The Argument

by Victoria Jenkins

  The exasperation that floods her daughter’s features is tangible. Hannah knows what it is that Olivia would like to say, but she knows that even despite her recent attitude, she wouldn’t be cheeky enough to come out with it. Hannah knows what Olivia thinks of her, that she is over the top, controlling, but having tried every other way to make her see sense and having failed to get Olivia to so much as acknowledge each attempt, she has little other choice than to deal with her daughter in her own obtuse manner.

  ‘Maybe it does,’ Olivia says, widening her eyes.

  She is goading Hannah, pressing her mother until she gets a reaction. Hannah knows Olivia will be disappointed in the lack of response her challenge receives. She never acts on impulse, not anymore. She learned a long time ago that reacting to anything before thinking it through only leads to trouble. Hannah was once like Olivia, headstrong and single-minded. She did what she wanted without heeding any warnings and gave no thought to the consequences. She too once needed someone to guide her away from a path that would only lead to danger.

  ‘Did you enjoy it?’ Hannah asks. Olivia eyes her suspiciously, wondering where the question is headed. Her focus flits from one side of Hannah’s face to the other as she tries to formulate an answer, as though trying to settle on the least incriminating response. It really isn’t a trick question; Hannah is curious to know whether it lived up to her expectations.

  ‘It could have gone better,’ she eventually says.

  ‘In what way?’

  Olivia pauses. Her mother can read her as though the things she doesn’t want to say are tattooed across her forehead, printed in bold lettering for everyone to see regardless. Something has happened, she has done something, something she doesn’t want Hannah to find out about.

  ‘I’m just different, aren’t I?’ Olivia says, and Hannah suspects the comment is an evasion of a truth she doesn’t want to admit to. ‘People laugh at me. They laugh at how I dress.’

  ‘What’s wrong with how you dress?’

  Hannah looks look her up and down, taking in the jeans and the t-shirt, wondering what anyone might find amusing in the very normal clothes her daughter is wearing. The jeans are too big for her, hanging slightly around her hips, but not in any way that might not be regarded intentional.

  Hannah’s attention isn’t away from Olivia’s face for long enough to miss the roll of eyes she is offered in response to the question.

  ‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ she snaps, studying her mother as though a second head has sprouted from her shoulder and she is unsure to which of them she should direct her anger. ‘God,’ she continues, ‘you’re not even that old.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Urgh,’ she says, throwing her arms in the air, exasperated by her mother’s refusal to rise to her bad mood, because that is what she is looking for. Olivia seemed to enjoy confrontation, actively looking for opportunities to get into an argument with Hannah over something, no matter how trivial the subject. She is the same with her sister at times, moody and cantankerous, always trying to wind Rosie up at any opportunity she sees available.

  ‘Other parents get it. Other girls my age get to wear nice stuff, they get to go to parties.’

  Hannah thinks of Casey Cartwright’s profile picture, the image like a still from an x-rated adult film. Is that what her daughter aspires to? Is that what all her parenting has been for, so Olivia can join the herd and follow everybody else in their mundanity?

  ‘Nice stuff,’ she repeats. ‘Like Casey Cartwright, you mean? Was she at the party tonight?’

  Olivia narrows her eyes questioningly, an expression she seems to wear much of the time. ‘What are you bringing her up for? What do you know about Casey Cartwright?’

  ‘I’ve seen how she dresses, that’s all. Her Instagram profile picture should come with a parental guidance warning.’

  Olivia glances at the iPad on the arm of the sofa, her face contorting as though she’s just received life-changing news.

  ‘You’ve been looking at her Instagram?’ Her voice rises and her cheeks flush pink. ‘Oh my god, you are so embarrassing.’

  ‘What’s embarrassing about that? She’s not going to know.’

  Hannah knows why Olivia is angry with her. She isn’t interested in fashion; she doesn’t wear make-up; she can’t remember the last time she bought a new pair of shoes. These things just don’t interest her, in the same way she doesn’t expect Olivia to show any interest in maths. It just isn’t her thing, and that’s fine, but what her daughter fails to acknowledge is that not everyone has to like and do the same things. Hannah wonders how Olivia might react if she was to come downstairs one morning with a full face of make-up on and a dress inspired by the pages of a fashion magazine. No doubt, she would probably then find her mother an embarrassment. No matter what she does, Hannah won’t win.

  ‘Would you have gone tonight if your father was home?’

  Olivia says nothing. They both know what her honest answer would be. It isn’t that Michael is stricter than Hannah, but she suspects that Olivia regards her as more malleable. Perhaps she has been guilty of being so, and if she has it will have been done in the hope of a quiet life. Yet Hannah understands now that when something seems easier in the short-term, it is inevitably setting up a long-term hardship, one that often can’t be seen until it is too late.

  ‘I’m going to tell him, you know that, don’t you?’

  Olivia’s dark eyes narrow again, and her top lip thins. She eyes her mother defiantly. ‘Tell him what you like,’ she says, her words stepped with a challenge. ‘I don’t care.’

  Hannah raises an eyebrow. She loathes it when her daughter has this attitude. Unfortunately, she is embracing it with increasing regularity. She puts out a hand. ‘Your phone.’

  Olivia scrunches her face as though she has just bitten into something sour. ‘You can’t.’

  When Hannah raises the eyebrow further, the look alone is enough. Olivia reaches into her pocket to retrieve her mobile phone, before slamming it into her mother’s open palm.

  ‘I hate you,’ she hisses. ‘You’ve ruined my life.’ She marches to the living room door and yanks it open before turning back to the room, her mouth moving to say something she doesn’t seem capable of articulating, a million and one words that are sitting on her tongue ready to be fired at her mother. Instead, in a voice that is disconcertingly calm, all she says is, ‘I’m never speaking to you again.’

  She slams the living room door shut behind her before heading upstairs. Hannah hears her heavy steps tramp across the landing and Olivia’s bedroom door thud shut. There is no thought for Rosie, who is sleeping in the room next door. There is no thought for anyone but herself. If Hannah could put her behaviour down to just being a teenager then she would, but where Olivia is concerned, she fears that there is something more, something they are only now beginning to see the start of.

  3

  Two

  Olivia

  * * *

  Her head hurts. She drank nearly three glasses of wine at the party last night, even though she had hated the taste of it. She had tasted wine before – she stole some of her parents’ months earlier, sneaking downstairs during the night and trying it through a frustrating combination of curiosity and boredom – but just a couple of sips had been enough to deter her from bothering again. Last night had felt different though. Last night, for the first time ever, she felt as though she might be able to fit in somewhere, if only she was given a chance. People laughed at her, but Olivia is so used to that now that she was almost able to block out the sniggers and the comments whispered behind the back of raised hands, ignoring them with a determination that does not usually come naturally to her. She knows she will have to change to fit in anywhere, but the idea of changing is one that only seems to her a good thing.

  The party was full and loud and was everything her mother would have hated. The girl who lived there had been left home alone with her older sister, their parents entrustin
g them with the house while they went for a long weekend abroad with friends to celebrate an anniversary. Olivia couldn’t imagine her parents ever doing something similar, not when the closest they came to a celebration of anything was to stay up past ten o’clock. Her mother would have been mortified by the number of people crammed into the noisy living room, by the drinks spilled in sticky puddles on the kitchen worktops and the plants that had been knocked over in the garden, their ceramic pots shattered upon the patio.

  Olivia stares through glassy eyes at the artexed ceiling, the swirling white patterns making her headache worse. She has done this so often over the years, during all her time spent in this bedroom, seeing shapes and figures in the twists and turns that play out above her: a dragon with its long tail looped around itself; a bird taking flight from the branch of a tree; a face with blurred features that watches over her as she tries to find sleep amid her thoughts. She pushes the duvet down to her waist and lifts her pyjama top from her chest, allowing the air to circulate and cool her sticky skin. She would love to open a window, to feel a burst of fresh air against her face. For now, she stays where she is, replaying in her head what happened at the party last night and the argument she had with her mother when she got home.

  She meant what she said to her, every word. She hates her mother – more than hates her – and she will never speak to her again. No one can make her, and the notion that Olivia can control their communication – or lack of it - feels empowering in a way she couldn’t have anticipated and now wishes she had used sooner. Silence will be her weapon. She wonders just how much suffering she will be able to inflict with it.

  Olivia lies beneath her duvet for what feels like forever, her thumping head made worse by the anger that throbs through her like a second beating pulse. She feels so much of it that she thinks she might explode, and she wonders how her mother would feel then, to come upstairs later to find nothing left of her, just a mess of pieces blown apart by the suffocating dictatorship her parents insist on inflicting upon her. It would serve her right.

  She stares at the wallpaper and the embossed patterns that can still be made out through the paintwork. A few years back, she had begged her mother to have her room redecorated. Childish fairies and toadstools had still adorned the walls, having been there since Olivia was just a little girl. No matter how much her mother might have wanted to keep her young, Olivia was growing up. She was a young woman now, and young women didn’t have fairy wallpaper in their bedrooms and pink curtains hanging at their windows. She had thought her mother might strip the walls – even better but far less probable, that she might have agreed to let Olivia have a go at doing it herself – but she had instead only painted over the paper, the pale emulsion bubbling at the joins. In places, where the paint was applied too thinly and could have done with another coat, traces of the animations can still be seen, like some relic of the past, her mother still clinging on to a childhood that has gone.

  Olivia doesn’t want to be reminded of her childhood. When she sees these patterns through the paint, it is like looking at ghosts from the past, things she doesn’t want to have to be subjected to. She isn’t a little girl anymore. Just months from now, she will be old enough to do so many things she knows her mother is desperate to keep her from, but there will be nothing she can do to stop her, not now that Olivia has decided things need to change around here. Olivia wants to smile at the thought, but despite everything, she can’t bring herself to find any satisfaction in it.

  There is a knock at her bedroom door, and the irony of the gesture makes Olivia’s hands curl into small fists at her sides. On any normal day there wouldn’t be a thought for her privacy, but she realises that this is not like any normal day. Nothing is normal, not after what happened last night. Something feels shifted, some power game that has been silently played out between her and her mother for so long now, with Olivia always in a losing position. But not anymore, she thinks. Nothing is normal now, and she knows that things may never be normal again.

  Her mother wants her to call out to answer her; this sudden knocking of the door to announce her presence on the other side is nothing more than a trick to get Olivia to speak. She won’t do it. She made a threat, and she intends to carry it out. Ignoring the sound, she turns on to her side and faces the wall.

  ‘I’m coming in,’ her mother says, when the third knock at the door goes unanswered.

  Olivia closes her eyes at the sound of her mother entering the room, bracing herself for the lecture she knows is to come. There have been so many of these ‘talks’ that they have all started to merge into one. The general message is always the same: don’t do anything remotely exciting; don’t break any rules or dare to do anything that might involve having what is commonly known as fun. Olivia wonders not for the first time whether it is possible to die of boredom. If it hasn’t been achieved by anyone yet, she believes she may be monotony’s very first victim.

  ‘You don’t want to stay in bed all day, do you?’

  Her mother stands behind her, trying to taunt her with the question and with the answer she knows Olivia will not give, and Olivia can sense her presence looming there, like some harbinger of doom. They talked about them in an English lesson once at school, these people or things that arrive like a bad omen, and it occurred to her at the time that the description fitted her mother in so many ways. Something bad always happens when she’s around, and this is it, Olivia thinks, she is living it – the bad thing that has followed her mother’s presence is this life that she now finds herself trapped in.

  ‘I think you should come down and have some breakfast, at least. You haven’t eaten anything since yesterday.’

  If she was to bring herself to speak to her, Olivia would tell her mother that she isn’t hungry. There is an empty feeling in the pit of her stomach, that kind of burning hollowness that usually passes once a mouth has been fed, but this particular sensation requires something different, something food alone cannot conquer. If she was to stop eating completely, would anyone notice her disappearing? She wants to be noticed, but only if it is silent and subtle and pain-free, and starvation doesn’t seem to her to be any of those things. She has tried it, and she is doing well so far at limiting what she consumes. They can’t force her to eat, and they can’t make her talk. Olivia has some control over her own life, at least.

  When she feels her mother’s hand on her shoulder, Olivia has an urge to hit it away. She won’t give her the satisfaction of seeing a reaction. This is what her mother wants, to goad and test her, to see how far Olivia can be pushed before she will break. Her mother would love to see her lash out because then she could argue that her point has been proven: her daughter is nothing but trouble, out of control. She would become the poor victim, the woman whose wayward daughter assaulted her, with Olivia forever condemned as the evil horror-film-cliché offspring.

  ‘I only want what’s best for you.’

  Her mother’s fingers press against her shoulder, massaging her skin. Olivia grimaces. She holds her breath, not wanting to slip up and say what is stuck at the end of her tongue; not wanting to end so soon what she has only just started. Now that she has made the promise – to her mother and to herself - she needs to see it through.

  ‘I know you don’t feel it,’ her mother continues, refusing to give up, ‘but you’re still young. You think I don’t get it, but I do. And when you’re older, when you’ve got kids of your own maybe, you might finally understand me too.’

  When her mother’s hand leaves her, Olivia draws in breath through clenched teeth. She just wants to be left alone; is that so much to ask? She will never have children; she isn’t sure why anyone would ever want to. Why would she want to be a parent, when all parents seem to do is mess things up? Olivia will be a better person for not bringing any kids into this world and subjecting them to the things she has had to put up with. It seems to her that some people have children just to meet a societal expectation, and what then? They are left to raise peopl
e they don’t really like, resenting them for the life that has been lost in return. Then there are the ones who have children too young, who have barely left their own childhoods when they become parents. Olivia cannot think of anything worse.

  ‘There’s food downstairs for you when you’re ready.’

  She waits for her mother to go, relieved at the sound of the bedroom door being pulled closed behind her. Olivia turns on to her back again, refocusing on the patterns on the ceiling. She thinks about what happened at the party the night before and feels a flush that rises to her cheeks. She thinks about that boy, about what they did – what she did - and she imagines telling her mother, watching the reaction on her face when she hears about what really went on at that party. It would be worth whatever trouble she would get into just to see the look on her face.

  Olivia needs to get out of here. She needs a plan. Her head hurts more as she thinks too deeply, and she knows that she can’t do this now; she needs more sleep first. She needs to sleep through the ache that tugs at her head and the numbness that pulls at her legs until she finds herself able to get up again and face the world. Lost to a daydream of a different life, somewhere far from this place they call home, Olivia finds her eyes growing heavy and she loses herself to the fantasy of being somewhere else. Of being someone else.

  When she sleeps, the dream doesn’t go with her. It never does.

  A couple of hours later she is roused from sleep by the sound of more knocking at the bedroom door. Her head remains fogged with the effects of alcohol, and her limbs feel heavy, her ankles still weighted to the bed. There is a second bout of knocking. Her mother is persistent if nothing else, she thinks.

  ‘Olivia.’

  It is her father, home from his work trip. He has been away for three nights, though it feels like longer this time around. She is never too sure which she prefers, her father at home or not, because at least when he is there the tensions between Olivia and her mother have something between them that is able to offer a distraction. When it is just the two of them – or three, counting Rosie, who is mostly there in presence but rarely present in spirit – the awkwardness that settles when they are compelled to be in the same room as one another offers the worst kind of silence that Olivia has ever known. She prefers her father there, she thinks, though there really isn’t much in it.