Who's That Girl?

by Mhairi McFarlane

  It was a warm day, and Edie decided to walk the twenty minutes or so into the city centre, up the hill and past the cemetery, which was now back to being a silent garden full of peaceful dead people, rather than the site of the baroque staging of a still-warm sexy cadaver.

  She remembered, as she passed, how it felt to be picked up by Elliot. If she blocked out the massive embarrassment factor, it was worth a swoon, in memory. He was surprisingly strong, for a lean-looking boy.

  A funny thing happened, as Edie strode up the hill and down again, into the mouth of the city centre, her blood pumping. She felt her spirits rise. Edie remembered a very useful thing about herself that she was prone to forget: she had resilience. When things were bad, sooner or later, she fought back.

  Edie once came home from a history GCSE lesson and saying to her dad she’d read a phrase about Cardinal Wolsey, he was ‘energetic in the moment of reverse’.

  ‘That’s me,’ she said to her dad, ‘I’m energetic in the moment of reverse.’

  Her dad laughed and ruffled her hair and said, ‘You might feel differently when you get to the end of his story,’ but Edie adopted it as her motto nonetheless.

  So, she recapped: everyone online was tomatoing her. Her whole office had voted to get rid of her. She was a scarlet woman and a marriage wrecker. Edie knew she wasn’t the person they were saying she was. She could get past this.

  Hannah once said to her: ‘Pretty much the worst thing that could’ve happened to you has already happened to you and you’re still here and you’re OK. That makes you very strong. That is powerful.’

  36

  Edie wondered if her dad had noticed the significance of her age today. They never spoke about her mum, really. Occasionally her dad would say ‘just like your mother’ or ‘as your mother used to say’ but it made them all stiffen and he didn’t do it often.

  Some things, Edie thought as she wiggled the straw in her iced coffee, sitting outside Caffé Nero, were too big to be chipped away at in small talk.

  There was one group family photo on display at home, half hidden in clutter on top of her dad’s piano in the dining room. In it, Edie’s darkly pretty mum looked incredibly like Edie, but with the eighties perm and frosted make-up of the time, in a blue strappy sundress with elasticated waist.

  Each of her girls were caught in the right angles of her elbows, Meg a grumpy-faced confused toddler, Edie with a kitchen-scissors fringe. Her dad was beaming, his arm slung round his wife’s waist. They were in Wollaton Park, having a picnic, a tablecloth spread in front of them. Edie didn’t know if the picture was taken by a stranger, or a fifth picnicker. She didn’t ask many questions about the past. It made her dad’s face cloud over. It was as if she was trying to catch him out.

  Edie couldn’t look at the picture without thinking how little time they had left with her. She remembered her mum wore a perfume that made her skin smell like crushed rose petals when she hugged her. Edie could recollect her letting her stand on a chair to stir cake mixes with sultanas in them, and feeding their pet gerbils, Sam and Greg, together. Or her mum tying bibs on both girls, sitting them at the kitchen table with poster paints to make a creative mess.

  There were also signs of impending doom: her mum sobbing quietly at the strangest, most innocuous times. Edie once thought it was her gerbils squeaking, and realised it was her mother, trying to stifle the sound with her hand over her mouth, as Edie and Meg played on the sitting-room floor. There were days she didn’t get out of bed and told Edie it was because her legs didn’t work.

  Edie used to worry whether she or Meg had done something wrong. She still looked back now and wondered what she could have done differently. There was a cliché she knew to be true: kids always blame themselves. Though in adulthood, Edie discovered pretty much everyone blames themselves. Unless they’re Jack Marshall.

  And she very clearly remembered the day when her mum didn’t collect her from school. Instead, Edie was called to the headmaster’s office. There was lots of urgent whispering and looking at her worriedly and then a chain-of-command error whereby the teachers thought the family were telling her, yet her tearful aunt picking her up from school thought the teachers had broken the news.

  Her Auntie Dawn was ashen, gulping for air and squeezing her hand as she briskly walked her the short distance home, Edie side-eyeing her, curiously.

  There was a police car parked outside their house, and Edie wondered if they’d been burgled.

  By the time Edie peered round the living room door and saw her dad weeping, head in hands, in a house that was peculiarly thronged with people, Edie knew something strange and terrible and aberrant had occurred. What had been taken, to make her dad so upset? She checked, and Sam and Greg were still there.

  Her mum would know.

  She tugged on a passing uncle’s coat and said: ‘Where’s my mum?’

  He started in shock, and said: ‘She’s dead! Has no one said?!’ and Edie felt he was angry with her for not knowing. Everyone fell silent and stared, and Edie said, like it was a bad joke and its time was up: ‘I want my mum.’

  She and Meg were told their mum had been very poorly, and the poorliness was in her brain. It had made her think swimming was a good idea when it wasn’t, their dad said, and she drowned. There was a lot to think about there. Edie had dreams about black water like oil and weeds tangled in her mum’s hair, pulling her down as she struggled to kick her way back to the surface.

  Edie was a natural question asker, though she could tell it wasn’t welcome. Where did she swim? Was it cold? Was the water very deep? Why didn’t people help her, wasn’t anyone else swimming too?

  The vague, evasive answers she got, designed to play down the horror, only deepened the mystery.

  On the day of the funeral, Edie and Meg were left to watch cartoons with a twitchy neighbour – long before the days of Margot in Forest Fields – as babysitter. Funerals weren’t for children, they were told, and they could see everyone at the wake afterwards, at the house. That involved lots of cups of tea and Stowells wine boxes and bustling around. Younger Edie thought there might’ve been an odd atmosphere, although she didn’t know what atmosphere the occasion should have. As her aunt left, Edie heard her talking to their dad in the hallway.

  ‘Those girls? What’s going to happen to them?’ she said, in a tone that was more challenge than regret. She didn’t hear her dad answer, if he did.

  Edie looked at Meg smacking her favourite Transformer against the coffee table and thought: what would happen? How did you do life, without a mum? Weren’t they meant to be quite essential? Who was going to make the packed lunches?

  Faced with a father who was barely able to function as one parent, let alone two, and a five-year-old sister, Edie decided she’d have to step up. In the months following the funeral, she learned how to make ham and cheddar sandwiches. She discovered where the mop was kept. She mucked out Sam and Greg on her own. She comforted Meg when she woke up after a nightmare. At first she was very proud. Then she felt exhausted.

  It was never enough. She could never be enough. Edie felt like a dog chasing a car. The persistence of the absence was debilitating.

  Every time their dad made them beans on burned toast or pizza that was frozen in the middle, Edie would think, vaguely: it’ll be OK when Mum’s back. She’ll be back for my birthday. She wouldn’t miss that, would she?

  Then a classmate called Siobhan told her that her mum hadn’t died swimming, she’d jumped off a bridge on purpose because she was mad, and she knew it was true because her parents had told her. Edie felt very angry with her dad then that she knew less than Siobhan Courtney.

  She came home and asked if it was true and howled at him and he cried and then she felt so guilty, she didn’t know which part of it all was making her weep. It set a pattern with her dad that would continue until … well. It continued.

  When she turned ten, during the creaky, sad simulacrum of a birthday party in McDonald’s – her dad was in the
middle of what Edie would later realise was a nervous breakdown – she finally realised this loss was not going to diminish as time passed.

  It would grow and grow, it would hurt and matter in new ways, all the time. The older she got, the more questions Edie had for her mum, and silence was always the stern reply. It was different for Meg: their mother existed mostly pre-memory for her, she had a much blurrier sense of Before and After, whereas their father felt the difference so keenly he’d been shattered by it. He couldn’t – or wouldn’t – talk about it. In the individuality of grief, Edie was on her own. Looking back, she could clearly see that her early teenage years, shinning out of her bedroom window to drink in parks with boys, was an escape from the pressures of her home life. Between those walls, she worked hard to be the person both her father and her sister needed her to be. Outside, she ran wild to let it out.

  Sometimes, she hated her mother. If your parent died through an ‘act of God’ you were free to simply miss them, without hesitation or resentment.

  As much as Edie knew that depression was an illness and she’d lost her mum to something as implacable as any other illness, her heart couldn’t rationalise away the fact that her mum made a choice.

  Her mum lied to their GP. She decided not to take her medicine. She left Meg alone in the house, unsupervised, and walked out of the door. Her mum had looked at the water below, thought about her family, and chosen the water. Anyone lecturing Edie needed to understand that emotions weren’t logical and never would be. Their mum wasn’t just taken from them; their mum left.

  37

  Edie’s brutally short annual flying visits had left her with no time to explore her home city, and she was enjoying rediscovering it more than she thought she would.

  Once she’d got past her It’s Not London Though stumbling block, she was finding plenty of things to like in Nottingham. And, whisper it: she appreciated being part of a place that was less hectic, impersonal and sprawling. If this was simply getting old, it felt quite nice. When she was small, Meg asked Edie what it felt like to die. Edie carefully told her it was like a long sleep when you were tired. So maybe ageing was like a nice sit down after being on your feet all day.

  A wander up into a tiny shopping arcade led her to a creperie, with white subway tiles, wooden furniture and a nice woman in an apron tossing them expertly in special large circular pans.

  Edie sat at a round table outside the shop and wolfed down a posh pancake full of salted caramel. Her appetite was definitely making a comeback.

  Her phone rang, a call from Hannah, and she answered it with a mouthful of food.

  ‘Happy birthday!’ School friends never forgot your birthday. Life truth. ‘What we doing tonight then?’

  ‘Are you expecting to do something tonight?’

  ‘Yes. Of course. It’s your bloody birthday and I’ve had a long and bloody week. What are you doing?’

  ‘Right now I’m eating a big pudding for lunch and then I was going to find a park with ducks. Not sure where that is, though.’

  ‘You’re an indoorsy person, Edith. Don’t fight it. I remember you on our geography field trips. You sat on the coach with your Walkman. Miss Lister had to drag you out by the nipples. Why no birthday plans?’

  ‘I’ve said I’ll go to The Lion with Dad and Meg. I didn’t see the point celebrating being old and reviled.’

  ‘This is quitters’ talk. I tell you what you’re going to do. You’re going to buy a new dress, go home, put yourself in a hot shower, drink a glass of Poke while you’re getting ready and me and Nick will come meet the family Thompson. What time?’

  Edie wilted in the face of Hannah’s purpose. ‘Eight.’

  ‘See you then. I warn you, I feel in the mood for dancing.’

  Edie groaned and laughed and noticed, grudgingly, she felt happier than she did before. A follow-up text from Nick confirmed that the dancing was a nail-on.

  She didn’t just want to sneak past this birthday because she was a social pariah. With her nearest and dearest, she also feared letting go. Becoming hopelessly morose-pissed and weepy and ending up that middle-aged woman in the corner, lamenting her lost youth. And lack of a family that she’d said she didn’t necessarily want, or not since Matt, but now wondered if she did, maybe a little too late. Edie had never powerfully wanted kids, getting very annoyed with people who did sympathy faces and sometimes openly made the connection with what happened with her mum.

  The truth was, Edie had no idea if her ambivalence was because of what happened with her mum. She couldn’t live an alternative past where her mum did take her meds to find out, could she?

  Edie wiped her mouth with a napkin, consciously parked the dark thoughts and drifted round fashionable clothes shops with pounding music, telling herself she had every right to be there, among the truanting teenagers. She found herself a simple strappy black maxi dress, something she didn’t need to try on to know it’d fit. She had been avoiding mirrors. The remarks on Charlotte’s profile came back into her mind, whenever she saw her reflection.

  Too much make-up … falling out of her dress. No one’s marrying that. NO ONE.

  On her walk home, Edie’s mobile rang again, rattling in her handbag. The sight of the name gave her a jolt: at once entirely plausible and yet ludicrous.

  It was a struggle not to waggle her iPhone in the face of innocent passers-by on Mansfield Road and point: ‘LOOK, ELLIOT OWEN. THE Elliot Owen! Not someone with the same name or someone I put into my phone under that name as a drunken jape.’

  ‘Hello?’ she said, in a high-pitched, neutral tone, as if she didn’t know who it was.

  ‘Hi, Edie? It’s Elliot.’

  Gulp. She hadn’t noticed what a great voice he had before. Probably because when it wasn’t disembodied, you were distracted by the rest. The manful lifting and light beard action.

  ‘Hi!’

  ‘I wanted to check that you’re OK, after yesterday?’

  ‘That’s so nice of you. Yes, I am, thanks. Thanks for all the words of encouragement. And the whisky.’

  This was very thoughtful of Elliot. Nevertheless, Edie wished she hadn’t talked about it with him. As kind as he’d been, it was embarrassing to have lost it. Edie always kept her personal business away from the professional (with one glaring exception). She wasn’t a weeper or a sharer. What must he think of her? She hated pity.

  ‘What I always try to remember is that no one remembers the made-up horseshit stories a week later. Your antagonists will get bored, they always do.’

  ‘True, thanks.’ Pause. God, Edie wished she’d known this conversation was coming, she’d have prepared.

  ‘Erm. How’s Archie? I hope he calmed down?’

  ‘Archie? Oh, yeah. He’s Archie-ish. We’re now locking horns over my accent not being Nottingham enough. He’s got a Sleaford Mods CD and he’s seen Saturday Night, Sunday Morning and suddenly he’s an expert on the local dialect. I’m not talking like I’m in t’ Four Yorkshiremen sketch t’appease him.’

  Edie laughed and tried desperately to think of what to say next.

  ‘In other news, it’s my birthday.’ She navigated round a pushchair in front of her by hopping into the road and back out, causing an oncoming car to beep at her. Handling a phone call with a major international celebrity and traffic – not easy.

  ‘Happy birthday! Doing anything exciting for it?’

  ‘Just the pub. I’m not much of a birthday person.’

  She was doing a good job of making herself sound a real riot. Elliot would soon be sacking off his invites to board P. Diddy’s yacht in favour of hanging out with Edie in Forest Fields Asda.

  ‘Well, have fun. You deserve it.’

  ‘Thanks, I’ll try. Are you on set at the moment?’ Edie asked, finally at a loss for anything else to say.

  ‘Yeah. On set, but in my trailer. I’m reading scripts and wondering how you jump behind a sofa and survive five rounds from an assault rifle. I think the answer is, “because sequel.”�
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  ‘Haha.’

  ‘“I’m going to do a transgression on you,” is a line, I kid you not. Liam Neeson’s attached. There’s also a mind-blowingly bad romcom. I’m a brilliant playboy obstetrician who falls in love with a single woman having IVF triplets.’

  ‘You had me at “playboy obstetrician”.’

  Elliot laughed. ‘There’s a line about being the Obi Wan Kenobi of OB/GYNs. I was crying trying to read it aloud.’

  ‘What does that even mean?’

  ‘I use the Force-ps, of course.’

  Edie couldn’t speak at first for guffawing.

  ‘You have to do it! Then you can be on classic romcom posters where you’re standing back to back with your co-star. You’re doing the “I give up” hands and shrugging, while the woman is pointing back at you with a This Guy expression.’

  Edie was rewarded with what sounded like a proper laugh.

  ‘I’ll call my agent straight after you. What could possibly go wrong? Other than the placenta detaching. Sorry, spoilers.’

  They laughed and Edie felt she should wind the call up during the triumphant riffing and before the uhhming and aahing started.

  ‘Anyway I’m genuinely feeling the better for your pep talk. I’m bearing in mind what you said about “those who know me better, know better”. That was good advice. Thank you.’

  ‘Ah, great, glad it helped.’ Pause. ‘I think that “those who know me better” was Marilyn Monroe talking about how people thought her breasts were fake. But whatever works, eh?’

  Edie let go of a honking divvy laugh that she regretted a bit, after they said bye and rang off.

  As she walked up the street to her dad’s, Edie saw Margot standing outside the door. She had the fag glued to one hand as usual, and a cake on a plate in the other. She was wearing a blousy cream dress, with ruffles. Edie remembered that photo of Margot: she still dressed as the siren she once was. It was quite cool, really, if you forgot the viperous personality.