by Ali Mercer
Ellie said, ‘Is that it?’
Mum didn’t respond, and Ellie repeated herself. Mum said, ‘Is what it?’
‘About the girl. Mark’s little girl. The one he doesn’t see, and didn’t tell you about. You aren’t even angry with him?’
‘You sound as if you want me to be,’ Mum said.
‘Well, are you?’
‘I can’t talk about it when I’m driving.’
‘Then you’re just going to let him off the hook?’
‘Look, good people sometimes end up in bad situations, OK? And he’s a good man. His mother might be a little difficult… She really shouldn’t have come out with all that stuff in front of you. But she has, and now I know and I need to digest it and talk to him about it. But there’s no reason why it should have any effect on you, so can we please drop the subject? At least for now?’
I turned round and pulled a face at Ellie. She shrugged. ‘OK. I was just trying to clear the air.’
‘I don’t think it’s that big a deal,’ I said to Mum. Then I said to Ellie, ‘How’s your headache?’
‘Headache? What headache? You didn’t say anything about a headache,’ Mum said.
Ellie frowned at me to signal that she didn’t want Mum fussing about it. ‘It’s gone now. I just didn’t feel too good when we were at Ingrid’s. What kind of operation was it they used to do there? You know, the one Ingrid didn’t want to talk about?’
Mum started telling us about an aunt of Mark’s who’d had a lobotomy there in the fifties, and then Ellie wanted more details about what kind of operation it was and how it worked and Mum ended up telling her to look it up. I tuned out. The idea of people sticking sharp objects into other people’s brains didn’t really sit well with smoked salmon and summer pudding, and Mum was having to drive a bit faster than usual to keep up with Mark, which wasn’t great round the bends.
Once she’d got the grim medical information she wanted, Ellie went very quiet and fell to looking out at the view and periodically rubbing her temples, as if in sympathy for Mark’s mutilated aunt. We drove the rest of the way in silence. It wasn’t far – not far enough, in my opinion. I could have done with Ingrid being a bit further away.
Then Mum pulled up behind Mark’s car in a cul-de-sac of identical-looking detached houses, brand new but built in creamy stone so as to look traditional, and all crammed in with about a foot between them.
There were no pavements – I guessed that was so the developers could fit in as many properties as possible. Each house had a pocket handkerchief of immaculate lawn in front of it; Mark’s was adorned with a weedy sapling in a central bed. It was fantastically impersonal. Talk about a clean slate – this was perfect: it was just the place for a family that had plenty of reasons not to look back.
Inside, the house was a bit tight in terms of proportions but nice – very clean, freshly painted, with new-smelling carpets. It would get cramped pretty fast once we were all living there and the baby had arrived, but Mum and Mark were already talking about remodelling the place and building an extension. As long as I finally had a room of my own and could close the door on them all, it would be all right.
The room I wanted was the second biggest, after the master bedroom, and was at the back of the house, overlooking the tiny garden. I could imagine myself in there, with my stuff… not that I had much of it: GCSE textbooks, clothes, a bit of make-up, and that was about it. Not like Ellie, who kept everything – old friendship bracelets, books, toys, and whatever random junk was left over from playground crazes of several summers ago.
What a relief it would be, not to have her clutter all around. Just me and my space and plenty of it. I’d be able to sit round messaging Jake without worrying that Ellie was going to forget the knock-and-wait rule and suddenly burst in on me.
Maybe I’d even be able to get Jake in here, one day. It wouldn’t really feel like doing it at home – more like being in a hotel, with a bit of added risk.
I went out and knocked on the door of the little room that was going to be Ellie’s. There was no answer, so I went in. She was standing with her back to the door, looking out of the window onto the small square of garden and the other houses of the estate.
‘You didn’t wait for me to invite you in,’ she said. ‘If I did that to you, you’d have a fit.’
‘Well, I’m here now,’ I said, and came to stand next to her by the window. ‘What do you make of it?’
‘Do you mean the room, or the house, or the place? Or the whole thing?’
‘Any of it. All of it.’
Ellie paused. There was a weird, tight energy around her, the kind of energy people give off before they start a fight.
‘I think it’s doomed,’ she said.
I started laughing before I realised she wasn’t joking. She said, ‘Laugh all you like. If you weren’t so wrapped up in yourself, maybe you’d feel it too. And your father is not a good man, whatever Mum wants to believe. He told us something that wasn’t true and we believed him. That means we shouldn’t trust him. And he didn’t love that little girl. You could tell. I don’t think he wanted her at all.’
And she turned away and hurried out to the landing, and began to scamper down the stairs.
‘Yeah, well your dad isn’t all that either,’ I muttered, and started after her.
We found Mum and Mark in the kitchen, playing kiss-and-make-up – they jumped a foot apart the minute we came in.
Mum ran a hand through her hair. She was flushed but happy and I could see that whatever he’d said to her, she’d decided that he was the wronged party and she was going to feel sorry for him and forgive him. Well, what did I care? It was really nothing to do with me. Or not much, anyway.
Ellie glowered at both of them and I suddenly got a glimpse of the kind of teenager she might become. Happy days ahead – though I’d be well out of it by then. I just had to get through the next few years… I figured that once we’d moved, I could probably come up with a couple of reasons to get the train back to London, and talk Mum into letting me go on my own. After all, she was going to be pretty distracted once the baby came. That way Jake and I would be able to carry on seeing each other.
I fiddled round on my phone while Ellie sulkily read her book and Mum and Mark looked round the garden. Then Mum kissed Mark goodbye and they both told each other they wished we could stay, and she drove us back to London.
Mum asked us what we thought of the house and we both said we liked it, and that was that. After a while Ellie fell asleep in the back and I told Mum I didn’t think the thing about the kid was that big a deal and I was sure Ellie would come round to the same way of thinking once the shock of it had worn off, and Mum seemed reassured and I decided it was all going to be fine.
But that night Ellie woke me up – not the way she sometimes did, by crying out at a nightmare. Instead I surfaced to hear her quietly sobbing.
I switched the bedside lamp on and scooted across to her bed, and she sat up and I held her tight. She was cool and clammy to the touch and shivering slightly, as if she’d caught a chill.
‘It was only a dream,’ I said, but she shook her head.
Her body felt as light and insubstantial as a bird’s, as if she was hollow. I could make out the bumps of her backbone through her nightie; she didn’t have any spare flesh on her. She was all nervous energy, like a weathervane spinning round in a storm.
She said, ‘Didn’t you feel it? When we were in the car coming home. It was like a dark shadow.’
I tried to remember what the drive had been like. Some spooky woods. The countryside, which was fairly creepy in itself. So much easier to hide secrets in a big landscape with hardly anybody around. Then we’d got onto the motorway and joined the familiar London traffic, and finally we’d got back into the flat and I’d barred Ellie from our room so I could message Jake.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said. ‘I mean, sure, it was a weird day and Ingrid isn’t exactly cosy. But the c
ar journey was fine. It was just a bit dull.’
‘You must have felt it,’ she said. ‘It was so strong.’ And then she started crying again. I held her close and she said, ‘Someone’s going to die.’
Her face was against my chest and her voice was muffled, and I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. I said, ‘It’s all going to be fine, Ellie. You must be coming down with something. I’m going to get Mum.’
But she shook her head. ‘No. It won’t make any difference. Let her rest.’
She pulled away from me and I thought I’d offended her, but then she gazed up at me and her peaky little face – all hollows and shadows in the light of the bedside lamp – was so full of affection, and so sincere, that I was completely unnerved.
She looked exactly the way she might have done if she thought I was the one who was about to kick the bucket. Or as if she wanted me to remember what she was about to tell me, whatever happened.
‘I do love you, Ava, you know,’ she said. And then she just couldn’t resist adding, ‘Even if you are a bit mean sometimes.’
‘And I love you too,’ I told her.
It felt really strange to say it. I wasn’t sure when I ever had. But it struck me as true, too.
She said, ‘You think you’re a horrible person, and you don’t trust anyone who actually likes you. But you’re not that bad. You’re really not bad at all.’
With that she turned away from me and snuggled down under her bedcovers and closed her eyes. I turned the light out and got back into my bed, and soon afterwards I heard the soft, gentle breathing that meant she was asleep.
That sound had been part of my life for so long, it was hard to believe that the time was not all that far off when I would leave home, and night after night would go by without me hearing it. I would have thought that was something to look forward to. But now it came to it, I could see how much I’d miss her.
Nineteen
Paula
It was probably just as well that Mark was out at work when the special needs teacher from the local authority called round for a home visit. Given the way things had been going since the Christmas show, I wasn’t at all sure he could have been trusted to be polite to her.
I’d tried to talk to him… I’d tried to be civil. The rage I’d felt after the show was still there, but I prided myself on keeping it under wraps. It hadn’t made any difference. Mark had gone into lockdown, and was refusing to discuss Daisy at all until the professionals had told us exactly what was wrong.
Given the waiting lists ahead of us, that was not likely to happen any time soon, but that was Mark all over. He liked to kid himself he was in control… but actually, he just had a habit of avoiding anything that reminded him he wasn’t.
I made sure the house was spotless before the teacher arrived; at least that made me feel that I’d done as much as I could to prepare. I couldn’t help but feel that everything about Daisy was now under the microscope, including me and Mark, our relationship, our parenting, and the home we had provided for her.
Mary Greengage turned out to be a pleasant, grey-haired woman with a calm, authoritative manner, dressed in the kind of clothes that teachers wear to appear smart but approachable – cardigan, floral blouse, skirt, sensible shoes. I showed her a couple of Daisy’s favourite toys – most of them lit up, or made sounds that drove Mark crazy – and she watched Daisy play and made a few notes, and then I offered her a cup of tea and she said yes.
It was soon after four, and already dark outside. Daisy was in the dining room, rolling out playdough worms on the table, and Mary stood next to me in the galley kitchen in front of the blind-covered window as we waited for the kettle to boil.
I said, ‘Did you meet Amy? At pre-school?’
‘I did have a chat with her, yes.’
‘I don’t know if she would have told you this, but Daisy loves playing with gluesticks. I don’t mean with glue on them – clean ones. She likes to twiddle them round between her hands. Amy keeps a little tub of them on a shelf by the door specially for Daisy, so she always knows where to find them.’
‘Mm,’ Mary said non-committally.
The kettle boiled and clicked off. I poured the water onto teabags in two mugs and was hit by a sudden and intense spasm of doubt.
I said, ‘Do you have any idea why Daisy does it?’
‘Does what?’
‘Twiddling things, or twirling them between her hands. She’s always done it. I mean, she’s done it for as long as she’s had the physical ability to do it. She used to sit in the middle of the living-room carpet surrounded by toys, playing with an old sock – flipping it up and down as if that was the most interesting thing in the world.’
Mary cleared her throat.
‘It could be what is sometimes described as repetitive behaviour,’ she said.
‘Repetitive behaviour? What does that mean?’
Suddenly she was as stiff and expressionless as a piece of paper, and I knew straight away that it did mean something, something big, and that Mary Greengage was worried about how I might react to it.
‘It could suggest a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder,’ she said.
I very carefully poured a little bit of milk into both our mugs, fished out the teabags and dropped them in the pot with all the other used teabags and put on the lid.
I wanted to say, It can’t be. But I couldn’t. Because what did I know? Nothing. Nothing at all.
I said, ‘So how do we find out for sure?’
‘It’s not a quick process, I’m afraid. After this visit I’ll send a copy of my report to your family doctor and recommend further investigation. Your doctor will need to write a referral. Then you’ll get an outpatient appointment from the community paediatrics team at the hospital in Oxford. Depending on how that goes, you might be offered a full assessment. That’s when you could potentially be given a diagnosis.’
I don’t know how it happened. My mug somehow slipped from my fingers. Before I knew it I was looking down at a puddle of tea and bits of broken china on the floor.
Then I was apologising and soaking up the spill with kitchen paper and Daisy had emerged from the living room to find out what all the commotion was about. She was twiddling something furiously between her hands – a wooden spoon she’d decorated with stuck-on hair and eyes at pre-school to make a kind of puppet, though she’d never actually played with it as such. Then she stopped twiddling and reached for my stomach, as she sometimes did for reassurance, and I found myself glaring at Mary as if she might be about to criticise me as Mark had. Because if this was a way I could give Daisy the comfort she needed, why on earth would I listen to anyone who might tell me to make her stop?
* * *
When Mark came home that evening I tried to tell him about the visit.
He said, ‘Look, I can’t talk about this now. I need to email a couple of clients. Will you call me when dinner’s ready?’
And with that he withdrew to his little office at the end of the kitchen, and shut the door.
After dinner Daisy settled down in the living room with the keyboard that played ‘Greensleeves’, and Mark grimaced and said, ‘So much for a nice relaxing evening.’
‘At least she’s happy,’ I said, putting the pot on the hob with coffee.
Mark sighed. He’d just cleared the table, which was something he always helped with, though he would never fill or empty the dishwasher, or wash up; those were my jobs.
‘I quite fancied watching some telly, but I won’t be able to hear a thing,’ he said. ‘Guess I’ll have to wait till you’ve got her in the bath. Or watch it on my laptop in the office.’
I decided to ignore this. ‘Mark… is now an all right time to talk to you for a minute?’
He was instantly wary. ‘Talk to me? What about?’
‘I wanted to tell you about the visit we had today,’ I said. ‘The teacher who came round, she said…’ My heart was racing. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get the words out. ‘All the twidd
ling Daisy does, you know, the way she rolls things around between her hands – apparently that could actually mean something.’
Mark’s eyes narrowed.
‘It could suggest a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder.’
‘Autism? I thought that meant you were either a genius or lying in a corner banging your head on the floor. That doesn’t sound like Daisy at all.’
‘It’s a spectrum, Mark. That means there’s a range of behaviour. After the teacher had gone I looked it up online. There’s lots of stuff you can read about it. I’ll send you some links.’
‘But this isn’t definite, is it? You said it could suggest that’s what she’s got. It might not be that. It might be something completely different. Maybe it’s nothing at all.’
‘From what I’ve read up so far, it seems to fit…’
‘Oh, so you’re diagnosing her now, are you? I wouldn’t have thought you’d be so quick to write off our daughter.’
‘I’m not writing her off. I just looked it up.’
‘Yeah, well, everyone’s an armchair doctor now, aren’t they? All you need to do is type in a couple of symptoms and bingo, you’ve got a syndrome. You know it drives real doctors crazy, don’t you?’
‘I know you’re worried,’ I said, ‘but you don’t need to take it out on me.’
‘Oh, spare me the entry-level psychotherapy. This is bullshit, Paula. All of it. They haven’t got a clue what’s wrong with her and neither have you.’
‘The teacher’s going to write up an official report. I’ll give you a copy when I get it.’
‘Can’t wait,’ he said, rolling his eyes. ‘Will you bring me in a coffee when it’s ready?’
With that he stomped off to his office.
I carried on standing in the kitchen, listening to ‘Greensleeves’, trying to take deep breaths, willing myself not to go in there and pour the coffee over his head.
How could he be so insufferable? So arrogant? Even if he didn’t care for me any more… how could he be like this about his child?
