Chapter 10 Fliss
X.
Fliss
IT’S NOT TRUE, THE STORY her family is telling about her.
But then her family has never known the truth about who she is. Or was.
It started with her name. From the Latin, felicitatem, meaning happiness and – here’s the kicker – fertility.
And yet she was the unhappiest of her parents’ children, even if you count Magnus who died, aged four, at the beginning of the hot, cloudless summer of 1988.
Was Magnus unhappy? Was he even old enough to understand the concept?
Before he got meningitis, he’d been a chuckling little thing: golden hair and skin, a buttery smell at the back of his neck.
She had loved being his older sister. There were thirteen years between them and she liked to prop him against her hip and teach him things.
‘Now what do you say?’ she’d prompt when a nanny gave him an ice-lolly, mimicking her mother without even realising she was doing it.
‘Good boy,’ Fliss said when he gave a toothy ‘thank you’, and then she’d cuddle him and kiss him on his perfect, perfect cheek.
Being with Magnus made Fliss feel capable and loved.
Her own mother dispensed her love from a distance.
Fliss knew it was there but it never felt close enough.
Her father was more affectionate but he valued strongly held convictions and, generally speaking, Fliss either didn’t know or was too scared to know what her own convictions were.
Her father approached her as you would an affectionate but dim pet, almost surprised to see his daughter sitting there around the dining table.
‘Dear Fliss,’ he’d say distractedly and then he’d ask for someone to pass the wine and turn his attention back to Ben.
Occasionally, her father would pat Fliss on the back or kiss the top of her head.
She knew, from the age of four or five, that these moments of interaction must be treasured appropriately.
She stored them up, magpie-like, each word or gesture a scrap of shiny tinfoil in her tiny nest. She was desperate, always, for more of his attention, but the desperation put him off.
So then Fliss tried the opposite. She tried to become rebellious, angry, inviolable.
As a teenager, she had a Goth phase where she dyed her hair black and wore fishnets and ripped denim cut-offs and purple eyeliner.
At no point did she grasp that what she thought of as originality was the worst kind of cliché.
Her mother, who thought cliché was lower class, despaired of her.
But Fliss loved her brothers and for a long time, she thought this was enough.
Although she pretended to find Ben annoying, it was simply a pose of adolescent disdain.
She prided herself on the fact that only she could see the real him, the lost soul who existed underneath the surface of his outward dazzle.
Ben was insecure: this was the secret no one else knew.
He was constantly wanting the good opinion of others, to shore up his own lack of belief.
It used to be sweet but, over time, his apprehension hardened and cracked into something more damaging.
When Magnus died, it broke them all in different ways.
Fliss’s mother, always remote, became an unreachable satellite, occasionally transmitting signals to their family planet from an implacable distance.
Their father never spoke of Magnus’s death and filled the hole left by this awful, yawning sadness with fake bonhomie and bluster.
If you didn’t know his history, you would have thought him a cheerful man.
Ben, shattered by grief, became determined to control his world and the people in it.
It just so happened that he was rewarded for this.
Over the years, Fliss watched as her surviving brother became a powerful man.
Then the power itself was the thing he needed to protect. It was the thing he loved the most.
And Felicity? Well, she spiralled into cliché again.
That was the other thing about her – she never learned from her mistakes.
She just kept repeating them. Drugs, alcohol, sex.
She slept with unavailable men and sometimes women.
She came on to Martin, for fuck’s sake, even though he was obviously in love with Ben.
Poor Martin. He never did realise they were all laughing at him, with his mooning face and his twitches and tics and his hopeless attempts to fit in.
But Fliss liked him. His was the only star, in the grand Fitzmaurice constellation, that shone less brightly than hers.
She had tried, over the years. She really had.
She had tried so hard to be different; to escape from herself; to be happy, fertile Felicity.
Long periods of sobriety. Stints in expensive rehab, paid for by Ben and Serena, who resented it.
She had tried different jobs and different homes and different clothes and different personalities and different countries.
Even different names. She rejected Felicity and became Brie or Casey or Jessica or Skylar.
But, again and again, the effort proved too exhausting and she would be washed up on the shore, breathless with the impossibility of being anyone other than her stunted self, and then she would look for the thing that would make it better.
The next hit, the next high, the next fuck, the next drink.
Because ‘The Next’ existed in a slippery, tiptoeing future, full of silvery promise.
She kept telling herself that The Next might just be the thing that saved her.