Chapter 17
Olivia doesn’t rush out of bed the next morning.
Nick’s here, Lily’s here, even her dad’s here, passed out, no doubt, in the garden shed.
One of them can keep the good ship Greenwood afloat while she spends a few more minutes sinking below the bed sheets, avoiding the start of the day.
‘You do breakfast,’ she mumbles into the pillow, when the alarm goes off on her phone.
Nick gets up silently, and she returns safely to slumber.
She exists in that dozing state somewhere between dreamland and the dawning of a new day, until she hears a thumping on the door and opens her eyes to see Lily, standing in her kimono.
‘Oh hi,’ Olivia says, propping herself up while scrambling for her glasses on the bedside table. ‘How did you sleep?’
‘You know me,’ Lily shrugs, sitting on the end of the bed. ‘Never happier than when on a sofa bed, a floor or someone’s couch. It’s the bonus of living a nomadic life.’
‘Is that what we’re calling it now?’
‘Ah, there she is,’ Lily shakes her head. ‘Olivia Version 2.0. I thought I’d come in and check on you, but I won’t stay if you’re going to be an arsehole.’
‘Sorry I’ve not yet managed to hang the bunting out or blow up the balloons.’
‘Are you OK, sis?’ Lily rubs her eyes.
Olivia gets up and walks towards the chest of drawers and her contact lenses.
‘I don’t think I am, no. The Gen Z colleague who gave me the gummy also tore a strip off me, and it’s caused some kind of epiphany.
It’s like I’ve lost the bit in my brain that prevented me from seeing what a doormat I’d become and everything that was holding me together has just come undone.
Whenever I feel a pressure to do something just to please someone else, I get so angry.
It’s like I’m suddenly overwhelmed by decades of pent-up rage. ’
‘Well, you’ve been swallowing it down your whole life, so no wonder you need to unleash it,’ says Lily, tightening her kimono.
‘Unleash away. But don’t get so lost in fury that you poison the rest of your life with it.
Mum dropped the ball when we were kids, I’m not denying that, but at least she was trying to handle the ball.
Whereas Dad, he had no bloody interest in it.
He couldn’t drop the ball because he never picked it up in the first place. ’
‘Yeah, but he never belittled me, did he?’ Olivia stabs a contact lens in her right eye.
‘He never did anything at all for you, or any of us. Where was he when you were off school for months? I know Mum handled that badly, but have you ever thought maybe it was just because she was doing it all alone?’
‘Don’t do that,’ snaps Olivia.
‘Do what?’
‘Make me feel like I was a burden that had to be shouldered. I didn’t choose to have anorexia any more than I chose to have appendicitis.’
‘I know that, Olivia. You really don’t need to get all defensive with me.
I’m just saying that she was doing her best with the limited information and resources that existed in 1997 when it came to supporting a severely ill child with an eating disorder at the same time as a husband lost in alcoholism. ’
‘He was hardly an alcoholic back then.’
‘But how do you know that, Olivia? We weren’t married to him.
There’s all sorts of shit we weren’t privy to.
He didn’t just become a raging piss artist in the last couple of years.
That’s not how the illness works, you know that.
I’m not excusing Mum for how she sometimes handled it.
I’m just saying that she was trying, in her own, weird, Mum way. ’
Olivia thinks back to the day, when she was seventeen, that Tina was called into school for a Very Important Meeting.
Olivia was, if nothing else, a conscientious student with excellent grades, and as a result, Tina couldn’t work out what could be so serious as to require her coming into school in the middle of the day, when she needed to be at work delivering yet another dreary pitch about the ketchup account.
She had delayed the meeting three times, until the headmistress had been forced to step in and call her personally, demanding that she come in about an ‘urgent pastoral matter’.
When Tina walked into the head’s office, Olivia felt a strange mixture of terror and relief – terror at the prospect of what was about to happen, but relief that perhaps it might finally all be over, and someone could make her better.
She couldn’t say when she had stopped eating.
It had happened gradually, over the course of a year, the level of food she ingested slowly getting lower and the subterfuge around it getting higher until finally she felt caught in a vice-like grip between these two things, all her energy channelled into controlling what she put in her body and what people thought she had put in her body.
But one teacher had noticed her stuffing the cake in her blazer pocket, and then depositing it in the bin, and then there had been the morning she half-fainted in assembly.
Bulking herself out with extra layers had gone a long way towards masking the fact her body was shrinking, but she had recently developed a light dusting of fur on her face, a clear giveaway that all was not well.
Tina was appalled. She had immediately got Olivia an appointment with an eating disorder expert who had suggested that Olivia be admitted to hospital, ‘as a precautionary measure’.
But Tina thought that was a bit much. After all, Olivia hadn’t fainted again, and she’d watched her eat on two separate occasions in the preceding week.
Wasn’t there something else they could do, something less drastic?
The doctor had said that Olivia needed to have some time off, come for twice-weekly therapy sessions, and be watched like a hawk in between.
Her mother had taken some of her precious annual leave to hover over her daughter in what felt like an almost constant state of resentment.
Olivia sits back down on the bed next to her sister.
‘I know it sounds ridiculous that I still can’t let it go.
But I can’t forget the time she told me off for not being able to diet like a normal teenager.
“You always have to take it too far!” She said that to me, Lily.
And I don’t understand how she could have been so ignorant as to think my studying for my exams was a sign I was better.
The only thing it was a sign of was me transferring my mad perfectionism from food to schoolwork. ’
‘Speaking of perfectionism,’ sighs Lily. ‘I could be making something out of absolutely nothing, and I’m sorry if this seems like I’m overstepping the mark. But is Saskia OK? She was quiet as a mouse and barely ate anything last night.’
Olivia turns to her sister and looks directly into her eyes.
She senses Lily’s concern that she has just made everything worse, that she is about to be banished from the house quicker than you could say ‘Olivia Greenwood has left the group’.
But there is also a softening around her sister’s eyes as they start to glisten, and Olivia feels her shift closer.
‘Promise me, Lily, that you will never, ever, ever worry about overstepping the mark when it comes to the kids?’ She cradles her sister’s chin in her hands.
‘Anything you even vaguely suspect, the slightest thing you think is wrong, you promise to tell me? I always need you to be direct. I don’t want the Fryer family’s pathological fear of confrontation to come before Saskia and Jack.
However hard the thing is to say, I always want you to say it to me. Nothing matters more.’
Lily nods her head vigorously. Olivia stands up, lets go of her sister’s chin and kisses her forehead. ‘Good,’ she says. ‘You’re right, I have been an arsehole, totally caught up in my own anger. I don’t want to make the same mistakes Mum did. Thank you, Lily. Thank you.’
Tears, a hug with Lily and a strong coffee later, Olivia finds her daughter bent over an open workbook in the kitchen, the crumbs of a keto bagel on a plate next to her.
‘Morning, darling,’ she says, bending down to envelop her child in her arms. Saskia sits up, her back ramrod straight, and begins to squirm in her chair.
‘Mum, what are you doing?’
‘I’m just giving you a hug. Aren’t I allowed to give you a hug?’
‘You’re so weird,’ she says, trying to get rid of her mother with a shrug of her shoulders.
‘It’s OK to be weird,’ says Olivia, sitting down next to her. ‘Weird is good. Weird is cool. You do you and all that. I just …’ Olivia looks at the empty plate. ‘I just wanted to check you were OK, that you’d had breakfast.’
‘I’m OK,’ nods Saskia robotically, ‘and I’ve had breakfast.’
Olivia reaches her arm across the table and puts it over her daughter’s right hand.
‘I also, I just wanted to …’ She stumbles for the words, notes the look of quiet, bored disdain on Saskia’s face.
‘I wanted to say that however busy or distracted I seem, however mad it might feel with Grandad and Auntie Lily here, however annoying it might be that me and Dad keep arguing about his CrossFit, none of it is more important than you.’ She shakes her head, puts her arms around her daughter for another hug, whispers into her ear. ‘None of it.’
It takes a moment, but then Saskia leans back into her. No words are said, but in this one moment of closeness, none are needed.