorry.”
Lily collapses into his arms. She feels the wetness run down her cheeks, and she cries harder. David pulls her down to a chair and sits next to her, holding her tightly to his chest. As Lily cries, she can hear his heart beating.
“Mr Winterbottom?” A young doctor stands in the doorway. “You can see your daughter now.”
David doesn’t let go of Lily. “Is she…”
“She’s going to be sore for a few days. We’ve had to pump her stomach, which involves a rather invasive procedure to her throat,” the doctor smiles, “but she will be fine.”
“This is Fiona’s sister, my eldest daughter. May we both go?”
The doctor nods. “But just a few minutes. She’s going to need to sleep.”
Fiona’s face blends with the hospital pillow, her dark eyes sunken and her lips pale. David hesitates, stands by the door, trying to blink back tears. Lily stands at the side of Fiona’s bed and reaches out to touch her hand, which has a plaster across the back of it.
Fiona opens her eyes, “I feel dreadful.”
David hovers at the foot of the bed, while Lily tells Fiona to shush. Lily wipes Fiona’s fringe from her face and tells her to rest. Fiona struggles to lift her head an inch off the pillow, to look for her father. Her eyes fill with tears as she sees him by the door, “I know I’ve been stupid.”
“No, it’s me that was stupid,” says Lily. “I’ll never forgive myself.” She sinks into the chair by the side of Fiona’s bed, her hands clenched in fists.
David steps forward. “Stop it now, both of you. Fiona, you need to sleep. Everything will seem different in the morning.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy.”
“I said, no talking. Everything’s going to be ok.” He plants a kiss on Fiona’s forehead. “Now, close your eyes and rest.”
“Time to go,” whispers a nurse, “you can see her again in the morning.”
The snow has settled and the moon spreads a translucent light across the deserted streets, as David puts an arm across the small of Lily’s back, and they make their way back to the flat.
Stuart and Jo are waiting for them; Lily rang them from the hospital to tell them Fiona was ok. Jo opens the door and leads them upstairs. Stuart is waiting in the hallway. He doesn’t meet David’s eyes as he asks, “Would you like a hot chocolate?”
“Thank you,” says David, taking off his coat. Stuart turns towards the kitchen. “Er, Stuart? I have a favour to ask. Would you mind if I spent the night on your settee?”
“No, not at all. It’s the least I can do.”
“I’ll make the hot chocolate,” says Jo, putting her arm through Lily’s. “Give us a hand, Lil.”
Stuart has his back to the wall, as he watches Jo lead Lily into the kitchen. He glances at the attic stairs. Fiona’s father stands at the bottom of them, blocking the entrance. “I’ve got a sleeping bag upstairs.” David doesn’t shift his position. Stuart breathes and looks him in the face, “I’m sorry…”
“It’s not me you need to apologise to.”
“I know,” says Stuart, looking at the floor.
“I think, I think we all have lessons we can learn from this.” David stands to one side to allow him to pass.
“Thank you,” Stuart mumbles as he climbs the stairs.
Jo and Lily are sitting on the settee when Stuart comes back downstairs with a royal blue sleeping bag that has badges sewn onto it. Four mugs of hot chocolate stand on the coffee table and David has taken his coat off and boots off. Stuart lays the sleeping bag over the back of the settee. “It was right at the back of the wardrobe.”
Jo stands and picks up two of the mugs. She hands one to Stuart. “Right, we’re off to bed,” she says as she nudges Stuart towards the door. Then she turns back to Lily and David and adds, “Not together obviously. Think we’ve had enough of that kind of thing for one night.”
David actually smiles as Stuart stares at Jo with a look of horror on his face. “Thanks for that, Jo,” he says. “Right. Night everyone, see you in the morning.”
As Jo leaves the room she turns on the lamp on the sideboard and flicks off the overhead light, leaving David and Lily in the half-light. The gas fire creaks. Lily picks up her hot chocolate and takes a mouthful, and then spits it back into the mug. “Aah, hot, hot.”
“You look so like your mother. She was about your age when I first met her.”
“How, I mean where, or when, did you meet her?”
“I used to play in a band. Just kids stuff really. And we played a gig at these awful discos they used to put on at the Church Hall, and she just came up to us afterwards and started talking. All the lads were hoping she was interested in them. Well, she was a bit older than us and so beautiful. We’d been at the same school together, but she’d never noticed me. I couldn’t believe my luck when she asked me if I wanted to dance.”
“Aunt Edie said you were a plumber.”
“I was, kind of. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do when I left school. Actually I did,” he laughs. “I wanted to be a rock star, but there weren’t many vacancies for rock star down at the job centre and my father, he was a plumber, and he had always wanted me to go to work with him. So I did but I didn’t much care for it. I wasn’t very good at it either.”
“So, what happened?”
“Well, your mum, she always saw me as a musician. I was fifteen when we got together, eighteen when we got engaged. She gave me the confidence to tell my father I didn’t want to be a plumber, and she found a job advertised for session musicians for a recording studio, and I got the job. I mean, when I say job, it was very sporadic, some weeks I didn’t get paid a thing. But Pamela never minded about money. She was working and she earned just enough to make sure the bills were paid.”
“My mum had a job?”
David nods. “She was a typist in a legal firm. She didn’t really like it, but she never complained. And she used to organise gigs for the band, The Recluse we were called. Stupid name.”
“Did my mum want a baby?”
“I guess she must have done, I just didn’t realise. I know it sounds selfish, but we were so happy. I didn’t want a baby spoiling things. I was young. I didn’t know then that babies grow up fast and become incredible human beings. I just thought it would keep us up all night, screaming.”
“Do you think she regretted it? I mean when she told you she was pregnant and you weren’t pleased, do you think she wished she wasn’t pregnant?”
“No. That was the thing about your mum. She was always sure; she wasn’t the type of woman to regret things.” He strokes Lily’s cheek. “She didn’t tell me at first, she wanted to wait until she was twelve weeks, but she couldn’t wait. She was glowing with this great big secret and she, well you know what they say about pregnant women, she was absolutely blossoming, like a flower; she never looked more beautiful.”
“What did you say when she told you?”
“Oh Lily. I didn’t say very much. I mean I tried to pretend I was pleased, but not much got past your mum. But she didn’t seem to mind. She was completely sure I would come round, which of course, I would have done, if…”
“If things hadn’t turned out the way they did.”
“She used to call me Rock Star.” He laughs softly to himself, his eyes shining.
When Lily climbs the attic stairs that night, the sounds of her father zipping himself into the sleeping bag follow her up the stairs. The Velux window at the top of the stairwell casts a red glow over the stairs, as the new dawn breaks in the sky.
Chapter 37
Jo brings Lily a cup of te
a at eleven o’clock the next morning. Lily, having had only four hours sleep, raises herself on one elbow and asks, “Where’s Da… er, Fiona’s…, David?”
“Fiona’s David is downstairs, bleaching all the ashtrays. I can’t believe you slept through his telephone conversation with the hospital at seven thirty-three this morning.”
“Is Fiona…”
“Fiona’s alright.” Jo takes out a packet of tobacco from her bra. “She’s being discharged this afternoon.”
Lily takes a mouthful of tea and then jumps out of bed, still wearing her clothes from the night before. She pulls an extra jumper over the top, and opens the door. Jo looks up from her hand rolled cigarette. “Where are you going?”
“Just, you know, to see what’s happening.”
David is wearing Stuart’s apron and a pair of rubber gloves when Lily enters the kitchen. It seems he has all the contents of the cupboards lined up on the worktop next to the sink. “Ah, Lily. You’re up at last. Did you get your cup of tea? I’ve made porridge, there’s still some left on the stove. Give me a moment and I’ll heat it up again.”
“How’s Fiona?”
“The doctor says she’s doing as well as can be expected. I’m going to pick her up in an hour. You may come with me if you like. He did say she’s a bit down, but that’s perfectly normal in these situations.”
“Are you going to stay?”
David nods. “I’ve asked Stuart if he’d mind putting up with us for a couple of days. I don’t really want Fiona’s grandmother to see her in this state, or her mother for that matter. Besides, there’s not really the room at my mother’s. She only has a spare single bed. So, Stuart has offered to sleep on the settee, Fiona can have his room and I’ve bought an air bed this morning, so I can sleep in with Fiona, until she’s fully rested.”
“Have you been to bed?”