Chapter 7 #2
Olivia hands the glass to her bemused-looking father and starts to drink. ‘And while we’re at it, can I have one of your fags?’
‘My what?’ Her father is almost as dishevelled as she is, though Olivia hopes she has less facial hair than him. She runs a finger over her chin to check, makes a mental note to crawl back into bed with her tweezers later.
‘Your cigarettes. The ones you pretend you don’t smoke by hiding the butts, badly, behind the hydrangea pot, where you think I can’t see them. I’d like one of them, please.’
‘Well, OK,’ he concedes, putting down the mug of tea, swigging from the wine glass, and heading back into the garden.
Olivia slips her battered feet into a pair of Jack’s Crocs that have been left by the door and walks out to the rotten garden table, where she plonks her wine down, stretches her arms out, and sticks her middle finger up at the neighbour who is watching from a first-floor window.
‘Olivia!’ scolds her father, throwing a lighter and a packet of Benson and Hedges down on the table.
‘Dad!’ replies Olivia, looking at the packet in horror. ‘How could you smoke such shit?’ She lights one anyway, takes a deep drag before chugging back another swig of wine, hoping her dressing gown doesn’t fly open in the breeze.
‘Cheers!’ She raises her glass into the air. Her father meekly does the same. ‘Here’s to Nick taking responsibility for the kids this weekend, instead of trying to up his deadlift!’
‘They’re good kids,’ says her father.
‘All kids are good, Dad.’ Olivia tightens her dressing gown around her, then inhales deeply on one of the Benson and Hedges.
‘They don’t become “troubled” out of a clear blue sky.
It’s not gangs or social media or drugs that make them that way.
It’s usually the shit they’re having to put up with at home. ’
She flicks the cigarette on to the patio, watches as it burns itself down. ‘Like, looking back, I was the difficult child, wouldn’t you say, Dad?’
He stares at his glass of wine, looking for the answer at the bottom of it. As ever.
‘The whole world revolved around me! Do you remember she said that, when I had my appendix out and didn’t want to go back to school after a week?
Like, I know she was having to juggle an awful amount of stuff because you were living it up in Darlington or Ditchfield or wherever, but fuck, can you imagine what that made me feel like?
’ Olivia chugs some more wine, lights another cigarette.
‘I guess you can, because you got it in the neck as well. But at least you were an adult and kind of deserved it. You could cope with it. Though fuck knows why, as a grown-up, you put up with it for quite so long. I guess that’s where I get it from. ’
Peter lights a B&H in solidarity. ‘Your mum has her own reasons for her little midlife crisis, we just have to bear with her for a bit.’
‘She’s nearly seventy, I’d hardly call it midlife. Or at least I hope not, or we’re all in for a long old slog.’
‘Olivia, you can’t wish death on your mother!’
‘Oh my god, Dad, you think you’d get in on the joke a bit more, given that she literally evicted you from the house in which you made a life together for almost forty-five years.’
‘Listen, I’m sure once she’s got all this, all this …’ He waves his cigarette around in the air hopelessly. ‘All this silly business out of her system, everything will go back to normal.’
‘Good of you to be so magnanimous when she’s not exactly extended you the same kindness over the last few months. Tell me, Dad, why are you being so nice about her when you’re having to live in my shed?’
‘As I said, I’m sure it’s all a phase. I’m just grateful that you’re being so kind to an old man down on his luck.’
‘It’s the least I could do, considering you’ve always at least been nice to me. Maybe you haven’t always been there, but when you were, you went out of your way to show us that you loved us.’
‘Ach, it was nothing. Your mother did the lion’s share. I know she didn’t always get it right, but she tried.’ He looks morosely at the hundreds of butts behind the dead hydrangea, as if pondering the life he’s also thrown away.
‘Cheer up, Dad.’ Olivia rolls her eyes. Today is not the day to dwell on the ruins of her parents’ marriage, not when so much of her own life lies smouldering in flames. ‘We’ve got Lily’s fortieth to look forward to. Mum’s pulling out all the stops for her resident chakra reader.’
‘Her what?’
‘It’s Mum’s latest wheeze to excuse bankrolling Lily. She’s got her reading all her friends’ chakras and is paying her for it.’
Olivia’s father looks at her blankly.
‘Chakras, Dad. Energy points in the body, or some such guff that Lily learned about when she went to India last year. She swears that after a life-changing spiritual experience in the Himalayas, she can now unblock people’s chakras through the healing power of her hands.’
‘What a load of old bollocks,’ says her father.
Olivia feels a smile creep across her face. She’s forgotten what it’s like to actually laugh with her dad, after all this time.
‘Anyway, back to the party, which Mum is approaching as if it’s a state banquet. Apparently, despite being family, we have to provide a formal RSVP to announce that we will be attending.’
‘Do you know if that Colin is going to be there?’
‘Clive, Dad. His name is Clive.’
‘Colin, Clive, Nigel, you know what I mean.’
‘I imagine that Mum won’t miss a chance to hijack Lily’s special evening and introduce us to her new beau, if that’s what you mean.’
‘He’s a Tory, you know,’ announces Peter.
‘Didn’t you vote for them at the last election?’ Olivia looks momentarily confused.
‘Yes but I wouldn’t disclose that information in public,’ Peter says, his cheeks reddening. ‘Whereas he proudly admits to it!’
‘Well, you know what they say, Dad?’ Olivia tries to look philosophical while dragging deeply on her cigarette. ‘Rejection is the universe’s protection!’
‘Who says that?’
‘Wise people.’ Olivia drains more wine. ‘It means that when something isn’t for you, it’s because the universe wants you to do other, better things. Like …’ She takes another drag of her cigarette, thinks for a moment. ‘Being Anniversary Architect for The Morning.’
‘Being what?’
‘Never you mind, Dad.’ She wishes she could have been this facetious with Stephen yesterday.
‘What I’m saying, Dad, is that maybe you should be seeing this whole divorce thing as a lucky escape.
Maybe instead of it being the worst thing that ever happened to you, you could see it as a second chance at life. ’
‘But I’m living in your shed, Olivia.’
‘It could be worse. You could be living in her shed.’
‘Actually, until we’re officially divorced and the papers are signed, it’s our shed.’
‘Dad, you’ve got Stockholm syndrome. She’s always blamed you for everything going wrong in that marriage. Even when we were kids, everything was your fault.’
‘That’s because it was,’ he shrugs.
Olivia can’t be sure, but she thinks she sees tears in her father’s eyes. She almost reaches across the table and comforts him – she’s always had this painful sense of feeling sorry for him, which is why she took him in so readily – but a small, childish stab of revulsion stops her.
‘No need to be maudlin,’ Olivia says, draining more of her drink. She realizes, with a shock, that she sounds a bit like … her mother.
‘Mum!’ Jack is standing in the kitchen door, a look of horror on his face. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Ohmygod this is hilarious,’ says Saskia, joining him. ‘Mum has completely lost the plot.’
The good girl in Olivia – the one who has controlled her for most of her life – thinks this is probably true, and yet the Erling Haaland gummy in her seems to think she’s never been more sane.
‘Peter,’ says Nick to his father-in-law, as he appears behind his children. ‘Would you care to explain what you’re doing out here?’
‘Oh that’s it, address my dad instead of speaking directly to me!
’ Olivia throws another cigarette on the ground and uses the Crocs to stub it out.
‘What is this, the Republic of Gilead?’ She puts on a high voice and starts shivering meekly.
‘I hope you don’t mind, kind sir, if I put aside my duties to accompany this gentleman as he partakes in an ale and a pipe. ’
‘Mum, you’re wearing my Crocs?’ Jack stares at the Man City Jibbitz on her feet, as if trying to make sense of the scene before him.
‘Can’t a mother wear her son’s Crocs while having a fag and a glass of wine outside at eleven o’clock on a Saturday morning?’
‘Erm, no, not really?’ Jack tugs nervously at some of the curls on his head.
‘Olivia, I think you need to come inside,’ says Nick, trying to reach for his ten-year-old son.
‘Olivia,’ parrots Olivia, in a baby voice, ‘I think you need to come inside.’
‘I just want to say that this was all her idea,’ says Peter, weakly.
‘Oh god, Dad, take some fucking responsibility for yourself for once in your life,’ she spits. The good girl gasps internally, but Erling Haaland appears to be mentally punching the air in joy.
‘We shouldn’t be swearing in front of the children,’ says Nick through gritted teeth.
‘I know, we should just be minding our Ps and Qs and pretending we’re a nice, normal family.
’ Olivia laughs to herself, and in the process spits some wine down her dressing gown.
‘That worked so well for my parents.’ She drains the last of her glass, kisses a clearly appalled Jack on the head, and then heads back into the kitchen.
‘I am loving this version of you, Mum,’ sniggers Saskia.
‘Olivia, what is going on?’ Nick looks equally furious and worried.
‘I’ll tell you what is going on, darling,’ she says, looking in the fridge for another bottle of wine.
‘I didn’t get the job I’d been led to believe I was going to get by my lying, manipulative boss.
Instead, he gave it to Nina, the woman I have lovingly mentored for the last three years.
’ She shuts the fridge and waves a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc triumphantly in the air.
‘Despite all my hard work, and the many years spent doing EXACTLY what that sociopath has asked of me, he has essentially demoted me, stripping me of my ability to write a single word, and giving me a nonsense title which basically involves ordering some cheesy Wotsits for a party and putting together a “celebratory” magazine that will mostly be used to line cat litter trays.’
‘Oh Olivia.’ Nick softens, moving towards his wife as if to give her a hug. ‘You should have said.’
‘Well, pardon me if I didn’t want to say.
Pardon me if I wanted to go out and shake out some of my rage.
And I’m continuing to shake out the rage, because it turns out there’s a hell of a lot of it bottled up.
’ Olivia cracks the top of the bottle and grabs a clean glass.
‘Now if you don’t mind, I want to go upstairs for a bit of me time.
And yes, that is a euphemism for exactly what you think it is, Nick. ’
‘That is so gross,’ sneers Saskia.
‘You can’t wear shoes upstairs,’ says Jack, sensibly. ‘You always say that.’
Olivia’s inner good girl, not to mention her husband and children, watches in amazement as she kicks the Crocs off her feet and into the air, so that they land on the floor with a smack.
‘I’m storing this one in my bank for the next time she tells us off for being messy,’ says Jack, nervously twirling his hair round his finger.
Saskia sniggers. Olivia storms up to her bedroom, with only the wine bottle for company, and the voice of her inner good girl pleading with her to sleep whatever this is off.