We All Live Here

Chapter Two

In the days since Dan leaving, and her mother dying, Lila has developed a series of strategies to get through each day. When she wakes, mostly between five and six a.m., she slugs down an anti-depressant citalopram with a glass of water, dresses before she has time to think, and walks Truant for an hour, striding up to the Heath where the early-morning dog-walkers cross muddy paths with the lone coffee-drinkers and grim-faced runners in earphones. She walks while listening to audiobooks or chatty, anodyne podcasts, anything to ensure she’s not alone with her thoughts.

She returns and wakes the girls, bribing and cajoling them out of bed and onto the school run, trying not to take personally the harrumphing and cries of anguish about missing socks and phones. Since Bill moved in with them he has made breakfast, insisting that the girls eat porridge with berries and a variety of seeds instead of Lila’s Pop Tarts and three-day-old bagels with jam. Bill is rigorous about diet and talks endlessly of fish oils and the scouring properties of lentils, ignoring the rolling of the girls’ eyes, and their longing looks toward the box of Coco Pops. In the evenings he rustles up nutritional meals involving unfamiliar vegetables, and tries not to show his hurt when the girls grumble that actually they’d rather have a ham and cheese toastie.

When Lila returns from dropping the girls, she sits in what is laughingly called her study, a room near the top of the house still lined with the battered cardboard boxes of books they never unpacked, and attacks the most urgent admin of the day. This—and its accompanying financial calculations—exhausts her so she often has a little nap on the sofa-bed, or occasionally lies on the rug listening to a soothing meditation podcast, trying to ignore Truant’s barking downstairs. She tries to eat regularly so that her blood sugar does not drop, and her mood with it. When she wakes up, she shakes off her grogginess with a mug of tea, and then goes to the shop for whatever they don’t have. By then it’s usually time to collect Violet, at which point she becomes Mum again, with no time for invasive thoughts, engaged instead in endless domestic warfare against mess, laundry, homework, the respective travails of her girls’ days, until bedtime. Then she takes two antihistamine tablets (the doctor will no longer prescribe her preferred sleeping pills: apparently they are now considered a “dirty drug”), or sometimes, if in a pronounced insomniac phase, smokes half a joint out of the window. Finally, when she feels mildly confident that sleep is approaching tentatively, like a skittish horse, she switches on a sleepcast—in which soft-voiced actors read boring stories in monotones—and prays not to wake again within a couple of hours.

She does not want to think about her ex-husband and his effortlessly gorgeous new partner. She does not want to think about his and Marja’s spotless home up the road, with its sparse selection of stylish objects and Noguchi coffee-table. She does not want to think about her absent mother, who had somehow made all of this mess so much more manageable.

Some days, Lila feels as if she’s battling everything: the furious, slippery contents of her brain, her wavering, unreliable hormones, her weight, her ex-husband, her house’s attempts to fall down around her ears, the world in general.

As the girls get up from the supper table that evening, leaving Bill gazing reproachfully at the unfinished bowls of venison and pearl barley stew (“It’s a very good meal—high in protein and low in fat”), Lila realizes with an internal thud that a whole new battleground has just opened up: Dan’s new baby. This child will be the half-sibling of her daughters, a constant presence in all their lives. It will have an equal right to whatever their father has—money, time, love. This child, more than anything else, makes it all real—Dan is never coming back, no matter how unlikely she had known that was. This child is going to be a new thing for Lila to deal with—possibly daily—for the next eighteen years. And the thought makes her want to ram her knuckles into her eye sockets.

···

He calls at eight fifteen. No doubt after Hugo, Marja’s well-behaved six-year-old, has been in bed, bathed, compliant, in clean pajamas and with carefully brushed teeth, for at least an hour. Violet, meanwhile, is hanging by her legs from the banisters, singing the words to a rap song that has contained, at the last count, eleven different references to genitalia.

“Lila.”

She feels the reflexive clench of her stomach at his voice. Takes a breath before she speaks. “I wondered when you’d call.”

“Marja’s really upset.” He sighs. “Look, neither of us wanted you to find out like this.”

“Marja’s upset, is she? Oh.” The words are out before she can help herself. “How distressing for her.”

There is a short silence before he speaks. “Look, it’s eighteen weeks. We thought it was best to get through the summer holidays and then…”

“But it’s fine for the school mums to know.”

“She didn’t tell them. That bloody woman—what’s her name?—she guessed. And Marja couldn’t lie so—”

“No. God forbid there should be any lies involved around here. So when are you planning to tell the girls?”

Dan hesitates. She pictures him running his palm over the top of his head, his habitual gesture when faced with something he finds difficult. “Uh…well. We thought—I thought—it might be better coming from you.”

“Ohhh, no.” Lila stands up from the table and walks to the sink. “Oh, no, Dan. This one’s yours. You want to tell the girls they’re being replaced, that one’s on you.”

“What do you mean ‘being replaced’?”

“Well, you’ve already moved out to play Daddy to someone else’s kid. How else are they meant to see it?”

“You know it’s not like that.”

“Do I? You were their dad. Now you take someone else’s kid to school in the mornings. Have dinner with him every night.”

“I’m still their bloody dad. I’d have dinner with them every night if I could.”

“Not if it involved living with us, though, right?”

“Lila, why are you doing this?”

“Me? I’m doing nothing. You’re the one who ran off. You’re the one who started sleeping with one of our actual neighbors. You’re the one now raising someone else’s kid while your own children see you two days a week.” She hates herself for the sound of her voice, the words that are pouring out of her, but she cannot stop herself. “And you ’re the one who decided to impregnate a woman twelve years younger than you with another bloody baby. A baby which, if I remember rightly, you insisted to me you would never have, no matter how much I wanted it, because you could barely cope with the two we’ve got!”

It is at this point that something makes her look over her shoulder. Celie is standing by the fridge. She has an orange-juice carton in one hand and she is staring at her mother.

“Celie?”

Celie is ashen. She puts down the carton and bolts from the room.

“What?” Dan is saying. “What’s happening?”

“Celie!” she shouts. And then, turning to the phone: “I’ll call you back.”

The door to Celie’s room is bolted and loud music is playing. Lila tries the door, twice, then bangs on it, but gets only a muffled Go away in return. She stands for a moment, unsure what to do, then eventually slides down the door and sits, her back to the wood, listening to the relentless thump of the beat.

As she sits, a slew of messages begins to come through from Dan. She does not have the constitution to read them just now but catches sight of:

you insist on making things more difficult than they

like I said neither of us want to cause the girls any

and they will learn to love the new b

She switches her phone to Do Not Disturb, and sits, trying to regulate her breathing.

Finally, the music lowers in volume. “I’m going to sit here until you talk to me, sweetie,” she says, loud enough for Celie to hear. Her voice echoes into the silence. “I’m not going anywhere. And you know I can be really annoying like that.”

Another long silence.

“I have a Thermos, a sleeping bag, and some mint cake. I could be here till Thursday if necessary.”

Finally she hears footsteps crossing the floor. She hears Celie unlock the door and walk away again. Lila climbs heavily to her feet and opens it tentatively. Her teenage daughter is lying on her bed, her long black hair fanned dramatically around her head, her socked feet up the wall.

“I hate him.”

“You don’t hate him . He’s your dad,” she says, thinking: I do, though.

“He’s so pathetic. You know she posted her test result on Instagram?”

“What?”

Celie holds up her phone. And there it is, a photograph of the white plastic wand with a little blue line, OMG in looping text underneath it.

“So much for not telling anyone.” Lila hands back the phone, sits down on the bed, puts her hand on Celie’s leg. “I’m sorry, darling. I’m so sorry you’re having to deal with all this.” She swallows. “And I’m sorry I…I don’t always handle it very well.”

Celie wipes a tear furiously from under her eye, wiping again when she sees the smudge of mascara on her finger. “Not your fault.”

“Well, it certainly isn’t yours.”

Celie gives her a sideways look. “When did you know?”

Lila shakes her head. “I heard one of the mums talking to Marja about it at school today. That was why Dad called. I’m sorry you had to overhear it like that.”

Celie shakes her head. “I already knew.”

“What do you mean, you knew?”

“She has Pregnacare vitamins in their bathroom. She’s had them for months. Why would you have those if you weren’t having a baby?”

Lila feels another painful clench. So this was planned. She closes her eyes for a moment, grits her teeth, releases her jaw, then says: “Well, maybe you’ll love it once it gets here. Maybe it will be a wonderful addition and you’ll find that having an extended family is a really lovely thing. It’s going to be fine, Celie. In fact I’ll bet you love having another little brother or sister. Someone else to adore you. Just like we all do.”

There is a short silence.

“Oh, God, Mum, you’re such a rubbish actor.”

Lila looks at her. “Really?”

“You have no poker face at all .”

They sit together for a moment. Lila sighs. “Well, all right, it may feel a bit odd for a bit. For all of us. But I know your dad really does love you. And these things tend to work out in the end.”

Celie wriggles toward her, reaches out, and squeezes her hand. She slides it away again, but it’s enough. “Are you okay, Mum?” she says, after a minute.

“I’m absolutely fine,” says Lila, firmly. “I have you two, don’t I? The only family I’ve ever wanted.”

“And Bill.”

“And Bill. What would we do without Bill?”

“Even if he does make us eat really gross food. Mum, can you have a word with him about all the lentils? They made me do a really loud fart in morning geography and I swear everyone knew it was me.”

“I’ll talk to him.” Lila slips into her bedroom and takes a second citalopram before she heads back downstairs. The doctor was adamant that she should stick to the recommended dose. But the doctor’s ex-husband wasn’t busy impregnating half of north London. Lila grabs a second Citalopram.

···

“All okay?” Bill is washing up, classical music from Radio 3 seeping gently into the quiet of the kitchen. Even if she tells him she’ll do it later, he’ll start fidgeting while she watches television, then quietly absent himself from the living room, appearing half an hour later with a damp tea-towel and an expression of quiet relief. Bill likes order. And over the past few months she has come to understand that Bill needs to feel useful, even if she worries that a seventy-eight-year-old should rest more than he does. He turns to her, the tea-towel over his shoulder.

“Fine,” she says. And then she adds blithely, “Dan is having a baby. With the Bendy Young Mistress.”

Bill stands for a moment, digesting this. “I’m so sorry,” he says, in his clipped, stately-home voice.

There is a short silence.

And then he says: “I don’t really know what to say. Your mother would have known.” He walks up to her and she thinks he’ll give her a hug. But he hesitates, then puts a hand on her upper arm and squeezes it. “He’s a fool, Lila,” he says gently.

“I know.” Lila swallows.

“And he’ll be sorry when he’s struggling with all those sleepless nights and nappies,” Bill adds. “Teething. Toddler tantrums. All that dreadful mess and chaos.”

I loved that chaos , she thinks sadly. I loved being in the middle of it all, my grubby babies, my house of plastic toys and unemptied laundry baskets. I wanted five. A little tribe. And a house in the country filled with dogs and muddy boots and baskets of kindling we’d collected in the woods . “Yeah,” she says.

When she raises her head, Bill is watching her. He looks down at his highly polished shoes. Bill’s shoes are always polished. She is not sure she has ever seen him without a neatly ironed shirt and shiny shoes. “Actually, she would probably have called him a wanker,” he says suddenly.

Lila’s eyes widen. She thinks for a moment, then says: “She probably would.”

“A stupid fucking wanker. Probably.”

Bill never swears, and these words coming out of his mouth sound so unlikely that they stare at each other and let out a short, shocked laugh. Another follows, like a hiccup. Lila’s laugh becomes a half-sob. She has both hands over her face. “It never stops, Bill,” she says, crying. “Bloody hell. It just never stops.”

Bill squeezes her shoulder. “It will. That’s it now. That’s the three things.”

She sniffs. “Since when did you become superstitious?”

“Since I didn’t salute a solitary magpie and your mother got hit by a bus the next day.”

“Seriously?”

“Well, I have to blame something.” He waits until she’s stopped crying. “You’ll be okay, dear girl,” he says softly.

“We’ll be okay,” she repeats, and pushes her hair from her eyes. She sniffs, wipes away her tears. “Do I look okay?”

“You look fine.”

She studies his expression and screws up her face. “Jesus, Bill, you have a worse poker face than I do.”