by Fiona Neill
The conversation shifted again. They began discussing future job prospects for their children.
‘There’s big potential in depilation,’ said Loveday. ‘All these chemicals that mimic hormones will make us way hairier.’
‘Not if they imitate oestrogen,’ pointed out Harry.
Wolf ran through current trends. Payday lending, obesity, diabetes, nail bars. There was no point in going to university, he said. The Western spirit was sick and needed healing. That was where the money was. He was wondering if he should retrain as a shaman.
‘Actually things were far worse in the early twentieth century,’ pointed out Ailsa. ‘People forget a third of children didn’t make it to adolescence in the pre-antibiotic era. There were millions of men with post-traumatic stress from the wars. What about the Holocaust? And Stalin? And rickets?’
‘By the way, I’ve completed your natal report,’ said Loveday, putting her hand on Ailsa’s knee, who gave Loveday a look of utter incomprehension.
She pointed at a bunch of papers on the table. On the front was a large circle with three smaller circles inside. Ailsa vaguely recognized the symbols of the zodiac on the outer edge of the biggest circle.
‘Your astrological chart. Remember you gave me all the details about what date and time you were born a couple of weeks ago.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Ailsa vaguely.
‘It must have taken ages to compile,’ said Harry, gently nudging Ailsa’s calf with the tip of his toe.
‘Thanks very much,’ said Ailsa.
‘Shall I go through it with you now? Just the headlines? It’s one of the most interesting readings I’ve done in ages.’
‘I’ve had a really long day,’ said Ailsa. ‘My head is about to explode. Maybe over the weekend?’
Loveday looked disappointed.
‘We’re dying to hear what it says,’ said Harry. Ailsa looked at Harry and was gratified to see that he winked at her. She glanced at the contents list: chart patterns, important features, angular planets, sun, moon rising, other aspects.
‘Looks very comprehensive,’ said Ailsa, putting it down beside her. Loveday picked it up again.
‘You have the planetary pattern type called the funnel shape. It’s the first time I’ve come across it,’ said Loveday. Ailsa didn’t respond.
‘What does that mean?’ asked Harry politely.
‘Ailsa has a serious and conscientious personality and is very practical with a talent for working with the public. She’s a good manager and has a strong drive to achieve success. She can be fearful of taking risks and her achievements come from hard work.’
‘I’d agree with that,’ said Harry. Loveday took this as licence to continue. ‘Sun in Libra, that’s interesting. The sun is the second house, ruler of the rising sign. You seek harmony, you support both sides in a dispute and you may have a hard time making a decision, but Pluto in Leo means there is potential for sudden bursts of anger due to repressed emotions exploding.’
‘Also very true,’ said Harry. He showed Loveday a scar on his calf. ‘She’s like an animal when she’s pushed.’
‘That’s all very interesting, Loveday, but I think I might absorb it better after a good night’s sleep,’ said Ailsa.
‘That’s the sun in Libra speaking,’ said Loveday. ‘Let me read you the part on the sun in square with Chiron.’
‘I’m quite tired too,’ said Harry, pulling himself upright. ‘I need to be back at my desk by nine o’clock tomorrow morning.’
‘Chiron is the wounded healer; it represents loss which leads to empathy. It’s a powerful connection with your sun. You have experienced pain and frustration, perhaps through your relationship with your father.’
‘It’s the same for me,’ said Wolf as if to demonstrate his empathy. ‘I longed to be close to my father, but the more I tried, the more he pushed me away. He feared intimacy.’ He put his hand on Ailsa’s shoulder.
‘Well, that’s not a problem with my father, because he’s sleeping like a baby in Ben’s bedroom, less than a hundred metres away,’ said Ailsa.
Harry stumbled towards the door. Ailsa put her arm out to steady him.
‘I know exactly what’s going on,’ he slurred. ‘My brain is producing anandamide.’
‘Ananda is Sanskrit for bliss,’ said Loveday. ‘Isn’t that a beautiful coincidence?’
‘It’s the science that’s beautiful,’ said Harry. ‘The proteins that transmit the anandamide message to the brain receptors are located in the striatum, which accounts for the blissful feeling; the cerebellum, which is why I’m stumbling; and the hippocampus, hence the fact I can’t remember the beginning of this sentence.’
‘Come on, Harry. Time for home,’ said Ailsa, admiring his shoulders as he struggled to put his T-shirt back on.
‘Where have you been, Ailsa?’ Harry asked as if he had only just remembered she was there.
‘The midnight train down memory lane,’ replied Ailsa.
10
‘Do you have any regrets?’ I asked Mum. Her eyes had a dreamy, faraway look. Maybe she was tired from work. It was half-term but so far she’d spent most of the week at school. ‘Are you listening?’ She looked at me, struggling to focus. I followed her from the sitting room into the kitchen and back into the sitting room. En route she put a couple of dirty mugs in the dishwasher, shoved some clothes in the laundry basket and squawked with joy when she found the landline handset at the bottom.
‘Why can’t anyone put it back in the right place?’ she asked, using a diversionary tactic that might have worked with Ben but not with me.
‘You didn’t answer my question,’ I pointed out.
She opened a drawer and began rummaging through bits of paper.
‘Of course I have regrets. Everyone does. But they’re pretty trivial. Ha! Found it!’ She slammed the drawer shut, causing Lucifer to leap off the sideboard. In her hand was a letter from Norfolk County Council.
‘Like what?’ I persisted. She thought for a moment and I knew she was trying to come up with the most uncontroversial example possible. Why could she never be honest with me? Was she worried that messing up might be inherited? Or contagious? Or that she might simply put an idea into my head that I’d never had before? Didn’t she realize that secrets were almost always more corrosive than the truth?
‘I wish I’d learned to play tennis,’ she said finally. Brilliant. I couldn’t have come up with something more boring even if I’d thought about it for twenty-four hours. She didn’t see my eyes roll because she was too busy punching numbers into the phone. I don’t know why I was angry with Mum when it was Dad who had betrayed her. I knew it was unfair. But I thought she should have trusted us with the truth and blamed her for lying to us over and over again about why we had to leave London when the fact was we had never asked Dad the same question. We’d felt sorry for him because Mum had dragged him away too and he’d allowed us to think that.
If I’m completely honest, and I still have self-loathing over this, I think somehow I held Mum responsible for the fact that Dad had done it, as though there was something lacking in her rather than something lacking in him. I should have felt empathy but instead I felt angry with her for being a victim. Later, the most useful conversation I had with the therapist was when I realized how my simultaneous discovery of Dad’s betrayal and Jay’s relationship problem meant the two became entwined in my head and that all my anger was most likely a mask for fear.
‘Really? I don’t think I’ve ever heard you talk about your serve or even seen you watch Andy Murray play a match,’ I said.
‘It’s crept up on me since we moved here. If I did something active and sociable it would help to meet people and keep fit.’ She sounded really upbeat. She was good. I give her that. I persisted. The idea that she might genuinely be happy didn’t occur to me. I thought it was all a front until the video of me appeared on the Internet and I made her really unhappy. Then I realized she wasn’t faking it. Mum never said this, but at
the point where she had managed to put everything behind her and start enjoying life again I blew it apart.
‘I mean regret for something that you’ve done rather than what you haven’t done,’ I kept on, although of course if Rachel were right about Mum the opposite would hold true. ‘And then having a crisis in a Joy Division “Love Will Tear Us Apart” kind of way.’ She looked up from the phone, gave me one of her narrow-eyed looks and laughed.
‘What are you doing listening to Joy Division?’
‘Jay’s grandfather knew their manager.’
I regretted mentioning Jay to Mum. I still felt the simple electric pleasure of saying his name but there was a bitter kick afterwards that felt close to unease.
‘So what’s going on with you and him?’ She tried to frame it in a really casual way, with a knowing smile to underline the fact that she was cool about it. Over the past couple of weeks since her trip to London Mum had seemed more like her old self again, and that meant that she suddenly took way more interest in what I was up to at the precise moment when I could have done without the scrutiny. I had got used to operating under the radar.
‘I told you, we’re friends.’
‘He seems like a nice uncomplicated boy.’ I knew she didn’t mean it because I’d overheard her telling Dad that it was incredible that such indiscreet parents could produce such a mysterious child.
‘Marley’s having an eighteenth-birthday party,’ I said, trying to change the subject. ‘When mocks are over.’
‘Will you go with Jay?’ she asked.
I nodded. ‘And Becca and Marnie. They’re going to come here to get ready.’
‘Sounds fun.’
She was trying hard, but the sudden turnaround in her attitude irritated me even more than her previous disapproval because it was so obviously fake. She could sense my annoyance because she finally answered my question.
‘The biggest regrets are always for the things that you haven’t done,’ Mum said finally, and I knew she wasn’t talking about tennis. ‘Not for the things you have done.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like not revising for your exams because love is tearing you apart,’ she said. It was a tactic taken from the chapter in parenting manuals where they recommend dealing with serious subjects with humour. She would never understand.
‘Why did we move here, Mum?’ I was giving her one last chance to be straight.
‘You prefer it here to London, don’t you? I think we all do now.’ Nice sidestep.
‘Yes. But that wasn’t what I asked.’
She put the phone to her ear again.
‘I’ve told you a hundred times before, Romy.’
‘It’s just that Loveday was asking me the other day and I wasn’t sure what to say.’
I knew this would get her attention.
‘Why was she asking?’
‘Maybe she thought I’d give her an honest answer.’
She gave me a piercing look that went straight to my stomach and for a moment I thought she was about to capitulate. But she pulled back.
‘Because I got offered a job that I couldn’t refuse. Because Granny had died and we needed to be closer to Grandpa. Because we wanted to get Luke out of London. Because we thought Ben would find it gentler in the countryside.’ That was a new one. I hadn’t heard her use Ben as an excuse before.
‘Do you think if you say something often enough you end up believing it?’ I asked, my tone more hostile than I had intended. ‘Is that something you’ve learned from Dad? He’s probably written a paper about it.’
She opened her mouth as if she was about to say something but instead her top lip did that thing where it tensed so much that her mouth turned into a cartoonish straight line.
‘Hello, hello, is anyone there?’ shouted a voice from the phone. Mum switched her attention to the call.
‘At last a real person,’ she said into the receiver. ‘I want to make a formal complaint about a building that has been put up without permission from the council,’ she said. ‘I’d prefer to keep it anonymous if that’s possible.’ Boring, I thought to myself as I left the room.
If there had been a door to slam I would have slammed it. But that was the other problem with open-plan houses. They limited the possibility of self-expression. Funny that architects who are so keen to express themselves don’t think of that.
I headed down into the basement. I knew Dad wasn’t at home, because Ben had told me that he was taking him to a screening of The Spy Who Loved Me at the village hall. That was as good as it got for a Wednesday afternoon during half-term in Luckmore. At the last minute Grandpa had gone too. I had begun to notice that whenever Dad got angry with my grandfather he would always do something really nice with him the following day. The previous week he had shouted at him for using the chainsaw in the garden again. Then the next day he took him for a walk on Cromer pier and joked to Mum that it didn’t once occur to him to push him over the edge. When Grandpa got back he said very loudly that it was really great to be home, and Dad got annoyed again so the following day he took him for lunch at the pub. Mum had teased that Dad was breaking one of his favourite rules and rewarding bad behaviour. ‘Good one, Ailsa,’ Dad had laughed. I couldn’t understand how they were getting on so well. Did Mum have no self-respect?
I hardly ever went into Dad’s office even though it was opposite the TV room. It was never locked but the door was always closed and he didn’t like anyone going in there in case we disturbed his work. He even vacuumed it himself so that no one muddled up the different piles of papers on the floor. Because it was full of boxes and had no windows apart from the panes in the single glass door it was dusty and, in the winter when you could hardly ever open the door into the garden, very claustrophobic.
The first thing I noticed was that at least one layer had disappeared from the huge wall of boxes that had previously surrounded his desk, so that you could now at least see across from one side of the room to the other. I did a rough calculation and reckoned that Mum must have unpacked about ten. I read this as a positive sign that she was putting down roots in Luckmore. Or at least putting down roots with Dad, because Norfolk had never really stopped being her home.
As far as I can remember, my thinking at that moment went something like this: Aunt Rachel thought Mum was an ostrich. I realized that if I didn’t want to share the same fate I had to define myself in relation to Mum and make myself as different as possible. So if Mum’s biggest failing was that she tried to avoid confrontation I would do the opposite. I didn’t question Rachel’s analysis, even though Mum was always the one taking action. She just did it more quietly than most. Neither did I take on board Dad’s theory that the criticisms we make of other people are more often than not a reflection of our own frailties. Instead I decided to be someone who always took action. I would deal with everything head on. And this was where I needed to start.
I closed the door behind me. The floor-to-ceiling bookshelf on the wall to my left was filled with books, journals and research papers. I couldn’t tell whether they were organized thematically or alphabetically. I knew the answers to some of my questions were there. I just wasn’t sure exactly where. Or even what the questions were.
The first few days after Jay’s confession I had kept the curtains closed and ignored his attempts to communicate. I was frightened by what he had told me.
Eventually longing overcame fear and I messaged him: Addiction is a disease not a character flaw. He replied he missed me so much that his chest hurt.
I knew I should have been repelled, because that’s what my parents told me later, but I wasn’t. And really who were they to judge given everything that had been going on with them? I tried to conjure up disgust. I really did. It would have been way less complicated to cut Jay out of my life at this stage, especially when no one knew he was even in it. But the fact that he had lost an eighth of his life (his maths) to PornHub did nothing to make him less attractive in my eyes.
I wanted t
o help him. Dad always said empathy was a pre-frontal cortex issue, which meant it must be a good thing. He claimed it formed the basis for all moral behaviour. I guess I thought I could save him.
After we started messaging again I thought he might avoid me because he felt embarrassed or regretted confiding in me. The opposite was true. He sought me out at school at every opportunity and made sure that we caught the same bus home every evening. In Biology classes he hooked his leg around my ankle, and I sat there watching Mr Harvey’s mouth moving without hearing anything, poised on the edge of something that lurched so swiftly between agony and ecstasy that it made me feel sick.
I thought Marnie and Becca would notice what was going on, but at the beginning of the week a scandal broke at school that eclipsed the fact that our threesome at break had become a foursome. Because at the end of break on Tuesday Stuart Snapchatted Marnie a naked selfie. Becca took a quick screenshot and enlarged the photo.
In PSHE we sat at the back of the classroom and instead of doing a spider diagram suggesting ways of promoting love, respect and care in relationships, we tried to work out if it was really Stuart’s body or his head superimposed on someone else’s. He had a big dick, Becca declared as authoritatively as you could when whispering. The received wisdom was that this was good. I wasn’t so sure. I said I thought it looked lonely and forlorn, like it was the last penis left in the world, and Marnie and Becca laughed so much that Mr Harvey sent us out of the classroom.
Jay and I briefly debated whether we should stop doing the thing at the window, but he said that he thought it was progress to feel turned on by a real person and at least it took the edge off my desire. We talked about everything. He told me that for the first time he believed it was possible for him to change. He described the first and last time that he had tried to have what he called ‘real, actual sex’, a year ago. How the girl was a friend of Marley’s and they had gone swimming naked in the sea after a party in Ibiza. He told me how they made out for an hour on the beach and he didn’t feel anything. Eventually he told her that he had drunk too much. He tried to convince her that it wasn’t her fault.