Gordon #3
His sister introduces the woman only as Kate.
And Gordon isn’t sure why, but as they stand on the corner deciding what to do with the hour before dinner, Maia struggling to keep her umbrella from turning inside out, he realizes they’re probably a couple.
Maia’s never mentioned a man, but then she hasn’t talked about a woman either.
With nine years between them, he’s never really known much about her life.
Only in the last few months has this begun to change.
Now, he knows that she likes watching hospital dramas to try to diagnose the patient before the on-screen medics do; that she’s never been overdrawn, although she has run up a ￡20 fine at the library and is too embarrassed to go in to pay it off; that she rides a bike to work each day, but can’t run because her ankles are weak from the years of ballet when she was younger; that she has a cat called Poppy.
Maia looks from him to Kate in that recognizably nervy way of someone who has just introduced two people and is unsure what they might be thinking of one another.
Gordon decides it’s probably best to assume they’re a couple and let them correct him if he’s wrong, and as they walk down St. Martin’s Lane toward the gallery they’ve decided to shelter in, he says to Kate, “How long have you two been together?”
“Seven years now, I think. That’s right, isn’t it, Maia?” Kate says, and Maia nods, her face flushing.
Gordon cringes. “Seven years. Sorry, I guess I’ve never asked.”
“Oh, that’s okay—my brother still hasn’t met Maia. At least in person,” Kate says. “He lives in Australia.”
Gordon is grateful that Kate is trying to make everything seem normal. But for the second time today, he feels he’s being confronted with the person he once was. First at school with Lily, and now, just a few months ago, before the accident. Someone who couldn’t be trusted, even by his own sister.
Their voices, even their footsteps, echo in the gallery, and he wonders if it was the best place to have come.
Although Rob often talks to Gordon about art, when Kate comments on the light or a subject’s expression, he can’t think of anything interesting to say in return, so instead only murmurs his agreement.
Maia is quieter than usual, but a few times he catches some tiny intimacy pass between the two women—a look, the way they stand before a painting with their shoulders almost touching—and he feels crestfallen.
As though he is on the outside, when he’s only just started to feel on the inside with his sister.
He shakes himself, knowing he has no right to feel jealous.
“I like this one,” he says, pointing to a Cézanne, determined to make an effort.
Kate doesn’t seem to mind the simplicity of his statement and says, “Oh, me too. That’s one of my absolute favorites.”
“Yeah, lots of energy,” Gordon says, and this time, Maia turns to look at him. Their eyes meet for just a second, but he picks up some indefinable thing, like thanks or approval. It seems to allow her to relax into her own body for the first time since they’ve met today.
They stop in front of a hideous image, a painting on loan from a gallery in Madrid. It shows a naked man, frenzied and wild-eyed, consuming a smaller figure, its bloodied, headless body clasped between his hands. Maia nods toward it and says quietly, “Does it make you think of Dad?”
Gordon studies the artwork—his eyes traveling across it, taking in each detail—then the label beside it. Saturn Devouring His Son, Francisco Goya, c. 1820–23. His stomach drops. It sandpapers a rawness he hadn’t known was inside him, and it feels too much to carry on looking.
In a pasta restaurant back near the tube station, the three of them chat easily as they twirl spaghetti onto forks.
The mood only changes when there’s a break in the rain and Kate excuses herself to go outside for a cigarette.
As soon as she’s left the table, Maia says, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that earlier.
In the gallery, about the painting and Dad. It was stupid.”
Gordon seems surprised she’s mentioned it and brushes off her apology. “Is that how you see it, though?” he says. “Do you think Dad consumed me?”
He sounds so vulnerable, so earnest, Maia wishes again she could take back her words.
She glances out of the window at Kate’s familiar profile leaning silhouetted against the wall.
The tip of her cigarette glowing in the darkness, first up near her face, then resting down by her side, the dot of red light bouncing slightly as she taps away ash with her index finger.
Maia doesn’t need daylight to fill in the gaps; she knows Kate’s short, clean nails and the way she closes her eyes momentarily just before she exhales.
She turns back to Gordon, sensing his eyes on her, waiting for an answer.
“I don’t know if consumed is the right word.
Manipulated, though. You were rewarded for being awful to Mum, before you’d had a chance to…
I don’t know, form your own conscience, I guess. ”
She pauses, not knowing if this is what he needs to hear.
But he’s still sitting there looking like an animal caught in a trap pleading for her to let him out, so she goes on.
“So it screwed with you. He didn’t care about you becoming your own person, he just wanted to mold you into something that could hurt Mum. ”
Gordon’s head drops and they’re both silent now.
The waiter arrives and asks if everything is all right with their meal and they both nod and say it’s delicious, even as the pasta congeals in their bowls.
They make small talk, but it’s as though the painting is still with them, and suddenly neither has the appetite for what’s in front of them.
Maia sees Kate stubbing out her cigarette beneath the sole of her shoe outside, and in a rush of words, an attempt to salvage things, says, “You know, it’s not just you.
We’ve both let Mum down. You’d think at my age, in my profession, I’d have found a way to help her, to fix things.
But it’s different when it’s family. I can’t work out how he has such a hold over her.
” Kate is approaching the table now. “I don’t understand why she stays; why she goes back.
The only thing we can do is be there when she needs us. ”
Kate sits down. “Is everything okay?” she asks, her hair darkened in patches where rainwater must have dripped from the awning.
“Yeah. We were just chatting about Dad. Nothing quite like it to ruin the mood.” Maia looks at Gordon rather than Kate as she speaks, hoping he’ll understand they’re in this together.
Because whenever she thinks of her mother, her whole being pricks with guilt.
For not being enough. For not being a daughter Cora will confide in.
For not challenging her father as she’s grown older, because the moment she’s in his presence, she’s nine years old again, hollow and scared, the wind blowing straight through her.
Medicine is their only common ground. Their only safe topic.
Which comes as a relief, but also a betrayal.
So it’s easier not to think too much. To exist in the calm between the moments of intense, mind-spinning panic, which arrive without warning and make her breath ragged until Kate has talked her down.
Until she finds a way to normalize her mum still being in that house.
With no direct access to her own children, not even a door key to come and go as she pleases.
They skip dessert and Kate asks for the bill.
“Sorry,” Gordon says, as Maia opens her wallet.
“I was the one who suggested dinner. It’s fine.” She knows there was a time when he would have nonchalantly tossed a credit card onto the table and that it must pain him not to be able to contribute now.
Outside, the three of them shelter in a doorway on the opposite side of the street.
“I hope this hasn’t been too much for you,” Maia is saying, searching Gordon’s face for clues, but whatever connection they’ve made has somehow fallen loose.
He’s avoiding eye contact, staring at the people through the windows of the restaurant they’ve just left.
He’s probably dreading going home, she thinks.
It depresses her to think of the three of them in that house.
Still gathered joylessly around that table.
Her mother has left four times now. The first and the second time, Maia had thought it was permanent.
She has begun to count off these attempts, seeing their only purpose as bringing them one step closer to seven.
Seven is the magic number. A talisman. It is the average number of times a woman will attempt to leave an abusive partner before she’s finally successful.
She’d said this one night before sleep and realized from Kate’s pause, from the not-quite-silent intake of breath and her hand squeezing Maia’s, that she was thinking, But it’s an average.
There will be outliers. There will be some who never manage it or who run out of life trying.
And Maia knows how unscientific, how irrational, her thinking is when it comes to her family.
“Goodbye then,” Gordon says.
But Maia isn’t quite ready to part. She needs to extract some sort of assurance from him. “You won’t…Gordon?” She uses his name to try to draw his attention back to her. “You won’t, er, mention this to Dad, will you?”
“Mention what?” he says, and she can tell he’s not really hearing her.
“About me and Kate, and—”
“She’d prefer it if you didn’t tell your father she’s gay,” Kate says flatly.
“Oh, right. Yeah, not a word.”
Gordon’s eyes are flickering back to the couple in the window, to the glass of wine in the woman’s hand, its velvety liquid falling toward the lip of her glass as she tilts it to drink.
Maia is saying something, and he knows he is thanking her and saying what a nice evening it’s been and that they should do it more often, but in his mind, he is already halfway down the street.
Once they’ve parted at Leicester Square tube station, Gordon heads along the road.
The pavement is busy with people, but he doesn’t see them.
His eyes are on the signs above the shops, thinking about the velvet-red of the woman’s wine.
He can already taste it on his tongue, catch the whisper of its scent as he imagines taking the cork from the bottle he’ll buy.
Eventually, he finds a corner shop, sees the white strip-lighting inside.
He travels between the aisles with the focus of a sniffer dog, moving around other shoppers as though they are inanimate obstacles.
And then he finds what he is looking for.
Rows of Merlot, Shiraz, Pinot Noir, Malbec.
Gordon picks out a cheaper Cabernet Sauvignon and there is instant comfort in having the bottle in his hand, in its pristine label, its contents dark and promising.
He wants to sink into it, to consume it and let it consume him.
But then, just as he is approaching the till, his eyes catch on it.
There, on the shelf behind the checkout.
Gordon’s. Its familiar green glass. The cursive script that spells out his name.
That says, Yours. And that now also says, Lily.
And lawyer, and assault, and the way he’d felt today when he’d shared his memories of that night and its aftermath with Rob.
And later, realizing his own sister hadn’t trusted him.
And he is thinking, Oh, God, and wanting to be far away from that bottle, from that name, from his name, from the red Sauvignon, and the mistake he was about to make.
He shoves the wine back onto a nearby shelf, crushing it in amongst family-sized bags of crisps.
And then he turns and sprints from the shop.
“Hey!” someone calls after him. And he holds up his empty hands to whoever might be out on the street watching him go, and runs.