It takes twenty-five minutes to attach one stupid bit of plastic to another but there’s no way Alex is going to ask Dad for help. The inane conversation behind him stops eventually, thank goodness. It’s great for a few days but I think I’d kill myself after a month in a place like this. Fuckwit. The splash of the mop and the scrape of the bucket, the rhythm just slow enough to show that he wasn’t putting any effort in. Will he make everything worse or better if he confronts Dad? He wants someone older and wiser to tell him what to do, but there is no one. He is out of the harbour mouth now and he can feel the long sway of the ocean proper. One more turn of the nail. He unrolls a length of electrical tape and bites it off with his teeth. Leaning into the recess he tapes the nail to the body of the pipe to keep his makeshift tourniquet tight. Round once, three, seven times. It’s not pretty but it looks serviceable. He stands up. Soiled wet elbows, soiled wet knees.
Done? His father opens the back door and pours another bucket of dirty water into the stone gutter.
Alex twists the big dial to Drain and restarts the machine. The drum turns over a few times, then picks up speed, juddering. He looks into the recess. The makeshift junction holds without leaking. Result.
As he’s leaving the room, Dominic touches his arm. Alex.
Alex fixes his attention on the light switch.
What’s the matter?
Alex steps back very slowly to disengage from his father’s touch. Like two spacecraft undocking. If he says anything now he will explode. He walks slowly towards the door.
Alex …?
She didn’t know who she was any more, that was the truth of it. The newel post, her fairy-tale father, ‘My Funny Valentine’. She had given up trying to remember her own bedroom. It was like moving to the edge of a cliff and gazing down through miles of empty air. You thought you were anchored by the tick of the clock, the sound of your children in the garden, these hands gripping the arms of this chair. Reality. It meant nothing. It was the story that mattered, the story that held you together, the satisfaction of turning those pages, going back to favourite scenes over and over, a book at bedtime, the reassurance of it. Saying, This happened … Then that happened … Saying, This is me. But what is her story? Losing the plot. The deep truths hidden in the throwaway phrase. She was coming, wasn’t she? Karen was coming. Her vengeful little angel.
Kick, says Daisy. Kick your legs right up. And he manages it, just, despite gymnastics totally not being his forte. She holds his ankles and yanks them higher to straighten his knees.
And the world is suddenly upside down, his face fat with blood, a delicious wobble in his arms. He’s like Atlas, carrying the planet on his upturned hands. And then he can’t hold it any longer. His arms give way and he crumples onto the grass, shrieking and laughing and rolling down the hill. But he lands on a stiff little thorn branch. Shit bugger bloody, shit bugger bloody.
Benjy …?
He gets to his feet and does a little anaesthetic dance. The pain is going down. But then he takes his hand away and sees the four red lines cut into the soft flesh of his underarm, tiny red drops blooming. He starts to cry and Daisy holds her arms open. Hey, Action Man. So he comes and slumps in between her legs and she hugs him.
Shit shit shit.
She rocks him gently. She remembers how this used to feel, how it still feels. Nothing you can do, just wait for the time to pass. The Armour of Christ. She’s not angry now, nor as confident, just exhausted, mostly. Thinking and feeling too many things in too short a time.
But Benjy is crying not just about the wound on his arm, he is also crying about the woman who is being mean to Dad. He doesn’t like to see adults suffering. He still believes that when he reaches the age of twenty-one he will no longer be sad, he will no longer be afraid, he will no longer be bullied. It is a hard clear star he can fix his quadrant on. But if that woman at work can bully Dad …
My turn, says Daisy.
Benjy dries his eyes and rolls away so that she can stand up. She finds a little pillow of grass. Forehead down, hands planted. A little push and her legs rise into the blue. Like diving into the earth. Absolutely vertical. The tiniest splash and little waves of earth spreading away from the spot where you vanished into the dark. Limestone, granite, basalt.
Mum bought a weird doll, says Benjy.
What kind of weird? She wondered how long you’d have to stay like this before it started feeling normal, till it looked right.
She said it was for someone, then she said it was for her.
Daisy thought about the baby who died, those scary thoughts you got sometimes. What if I were someone else? What if I never reached the world? It’s something for school. Just to reassure him. A project. Though God alone knows what Mum was up to.
That’s all right, then.
Yeh, that’s all right.
Can we go back now?
Of course. A few more precious seconds then she gave in to gravity.
Say it began with shadows, that it was shadows always. The sun above us, below us a dark figure that is ourselves and not ourselves. Look how it follows me, see how we dance in time. Narcissus, all of us, right from the beginning. Trace your hand on the rock wall of this cave, using flint, using charcoal. Now the ghost of you will live on after you have gone. Draw lines in the dirt. This is the wolf and that is the river. There are the hills and the men who live beyond them. This is how we can trap the wolf. This is how we can kill the men. Imagined futures breeding and branching. We are, I know not why, double within ourselves. So many different things to want and fear. Ghosts fighting for possession of a body.
Gather round the fire, says the old man. Once upon a time … And suddenly we are transported to a world that seems both strange and familiar. Angels and demons, wolves and shadows, the men who live beyond the hills.
The salmon wasn’t going to fit into a single baking tray, was it? Louisa should have thought of that in the shop. She would have to rearrange it after baking, cut-and-shut, like a crashed car. She placed the jar of honey and the jar of olives on opposite corners of the cookbook to hold it open. Foil, peppercorns, mustard. Open the fridge. Sour cream, dill. Amazing you could get it here. She looked out of the window and saw Benjy and Daisy returning from a walk. It had happened this week, hadn’t it, Daisy realising? Suddenly it was obvious, now that she thought about it. The way she held herself, some tension gone. Memories of that ghastly funeral, the way she sang the hymns, trying so hard to put her heart into something. She hadn’t told her parents, had she? Or perhaps she’d told them and it had gone down badly. Angela’s weird behaviour, perhaps it had nothing to do with the baby dying, or not that kind of baby dying.
She should have had two children. Or three. Or four. Melissa would have been a different person, surely. Sixteen years of ruling the roost, it couldn’t be good for anyone. Forty-four. She wasn’t old, was she? She could still have a child, with Richard. Was that an absurd thought?
Richard sat down on the bench and handed Melissa a mug of tea. That ridiculous cane. Like someone’s grandad. She took the tea only because it would have seemed childish to refuse. He let the silence run for ten seconds. You want to be successful, you want to be rich, you want to have a good job.
And …? She didn’t need any more of this stuff, not today.
You can offend some people. In fact, you have to offend some people if you’re going to get things done. He should have talked to her like this a long time ago. He should have done many things a long time ago. But you have to admit when you’re wrong.
I haven’t done anything wrong. He refused to answer. She told you, didn’t she? Thanks, Mum.
People are scared of you, Melissa. That’s how you get them to do things. And you can do that at school but it doesn’t work in the long run. You have to learn how to make people like you.
It caught her off guard. She was waiting for a lecture about knuckling down and toeing the line, but she was holding her shield in the wrong place and he had slipped a blade in u
nder her ribs, because the shameful truth was that she wanted to be like him. The salary, the respect, the achievement.
A little column of midges rose and fell in the centre of the lawn as if contained in a big glass tube.
Richard rubbed his face. You have to find something you really care about, then everything else falls into place. But I’m not sure you’ve found anything you really care about.
I care about … But what did she care about? Out of nowhere she was crying. Sailing boats and women blowing glass. She would never be an artist, she would never love someone, she would never be loved.
Melissa …?
But she was standing up and running towards the house, her spilt tea dripping through the slats in the bench.
Daisy was passing through the kitchen when Louisa held out a glass of wine in a way that clearly meant, You’re staying.
So Daisy clinked the glass against the chunky handle of the big knife Louisa was holding. What happened in there, by the way?
Washing machine. Louisa swept the carrot peelings into the bin. Alex fixed it. Your dad mopped the floor.
Sounds about right.
I’m sorry Melissa was horrible to you.
So, everybody knew.
I ought to come up with some sort of excuse, her being my daughter, but she can be an utter shit sometimes.
It was my fault, really.
Many boys have made the same mistake.
Daisy realised that they were talking about the kiss.
She should carry a government health warning, that girl. The kettle clicked off and Louisa poured the boiling water into the biggest pan.
Like it was the most ordinary thing in the world. And Louisa was on her side, Louisa of all people, Louisa who picked tiny pieces of fluff off Richard’s jumper. The jar of honey and the jar of olives.
It happened this week, didn’t it? Louisa slotted the kettle back on to its stand.
We went for a walk up Black Hill.
I didn’t mean that. Louisa dried her hands on the tea towel and looked at her. It’s like there was a big knot inside you. And someone’s untied it.
God, she stumbled through life failing to understand everyone. Louisa. Melissa. Jack. Lauren. Herself most of all. How did you know?
You’re a good daughter, said Louisa. I don’t think they’re proud enough. She halved the tea towel and hung it over the rail on the Aga. Now. What do you think? Shall we pull out the stops for the last night?
Good idea, said Daisy, because that was it, wasn’t it? Nothing more to be said, nothing more that needed to be said.
There are no flowers so Daisy makes a collection of holly and grasses and a budding branch she can’t identify and arranges them in the handpainted Spanish jug which she places in the centre of the table. Paper serviettes folded and rolled, a bishop’s hat in every place. Two candles in wine bottles, flames multiplied in the wobbly glass of the leaded panes. Marks & Spencer’s Chablis, the salmon cut and shut so deftly on a fresh sheet of silver foil that no one notices, flecks of grass green in the white of the sauce, asparagus, beans and carrots.
Why does it make your wee smell funny? asks Benjy.
Methanethiol, said Richard, and some sulphides whose names temporarily escape me.
Fresh bread, half the loaf sliced so the slices curled away like in an advert. The little bone-handled butter knife stuck into the pale yellow slab. Whisper Not, Dominic’s choice. Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette.
They’re both solicitors, said Alex. It probably counts as animal cruelty. The dogs are shut inside ten hours a day. I take them to the park and they go ballistic.
Angela is drinking too much in the hope that it will calm her, though she can see, too, that it is loosening her grip on the real world.
Once more, Benjy is picturing the centre of the table as a city on an alien planet, the condiments, the wine bottles, the handpainted Spanish jug transformed to towers and gun ports. The two candles become refinery flares, an empty wicker mat the landing stage for which he aims as he weaves through the heavy laser flak in the scout vehicle.
How often is Angela like this? asks Richard quietly, because he had learnt over twenty-five years of being a doctor that normal was a very broad church and pathological too easy a diagnosis.
Just forming the word never in his mind makes Dominic realise how serious this is. His silence speaks for him.
I suspect she needs to see someone.
You’re right, says Dominic, though he had lost the right to advise her on all but the most trivial matters after losing his job. As if one paid actual money for such rights. I’ll see what I can do.
Louisa and Daisy are talking about swimming. It was just a thing I was really good at.
But …?
In the end it’s just going up and down a pool. I think it’s better doing something actually fun that you’re not so good at.
Like?
How rarely she asked the question. Acting. I liked acting.
Louisa rested her knife and fork at half past six. And your friends in the church?
I’m not sure they’ll be friends any more. What would she do? Walk away, like she’d walked away from Lauren?
It might be good for them. She sipped her wine. There’s a lot of troubled people out there.
She was right, wasn’t she? Meg, Anushka. Who could tell? So many ways of being saved. So many cold dark places.
Richard turns to Melissa. I remember you saying you’d got a dodgy Oberon.
He is being kind, and this, she knows now, is the thing that scares her most of all. Kindness, her inability either to give it or receive it. I haven’t really been thinking about the play. It seemed the least of her problems. We’ll work it out. Down the other end of the table Mum and Daisy are gossiping, like she’s been usurped and they want her to know it. She needs distracting, but Richard is talking to Dominic again so she turns to Alex. Your dad said you were going to Wales. Because she can do it, too, she can be kind, she can be interested. It’s not hard. Mountain-biking, right?
He stares at her long and hard then laughs quietly. Utter disdain. You’d hate it.
And she thinks, fuck nice, fuck kind. Dust and tumbleweed. Her father’s daughter, because no one treats me like that, no one.
Fourteen hours to go, said Dominic. We seem to have made it without anyone killing anyone else.
Thank you, said Angela. For all this. For bringing us here. As if she were a little girl remembering to be polite.
You’re welcome.
A toast. To Richard.
And Louisa.
Cheers.
Something provisional about the two hours between supper and bedtime. Everyone kicking their heels slightly before tomorrow’s departure. Daisy reads Tintin to Benjy. Flight 714 to Sydney. Two hours and every trace of you and your friends wiped from the surface of the earth!
Angela fills half a suitcase. Dominic means to say something, about her seeing someone, about her getting help, but he can’t work out how to do it. He takes the cardigan from her hands and offers to finish the packing and this seems enough to absolve him of the greater duty for the time being at least.
Angela wanders downstairs and makes a cup of tea. Richard is putting the food they won’t need for breakfast into a cardboard box. Flour, olive oil, two bags of cashews. He asks if she is all right. She summons enough self-possession to head him off at the pass because she is tired and a little drunk and not sure she could explain even if she wanted. He gives her a hug which feels clumsy because it catches her by surprise and she is not able to return it deftly enough. He holds her for a long time and she wonders if he is going to say something, about Mum, about Dad, about the two of them being brother and sister, perhaps, but he finally breaks the silence by saying simply, Look after yourself.
Half-eleven. Alex comes out of his and Benjy’s room en route to the toilet. Something in the corner of his eye. Turning, he sees Melissa, standing at the end of the corridor watching him, leaning against
the window sill, hair down, bare legs, man’s shirt. He tries to turn away but leaves it just a moment too long. She pushes herself lazily upright and walks down the landing, face blank. He can’t believe this is happening, all his previous opinions swept away by the fierceness of his wanting. She stands in front of him, arms hanging by her side, steps a little closer, angles her head and lets herself be kissed. He puts one hand round the back of her neck and pushes his tongue into her mouth. Pine fabric conditioner. Freakishly pliable. He lifts her shirt. White cotton knickers, the roundness of her arse under his hand. He pulls her towards him so that she can feel his erection, wanting to know what permissions he is being granted. She neither presses back nor pulls away but takes hold of his t-shirt, turns and begins leading him towards the bedroom. There is something about this that he doesn’t understand, but there are many things he doesn’t understand about Melissa. Perhaps this what she is like when she gets horny. He knows little and cares less.
Angela puts her mug of tea on the side table and opens the creaky door of the stove to make herself a fire, balls of paper, kindling pyramid, small log. She lights the paper, shuts the door and spins open the little vent, sits back and waits for it to roar and bloom and settle, then spins the vent almost shut.
Fatigue and wakefulness warring with one another. If she can make it through tonight perhaps everything will be better in the morning, but if she goes to bed now she will lie staring at the ceiling. She feels ill at ease being down here as the house grows empty and quiet, but if she is upstairs she will worry that these rooms are neither wholly empty nor wholly quiet.