by Fiona Perrin
The feeding machine was one of our jokes. When Wilf was younger he used to wait at the kitchen table for me to come in the door, Bodger also looking up hopefully, and I’d say, with a hint of humour, ‘What do you think I am, a feeding machine?’ Now it had become a standard source of him teasing me.
I pointed to the two food bags on the floor and he nodded contentedly and put his headphones back on.
‘That’s selfish, Daisy,’ I said.
‘You’ll have to get a, like, job and pay for better broadband yourself.’ Lily was gleeful. ‘You could get a job at Maccy D’s.’
‘There is no way I’m wearing a nylon tunic,’ Daisy spat. ‘And I’d stink of animal fat…’ She was a vegetarian, I think at that point, but it was quite confusing as she also sometimes claimed to be a pescatarian, lactose intolerant, a flexitarian# and various other things, depending on her mood or political/ideological persuasion that week. Sometimes, she forgot all of these things and ate a standard bacon sandwich, generally when she’d spent a few weeks demanding I buy gluten-free bread and that the whole house stop eating meat.
‘Can we deal with this later?’ I clutched my head again. ‘I’ve had quite a difficult evening as it is and…’
They were still at it though when the door opened again. I knew it was my parents – who I love dearly, of course – and let out a big sigh.
Mum came in first, all bent from the cold, her practical grey snood pulled over her white hair. ‘Calypso? We thought you’d be home by now. Hello, kids.’ She said it very loudly as she was quite deaf and refused to switch on her hearing aid, due to her belief that the toxicity of radio waves from hearing aids damaged the brain. I secretly thought it was because she liked having an excuse to withdraw from the world.
‘All right, Lois?’ the twins mumbled, but at least it made them stop arguing. Wilf indicated that he’d seen them arrive by doing a pretend fist bump in the air. Mum did one back. My parents refused to be called anything ‘age-defining’ like Gran and Grandad.
Dad – Lorca to the kids – came in after her, as tall as she was short, bending his head in the doorway. He had a hat on too and pulled his overcoat tight round his thin frame. His face was lit up in his usual smile but there was five days’ worth of grey stubble covering his chin. I wondered what I needed to do to get my folks to look after themselves: did they actually shower? His face itched mine as he kissed me, but he didn’t seem to smell.
Mum threw off her coat and sat down at the table beside Daisy. ‘Lily’s been such a twat,’ she immediately started telling her gran.
‘Daisy, please, I’ve had enough of this language,’ I said, my head throbbing even more now from the collection of humanity around me. They were my family, sure, and I loved them to death, but that didn’t mean they didn’t make me feel demented, all the time.
‘Twat’s not even a swear word,’ Daisy said. ‘Although it is in America. There it’s pronounced twot and it’s just like saying c—’
I shouted, ‘Daisy!’ just in time and she grinned as if she’d outsmarted me. Of course, she had.
Lily told Mum about the broadband issue.
‘It’s corporations wanting to take advantage of the vulnerability of the young,’ shouted my mother when she’d finished.
Dad had managed to get Wilf’s headphones off him. ‘We had ones like that at the silent rave,’ he told Wilf, who managed to not look too shocked about his adoptive grandparents knowing what a silent rave was, let alone attending one.
‘That’s so cool,’ he said kindly. ‘You and Lois throwing some shapes.’
‘It’s at this new centre we’ve found out about.’ Dad addressed us all now. ‘It’s a multigenerational meeting place. You can live there too.’
The kids and I looked blank. Dad was always finding new ‘experiences’ and believed very strongly that there should be no limit on personal development at any age. ‘Going to be dead soon,’ he’d say cheerfully, ‘so no reason not to have a go at everything on offer’. Recently he’d started talking about going to the Burning Man festival in the desert near Vegas, which was wild and hippy and full of psychedelic drugs. We tried not to mention the fact that he was seventy-nine and sometimes couldn’t seem to get from his house, a few streets away, to ours without getting lost, let alone mainline acid in forty degrees in Nevada. He tried very hard to keep up with the kids, particularly the EDM DJs that Wilf adored.∫
But none of us knew what a multigenerational centre was. I didn’t know if I cared at that point – I was standing by the kitchen cabinets with my coat on and still no one knew that I’d come there straight from A & E.
‘It’s called Yoof and a Roof,’ Dad went on. ‘It’s a concept from Holland. Young people get somewhere to live and us oldies live alongside them – everyone benefits as our brains are being stretched and we get to do stuff that keeps us active. We’re thinking of moving there.’
‘We had a brilliant time,’ shouted Mum.
This was too much to take in, so I tried not to. My folks lived in the home I’d grown up in. From the outside, it looked like one of those terraced houses on the TV on programmes about hoarders. Inside, the sofas were over-stuffed, sagging but comfortable. The kitchen was full of whatever fad they’d got hooked on last – there’d been a film screen for a while in front of the sink while they binge-watched Game of Thrones, which made washing up quite hard. It was messy and mad, but it was where they lived.
I turned and took my coat off. ‘Where’s it at, Lorca?’ Wilf asked politely.
‘Down by the park. They’ve taken over Seymour House,’ Dad went on enthusiastically. ‘The old boys’ school.’ He was talking about a particularly Hogwarty building with gothic spires.
‘It’s painted in colours to help people with dementia,’ shouted Mum.
‘Cool,’ said Wilf.
‘What will you do with your house?’ Lily said, ever practical.
‘Oh, sell it or rent it or something,’ Mum said vaguely.
The thought of getting rid of the stuff in my folks’ house and preparing it for someone else to live in it made my head hurt even harder. That was days/weeks/years of effort. Whole Saturdays and Sundays for decades, probably. And all down to me. I mused how selfish it was of them to have had only one child – me – when I could really do with some super-helpful siblings to share the strain – and pleasure, of course – of their lovely company.
They’d crossed a line in about the last six months and were less endearing-crazy than stop-the-world-I-want-to-get-off-nuts. The idea of someone else making sure they were feeding themselves and washing in an old people’s home was quite appealing.
Lily went out of the room, probably to do more revision. And still no one had noticed that I was a shell of the woman who’d left the house this morning. I’d just got out of A & E, for God’s sake, and none of them had shut up long enough for me to tell them. I desperately wanted – needed – to lie down.
‘We’ll have to think about all that,’ I said as calmly as I could. ‘And not now… I’ve had quite a day and…’ I started to unpack the bags.
No one got up to help or asked me why my day had been such a bastard. I tried to work out if my parents had eaten already or had popped round hoping to be fed.
My precious sushi. I’d still not peeked in any of the bags to work out the sashimi quotient; if I drew attention to the bag itself, its contents, raw fish or otherwise, would be devoured.
‘Poor Cal,’ Wilf did say, but then put his headphones back on while Daisy got her laptop out, so they could show her the old people’s home on the web. They were all poking at the screen and saying things like, ‘Can you make the text any bigger?’ when Lily came storming back in.
‘Daisy,’ she shrieked. ‘WTF!Ω It’s still going really slowly because of you…’ and the whole argument about how crap our broadband was and how selfish Daisy was started again.
My parents ignored them. ‘Is there any spare food going?’ Dad said. I felt the bruises in my ribs h
urt as I reached into the fridge. ‘You were going to make dinner, weren’t you?’
I started to cry but this time in outrage. I also started shouting – I’m not proud of any of it. ‘Does any of you know or care what’s happened to me tonight?’
Wilf couldn’t hear, of course, but the twins and Mum and Dad all immediately stopped talking and looked up from the table.
‘Mum, are you all right?’ Daisy said as I clutched my head with one hand and the kitchen bench with the other.
‘NO! I am not all right,’ I went on. ‘I’m seriously not all right. I’ve been knocked down…’
Daisy leapt to her feet and rushed to me. Mum and Dad both looked at me with slack jaws. Lily was wide-eyed with anxiety. It made my heart ping. She was desperately worried about the exams, but also lately she had an air – like a bird on a wire waiting for the next reason to fly away. My tears were coming wet and fast although I was trying to stop them for her sake.
Daisy threw her arms around me. They were skinny and inadequate, but I clung to her ribcage and she let me cry into her shoulder. She smelt like she did as a baby despite the overall waft of Hollister body spray. ‘Awwww, Ma,’ she said. ‘What do you mean, knocked down?’
In between humphs of woe, I let go of her, tried to explain about Patrick, the ambulance, going to A & E and Marvin bringing me home. I had to stop in the middle as we’d forgotten Wilf, who was told to take off his headphones by Mum.
‘Is there something going down?’ he asked and was given a quick summary by Daisy.
‘Bad shit, Callie,’ he said after this. ’Are you OK?’
His eyes looked baleful – like Bambi. He picked up the stripy blue and white scarf he always wore and wrapped it round his neck as if to protect himself.
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Just need to go to bed.’
‘Man,’ said Wilf, ‘no shit.’
I held up the bag of sushi from No Fusion and for a tenth of a second Lily’s face lit up, like it used to. ‘Let’s see what’s in it. Maybe get the chopsticks out?’ Mum and Dad were salivating. ‘Someone needs to cook something else though. The bloke bought it for one – or two – not six.’
‘We’ll get Domino’s or something?’ Wilf said with carbohydrate hope in his voice.
I am pleased to report there was a six-slice box of mixed sashimi as well as lots of sushi, complete with wasabi, soy sauce and ginger. I got two slices of sashimi through epic negotiation, which included drawing on the fact that I was the only person who’d been to A & E that evening. Lily ate her maki rolls with her shoulders bent. Daisy took a photo. ‘It’s gram-able,’≈ she said.
Wilf got his quasi-grandies to pay for a massive pizza and similarly sized garlic bread by showing them how cool the Domino’s app was.
It was all lovely, but the idea of a pillow was lovelier. ‘I’m going to bed.’
*
Lily came up the stairs with me and fussed around. ‘I can’t believe this happened to you,’ she said.
I tried to reassure her while I cleaned my teeth and then had a quick look at my bruises while she was fetching me some arnica. I was going to have a pattern of purple cascading down one side of my body; it would turn yellow from there: attractive. Still, it wasn’t as if I were going to be showing my body to anyone else. That sort of thing didn’t happen to me any more.
I pulled on my pyjamas and sat on the edge of the bed to swallow the arnica tablets with a glass of water. I also necked a couple more co-codamol to try and control the throb of my head.
Lily encouraged me into bed and then gave me a kiss as if I were the child and she the mum. ‘I love you,’ she said and tiptoed out of the room as if I were already asleep.
My phone tinged in my bag and I picked it up to see a text from Marvin.
DAAAAAAATTTTTTEEEEEEEE
It read, which meant he’d managed to pull a hot one, then:
Hope you’re OK Cal, will check in with you tomorrow, big love Mx
I sent him a simple kiss back and saw that I had unread emails. Mostly junk promotions.
‘Night, Cal,’ said Wilf through the door. ‘Hope you feel a bit better soon.’ And he was gone, his teenage body going down the stairs two at a time. I smiled despite everything. It was hard not to, when Wilf was around.
I lay back on the pillows and desultorily deleted another couple of junk promotions. Then I clicked on an email that had been sent earlier that day, from an address I didn’t recognise –
[email protected]
with the subject,
Attachment for Ms Calypso Brown
It was probably one of those scams requesting my banking details to secure an amazing deal in Nigeria where I’d make millions, I thought woozily.
But instead, the email sprang into life on my screen.
And my world fell apart.
*Yes, I understand that it’s not the done thing for a sixteen-year-old girl to swear like a drunken sailor, but this was a particular phase Daisy was going through, more of which later.
†Yep, as above.
‡A TV series from the US; apart from that, it doesn’t really matter.
§Generally, not getting invited to all the right parties.
#Vegetarian as and when she felt like it – helpful for food shopping and menu planning, I agree.
∫Electronic dance music. In essence, repetitive beeps and other noises, with no discernible melody.
ΩWhat the F**k – I apologise now, wholeheartedly and repeatedly, for the state of my offspring and the inadequate parenting that should have stopped this kind of behaviour.
≈Food that was aesthetically pleasing and aspirational enough to be posted on her Instagram feed, making all regular meals seem inadequate.
3
Dear Ms Brown,
Read the very official-looking attachment on letterheaded paper from a solicitor’s practice with an address in the town centre.
We are instructed on behalf of Mr Ralph Colesdown and Mrs Petra Colesdown of 46 Sycamore Close, Seymour Hill, to officially inform you that they intend to take the minor Master Wilf Colesdown (‘Wilf’) with them when they move in July to Cape Town, South Africa.
South Africa? What was this about South Africa? They were going to take Wilf to South Africa? On holiday? To visit Petra’s folks?
‘when they move in July,’
No, they meant for good.
Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, God, no. Not Wilf. Being taken away – and not to live on the other side of town but the bottom of another hemisphere.
My worst nightmare had become reality via words on a screen.
Why hadn’t Ralph said anything? I’d seen him two days previously when I’d gone to pick up Wilf with his bike. He hadn’t met my eyes as he’d come to the door of their house, standing on the faux-Georgian porch steps and hurriedly going to help Wilf load the bike into the back of my estate, but I’d written that off as just being Ralph. ‘All right, Cal?’ he’d said and that had been it.
The coward. The unbelievable shifty coward. He’d known then that this letter was coming but said nothing because he hated confrontation. Having to be the bearer of bad news was anathema to Ralph. My left fist clenched into a ball as I held the phone with my right. I read on:
Mr and Mrs Colesdown believe that this official communication, whereby they give notice of their intention to emigrate with Mr Colesdown’s son, Wilf, recognises the role that you have played latterly acting in loco parentis to Wilf,
Loco parentis? Was that what they called looking after him for eight years? I remembered the six-year-old boy who’d walked through the door, shyly holding onto his dad’s hand all that time ago. He’d mumbled, ‘Yes, please,’ when I gave him a drink, had played happily enough with Lily and Daisy, who had treated him like a pet kitten, but had avoided directly meeting my eyes.
Newly in love with Ralph – and yes, it was love back then – and the idea that we could create a more perfect family from interlacing our two imperfect ones, I’d silent
ly promised to always be there for Wilf. And he was always a very easy child to love – sweet natured and quietly clever; blackly funny in a way that made you gasp for breath before you laughed, a dark mop of hair that had come from his mother, tragically dead of a brain tumour when he was just two. I made a promise to Sylvia to look after her son, while never forgetting her.
My heart was beating fast in my chest. I was supposed to be going to sleep to recover but these surges of anger had made me feel more awake than I’d ever been.
Was this Petra? Certainly, in the last few months, she’d bought Wilf even more presents – new devices for his Mac, but never quite the one he really, really wanted; clothes that he politely accepted and then threw to the back of his cupboard – and cooked him dinner whenever he was visiting his father. Wilf said most of her food tasted like polystyrene, which I pointed out wasn’t kind at all, but, of course, I was secretly pleased.
Ralph had also tried to talk to me about Wilf moving in with them for good, but I knew how to brush him off. All I had to do was ask whether Wilf had said anything himself about it and I knew I’d won a reprieve. Ralph was, fundamentally, a lazy bastard and he hated any kind of difficult conversation. And while a combination of anti-depressants and Petra had made him much more subdued than he used to be, he still steered clear of any kind of confrontation. So, all I’d had to do when he’d brought it up again, a bit more forcefully this time, was slightly raise my voice and he’d slunk off.
But had they been plotting other ways to get Wilf under their roof? I thought the way Petra tried to love Wilf was quite bogus. On the few occasions when I’d seen them together, she’d made quite a display of affection for him, but her hugs were wooden and her shrill voice over-solicitous. And she seemed to always be looking out of the corner of her eye at me to see if her behaviour was having any impact: it was as if she was playing at being a better mother than I was. She also spent a lot of time talking about how she’d transformed Ralph, as if she cared more about being seen as an angel of mercy to him and his motherless son than actually being a real mother figure to Wilf.