by Rosie Price
“I doubt it,” Rupert said. He popped gum from its packet and chewed on it thoughtfully. “Perhaps a sip, every now and again. Half a glass at a wedding. But I could gladly live the rest of my life without being drunk. You know, properly pissed.”
“Really? Even if you feel one hundred percent better? Like, even if someone told you you’d never be, you know, depressed ever again?”
Rupert laughed.
“What?” Max felt defensive and a little bemused. “You’ve been doing so well recently. You seem so much…”
Rupert shook his head. “I’m not laughing; it’s not funny. Don’t worry about me, Max. I’m not missing anything. It might look like it from the outside, but in fact I see everything more clearly.”
Max wanted to ask his uncle what exactly it was that he could see clearly, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the answer. Instead he tried his best to meet him halfway. “I guess the alcohol does”—he waved his bottle—“blur the edges a little.”
“It does. And sometimes you need that, until there comes a point when you can’t see anything at all.”
“Isn’t that exactly the point?” Max said, taking a swig.
* * *
—
On Christmas Eve, Alasdair, Nicole, and Lewis arrived from London. Alasdair had driven, and Lewis and Nicole turned up in the front hall dead-eyed and yawning, presents spilling from their bags onto the tiled floor. Max wondered whether it was possible that they’d been forced to listen to the cricket coverage for the entire journey, since they both looked very relieved that it was over. Even Lewis seemed happy to see Max, and for a moment Max thought that Lewis was going to hug him, but he was so surprised by the possibility that he kept his arms by his sides, and Lewis instead slapped him on the back. Because Alasdair had been absent for two of the last three Christmases, and Rupert the other, this was the first time the whole Rippon family had been together for the holidays since Bernadette had died, and William was insisting that they do everything as she would have wanted. Tomorrow, there would be no presents until after the queen’s speech, and no champagne until the afternoon. Max smuggled a bottle up from the cellar on Christmas Eve, though, and he snuck into Nicole’s room on Christmas morning before church, wrapped in an old quilt that was making his eyes itch and his nose run, and popped the cork right next to her head.
“Morning!” he said, as she flailed at him in protest, her head still buried in the pillow. Max had been hoping, once Nicole arrived, that things would start to get a bit more lively. It was a promising start: they had time for a glass each before church, and during the service Max stood at the end of the aisle and sang as loudly as he always did. He took communion because it was Christmas, then watched as the priest and his two deacons in their white-and-gold robes went to Lady Caroline, who was sitting on a reserved cushioned chair in the front row, and knelt before her while she took communion. When they got back, though, Nicole refused to have any more to drink until lunchtime, so Max had to disappear upstairs alone every thirty minutes while the turkey was cooking, the alcohol filtering straight through the lining of his empty stomach into his blood. By lunchtime, he was giddy, his mind working through the possibilities of how he might best sustain this excitable mood. Too much food would be a mistake, but he’d have to suppress the inevitable headache somehow.
“When are you going to sign it over?” Nicole said as they were eating lunch. Her question was addressed to both her father and Alasdair, but it was Alasdair who put down his glass, suppressing a belch with authority.
“In the new year, I should think. My lawyer is still talking to Lady Caroline’s lawyer. Or lawyers. She has a whole fleet. She wants to renovate it and actually move in, which seems like madness to me. If I were her, I’d probably tear it down.”
“So we have one more Christmas to wreck the house before we sell it, then?” said Max loudly.
“Absolutely not,” said Alasdair. “She’s already done her best to decimate our asking price. The place needs to be spotless.”
“Not even a little party? Granny would approve.”
“Tell you what,” he said. “You can have a party, but only if you stay on after Christmas to finish clearing the attic.”
“Oh, I’d love to, but I have to go on holiday,” Max said.
“I’m staying,” said Lewis, glancing at his father.
Alasdair grunted. “Lewis doesn’t have anywhere better to be,” he said.
Faintly, Max registered that Lewis was watching him as he ate. Lewis had worked efficiently and methodically through his meal, both elbows on the table so as to guard his plate. Only when he was finished did he sit back in his chair, both hands resting on the table and making little folds in his paper crown, his wristwatch gleaming in the light of the chandelier above them.
“Might as well make the most of it,” Lewis said now, in response to his father. “While we still can.”
“Well, if you feel that strongly about it, I’d be quite happy to leave you to finish here on your own,” said Alasdair, “save me the trouble of wasting another week’s holiday in the middle of nowhere.”
“No, no, I’ll stay too,” William said. Zara looked at him sharply, but William didn’t look back.
Max, oblivious to these loaded looks, took the opportunity to slip out of his seat, mumbling that he was going to the toilet, but turning left instead of right at the door to the dining room and up the back staircase to his bedroom. There, he rifled through his things and found the little plastic bag he was looking for. He hadn’t brought it here on purpose, and it did seem like a bit of a waste, but it was Christmas, after all, and it was raining. He deserved a treat. Max tapped out a little of the white powder onto the wooden chair at the end of his bed and sat cross-legged on the floor rolling a ten between his thumbs and forefingers. He wished Elias were here. Or Kate, she’d never really been into this, but she would at least have been in on it. He needed this, just a hit of energy. That was what Rupert didn’t understand. It was real life that was blurred around the edges, real life that contained ambiguity. Intoxication: this was real, tangible clarity. He leaned over, snorted the line, sat back as his thoughts came into focus, senses came alight. In this state, there was nothing but the perfect geometry of his surroundings. Crisp corners, clear edges. He put the bag in his back pocket, and went back downstairs.
* * *
—
Max was relieved to leave Bisley House once Christmas was over. On Boxing Day, he’d hardly left the sofa, but the next day he walked the lower floors one last time and then went down to the walled garden, which in the summer was heavy with the scent of roses and freshly turned earth. He’d always hidden here when they’d played hide-and-seek, because Nicole had hay fever and would be doubled over with a sneezing fit as soon as she came close to finding him. The far wall was covered by a creeper with white blossoms, which Max supposed was Lady Caroline’s winter jasmine. Nostalgia threatened, but he shook it away. Lady Caroline would be here, soon, pushing her own grandsons to take unsuspecting local girls to view the jasmine. Quite how this plant was supposed to inspire romance, Max was not quite sure. Things must have been very different in Lady Caroline’s day. Somehow, he couldn’t imagine her downloading Embers.
He’d texted Kate to ask her if she wanted a lift back to London, but she told him she was staying a few days longer, which was a surprise to Max, as he knew she usually tried to shorten her stays in Randwick as much as possible. Zara was driving him and Nicole, while William stayed at the house to help clear it out. Rupert was already back at his flat, having taken the first train running on Boxing Day. Nicole sat in the front, inflicting her music on Zara and Max, while Max speculated about Alasdair and Lewis’s relationship.
“I think they both have abandonment issues,” Max diagnosed, slumped in the back seat of the car, “since Aunt Sylvie left.”
“Wouldn’t that mean t
hey’re both really clingy?” Nicole said. “I’ve always thought that Alasdair didn’t like Lewis that much. God, that sounds awful.”
“Maybe abandonment issues that manifest as a deep-seated distrust of women?” said Max, astounded by his own insightfulness.
“Sylvie was a bitch, though,” Nicole said. “Do you remember when she threw my dinner in the bin because I complained about the olives?”
“That was you,” said Max. “You threw the dinner she’d cooked for you in the bin after you complained about it.”
“That does sound a bit like me,” said Nicole. “I hate olives.”
“Seriously, though, I think they’re both a bit fucked. Maybe you should introduce them to some of your therapists, Mum.”
Zara raised an eyebrow at Max in the mirror. “Don’t drag me into this,” she said, mockingly defensive. “I’m not even related to them. This is your family, your flesh and blood. Take it up with your father.”
“You married into it, though,” said Max, who was in the mood for a debate. “That makes you even more responsible if they’re all fuckups. You chose to be part of it. The rest of us didn’t.”
“Responsible?” said Nicole. “How?”
38
In Kate’s bedroom there were blackout curtains, and on the morning of Christmas Eve she slept until ten o’clock. She woke to the sound of Joni Mitchell’s Blue playing from the living room. Kate had put this album on every morning one summer, had left it playing through the house when she’d packed her bag and gone to school, on those days when Alison couldn’t get out of bed. She buried her face in the pillow. Why she had thought this album might help Alison, she had no idea.
Alison soft-boiled eggs for them both, and they sat in their little kitchen with the door open so she could hum along with Joni’s voice. Kate got up and turned the music down without saying anything, and then felt sorry that she had done so. After breakfast, Alison went to the corner shop to buy milk and bread. She came upstairs to find Kate sitting on her bed, looking around her room.
“I feel old,” she said. “I’m too old for this room.”
It took her all afternoon to clear it out. Alison helped by filling plastic bags with clothes and belongings she would take to the council to be recycled, and boxes with possessions of Kate’s she could not bear to throw away. As they sorted their way through everything, Kate thought how strange it was to have another person piece together a history of her own life which was to her unknown; that Alison’s memories of Kate’s childhood, of her preverbal existence, had a life to which she had no direct access. When her wardrobe and chest of drawers were clear, and the pile of possessions on the armchair had been condensed into a few boxes, Alison helped Kate to push the bed from the middle of the room to the alcove in the corner of her room.
When she went to bed that night her room smelt faintly of polish, but the air was thinner, colder: cleared of the dust that had built up over the years. Again that night she slept deeply, falling quickly under, too quickly for her to turn off her bedside light even, and when she woke her skin was clean, her pajamas and her sheets smelling of her mother’s laundry detergent, and the duvet over her feet heavy where Alison had crept in in the night and left a stocking on her bed, just as she’d done when Kate was little. Downstairs Alison was listening to Joni again.
She opened her gifts at the kitchen table: a pack of cards with pictures of her university on the back, a bar of lavender soap, and some plastic-coated earrings she knew she would never wear. Once she was washed and dressed and smelling of soap they drank coffee and listened to music loud enough to negate the need for conversation. They had chicken this year; there were only two of them, not enough to justify a turkey, and Kate watched her mother stuff it with the pork meat and herbs she’d bought from the supermarket a few days earlier. The fridge was glut full, and the prepackaged sauces, puddings, and creams made Kate feel slightly nauseous. So too did the chicken, whose freshly plucked skin was stretched so thin that it had begun to tear over its fatted torso. Alison thrust handfuls of pork meat up inside the chicken, pressing into the moistened meat half a lemon and two peeled cloves of garlic, rubbing butter and salt into its skin.
At lunch, Alison slowed her eating pace to match her daughter’s.
“You do seem better than last year,” she said when Kate pushed away her half-finished plate: she had picked over the breast meat but hadn’t quite been able to dislodge from her mind the image of raw flesh, bound and pierced. Her mother had spoken as if picking up an earlier conversation.
“What do you mean?” Kate said.
“You were so very sad this time last year,” Alison said simply. “I didn’t quite see it at the time, but I can see it now, now that you seem a little happier.”
Alison’s incisiveness came as both a surprise and a relief to Kate. It was much like the feeling she’d had when she’d first got drunk as a teenager, and when, after being driven home by her mother and put to bed, believing herself to have behaved with the perfect impression of sobriety, she’d woken to find that Alison had gone to work leaving a packet of paracetamol and a packet of bacon out on the kitchen counter. Then, just as now, Kate had realized that her mother had deduced far more than she allowed herself to believe. In the afternoon, when they went out for a walk, Kate told her mother that there was a sadness she could not name, and Alison kissed her on the top of her head, looped her arm through her daughter’s. When Kate grew weary, and the sky began to run, they went home and Kate lay on the sofa with her head resting in Alison’s lap, her eyes closed, listening to the voices on the television, not yet ready to sleep.
* * *
—
Claire rang Kate two days after Christmas to complain of weight gain and boredom.
“There are no good-looking people in Randwick,” Claire said, sighing. “I’m wasted here.”
“Haven’t you just been with your family?”
“Well, exactly.”
“We can go somewhere but you have to come and collect me. And you know nowhere will be open.”
“It’s fine, I’ll take Mum’s car,” said Claire. “I’ve got an idea.”
When Claire first suggested that they go to Bisley House, Kate refused. If there was even the smallest chance that Lewis was still there, she told Claire, she wouldn’t go. Once they’d set off, though, Kate agreed to go through the village so they could catch a glimpse from afar.
“Aren’t you curious to see it?” Claire said.
“I’ve already seen it.”
“Yes, but to see it now, wouldn’t it be different? Now they’re moving everything out?”
“What, you think it would be cathartic seeing it empty?”
“Yeah. I dunno. Some symbolic shit.”
The sky was pink, just as it had been when Kate and Max had driven this way the year before, and the houses on the lanes were lit with Christmas lights. By the time they got to Bisley it was almost dark. As they rounded the corner at the top of the lane above the house, Kate began to feel excited. They wouldn’t be seen in this light, particularly if they parked in the lay-by opposite. They could get out of the car, perhaps get close. She knew it was possible that Lewis was still there, but it was more likely that he would have gone back to London at the same time as Max.
“Actually,” she said to Claire as casually as she could, “I think Max might have said they were all going back yesterday.”
Claire smiled. “So you do want to see it.”
“Maybe,” Kate said. “I don’t know. I don’t want anybody to see us.”
They parked, as Kate demanded, in the lay-by. There were no streetlamps on the lane, and the hedges were thick and high. The gates were open, and Kate crossed the lane, stood at the entrance. It was Claire’s turn, now, for hesitation.
“Are you sure?” she said.
Kate put up the hood of her coat an
d stepped onto the driveway. The house was less glowing than she remembered it, more gray, its bricks dirt-worn. Her feet crunched on the gravel as she moved closer, and she saw that there were lights on in some of the windows, and a car, a four-by-four she didn’t recognize parked out front next to a yellow dumpster. On the cool air she could smell faintly the smoke of a wood fire. There were people still, but it was dark out here, so even if he was there, she would see him before he saw her.
“I’ve been here before,” Claire whispered to Kate. “They held the village fair here when the school fields were shut with foot-and-mouth. We were about twelve. Do you remember?”
Kate shook her head without looking away from the house.
“They had to evacuate the paddling pool after David threw up in it.”
“Why does he always throw up?” Kate whispered back.
“He has a weak constitution,” whispered Claire.
Kate took another step forward, and the motion sensor above the doorway blinked, flicking on the security lamp and flooding the driveway with white light. Instinctively, Kate pulled her scarf up around her face, and they both shielded their eyes. With black dots in her vision, Kate loosened the scarf and looked to the uppermost window, her face bathed in light. For a second she stood there before she turned, and walked back to the car.
“It’s like being in a thriller, this rape stuff,” said Claire, as she pulled her seat belt across her chest and slammed on the accelerator. She glanced sideways at Kate. “Sorry, that was a bit insensitive. I just don’t have any real enemies, you know. Not since school, anyway. I miss that, having enemies.”
“I hope it was him in there,” Kate said quietly. “I hope he saw me.”
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