Chapter 29
‘Sass called me last night,’ explains Lily, when they get in. ‘Everything’s OK, she just needed a bit of help with Dad.’
‘With Dad?’ Olivia scrunches her nose up, pulls down her skirt for what feels like the seventy-eighth time that morning. ‘What the hell?’
‘Looks like you might have needed a bit of help too, Nick,’ Lily says, spotting the dark purple bruise on his neck. ‘Did you get into a fight with a leech?’
‘Eww, Dad,’ says Jack, now noticing the mark on his father. ‘What happened?’
‘How about we go and play a game of FIFA?’ asks Nick, deftly changing the subject.
‘Yes, and while you’re doing that,’ says Lily, turning to her sister, ‘how about you come through to the kitchen with me?’
It is a command rather than a question. Olivia follows Lily into the immaculate kitchen, the only thing out of place a clear council recycling bag groaning with empty ale bottles.
‘So it turns out that Dad is on the booze again in a big way.’ Lily sighs.
‘This is what I found in his shed. Saskia called me late last night because he was completely pissed and she didn’t know what to do about it.
She was really upset, Olivia, sobbing. He’d passed out in the garden in the cold with a fag in his hand, and she was terrified he was going to freeze to death. ’
‘Oh my god.’ Olivia presses her hands to her face.
Why hadn’t Saskia felt able to call her parents?
‘I shouldn’t have left her with him. It was so irresponsible of me, I don’t know what I was thinking.
Poor Saskia, I need to check on her.’ She starts to make her way to the stairs, only to stop abruptly when she sees Lily shaking her head.
Her sister finally props the mop against the kitchen counter and motions for Olivia to join her sitting down at the table.
‘I think Dad’s drinking is the least of your problems right now,’ Lily says, lowering her voice and leaning in to take Olivia’s hand.
‘When I got here, Saskia looked a wreck. So exhausted and shaky. She’d managed to haul him on to the sofa in here where he had very charmingly thrown up, thankfully mostly over himself.
Anyway, she was obsessively cleaning, I mean obsessively.
Like removing-the-limescale-from-the-taps kind of obsessive.
It was like she was trying to bleach away the madness of Dad.
I asked her if she’d had dinner yet because she looked absolutely manic, Olivia, and she just clammed up completely, froze.
She was like, “Yeah, I ate loads earlier, I’m not hungry,” which was the biggest load of overcompensating bollocks I’d heard since Mum told me she was throwing me a fortieth birthday party.
’ She moves her chair in closer to Olivia, grips her hand a little harder.
‘Listen, sis, when you’re sixteen and your parents have gone away for the night you should not be choosing to polish the kitchen surfaces, do you get what I’m trying to say?
’ Lily rubs her eyes. ‘I think Saskia is unwell. I think she might have a problem … you know, like the one you had when you were younger.’
Olivia gulps hard, swallowing back all her shame and the temptation to spiral into a pit of self-loathing.
‘I’m sorry, can you say that again?’ She shifts back in her chair, removes her hand from her sister’s.
‘I think Saskia is unwell,’ Lily repeats.
Olivia wants this to not be true. She wants there to be some other, more benign reason for her daughter’s behaviour, for the washed-out look that has been on her face for the last few weeks. But even as she acknowledges this, she feels the prickly resistance drain out of her.
As Olivia surveys the sparkling kitchen, she wonders: how had she not realized this about Saskia sooner?
And yet as she catches a whiff of the beer from last night, Olivia sees how disingenuous she is being.
Because she did realize it, didn’t she – how could she have not?
The protein bagels, the obsession with football training and the A grades – telltale traits of perfectionism.
Olivia had seen them, and like her mother before her, she had chosen to gloss over them, to view them as naturally occurring parts of Saskia’s personality, rather than the toxic by-product of believing that your personality alone is not enough.
‘Oh my god,’ whispers Olivia, placing her hand on her chest in order to try and contain the burning feeling rising there.
‘Oh my god. Saskia is me, and I’ve become our mother.
’ She tries not to lose herself in the horror of her sister being able to acknowledge this thing that she could not.
‘Can you believe that I actually thought the house was suddenly sparkling clean because Dad and Nick had developed a new-found respect for me after I stopped sugar-coating everything? Jesus, it didn’t occur to me for one moment that I’d simply handed all my people-pleasing qualities on to poor Saskia instead.
’ Olivia shakes her head. ‘How could one woman be so fucking stupid?’
‘Woah, maybe go easy on yourself there, the last time I checked you had a husband slash co-parent on board for this journey. And your people pleasing isn’t all horrible, you know. There’s some light to that shadow side. Like …’ She goes to think, comes up short.
‘We’re survivors,’ says Olivia. ‘Us people pleasers, we’re survivors.
We’ll do anything to stay alive, to keep going, because we don’t want to be alone.
We’re terrified of death, of missing out.
And maybe that worked for me, in a weird way.
It stopped me from taking the illness to its inevitable conclusion.
I just transferred all my obsessive control over food into my obsessive control over people and making them happy.
Or not making them cross. But I’ve just handed it all down to Saskia.
’ She thinks she’s going to be sick, and clearly looks that way too.
‘Hey, stop that. You’re not solely responsible for the wellbeing of everyone in this house.
We need to get Dad some proper help. And when I say “we”, I mean “we”, not just you.
I’ve been pretty negligent on that front and left it all to you, but it’s not fair, as you’ve got so much shit on and I’m just …
’ Lily puffs her cheeks out in frustration. ‘Chakra reading.’
‘I can’t believe I couldn’t see what was happening to Saskia.
’ Olivia appreciates Lily’s offer to help their dad, but she can’t think about him now.
‘I should have been a bit more savvy, given the fact I’ve spent most of my adult life in seething resentment at Mum for not taking my eating disorder seriously.
For not taking me seriously. Or for taking me too seriously, and dismissing me as a crazy drama queen. ’
‘Psychology 101,’ Lily says. ‘If we don’t get therapy, we will unwittingly recreate the circumstances of our traumatic childhoods in order to try and understand why they happened. This is all textbook, frankly.’
‘Have you and Nick been secretly doing psychoanalysis together behind my back?’ Olivia thinks today might be the day that her horror finally manages to break through the botox and create a permanent crease on her forehead. ‘Like an affair, only with conversations about Freud instead of hot sex?’
‘I’m not going to dignify that with a response.
Can we talk about how you direct all your negative energy towards Mum but seem to forget that you had a father who could have also noticed your eating disorder and tried to help you?
A father who is currently sleeping off a huge hangover in your shed. ’
‘Wow, I didn’t realize that my mental health was under the microscope as well as Saskia’s.’
‘Don’t do that. I didn’t traipse all the way over here on my weekend to have a fight with you.’
‘Sorry.’ Olivia shakes her head and hopes that in doing so she will also shake off some of the resistance she feels to her little sister, sitting here psychoanalysing her.
‘I’m just trying to say that you’re mega-hard on Mum but you forgive that loser a whole raft of things.
Tina wasn’t perfect, far from it. But for all her faults, she was actually there for our childhoods.
She was there in the morning when we got up, she was there in the evening before we went to bed, even if she was sometimes late because of an overrunning board meeting.
She was there on the weekends taking us to clubs and swimming and sleepovers.
If he’d showed up more, we might have felt more loved.
She wasn’t drinking her time away in the pub, or running away with work, like Dad.
Is it any wonder she was a bitter old cow, given the amount she had to put up with from him?
And yes, she shouldn’t have taken it out on you, of course, but I’m guessing that she was only doing what she learned in her own childhood, which was to blame the most spirited girl in the family for all of said family’s ills.
’ Lily pauses, lets that sit with her sister for a while.
‘And you were the most spirited girl in our family, Olivia.’ She points a half-bitten fingernail at her big sister.
‘You were the brave one, the one who told them the truths they couldn’t face seeing themselves.
Do you remember when we went on that holiday to Majorca, and they woke us up arguing because Dad had clearly been drinking?
And you started yelling at them to stop?
And then it was all “Olivia is making a fuss, why does she always throw tantrums”, even though all you were doing was responding to their shitty behaviour?
You always stood up for me, you always stood up for us, you always called out their unhealthy behaviour and they couldn’t deal with it so you became the black sheep.
You became the problem. But you weren’t the problem – you were the solution, if only we’d seen your illness for what it was.
A sort of barometer of all our dysfunctionality. ’
Olivia can’t believe it’s taken her so long to see this: that rather than being a difficult child, she was just a lightning rod for her parents.
The night out with Rose has restored her to the spirited soul she had been before she felt she had to start people pleasing.
The lie isn’t this new, honest version of Olivia, but the one who had existed for several decades until she accepted Rose’s cannabis gummy.
‘Have you heard of the fight, flight and freeze trauma responses?’ Lily continues. ‘They’re what happens to our nervous systems when we run into a situation that is dangerous for us. They’re like acute stress responses. But did you know there’s a fourth one, people don’t talk about quite so much?’
Olivia looks blankly at her sister.
‘Fawn. That’s the fourth trauma response, the one where instead of fighting or running away from the source of danger, you try to sweet-talk it.’
‘Oh,’ says Olivia, shifting in her seat.
‘And fawn is your response, Olivia. The way you’ve always tried to solve the problem of our family has been to make it yours alone to nurture. But you can’t make people love you by being a doormat. They just step all over you even more.’
‘Yeah, I think I’m starting to believe that now. Why do you have such a good handle on it all, though?’
‘I used all my savings on really great therapy and learned to set boundaries. You used yours to go to university.’
‘Well, that worked out great for me, didn’t it. Maybe that’s what we need to do for Saskia,’ says Olivia, rising from her chair. ‘I need to speak to her. That’s all that matters. Did she tell you anything? Did she admit to having a problem? You need to tell me what you found out.’
‘Woah, slow down there, tiger!’ Lily motions for Olivia to sit.
Olivia is about to open her mouth to speak, but is beaten to it by her sister, who is clearly on her own truth-telling mission.
‘She didn’t admit anything to me, I’m just stating what I can so obviously see.
But before you go in there?’ Olivia nods her head mutely at her sister.
‘Please can you promise me that you will remember this one, really important thing. That however unforgiving you are of Mum? That’s how unforgiving you’ll always be of yourself.
You hold the two of you to this utterly impossible standard of motherhood, of womanhood, one that fails to acknowledge the reality of being a human.
Yes, Mum was a bit of a dick. Yes, she can still be a bit of a dick.
But don’t make the mistake of thinking that’s all she is.
And don’t make the mistake of holding yourself entirely accountable for what Saskia is going through right now.
You bear some responsibility for it, of course, but it’s the responsibility of holding her through it, rather than ignoring it by pretending everything’s perfect.
Do not go into a shame spiral and make Saskia’s problems all your fault, because you know how well that goes, right? ’
Olivia nods. Lily rubs her eyes with the heels of her hands.
‘We’re not children any more, Olivia. We don’t have to subscribe to this fairytale notion of perfection and happiness that our mum tried to push on us because that was the only survival strategy she knew.
Imagine being a young woman in the sixties and seventies?
We think it was all flower power and the Beatles, but they’d only just invented the bloody contraceptive pill.
They’d only just been given the right to legally have an abortion.
It was basically the Dark Ages. We’re all really mean to Boomers.
We think they’ve had everything handed to them on a silver platter.
But fucking hell, they didn’t even have period pants, Olivia. ’
‘Yeah, it does sound pretty bleak when you put it like that.’ Olivia goes to give her sister a hug, rubs her back. ‘I’m glad you’re here, Lil. I’m so glad you’re here.’
‘I’m glad you are too,’ says Nick, bowling into the kitchen, holding his phone aloft in the air. ‘Because I think you’re going to want to be together when you see this.’