Who's That Girl?

by Mhairi McFarlane

  ‘Well if he did feel like that, the moment’s completely gone. He doesn’t feel like that any more. I’d go so far as to say he doesn’t like me much.’

  ‘He sounds more wary than anything. You know when you lost it at him, you said some harsh things?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What, exactly?’

  ‘Uh …’ It pained Edie to remember. ‘That I wasn’t his fan girl. That we were only colleagues, not friends, and I didn’t give two shits about him.’ Edie winced. ‘He knows I said that in anger, though. He knows I was lashing back.’

  ‘He knows … how? You said so?’

  ‘Not in so many words.’

  Edie thought of her secrecy at Ad Hoc. Louis saying she was a mystery. Of her failure to ask Jack what the hell was going on. And about Fraser’s reading of the situation between her and Elliot, which sounded like he was talking about strangers, Edie shrinking from saying: Do you seriously mean you think Elliot’s smitten with me? Perhaps Edie’s life badly lacked some plain speaking.

  ‘You told him you had no time for him, and now he’s behaving like he has no time for you.’ Hannah smiled. ‘Great mysteries of our age. Why not tell him you didn’t mean it, and ask him outright how he feels about you?’

  ‘It’s too late,’ Edie said.

  ‘How do you know it’s too late if you don’t ask him?’

  ‘We’re not working together any more.’

  ‘If he feels the way I’m pretty sure you hope he feels, you don’t need to be.’

  This was incontrovertibly true. How on earth could Edie ever ask Elliot Owen something like that though? What if he choked to death on his laughter?

  The sky darkened, and the fog-wreathed Warner Brothers logo appeared on screen, to cheers. Edie sank into her seat.

  It was preferable to think Elliot hadn’t been into her. Because if by some astonishing, anomalous quirk of the fates, Elliot Owen had briefly fancied her, and tried to tell her, and she’d mucked it up, Edie would have to punch herself in the face for eternity.

  66

  Would Margot prefer a self-propelled or powered wheelchair? Edie accepted it wasn’t the most glamorous decision for the wasp-waisted woman who used to have men in dickie bows and dinner suits fighting to light her cigarette. Still, those Sobranies had taken their toll, and wheelchair it was. Edie studied the Shopmobility leaflet and pondered how best to lure Margot to place her bony behind in one.

  Please do this and take my mind off the actor?

  She felt sure once Margot had enjoyed an outing, felt its benefits, she’d be up for more. She waited until G&T o’clock to pop round with it.

  Edie knocked on the door, no answer. There were lights on, she was definitely there. Of course she was there, she was never anywhere else. She let herself in with the key from under the tub, calling: ‘Margot! Hello? It’s Edie!’

  There was a low burble of noise from the front room, punctuated by birds cheeping. She peered gingerly round the living room door. Margot was in a patterned pink kimono, sprawled on the sofa asleep, head thrown back, a film she’d long stopped watching still playing on the television. Rosalind Russell leaned in to have her cigarette lit, in the 1940s.

  Edie would leave the leaflet, and a note – was it alright to go poking about to find pen and paper? As she was nosying around the hallway table, a thought struck her. She walked back into the living room. Where was the snoring?

  She gazed at Margot. And then she saw it. The candle-wax pallor. Her mouth open, slightly twisted. Her eerie stillness. The way her hands were clinging on to the sides of the sofa, claw-like. A grip that had frozen, possibly hours previous.

  ‘Margot?’ Edie said, frightened. It was a childlike fright. ‘Margot?’

  She stepped towards and around her and examined her from another angle, feeling bizarrely intrusive. Edie had never seen a dead body before. When she read in news stories that it was ‘obvious’ someone was dead, she always wondered how they could be so sure. Maybe they were a few vigorous chest pumps away from spluttering back into life.

  Looking at Margot now, she knew. Whatever had made Margot, Margot, was extinct, flown, gone. She was like a sculpture. Her pilot light had gone out.

  Edie walked back to the hallway and picked up the telephone mounted on the wall, lilac plastic. She had the strangest sense that this was the wrong reality: that if she retraced her steps, she could walk back out the door, knock, walk in again and share a drink with Margot.

  She spoke in a stranger’s voice.

  ‘Hello … Ambulance, please. It’s my neighbour. No, I think she’s dead. I’m not sure.’

  Edie lowered herself on to Margot’s chair, looking at the lipsticked fag butts in the swan ashtray, and stared at her body for what felt like an hour. Edie was numb. The birds hopped and squeaked and nibbled at their bird feeder. The knocking and commotion of the paramedics at the door made Edie jump out of her skin, even though she was expecting them.

  Suddenly the house was filled with the bustle of strangers, people in green uniforms, speaking in confident voices. What was her name, how long had Edie been here, did she know if she was on any medication.

  When someone with two fingers to Margot’s neck, then wrist, shook their head, Edie had to fight back the first sob. It hadn’t been fully real until someone qualified declared that it was. They thronged round Margot and Edie stared at her slippers, willing her legs to twitch.

  ‘Looks like a massive heart attack, but we can’t be sure,’ said a stocky man with a kind face and Yorkshire accent, after fifteen minutes or so. ‘She wouldn’t have felt anything. It would’ve been quick.’

  Edie nodded, blankly.

  They loaded Margot’s slight body on to a stretcher, her pink dressing gown cord dangling like ribbon. With the ambulance engine chugging in the background, they discussed next of kin with Edie. She told them about the son. She had to get out of Margot’s house now – it was full of officialdom, pacing around. It gave Edie a jolting reminder of being nine years old again, in the house next door.

  In a heartbeat, or more accurately, a missed heartbeat, everything that was Margot’s was no longer private. It felt so wrong. Stop. Come back. Bring her in. Wake her up.

  Edie stepped over the wall to her house, sweaty hand clutching her Shopmobility leaflet. In their front room, Meg was watching television. Edie had never been so grateful for her sister being alive.

  ‘Meg,’ she said, stood in the doorway, and felt her face collapse as she started speaking, ‘Margot’s dead. I just found her.’

  ‘Oh, shit. From next door? The battleaxe?’

  ‘She was my friend!’ Edie said.

  Edie fell on to Meg and put her arms around her, shaking with sobs, her tears soaking through Meg’s saggy sweatshirt.

  Meg put her arms around her as reflex.

  ‘I’d got her this leaflet,’ she howled, and showed a bewildered Meg. ‘I was going to hire her a wheelchair. We were going to do things together. I wanted to take her to Goose Fair.’

  Meg squinted. ‘Won’t you be back in London by Goose Fair?’

  ‘No, I’m moving back to Nottingham,’ Edie gasped. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll move out of here.’

  Meg looked confused and vaguely patted Edie’s back. The floodgates had opened for Edie.

  ‘Why bother to love anyone, Meg? They just leave. Everyone fucking leaves me,’ Edie said, through another torrent of tears. ‘I can’t get anything right. Everything I try to do, it turns to shit.’

  ‘Me and Dad didn’t leave,’ Meg said, but not resentfully. She was evidently startled, even disarmed, by the state Edie was in. She’d never seen her like this.

  ‘No, true,’ Edie said. ‘You just don’t want me to be here. That’s a difference, at least.’ She wiped at her face and smiled to show this wasn’t said in anger.

  ‘I do want you here,’ Meg said, in a quiet voice. ‘You left. You left us. Whenever you come back, it’s like you can’t get away fast enough.’

  ‘On
ly because I feel guilty all the time.’

  ‘Why?’

  Edie had never been asked this before. Probably because she’d never admitted it. She had to compose herself a bit more before she could reply.

  ‘I tried to make up for Mum not being here, and I couldn’t. You were disappointed in me, Dad still wasn’t happy. I thought if I couldn’t make it right, I was better off out of it. Rather than letting you down all the time.’

  Edie saw tears slide down Meg’s face now. She looked five years old again, to Edie. ‘We didn’t want you to go. It was like we were never good enough for you. We thought you were ashamed of us. That’s what me and Dad thought. He said he understood, that he hadn’t given you the start in life he wanted to.’

  Edie stared at her younger sister. She hated the thought of them having had this conversation.

  ‘I wasn’t ashamed, why would I be ashamed?’

  ‘We weren’t London, or cool.’

  ‘London isn’t cool,’ Edie said, half-hiccup laughing through her tears. ‘It’s lonely and quite shit for the most part. Is that what you thought, that I thought my family were a disgrace to me?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It wasn’t that. It was because I wanted to make it better for you and I couldn’t and I thought you hated me for it.’

  ‘How could you make it better?’

  ‘By doing Mum’s job, I suppose. Looking after you and Dad the way she would have done.’

  ‘We didn’t want you to be Mum. We wanted you to be you.’

  It was Meg’s turn to stare at Edie in amazement. How had they never discussed this before?

  Edie could only say: ‘Oh.’

  ‘Also, you did make things better, lots of the time. When I’m sad or I miss you or I miss Mum, I still make that hot chocolate you used to make me, remember?’

  ‘Oh, God …? Yeah.’

  Edie hadn’t thought about that for years. When Meg was inconsolable for their mum when she was small, Edie decided on a combination of two great remedies: lying and sugar. She told Meg that if she stopped crying and drank her special hot chocolate (marshmallows, Flake, Carnation milk: approx 3,000 calories a pop, all ingredients available from the local inconvenience store), she’d feel better. Often, it worked.

  ‘You took really good care of us,’ Meg said. ‘But you didn’t have to. You could’ve stayed and been an arsehole, as long as you stayed.’

  Fresh tears rolled down Meg’s face and Edie wondered how she’d lost sight of her little sister. This was the same Meg who used to follow her around holding her pet rabbit Mungy, who used to hang on her every word, who nicked her clothes and copied her taste in music and idolised her friends. Somehow, through misunderstandings and distance and miscommunication, they’d drifted apart. They’d mistaken each other for enemies, rather than the closest ally they’d ever have.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Edie said, putting her arms round her shoulders and holding her again, ‘I’m so sorry for running away. It wasn’t you I was running away from. I just miss Mum so much sometimes.’

  ‘So do I,’ Meg said, and they held each other as they both sobbed.

  ‘Sometimes I’m so pissed off with her,’ Meg said, when they’d steadied enough. ‘I didn’t even get to know her. How shit is that?’

  ‘I get angry with her too,’ Edie said. ‘I think we’re allowed. I think Mum would say we were allowed. Growing up without her hasn’t been easy. It’s been this giant unsaid thing hovering like a big Zeppelin. If we don’t say it, we’re denying how difficult it’s been, and that’s not fair.’ Edie paused. ‘How difficult it still is. It’ll always be difficult. We have to miss Mum for our whole lives. That’s it, isn’t it?’

  She paused. Somehow, naming the terrible thing took away some of its terror.

  ‘I think I used to think there would be a time when it wouldn’t hurt as much any more, or a place I could go where it wouldn’t hurt as much. That’s also what the running away was about. Home is the one place I had to face how much I miss her.’

  Meg nodded and there was a fresh flood of tears from them both. They were crying out over twenty-five years of them, in the space of fifteen minutes.

  ‘I read an analogy of depression,’ Meg said, as they steadied, wiping under her eyes with a floppy cuff. ‘About how killing yourself is like jumping out of a tall building when it’s on fire. You don’t want to jump out, but bit by bit, it becomes impossible not to because you’re so scared and in so much pain. No one thinks anyone jumping out of a building on fire wants to do it.’

  ‘Every time I think that Mum chose to go, I’m going to remember that,’ Edie said. ‘I know in my heart that she didn’t choose it, but sometimes when it’s hard to bear, being angry is easier.’

  ‘You put things really well when you talk about your feelings,’ Meg said.

  ‘I thought I always have irritating smart comebacks?’ Edie said, smiling.

  ‘Yeah, those too,’ Meg gasp-laughed.

  They sat quietly, side by side, through the slowing of their sobs, Edie rubbing Meg’s back.

  ‘Margot said you had passion, by the way,’ she added.

  ‘She did?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The front door opened and closed. Their dad put his head round the door.

  ‘I’ve got th— oh God, what’s happened?! Are you alright?’ their dad said.

  ‘We’re OK. It’s Margot. She’s dead,’ Edie said.

  ‘Oh.’ Their dad looked from one blotchy tearstained face to another, and back again, his own face taut with incomprehension. ‘Meg didn’t kill her, did she?’

  Their dad put his canvas shopping bags down at his feet and listened to the story of Edie’s ghoulish discovery.

  ‘Very sad. I’m sorry you had to be the one to find her.’

  ‘She had to die. I had the easier bit,’ Edie said.

  He looked from Edie to Meg, perplexed, and could obviously sense the disturbance in the atmosphere. Edie knew she had to take this window while it was thrown open, before her dad stood up to make the tea and Meg loped back off to her bedroom.

  ‘Dad,’ Edie said, ‘I’ve been talking to Meg. There’s something I’ve never explained, about why I’ve stayed away so much. Meg says you thought it was you; that I was ashamed of you both, but that’s not it. That was never it. I always wanted to make up for Mum not being here and I couldn’t manage it. I couldn’t be here and I couldn’t stand letting you down. And I didn’t want to face my own grief, especially not if it made you two sadder. I feel silly saying it, but it’s true.’

  She still had to force herself, against the ingrained habit of years, to say the ‘m’ word. She hadn’t realised what a taboo it had become.

  ‘… It wasn’t because I didn’t like being around the two of you. It was all about Mum. It was my way of dealing with it. I couldn’t fix it, so I ran away. Fix or flee, that’s what I do, I’ve come to realise,’ Edie said. ‘Mostly flee, I think.’

  Her father frowned. ‘Why would you need to do that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I made a decision really early on that losing Mum would be less bad if I did the things she used to do, around the house. If I looked after Meg. Then you had your problems …’ she didn’t want to make her dad feel worse about this. ‘I thought it was my fault.’

  Meg said quietly: ‘I always wondered if she’d have been OK if she’d stopped at the one kid.’

  Her dad shook his head.

  ‘You have nothing to feel guilty about it, this is extraordinary to me. I had no idea. I should feel guilty, very guilty, I fear. Not you two.’

  ‘Why should you?’ Edie said.

  ‘For not holding everything together better when she died, for losing my job. For not seeing how sick she was, and leaving her alone with both of you.’

  Her dad’s eyes were glassy and Edie realised how near the surface this was. Meg started snuffling gently and Edie put her arm round her.

  ‘Mum’s illness wasn’t your fault!’

&nb
sp; ‘No, but who’s to say how differently things would’ve been if I’d acted differently. If I’d acted sooner.’

  ‘Dad, that’s mad,’ Edie said. ‘Neither of us have ever blamed you for what happened to Mum. She was seen by an emergency doctor the day before she died, wasn’t she?’

  Her dad jerked his head in agreement, not speaking.

  ‘And she promised the doctor she wouldn’t do anything silly. You couldn’t watch her all day, every day. You couldn’t have done more. Depression is an illness and no one would criticise someone who was widowed in any other situation.’

  With these words, Edie realised this absolution was necessary for all of them. Her mum had an illness that killed her, and yet they were all still labouring under the guilt that it shouldn’t have happened. That somewhere along the line, they each in their own way could’ve changed the course of history, and prevented or replaced that loss. You couldn’t put a burden down if you didn’t admit to yourself you were carrying it.

  ‘Our job wasn’t to stop Mum dying, because we couldn’t have done that,’ Edie said. These words were like a magic spell that could banish a curse. ‘Our job has always been to just look after each other.’

  Her dad nodded and tears rolled down his face. Edie got up to hug him.

  ‘Meg, join in,’ she mumbled into her dad’s mothball-smelling old jumper and she felt her sister’s arms around them.

  ‘We’re alright, the three of us,’ Edie said.

  ‘Let’s have a cup of tea,’ her dad said, when they broke apart and everything felt different. Except their dad’s constant desire for tea.

  ‘I wish I hadn’t had fights with Margot now,’ Meg said, wiping at her cheeks with the sleeve of her hooded top. ‘She sounds like she could have been alright.’

  ‘Nah, she loved it,’ Edie said.

  Before she could stop herself, Edie caught herself wondering if Margot could overhear from next door. Maybe Margot could hear from wherever she was now.