by Emma Healey
‘Have you told Kiran that?’ Jen asked, wondering how she’d managed to sound the least bit interested. You’ve just accused me of being a bad mother, she wanted to scream, you’ve told me my daughter’s dangerous and not good enough to spend time with your precious offspring. Meanwhile, my daughter has developed a phobia and is sneaking people into the house because she’s so scared. I don’t have any emotional energy left for your problems. She patted Maya on the shoulder.
‘I think he’s already found someone else,’ Maya said.
‘I see.’
‘I’m sorry. I should be going. We’ve promised to keep up normal family dinners till we tell the kids. But, can I just use your loo?’
Jen put the mugs in the dishwasher while Maya was upstairs, determined to leave her with an impression of neatness, of competence. It wasn’t until later that she remembered the condoms in the bin. ‘Dammit,’ she said aloud. ‘God knows what she’ll be telling the other parents now.’
Not in front of the children
‘First sign of madness,’ Hugh said, coming through the door. ‘Talking to yourself.’
‘You’re home early.’
‘Landlord cancelled.’ He’d brought an unsettling sort of energy home with him and had a peculiar look on his face. ‘Lana not home?’
‘No. She’s out with Bethany.’
‘So we have the house to ourselves?’
Jen suddenly realized what the peculiar look was. She felt a little thrilling ache expand inside her. They went upstairs, and she heard the clink of Hugh’s watchstrap as he took it off. Once upon a time, they’d been noisy, vociferous, but since having children they’d got good at having sex in near-silence, at closing the curtains and switching on the light and drawing back the covers with no discussion. She’d got good at communicating excitement by suppressed breaths rather than loud moans. She didn’t remember ever caring what her parents or flatmates thought, but God forbid the children should know what was going on.
Jen giggled slightly, breathily, as she took her clothes off, and Hugh grinned. They’d never been sombre love-makers. He kissed her and she lay down and he kissed her again. Hugh was bigger now than he’d been when they’d met, and his weight pressed her legs wider, his skin was rougher and he sweated less, but the smell they made together was the same. Sharp, like sea salt and lemon.
Hugh had just guided her fingers between their bodies when the sound of the front door opening made them pause. Lana was home. And when Jen’s head hit the headboard they didn’t stop and shift down on the mattress because that meant they’d be on the creaking spring. Instead, Hugh just curled his hand around the top of her head and held her until they’d finished.
Jen laughed quietly again as she dressed and then ran downstairs, leaving her husband naked on their bed.
‘Is Dad home?’ Lana asked, pointing at his shoulder bag on the kitchen floor.
‘Yes.’ Jen’s voice was scratchy, and she cleared her throat.
Lana narrowed her eyes. ‘What have you guys been doing?’
If it had been her mother asking, Jen would have told her. Bold and unashamed. But it was her daughter.
‘Nothing,’ she said.
‘Well, you look weird.’
Jen thought of Hugh, lying on their bed. ‘Well, apparently, Ash stayed here last night.’
‘What? Oh shit.’
‘Oh shit is right. Her mother’s been round, so I know the truth.’
‘No, you don’t. Nor does her mum.’
‘What I can’t understand is why you felt you needed to sneak her in. I wouldn’t have stopped you having a friend to stay.’
‘Good to know. But I didn’t sneak her in. She wasn’t here. She was at Jonno’s.’
‘Jonno’s?’
‘The guy Ash fancies. Her mum would freak out if she knew.’
‘Her mum is pretty freaked out as it is.’
‘Well, Ash didn’t think she’d notice she was out. Her mum and dad are, like, divorcing, though they think Ash doesn’t know. Plus, she thought her mum wouldn’t check with you.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she’d done this big speech about leaving us to heal or whatever, when we got back from Derbyshire.’ She spotted the basket on the kitchen table and started to poke through its contents. ‘Also, she didn’t want to drop any of her actual friends in it.’
‘I thought you were actual friends.’
‘Not really. She’s all nice one minute and then weird and mean the next. She’s the one who told the boys to spell my first name backwards. Just because she didn’t like her anagram name. Now they’re constantly asking me if that’s what I’m into. And she deliberately boasts about money in front of Bethany. And she says she’s not dieting but keeps losing weight. And she’s always telling everyone to get their eyebrows threaded. She’s obsessed with eyebrows. Can I have some of this chocolate? Why is Dad still upstairs?’ The chocolate wrapper fell to the floor. ‘Oh my God,’ Lana said. ‘You were having sex.’
Sunflowers
Candlelight was flickering along the hallway on Wednesday evening when Jen got home from her two-week see-where-we-are meeting with Tori in HR. The management team had suggested Jen wait until the end of Lana’s summer holidays to come back. It was only three weeks away, but she wondered if she’d have a job to go back to by then.
Tea lights sat in jam jars and the kitchen was filled with a smell of toast. Lana huddled in one of the chairs and stared around the room, blinking at things as if she were taking a series of photos: the glass plant pots along the windowsill, the fish print above the microwave, the little Japanese cups on the dresser. Meg was setting the table for dinner, and obviously finding it difficult in the half-dark.
‘Do you think we could turn a light on now Mum’s home?’ she said.
‘I like watching the shadows,’ Lana said, which wasn’t exactly a no but certainly wasn’t a yes.
‘Are these the flowers from your room?’ Jen asked, as she took her jacket off. There were three or four large sunflowers in a brown jug. Meg had made it her duty to replace the flowers every time they drooped, as if this act alone would correct everything.
‘Lana thought she’d share them,’ Meg told her, smiling at Lana, as if to say thank you, though Jen was sure Meg didn’t approve: the jug and the flowers didn’t suit the kitchen; the rusticity of the jug was less charming among the mess of bills and unwashed crockery.
Lana made no effort to answer but hunched in her chair and blinked at a single yellow petal lying on the table. The flowers rather seemed like they’d been in the wars, with ragged leaves and quite a lot of petals missing. The seed-filled centres were marred with gaps, too, so that the flower heads looked like a bunch of rag dolls whose hair and faces had been battered, their mouths left with missing teeth. Jen couldn’t imagine Meg had tortured them like that, and they seemed a slightly sinister gift.
‘Well, it was a nice thought…’ Jen began.
‘They were just in my room, it’s no big deal,’ Lana said.
There was a long moment of quiet then, the oven timer ticking while they all looked at the ragged flowers, the bright yellow of the petals shaming the candles’ watery glow. Jen wondered again how they’d got into that state and imagined Lana tearing them roughly from the vase, or even hacking at them deliberately.
‘Can I do anything? Chop anything?’ Jen asked Meg, helping herself to another of Maya’s Trojan dates.
‘No,’ Meg said, her back straightening suddenly. ‘But, oh, put the light on and come here. Mum, I think I can feel the baby kicking.’
Jen pressed the switch and squinted under the glare of the overhead lamp. Meg bent a little and pulled up her jumper to lay a hand on the taut skin. As she did, her long hair swung dangerously near one of the tea lights still flickering in its little glass and Jen noticed several things at once: first, that Meg’s hair nearly touched the flame; next, that Lana saw this; and last, that her younger daughter had no intention of warning Meg of
the danger. Jen darted forward and swept the fall of hair away, tucking it behind Meg’s ear.
‘Careful,’ she said, though she knew her elder daughter hated to be told that. And then she kissed her twice, on the hair that had nearly been burnt. She kissed her deliberately, knowing Lana was watching, and she felt as though she was administering a punishment. Meg took her hand and held it to her bump, but Jen couldn’t feel anything.
‘It’s stopped,’ Meg said. ‘She’s stopped, I mean.’
Lana stood then, unfolding herself, stretching. As she reached her hands above her head, Jen heard her spine cracking, a beat off the oven timer’s tick. There was a smell of sweat – childish sweat – and a bright, expensive scent which Jen recognized as the perfume she hadn’t been able to use since Lana’s disappearance. She hadn’t thrown it away because the bottle was the prettiest thing on her dressing table and because Hugh had been so pleased to have bought her something she actually liked, but she’d kept the top firmly on so she didn’t have to smell it.
Lana let her arms drop, as if she realized she’d just given something away, but when Jen scanned her face there was nothing there: no guilt, no cunning.
‘Sorry,’ Lana said to Meg. ‘I’m in your way.’
She walked a few paces into the hall, where she stopped to lean against the doorframe. She looked exhausted, as though those few movements from the kitchen had been too much. Even her hair looked tired, and fell straight down from her scalp with lank weight, exposing the scarred pink skin. She was still wearing pyjamas, and the top was very slightly grubby with a rip in the collar. She closed her eyes and held her face up to Jen, presenting a blank, a mystery. This, Jen felt, was her retaliation.
‘Every day is a fight, isn’t it, Mum?’ Lana said, her eyes still closed. It sounded like something she had heard somewhere, not a sentence a London teenager would think of, but Jen couldn’t ignore it.
‘Is that how you feel, darling?’
Lana opened her eyes, but looked over Jen’s shoulder, as if there were someone else standing in the hallway. ‘I thought it was for you, Mum,’ she said.
Finally pushing off the doorframe, she trailed her fingers along the dado rail. The movement drew Jen’s attention to a tiny scrap of petal, caught under her nail, and she saw that the creases of her daughter’s hands were stained with yellow.
Mother’s Day
For Jen, yellow became the colour of worry, of dread, of paranoia, though Grace insisted she was wrong and that yellow gemstones in particular reduced panic and exhaustion. Which is how, after a chat over cups of rooibos tea and almond milk, she ended up wearing Grace’s ridiculous citrine ring.
‘Are you having an affair?’ Hugh asked, when he saw it. And for a moment he seemed genuinely worried, which cheered Jen up considerably. She couldn’t help torturing herself by looking at Lana’s Instagram again, though, scrolling back through the months, half terrified at what she might find. (Was she imagining it or did there seem to be a lot of yellow in the pictures Lana posted?)
She reread the disturbing sentence about red wine and ‘men who leave bruises’, studied again the photo of the housebreaking cat, let her mouth water over the chocolate brownies, and frightened herself with the sight of the skulking man in the corner of the #rapture picture. Her eyes were dry by the time she had scrolled back to March.
‘I didn’t even get a bloody card,’ Jen said suddenly, finding a familiar photo.
Hugh, dozing in an armchair, jerked awake, his book thunking to the floor and his reading glasses coming to rest at a new slant across his face.
‘From Lana,’ Jen said. ‘I got one from Meg…I think.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Hugh’s voice was groggy.
‘Mother’s Day. I didn’t get a card from Lana.’
‘And you’ve only just noticed that now? It must be five months ago.’
‘No, of course I noticed at the time, or at least, I didn’t not notice. I know she didn’t even say the words Happy Mother’s Day to me, but now look at this.’ She turned the computer round so Hugh could see the screen, watching his face for a reaction.
‘Oh, that’s nice,’ he said, before righting his glasses and picking up his book.
Jen turned the laptop back round.
‘Nice?’ she said, looking at the picture.
It was an old photo taken when Lana was about two and showing a younger Jen, her hair still long and dark, her smile lines still characterful rather than craggy. They were standing in a garden, the shadow of a tree lying over their faces, the dappled sunlight highlighting the tip of a nose or the sharpness of a canine tooth. In the picture Jen was wide-eyed, on the verge of laughter, surprised by a grubby-cheeked Lana, who had just tangled herself in Jen’s long cardigan and was grinning madly. Jen could still feel the texture of that cardigan, a thin, buttery wool, and remember the weight and heat of the little body wrapped so close to hers.
‘It’s one of the photos from the album in the dining room,’ Jen said. ‘She must have scanned or photographed it specially. And it says: hashtag Happy Mother’s Day, and hashtag proud daughter and Words can’t express how important the bond between mother and daughter is.’
‘You seem to be annoyed,’ Hugh said, not looking up from his book, though he hadn’t turned the page in a while.
‘Well, it’s all just lies.’
‘Lies?’
‘She posts these pictures, these sentiments, as if she’s living them, as if they mean something, but in reality she couldn’t care less about any of it. She wants her friends to think she’s done something for Mother’s Day, but not her own mother.’
‘Or’ – Hugh rubbed his hands across his face – ‘that’s what’s going on in her head, and she can put it on social media but doesn’t know how to express it to you directly.’
He sounded very un-Hugh-like and Jen didn’t know how to answer him. He didn’t seem to know how to continue, either, and he balanced his book on the arm of the chair, where it rested for a moment before sliding off and banging to the floor again.
Jen stared at the photo for a few seconds then closed the window and the laptop. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ she said, ‘but I don’t see how much harder it would have been to write some of that in a card.’
Making a scene
‘Why do you care so much if she says one thing online and another at home?’ Meg said on Saturday, as she removed the tomato from her artisan burger (what made it artisan? Jen wondered). ‘Most people give a false impression of their lives through social media; there are articles about it every day, usually shared on social media.’
Jen laughed and bit at a very crisp chicory leaf. Having a daughter deliberately try to cheer her up cheered her up, and eating a perfect, peppery chicory leaf gave her joy, so why was the chief emotion she felt still sorrow? And was this how Lana felt at those moments when she was laughing, when Hugh thought perhaps she was ‘back to normal’?
‘You probably won’t remember this, but when Lana was about nine she decided to be a director,’ Jen said. ‘A theatre director.’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘Well, you were at university then.’ Jen paused, wanting to get it right, to explain properly. ‘Anyway, at the time, there was a sort of craze at her school for putting on plays.’
‘Yeah, I went to one, a musical about space. She played a Lovebug.’
‘God, that was awful,’ Jen said. ‘She had about two lines and I had to make her a neon costume. I’d forgotten that.’
‘Here on planet Lovebug, every day is Valentine’s Day,’ Meg mimicked in a high voice with a fake American accent.
‘Oh, poor Lana, and she was so thrilled to get the part. I’m amazed you remember the line.’
‘It’s the sort of thing that sticks. And I’m pretty certain she practised it at least a hundred times.’
‘Probably. But that’s not what I meant. That Lovebug play was arranged by the teachers, the music department. The plays I’m talking about
were private.’
‘Private plays? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?’
‘Lana and her friends wrote and directed and starred in them themselves.’
‘When she was nine?’
‘Nine or ten. She worked on the scripts at home, and she did talk to me about them, talked about the characters. She wasn’t secretive exactly, but I could never see any of the plays because they were performed at lunchtime. The only audience was other children who didn’t mind giving up their playtime to sit still in the main hall.’
‘They were allowed inside during playtime? The school must have changed since my day.’
Jen shrugged. ‘I suppose she was part of a quiet sort of set, trustworthy.’
‘Oh, thanks. You mean I wasn’t?’
‘And everything was about creative expression then.’
‘I’m not sure what you’re getting at,’ Meg said.
‘No, I’m not sure, either.’
Meg turned on a sigh to ask the waitress for more ketchup.
‘It’s just,’ Jen carried on, feeling her way, ‘there was a kind of performance going on, a performance that took up lots of time and energy, and I suppose I was a little jealous, or hurt that it wasn’t for my benefit, that it was for the benefit of other people entirely.’
‘Oh. I get it. And you feel like she’s doing the same thing now, on Instagram or whatever?’
‘Yes,’ Jen said, relieved. ‘That’s it.’
Meg shrugged. ‘That’s probably exactly what she’s doing. Not everything is about you.’
Jen let her fork fall on to the plate. ‘You sound like Lana.’
‘Well, I’m beginning to see her point of view.’
‘Oh, don’t say that.’ The words came out on a wail, which Jen hadn’t intended, and the waitress looked shocked as she put down the ketchup.
‘Sorry,’ Jen said.
‘Sorry,’ Meg said, though Jen couldn’t tell if it was for the waitress: a sorry-for-my-weird-mother sorry, or for her: a sorry-for-making-you-wail-in-public sorry.