by Fiona Neill
‘Are you wearing any of your own clothes?’ asked Ailsa.
‘I’m here. Isn’t that enough?’ asked Rachel. ‘And I’ve just fed Lucifer.’
‘I’m glad you’ve finally helped get a meal on the table,’ Ailsa teased.
‘You’re a much better cook than me, Ails. Always was.’
Rachel always turned criticism of her into a compliment to Ailsa.
‘Harry does all the cooking now.’
She put the car into gear again and tentatively pressed the accelerator. The wheels spun beneath her, digging even deeper trenches, sending a new spray of snow over the windows. She pressed harder and the wheels wheezed disapproval.
‘You should have dug around the tyres,’ suggested Rachel.
‘That wouldn’t work. I’m going to sit here with the engine running for a bit longer so the heat from the chassis melts the snow,’ said Ailsa. She put Radio 4 on again. There was a severe weather warning for the south-east of England. Advice to stick to main roads. Essential journeys only. Freezing fog. Thundersnow. Not even the BBC spoke in proper sentences any more. Stop noticing this shit, Ailsa chided herself. It was so ageing.
‘We’ll be spending another week here if it goes on like this,’ said Rachel, echoing Ailsa’s worst fears. She felt guilty straight away. She loved her sister. And everyone said that grief was easier if you shared the different stages together. But they weren’t synchronized. While Rachel had been poleaxed by their mother’s death and had spent the funeral in a Valium haze, Ailsa had organized everything. By the time Ailsa gave in to the grief, Rachel had entered the angry phase.
‘Did I tell you the last time I went to see Dad, just before Christmas, I couldn’t find him when I went in the house?’ said Ailsa over the noise of the engine and the radio.
‘Who?’
‘Dad. The front door was open. I went upstairs. His bed was broken. It was at a thirty-degree angle. His head was hanging over the edge like he’d been decapitated.’ Rachel didn’t say anything. ‘He could have had a stroke because of all the blood pooling in his head.’
‘But he didn’t.’
‘Didn’t what?’ asked Ailsa.
‘Didn’t have a stroke.’
‘He’d laid the table for lunch. There was a place set for Mum with those biscuits that she used to love. That’s all he’d been eating. He could have starved. Or got scurvy.’
‘KitKats?’
‘No, the Scottish ones she used to have as a child.’
‘Tunnock’s.’
‘Exactly.’
‘But he didn’t.’
‘Didn’t what?’
‘Didn’t starve.’
‘What’s your point, Rach?’
Rachel unwound the scarf from her face and leaned forward until she was jammed in the gap between the two front seats so that she could see her sister more closely. ‘The trouble with you, Ailsa, is that you think you can control everything. You don’t have superpowers. You’re not omniscient. You can’t prevent disasters. Shit happens. It just does. And we all have to get on with it. You can’t inoculate us all against disaster.’
‘We need to work out a routine. So that one of us checks on him every four or five days,’ Ailsa responded. ‘I can’t keep doing this on my own.’
‘You’re falling for his old tricks. Dad has always made everything about himself. That’s probably why Mum ended up having a heart attack.’
I could say the same thing about you, thought Ailsa. ‘He’s one of those larger-than-life figures –’
‘Which is shorthand for a recovered alcoholic with an overinflated sense of self,’ Rachel interrupted.
‘He’s drinking again, Rach. It’s been a really difficult time and it’s worse when you see his grief close up. He’s much more vulnerable than he used to be.’ Still nothing. Ailsa turned towards her. ‘The question is, what are we going to do, because doing nothing isn’t an option, is it?’
Rachel’s wild eyebrows furrowed. Ailsa was gratified to know that finally she had got through. The great thing about having a difficult conversation in a car was that you had a captive audience. It was a tactic she had learned soon after having children. Ailsa affectionately patted her sister on the shoulder. They had been through so much together. They would get through this. Rachel remained silent.
‘Do you think I should be dating a man who is young enough to be my son?’ she suddenly asked. ‘I mean what are the real differences between my body and the body of a twenty-seven-year-old? Do you think people can tell if your internal organs are old?’
Ailsa gripped the steering wheel as hard as she could so she wouldn’t say anything she regretted.
‘I read somewhere that a woman in her early forties and a man in his twenties represent perfect sexual compatibility,’ said Rachel dreamily. ‘I’m in great shape for someone who is almost forty, don’t you think? He’s been so lovely to me about Mum. And he’s not married. I know you have a problem with that. I’m not totally insensitive. So what’s the verdict?’
‘You’ll probably get hurt,’ said Ailsa, revving the engine again.
‘Why?’ asked Rachel.
‘You’ll meet his friends and they’ll talk about things that you know nothing about.’
‘Like what?’
‘Music, apps you’ve never heard of. I don’t know – that’s the point.’
‘Age doesn’t exist any more. It’s all about shared interests and experiences.’
‘He’ll want to have children,’ warned Ailsa.
‘We’ve already talked about freezing my eggs,’ said Rachel. Ailsa pressed the accelerator. ‘And he wants to get to know my family better.’ This was why Rachel always ended up getting her own way. She just kept going until eventually the opposition capitulated. That’s why she would be so good with their father, if only Ailsa could get her on board.
‘Better?’
‘You’ve met him already.’
‘God, he’s not one of your builders, is he?’
Ailsa put the car into reverse and pressed the accelerator to persuade the wheels to get purchase on the slippery snow. For a moment the wheels spun, churning up the snow as high as the windows. She pushed the accelerator as far down as it would go. The car burst into life and shot into the car parked behind. The bronchial alarm of the people carrier belonging to Ailsa’s new next-door neighbours wheezed into action. Ailsa’s head thumped back against the headrest.
‘Shit,’ she said.
‘Shit indeed,’ said Rachel. ‘I’ve probably got whiplash. I might have the body of a thirty-year-old but I’ll develop the posture of an old lady.’
In spite of herself, Ailsa couldn’t help giggling. Rachel annoyed her more than anyone else she knew but she also made her laugh the most. Loveday came out of her front door straight away and Ailsa knew that it was she who had been looking out of the upstairs window. She berated herself for not making more effort with their new neighbours because it would have made everything easier now that she had crashed into the only car within a mile of the house.
She remembered how six weeks earlier, just after she had moved in, Loveday had come to the front door and Ailsa had ignored her and ducked down beneath the picture window in the sitting room. Loveday wanted to invite them over for a drink. Ailsa knew this because she had told Harry over the garden fence. As the doorbell rang more and more insistently, Ailsa had imagined a future where their lives were seamlessly integrated like honeycomb. A hole would be cut in the fence between the two gardens and a gate erected so that the children could go in and out of each other’s gardens as they pleased. The gate would never be shut. Crockery from one house would appear in the cupboard of the other. Books would be shared. Clothes would migrate. She instantly knew that this was not what she wanted. Eventually she would need new friends. But right now she didn’t want the burden of absorbing anyone else’s lives. They needed to rebuild their own. In the end Loveday had gone. But she had stayed long enough for Ailsa to know she was a woman who wa
s used to getting her own way.
Loveday’s arms were folded, probably against the cold, decided Ailsa as she opened the electric window to speak to her.
‘I am so sorry,’ said Ailsa. ‘So sorry.’ She wanted to get out of the car to assess the damage but Loveday’s arms blocked her way.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Loveday. She smelled of patchouli oil and the musty aroma made Ailsa feel queasy.
‘We’re fine, aren’t we, Rachel?’
Rachel nodded. Loveday leaned over and rested her forearms on the edge of the window so that Ailsa could see two sets of surprisingly long painted nails. She was wearing a big chunky necklace that banged against the car’s paintwork. It was a silver eagle’s skull, and the beak nestled between her breasts. Loveday noticed her looking.
‘My talisman is an eagle,’ she said.
‘Sorry?’
‘We all have an animal spirit that protects us. Mine is the eagle,’ Loveday explained. She touched the necklace and lifted it towards Ailsa. ‘The wings represent the balance between male and female. It denotes protection and survival.’ Ailsa stumbled for a response. ‘My husband is a bear,’ said Loveday, filling in the silence.
‘Polar or grizzly?’ asked Rachel.
‘How interesting,’ said Ailsa, trying not to giggle.
‘He’s curious, secretive and fierce. All at the same time. It’s a great combination. Bears and eagles are very compatible.’
‘Unfortunately I don’t have a talisman,’ said Ailsa, stumbling over the unfamiliar concept in an effort to sound interested.
‘Maybe if you did, this wouldn’t have happened. Maybe that’s what’s been missing from our life,’ said Rachel from the back of the car. ‘Hi, I’m Ailsa’s sister,’ she explained to Loveday when it became apparent that Ailsa wasn’t going to introduce her. ‘Not the most auspicious way to meet, is it?’
‘Really, it doesn’t matter as long as both of you are fine,’ said Loveday. ‘It’s your car that’s taken the hit.’
‘We were trying to get my father home. He’s desperate to visit my mother’s grave. She died earlier this year. But he’ll just have to stay here until the snow clears. None of us will be going anywhere. The older children were meant to be going to a party. New Year’s Eve is going to be a bit of a damp squib.’ Ailsa listened to herself babble, trying to work out if she was in shock or trying to compensate for her previous indifference.
‘It’s settled,’ said Loveday firmly as Ailsa stopped. ‘You must come to us. Our friends can’t get here and I’ve cooked enough food for a whole ashram. The children can hang out together.’
‘What a lovely idea,’ said Rachel before Ailsa could answer.
‘It will be nice for everyone to meet properly,’ said Ailsa, trying to regain control of the situation.
‘There is always opportunity to be had in adversity,’ said Loveday with a smile. ‘That’s one of my mantras.’
Another face appeared at the car window. Loveday introduced her son, Jay. He was wearing a hastily pulled-on T-shirt and pair of jeans. His eyes were half closed as he wearily offered to help.
‘Jay?’ questioned Rachel. ‘Like the bird? Because your mother’s an eagle?’
He looked perplexed. ‘After my grandfather,’ he then said with a smile. ‘Shall we try giving it a push?’
Ailsa closed the window.
‘Lock up your daughters,’ Rachel laughed as Romy came out of the house to see what was going on. Jay looked across at her and their eyes met. Sometimes that was all it took.
‘Actually, lock up your sister,’ said Rachel. ‘Did you see the definition in his arms? He’s hot.’
‘You’re too old to call people hot,’ says Ailsa. ‘You’re beginning to remind me of some old bottom pincher.’
Rachel leaned on Ailsa’s shoulder and they clung to each other, laughing like they used to when they were children. Ailsa waited for Romy to come over and tell her to stop being embarrassing, but when she looked up at her Romy was smiling too.
2
We moved to Luckmore at the end of the summer of 2013 but all of us agree life there didn’t really begin until the Fairports arrived next door a couple of months later. Until then we were just existing, hoping Mum’s mantra that life was about getting on with it was true. ‘If in doubt, create a routine,’ was her personal philosophy. Sounded more like slow death to me, but stranded in the middle of the countryside with crap Wi-Fi, what else could you do but get up, eat, sleep, repeat?
At first we protested. Luke the loudest. We formed a united front, refusing to unpack our stuff, bring home new friends or leave the house, unless it was to go to school, until they promised we could go back to London. Ben wrote a petition. He told Mum and Dad that he would for ever look back on his childhood with sadness. Dad said he was absolutely right because traumatic experiences are stored in our long-term memory more than happy ones, and studies show 80 per cent of our earliest memories have negative associations. Mum and Dad were totally unmoved. Ben created a fantasy world where he was a British spy captured in Syria, because he had a theory that if something really bad happened, it helped to imagine an even worse scenario.
I couldn’t imagine anything worse than leaving London. Things I missed: the cafés, the pavements, the smell of Indian food, and even things I could never imagine missing like street lights and dodging dog shit on the pavement. I longed for the smell of the Underground. I missed the noise of Shepherd’s Bush Market. I was oppressed by the huge grey sky. Mum claimed it made her feel light and free, but I felt as if I was being buried alive, slowly suffocating beneath the weight of its constant scrutiny. She was from these parts. So she belonged to the landscape. I didn’t.
I hated the attention-seeking wood pigeons and the gangs of deer that woke me up before it was light. Most of all I missed my friends. Mum suggested I invite them up for a weekend but I said they would die of boredom. Then she got angrier with me than she had with Luke, even though he had been a lot ruder. She told me not to be so selfish and reminded me that Granny had just died and we needed to move to Norfolk to look after Grandpa, which totally contradicted their cover story about having to move because of Mum’s new job.
For the first month the only person we saw from our old life was Mum’s sister, my Aunt Rachel, who was between writing jobs and came every weekend to help organize our new home. Rachel kept telling Mum that death and moving house were the most stressful life events apart from divorce. I wondered how useful it was to keep going on about this but now of course I realize there was a hidden warning in what she said.
I could have told her that going into the lower sixth of a new school where your mother is headmistress ranks pretty high on the stress gauge. Especially when Mum’s first new policy involved introducing a school uniform with skirts so long that they made the Amish look slutty. But no one asked me how I felt. This isn’t an excuse for what happened later, by the way. I’m only setting the scene.
At exactly five o’clock in the afternoon Rachel would start debating with Mum whether it was too early to open a bottle of wine.
‘Just open it,’ I wanted to tell them. ‘What difference does an hour make?’
Because six o’clock seemed to be some magic cut-off point when adults were allowed to consume alcohol. Was this about control or self-control? I wondered. Or were the two linked? Did having control mean that you had self-control? There were so many unanswered questions.
Mum used to say that I had good self-control. But really I was just better than Luke at doing what she wanted. Revision timetables. Science Club. Texting her. Luke was always wilder than me. Shortly after we moved here I overheard Mum telling someone that really it was for Luke that we had left London. And for a couple of days Ben and I blamed him for the Miseries. But then Luke told me that he had heard Mum telling Aunt Rachel that it was really for me because girls in London grew up too quickly. If I had been consulted I would have told Mum that Kim Kardashian, legal highs, Internet porn and all the oth
er stuff she obsessed about had seeped everywhere, like oestrogen in the water table.
Finally Mum and Dad settled on a single version of events: we had moved here because of Mum’s new job, and I think they grew to believe this. As Dad was so fond of saying, truth is subjective and the most important thing is to have a credible narrative. Then, just as we reached our lowest point, the Fairports came into our life and for a while everything made beautiful sense.
What can I tell you about Luckmore? You had to drive five miles to buy a pint of milk. Eight miles to find a cashpoint. There was no public transport. The average inhabitant was sixty-seven years old. It was a new village, built in the 1960s on either side of a quiet B road in the middle of nowhere by a local architect who saw himself as Norfolk’s answer to Le Corbusier. At least this was what Mum told visitors. Apart from our house and its twin next door, the other houses in the village were all different. We were out on a limb on the other side of a piece of common ground. ‘Less limb and more amputated leg,’ Dad joked.
On the ground floor there was a double garage, a utility room and another room also accessible from the garden where Dad was supposedly writing his book. On the floor above were the kitchen and an open-plan sitting room. The acoustics meant that even if you were in the loo on the half landing upstairs, you could hear everything being said in the kitchen. We all slept on the second floor apart from Luke, who had been given the attic just because he was a year older than me. ‘Older and wiser,’ Luke said to me when this arrangement was revealed. Every morning I woke up to the thud, thud of him doing exercises. Mum didn’t stop him because she thought his exercise routine demonstrated willpower. I could have told her that it had nothing to do with willpower and everything to do with getting girls but I was loyal to Luke.