We All Live Here

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-one

Celie

Something is going on at Dad’s. Marja lies on the sofa a lot, or hides in her bedroom when Celie and Violet are there. She used to make special meals on the nights they were staying: big dishes of Asian food or enormous bowls of pasta and salad, all laid out on their little kitchen table, with posh ice cream to follow, like she was trying to use dinner time to make them all feel like a family, but now she just asks them to pick something from the takeaway menu, her face pale and apologetic, and retreats. When she is in the living room, she and Dad are always speaking in low voices. Celie wondered for a while whether it was down to her: she has spent the last eighteen months letting Marja know, in a million subtle ways, that she might have to be there, but it doesn’t mean she’s ever going to consider her and Hugo family . Marja wants them all to forget what she did, stealing Dad from Mum, and act like they’re some kind of blended Instagram family. She uses this fake-friendly voice to talk to Celie, and offers her spare skincare samples and things that she’s bought at the shops and apparently can’t use. But Celie does her best never to talk to her beyond one-word answers, and makes sure the moment Dad lets her leave the table she heads to her and Violet’s room to sit on her phone. It’s annoying because Hugo always wants her or Violet to play with him, and Dad is always saying: C’mon, girls, just give him half an hour . But who wants to play with a six-year-old boy? If Marja wanted a babysitter she should have hired one.

She has watched Marja turn from this yoga woman, with her stupid defined shoulders and her Lululemon leggings into a big fat whale, and sometimes she wonders whether Dad feels bad he left Mum for her now that she’s changed, whether it will make him go off her, but Dad still seems bewitched, always hovering round her, checking she’s okay, squeezing her hand when they think Celie’s not looking. It’s revolting, the way they’re all lovey-dovey in front of her, like she’s just meant to pretend it isn’t happening. But now Marja is nearly always upstairs, and Celie is wondering whether her determination not to let Marja have an ounce of affection has finally had an effect. She feels a little weird about it, admittedly, given that there’s going to be a baby, and she isn’t sure whether Mum would even want Dad back after all this time. Mostly she just doesn’t want to have to deal with more stuff.

Because things are also weird at home—Bill is still staying at the bungalow and Gene is away working so the house is really quiet. And Mum is preoccupied, taking extra-long baths or always out, earphones in, with Truant. Her mouth is doing that turned-down thing when she doesn’t even realize she’s making her lips look thin, and you have to ask her twice for anything because she’s not really listening. Celie had looked through her phone once—Mum is hopeless at passwords: they’re always either Celie1 or Violet1 or something like that—but there’s not much in her messages, except for a bunch of times she asks Bill to come home. At first Celie thought they must have had a row, but she keeps telling him she loves him and he keeps saying he just needs some space. Celie asked Violet if she had done something to annoy Bill—she was remembering the time Violet used his personalized note cards to draw space aliens—but Violet swears she hasn’t. So basically they spend their lives shuttling from one weird atmosphere to another.

She talked to Martin about it when they walked to the bus stop after Animation the previous week. He had done a whole storyboard about having a new baby brother and how he had imagined it turning into a ginormous monster that ate his parents before the last frame showed it as a tiny little wormy newborn. He had told the group it was based on his feelings when his mum got pregnant by his stepdad.

“Do you like your brother?” she had asked him. “Your stepbrother, I mean.”

“Half-brother,” he said. “Yeah. He’s okay. He’s a little dude.” He had glanced at her. “I wasn’t sure I was going to like him because at first I thought my stepdad was a bit of an idiot. But it’s weird. Like when I first went to the hospital to see him, he was just—I don’t know. Just this tiny kid. And I’d never had a brother, so I suppose it felt…nice? He can be quite annoying and stuff and he goes in my room when he shouldn’t. But yeah. I like him being around.”

“I think I’m going to hate my dad’s baby,” Celie says, as they sit on the bus-stop seats that are set at a slant, so you always feel like you’re about to slide off. “It just feels like it’s all his fault.”

“How?”

“Well, if the baby hadn’t come along Dad might have gone back to Mum eventually. And now…that’s it.”

Martin considers this. “I don’t know. My aunt went back to her husband even though she had a baby with someone else. Sometimes if people love each other that much they can find a way around it.”

Celie wonders whether her mum and dad love each other that much. She doesn’t really remember them hugging in the last years they were a family, or even smiling at each other. Mum was always working and Dad was always out, and they were a bit snappy with each other apart from when they were on holiday.

“I think I’m just still mad at Dad and Marja. So I guess I’m going to be angry with this kid too.”

“You should talk to your dad.”

Except Celie doesn’t have the kind of dad you can talk to. The one time she told him she hated going to his house he just told her she wouldn’t always feel that way, and when she said she would, he got frustrated and told her she was being “deliberately difficult.” And that when she was older she would learn that life was complicated and things didn’t always work out how you wanted and you had to adapt. She didn’t bother saying anything to him after that. Marja tried to talk to her once, before she got pregnant. She sat down while Celie was eating breakfast and said she understood Celie probably had some complicated feelings about the new set-up and she wasn’t going to try to take her mother’s place. Celie had almost laughed. You couldn’t begin to take Mum’s place , she wanted to say, but instead she just slid silently off the tall breakfast stool and took her bowl of cereal upstairs.

She doesn’t talk to the girls at school about her parents. Soraya’s and Harriet’s families are still together, and she gets the feeling they wouldn’t really understand. She would have talked to Gene about it but he doesn’t bother texting now he’s away working. She doesn’t even know what country he’s working in. Bill sends the odd text saying politely that he hopes she’s well and that she’s doing her homework and he will see her very soon, but it’s like getting a message from a teacher—weirdly formal—and she never knows how to respond beyond just sending him a couple of kisses. He doesn’t even understand emojis.

Celie walks to her dad’s house, dragging her feet and staring at her phone. Her mum will have dropped Violet there straight after school— she tends to pull up in the street and just wait in the car until she sees that Violet has been let in. Celie, being older, has been given a key to the house but always rings the doorbell anyway, just so they know she doesn’t think it’s home. She stands in the porch, wondering whether Mum remembered to pack her overnight bag and drop it with Violet’s. She forgot the previous weekend and Dad had to drive back to theirs so that Celie could pick it up and he was really grumpy about it, even though he didn’t even have to get out of the car. Apparently he doesn’t like leaving Marja alone, even though she has, like, actual months before the baby is due.

Nobody answers the door. Celie rings again, leaving her finger on the bell for a count of five, even though she knows this will irritate Dad. There is still no answer. Finally, she digs around in her bag for the key that he gave her and lets herself in.

Marja’s house is always immaculately tidy, but today the living room is strewn with Hugo’s toys, a plate with crumbs, an open book, a cushion on the floor. Celie stands in the doorway and gazes around. She walks through to the kitchen—the radio is still on, and there is a note scribbled on the kitchen table.

Had to take Marja to hospital. Get Mum to pick you up.

Dad x

Not even a “sorry.” Just Get Mum to pick you up. Celie stares at the note, feeling a simultaneous swell of irritation at her father’s lack of caring, combined with the vague relief that she will be able to go home tonight. She puts the note on the table, and sits for a moment at the kitchen island. Then she stands and opens the kitchen cupboard with the treats in and helps herself to an expensive nut and dark chocolate bar, the kind that costs two pounds in the corner shop. She leaves the wrapper on the side, and goes upstairs. You are meant to take your shoes off at the door in Marja’s house—she has pale wood floors and cream carpets—but Celie keeps hers on, deliberately scraping her feet on each step, just in case there is any dirt left behind.

Marja’s bedroom has zero clutter: all the clothes are folded neatly or hung behind the doors of the fitted wardrobes that don’t even have handles. You have to press them in one place to get them to open. The bed is made neatly, with two color-coded cushions on each pillow and one of those blankets that isn’t a blanket covering the end of the bed. Celie opens the wardrobe and gazes at Marja’s clothes, which are nearly all cream or black or white. It is basically the most boring wardrobe she has ever seen. She opens the drawers, ready to be repulsed by sexy underwear, but all Marja’s knickers are plain gray or black, with only one bra-and-knickers set that is made of silk with some lace stuff. Marja doesn’t have a lot of stuff, not like Mum, but she does have really expensive skincare and perfumes.

There is a whole tray of makeup, laid out carefully with a magnifying mirror, on the dressing-table in front of the window. Celie sits down and picks up the different tubes and wands, opening them to try the different colors. She outlines her eyes with Marja’s Chantecaille eyeliner, then uses the Chanel eyeshadow palette. Marja’s skin is darker than hers, so the foundation doesn’t work, but she uses a little cream blusher and highlighter, then examines her face closely in the magnifying mirror, searching for pimples and open pores.

When she has finished doing her face, she sniffs the perfumes. There are eight different bottles, and she tries each on her wrist until the scents have all blended and she can’t tell which is which. She tries the hand cream on the back of her hand, rubbing it in with her index finger until it is absorbed. Then she picks up the really expensive moisturizer and sniffs it. It has a subtle, flowery smell. She gazes at it for a while, then gets up and walks to the en-suite bathroom. She squeezes the tube so that a manic white worm of cream wriggles its way into the plughole, and then does the same thing twice more, so that the tube is nearly empty. She puts the lid on and goes back to the perfumes, unscrewing the lids that will come off and pouring most of the precious gold-colored liquid into the washbasin. She tops up the bottles with water. She does the same with Marja’s luxe-looking cleanser and then her serum. Then she rinses away the residue, and replaces the bottles carefully on Marja’s dressing-table.

She looks around at the bedroom again, then heads downstairs and calls her mother.

···

“Why your father can’t schedule her appointments around the times you’re with me, I don’t know.” Lila is shaking her head as she drives Celie home. “He only texted me about Violet ten minutes before school pickup.”

“I don’t mind,” Celie says.

Lila shoots her a glance and her face softens. “Sorry. I shouldn’t moan about Dad in front of you. And I don’t mind either,” she says. She reaches out a hand. “I get you for an extra night, after all. Hey, how about we order takeaway tonight? How about a really big unhealthy pizza with extra cheese and whatever toppings you fancy?”

Mum’s cooking has been so terrible since Bill left that Celie’s Yes probably came out more enthusiastically than she meant. But Mum doesn’t seem to notice. She hasn’t worn makeup for over a week now. Her hair is scraped back in a ponytail, she has big shadows under her eyes, and she is wearing the same sweater she has worn for three days this week. For a while Mum had looked like herself again, but now she’s mostly like someone who’s got out of her sickbed to answer the door.

“When is Gene coming back?” Celie says.

Mum keeps her eyes on the road. “I’m not sure,” she says. “He…he…I think his job may keep him away for a bit.”

Celie stares at her knees. She can smell the perfume on her hands and it’s making her feel a bit sick. She thinks she could have talked to Gene about what she’s done. There isn’t really anyone else she could tell without them freaking out. “Is he definitely coming back?”

Mum makes the face she does when she knows something she’s not saying. “I—I don’t know, lovey. I’ll talk to him at some point and we’ll work it out.”

···

The following day Mum asks Celie to pick up Violet. She has an important work meeting, apparently, and even though Celie moans at her that Violet’s school is in the wrong direction, and she’ll have to wait ages because of the stupid play rehearsal, Mum is adamant that she cannot go herself. She is being really odd. She didn’t eat more than a slice of the pizza at supper, and she could tell she was on the phone with Eleanor all night because she could hear her murmuring, I know. I know. I just don’t know what to say to him , when she went past her closed bedroom door.

“Celie, I very rarely ask you for anything. But I do need you to do school pickup for me just now. Bill will do it tomorrow, but he can’t today, and your school finishes in time for you to meet her.”

Parents are so selfish.

Celie gets to the playground at a quarter to five, fifteen minutes before Violet is due to finish, and eats a packet of salt and vinegar crisps that she bought on the way over. She should really have bought some for Violet too so she needs to eat them quickly and throw the packet into the bin so that Violet won’t find out and go on all evening about how mean she is.

Celie has felt weird all day about the perfumes. She’s not sure what came over her the previous afternoon and part of her has been waiting for Dad to call and ask her what the hell she thought she was doing, to tell her she’s a horrible, horrible person. But he hasn’t said anything. She has carried the knowledge of what she did like an increasing pressure all day, pushing at the inside of her head, like something uncontainable. She texts Martin while she waits, her fingers pinking at the ends from the cold.

I did a weird thing at my dad’s.

She tells him about the perfumes, and the creams. There is a short pause, the dots pulsing, and she thinks he’s about to tell her she’s a freak, or that he doesn’t really want to talk to her any more. Maybe he’ll join Meena and the other girls in ignoring her. The dots go on long enough for her to regret even telling him. And then he says: When my mum got together with my stepdad I went through her drawer and threw all her birth-control pills out of the window into next door’s garden. I think I thought it would stop them doing anything. All it did was get me a baby brother, haha.

PS though no baby foxes this year so who knows what happened

It makes her laugh, and feel a bit less weird, but a few moments later the anxiety returns, a big knot in her stomach, like she’s waiting for something terrible to happen all over again.

It’s almost five when the doors to the primary school open, and the kids start to file out, dragging rucksacks or clutching creased pages of their play script. There are loads of other parents in the playground by then, and she keeps her head down, her hood up, focusing on her phone so she doesn’t have to talk to anyone about how they remember when she was at school there, how much she’s grown, all the stupid things adults say. It takes her a moment to notice that Violet, when she walks over, is not on her own. At her side, holding her hand, a big grin on his face, is Gene, chatting briefly to Mrs. Tugendhat, who has her hand pressed to her chest, like she’s literally trying to contain her heart. They talk for a moment and he nods vigorously, then puts his hand on Mrs. Tugendhat’s arm. When the teacher finally walks off she touches the place where his hand had been, like she doesn’t even know she’s doing it.

“Hey, kiddo,” he says, pulling Celie in for a hug. He always does this, like he doesn’t even notice whether you actually want one or not.

“I thought you were away working.”

He pulls a weird face. And then his grin returns. “Well, I am! But I had an early finish and I missed you guys, so I thought I’d just stop by and walk you home. I can’t stay long—gotta get back to work—but I just wanted to see your smushy little faces.”

And even though he’s really irritating, and he’s wearing his stupid Grateful Dead T-shirt, which makes him look like an old hippie, Celie feels something inside her collapse with relief.