Chapter Forty-Nine
STUART, SEVEN YEARS EARLIER
I put my hand to her forehead, which is cool to the touch. I peer into her eyes, which are as cloudy and dead as they are every morning of her life.
“You seem OK,” I say kindly.
I see a flash of rage pass across her face.
“I’m not OK,” she hisses. “I’ve been awake all night.
My arms and legs feel like there are needles running all through them.
My head…” She puts a hand to her skull. “It pounds, and it pounds, like a sledgehammer going up and down. My eyes are burning hot. And I can’t feel my feet, Stuart.
I can’t even feel them.” The rage passes and her eyes fill with tears again.
One falls from her tear duct down the side of her nose, and she flicks it away with her finger.
“What’s wrong with me?” she asks, her voice a sweet girl’s again.
Nothing’s wrong with you, is what I want to say. You are just trying to stop me taking my daughter out for dinner tonight, but that is not going to happen. Not even if your eyes fell out of their sockets and your feet exploded into mincemeat. Nothing will keep me from seeing my girl.
“It’s probably just a killer hangover,” I say. “You know how that happens sometimes? Especially to women?”
“It’s not a fucking hangover, Stuart! I’m really ill! My God, I just told you, I think I’m dying!”
“Well, then,” I say. “Shall I call for an ambulance? Or I could take you to the hospital, but you’d have to wait until I’ve seen Daisy off for school.”
I know that she won’t want to take up either of these options. She is terrified of medical experts, of their questions, of the lies she would have to tell them about the way she lives her life.
“No,” she says. “No. I just need you to stay with me. Look after me.”
I sigh and run my hands down my face. “I will be here all day, Jess. I will take care of you all day, I promise.”
“And what about tonight?”
“Tonight,” I explain softly, “your mum will be here. She can call me if you get worse. I’ll come straight back. OK?”
“No,” she gasps. “No. She won’t know what to do. She’s hopeless. She’ll just pretend she didn’t hear me, you know what she’s like. She’s selfish, Stuart. She’s not like you.”
I sigh again. It’s ten past seven and I need to wake Daisy up. “Listen,” I say, putting my hand on her knee and then pulling back the covers. “We’ll talk about this later. I need to take care of Daisy now. I’ll come back and check on you in a minute, OK? I’ll bring you some tea and toast.”
“I don’t want toast. I’m too sick to eat.”
I nod sympathetically. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
In the kitchen my heart feels heavy. I knew this was going to happen, yet that still hasn’t prepared me sufficiently for how helpless I feel about it.
The whole day hangs over me now, the endless ticking minutes of it taking me to the point in the day when this is all going to explode and erupt into a magma-hot mess of screaming and tears and physical violence and I can’t bear it.
I just can’t bear it. But for now, I have a packed lunch to make, a kettle to boil, a child to send to school in the most functional way I possibly can.
Daisy looks up at me from the kitchen table, where she is putting on the makeup she is not supposed to wear to school. “Is she pretending to be ill?” she asks.
“Well, yeah,” I say. “I mean, I don’t know, maybe she is ill. But either way, the timing is a bit…”
“Suspect?”
I nod. “Yeah,” I say. “Maybe a bit.”
I don’t want this house turned into a battlefield with teams and sides, I don’t want Daisy to hate her mum. But equally I have to acknowledge that Daisy’s not a little kid anymore, that she is perceptive and bright and entitled to her viewpoint. “Can I make a suggestion?” she says.
I look at her and nod.
“Go out now. Seriously. Don’t go back to her. Put your phone on silent. Leave the house. Don’t let her get into your head today.”
She’s right. I know she’s right. But I also know I won’t do it. “I can’t,” I say, “I have to walk the dog.”
“Walk him now. Then bring him back. Don’t take your phone. Don’t talk to anyone.”
I nod. I mean, I guess I could do that. I could swing by the old squat, see my old friends, then I could go into town early, buy something nice for Blaise. Just take a whole day off, from this place, from that woman, from the life into which I’ve found myself subsumed.
I hand Daisy her packed lunch. I make it for her every day even though she rarely eats it; there’s always chicken nuggets after school, or a tube of Pringles. She takes it from me and says, “Walk me to the station? With Hugo?”
“I was…” I glance up at the ceiling. “I said I’d be up in a minute, with her tea.”
“She never even drinks the fucking tea. Just leave her.”
My heart races with anxiety at the thought, but I know that the minute Daisy goes, I’ll surrender, submit, I’ll take her her tea, I’ll be pulled back in, and all I want today, all I want in the whole world, is to have a nice dinner with Blaise. I nod.
“OK, yeah,” I say. “Let me just get my jacket. You get the dog.”
I leave a note for Jessamine when I return to drop Hugo home.
“I’m heading out for the day. See you tonight.”
And then I go.
It’s like a dull metallic ringing sound all day in the back of my head, the reality of what I have done.
My phone is on silent, but I keep imagining it to buzz or trill.
I have to resist the urge to pull it out of my pocket and look at it.
I head over to the squat and have a cup of coffee with Drew and his current girlfriend.
I feel the rawest ache of nostalgia as I look around the once familiar kitchen, feel the echoes of the happy times I spent here, see the shadows of the person I was when I lived here, a person who had options, who laughed, who sang.
I was the freest person I knew. I mean, I used to pity my brother for having to go to work every day and go home to the same house and see the same people.
I thought that was a prison. And now, God, I would give anything for that benign imprisonment. Absolutely anything.
“How are things?” asks Drew. “You look… I mean, you look well, but maybe… have you lost weight?”
I smile. “Probably,” I say. “I’ve got myself in a bit of a complicated situation with a complicated woman. Life is very…”
“Complicated?” suggests Drew’s girlfriend.
“Yeah.” I laugh wryly. “Yeah.”
When I leave, I walk toward Camden Town and meander for a while through the incessant crowds, the wide-eyed tourists.
I take the towpath down the side of the canal all the way to King’s Cross and stroll around Granary Square for a while, which is virtually deserted on this fresh February morning.
I wander around the bohemian designer shops, looking for something weird and beautiful for Blaise, and buy her a beautiful steel ring set with a black crystal rose.
Something small that won’t take up too much room in her rucksack.
I buy a sandwich and a cup of tea at a coffee shop in the station and then, and only then, do I dare to look at my phone.
It shows twenty-three missed calls. It shows eighteen new text messages.
I have notifications for numerous voicemails.
I turn the phone face down on the table and breathe in hard, trying to control my heart, but I can feel panic gnawing at the edges of my consciousness.
I pull myself back from it. Fuck no, I think.
Fuck no. This is my day. This is for me.
When I am an old man and I look back on my life, I want today to shine in my memory like a burnished star, I want to remember this precious day with my one and only daughter, this remarkable young woman who I have spent a total of less than ten days with over the nineteen years of her life, and I want to think of a beautiful walk through London, the pleasure of handing over my card to pay for that ring, the sun just blotting through the cloud overhead as I, younger now in this moment then I ever will be again, head through this remarkable city, free, joyful, and fully fucking alive.
No, I think to myself, fuck you, Jessamine Black. Fuck you.
This day is for me.