by Sanjida Kay
‘She asked you to,’ I say, putting my bread down and wiping the grease from my fingers.
‘I have no recollection of her doing so,’ he says with spirit.
‘Look, Dad, they just want you to say you’re sorry. We’re all sorry. How hard can it be?’
It’ll be the anniversary of Ruby-May’s death in three days. I have a churning sensation in my stomach. If they don’t forgive Dad, if we don’t knit back together as a family by then, I don’t think we ever will. It’s bad enough watching your mum walk out on you, followed by both your sisters, whilst your father drinks himself stupid, but we were still a family. I don’t want to lose that. It’s pretty fucking lonely, as it is. My girlfriend left me on New Year’s Eve too. Thanks, Maddison. Although, to be fair, I hadn’t paid her any attention for months. Not since 15 August, to be precise.
‘It’s monstrous that Ruby-May is no longer with us. Obviously I am sorry. But it was not my fault,’ Dad says. ‘Why should I be held responsible for that poor child’s death?’
There’s something monstrous about Dad’s statement and I don’t feel like I can even process it right now. One of the old men gets up and shuffles a black pawn over to a white square and then sits back down. The two chess players contemplate the pieces.
‘We should tell Luca to come here,’ I say, trying not to think about Ruby-May. ‘He told me he goes to one of the cafes off Queen’s Square in Bristol. He plays chess with a group of old men who are there every day. It reminds him of home, but he says he misses the giant sets like this one.’ The other man now gets up and pushes a rook across the stone slabs. ‘Luca says you think about chess differently when the pieces are so large; it’s as if your brain is wired to respond like it’s real and no longer a game.’
My father ignores me. ‘She even says I was drunk.’
I don’t say anything. Dad spent much of my childhood in an alcoholic stupor, as far as I can remember. Although he wasn’t there for more than half the time – he stayed in his flat in Bristol during the week, instead of coming home to us. It’s probably why Mum walked out.
He looks at me from beneath his thick, wiry eyebrows. ‘I know what you’re thinking, Son, but I stopped a couple of years ago when the doctor put me on Warfarin. You can’t drink when you’re on blood-thinning medication. I thought he was being a scaremonger, and I had a pint in the pub and passed out. Cracked my head on the hearth.’
‘But Amy told me—’
‘I know what she said,’ he mutters. He pushes his focaccia aside, his appetite gone.
I think back to that day when I’d arrived so catastrophically late. Dad had been groggy, spaced out, and I’d believed them when Bethany and Amy had told me that he’d had more than half a bottle of red that afternoon, leaving Ruby-May on her own in the garden. Maybe he didn’t even remember drinking. He has been confused and forgetful since we arrived in Italy, and yet, in everyday conversations like this, he seems his old self: razorsharp and acerbic.
He puts down his empty coffee cup and stares at me. His eyes are paler than they used to be, but clear, unclouded.
‘I know you’re angry with me, Son, and you may very well not have forgiven me. I am sorry for how I behaved to you and your mother. I should have said so many years ago, and I’m sorry about that too. But there is nothing wrong with my mind.’
I drink my beer and look up into the clear, blue sky. There are two parallel white lines marring its perfect clarity: the past trajectories of planes, or the trajectories of past planes?
I wonder if it’s possible that someone else is lying to me about what really happened that day, almost a year ago.
EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO, SOMERSET
15
NICK
I waited for a bit, because sometimes she came to get me and sometimes she didn’t. She disliked being pinned down, or being made to let go of the moment.
When you’re painting, she said, it’s like chasing a butterfly, you have to follow it wherever it takes you.
She’d traced a dreamy line in the air and I knew what she meant: the speckled brown butterflies we found on the bridleways near our house alighted on a flower for a fleeting instant, before spiralling into the sky or darting over one of the pines, their flight a crazy zigzag before they disappeared towards the heath. But I didn’t understand how pursuing butterflies was like painting, and why that meant she couldn’t pick me up from school.
It was a long walk home, although it was shorter if you cut across the fields. I was twelve years old. It was May, or maybe June. I frightened the cows and got home smelling of horse manure and fresh mud. I thought she might look up and smile and tell me the butterfly had landed on her fingertip, before giving me an ice-cold glass of milk and a chocolate-chip cookie. But I’m mixing her up with someone else’s mother. I poured myself some orange juice and ate one of the last apples from the previous year, wrapped in newsprint, the skin waxy and puckered.
I didn’t disturb her – she didn’t like that – but eventually, maybe a couple of hours later, I went upstairs and peeked in the doorway of her studio. She wasn’t there. It was strangely tidy: her paints had gone. A bee buzzed around, banging against the windows until I let it out. I looked in all the other rooms, but they seemed exactly the same as they had been that morning. The crusts from my plate of toast, left over from breakfast, were still on the kitchen table. I ate them absent-mindedly and wandered round the garden, hoping to come across her trying to capture the elusive dart of a dragonfly or the exact shade of the shadows as the evening drew in. There was no sign of her. I ate most of a packet of stale digestives, some Cheddar that had gone hard and cracked and half a bar of cooking chocolate. I was watching TV, up way past my bedtime, and feeling distinctly weird, hungry and sick, all at the same time, when Dad arrived.
He whistled as he walked up the path through the velvet darkness, his keys clinking in his palm, his breath sweet with brandy when he leaned over the sofa to tousle my hair.
‘Where’s your mum?’ he said.
I shrugged and he did a kind of slow double-take, as if he was a deep-sea diver.
‘Eleanor!’ he called. ‘Eleanor?’
I don’t remember what happened after that. I know there was some shouting when he phoned her mobile – I’m not sure he even spoke to her that night; he may just have left several ranting messages. But he was in a grim fury when he bundled me off to my room, without checking that I’d wiped the chocolate off my face or brushed my teeth, and I lay rigid in bed, staring up at the shadowpattern of leaves on the ceiling, with this cold, tight pain in my chest. Somehow I knew that she wasn’t coming back. I wasn’t angry with my mother, not then; I was furious with my sister, because Bethany, the month before, when she’d turned sixteen, had left home and left me behind, as if I was just another one of her possessions that she could carelessly shrug off. And now, without my mother or my sisters, I would be alone with my father.
16
AMY
It’s late afternoon. They’re all outside on the terrace. Lotte, thanks to Luca’s patience, has got in the pool. She’s wearing armbands and will only go in the water if she can sit on the blow-up unicorn, but it’s progress. Luca has a textbook on child psychology next to him, but he’s reading a well-worn copy of The Divine Comedy; and Matt dozes with his fishing magazine on his stomach. Amy lies opposite Bethany and Chloe, but she can’t stay still.
Her stepdaughter and her sister are leaning conspiratorially over Chloe’s neon-pink iPad, whispering and giggling. She wishes Chloe would play with her younger half-siblings, instead of spending all her time looking at Instagram and trying on Bethany’s make-up. As for her sister, why can’t she act like an adult and help out, instead of pretending to be Chloe’s friend? She suspects it’s about Bethany’s ego: she loves Chloe looking up to her. She sighs. Is she overreacting? She’s probably jealous: envious of their smooth, honey-brown skin, their thick, gleaming hair, their obvious closeness. Bethany, only two years younger than her, is in a whit
e halterneck bikini and a filmy kaftan; her breasts are firm, her stomach flat and taut. She can see the sinewy movement of Bethany’s biceps, the way her thigh muscles glide beneath her oiled and bronzed skin.
She doesn’t even own a kaftan, so she’s thrown a large white shirt over the top of her swimsuit and has wrapped a sarong around her waist. It’s an all-in-one costume, so she doesn’t have to reveal the loose grey skin she’s left with, after her sudden weight loss last year, and she knows she’ll end up with vicious tan lines. The whole outfit is too hot and she envies Chloe’s spare body, the way she can sling on a spaghetti-strap vest without any lumps or sags or stretchmarks showing.
She keeps thinking of her father, struggling down the track with his suitcase. The children haven’t yet asked where he is, but they will. She sighs. She wishes Nick hadn’t brought him, but at least he went after him. He’ll make sure David gets home safely. But then, of course, how could Dad get back, unless Nick goes with him? It’s a ferry ride, a taxi, a train journey even to reach the airport. Her father couldn’t do it on his own.
She’s not surprised when she hears the car pull up outside the house. She goes and stands at the corner, in a pool of shade, and watches her brother helping their father out of the people-carrier. She waits for Nick to carry David’s suitcase up to his room and then come back down the stairs.
‘Hey,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t…’
‘I know. Let’s go for a walk,’ she says.
They go round the far side of the apartment where Luca and Joe are staying, through scrubby grass, stiff with seedheads and vetch pods, and past row after row of olive trees and shrubby juniper bushes, the land rising steeply and sharply, the earth dusty and red-gold. She half-imagines she can see the scalloped roof of Carlo’s farmhouse, but she knows it isn’t possible from this angle.
‘There weren’t any flights,’ Nick says.
‘You didn’t try, did you?’
‘He couldn’t get home by himself.’
Standing behind the converted barn, she sees how crude it is – the rough attempts to plaster the walls, blue plastic tubing erupting from the ground. There’s coiled black hose beneath the olives, cigarette butts and shotgun casings, the occasional glint of a glass bottle; detritus left by farm boys who must have been standing right by the holiday house. They walk round the back of Maregiglio.
‘Matt’s going to kill me,’ Nick adds.
‘Or Dad.’
‘Or both of us.’
She’s not sure what’s worse: Matt’s rage or his emotional absence.
She rubs her eyes. There’s a half-open shed a little way from the house, screened by some stunted cypress trees. In the cool darkness at the back, there are large plastic containers with chemicals for cleaning the pool, a rusting rake and a brush. Drifts of desiccated olive leaves crunch beneath her feet. For a moment they pause. From here, in between the trees, she can see bright slivers of the pool, of her family, sprawled out on their loungers. In fact from this angle they can see directly into Bethany’s and Chloe’s bedrooms. She imagines her sister padding about, naked; Chloe in her bra and pants admiring herself in the mirror or, more likely, obsessing about how she looks, trying on different outfits. Amy shivers in spite of the heat. She should tell them to keep the curtains closed.
‘If he’d only apologize—’
‘He says he wasn’t drunk,’ Nick interrupts. ‘He can’t drink, because he’s on some medication.’
‘Warfarin. It hasn’t stopped him. He isn’t drinking wine any more, but he still has shots of that cider brandy his neighbour Tony brews.’
Nick frowns. ‘You said he’d had half a bottle of red.’
She shakes her head. ‘You must have misremembered. You weren’t even there. It was definitely brandy. That stuff Tony makes is lethal. Dad probably isn’t even aware of how much he’s drinking. What does it matter anyway? The point is, he was drunk.’
The wings of cricket-like creatures brush drily against her calves and she walks on. Nick follows. They turn the corner and face the sea. Gulls wheel on the thermals like pterosaurs, and shouts and laughter drift up from the beach hidden below.
‘It’s just an excuse,’ she says, suddenly angry – with her father, for his stubbornness; and with her brother, for making her face the anniversary of her daughter’s death with the person responsible. ‘You do know he used to bring them to the flat, the one you live in now.’
‘Who? What are you talking about?’
She wants to hurt him for bringing their father here. ‘The women. All the women.’
‘What women?’ he asks.
‘Nick, you must have known.’ She’s impatient with him now. ‘That’s why Dad didn’t come home during the week. It’s not like Bristol is that far away. He lived with them in his flat, and then he came back to Somerset at the weekends.’
‘What? Dad did that?’
She wants to shake him. ‘All through our childhood. Why do you think Mum left?’ She wonders if Nick still blames himself for their mother leaving; kids often do, don’t they?
‘I didn’t…’ He presses his fingers against his temples. After a few moments he says, ‘She should never have left. Us, I mean. What kind of a woman does that? Even if—’
‘She didn’t want to be a mother,’ Amy says. ‘She wanted to be an artist. He didn’t let her. And then he betrayed her. Again and again and again.’ She thinks of Eleanor, now living in a commune in Santa Fe, painting spare landscapes: bones and blistered wood, seedpods and paintbrush trees. They email now and again, but as far as she knows, Bethany and Nick refused to keep in touch with her.
‘It wasn’t his drinking, then?’
‘It didn’t help – he was a heavy drinker, but he wasn’t an alcoholic. He was absent, whether he was with us or not.’
She looks out at the impossible blue of the sea and feels as if her mother is right there, like a mirage, shimmering in the desert, sand swirling round her long tunic, holding a paintbrush in her hand. What would she say now?
Nick looks upset. ‘Did Bethany know? Is that why she went and lived with one of Dad’s friends, instead of moving into his flat?’
Amy feels bad now, but it’s not up to her to tell him Bethany’s secrets. ‘I don’t know, Nick,’ she says, the guilt fuelling her anger.
Well,’ he says, ‘people change. He’s our dad. He needs our help. Please, Amy.’
She folds her arms. ‘I can’t forgive him. And I don’t know why you have. But I won’t turn him out on the street.’
‘Or into an olive grove? Thanks, Sis.’ He hesitates and then gives her a hug.
13 AUGUST, ITALY
17
NICK
Dad doesn’t appear at breakfast, and Amy must have spoken to Matt because he doesn’t have a go at me. I’m sitting in miserable silence, hunched over my toast, wishing the Italians made marmalade and doing my best not to think about what Amy told me yesterday. I keep imagining Dad in my – or, rather, his – flat. The grief and sadness I felt when I was twelve years old, after our mum left, threatens to overwhelm me all over again. I’m also not sure what to make of his assurances that he wasn’t drinking – that he doesn’t drink any more – and of Amy telling me he has shots of cider brandy when he thinks no one is watching.
Bethany and Joe bounce in, like a fake couple in a sportswear catalogue.
‘Joe’s found this amazing beach. We should go. Come on guys, you’ll love it!’
Bethany’s enthusiasm is legendary, as is her ability to get her own way. She bulldozes through our inertia and, in a little over an hour, which I’m beginning to realize is fast when small people and a teenager are involved, we’re en route. We can just about fit all of us in the people-carrier by squashing Lotte and Theo on our knees, in spite of Amy’s protests.
‘Well, love, we never had any child seats to start with,’ Matt had said.
I stare out of the window at the olive groves as we drive past, the leaves rippling silver in the sunshine, th
e twisted trunks a glazed pewter, and feel bad about Dad. No one suggested that he come with us, but maybe it’s for the best; my siblings might have calmed down, after a day at the beach, and be a little more willing to forgive him.
I shout at Matt, who’s driving, to wind the window down and hang my head out in the breeze. Even the dust smells Italian. The kids start shrieking as gusts of air pummel them and make their hair stand on end. Matt closes all the windows and blasts us with air con. I lean my hot forehead against the glass; Lotte’s bony knee is digging into my ribs, and Chloe, whose lap she’s sitting on, is wriggling, lip-syncing to Selena Gomez, her headphones catching my ear, and it reminds me of all those other car journeys I’ve been on with Bethany and Amy as kids; shoehorned in the back, me in the middle, my sisters elbowing me, singing, smiling and squabbling.
We head in the opposite direction from the town, skirting round the tail end of the island and down a tortuously steep track between burnt sandstone-coloured cliffs.
‘Hey, doesn’t this remind you of Watchet?’
It’s a beach in Somerset that our parents used to take us to sometimes. It’s famous for fossils, not that any of us had the patience to look for them – too busy chucking sand at each other and skimming stones.
‘Er, no,’ Bethany says, laughing at me. ‘Did we ever go to Watchet when there was blazing sunshine?’
‘Of course we did!’
‘Do you remember that time Dad insisted we had a picnic on the beach and it was snowing?’ Amy says. ‘Mum was desperate to have a bit of time to herself to finish her painting, and he made us those terrible cheese sandwiches, doorstops of stale bread and wedges of butter, and forced us to get out of the car and eat them in a howling gale?’
‘It wasn’t actually snowing,’ I say.
‘There were drifts at the bottom of the cliffs, and sleet coming in from the Bristol Channel,’ Bethany says. ‘I remember crunching ice crystals in my sandwiches.’