Chapter 1 Jules “Seaside” #2
The Kooks’s “Seaside” is drifting out from Liam’s room as I hurry past, along with the stale stink of that disgusting weed he smokes, even though Adam and I have been over all the reasons why he should quit countless times.
He’s usually so nocturnal, I’m surprised he’s awake at this hour. Or maybe he’s been up all night again?
I find Nelly in the kitchen doorway downstairs, her nose buried into the crook of her arm.
“It’s a shitshow,” she winces, as I squeeze past. “Literally.”
Liam, twenty-one, really is up. Wearing boxers and a black T-shirt, he’s squatting on a kitchen chair clutching a mug of coffee, while Groucho Barx, our senile—and frequently incontinent—black-and-white collie, peers up at me with guilty brown eyes from where he’s quivering by the back door.
“We can’t find the remote,” Liam says, nodding down at Mop Bot, the new robot vacuum cleaner, as it continues merrily smearing one of Groucho’s more exuberant deposits over the tiles in blissful, space-age arcs.
Striding across the kitchen, I pick the damn thing up.
“Mum! Gross,” Nelly cries.
I jab at the button on Mop Bot’s top until it dies abruptly in my arms. Gagging from the smell, I dump it on the floor.
In the moment of silence that follows, Liam snorts with pent-up laughter.
“Not funny,” I snap, glaring across at him and his pale skinny legs, rife with line tattoos.
I hate the fact that he’s done this to himself over the past year, but it’s not like I’m in much of a position to criticize him.
I got a drunk tattoo myself in my misspent youth—to my everlasting shame.
A cartoon rat on the back of my shoulder in honor of my boyfriend at the time, Mickey Ratty. But at least I very rarely see mine.
Climbing down from his kitchen chair, still laughing, Liam half hops, half dances across the messy tiles into the hall like he’s playing Twister.
“Oi. That’s mine!” Nelly exclaims, pulling at the hem of his T-shirt. “You pig! It stinks of smoke.”
Backing off, his slopping coffee cup held aloft, Liam sidesteps her as she gives chase, like they’re both still kids, just as Adam arrives in his pajama bottoms and faded Nirvana Nevermind T-shirt. He flattens himself against the wall as Liam and Nelly tumble past, shrieking and swearing.
I slowly survey the wreckage Mop Bot has left in its wake. The kitchen floor looks like a Jackson Pollock if he ever had a Brown Period.
“I didn’t want that bloody thing anyway.”
Adam holds up his hands, as if fending off a bear. “Only trying to help,” he says.
It takes all my self-control not to yell that this isn’t helping. He’s not helping. He never helps. None of them do. Or never enough.
Which is why I called a family summit last month and pointed out that, since Liam had dropped out of uni and Nelly was working from home, and since they’re both now technically adults, they could start helping out around the place.
But it fell on deaf ears, until my “aggressive tone” was noted by Nelly, while Liam, who never misses an opportunity to gang up with his sister, added that I was “having a go.” Then Nelly accused me of being menopausal in such a condescending way that I honestly wanted to stab them all with a fork.
Adam decided that the best solution was to buy me a robot vacuum for my birthday.
Yeah. Right. Lucky me.
Negotiating his way across the clean patches of tiles, Adam lets Groucho out into the back garden from the utility room and starts wafting the door to get rid of the smell. He looks at me as I snatch the mop from the cupboard.
“Um, you wanna leave that and maybe…?” He gives me a hopeful smirk, glancing back upstairs.
I can’t actually believe what I’m hearing. “No, Adam,” I tell him. “I really think the moment has passed.”
—
It takes an age to wash the floor while Adam takes Groucho Barx for a loop around St. Ann’s Well Gardens in case he does it again.
When I’m finished, I survey the kitchen with its ancient green cabinets that Adam refuses to get rid of because of their “sentimental” value.
It’s like he’s trying to keep his parents’ kitchen as it was when they were still alive and lived in this house, as a kind of mausoleum to his childhood.
He even had the cheek to say the other day that everything here’s so old, it’s come back into fashion, but I don’t buy it. It looks like what it is—a dump.
Out in the utility room, I tentatively sniff my original seventies Missoni sundress hanging on the drying rack.
Phew, now that I’ve washed it, it doesn’t smell too musty.
And just as well, because there’s no way I can afford anything new for the party, so when Nelly suggested going down the vintage route, I ventured into the loft and found this old friend I bought in Camden Market in the nineties. I’m hoping it’ll look cool and vibey.
When Adam gets home, Groucho skitters across the wet kitchen floor with muddy paws, and I huff.
“Don’t forget you said you’d take this lot to the dump,” I remind him, and point as he heads out toward the shed.
There are several boxes of loft junk that I’ve left piled up by the back door.
The first lot of many, I hope. It’s stuffed to the rafters up there, but if we cleared it out, we could turn it into a home office for Nelly.
That would be one way of getting her out of our dining room, where she currently works.
As he takes the lid off one, I feel an urge to slap his hand away. Why can’t he ever just do what I ask?
“Is that my wedding suit?” He sounds dismayed.
“It’s wrecked. The loft wildlife have had a field day,” I reply defensively.
Rummaging down, he pulls out my wedding veil, which is covered in mouse droppings, along with my lovely silk dress that the moths have chewed into lace.
“Oh my God. Can’t any of it be salvaged?”
“It’s all ruined. Just take it. I want it out. Gone.”
Pulling a pained expression, he moves like a government inspector at a customs checkpoint to the next box. Under the lid is a dog-eared backgammon set.
“But we used to love playing,” he says.
“Used to. Twenty years ago. Because that’s how long it’s been up in the loft. Just give it to a charity shop, okay?”
Oh God. Here we go. I see his frown as he spots what’s underneath. A jumble of his broken childhood Star Wars figurines. I chew my lip, the ghost of our Spectacular Fucking Row from 2014 suddenly looming large.
Apart from our increased scratchiness of late—well, scratchiness might be an understatement—mostly over the years we’ve rubbed along pretty well.
Neither of us is particularly volatile, preferring the kind of stealth combat offered up by silent, simmering sulks and petty digs.
But occasionally there’s enough umbrage taken for one of us to blow.
The violent fate of Adam’s Star Wars collection caused a pretty major explosion.
I stare down at the survivors’ dusty faces and partially melted limbs. “Maybe someone else’s kid might want them?” I suggest.
“No. Dad gave them to me,” he says, like he’s a schoolkid and I’ve just tried to snatch something off him at the school gates. No, he hasn’t forgotten the Spectacular Fucking Row either.
He puts the box on the floor reverentially, making it clear he’ll be taking it elsewhere, but certainly not to the charity shop, then starts on the next box.
He holds up a bundle of my old diaries. “Seriously? Do you want to throw all our old stuff out?”
“The past is a foreign country. Isn’t that how the saying goes?”
Anyway, what’s the point of keeping that old drivel? Especially if Liam or Nelly accidentally got to read them. Or Adam. There’s lots of stuff about him in there too.
I sigh, as he digs deeper.
“No way. Not all our mixtapes.” He sounds horrified.
I stand next to him and peek at the jumble of tapes and CDs we used to make for one another, until his last laptop with a CD burner died a few years before lockdown.
He picks up one of the cassette tapes and dusts it off, examining its ancient track names written out in his sloping handwriting. Along the spine it says For Juliet 1989 in faded blue pen.
“But you love ‘Ride on Time’ and ‘Eternal Flame.’ ”
The accusation—no, the betrayal—in his voice makes me flare with anger. All I want to do is to clear some space, get some order. He’s such a bloody hoarder. It’s suffocating.
“It’s old tech, Adam. Just chuck it.” Snatching the lid from him, I replace it firmly on the box. “Or, I don’t know…re-create them all on Spotify, if you must…”
But from the way he looks at me, I might as well have thrown the whole box at his head.