Chapter 20
Jodie wants to meet for a coffee in Yorkville, near her office. The early December snow is starting to fall, making the rows of cute Victorian redbrick buildings seem even prettier. I love breathing in the air, which seems colder and crisper than in London.
The cafe is full of trendy breastfeeding mums who wrangle toddlers and sip coffee over the heads of their sleeping BabyBjorn kids. My skin itches with irritation. Jodie doesn’t seem to notice them.
Jodie is all business, talking about her agency, and the boss she eventually plans to overthrow, whom she calls ‘Dryballs’ for some reason.
I didn’t have her down for a blue-sky thinker underneath the hipster haircut and rockabilly shirts, but here we are.
I’m only half listening because one of the young top-knotted mums at the table next to us has put her New Yorker tote bag down on the chair in between our tables.
She smells, arrestingly, of Body Shop Dewberry.
Something snaps. I want out of this simmering envy.
Before I can engage my brain fully, I hear my mouth in action. ‘Sorry, would you mind moving your status anxiety symbol off that chair? A friend of ours is coming soon.’
There is no friend coming soon. The top-knot woman is so serene, she either doesn’t hear me, or is choosing to ignore me. And then, of course, I am envious afresh at precisely how few fucks she has to give around the likes of me. Part of me hates myself for it, for stooping so low.
Jodie is looking at me as though I’ve just sicked a fully formed walrus up out of my throat.
‘What the heck was that?’ she whispers.
It’s only afterwards that my synaptic pathways fuse together, after years in rusty decrepitude, and I remember. The fucking Dewberry.
Just as we do every Saturday, and like every other thirteen-year-old in Northside Dublin, Jilly and I take a bus to Grafton Street to our personal mecca, the Body Shop.
This is what amounts to a hobby for us. While the shop assistants aren’t looking, we grab handfuls of Dewberry body lotion and smear it on our arms, our stomachs.
We feel the bath pearls and the soaps that look like oversized jewels under our bitten-nailed fingers.
We huff the Blue Ice shampoo and Fuzzy Peach perfume oils.
We even, on occasion, manage to get some handfuls of body lotion down our baggy jeans and on to our bums. ‘Surely that’s four pounds’ worth of cream on me now!
’ Jilly squeal-whispers. I buy a kiwi lip balm for my pencil case, and a can of Japanese washing grains.
Not having to use my mum’s Aapri pads any more already feels like a big, grown-up step.
I arrive home, swinging my little green plastic bag as I walk through the front door, to an unfamiliar scene.
The first thing I notice in the sitting room is the whiskey bottle and mugs in the middle of the coffee table.
The room has a blanket of cigarette smoke hanging weightless and imposing in the air.
My mother is crying. Mrs Carson’s arm is around her shoulder.
Patrick, my dad’s boss, stands in the fireplace, hands behind his back.
They all stiffen at the sight of me and my little green Body Shop bag.
‘Esther, love, we need to have a talk about something,’ says my tearful mum as the room tilts a bit. I see myself from the outside, a child star playing a role in a serious, adult drama.
‘Your dad was in an accident at work,’ Mum is saying. ‘There was a heart attack, we think. We won’t know everything for a while. But he’s gone. He’s died.’
‘What dad …’ I say, trying to piece it all together.
‘What fucking dad,’ my mum laughs sadly, mockingly. ‘How many do you have?’
‘Joanie, she’s just trying to take it all in,’ Mrs Carson says gently. I can’t bring myself to tell them that my insides are flush with gladness. No more shouting! No more times where Dad hits Mum and Mum sometimes hits Dad back but mainly doesn’t.
Almost immediately, I turn the evil thoughts of relief inward, shamed.
Christmas has now come and gone with blessedly little fanfare in this house: 25 December is a regular day on the calendar – Naomi visited David’s parents to observe Hanukkah a few days prior – but even though the Holidays are happening right outside the door, the lack of Christmas chat is giving me little time to wonder about what my mother, or Johnny, or Carrie are up to.
Every so often, the pang of guilt about mum spending Christmas on her own surfaces. I vow to make it up to her next year.
But as Naomi and I ease into the afternoon, chatting about where to buy clothes and nice shoes, I can’t bat away the thought that in another life, this very normal day we are having would have been my baby’s second Christmas.
Santa stockings and baby elf costumes. All those gurgles and smiles, lit by fairy lights.
Is Johnny thinking the same way? Maybe he and Melanie are having the time of their lives somewhere in London, cosy and content and not giving me a second thought.
Naomi doesn’t notice the sadness, or ask about Christmas. For that, at least, I am grateful.
Naomi does want to know more about living in London.
‘I’ve never lived anywhere but here,’ she admits. ‘I always thought when I was a kid that I’d like to go live in New York, or maybe Seattle, but that never happened. I was always just OK here.’
‘“OK” sounds pretty good to me,’ I tell her. ‘I wasn’t OK though. I was restless. Couldn’t wait to get going.’
I tell her about my very first night in London with a shudder.
‘Wet behind the ears doesn’t even begin to describe it.
It was this hostel in Bayswater, with four bunk beds in it,’ I tell Naomi.
‘It was a brutal couple of months. The loneliest time of my life.’ I swallow back down the next words: ‘until recently’.
‘There’s a lot to be said for fresh starts though,’ I tell her. ‘I mean, I feel like Benjamin Button, just by being here.’
Naomi stiffens. ‘I thought you were here on vacation? For a couple of months?’
Yikes. ‘I don’t know what this is, honestly,’ I venture. ‘Right now, it’s definitely a vacation.’ She seems assured, but only just.
‘Can I ask you about something?’ I say, keen to change the subject.
‘You can ask me anything,’ she says with real sincerity.
‘What was David like?’
‘Ah,’ she replies, pulled towards warmer memories. ‘What was he like. No one has asked me that in a very long time.
‘He … had integrity,’ she says after a while. ‘He could never say anything mean about another person. Hated others being treated badly. He was incredibly loyal.’
‘Well, that strikes me as a really fantastic quality.’
‘Yeah, he was a solid guy, you know? Totally stand-up,’ Naomi says with a slight catch in the throat. ‘It was only after he passed that I realized he was the thing holding everything together. You know, we always think that it’s the mom doing stuff like that, but really, he was this family’s mom.’
‘I wish I’d met him.’
‘I mean, I wasn’t even really looking to meet someone but there he was. There was probably something in my upbringing that made me latch on to someone like him.’
Something spidery in me reawakens. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, like my step-father was not a good person,’ Naomi says softly. ‘It all looked pretty good from the outside, we lived in a nice house and we went to good schools, but inside the house, things were pretty hellish.’
I feel a pang of protectiveness over Naomi. Poor Ted, too.
‘Oh my God. Me too.’ I am almost shouting in my haste to show that we have this in common. I’d completely forgotten that I’d read about Ted’s childhood in that magazine article.
‘Really?’ Naomi squints at the coincidence, but not strictly in a bad way.
‘Yeah, I mean, my mum was his punching bag.’ What I say next surprises me. ‘Sometimes I was a bit jealous of that, because it meant he was at least noticing her.’
‘Oh wow, that’s awful,’ Naomi says.
‘No one thought we were the respectable house on the block or anything though,’ I add. ‘People on the road used to call our house Hiroshima.’
‘My brother got it way worse than I ever did, I think,’ Naomi reflects. ‘Oy, the poor kid was left black and blue.’
‘That’s so shit,’ I say, because it really is. Trying to sound casual, I add: ‘Well, maybe we could all meet up and trade war stories one day, I dunno …’
‘He’d be one to talk,’ Naomi says almost to herself.
‘He’d be one to talk?’
‘Forget I said that,’ she says, straightening herself. ‘What I mean is, I don’t think talking about these things is my brother’s strong suit.’
I want to draw more out of her about him. Instead, I decide to keep counsel. Let the hare sit, as my mother would say.
I’m sitting at Naomi’s kitchen island, pretending it’s mine.
I am casually browsing baby buggies on a department store website on my laptop, trying to choose which one I might like if money were no option.
I get as far as fur inserts for prams when Violet pings me a message. ‘Hey, do you wanna Skype?’
I don’t want Violet to see Naomi’s house – equally, I don’t want her to know that I don’t want her to see the inside of Naomi’s house. I want all of this to be just for me, for now at least.
‘I’m on the move, but I can be in a Starbucks in ten minutes,’ I type.
Later, as I settle in front of a grande macchiato, Violet and I have our first face to face in a while.
She appears to be in a hospital corridor, or at least somewhere cold and awful and sterile.
Glasses sit on a face that looks swollen from crying, and her shoulders are even more rounded and hunched than usual now that she’s out in the wider world.
‘You all right?’ I say to her in my best mum voice.
‘Not really. I don’t really know what’s wrong with me.’
‘It’ll all be OK,’ I reassure her.
‘This doesn’t feel the same,’ she admits. ‘My mum has started to get really shouty. Screaming about the nuns trying to take her away and shit.’
I realize that Violet has needed Ted, and the community she has created in thrall to him, probably more than any of us.
‘Is there anyone there with you?’ I ask, knowing it’s probably futile. It’s enough to set Violet off.
‘Oh yeah, hang on a sec, I’ll just round them all up,’ she says hurriedly, opening a nearby window. ‘Where’s my gang at? C’mon, I know you’re there somewhere.’
‘Sorry, Violet,’ I tell her, and I genuinely am.
‘There’s a girl on Twitter that’s annoying me,’ she says. ‘Her name is Benni Brisk. Look at her profile.’
Benni Brisk has pinned a tweet: ‘Love tweeting about Ted Levy and literally only Ted Levy and nothing else, only follow me for Ted Levy tweets only.’
Benni looks twenty-five, lithe and pretty in an unimaginative, chai-latte way, which is I’m sure what is really driving Violet to despair. She doesn’t want to share him with some random bikini model, although I guess none of us do.
‘Like who even is she?’ Violet spits.
‘Violet, her tweets seem to be coming from Alaska. She’s in the middle of absolutely nowhere.’ Is that what is concerning her? Benni’s proximity to Ted?
‘Yeah but … she’s not in the group, she’s never asked to be in the group.’ She is clearly spinning.
‘I know, but … she doesn’t have to be in the group to be a fan. She can just do her own thing and tweet whatever she likes,’ I reason. ‘She can be a fan of Ted’s if she wants and that’s OK. It doesn’t need to mean anything.’
‘It’s just … he’s getting bigger,’ Violet says. ‘Like a proper famous person.’
This too, makes me shiver a little, though I won’t admit it. ‘All we can do is tend to our own patch of the online universe and have a bit of fun with it,’ I tell her. ‘Ours is a space to just appreciate and talk, remember?’ I note the long silence. ‘Well, it’s your space, but …’
‘I still can’t believe you haven’t met him yet,’ she says. ‘What’s stopping you?’
‘If only I knew,’ I tell her truthfully.
Violet huffs an unkind laugh and, shaking her head, she signs off, giving me the middle finger as she goes.