Gordon
“Go on.”
He sensed this as the moment he’d pushed it too far. “The bill, please,” his father had said to the waiter. And then he’d sat staring into space and it was as though a shutter had come down.
He wants to explain, but realizes he can’t even explain it to himself, except that he has always wanted to be called Luke.
Outside the classroom, he sits against the wall, pinching at the birthmark on his forearm, watching as its misshapen heart outline disappears and reforms, disappears and reforms.
That night over dinner, his father asks how his first day back was. “Good,” he says, as he shovels forkfuls of macaroni into his mouth.
“Don’t speak with your mouth full,” his father tells him, and then looks pointedly at his raised elbows, stuck out at odd angles as he manhandles his cutlery. Gordon lowers them.
He notices his mother’s drink and says, “Can I have a straw too?”
“No,” Maia says.
“It’s not up to you. Why does Mum get one and not me? She’s not even a child.”
“I’m just getting better from some dental work,” she says.
Maia sighs and their father gives her a sharp look.
Gordon stops shoveling, stares at his mother’s face and sees the fat swell of her left cheek, as though she’s stuffed a ping-pong ball inside.
And, not understanding quite why, he detects she isn’t telling the truth and that the others are all in on the secret.
It’s always like this. The three of them, knowing something he doesn’t.
And he suddenly craves another outing with his dad, to be just boys together again, to pull him away from Maia and his mother and redefine allegiances.
Ever since Pizza Express, he’s been thinking of other things he could tell his dad, things that would please him.
So now he’s saving them up in his head, a my-grandmother-went-to-market-and-she-bought-style list of all the things his mother does wrong.
Maia sits on the sofa, the plate of biscuits Mrs. Radley left out for her half empty.
She likes babysitting for the Radleys. They only live a few streets away, but where Maia’s house has faux pillars flanked by neat planters, theirs has a path of old tiles that look like they’ve always been there, bordered by riotous plants that tickle at your ankles as you make your way to the front door.
Inside, there is the mess of everyday life.
Of people leaving things where they put them down, and then not picking them up again until Mrs. Radley announces it’s time for a blitz.
There is something cozy and not unclean about their mess, and Maia sinks into it, takes her textbooks from her bag the minute the children are in bed, spreading them out on the coffee table, placing one at a casual angle on the floor, wanting to integrate her things with theirs.
At home, the cushions are always plumped, the work surfaces wiped down, as though an orderly veneer will purify the reality of their lives. But somehow it doesn’t work. The tidier it is, the more it looks like they’re hiding something.
“Blimey, Maia! It’s like a show home,” a girl from her year had said once when she’d stopped by unannounced to borrow her tutu for a recital.
“Where’s all your stuff?” she’d asked, glancing into the living room as Maia ran upstairs to get the skirt.
“Oh, we keep a lot of junk in the garage,” she’d said, hoping she wouldn’t ask to see.
When the Radleys arrive home, she hears them on the path outside before their key is in the lock.
They are always talking or giggling over something and when Mrs. Radley calls him a bloody idiot for dropping his keys, he only laughs.
As Mrs. Radley searches in her handbag for the babysitting money, Mr. Radley chats to Maia, but his eyes are drawn back to his wife as though she is a slice of chocolate cake and he is politely waiting for the moment when Maia leaves, and he will be free to tuck in.
She imagines them like the characters in the sex education video at school, where a cartoon couple chase one another around the bedroom trying to tickle each other with feathers, looking happy and excited.
She knows sex isn’t about feathers, but Mr. and Mrs. Radley seem as though they’d have fun like that.
Sometimes she hears her own father grunting through the wall.
She pulls the covers up over her head, but it’s habit to want to know if her mother’s all right.
She strains to listen from beneath the duvet but hears nothing.
It makes her think sex is probably something her father does to her mother.
Not the reciprocal act they talked about in part two of the periods chat at school last year.
Maia isn’t interested in boys. Sometimes, when her friend Sadie is talking, she finds herself transfixed by the soft pink of her lips and imagines what it would be like to lean in and kiss them.
But she doesn’t do anything, because it feels complicated.
All her focus is on getting to university to study medicine.
It seems odd to be following in her father’s footsteps, but when she’s witnessed him in professional mode, the fear she often feels is overshadowed by something close to admiration.
She’s in awe of the reassuring voice he uses with patients; the way he shakes the thermometer before reading the mercury, his face never betraying alarm no matter how high her fever; the calm precision with which he’d administered a shot of adrenaline the time Gordon had been stung by a wasp.
For a moment that day, it had seemed as though he might die right there at the picnic table in his Batman costume, but then her father had donned the invisible cape of medic and saved him.
A hero, fleetingly. She longs to possess that kind of competence and control.
Even though they have the thick UCAS book in the sixth-form common room, Cora clocks a noticeboard at parents’ evening and in the days after makes suggestions of where Maia might apply.
“It says you need to write a personal statement. Do you know what that is?” Maia reminds her that she’s only in the lower sixth and doesn’t need to do it until the start of the next year.
Her mother looks panicked, as though they might somehow forget in the meantime.
Maia looks at the places she’s suggested on a map.
Manchester, Leeds, Cardiff, Edinburgh, even one in Ireland where Grandma Sylvia lives. They are all far, far away.
Maia knows her mum rarely speaks to Grandma Sylvia.
Dad doesn’t like her to make long-distance phone calls and they never visit.
Sometimes, Grandma Sylvia sends checks for Christmas or birthdays that their father deposits into a bank account, along with Maia’s babysitting money.
“Mum,” she’d asked once, “why is Grandma’s name Sílbhe on here? ”
“Oh, that’s her name. It’s the Irish version of Sylvia.”
“So why don’t we call her that?” She saw her mother pause, open her mouth, and then close it again. “Well, how do you pronounce it then? Properly I mean?”
“It’s Shilva,” her mother told her, and her face had softened as she’d said the word. Maia knew then why her father wanted to erase any connection with Ireland.
Maia says the name in her head, lets it swirl around in her thoughts at the dinner table like an act of defiance.
Sílbhe. She enjoys the little flick above the í, like the flame of a candle that refuses to be blown out.
At school, she starts writing her own name as Maía, a change so subtle no one notices but her.
Gradually, Grandma Sílbhe comes to seem their only potential savior.
Maia imagines turning up on her doorstep or calling from a telephone box and asking if she can reverse the charges.
But in the end, she writes a letter, paying for a stamp with money she finds on the ground.
It only takes a week or two of walking with her eyes down on the way to and from school.
People don’t drop money in the streets near home, but by the small parade of shops, the park, the ticket machine at the train station, she finds coppers everywhere.
She wants to tell her mum this, so she’ll have money of her own, but knows her mother—the doctor’s wife—can’t be seen hunting for change in the dandelions that grow up around the glass bottle bank like some kind of bag lady.
Maia thinks about this and is shocked to realize how little separates them.
Her mother lives in a warm house and is bought clothes to wear, but she has no more money or freedom than the woman who pushes a shopping trolley of scavenged treasures around town.
Late one night, she’d come downstairs for a glass of water.
The light in the living room was off, and so Maia had stood in the darkness, unseen, as her father knelt over her mother, wrists held behind her back, as she ate from a bowl on the kitchen floor, his voice low and calm beside her.
“Maybe now you’ll think twice about making us live like animals, Cora.
It’s not nice, is it? I hope this will help you to remember to clean out the fridge next time.
No one wants to have to eat rotten food like this. ”
Maia had turned, silently carried what she’d seen up the stairs with her, and then vomited it across the landing carpet.
She had stood for a moment, looking at the walls splattered with chunks of carrot she couldn’t remember eating, wondering what to do.
And then she’d called out weakly from the top of the stairs, “I’ve been sick,” and moments later her parents had appeared, no trace in their faces of what she’d just seen in the kitchen.
The next morning, she’d written the letter in the school library on pages torn carefully from the back of her exercise book.