by Jemma Wayne
Now Veronica giggled too. “Aw, really?”
“Yep. That’s the dare,” Sarah nodded. “Off you go.”
Veronica held her towel tight to her chest, but stood up. Together they opened the TCR door and trod carefully through the changing room. Veronica opened the door to outside and put one foot on the deck.
“You have to leave the towel inside,” Sarah reminded her.
Veronica sighed dramatically, but nodded assent. “Leave the door open,” she ordered. And in an instant, she had thrown her towel at Sarah’s feet, leapt into the darkness and begun shimmying across the deck to the silent Bon Jovi beat.
Sarah bent double with laughter. Flashes of white limbs darted past the doorframe. In and out of shadows Veronica’s bareness moved. From the darkness, Sarah heard Veronica stub her toe. She looked at her waterproof watch. “Ten more seconds!” she called between giggles. She saw Veronica crouch down in the move she knew preceded the cartwheel into the chorus. Legs flailed. And, all of a sudden, Sarah felt a strange guilt, and pleasure, in watching. The next moment, Veronica was in the doorway, hands dramatically covering her privates, grabbing her towel from the floor. “Your turn,” she grinned.
The tightening in Sarah’s stomach caught her by surprise, but she didn’t show it to Veronica. “Go on then,” she challenged. “What do I have to do?”
Veronica turned towards the pool, mulling slowly. “You have to go back in,” she declared after a while. “And you have to go under the cover, all the way to the end—”
“It’s pitch-black,” Sarah interrupted.
“I’m not finished. We’re going to put the underwater light on—”
“Someone will see.”
“They won’t. You have to touch the end, then swim back and do a handstand in the water. And you have to be naked and leave your towel here.”
“That’s so much worse than yours,” Sarah complained.
“Not my fault. You could have said anything.”
Sarah shook her head disapprovingly, but there was a knot of excitement in her chest and she already knew that she was going to do it. “Put the light on then,” she said.
Sarah’s phone beeped again, snapping her out of her reverie. David: Hope session good. Love you x
Sarah smiled, but she didn’t reply, the nausea persisting.
It had been years since she had thought about Veronica. When she’d seen her at Amelia’s school that Monday, despite over a decade cultivating the kind of composure that saw her dubbed one of the UK’s fastest rising barristers, she was wholly unprepared for the jolt, and for the entire drive home, she hadn’t heard a thing that Amelia had said to her. Every day since, she had found her mind going back to that moment – seeing Veronica – and thinking about how David was having lots of such moments, seeing Veronica, and engaging in private conversations with her. And now, agreeing to dinner.
If it had been possible, Sarah would have called Eliza when she received that piece of news – she the only person Sarah had made privy to that summer’s escapades. As it was, she was here.
She would go in soon and spend a bit of time with her parents before the dreaded train journey back into town. Her mother had barely had a chance to tell her how pale and tired and too thin she appeared, and thus far she’d only waved at her father. He was, as usual, in his vegetable patch on the front lawn. He’d only come to this in his latter years, but approached the agronomy of garlic, peppers and other spiced fare, with a childish gusto and equally ingenuous awe in discovery. Sarah suspected that occasionally their green-fingered next-door neighbour re-did some of his planting, but she didn’t mention this to her father, because of course the harvest and not the process was the point of the thing for him, the successful creation and resurrection of life from stillness. They all mourned Eliza differently.
Her mother’s strategy was busyness, embracing this with the kind of inexorable energy that made others tired from watching. She doubled her client list, concocting all the homeopathic remedies she had professed throughout her career, but now brought her none of the relief she had avowed, except in the time it took to create them and thus not spend thinking about her eldest daughter.
Sarah could not even begin to pretend that she herself was coping. She had at first combined both of her parents’ strategies: she instructed her clerks to approve more and more requests for representation; and she threw herself into the nurture of newness in the form of Amelia and Harry. But nothing was able to fill or distract her from the half of herself that had once contained her sister. Everything felt empty now. The past as well as the future. It was as though every memory was suddenly spliced in half, the parts that remained with her throbbing for those missing. How could she teach Amelia to skip rope without Eliza’s voice chanting the rhymes with her? How could she speak at a university alumnae event without remembering the way Eliza had leapt squealing from her bed the morning that Sarah had received her offer letter from Cambridge? How could she do anything without her greatest confidante, cheerleader, exemplar? Eliza had been there for everything. She had known everything. She had known Sarah. And in Eliza’s knowing, Sarah had known herself.
In the end, the only strategy that made a dent in Sarah’s devastation was collection. From the Latin colligere – not necessarily accumulation, but gathering together. In the twenty months that had passed since the accident, Sarah had spent hour after hour at their childhood home, collecting. David worried. He viewed it as a kind of atonement, a self-imposed penitence – it had after all been Sarah’s train that Eliza had been driving out of her way to meet, because Sarah was too petrified of the just-around-the-corner tube. Too nauseous to face it. Sarah’s mother suggested this hypothesis too and told her not to blame herself. Her father agreed. It was for them that she had finally conceded to a counsellor. But it made no difference. Methodically, Sarah collected pieces of her sister: the kitchen table, where Eliza had sat in pigtails, then with strands of blonde bleached into darkness; the shared bathroom where they had compared suntans and the evolving size of their breasts; the old TV on which they had watched Dirty Dancing on repeat; the tennis rackets that had once been bright and shiny and instrumental for their doubles triumphs; the closet that housed the coats they ‘borrowed’ from each other without asking; the swing-seat out front where they’d resolved a thousand tiny quarrels; the bedroom Eliza had presided over and where Sarah had sat, listening to tales of playground foes, and revision notes, and first kisses, and boyfriends, and ambitions, and plans. After the accident, people had remarked that the saving grace of the tragedy was that Eliza had not yet married, she had not left young children behind. But children may have borne Eliza’s blue eyes, or her infectious smile, or at least her blood and her genes, and even in glimpses and flashes Sarah may have had a way then to see her sister again. As it was, there was nothing but inanimate objects for her to collect. And memories. Like the summer at the pool house, when Eliza had buried herself in books and hormones and thoughts that Sarah wasn’t yet privy to, and Sarah had swum naked with Veronica.
Sarah ran her fingers over the flaking wood of the pool house door and considered how, despite the intangible sense of foreboding that the sight of Veronica incited, perhaps her reappearance was fateful. Perhaps it was significant that after all these years, now was when she materialised. Perhaps she was part of Eliza’s story too. Perhaps she was supposed to be a part of Sarah’s collection.
Veronica
At the top of the high street, between an expensive children’s boutique and a café that served tea in floral pots with hand-knitted cosies, stood Veronica’s most recent Primrose discovery: a convenience store that stocked everything from American graham crackers, to Chinese ready-meals, to proper deli-standard chunks of brie. The place had a bohemian quirkiness, and she always managed to find something there that she hadn’t even thought of needing. Besides, it padded the time between finishing school, and going home.
She should of course have been rushing there. After her c
onversation with David, she’d made it out of school well before 4pm, and she could have been dashing in glorious pleasure to the new house with the perfectly designed kitchen, and the duck feather-filled sofa; their city haven. But at this time of day George wasn’t yet home, and the neighbours were.
The noise hadn’t abated. Not in five days. Music and television blared through the walls, the man’s voice often accompanying it in obnoxious, yobbish tenor, and after George’s appeal to them, the fact of this felt like a deliberate two fingers up. When she was on her own, there was an intimidating flavour to this, even behind brick, and often Veronica found herself thinking about how very much worse it might be on the other side of the wall. Veronica hadn’t mentioned her unease to George. She didn’t want to burden him with another thing he would be unable to fix. But she couldn’t fix it either, not the neighbours and not the way she felt. More than anything, she dreaded the sound of the baby.
Veronica was standing in the snacks aisle contemplating this, as well as what she would prepare for the dinner party with Sarah, when the boy, Dominic, walked in. He didn’t see her. Hands in his pockets, he paced purposefully towards the counter where the lady serving was busily talking to a French customer about a spate of bicycle thefts. As he joined the queue, Dominic’s narrow eyes darted around the shop. Veronica wondered if he had been home from school yet, or if he, like she, was avoiding the inevitable. She wondered too, for the millionth time, why since the night of the thuds, she had still not seen, or heard, his mother. Every morning that week, she’d asked herself if she should be doing something, telling someone. Over the years, it was a question she’d asked more than once before. But she still hadn’t managed an answer. Her week had been consumed: by her new job, by the surprise of her encounter with Sarah, by George, by Amelia, and by the usual, empty-belly longing. Besides, it wasn’t her business, she’d told herself.
Veronica took a step forward. Joining the queue behind Dominic, she tapped him lightly on the shoulder. “Hello there.”
The boy looked up jumpily, and at the sight of her he sunk his hands further into his pockets, shifting his weight from foot to foot. Just like the first time they’d met, Veronica couldn’t help picturing a meerkat, or a squirrel, something feral and angst-ridden – ready at a moment’s notice to leap in any direction, at once timid and threatening. “Hi,” he muttered.
“What are you after then?”
“Nothing,” he shrugged. “Just something for my mum.”
Veronica noticed the boy’s lack of basket. “That’s nice of you.” The queue moved forward a little and Veronica and Dominic shuffled their feet accordingly. “Is she okay, your mum? I haven’t seen her for a few days.”
Squirrel-eyed, Dominic glanced up warily. “Yeah, she’s fine.”
“Really?”
There followed a split second in which understanding suggested itself. The boy’s expression changed, staring at her quizzically (gratefully?), and Veronica wondered if ‘fine’ might be about to be qualified, if her concerns might be confirmed. She held her breath. But the next second Dominic turned away with a muttered, “Yeah, ’course”. And, surprising herself, Veronica audibly exhaled.
The relief was unexpected but it came with a surge of validation. They’d been right not to do more. The woman was fine, her son had said so. And here he was, picking something up for her, looking after her. They must be close. Veronica instantly romanticised an idea about an unbreakable bond between them – in the face of adversity, mother and son, always having each other. Once authorities get involved in domestics, who knows what could happen to that. Yes, she and George had been right not to interfere.
“And your dad?” Veronica continued, much more breezily.
“He’s not my dad.”
“Sorry, yes, you did tell me that. Where is your dad?”
It was an entirely inappropriate question. Veronica hardly knew this boy, only what she had heard through the wall, only what she had judged from the doorstep; but on the gentle gust of relief, she felt suddenly an irresistible compulsion to probe further, to help him.
This feeling was not unique to Dominic. It had been a pattern of Veronica’s throughout her life, a conscious strategy even: digging, embroiling, analysing, fixing. Her first ‘project’ had been a girl at school who suffered night terrors. Then at university there was a devout Christian girl who needed help coming out to her parents. Dominic was merely another. It wasn’t altruism. Veronica knew this. The reason was far more self-serving: it was simply easier to fix others than to acknowledge fractures of her own. But the motive was irrelevant. The result was good, helpful. Besides, it worked. It distracted her from herself. It gave her that crucial sense of control and confidence, just enough to stop her, untethered in her own life, from spinning out of reach.
She was untethered now. Each morning that week, she had felt the seeds of resentment taking firmer root, and she was barely able to look at Amelia – the manifestation of everything she didn’t have. She longed to tear something down. Longed for it. She could feel that longing rising, self-sabotaging and untameable. But, here was Dominic. Offering her a chance at distraction.
“My dad’s not around,” answered Dominic, looking at Veronica now with something between curiosity and suspicion. “He died when I was four.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“S’okay. I did it.”
“What?”
Dominic had now reached the front of the queue and he didn’t answer. Instead she noticed him lower his voice a little as he asked the lady at the counter for Rizla papers. The lady lifted an eyebrow. “Are you eighteen?” she asked him loudly, looking downwards at his scrawny frame.
“It’s only the papers, not tobacco,” he answered with surprising boldness. “Where I usually go, they never care. You don’t have to be eighteen for the papers.”
“What are you going to do with the papers?” pressed the lady. “Wallpaper your room?” A woman further back in the queue supressed a chuckle, but Veronica felt a stab of sympathy for the boy.
“They’re for my mum,” said Dominic. The back of his neck had flushed red.
“Then better for her to buy them herself,” replied the lady. “Sorry, but I have a duty of care.”
Veronica noticed Dominic floundering, his feet moving, his fists clenching, and she was about to offer to purchase the papers for him, when, “Fucking stupid,” he declared, loud enough this time for everybody to hear.
The lady didn’t know what to say. She opened her mouth to respond, then closed it again, and by the time she’d formulated a rebuttal, Dominic was long gone, slamming the door as he stormed out of the shop.
In the company of reliable Primrose Hill sympathisers, the lady now put away her reproach and smiled with incredulity at Veronica. “As if it’s really for his mum,” she said. Her head shook gently in a tilted, slow movement, as though to convey her sadness about the state of the world, or at least its youth. “What mother would actually send her child to buy cigarette papers?”
Veronica agreed, adding the woman next door to her list of mothers who, despite their own suffering, did not deserve the gift of a child.
Simone
Terry is all smiles. Simone watches from the window as, in the summer sun, he returns from an afternoon at the pub and stumbles pleasantly into the flat. Dominic is already home with her papers and is actually doing his homework on the living room table. Terry slaps his head in jovial greeting before throwing Jasmine into the air and settling onto the sofa with her on his lap. He turns the TV up to high volume. It has been gently playing Peppa Pig for Jasmine but now erupts with the vicious arguments of a panel show – something about trade unions that Simone can’t follow but the people on the TV, and Terry, seem impassioned by. The noise is deafening. Simone leans back against the window. She is smoking a joint. Ordinarily she’ll only have one a day, usually in the evening, but this is already her second. Through the roar of the TV, Dominic pushes his homework angrily into a pile an
d looks over to her, waiting for her to say something, to do something. With what she hopes is sympathy, she returns his stare, but remains in her pleasant fog.
There’s a sheet of 20th Century poems on the top of Dominic’s pile. He used to make up poems, trying to set them to self-taught chords on the guitar that was once his father’s. The instrument smelled of wood and smoke and something else indiscernible that still conjured him, and Simone used to watch Dominic breathing that in, savouring the man he surely couldn’t remember, caressing the strings he couldn’t really play. Until Terry sold it one day for a tenner.
Dominic’s exams are in a few weeks. It doesn’t matter. He’ll go to the local school, which is not a grammar, but no worse than the rest of them. Anyway, Terry was right – where did all her A grades get her? Dominic stands from the table with clear contempt – for her, for him – but shuts the door to his bedroom quietly. Even in temper he will not slam it.
There never used to be punishments. Most of the time, when she was lucid, she and Dominic were mates. She never wanted to be the kind of aloof, lofty parent that thinks they know best, when life had proved so completely that they didn’t. Occasionally, if Dominic happened to pick a moment when her head was pounding, and said something cheeky about one of her boyfriends, or joked about her making them late again, she would feel her mood hardening, and without meaning to she would round on him, and tell him he was a rude little brat with no respect. But still there were no punishments. Terry was the one who started on those. It was for Dominic’s own good, he explained at the beginning. She’d been too soft, she’d let him do whatever he wanted, children didn’t need that. And since by then it was clear she’d been doing everything wrong, she thought he was probably right. At first it was chores – doing the washing up, cleaning the bathroom. But later there were slaps around the head. Not hard at first, just enough to shock, they didn’t leave a mark, a lasting indictment. Until once, Dominic fell sideways against a door and lost a tooth, and Simone found herself persuading Dominic that Terry didn’t mean it, he didn’t mean it, and concocting a story for his teacher. After that, frequently, there was a belt. Or a fist. And then occasionally, without warning, there were weird penalties that she could never understand, like the time Dominic had been painting a poster for a school project, and used the kitchen table without asking, and so Terry made him drink the muddy paint water. She remembers Dominic looking at her in bewilderment when Terry had ordered him to do that, his face as clouded as the water; but she had only shrugged – helplessly, uselessly. She didn’t get it either. And she said nothing.