‘Dad phoned, he won’t be home tonight. And I’m going out too. With Cassie.’
‘Oh, OK. Thank you, Lola.’
Message received; a blow for a blow. Where would Thomas be sleeping? Who would he go to, so angry: a friend, a hotel? A woman?
I dialled him at last. It went to voicemail, as expected. There was nothing I could say.
All evening I watched to see if he might change his mind, walk in on the three of us at dinner, or turn his key in the lock as Lola left and I tidied up. But he did not.
I went up to bed, knowing I would not sleep. While we Waites alone would have done the trick, insomnia was guaranteed thanks to the world’s biggest story, happening just across the way in the US. As the psychiatrist apparently always told Lola, there was no such thing as an accident: I was meant to stay awake. Election-night coverage was starting to build and though I lay on my pillows, already overwhelmed by real-life dramas, every time I went to turn the TV off, something else went wrong so that I had to keep it on.
On and on through the night and wronger and more wrong it went until, finally, everything was going right.
The builder of a gilded tower was leader of the free world.
He came back.
‘The thing that hurts most, Darling,’ he said, from just beyond the kitchen doorway. ‘Is that you didn’t even come to me, try to talk to me. You assumed the very worst.’
‘I know, I was crazy, literally, I was in this sort of fever and I couldn’t think straight … I was scared, Thomas.’
He did not move closer. ‘Just. Hideous.’
I felt my pulse pick up. He was not being himself, not responding as I had imagined all through that terrible night.
‘You see, you kept on having these private bedroom chats; and then there was all her underwear. And once she shouted, “I’m not doing it, Dad …”’
‘Did she?’ His voice came as if from far away.
‘Yes, angry, like you were forcing … something.’
‘Ah,’ he nodded, as though being careful not to break. ‘I can’t remember that conversation. But sounds to me like she was saying, for the millionth time, that she wasn’t making herself sick …’
Truth does ring when you hear it. There was the most minute chiming in my ear. I released, so that the tears came:
‘I’m so, so sorry.’
His head bowed further.
‘Darling, I can’t,’ he said.
He walked out again.
I could not leave it alone.
My head no longer ached, but my mind itched. I sat in the conservatory, with my laptop and wanted to know.
Bright New Britain, from their earliest days, had tried to tattoo their hate on to our ordinary, decent lives. I knew better than most of what they were capable. I used to quake in my young bed at the mere thought of a close-shaven head – and then I had to watch ever-greater numbers of our neighbours slap the BNB canvassers on the back and tell them, ‘You’re all right.’
I feared, but I read; I had learned that ideas could save you. Save you from men who rose to power as men of the people and yet hated who the people, all of us together, really were. Men like Councillor Fletcher were driven to stomp all over anyone who called bullshit on the vivid sickly lens through which they saw the world. On the myopic things they did.
Once, as a teenager, I had stood up, shouted loud. It was the middle of the local elections and the papers were predicting a rise in votes for Bright New Britain, that they could gain a ‘significant foothold’ in the area. I couldn’t let that happen. I could not let people be fooled, not by those claiming to be one of the people; I might fear, but I read. I had other ideas.
I had ideas.
I went to the Citizens Advice Bureau and asked a lady with plain spectacles whether I could get a grant to prosecute the BNB figurehead. She smiled. We talked for a long time, even though someone else was waiting, and I left with an action plan. That afternoon I spoke to a lawyer. By the weekend, Malcolm Fletcher’s thugs, led by Darren Hodson, a man known for his prodigious violence and the eagle tattoo on his neck, had found me and punched me unconscious by the bins behind the pizza café where I worked each Saturday. I came to with a knife to my throat and as I screamed (the café was closed), I was told:
‘Don’t you go to lawyers, fucking ever. Or police.’
I did not. I thought I might. But the knife, you see.
I should have told Thomas the whole story, but I could not bring myself to, not quite yet. He did know that these days I still kept tabs on BNB, especially in Elm Forest. What did they do, these people, outside of the campaigns and the marches and the leaflets? What made them happy? Who and what did they love?
Luckily, the internet was made for people like me, who could not leave it alone.
There it was. A picture I had seen before, now archived forever: a younger but still old Malcolm Fletcher, in his pomp as Elm Forest councillor for Bright New Britain, greeting his new leader – him talk such a lotta battymout’ nonsense – on a walkabout of the town. Two larded smiles, four eyes set on the greasy populist pole.
Would a girl like Lola love such politics, were it not for Will? I found it hard to fathom. Was his charm so very great? What did we ever do to you, lovely Lolapaloo, my teensy teenage Nemesis? What harm have I done you, except to love Dad, our Thomas?
But there it was. No use professing to be stumped. The world was what it was and she – with her laptop and her phone and her moods and her young lusts, her young unedifying habits – she was very much a creature of it. No point pretending otherwise.
For more reasons than one could shake a juju stick at, Lola bloody hated me.
Trying harder was tough as old goat. Thomas and I had spoken, briefly.
I was sleeping in the spare room. ‘We’ thought it best, for now. I had tried to make my signature curry – it was his favourite – but time had got away from me and it had been rushed, and failed; Pattie’s end-of-the-afternoon stock had let me down, and we had all gone to bed half hungry.
It would seem that all laughter was conspiring to annoy me. Winding me up something chronic. I tried to shut my ears to the song-like twitterings of three girls from Lola’s old school, themselves covers and remixes of the girls who had come the day before and the days before that. These girls seemed to be endlessly ferried in oversized cars, with mothers who did not linger in either the doorway or the memory, apt embodiments of their fast-evaporating magnolia and vanilla scent. Friends (and therefore mothers) who I knew she talked to about me, all the goddamn time – maybe even the friend to whom she had proclaimed me a slut on the phone. Moreover, what with all the lift-shares, I was never sure which mother went with which girl. Today had not yielded the only one I had loved on sight: proper old school good egg – genes of a duchess, laugh of a stable girl – fagging away on our doorstep in the most unHartbrooke manner and a bit late and just so extravagantly human. Collection today could be by one of those who, when you opened your own door, regarded you with polite incomprehension. Or worst of all, the one or two former business Boudiccas who were now totally over reproduction and bored as shite in the burbs, and who snorted condescension to get their kicks as if it were the white stuff of the good old days. And yet, despite knowing the PR Lola would be giving me, and despite knowing there was more to being Alpha than cultivating long straight hair and not eating a sandwich, I was supposed to smile and to not mind and to offer teas and healthy snacks and iced fruit-infused waters. (Lola made it quite clear: we were never to look like starch-addicted proles in front of these lovingly reared Lilies, these trained orchids.) I was tempted – just for bant – to slap a bowl of fried chicken on to their laps, along with some pineapple punch, in all their greasy, sugary, blackfood glory, but it would not have been worth the fallout.
One girl, product of the perfume-spritziest mother and a platinum-card father I would never meet, blushed whenever she looked upon me – every goddamn time – and never even said hello, not once. I didn’
t know whether that was a you’re-a-parent thing, a you’re-black thing, or a you’re-such-a-bitch-to-Lola-and-you’re-shagging-her-dad thing. To loathe me for all three might be overkill, but you just never knew with kids.
Still none of them could be quite as singular as Will. I had seen his photo, I knew he was interested in the BNB. It set my teeth on edge, but the problem was how to put it to Lola. When her friends finally left, I asked her outright:
‘Your Will, Lola. Are you sure he’s OK?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well …’
‘What?’
‘He wouldn’t have something against our family, would he? Or rather, me.’
‘What? That’s absurd.’
I felt foolish but had to scratch the suspicion. ‘You know, he wouldn’t do anything to try and upset me, like make a silent call or break my window or—’
‘What on earth are you talking about now? He doesn’t know you, does he – and anyway he goes to Dovington.’
She spoke kind of fast and although it did not feel true, her words carried enough weight to make my shoulders sag.
‘No. Of course not. It’s just that … nothing.’
Lola said: ‘Anyway, we’re not … he’s not “my” Will … Oh, don’t worry about it.’
Then she scooped up all her things and moved to another room. The boy was clearly bad news, but I had no way of knowing how bad.
I was drawn again and again to Lola’s Facebook. It was an impressive fabrication. A hundred ‘Love you babes! xx’ to girls I knew full well she hated, tonnes of pouting photos with the usual filters to make her look even skinnier, or faintly tangerine, as if she was at Miami Beach rather than High Desford’s park on a wet Thursday morning. A cascade of photographic lies and half-truths. I knew this was symptomatic of the age; that a generation of girls were coming up the hill and would, like me, disappear over it in time, leaving behind them a gajillion bytes of filtered smiles at themselves and perhaps the odd hank of non-biodegradable hair extension. Social media as live, drawn-out, premature A-list obituary instead of living. Was that normal?
I tried, put it to him. It was the sort of debate you could joke about together, the sort of rhetorical question Thomas used to love:
‘Don’t be silly, Darling,’ he said. He would not look up from his paper. ‘She’s just a girl.’
‘Silly’; it smarted like a backhand slap. I longed to explain, that had she been the tiniest bit kind my heart would in fact ache for her, more with every selfie she plastered on to her friends’ screens.
Defeated, I went to find my son.
‘You be the stegosaurus, Mummy!’
As we played dinosaurs together, my phone buzzed. I let my son’s tyrannosaurus rex mash up my peerless stegosaurus over and over until I sprang with a squawk and wrapped my arms tight around him, a velociraptor of love; game over.
I checked my phone. So, there it was, again.
What did the other stuff matter, really – the calls, Lola, Thomas, any of it? How could anyone ever doubt that Stevie was my world? I had thought marriage would change that. It had changed my world, and the wider world had changed around my marriage, but he was still it. I loved Thomas, but Stevie was the wondrous core.
I knew what my problem was: I did not think things through, I was too big on love. Too big. But then, why else was I on this sweet Earth? Love was what I did, who I was. I had long ago decided that you had to love who you loved: love them all, love them hard. Love them even harder when you were blended like us.
Intimacy without love, now that was the real killer.
I wandered upstairs, back to the spare room. Muttered low at my laptop:
‘I’ll give you “silly”. Fuck … adoodle … d00 …’
I was in.
If you looked hard enough on Facebook, in the posts, the messages, all around and about, you tended to find the bad stuff. The words that someone wished they could take back, though they must surely have meant them, at least for a moment. The inauthentic truths and authentic lies. The smartarsities. The game-changing clauses.
Buried under all the ‘Love you babes! xx’ in Lola’s account was the bad stuff. The underground dirt without which she could not exist. The horseshit layer from which the verdant truth sprang. I hoped that I had got it all wrong, jumped the gun. But here were links to Will and through him to other men, young and not so young, to a group called BNB Futures which advertised in dark red-pink and orange. Go a click further, to her dad’s page, and you would find albums of photos of the wedding, of us Waites, of our young son. But that was not the worst of the bad stuff. There was much more in Lola’s world: in fusky corners and up digital alleyways, tucked away as messages and ads and links and posts of all kinds. Not the kiddie-bad stuff, not the druggie-bad stuff, but dark all the same. Somewhere amongst it all lay the worst thing of all: a dark red-pink and orange box heralding an event, this same night, to which Lola had been invited. BNB Futures was having a ball.
And Lola’s response?
Going.
From fireside gin to bathtub gin. A strange tinge to my drink, tonight, as if my thoughts had, over time, melted into the bitter fizz until everything tasted rank. I cupped it, weighed it; it could intoxicate me no more than my own foul and diluted logic. I could try to offer that to Thomas: an apology that was two parts explanation.
Still, I drank. I stared up at the ceiling. She was going. Tonight. I let the water go cold, pulled the plug for a minute, then topped it up with hot again. For four hours. I could not look away from the ceiling. I could no longer taste my gin. And Thomas did not come knocking once.
I went to her room.
‘Don’t go,’ I said to Lola.
‘What?’ she said.
‘Don’t go, please. I won’t mention it to Dad, but you really shouldn’t be mixing with those people.’
‘Have you been spying on me?’
‘No, but … I’ve seen the envelopes arriving from Bright New Britain. It’s Will’s influence, isn’t it? Bad news, Lola. Really bad. You need to stay well away.’
Lola turned her back on me, picked up a lip pencil.
‘Think you must have your wires crossed, Darling,’ she said. ‘I’m just meeting up with friends. Anyway, don’t think Dad is listening to you much at the moment.’
‘Right,’ I said, putting down the glass I’d brought up for her. ‘OK then, play it that way, if you want. I’m only trying to look after you. Nice new piercing, by the way.’
I carried my hypo-allergenic pillow down the cold blurred hall to the spare room.
‘Darling,’ he had said when I had cornered him coming out of our bathroom earlier. ‘I can’t, not yet. We need to take some proper space.’
‘What? Are you saying that—’
‘Well, we kind of rushed together, didn’t we? It was fast.’
‘But not wrong?’
He looked away, so grey now, so tired.
‘Thomas?’
I knew then I could not confide in him about Lola’s plans. Enough bad blood to drain away, enough to explain away without the added confession of a Facebook hacking.
‘All I’m saying is … let’s both get a good night’s sleep.’
And so, back to the spare room. I was settling the right pillow on to the wrong bed when I heard it. The raw-throated sound of retching. Enough, now. I walked next door to Lola’s bedroom and pushed the door open:
‘Lola?’
No reply. I opened the door of the en suite.
Lola was lying on the floor. She was quite still and in a flash I saw her just as I had at the foot of the stairs, but then she spasmed and began to writhe and moan. Her face was white and her head rested by a pool of vomit.
‘Lola! Oh, you poor thing.’
I knelt to sweep her hair away from the orange liquid and take her head in my arms.
‘What happened?’
‘Don’t tell Dad!’ The panic in her voice was more shocking than the sight of her.
‘What, I need to—’
‘No!’ A weak scream. ‘Please, I—’
She surged wearily on to her hands and knees and fell forward just in time for the torrent to hit the back of the toilet bowl.
‘Urgh. God,’ she was gasping, fell back on her knees.
I looked at her, the gleaming cheekbones, the bruised lips, the eyeliner and mascara bleeding downwards in black trails. I waited for her to speak. The shadows shifted on the far wall. The moment stretched. She had a globule of spittle on her cheek and I wanted to wipe it clean away, but I did not move, I waited.
‘You know I’m no addict or anything, but … well …’
‘Go on …’
‘Could something like cocaine make you sick?’
‘You mean vomiting?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not normally, no. But it is really, really bad for your head.’
‘OK, thanks.’ She lowered that look, a senseless mumble: ‘I thought I might have been spiked.’
I went to speak then swallowed it, waited.
She looked up again; two wide molten pools.
‘You think it too, don’t you?’ she said, so quietly it did feel as if I had thought her actual voice.
‘No, Lola. What?’
‘I’m pregnant.’
I stayed very still.
‘You’re sure?’
At that moment, Lola leaned over again, in a perfect, miserable curve and dry-retched into the echoing bowl. I rubbed her back, thinking. The noise subsided and she came back to sitting once more.
‘See?’
I nodded. ‘Have you taken a test?’
‘No, but … I’m scared. Promise you won’t tell Dad.’
‘Don’t worry, one thing at a time.’
She rested her head on me until her stomach ache appeared to ease and there was no more heaving.
Then I said:
‘We’d better get you into bed.’
‘I was supposed to be going out …’
‘Bed.’
I wiped up and saw her through to her bedroom. I busied myself putting away her ironed things so she could drag off her clothes unwatched and throw on the faded, oversized T-shirt she favoured, one of Thomas’s cast-offs. For the first time, I tucked her into bed.
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