Still Me
Page 53
‘A bit.’
‘You sit down with the others. I’ll take care of this.’
I forced my shoulders back. ‘No, Mum. I haven’t seen you for months. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on? How’s your night school? And what’s the doctor saying about Granddad?’
The evening stretched and the television burbled in the corner of the room and the temperature rose until we were all semi-comatose and cradling our bellies, like someone heavily pregnant, in the way one did after one of my mother’s light suppers. The thought that we would do this again tomorrow made my stomach turn gently in protest. Granddad dozed in the chair and we left him there while we went to midnight mass. I stood in the church surrounded by people whom I had known since I was small, nudging and smiling at me, and I sang the carols I remembered and mouthed the ones I didn’t and tried not to think about what Sam was doing at that exact moment, as I did approximately 118 times a day. Occasionally Treena would catch my eye from along the pew and give me a small, encouraging smile and I gave one back, as if to say, I’m fine, all good, even though I wasn’t and nothing was. It was a relief to peel off to the box room when we got back. Perhaps it was because I was in my childhood home, or I was exhausted from three days of high emotion, but I slept soundly for the first time since I had arrived in England.
I was dimly aware of Treena being woken at five a.m. and some excited thudding, then Dad yelling at Thom that it was still the middle of the ruddy night and if he didn’t go back to bed he would tell Father Ruddy Christmas to come and take all the ruddy presents back again. The next time I woke, Mum was putting a mug of tea on my bedside table and telling me that if I could get dressed we were about to start opening the presents. It was a quarter past eleven.
I picked up the little clock, squinted, and shook it.
‘You needed it,’ she said, stroked my head, then went off to see to the sprouts.
I descended twenty minutes later in the comedy reindeer jumper with the illuminated nose I had bought in Macy’s because I knew Thom would enjoy it. Everyone else was already down, dressed and breakfasted. I kissed them all and wished them a happy Christmas, turned my reindeer nose on and off, then distributed my own gifts, all the while trying not to think of the man who should have been the recipient of a cashmere sweater and a really soft checked flannel shirt, which were languishing at the bottom of my case.
I wouldn’t think about him today, I told myself firmly. Time with my family was precious and I wouldn’t ruin it by feeling sad.
My gifts went down a treat, apparently given an extra layer of desirability by having come from New York, even if I was fairly sure you could have got pretty much the same things from Argos. ‘All the way from New York!’ Mum would say in awe, after every item was unwrapped, until Treena rolled her eyes and Thom started mimicking her. Of course, the gift that went down best was the cheapest: a plastic snow globe I had bought at a tourist stall in Times Square. I was pretty sure it would be leaking quietly into Thom’s chest of drawers before the week was out.
In return I received:
– Socks from Granddad (99 per cent sure these had been chosen and bought by Mum)
– Soaps from Dad (ditto)
– A small silver frame with a picture of our family already fitted into it (‘So you can take us with you wherever you go’ – Mum. Dad: ‘Why the heck would she want to do that? She went to ruddy New York to get away from us all.’)
– A device that removed nostril hair, from Treena. (‘Don’t look at me like that. You’re getting to that age.’)
– A picture of a Christmas tree with a poem underneath it from Thom. On close questioning, it turned out he hadn’t actually made it himself. ‘Our teacher says we don’t stick the decorations on the right places so she does them and we just put our names on them.’
I received a gift from Lily, dropped in the previous day before she and Mrs Traynor went skiing – ‘She looks well, Lou. Though she runs Mrs Traynor pretty ragged from what I’ve heard’ – a vintage ring, a huge green stone in a silver setting that fitted perfectly on my little finger. I had sent her a pair of silver earrings that looked like cuffs, assured by the fearsomely trendy SoHo shop assistant that they were perfect for a teenage girl. Especially one now apparently prone to piercings in unexpected places.
I thanked everyone and watched Granddad nod off. I smiled and I think I put on a pretty good impression of someone who was enjoying the day. Mum was smarter than that.
‘Is everything okay, love? You seem very flat.’ She ladled goose fat over the potatoes and stepped back as it sprayed out in an angry mist. ‘Oh, will you look at those? They’re going to be lovely and crisp.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Is it the jetlag still? Ronnie from three doors down said when he went to Florida it took him three weeks to stop walking into walls.’
‘That’s pretty much it.’
‘I can’t believe I have a daughter who gets jetlag. I’m the envy of everyone at the club, you know.’
I looked up. ‘You’ve been there again?’
After Will had ended his life, my parents had been ostracized at the social club they’d belonged to for years, blamed vicariously for my actions in going along with his plan. It was one of the many things I had felt guilty about.
‘Well, that Marjorie has moved to Cirencester. You know she was the worst for the gossip. And then Stuart from the garage told Dad he should come down and have a game of pool some time. Just casual-like. And it was all fine.’ She shrugged. ‘And, you know, all that business was a couple of years ago now. People have other things to think about.’
People have other things to think about. I don’t know why that innocent statement caught me by the throat, but it did. As I was trying to swallow a sudden wave of grief, Mum shoved the tray of potatoes back into the oven. She shut the door with a satisfied clunk, then turned to me, pulling the oven gloves from her hands.
‘I almost forgot – the strangest thing. Your man called this morning to say what were we going to do about your flight Boxing Day and did we mind if he picked you up himself?’
I froze. ‘What?’
She lifted a lid on a pan, released a burp of steam, and put it down again. ‘Well, I told him he must have been mistaken and you were here already, so he said he’d pop over later. Honestly, the shifts must be taking it out of him. I heard a thing on the radio where they said working nights can be awful bad for your brain. You might want to tell him.’
‘What – when’s he coming?’
Mum glanced at the clock. ‘Um … I think he said he was finishing mid-afternoon and he’d head over afterwards. All that way on Christmas Day! Here, have you met Treena’s fellow yet? Have you noticed the way she’s dressing these days?’ She glanced behind her at the door and her voice was full of wonder. ‘It’s almost like she’s becoming a normal person.’
I sat through Christmas lunch on high alert, outwardly calm but flinching every time someone passed our door. Every bite of my mother’s cooking turned to powder in my mouth. Every bad cracker joke my father read out went straight over my head. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t hear, couldn’t feel. I was locked in a bell jar of miserable anticipation. I glanced at Treena but she seemed preoccupied too, and I realized she was waiting on Eddie’s arrival. How hard could it be? I thought, grimly. At least her boyfriend wasn’t cheating on her. At least he wanted to be with her.
It began to rain, and the drops spat meanly on the windows, the sky darkening to fit my mood. Our little house, strung with tinsel and glitter-strewn greetings cards, shrank around us, and I felt alternately as if I couldn’t breathe in it and terrified of anything that lay beyond it. Occasionally I saw Mum’s eyes slide towards me, as if she was wondering what was going on, but she didn’t say anything and I didn’t volunteer it.
I helped clear the dishes and chatted – I thought convincingly – about the joys of grocery delivery in New York, and finally the doorbell went and my legs turned to jelly.
Mum turned to look at me. ‘Are you okay, Louisa? You’ve gone quite pale.’
‘You sit down with the others. I’ll take care of this.’
I forced my shoulders back. ‘No, Mum. I haven’t seen you for months. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on? How’s your night school? And what’s the doctor saying about Granddad?’
The evening stretched and the television burbled in the corner of the room and the temperature rose until we were all semi-comatose and cradling our bellies, like someone heavily pregnant, in the way one did after one of my mother’s light suppers. The thought that we would do this again tomorrow made my stomach turn gently in protest. Granddad dozed in the chair and we left him there while we went to midnight mass. I stood in the church surrounded by people whom I had known since I was small, nudging and smiling at me, and I sang the carols I remembered and mouthed the ones I didn’t and tried not to think about what Sam was doing at that exact moment, as I did approximately 118 times a day. Occasionally Treena would catch my eye from along the pew and give me a small, encouraging smile and I gave one back, as if to say, I’m fine, all good, even though I wasn’t and nothing was. It was a relief to peel off to the box room when we got back. Perhaps it was because I was in my childhood home, or I was exhausted from three days of high emotion, but I slept soundly for the first time since I had arrived in England.
I was dimly aware of Treena being woken at five a.m. and some excited thudding, then Dad yelling at Thom that it was still the middle of the ruddy night and if he didn’t go back to bed he would tell Father Ruddy Christmas to come and take all the ruddy presents back again. The next time I woke, Mum was putting a mug of tea on my bedside table and telling me that if I could get dressed we were about to start opening the presents. It was a quarter past eleven.
I picked up the little clock, squinted, and shook it.
‘You needed it,’ she said, stroked my head, then went off to see to the sprouts.
I descended twenty minutes later in the comedy reindeer jumper with the illuminated nose I had bought in Macy’s because I knew Thom would enjoy it. Everyone else was already down, dressed and breakfasted. I kissed them all and wished them a happy Christmas, turned my reindeer nose on and off, then distributed my own gifts, all the while trying not to think of the man who should have been the recipient of a cashmere sweater and a really soft checked flannel shirt, which were languishing at the bottom of my case.
I wouldn’t think about him today, I told myself firmly. Time with my family was precious and I wouldn’t ruin it by feeling sad.
My gifts went down a treat, apparently given an extra layer of desirability by having come from New York, even if I was fairly sure you could have got pretty much the same things from Argos. ‘All the way from New York!’ Mum would say in awe, after every item was unwrapped, until Treena rolled her eyes and Thom started mimicking her. Of course, the gift that went down best was the cheapest: a plastic snow globe I had bought at a tourist stall in Times Square. I was pretty sure it would be leaking quietly into Thom’s chest of drawers before the week was out.
In return I received:
– Socks from Granddad (99 per cent sure these had been chosen and bought by Mum)
– Soaps from Dad (ditto)
– A small silver frame with a picture of our family already fitted into it (‘So you can take us with you wherever you go’ – Mum. Dad: ‘Why the heck would she want to do that? She went to ruddy New York to get away from us all.’)
– A device that removed nostril hair, from Treena. (‘Don’t look at me like that. You’re getting to that age.’)
– A picture of a Christmas tree with a poem underneath it from Thom. On close questioning, it turned out he hadn’t actually made it himself. ‘Our teacher says we don’t stick the decorations on the right places so she does them and we just put our names on them.’
I received a gift from Lily, dropped in the previous day before she and Mrs Traynor went skiing – ‘She looks well, Lou. Though she runs Mrs Traynor pretty ragged from what I’ve heard’ – a vintage ring, a huge green stone in a silver setting that fitted perfectly on my little finger. I had sent her a pair of silver earrings that looked like cuffs, assured by the fearsomely trendy SoHo shop assistant that they were perfect for a teenage girl. Especially one now apparently prone to piercings in unexpected places.
I thanked everyone and watched Granddad nod off. I smiled and I think I put on a pretty good impression of someone who was enjoying the day. Mum was smarter than that.
‘Is everything okay, love? You seem very flat.’ She ladled goose fat over the potatoes and stepped back as it sprayed out in an angry mist. ‘Oh, will you look at those? They’re going to be lovely and crisp.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Is it the jetlag still? Ronnie from three doors down said when he went to Florida it took him three weeks to stop walking into walls.’
‘That’s pretty much it.’
‘I can’t believe I have a daughter who gets jetlag. I’m the envy of everyone at the club, you know.’
I looked up. ‘You’ve been there again?’
After Will had ended his life, my parents had been ostracized at the social club they’d belonged to for years, blamed vicariously for my actions in going along with his plan. It was one of the many things I had felt guilty about.
‘Well, that Marjorie has moved to Cirencester. You know she was the worst for the gossip. And then Stuart from the garage told Dad he should come down and have a game of pool some time. Just casual-like. And it was all fine.’ She shrugged. ‘And, you know, all that business was a couple of years ago now. People have other things to think about.’
People have other things to think about. I don’t know why that innocent statement caught me by the throat, but it did. As I was trying to swallow a sudden wave of grief, Mum shoved the tray of potatoes back into the oven. She shut the door with a satisfied clunk, then turned to me, pulling the oven gloves from her hands.
‘I almost forgot – the strangest thing. Your man called this morning to say what were we going to do about your flight Boxing Day and did we mind if he picked you up himself?’
I froze. ‘What?’
She lifted a lid on a pan, released a burp of steam, and put it down again. ‘Well, I told him he must have been mistaken and you were here already, so he said he’d pop over later. Honestly, the shifts must be taking it out of him. I heard a thing on the radio where they said working nights can be awful bad for your brain. You might want to tell him.’
‘What – when’s he coming?’
Mum glanced at the clock. ‘Um … I think he said he was finishing mid-afternoon and he’d head over afterwards. All that way on Christmas Day! Here, have you met Treena’s fellow yet? Have you noticed the way she’s dressing these days?’ She glanced behind her at the door and her voice was full of wonder. ‘It’s almost like she’s becoming a normal person.’
I sat through Christmas lunch on high alert, outwardly calm but flinching every time someone passed our door. Every bite of my mother’s cooking turned to powder in my mouth. Every bad cracker joke my father read out went straight over my head. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t hear, couldn’t feel. I was locked in a bell jar of miserable anticipation. I glanced at Treena but she seemed preoccupied too, and I realized she was waiting on Eddie’s arrival. How hard could it be? I thought, grimly. At least her boyfriend wasn’t cheating on her. At least he wanted to be with her.
It began to rain, and the drops spat meanly on the windows, the sky darkening to fit my mood. Our little house, strung with tinsel and glitter-strewn greetings cards, shrank around us, and I felt alternately as if I couldn’t breathe in it and terrified of anything that lay beyond it. Occasionally I saw Mum’s eyes slide towards me, as if she was wondering what was going on, but she didn’t say anything and I didn’t volunteer it.
I helped clear the dishes and chatted – I thought convincingly – about the joys of grocery delivery in New York, and finally the doorbell went and my legs turned to jelly.
Mum turned to look at me. ‘Are you okay, Louisa? You’ve gone quite pale.’
