Chapter 23
It wouldn’t be correct to say that the car journey back is silent, on account of the endless belches that erupt from Peter’s throat, and the horrified ‘eww’s that come from Saskia. But otherwise, everyone in the car is subdued, grateful to no longer be trapped in the private dining room from hell.
‘We really are one messed-up family,’ says Jack, brightly.
‘I didn’t know you were ill when you were young,’ says Saskia, quietly. ‘What was wrong with you?’
‘Oh, it was just a bad bout of, um …’ Olivia feels her fingers start nervously drumming against her thumbs, wills them to stop. ‘Tonsilitis. Terrible tonsils, I had.’
She looks at Saskia, who still seems drawn and tired.
Maybe she should have said something bland and boring during her speech back there, something that hadn’t drawn attention to a time everyone would rather forget.
Maybe she should have bitten her tongue, behaved like the adult, the mother, that she really needs to be right now, for Saskia and Jack’s sake.
Maybe not everything needs to be said, and certainly not by her.
If earlier in the week her truth-telling had seemed like the empowering words of a newly awakened and independent woman, she feels like this evening’s reality is revealing just how far she’s falling short as a mum.
How much she’s turning into her own mum.
The conversation with Tina was awful but it cleared some air – air that had been left to fester for too long.
Does she really want to be having arguments with Saskia in twenty-five years’ time about how badly she let her down?
She needs to be emotionally mature now, not when her kids have grown up and moved out and the damage will already have been done.
‘Your mum’s new boyfriend seemed …’ Nick turns briefly from the steering wheel to check on Peter, who is passed out, his head resting on a window, drool dripping from his mouth. ‘Well, he seemed very right and proper.’
Olivia continues to bite her tongue. Now is not the time to tell him that Clive is the handsy man from the train.
‘Poor Gran. Poor Lily.’ Saskia puts on her headphones, presses ‘play’ on her phone, considers the matter closed.
Olivia knows that her daughter has a point. She takes out her phone and begins to text her sister.
I’m sorry for ruining this evening. I’m sorry for abandoning you with Mum after humiliating her so publicly
Immediately, Olivia sees her sister begin to type.
You didn’t ruin it because it was already ruined from the get-go!
I should have told you but I already celebrated with a party a few weekends ago, an amazing couple of days away that my mates organized in Margate.
I’m still trying to recover from it. This one was just to humour Mum … and we sure did that, eh?
I don’t think I humoured Mum at all, certainly not during the row we had in the loos. I was a bit of a dick. I should have risen above it, been the grown-up
Olivia, in this relationship, you’re not the grown-up. She is. You’re her child. Maybe just try not to see her as the enemy all the time?
Olivia stares at this message, feels herself begin to cry.
When did you get so wise, little sister? Thank you. Love you xxx
By taking that Erling Haaland gummy, she has unleashed a cascade of truth, a veritable domino effect of honesty. She’s had a sharp epiphany: Olivia has to face up to the fact that she isn’t a child any more. She is a grown-up.
Arriving home, Saskia storms upstairs and slams the door, while Nick goes and plays FIFA with Jack in the living room.
Olivia props up her stumbling father, guides him to the shed, opens the slightly stuck door and has a good look at this room he calls home.
There’s a small pile of neatly folded clothes on a chair, a selection of books about Roy Orbison, the little electric heater she got to make sure he doesn’t freeze to death out here.
It’s all a bit tragic. Why does she find it so much easier to accept her dad’s failings, but when it comes to her mum she boils with anger and hurt?
As he crashes around, trying to find his way to the bed, Olivia notices a picture on the tiny table, next to the Buddy Holly books.
It is of the Fryer family on a holiday to Majorca back in the early nineties, one of the few trips they ever went on together.
Olivia and Lily were usually packed off to camps the day after school broke up, spending weeks at a time practising tennis, and swimming, and arts and crafts, with an ever-rotating cast of minders who were probably only just out of school themselves.
She looks at the picture, the two sisters dressed in matching pink dresses with bows, her mother and father standing behind with their arms around their children, smiling.
They look like a normal family, a happy one, but Olivia has only one memory of the holiday itself.
The girls had been left in the apartment with a babysitter, though who that person was Olivia can’t recall now.
Similarly, Olivia has no memory of the finer details of that evening, other than her waking up at some point to the shrill shouts of her mother.
Olivia turned in her little single bed and looked towards Lily, who had also been woken up.
She put her index finger to her mouth, signalling for them both to stay quiet, then pulled the sheet up over her head in a way that she could hear Lily copying.
Tina was shouting words that neither Olivia nor Lily could understand – they were as foreign as the Spanish the babysitter spoke – and their father was shouting similarly strange words back.
They were, Olivia realized later, swear words, the kinds of words that parents weren’t supposed to say and children most definitely weren’t supposed to hear.
There was the sound of something smashing, and then of their mother crying.
But in the morning she was bright and breezy, as if nothing had happened, and Olivia had decided she’d made the whole thing up, a dramatic fever dream that, if she were to mention it to her mother, would seem like it had been invented to ruin an otherwise perfect holiday.
Now, looking at the picture, and her drunken father stumbling out of his trousers, she suddenly knows that it had been all too real.
Her father must have spent most of his marriage drunk out of his mind.
Olivia feels first a wave of relief, that she wasn’t making it all up, next a stab of guilt that Tina had worked so hard to hide it, and then sadness that her mum had got it so wrong in the process.
Is she feeling sorry for Tina, after everything?
She tries to imagine what it would be like if Nick was almost entirely absent, a feckless alcoholic, and is hit by the confusing realization that it’s possible to feel sorry for someone you were pretty sure you hated this morning.
‘Time for bed, Dad,’ she says. ‘Time for bed.’
Her father collapses into the Ikea day bed he sleeps in, and Olivia pulls the duvet around him, switches the electric heater on so that he won’t be cold. She turns him on his side so that he is in the recovery position, remembering her mum’s words from earlier.
‘I’m sorry I let you girls down,’ he whispers, putting his arms around his eldest daughter. ‘All of you.’
Despite Olivia’s desperate, deep-seated need for validation, she is not particularly good at receiving it.
The hug from her father leaves her feeling curiously disconnected.
She knows it to be a normal, paternal activity, one that millions of dads across the country carry out umpteen times a day.
She’s seen Nick do it with their kids, witnesses it all the time.
And yet she has no memories of her own father taking her or Lily into his arms, ruffling their hair or trying to smother them in kisses, as they desperately scrambled to escape (which is what happens now if either she or Nick dare to try and embrace Jack and Saskia).
Did it happen and she’s just forgotten, choosing to remember his absence instead?
One by one, she knocks on her children’s bedroom doors and goes in to give each of them a goodnight hug. ‘Love you, Mummy,’ whimpers Jack, her baby boy already in a half-sleep.
‘Your dress tonight kind of slapped,’ Saskia tells her, the unenthusiastic compliment feeling like a lottery win to Olivia.
Then she goes to her own room, and lies on her bed, staring up at the ceiling.
Surely her dad must have hugged them. That awkward embrace in the shed cannot have been the first time that the two of them have ever cuddled.
‘I’ve got no memory of either of my parents hugging me,’ Olivia says as Nick walks into the room. ‘Isn’t that odd?’
‘I mean, odd feels pretty normal at this point in proceedings.’
‘Have I told you about the time I answered the house phone to a weeping woman asking to speak to my mum? I went and got her, and then listened as she called the lady on the other end of the line, and I quote, a “home-wrecking whore”.’ Olivia puffs out her cheeks.
‘That was a fun way to spend a Saturday morning.’
‘I’m sorry, Olivia.’ Nick shifts over and puts his arm around his wife, kissing her on the ear.
‘My poor mum,’ she whispers into her husband’s shoulder.
Olivia hears his breath slow, unwraps herself carefully so as not to disturb him.
She looks up at the ceiling, wide awake.
She has spent most of her adult life in a state of extreme hypervigilance, constantly scanning the environment for danger, in the form of an upset relative, a disappointed mother, an annoyed friend or an angry boss. She’s tired of it.
She grabs her phone from the bedside table, opens up WhatsApp, and taps out a new message to Rose.
I know you’re planning to take The Morning down, have important information, but we have to meet in person.
I will see you at Brighton train station, next to the piano, tomorrow at 1 p.m., she writes.
She watches the ticks turn blue, sees Rose typing, then feels a lurch in her chest as the message appears on her screen.
Fine, have it your way, writes Rose. But remember to bring plenty of fags.