Daisy was wandering around Hay-on-Wye Booksellers looking for something a little more addictive than Dracula, something to hold her attention completely. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? There was a gay and lesbian section. She’d seen the sign. Scared to look, scared she might be revolted, or entranced, scared she might be accosted by some terrifying gatekeeper. Big netball coach, some flinty girl with Hitler hair.
Melissa was looking at a remaindered volume of watercolours by John Singer Sargent. She loved the cool clean heft of big art books. But these pictures frightened her, how good they were, as if the paint had simply fallen into place. Sailing boats, women blowing glass in a darkened room in Venice, fountains in a park in Paris. She would never be able to do this, would she, because to be an artist you had to run the risk of failing, you had to close your eyes and step into the dark. The feeling of her empty pocket where her phone should be. Being treated like a ten-year-old. Fuck.
Sorry. Angela bumps into a second person. Little passages of blankness, like when you’re driving a familiar route and come round to find yourself at the wheel. The health food shop. She is staring at a cold cabinet of cheese and salami and bean sprouts. Are Richard and Louisa cooking tonight? Karen’s birthday. She keeps remembering then forgetting then remembering. She decides to go to The Globe early, fearing she might be carried off by the riptide unless she moors herself while she has the chance. Bohemian reclamation chic, an old chapel once, now a café-cum-gallery-cum-something else. She buys a cappuccino and a white chocolate muffin and sits down. There is a balcony made of scaffolding and some truly ghastly paintings. The pulpit still stands in the corner. Like being a student again. Foreign language films and patchouli and Spare Rib. She looks up and sees that Karen has walked in, that Daisy has walked in.
A second later and she would have turned tail but Mum has seen her now so she can’t beat a retreat without making it seem like an insult. She walks over. Pews and hippy cushions and old blankets.
Hello, love. Mum is eating a muffin and huddling slightly, like she’s cold, or hiding from someone.
Hiya. Daisy sits.
A long strange silence, as if Mum is a child and feels no pressing need to communicate with the adult world. It scares her. Are you OK?
Mum is using the tip of her index finger to move all the crumbs on her plate into a little central pile. I’m having a difficult day.
Mine’s not exactly been a barrel of laughs. But Mum doesn’t react. Another long strange silence. I might be leaving the church. She catches herself by surprise, saying this. Again Mum says nothing, just leans over and smiles and rubs Daisy’s forearm. She seems sad. Mum …?
I just want you to be happy.
Something in her voice. An echo of Gran during that last year. The weirdest suspicion that she doesn’t really know who Daisy is. Mum …?
It’s Karen’s birthday.
Who’s Karen? She assumes it is some girl at school. Then she remembers. Karen who … She isn’t sure of the word.
Not the day she died, but the day she would have been born.
But this was seventeen years ago.
Eighteen. It didn’t used to bother me. Then all of a sudden … She sits up and gives a little shake, as if trying to throw off this passing strangeness.
That farawayness. As if Daisy is simply someone she has met on the bus with whom she is passing time. Have you got some money for a coffee? She needs to step aside for a few moments.
Maybe I’m just allergic to this kind of holiday, says Mum.
What kind of holiday?
Countryside, rain. She digs her wallet out of her bag and hands it over.
By the time the stripy mug of coffee is placed on the counter in front of her, Daisy turns and sees that Dominic and Richard and Louisa have arrived, thank God.
Phil the Fruit and Murder and Mayhem. The Great Outdoors (makers of fine leather goods). Teddy Bear Wonderland. Crusty loaves and Bakewell tarts. I had not thought death had undone so many. Like a mist around the living, the crush of ghosts, the ones we can’t let go. The outline in the bed, the empty place at the table. Siege Perilous. She crushes out the stub of her Silk Cut with the toe of her boot and fastens the top toggle of her green duffel coat. She stands on the bridge and watches the river flow to the sea. Silt and salmon, nitrates and mercury and human waste. Plynlimon to Monmouth, to the Severn Estuary, over the Welsh Grounds, down the Bristol Channel and out into the great downsweep of the North Atlantic Current.
Dominic assumed that Angela had found the message, her distance, her muted distress, but they drifted into a dog-legging conversation about a friend from college who lived in a squat in Finsbury Park, and the German student next door who was murdered, and the German club at school, and he realised that she hadn’t found the message, had she? Something else was wrong, the way she was running on autopilot, radio silence and the cockpit windows frosting over. He was off the hook. His vow of, what? three days ago? Getting Angela back on track, making the family work, being a proper father and husband. He wasn’t sure he had the energy now. He looked around the table. Richard and Louisa rebonded, Melissa absent in one way, Angela in another, some kind of sibling huddle at the far end, Benjy deep in his book. How rarely people were together. Gaps in the chain of Christmas lights. But Daisy and the kiss … Perhaps they had already done the right thing by not making a song and dance about it, all part of life’s rich pageant and so on. He tried and failed to catch her eye. A sudden stupid sadness, the worry that he had lost all of them, the urge to go and pick Benjy up and tell him how much he loved him. But you couldn’t do that, could you, in the middle of a meal, just go and hug someone and tell them that you loved them.
Where’s Melissa? asked Richard.
Louisa angled herself so that no one could hear and said quietly, I got a call from school.
About?
Melissa and her friends bullied a girl who then tried to commit suicide. Saying it to Richard made it sound worse, if that were possible.
The girl. Is she all right?
It seems so.
What did they do to her?
Louisa stalled. They never talked about Melissa and sex. That delicate boundary.
You can tell me.
She felt implicated by her own transgressions.
I’ll keep my distance. I promise.
They took a photo of this girl, Michelle, at a party, having sex with some boy, then they sent it to everyone.
Charlie Lessiter. Those boys who force-fed him laxatives. Swallow, Fatty, swallow! Holding him in a headlock. You’re worried they’ll expel her?
I worry that this is not just a phase.
Children can be vicious. He wanted to talk to Michelle, find out how serious it was. Because killing yourself was easy if you meant it. He wanted to be the doctor, wanted to be the lawyer. He didn’t like this blurry view from the outfield.
She thinks she can slip out of it like she always does. A bit of charm here, a few lies there.
Perhaps I shouldn’t keep my distance.
Meaning?
Perhaps I should talk to her. The other man, the one who’d found her smoking in the woodshed forty-eight hours ago, he seemed like a stranger now. I won’t wear hobnailed boots this time.
Two sweetcorn chowders, a slightly disappointing goat’s cheese tart, two Stilton ploughmans … Alex and Daisy were sitting on either side of Benjy, conspicuously looking after him, showing their parents how to be parents. Benjy was reading Guinness World Records. Look, this man lifted 21.9 kg using his nipples.
Benjy, seriously, why would I possibly want to look?
Alex observes his father. It seems both impossible and completely obvious. They didn’t love each other, did they, Mum and Dad, didn’t like each other half the time. A little flash of sympathy for Dad, then he thinks of the dirtiness, the lying, the disrespect. He wants to tell someone, but who? Daisy has enough on her plate. He could tell Richard, perhaps, but there’s something unmanly about handing over the responsibil
ity. He has to confront Dad. If he doesn’t then the knowledge is going to eat away at him, but every time he pictures this encounter his heart hammers and his palms sweat. Though it would resolve something, wouldn’t it? Something that has haunted him since the night in Crouch End.
Guess the record for the most underpants worn at the same time.
Benjy, just eat that potato.
One hundred and thirty-seven.
Benjy …
I’m a bit full actually.
Of what?
Nothing.
We had some ice cream.
Daisy looks at Mum who seems a little better now, more awake, more focused, stringing actual sentences together with Dad. That echo of Gran. Made her blood run cold. Though when she thinks about it maybe Mum deserves a bit of suffering. All the shit she’s given her over the past year. Schadenfreude. Is that a dreadful thing to think? Well, if she’s leaving the church then thinking dreadful things without feeling guilty has to be one of the compensations.
Banana split, treacle pudding, cappuccino … Richard picks up the bill.
Daisy was waiting at the zebra crossing when she saw Melissa sitting on the stone wall across the road at the pre-arranged taxi rendezvous point. She bodyswerved rapidly towards The Shop of Crap and stood beside an aluminium dustbin full of brooms. No, wait. She was tired of feeling cowardly, feeling vulnerable. Fuck what Melissa thought, fuck what Mum and Dad thought. She turned and looked back across the road, Melissa still unaware of her presence. Spiteful and shallow. Like they always said about bullies. Underneath they’re frightened. Because she had her own bluebird tattoo now, didn’t she? And there were things she’d learnt in the church that remained true in spite of everything. Putting on the Armour of Christ, kneeling in the street, that drunk woman spraying them with a can of lager. If you believed with all your heart then none of it mattered. What doesn’t kill me only makes me stronger.
Gay. What a wet fucking word it was.
She waited for a Post Office van to pull up then walked over the road. Melissa seeing her now and something extraordinary happening. The glossy thoroughbred look, the slow-motion hair, it counted for nothing. It was this confidence, wasn’t it, the Armour of Christ. Melissa was shrinking just as she had shrunk in Melissa’s presence four days ago. Daisy sat down beside her.
What? said Melissa nervously.
Daisy closed her eyes. She could let this moment run forever.
Once again, Dominic was deputed to sit up front and converse with the taxi driver. Young white guy in his twenties, polyester tracksuit top, tiny diamond earring, driving a little too fast, but not fast enough for Dominic to complain.
Five days and the landscape was fading already. The gash of gold and the green distance. How pleased we are to have our eyes opened but how easily we close them again. The barn owl on the telegraph pole. It was picturesque, then it wasn’t picturesque, then it was background.
Daisy stared through the window trying to discern a future that wasn’t clear yet. These were not her people, this was not her family.
The mobile was sitting right there in Mum’s bag. Melissa wanted to just grab it, have an all-out bitch fight, but Daisy would have loved that.
Louisa was remembering those family holidays in Tenby. Auntie May’s boarding house, though she wasn’t technically an aunt, of course. Deckchairs and slot machines, sharing a double bed with her brothers, the day Dougie smashed a crab with a rock and the time it took to die. There was an island out in the bay. She can’t remember the name now. There was a monastery on it and there were boat trips, but they never took one. It came back to her in dreams sometimes. Of course Richard should meet Carl and Dougie. Why had she been so frightened of this?
Outside the damp green world sliding by. Ash and poplar. Cord moss and hart’s tongue fern.
Angela had offered Alex the front seat on the way back so that she could sit quietly with Benjy in the back without being quizzed by Richard who was giving Alex a brief lecture on CT scanning. Iodine, barium, how The Beatles helped because EMI used their profits to make the prototype.
What’s this? asked Benjy, dipping his hand into the green plastic bag that was squished between him and Mum.
Oh, said Angela, it’s something I bought.
Alex looked round and saw that Benjy was holding a Victorian doll, stained lacy dress, blank china face, too broken to be an antique, too weird to be a toy.
Who’s it for? said Benjy.
For me, said Angela. For someone.
Benjy slipped it carefully back into the bag, half believing that it might hiss and bite him if he treated it roughly. Can you put it on your side? He lifted the bag gingerly by the ends of his fingers. I don’t like it.
What’s that? Richard glancing into the rear-view mirror, now that they had exited the narrow chicane of high hedges. Alex caught his eye and gave the faintest shake of his head, meaning Don’t ask, because he, too, knew now that something was wrong.
Louisa turned to him as he came into the bedroom. What do you think?
He scanned her top to toe. Hair? Clothes? The earrings. Metal sunflowers, bronze and silver. They make you look younger.
How much younger? Thirty is good. Sixteen is not.
Ten. Ten years younger. I like them. He swivelled and lay down with his head on the pillow. Sorry about this.
About what?
Family holiday. Not quite as restful as I had planned.
This is restful. She lay down next to him.
They stared at the ceiling, a king and queen on a tomb. The smell of cocoa butter. He liked Benjy, he liked Daisy, he liked Alex but he didn’t like Dominic. Something weak about him, insubstantial. And his own sister …? They had the same parents, they had lived in the same house for sixteen years but he had no idea who she really was.
Hey.
What?
You’re off duty. She checked her watch. One hour. She rolled onto her side and propped her head on her hand.
The spill of blonde hair, hips curved and creaturely. Desire coming back as strong as ever, that switchback of feelings. Wanting, not wanting. Anxiety, content. How fluid and unpredictable the mind was.
Wait. She put her finger to her lips, got to her feet and locked the door.
Are you sure this is a good idea?
I think it’s an excellent idea. She lay down beside him again.
What if someone hears us?
You can apologise publicly over supper.
He lifted her blouse and put his hand on that little bulge of warm flesh above her waistband. I’m afraid I can’t be too gymnastic in my present state.
Gymnastic? What were you planning?
What happened? Mum looked as if she had been standing in an inch of foamy water for the last thirty minutes. The same vacant expression she’d had all day.
I think there must be a leak somewhere.
Warm damp air, that flooded cellar smell. Alex splashed across the floor and turned the machine off. Wet clothing slumped and levelled in the glass porthole. At home she’d be shouting and swearing. Go and get yourself a cup of tea and I’ll sort this out, OK?
Thank you, Alex. She walked off into the kitchen, the damp slap of her shoes receding.
Christ. He squatted and ran his hand round the front hatch. Dry. Something at the back, then, or underneath. He heaved on the big white box, rocking it gently from side to side so that it boomed and scraped out of its recess. He peered into the dark between the side panel and the plastered wall. Darkness, two disconnected pipe ends, a broken circlip lying in the suds.
My God. Dad was standing in the doorway, like a bloody lemon as usual, letting someone else get their hands dirty. Washing machine broken?
No. It’s on fire. He wanted to go over and punch his father. But the china doll … Did Mum know? Was that why she was acting so strangely? She seemed so fragile. He shouldn’t do anything to upset her. He reached into the recess and picked up the circlip. Tendrils of black slime, the little metal ridges shea
red smooth where it had come free. He stood up. You find a mop and clean this place up. I’m going out to the shed.
The little fold where the curve of her bottom met the top of her thighs. He ran his hand down her back. The most adult activity, yet it made you feel like a child again, at home with your own nakedness, touching another person, skin to skin.
Something hovering that he could almost touch, some secret which had eluded him for a long time. But the warmth of her body under his hand, the quiet of this room, distant voices in the garden. He let it drift away.
In the corner of the shed, a crumbling wooden workbench, toy piano in sun-bleached red plastic, fishing net, spark plugs, filthy webs over everything. He picked up a coil of rusty garden wire thin enough to cut with the kitchen scissors. Red electrical tape. He wiped the roll clean on the leg of his jeans. Three-inch nail. Use it like a tourniquet. He sat down on the roller, light-headed suddenly. He hated being trapped inside other people’s problems. He kept his life simple. Do your work, choose good friends and keep your promises. He didn’t deserve this crap. He’d been dreaming about Coed-y-Brenin for weeks, nothing to do but cycle and eat and sleep. It scared him now, something happening to Mum while he was away. The idea that he might not have a home to come back to.
Are you making something? It was Benjy.
Washing machine’s bust.
He’s being a man, said Daisy.
He didn’t want to be a man. He wanted to run away with them. But he couldn’t say it. This gulf between them, a sudden flash of what Dad might be going through, of what he might have been going through for years. Fear and disgust, thinking how similar they might be after all.
See you later, yeh? Daisy laughed. Send out the helicopter if we’re not back in two hours.
Little princess. She really did believe it on some level, the old dream, not that her real parents would come to claim her one day, purring Bentley, chauffeur, paint like a mirror. Nothing that naïve, simply that they were out there somewhere. Because she looked at Mum’s brothers and the word uncle made her skin crawl. Three years since she last saw them. Never again, hopefully. Fat and badly dressed, smelling of cigarette smoke and fried food. That awful dog with the patch of hair shaved off and the stitches crusty with dried blood, sleeping on the sofa. At least Dad wanted to be rich. You looked at Grannie and Gramps and you saw where it came from, polish on the table every day, antimacassars and family photos and the row of china figurines. But she was Mum’s daughter, too. The fear that something genetic might rise and up and claim her if she wasn’t strong enough. That period when Mum was fucking everything in sight, echoes of that shitty estate, people with nothing to live for.