Chapter 31
Olivia Greenwood is changing. Or maybe she’s just becoming more herself.
Whatever the case, she seems to have started singing out loud on the train.
She’s sure of it. It’s the only way to explain the ability she has to spread out over an entire table without anyone daring to come near her on the morning commute.
She smiles at the people bunched by the doors, who try desperately not to meet her eye.
Miserable fucks, she thinks to herself, as the opening bars to ‘It’s All Coming Back to Me Now’ strike up for the sixteenth time this journey.
It’s the only song for it, frankly.
Just a few short weeks ago, this was her worst nightmare.
Someone hearing her sing, let alone an entire carriage?
There are so many things in Olivia Greenwood’s life that until recently she hadn’t allowed herself to do, like explaining to her husband how to give her an orgasm, and telling her dad to start pulling his fucking weight, and informing her boss that she’s not a nodding dog he can do with as he pleases.
Why wouldn’t she add singing out loud on the train to that list?
As she hums along, she realizes the great mistake she’s made her whole life, the thing that has led her to this moment, sitting on the train, singing Celine Dion like a madwoman: her inability to accept that life was full of problems for everyone, not just her.
As a child, she had been told again and again that she only ever caused problems, and perhaps, back then, this mistaken belief had helped Olivia to survive.
But now, as an adult, it is causing difficulties in its own right.
Olivia’s dogged conviction that she is always the problem, that she alone must come up with a solution to all of life’s issues because life’s issues only exist as a result of her existing …
well, it isn’t sane. It isn’t normal. It is the opposite of a delusion of grandeur – a delusion of inferiority, if you will – but every bit as sick and wrong.
Olivia has genuinely believed that if she wasn’t such a tricky human, her parents would have been content.
They would have organized birthday parties, and not shouted at her for having appendicitis.
Now she not only sees what bullshit this is – but what dangerous bullshit it is.
She has gone through life ignoring any truths that didn’t match her childish version of reality, brushing them under the carpet and beating herself round the head with the broom when she finds there’s no longer any space for them there.
It’s led her to some sort of breakdown, but as she stares at the backside of Battersea Power Station, she wonders if all breakdowns aren’t actually more like breakthroughs.
Now, as she moves her shoulders in time to the sweeping piano keys, she knows what she has to do, in order to make everything better.
Or, more pointedly, to stop trying to make everything better.
As she hollers out the chorus of Celine’s most important work to date, a few commuters jumping in shock at the vocal range and tone of the once mousy girl on the 8.
27 to Victoria, Olivia is ready for the challenge ahead of her.
She has to face the music.
Olivia has arranged to meet her mother in the Gail’s near the office. Tina had agreed on the condition it was nowhere near any of their usual Sussex haunts – right now, as she comes to terms with the fact that Clive is a sex pest, she cannot bear to be seen in polite society.
The invitation, extended shortly after that heart-to-heart with Saskia, came as a surprise to Olivia, much as it had no doubt been to Tina.
But as she found herself typing out the WhatsApp, Olivia knew she couldn’t even begin to help Saskia if she didn’t try to heal her fractured relationship with her own mother.
The conversation with Rose had reminded her, starkly, that not everybody had the opportunity to mend things with their parents.
She had spent most of her adult life simmering in silent resentment at her mother for not being there in the way she needed her to be, but now she suspected that her mum had barely had the capacity to be there for herself.
She had to tell Tina how she felt. She couldn’t believe she was saying this, but she needed to give her mother the chance to prove her wrong.
‘I could have driven you here,’ announces Tina, when Olivia sits down at a table tucked in the corner of the café.
‘I’m OK on the train. Used to it now. Only time I get to myself.’
‘Yes, well, I know that feeling.’ She pauses, fiddles with a pearl earring. ‘I hope that Clive hasn’t dared to show his face on the commute. Odious man.’
‘No, he hasn’t.’ Olivia clears her throat, decides not to say anything about the incident on the train, or the message she had received a few days ago from the British Transport Police to inform her that ‘after careful consideration of fresh evidence’, they had decided to drop the case.
‘I’m sorry that he turned out to be like that. ’
‘Yes, well, let the rubbish take itself out, and all that. I’m guessing you want to interview me about him for The Morning?’
‘What?’ Olivia motions to the waiter who is looking for the recipients of the giant chocolatey cappuccino and skinny latte.
‘I assumed that was why you asked me here.’ Tina leans back as their drinks are placed on the table in front of them. ‘To get me to give you some sort of exclusive about that tosser Clive.’
‘Oh, right.’ Olivia shakes her head. ‘No, no, that’s not why I asked you here. I don’t even write articles for The Morning any more. I’m their Anniversary Architect.’
‘Their what?’
‘To be honest, Mum, your guess is as good as mine.’ She sips her cappuccino, feels the caffeine light up her frontal lobe.
‘But anyway, I haven’t asked you here to talk about The Morning, or Clive.
I asked you here because I feel like …’ Olivia considers for a moment the possibility of legging it, talks herself out of it.
‘I feel like we need to clear the air, Mum.’
‘You don’t have to do that, darling, I know how stressful it can be looking after your father.’
‘Mum, this isn’t about Dad. It’s about us. Me and you.’
A great silence envelops them, as Olivia feels tears begin to prick at her eyes.
‘Well, OK,’ Tina eventually says. ‘OK. That seems sensible.’
‘I had a chat with Saskia the other day. I told her about being unwell when I was her age and how I didn’t want that to happen to he—’
‘I didn’t WANT you to be ill,’ Tina interrupts. ‘Honestly, Olivia, do you think I wanted you to suffer?’
‘No! No, that’s not what I was trying to say. I was just talking to her about what it had felt like when I was a child and—’
‘The thing about you, Olivia, was that you’ve always been so independent and headstrong.
Even when you were so ill. I always knew you had the strength to pull through.
You’ve never really needed me. You still don’t need me, not like Lily does.
I’m not having to fund you in your forties, thank goodness. ’
‘Headstrong and independent, just like you.’ Olivia sits back in her chair and tries to make sense of what she has just heard.
‘Maybe. Maybe we have more in common than you’d like to admit. You’re always going on about how I don’t love you, and the truth is that I’ve always felt like it’s you who doesn’t love me.’
‘Of course I love you, Mum.’ Olivia can feel both of their hackles rising, and knows she has to defuse the situation if either of them are going to come out of Gail’s alive.
‘If you’ll let me finish, I’ll tell you what I was actually going to say.
Saskia hasn’t been herself and I realized I’d been, how can I put it?
Distracted. By my own stuff. And that I need to focus on the kids.
She’s going to have some therapy, I think it will really help.
And I thought that in the spirit of getting healthier and happier, me and you could do with having a proper chat, alone, not in the loos of a restaurant during a massive family get-together. ’
‘I had therapy, you know.’ Tina raises her mug to her lips, blows on it, then puts it back down on the table without taking a sip.
‘That’s why I finally had the courage to divorce your father.
It was the prompt I needed after decades of enabling him, hoping that he would just get better and stop …
stop drinking. But you can’t make someone stop drinking, Olivia.
They have to want to do it themselves. And I had to start focusing on myself. ’
‘You were always working, always busy, always chasing something else bigger and brighter than what you had.’ The petulance falls out of her mouth before she’s able to catch it.
‘Olivia, do you really believe what you’re saying? Do you really think, after going through the juggle of work and parenthood yourself, and seeing what a drunk your father is, that’s what was happening?’
‘I …’ Olivia feels shame bubble inside her. ‘I always felt wrong around you.’
‘You were probably just picking up on how wrong I felt, but that had nothing to do with you. I was trying to be a parent and a successful businesswoman and a wife to a man I was in denial about being an alcoholic. But you weren’t wrong.’
‘I was, though. I was always so sensitive, so … I had an eating disorder, Mum. How can you say I wasn’t wrong?’