Startled, Juliet blinked, her eyes aching, and she turned away from Miss Lacey’s gentle gaze. This young woman seemed to know the truth, that Juliet was a bad, black-hearted person.
I’m doing this for them.
On the first full day of the holidays, Juliet woke up at 2 a.m., because Matt had turned off the hall light and Isla had woken up and been afraid of the dark, then at 3 a.m., because Sandy’s baby sleeping bag was too small for him (she’d asked Matt to make sure he put him in the larger one, and she knew he hadn’t been listening, and she should have double-checked). The second time she lay awake until morning slid around the thick curtains, unable to get back to sleep. Beside her, Matt snored lightly. If she pushed him gently on the arm he got furious with her. Years ago, when they first met, she’d kick him and that would stop the snoring. Sometimes it would jolt him awake, and he would turn to her, and their bodies would join together, both half asleep, waking each other with pleasure then, slowly, drifting back into unconsciousness. That was many years ago now. Since Sandy had been born Matt was so tired, he said, that her waking him up to complain about his snoring meant his productivity was affected all day.
I’m going to get this right, she told herself, blinking hazily. Bea had also broken up, and now all three children were hers for the summer. She didn’t expect Bea to hang out with them all the time, but she had extracted a promise from her that they’d spend one day together and this was that day. I’ll put the easel in the garden and we’ll all get messy doing finger painting. I’ll take them to the cinema. We’ll go to Wagamama for lunch as a special treat. We’ll make some biscuits in the afternoon. It’ll be a lovely London day. They’ll always remember it . . .
Her toes curled up tightly, she pulled the duvet under her chin and tried to go back to sleep, with no luck. At five-thirty Sandy was awake again, so Juliet, eyes already itching with tiredness, took him downstairs and began to prepare for the perfect first day of the holidays.
‘Can I watch something on your iPad?’
‘No, darling. Eat your pancakes.’
‘I hate pancakes. I want Cheerios. Can I watch something on your iPad?’
‘No. And no. Now, listen up, everybody. We’ve got a fun morning – Bea, put your phone down.’
‘No.’
‘Bea—’ Juliet actually wrested the phone from her daughter’s hand and Bea looked up, with a hissing noise.
‘Jesus, Mum. Don’t ever take my stuff off me, OK?’ She stood up and reached over for the phone.
Bea fucks herself with a ruler in class Ive seen it under the desk
dirty bitch
I saw it yesterday too loool
Yr a fkng pig bea
That ruler must smell disgusting fishy wank
DGAF but I have to sit next to her
Fishy wank ugly bitch
What does Fin say? Fin? You ignoring the fishy wank bae now? Plez
Juliet looked up at her daughter. ‘Jesus, Bea—’
‘Give me the phone.’ Bea snatched it back out of her hands.
‘Bea. Who’s writing that to you?’ Juliet twisted herself towards her daughter, craning her neck to try and see her face, bent over the phone again.
Bea’s knees were drawn up under her chin. Like a creature, retreating into casing. Like the baby she had once been inside her, waiting to unfurl. Isla was watching, with a blank, uncertain look on her face. Juliet put her hand on her daughter’s curved back, feeling the knobbles of her spine. She traced each one, two, three. ‘Darling, please tell me.’
‘Just people.’
‘Is it Molly?’
Bea raised her head. ‘People from school.’
Juliet felt slightly sick, as though someone had punched her in the stomach. ‘OK. I’m going to talk to your teacher next year now. I’m going to email—’
Bea stood up. ‘If you do that, I’ll leave.’ Isla picked up a piece of paper and started drawing furiously, humming to herself. ‘I promise. I’ll fucking run away and you won’t ever find me, you, anyone else.’
‘Bea, darling.’ Juliet pushed back the chair, swallowing hard. ‘Listen to me, sweetheart! They can’t do that to you. OK? It’s very simple. It’s good I’ve seen this.’ She managed to corrall her daughter into a corner of the kitchen and put her hands on her shoulders, all the time feeling as though she was trapping her, not helping her. ‘I’ll talk to their parents, I’ll talk to the school – I’ll sort it out, I promise.’
‘You’re. Not. Listening. To. Me.’ Bea pushed her mother out of the way, dark eyes burning. Sandy started crying, and dropped his cereal bowl on the floor. Bea shoved past Juliet. ‘Look, there’s stuff you don’t know. There’s stuff I have to sort out. Not you. You don’t know anything.’
‘But they can’t treat you like that!’
‘Mum! Sort yourself out, then worry about me!’ Bea’s mouth was open, and she was smiling, a ghastly grin, her eyes red. ‘You – look at you!’ Juliet glanced down, at her grandmother’s old dirndl skirt and her battered Birkenstocks, then realised she didn’t mean like that. ‘You don’t have the faintest bloody idea about what’s going on in your own life—’ She swallowed a huge sob. ‘L-let alone mine! Leave me alone!’ She backed away. ‘I’m going out.’
Isla looked up at her big sister. ‘But Beeeeee! I thought we were going to play together today. I wrote out a list, look—’
Juliet saw the agonised twist of her eldest child’s mouth, as she tried to work out what to do. The hell of family life, of people who loved you! And then Bea bit her lip, and pushed Isla out of the way. ‘Get off me, Isla. I don’t have time today.’
Isla’s round, jolly face froze into a mask of almost comic confusion; her eyes swam with tears. ‘I hate you!’ Isla shouted. ‘You hairy beast! You troglodyte!’
Juliet shushed Isla. ‘Bea, darling, you did say you’d hang out with us—’
‘God, Mum, you’re pathetic. Dad’s right.’ She backed away, down the hall. ‘Just . . . Leave me alone!’ The door slammed behind her.
How could she help her? What on earth could she do? Like a rat in a trap, Juliet’s thoughts circled around and around the same familiar routes. She sat down with her phone to email the teacher, then realised she didn’t have her new teacher’s email address, and, besides, she’d be betraying Bea if she did. She rubbed her eyes.
Where was her darling girl now? Walking to Highgate to sit silently in some café with some laughing, drawling girls and languid, cocksure boys? Pacing the Heath? Sitting somewhere in tears? Juliet’s heart contracted. She had tried at first to follow her, to be with her everywhere, but that just made the shy, reclusive Bea sly instead. She tried to give her a loving free rein but it didn’t seem to be working, and the report she’d had this term had echoed that. Over and over again: ‘Beatrice is a bright girl but her studies are not uppermost in her mind and we must all work to overcome the learning deficit she has accumulated during this next most important academic year.’
Oh Bea . . . with your thick dark hair that used to curl and little hands that loved to clap and your dark-brown eyes like Grandi’s that used to smile . . . I hate this, I HATE it, I can’t reach you . . .
Black despair washed over her again and she pulled herself up straight, leaning on the edge of the chair. Isla scribbled furiously on the paper, looking straight down. Juliet moved around the little kitchen, shoving cereal bowls into the dishwasher, and then clapped her hands. She’d adjust the plan slightly and go out now so she could be in when Bea came back later, which hopefully she would . . .
‘Right, chaps. Let’s get dressed. We’ll do finger painting later. The film starts in an hour and a half.’
Isla looked up suspiciously.
‘What film?’
‘Minions.’ Isla screamed with delight. ‘“Bottom”.’
Sandy laughed.
‘“Bottom”,’ Isla said again, then she flung her arms round her mother’s waist. ‘Thank you, Mother, I LOVE the Minions.’
‘Gre
at,’ said Juliet. ‘Right, let’s get dressed, we’ve got loads of time but we don’t want to be late.’
‘No!’ said Isla, with a cheerily anxious smile. ‘We don’t! Well done, Mum!’
But they were late, of course. Then the cinema wouldn’t let her cash in the voucher she’d been given when she’d taken Isla to see Cinderella and the film wouldn’t start. ‘The barcode’s indicating the voucher is no longer valid,’ the manager kept saying, and Juliet tried not to lose her temper and was snippy and rude instead. On Isla’s third loo trip Juliet dropped her phone into the Vue lavatory. During the baffling-yet-dull animated film the phone gradually became burning hot, then switched itself permanently off. Now, at midday, it was searingly hot, a clammy, still kind of heat that seemed to seep into the poorly air-conditioned cinema.
Wagamama was an endurance test where Sandy’s buggy, weighed down with shopping, fell over twice, once hitting another child whose father looked at Juliet as though she were a murderer and where neither Sandy nor Isla would eat anything, and Juliet’s tired fumbling fingers failed and she dropped a bowl of soy sauce on to her sweaty jeans. As she pocketed the change, smiling manically at the waiter and picking up the large covering of food on the floor with wet napkins, she reflected that that was £38 wasted when she could have given them crisps at home as a treat and they’d have eaten them and been happier.
She had put her Family and Friends railcard in her pocket, not her Oyster card so couldn’t pay for the bus and they wouldn’t let her on because the contactless machine didn’t work. Then it started raining on the way back and Isla got soaked and took her hoodie off, throwing it in a muddy puddle. The buggy fell over again with Sandy in it as she tried to clean Isla’s hoodie with her sleeve then realised it was stupid to do so when it was pouring with rain. Obviously Isla stepped in dog shit again, and then Juliet couldn’t find her keys and a man said under his breath, ‘Fucking hell’ as he had to step off the pavement she was blocking with her children while she rummaged in her bag, and she wanted to shout after him. We held you up for three seconds, you fucking dickhead. To run after him and punch him in the face, kick him in the stomach, and then she caught herself thinking these thoughts. London. The heat, the dirt, the other people, the relentlessness of it all.
They made cupcakes with cream cheese butterscotch frosting, but there was something wrong with the cream cheese and it went all runny and gloopy, like yellowing cottage-cheese-cum-lemon-curd. It wouldn’t stay on the cakes, which had been too long in the oven and were hard as pumice stones. Sandy wouldn’t eat them afterwards, and Isla said over and over again, ‘Can I watch something on your iPad?’
By this time it was still only 3 p.m. but Juliet made them tea early. Neither of them would eat the chicken goujons because she’d forgotten they’d had chicken for lunch at Wagamama’s even though they’d refused to eat that chicken too. The fox that was dying of mange or some long lingering illness kept slinking up to lie on their tiny patio. The smell came in through the open kitchen window. Sandy burned his hand on the pan with the chips in. His scream was high and thin, hammering into Juliet’s head.
She let them watch Peppa Pig while she cleared up, sweating in the muggy heat of the afternoon, and when she came into the sitting room Sandy had been sick everywhere. He had eaten the corner of Mog and Me, chewing away at it while he stared absentmindedly at the screen. The sick was made up of peas and sweetcorn and bits of carrot though she had no memory of him eating any of these foodstuffs in the last twenty-four hours. Isla accidentally kicked Juliet in the face whilst she tried to change her hoodie and T-shirt and then, eventually, when they were back in front of the TV again, Juliet realised if she didn’t go to the lavatory right then and there, she would wet herself.
As she sat on the loo, feeling guilty about not doing the finger painting, about shouting, ‘Oh for fuck’s sake, Isla’ after Isla’s boot had made contact with Juliet’s cheekbone, worrying about Bea since she couldn’t check up on her via her phone, enjoying the release of peeing, Juliet tried to smile. She told herself that one day, she’d laugh about how awful this day was. As another scream came from the sitting room, Isla sitting on Sandy by the sounds of it, and as she smelled something burning and as she couldn’t stop peeing, the longest pee in the world, Juliet unclenched her jaw and tried to say it, softly. ‘We’ll all laugh about this, one day.’
When Matt came back, at seven o’clock, Isla and Sandy were in the little paddling pool in the garden, naked. Juliet was sitting in the deckchair with her feet in the cool water, staring into the middle distance.
‘Relaxing I see,’ Matt said dryly, and went into the kitchen.
Juliet got up and followed him inside. ‘It’s been a long day.’
He took off his bike helmet, methodically unloaded his laptop, iPad and phone, winding the cables back around them, then untied his special cycling shoes. ‘Really? What did you do?’
‘We went to the cinema – and Wagamama, and then we came home and made some cakes—’ She trailed off, and smiled. ‘Gosh, it sounds rather nice when one puts it like that.’
A vein was throbbing in Matt’s glistening temple. ‘Yes . . .’ He filled a jug with cold water, began putting cups away, in his neat, precise way. ‘I’m sure it was hell.’
‘My phone’s on the blink, by the way. I dropped it down the loo.’
‘But you just got it,’ Matt said, turning on the coffee machine. He was deliberately keeping his voice even, she could hear the tone, and it made her even more nervous. And angry.
‘I didn’t chuck it in the loo because it was new. It was an accident. Looking after three children is hard work.’
‘Well, two children. Where’s Bea?’
‘I – I don’t know.’
Matt looked up briefly in the middle of pouring water into the coffee machine. ‘What do you mean?’
‘She left this morning. Listen, I found some texts on her phone.’ Juliet rubbed her face. ‘Matt, she’s being bullied. Some of the things they said . . . they’re awful.’
‘Like what?’
Juliet glanced back at the paddling pool. ‘I’ll tell you later. She stormed out because I wanted to email the school about it. She hasn’t come back and I can’t get hold of her – no phone. Can you call her?’
His eyes were bright. ‘She’s been out all day and you didn’t think to email me to ask?’
‘How am I supposed to email you?’
‘Your laptop?’ he said, with aggravated sarcasm. ‘You remember your laptop, don’t you?’
‘They took it away, Matt. They sent a courier to collect it. Two weeks ago.’ She put her hands on her hips, glancing at the children again. ‘If you listened to me you’d know. I did tell you.’
The same worn old grooves – that she was flaky, that he never listened, but now there was something tired, automatic about the lines, as though they each of them were glad to find the other one at fault.
Matt ground the coffee beans, leaning into the grinder and pulsing hard with each press of the button. The sound was like drilling. ‘So now you have no way of communicating with the outside world.’
‘Nope.’
‘How are you supposed to apply for jobs?’
Juliet wanted to laugh. It was as if he were questioning her like an employer himself, not her partner. ‘Well – I can’t. Besides, now we’ve made the decision to take Sandy out of nursery I’m with him most of the time. Have you tried looking after a two-year-old all day every day recently? It’s kind of hard work.’
‘Of course I have, he’s my child too.’ He carefully, neatly spooned the coffee into the filter handle, packing it down, then eased it firmly into the machine, turning it on and taking the tiny espresso mug from the shelf, and placing it carefully underneath the filter. ‘They’re all my children. Unless, of course, you followed your grandmother’s advice and let that black guy what’s-his-name get you pregnant. He gave her a cold smile. She’d have loved that, wouldn’t she?’
She stared at him. ‘What the hell are you talking about? What on earth has Ev got to do with this?’
‘Oh, you, your family, thinking I’m not good enough for you. The mythical Ev. You know! Charming old bag, your grandmother. “I do hope she’ll come to her senses.” Such a shame she couldn’t make it to the wedding! I do miss her.’
She ignored him. He’s trying to blame me. The therapist had said this the last time around. Juliet tried to ignore the rising tide of anger growing within her. ‘Listen, Matt. I’m not getting into this whatever it is with you. I’m merely saying looking after our children doesn’t leave much spare time. I have to keep my eye on them—’
‘Mama! Sandy’s floating in the pool!’
‘Sandy,’ Juliet cried, running into the garden, as Sandy emerged, shaking his hair into a blond fin and sitting up in the water. ‘Don’t DO that. Don’t put your head underwater.’
‘BIG YELLOW FISH,’ shouted Sandy.
‘Now, Sandy,’ said Isla firmly. ‘Don’t be stupid. You’re a stupid boy, aren’t you, Sandy. A little stupid poo-poo bum-head . . .’
‘I’ve had a really long day,’ said Matt suddenly, as the coffee machine started roaring and expelling hot steam into the already sweltering kitchen. ‘I’m going to chill out in the sitting room for a bit.’
‘Can you call Bea first?’ she asked. ‘The landline handset is out of juice.’
‘Jesus, Juliet.’
‘What?’
‘Can’t you? I just said I’d had a long day.’ He gestured round to the battle-scarred kitchen. ‘Can’t you even clean up a bit? Unpack the dishwasher?’
‘Are you joking?’ Juliet laughed, taking a step back. She wasn’t sure if he was joking. He must be joking! ‘Listen, Matt. Do you understand I know what’s really going on?’ And suddenly she felt everything teetering.
The Garden of Lost and Found Page 7