Chapter Forty-Three
STUART, SEVEN YEARS EARLIER
It’s a bright February morning, and I should be feeling that swell of hope and anticipation that this time of year can sometimes bring, those little pinpoints of light when the sun feels warm for a moment against your skin, when the daffodils push through.
I’ve always loved the changing seasons, the cyclical rhythm of things happening in the same order, at the same time; it keeps me grounded, but it also inspires me, makes me feel as if anything is possible.
But I am feeling none of these things today, two years after I first moved into this house. As the sun tentatively touches the bare branches of the trees in the back garden, I feel the weight of every recent decision I have made bearing down on me, like a cartoon anvil, casting me in shadow.
Jessamine is in bed, sleeping off the night before. I have given up trying to guide her toward sobriety, and I have given up trying to guide myself toward sobriety; drink, it seems, is all we have left.
I call up the stairs to her. “Tea or coffee?”
“Tea,” comes the reply in a pained, reedy voice. “And toast.”
I make the tea and toast and bring them slowly up the stairs, my breath caught in my chest. The smell in the room is metabolized rum, garlic burps, stale sheets.
Jessamine drags herself up to sitting and stares at me wanly.
She looks horrible. Her skin is sallow and drawn, she has gray circles beneath her eyes, and her hair is tangled and greasy.
She’s been wearing the same nightdress for weeks.
I’ve put a fresh one out for her but she refuses to wear it, as though it’s a matter of principle.
“Sun’s out,” I say, laying the tea and toast on the bedside table next to her. I pass her two painkillers and a glass of water and watch her down them.
“Has Daisy gone?”
“Yes. She left about forty minutes ago.”
Jessamine nods, passes me back the water glass, and then turns to pick up a slice of toast from beside her. She doesn’t ask how her child is. She hasn’t gotten up to see her off since her first week at secondary school last September.
Hugo appears and jumps on the bed. Jessamine frowns, so I snatch him up and put him on the floor.
“You should get up,” I say. “It feels like spring out there. Daffs coming through in the garden.”
She throws me a withering look. “Do I look like I am about to get up to admire daffodils?”
“No,” I say softly. “No, you don’t. But you should. It would do you good. Clear out the cobwebs.”
“Clear out the cobwebs.” She mimics me in a horribly camped-up estuary accent. “It’s all right for you,” she snaps. “You’re not fucking ill.”
I blink slowly. She’s playing the “ill” card again.
She says she’s got some kind of post-viral thing.
She had a bad cold just before Christmas, and ever since she’s stayed in bed all day, but she miraculously gets out every afternoon to the little shop on Grove Place and buys herself two bottles of organic wine and half a liter of dark rum that she somehow manages to carry all the way back to the house, come rain or come shine.
The wine is opened at 4 p.m. By 5 p.m., when Daisy returns from school, Jessamine has had half a bottle and is reasonably together, relaxed enough to ask Daisy about her day, express an interest in her schoolwork, in what she might want to eat for her dinner.
By 6 p.m. she has had a full bottle and likes to pretend that she has finished drinking wine for the day and says something like, “It’s happy hour!
Who wants a rum and Coke?” Nobody will want a rum and Coke, but she will pour herself one anyway and make noises suggestive of a special treat, an earned reward.
When dinner is ready she will open the second bottle of wine, pour a small glass for her mother and a large glass for herself, and she will sit and talk loudly and unpleasantly, complain about the food, push it around her plate, pretend that everyone is against her, start an argument, tell everyone maybe they’d prefer it if she just killed herself, then storm off to bed with the rest of the wine, telling everyone to fuck themselves on the way.
At some point she will come downstairs with the empty wine bottle and pour the rest of the rum into a tumbler, neat, then take the rum up and drink it until she sleeps.
Often the sleep will need assistance. Annie gives her things that her own GP gives her.
I wait until she is asleep before I come up.
If it’s been a particularly awful night, I’ll just take a duvet to the sofa and sleep in the living room.
But usually, I’ll walk into our room to find her slack-mouthed, rancid with drink, comatose, snoring, drooling, the monster quelled for another day.
“You should see the GP,” I say now. “Maybe it’s something serious. You need to get yourself checked out.”
“I haven’t got a fucking GP, Stuart,” she says. “You know that. I’ve told you a hundred times.”
“Well, sign up for one then. But seriously, it’s been nearly eight weeks since you got ill. You shouldn’t still be feeling like this.”
She knows and I know that she’s not ill, that she’s hungover, but this is the stupid game we play, because I am not, under any circumstances, allowed to refer to Jessamine’s drinking.
If I refer to Jessamine’s drinking then I am the enemy, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past two years, it’s not to be Jessamine’s enemy.
“Find me a GP who hasn’t got a three-year waiting list, and I’ll sign up.”
“OK,” I say then, “I will.”
She sighs and drops the toast back on the plate. “It’s cold,” she says.
I don’t tell her that of course it is, that if she wants hot toast, she needs to come downstairs and eat it quickly straight out of the toaster while the butter is still melting on it.
“What?” she asks me pointedly.
“Nothing,” I say with a sigh. Then I say, “Listen, my daughter’s coming over next week, from Australia. I’m going to take her out on the town, have a few drinks, a fancy dinner.” I lick my dry lips.
“That’s nice,” she says acidly.
I’ve known about this for weeks and have been putting off telling her.
“Yeah,” I say lightly, “yeah. It’ll be great.”
“When?” she says petulantly.
“Wednesday, probably. Just finalizing.”
“She only wants to see you for your money.”
I sigh again. She’s obsessed with the money thing. Thinks everything is about the money, constantly.
“She’s just a money-grabbing little bitch. You know she is.”
This is based on me giving my daughter ￡500 about a year ago to help toward her puppy’s vet bill.
Blaise offered to pay me back, but I wouldn’t let her.
The only reason Jessamine knows about it is because she goes through all my paperwork and emails.
I let her because it makes for an easy life, and if there’s one thing you must have worked out about me by now it’s that I like an easy life.
I give her a tight smile and then tell her I’m going down to make coffee for her mum.
“Well,” she shouts after me, “aren’t you going to say anything? I’m right, aren’t I? You know I’m right! Your choice to see her, but don’t come crying to me when she gives you some sob story about dying dogs and you end up giving her half your money!”
I slow as I approach the door, swallow down my fury, and quietly close the door behind me.
She sits across the kitchen table from me later that day, staring at me with icy eyes.
I have made spaghetti with a slow-cooked cherry tomato and basil sauce.
There are curls of hand-shaved parmesan on top of it.
It’s one of my specialties. Daisy in particular loves it.
I am drinking a cold lager, my third of the day.
I will have two more in front of the TV and then I will stop drinking.
Not least because if I drink any later than 9 p.m. I’ll be up half the night peeing.
Jessamine is usually on her first rum and Coke by now, but I see that she has already emptied the bottle and is making her way swiftly through the second bottle of wine. I have a bad feeling.
“What have you done to your hair?” she snaps at Daisy.
Daisy shrugs. “I just cut some side bangs. It’s no big deal.”
Jessamine shudders lightly. “It looks terrible. You should have asked Grandma to book you a proper hair appointment.”
Daisy narrows her eyes at her mother and then looks at me as if to say: “What the fuck?”
“Well,” I say, “as a professional hairdresser I can truthfully say you’ve done a lovely job. Really suits you.”
Daisy has blossomed in the last couple of months.
She turned twelve last October but looks older.
She cut all her girlish hair off last year into a bob that skims her jawline, and she wears edgy makeup and wants to get herself pierced.
She’s cool. Striking. We get on really well, and she is, as it’s probably clear, the only reason I’m still here.
She tells us about her day at school, about some girls who are giving her a hard time. Jessamine slops another serving of wine into her glass and says, “You make yourself stand out too much. That’s the problem.”
I throw her an admonishing look. “Jess,” I say, “that’s a terrible thing to say to a young girl.”
I turn to Daisy. “You can never stand out too much, OK? Remember that. All your life, just remember that.”
A darkness descends over the table. It feels like winter.
I hear Annie clearing her throat. I hear Jessamine’s fork clank against her plate.
Then I hear the sounds of the feet of Jessamine’s chair grinding against the tiled floor and the swoop of both of her arms, hands turned outward, heaving her plate of pasta across the table and straight toward me.
It tips into my lap, warm and red. The dish drops to the floor and smashes into two pieces.
Annie makes a shrill, panicked noise; Daisy yells out.
I don’t say a word or make a sound, I simply grab my paper napkin and scoop up the spaghetti from my lap and from the floor, get to my feet, put the napkin in the trash, put the two halves of the broken plate in the trash, and quietly leave the room.
She’s after me in seconds. I feel her fist around my ponytail, yanking my head back.
I grab hold of my hair and try to pull myself away from her, but she yanks back harder.
“What is it with you and her?” she hisses in my ear.
Her breath is sour and hot. “Are you a pedo? Is that what it is? Do you fancy her?”
“Jesus Christ,” I snarl, freeing my hair from her grip and turning to face her. “Jesus! What the fuck are you talking about?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” The horrible mimicry again. “You know what I’m talking about.” Her words are slurred, her eyes are wild. “You. And her. Daisy. You can’t get e-fucking-nough of her. Always complimenting her, telling her how great she is…”
“Well, I’m sorry, Jessamine, but someone has to. Left to you and your mother…”
The minute the words are out I know what I’ve done.
“Left to me and my mother… what?” Her voice is ripe with madness and fury.
“Nothing. Just that she needs a bit of building up. That’s all.”
“Why?” she asks. “Nobody fucking built me up. What makes her so fucking special?”
I pause. We’re here, having the conversation that I’ve been wanting to have for so long, but Jessamine is so, so drunk and so close to the far edges of reason and sanity that now is not the moment, but suddenly I find myself not caring.
“She’s not ‘so’ fucking special. Jessamine. She’s just a girl who needs a nice mum and some TLC; needs to be told she’s good and important; needs, Jessamine…”—I pause, inhale, and then continue—“not to end up like you.”
The palm of her hand is like flicked elastic against the skin of my cheek, stinging and raw. I clasp my hand to my face and sigh loudly. “Fuck’s sake, Jessamine.”
She goes to slap me again and this time I grab her wrist inside my fist. She pulls my hand toward her mouth and tries to bite it, but I pull away from her, and then she comes for me with everything, every bit of her—nails, teeth, fists, feet—and I curl into myself and I take it, take every last bit of it.
Afterward, she collapses against the wall, on her haunches, panting. “You’re a fucking loser,” she says, wiping drool from her chin. “A loser. All of you are. Especially her.” She jerks her head toward the kitchen. Then she sighs. “Ah well, who cares? She’s nothing to do with me anyway, is she?”
I cock my head, let myself sit down on the arm of the sofa. “What?”
“Nothing,” she says. “Nothing.”
Daisy finds me on the sofa an hour later. Jessamine has crashed and burned in bed. She perches gently on the other end of the sofa. “Are you OK?”
I nod. “I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?” She points at the scratches on my forearms.
I look down at them and smile. “I’m a big boy. I can take it.”
“Yes. But you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t have to take it. You do everything for her; you do everything for all of us. And then she treats you like that.”
I sigh. “It is what it is. She is what she is. She’s very damaged, your mum. For whatever reasons. And my job is to make sure that you don’t get damaged too.”
“Bit late for that, I’d say.”
“Well, OK, then, any more damaged.”
She smiles. “I’d really like to meet your daughter,” she says.
“Well, you should come with us! Blaise would love that!”
“Mum would lose her actual shit.”
Daisy used to talk like an Enid Blyton schoolgirl; now, five months into secondary school she sounds like all the other London kids. “Well, yes, she would, but she’s going to lose her shit whatever I do, so we may as well go for broke.”
“What’s she like, Blaise?”
“She’s cool. Like you. Except with an Aussie accent.”
“Is she pretty?”
“Yes, of course she is! I’m her dad after all.” I smile at her and then I think about what Jessamine had said earlier. “Do you think you look like your dad?” I say.
“I guess. I mean, sort of.”
“How well did you know him?”
She shrugs. “Not very. He used to come, like, every other weekend? Take us out for lunch? And then it got less and less and less. Last time I saw him was just before Christmas, two years ago?”
“Why did he stop coming over?”
She shrugs. “It was around the time you came, so I guess he didn’t like you being around very much.”
“Do you ever contact him? Like text him, or speak on the phone?”
“No.” She shakes her head vehemently. “Mum won’t let me. Apparently he hates us both.”
“But you have a number for him?”
“Yes. It’s his office number. Not a mobile number. So I can’t text him on it.”
I nod. “Do you miss him?”
She shrugs again. “Not really. I mean, I like him, but he never really felt like my dad.”
“You know,” I say, “if you wanted, I could try and talk to your dad, find out a bit more about what happened? Between him and your mum.”
She looks at me and nods. “But seriously,” she says, in a tiny whisper that I can barely hear, “be careful. Don’t make things worse than they already are.”
I pat her hand. “I’ll go carefully,” I say, “don’t you worry.”