Chapter 28
Ivy
‘This algebra is so fucking stupid,’ Lily says, throwing down her pencil. ‘It’s, like, completely impossible. I swear there’s no actual answer.’
‘Language,’ I say on autopilot as I chop onions for the spag bol we’ll have for dinner. ‘Rose, can you help her?’
It’s a reasonable suggestion. Rose is in the top set for maths; Lily’s in the middle set. It stands to reason that her sister could help her.
‘No, because I’m trying to do my geography right now, okay, and I’m in the zone—or I was until somebody interrupted me. Jesus Christ.’ Rose pushes her seat back and flounces off to their bedroom, presumably in search of headphones.
I sigh and put down the cutting knife, blinking at the searing pain in my eyes. I need to sharpen it so I can get these onions diced more quickly. ‘Let me see, hon.’
‘You won’t be able to do it either,’ Lily says.
‘I know.’ Don’t I just. I rub my eyes with my knuckles, trying to avoid getting onion juice anywhere near them, and squint down at her laptop before rearing back in horror.
‘Holy fuck, that’s aggressive.’ The screen is swimming with ys and ns and, it seems, the whole bloody alphabet.
‘That’s not an equation, that’s a bloody paragraph. ’
‘Right?’ Lily twists around to peer at me, ignoring my F-bomb right on the tail of telling her off for doing the same. ‘It’s, like, ridiculous.’
I continue to stare at the screen in horror.
Nope. Not a chance. I did reasonably well in my maths GCSE, but in the eight years since, my brain has clearly shed every last memory of how to solve algebraic equations.
Beside the laptop lies a notepad on which Lily, bless her, has scrawled all end of numbers and letters, trying to solve for n like she’s been told to.
‘Okay,’ I say slowly, ‘I think what you should do is copy the entire thing into ChatGPT and ask it to show you the workings. Then we can go through it step by step and make sure you understand it all.’
She groans. ‘Why can’t I just ask it for the answer?’
‘Because then you won’t learn, will you, and you’ll be screwed next year when you get to the exams and you don’t know how to work through this kind of question.’
I have to be careful here. Given half the chance, the girls would feed every bit of homework into an AI.
And while I’m absolutely not about to let them delegate their history essays to a bot, maths is an area where ChatGPT is the closest we’ll come to a private tutor.
It’s the closest we’ll get to closing at least some of the gap between the twins and the more privileged kids in their schools who have scholarly parents or extra tutors.
I can’t help her, Rose won’t help her, and she can go back to school tomorrow oblivious or she can at least have a stab at being able to understand how these bloody equations work.
I hover over Lily. Dinner won’t cook itself, and I’m kicking myself for not starting it earlier.
Most of the time, I can do the dinner prep while the girls are working through their homework, but every few days there’s a meltdown that means I have to abandon cooking altogether, and I don’t trust Lily not to paste the entire page into ChatGPT and just copy across the answers.
Rose storms back down the stairs. Storms is the right word because my slim little sister manages to sound like a fucking SWAT team when they’re not in stealth mode.
‘Excuse me? What the fuck happened to my top?’ She has her big pink headphones around her neck.
She marches over to the table and shakes her new top in my face. I sigh again and stand up straight.
‘I told you that might happen when we washed it, love.’
That is the fact that the top is half navy, half cream, and that the navy half has bled into the cream half. I saw this coming the minute she brought it home from some cheapo shop on Oxford Street.
‘You said you’d be careful!’ She throws the top down on the kitchen table, right on top of Lily’s notepad.
‘Oi!’ This from Lily. ‘What the fuck are you—’
I’m not having this kind of tone from Rose. If the twins want me to wait on them hand and foot, they can at least treat me like a fucking human being. I take a deep breath and hold out a hand to halt Lily.
One effing drama at a time.
‘I’m sorry it got ruined. It’s shitty, and I get why you’re pissed off.
But don’t take it out on me. I washed it just like the label told me to.
It’s the manufacturer’s fault. They’ve put two different coloured fabrics together because they look pretty on the rack, but do they bother colour-fixing them?
Nope. So that’s what you get. I’ll take it back to the shop and see if I can get us a refund. ’
‘Whatever.’ She glares at me and throws herself into her chair with the drama of a silent-era actor trying to convey utter hopelessness.
I glance back at Lily’s screen. She’s copying and pasting the answer to the equation from ChatGPT into the answer box on the maths website. Nope, nope, nope. Clearly I’m going to have to police this situation very carefully.
‘Not a chance, love.’ I pull out the chair next to her and sink into it, wiping my oniony hands on my apron before I move Rose’s discarded top. We’ll just have to eat late tonight. ‘We’re going through the workings. Line by line. Talk me through it.’
It’s not until I’m finally browning the mince forty minutes later that Rose pipes up again.
‘What the hell is that beefy stink? You know I’ve gone vegan, right?’
I get a panicked call from the on-duty nurse at Dawn’s care home around ten, just after I’ve sent the girls to bed. She’s sundowning, so they call me in to try to comfort her.
My plan for tonight is to process the news I got today from the council while I finish off an Etsy commission for a little sketch of someone’s aunt’s cottage and spend the rest of the evening going through the Christmas presents I’ve bought so far for Dawn and the twins.
I want to make sure I’m on top of them all, and I’ve been saving so Dawn can have some new, soft items of clothing to keep her comfy in the home.
She definitely needs an extra robe or two.
She’s messing up her clothes so often through a mix of spills and soiling that she needs multiples of everything to see her through laundry cycles.
But all that gets kiboshed when the call comes in. I can fork out for all the nice, soft pyjamas in the world, but having a family member there when she’s distressed is far more important, especially on nights like tonight, when she shoots far beyond distress to actual terror.
When I arrive at the convent, she seems to understand that she’s in a place that isn’t home, but she can’t grasp where she is or why.
She’s gripping her walker, barely able to stand.
Even if it wasn’t for the LBD, her terrifying weight loss means her muscles are wasting away.
She also—and this is by far the most upsetting part—seems to be having a fight with Dad in her head.
‘She keeps yelling for someone called Steve,’ the nun who’s been supervising her tells me.
I’d say looking after her, but that’s not strictly true.
This woman, in her navy skirt and white shirt and whatever they call those creepy navy headdresses, has her lips pursed in disapproval, as if Dawn’s mental lapse is mere self-indulgence.
It takes me less than a minute to work out that she’s not yelling for my dad.
She’s yelling at him.
‘Steve! Steve! What the fuck are you doing, just standing there? Get me out of this hellhole, you stupid bastard! No, no, I won’t listen. I won’t stay here. What do you mean, you don’t have the car with you, you useless twat?’
Here’s the thing. The Dawn who raised me didn’t swear.
Ever. She always used to say that swearing was spectacularly lazy, an uncreative substitute for proper communication.
Nor did she ever speak to my father like that.
They had a loving, respectful relationship; I don’t remember either of them raising their voices to each other.
(She didn’t hallucinate, either, oddly enough.)
Yet here she is: this brilliant, articulate, terrifyingly well-read woman screaming filth at her long-dead husband.
Hell isn’t a fiery cage somewhere in the earth’s core.
It’s standing by helplessly as a person you love becomes imprisoned in their own brain, tortured by the endlessly cruel tricks their mind devises for them.
Dad may be alive in Dawn’s twisted version of reality, but Lord knows, whatever betrayal she believes him to be guilty of seems to be causing her even more grief than his absence would in her rational mind.
They warned me about the hallucinations, but I don’t have a clue how to deal with this one. If she was asking for Dad, I could fob her off. Tell her he’s at work. But when he’s apparently standing in front of her and refusing to take her home, it’s a bit trickier.
I glance at the nun, whose arms are crossed and lips pursed while Dawn continues to launch her F-bombs.
The two women must be similar ages, but Dawn looks like an octogenarian, shuffling as she is across the room with tiny, unsteady steps, the hands white-knuckling the walker gnarly and mottled. Old lady hands.
‘Dawn,’ I say. ‘It’s me. It’s Ivy.’ Maybe if she remembers Dad well enough to think he’s here, then she’ll recognise me. Not my most rational train of thought, but it’s all I’ve got. I approach carefully. Distraction is my best bet right now.
She looks over at me, unseeing, as if I’m nothing more than an annoying insect, and then back towards the wall, where Dad is apparently playing on some fucked-up VR game in her head. ‘Steve. I’ll pack up. I can be quick. Just take me home. They don’t know how to make a proper cup of tea here.’