by Tess Stimson
We all maintain the fiction that Mum had an ‘accident’, but the truth is, she tried to kill herself four years after she lost my father. I remember her when I was little: she was beautiful and smart and funny, the kind of funny that made you snort milk through your nose. When he died, it was as if she died with him. I didn’t realise I’d been holding my breath, waiting for something terrible like this to happen, until the day I came home from school not long after my fifteenth birthday, and found her hanging from the bannister in the hall.
I wasn’t strong enough to cut her down. Instead, I propped her feet on a kitchen chair to take the weight while I called 999, trying to loosen the tie – my father’s tie – from around her neck. I thought she was dead. Her face was purple, her eyes bloodshot and bugging from her head, her tongue protruding from between blue lips. I had no idea she was still alive until the paramedics got her down and started CPR.
She was in hospital for four months, the first week in a coma in intensive care, and then afterwards in a psychiatric ward. They put me in foster care; the family I stayed with were perfectly nice, but they didn’t have much interest in me beyond the cheque they received for taking me in. Eventually, Mum was released, and they let me go home to her. Social services kept an eye, of course, but physically, she was fine. They put her on antidepressants, she saw a shrink once a week for a few months; everything seemed, if not normal, no worse than a thousand other dysfunctional, damaged families.
The memory lapses started about a year later. At first, I didn’t really pay much attention; she’d forget small details, talk about events that had happened several years ago as if it’d been last week, that sort of thing. I was too caught up in my own life at the time to really notice. But then I came home from Bristol at the end of my first term at university, and Mum thought I was still studying for my GCSEs. After weeks of tests, the doctors were no closer to a diagnosis, but speculated she’d suffered some kind of brain damage during her suicide attempt. Either way, she couldn’t live alone, so I sold the house and found her a care facility she was prepared to tolerate. At the age of eighteen, I was on my own.
Mum abruptly grips my hand, her fingernails digging into my skin. ‘I see it in you,’ she says. ‘I see what you are.’
I try to pull away, but she’s stronger than she looks. ‘What do you see, Mum?’ I ask wearily.
‘Me,’ she says. ‘I see me.’
Chapter 22
Louise
I know Caz will retaliate for me moving in on her patch, and that it won’t take long for her to make her next move. But what takes me by surprise is that Andrew’s the one to deliver the blow.
‘You’re taking me back to court?’ I demand, when I receive the letter from his solicitor and ring him at work. ‘You know I’m barely getting by as it is!’
‘You’re earning three times the amount at Whitefish compared to what you were getting from the university,’ Andrew says coldly. ‘You’re on a consultant contract; you’re taking home more than Caz. It’s only fair we look at your maintenance and child support again.’
‘You don’t need to take me to court! We could talk about it, and come to some—’
‘Caz is very upset,’ Andrew snaps. ‘If you insist on hounding her like this, you can’t complain when there are consequences.’
The gloves are really off now. Andrew’s taking a risk, going after me like this. Not that I’m about to land him in it with Caz and tell her what really happened the night of the storm; I can’t prove it, and he’s an accomplished liar. But he’s relying on my decency not to cause trouble between them, and there’s a limit to how much punishment I can take.
If I’m going to do this job at Whitefish, I’m doing it on my terms. Hiding out at Chris’s office when I go to London isn’t going to work if I want to beat Caz at her own game.
‘You want an office at Whitefish?’ Chris exclaims, when I ask her to arrange it. ‘I thought you didn’t want to be anywhere near Caz?’
‘Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer,’ I mutter. ‘I want to keep an eye on her, and make sure she doesn’t screw things up on your account just to get back at me.’
I don’t get an office, but I get a desk on the open-plan mezzanine floor, right in the hub of things. I’m a journalist: rooting out the real story behind the headlines is what I do. I soon discover Caz is smart and undoubtedly good at her job, and great with the clients, but she’s a terrible manager. She puts people’s backs up, she’s autocratic and high-handed, and the creatives don’t like working for her. It’s AJ who follows behind her and cleans up her mess, smoothing troubled waters and using all his charm to ensure her directives are met on time. Without him, she’d be sunk. I can use this, I think cautiously. If I need to.
But I truly don’t want it to come to that. I’m tired of this tit-for-tat nonsense. I can’t afford to go to court; it’ll cost thousands of pounds, and I earn just over the threshold to qualify for legal aid. If Andrew doesn’t back down, I’ll end up in even more debt. Taking the job at Whitefish was meant to make Caz think twice about messing with my livelihood. Instead, she’s upped the ante yet again. I’m starting to wonder where this is all going to end.
I pick up the children from school, feeling angry and despondent. Tolly is his usual sunny self, but Bella doesn’t even speak to me as she gets into the car. She’s still sulking over that wretched tongue piercing. Andrew is the one who made her remove it, but it’s me she blames. She’s been even more sullen and uncommunicative this week, if that were possible.
When we get home, I pull into the driveway and wait for Bella to get out and open the garage door. ‘Why can’t we get an electric one?’ she complains, as she does every single time I ask her to perform this chore.
‘Same reason as yesterday,’ I say evenly. ‘Same reason as tomorrow.’
Tolly leans forward in his car seat, straining against the restraints. ‘Let me! Let me!’
‘You can’t reach the handle, darling.’
Bella reluctantly slouches towards the garage, opening it with agonising slowness, and I tamp down a rising tide of irritation as she then stands in the middle of the drive, blocking my way, to check her mobile. When she finally moves, she drops one of her Bluetooth earbuds – a ridiculously extravagant gift from Andrew – and takes her sweet time picking it up, while I drum my fingers on the steering wheel and suppress the urge to scream.
Eventually, she gets out of the way so that I can park. I help Tolly out of the car, and go around the house. The builders are still working on the porch, their scaffolding preventing us from going in through the front, so we have to enter through the back door. I must admit, Gary Donahue’s doing a good job. The front of the house no longer sags drunkenly forwards for the first time since we bought the place.
‘I found this on the drive,’ Bella says, rudely shoving something at me as she pushes past me into the mudroom.
It’s an earring. Some sort of semi-precious blue stone: topaz, maybe, or aquamarine.
‘Whose is this?’ I ask, dumping my bag on the kitchen table.
‘Caz’s. She was wearing them the other week. Can you put it somewhere safe till I can give it back to her? I’ll only lose it.’
‘How did it end up in our driveway?’
Bella shrugs, putting her earbuds back in her ears. ‘Probably fell out of Dad’s car. Don’t call me for dinner,’ she adds, on her way up the stairs. ‘I’m not hungry.’
‘Bella—’
With a sigh, I put the earring in the soap dish on the windowsill, tempted though I am to drop it into the waste disposal, and reach beneath the sink for the cat food. I need to sort out the kids’ dinner early, as I promised I’d go over to my mother’s and help her and Min with arrangements for the party, which is less than three weeks away now. My heart sinks further at the thought. I really wish Mum hadn’t invited Andrew and Caz. This celebration should be a family affair, and instead, I’ll have to deal with Caz and her spiteful games. It seems like I�
��m never free of her these days.
I grill a couple of burgers on the barbecue outside, and take Tolly’s into him in the sitting room. I don’t normally let them eat food in front of the TV, and he responds as if I’ve just given him the keys to Disneyland. Bella’s dinner I cover and leave on the dining table, in case she changes her mind while I’m out.
I go up to her room and pop my head around her door to let her know I’m leaving. She’s curled up on her bed, facing the wall, a thick fleece blanket pulled up around her shoulders despite the fact it’s July and 29 degrees outside.
‘Bella?’ I say softly. ‘Are you awake?’
She doesn’t say anything, but I can tell from her breathing she’s not asleep.
‘I’m just popping out to see Gree,’ I say. ‘Call me if there’s anything you need. I’ll be back before it gets dark.’
Bella doesn’t stir. I lean over her and straighten the blanket, a fist squeezing my heart. For all her teenage attitude, she’s still my baby, and right now, her face scrubbed of make-up, her slight form dwarfed by the heaped blankets and pillows, she looks not much older than Tolly.
As I turn away, the phone on the bedside table illuminates with an incoming text from Taylor, and I can’t help but read it.
U hv to get it Im desperate.
I feel a flash of maternal concern. What can the girl possibly need that’s so urgent?
Before I can dig too deeply, my own phone pings with a message from Luke. Any idea what’s going on with Dad?
I put a mental pin in the text from Taylor, and reply to my brother as I go downstairs. Is there a problem? Mum didn’t say anything to me.
She said he had a funny turn.
I sigh inwardly. I’m on my way over. Will keep you posted.
Typical of Mum, I think crossly, as I go out to the car. If Dad were really ill, she’d have told me. Instead, she creates a drama by contacting Luke, knowing the first thing he’ll do is come to me. Somehow, my brother avoids getting sucked into her games in a way I’ve never quite managed. He takes after Dad: quiet and self-effacing, he generally glides below Mum’s radar, showing up – literally and metaphorically – just often enough to be left to his own devices the rest of the time. I’ve noticed he follows much the same policy with Min.
I let myself into my parents’ house. ‘Mum?’ I call. ‘You there?’
Dad ambles into the kitchen to greet me, a crumpled copy of the Telegraph in his hand. ‘Hello, poppet,’ he says in surprise. ‘Not at work?’
‘Working from home today, Dad,’ I say, kissing his cheek. ‘You all right? Mum said you had a bit of a turn.’
‘A bit of a turn, is that what she calls it?’ Dad snorts. ‘Didn’t get her own way over having a band at the party, is what she means.’
I scrutinise him carefully. He looks the same as always: tall and thin, as gangly as a teenager, with an unruly halo of white fluff around his ears and a pair of frameless half-moon glasses permanently perched on the end of his nose. He’s more than a decade older than Mum, but there’s a youthful air of mischief about him that even Nicky’s loss didn’t manage to dim. I’ve always thought of him as ageless, but I realise he’ll be eighty next April. He wears his years lightly, but eighty is old by anyone’s standards.
‘I heard that, Brian,’ Mum says, coming in through the back door. She’s been mowing the lawn, and her shoes are covered with grass clippings. I don’t know how she has the energy in this heat. My parents have an old-fashioned push mower, too, not one of those labour-saving petrol ones. ‘Hello, Louise. I like that dress on you. It suits you now you’re carrying that extra weight.’
‘Thank you, Mum,’ I say, not rising to the bait.
She reaches up to smooth Dad’s hair. ‘Honestly, Brian, look at the state of you. You look like you’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards.’
‘Fell asleep in my chair,’ Dad says, unruffled.
‘In the middle of the afternoon?’
‘Churchill used to swear by a nap,’ he says serenely, flapping out the pages of his paper and refolding it as he wanders back to his study.
‘Churchill had a country to run and a war to win,’ Mum calls after his retreating back. ‘Well, since you’re here, Louise, perhaps you can help me with the carrots,’ she adds, handing me the peeler. ‘I’ve got Luke and Min descending on me later with the boys. I could use a hand.’
I open the vegetable bin and get the carrots out. ‘Luke said you told him Dad had a turn,’ I say.
‘He’s not getting any younger. Cold water on the carrots, Louise.’
‘But he’s OK?’
‘He’s been a bit forgetful lately, that’s all. Let his eggs boil dry the other day, and he keeps feeding the dog. She had four breakfasts yesterday – she thinks it’s Christmas.’
I want to tell her that if she needs me to come over, she only has to ask; there’s no need to manufacture a crisis. But that’s not Mum’s way. She has never directly asked for help, even in the immediate aftermath of Nicky’s death. She finds our pressure points and uses them to get us to toe the line without seeming to lift a finger.
I pass her a peeled carrot and she dices it deftly, then scrapes it from the board into a saucepan. ‘Min told me you’d moved back home at the weekend,’ she says. ‘You handled that all wrong, you know.’
I pause, a half-peeled carrot in my hand. ‘Handled what all wrong?’
‘I can see what you were doing, moving into Caz’s space,’ she says. ‘I’m sure it unsettled her no end. But you need to be more careful. You gave her a genuine grievance to take to Andrew, and that wasn’t smart.’
‘It was his idea,’ I protest. ‘You think I wanted to stay in their house?’
She puts down the knife and looks straight at me. ‘Well, of course you did.’
‘No, I—’
‘Louise, I spoke to Gary Donahue.’
That silences me.
‘He said the damage to the kitchen wasn’t nearly as bad as it looked. He repaired the ceiling and patched the hole in the wall the first day. The house was perfectly habitable two weeks ago. He says he spoke to you and told you that.’ She turns back to the carrots and begins chopping again. ‘It’s not healthy, what you’re doing. You need to put some distance between you and Andrew.’
My mother has refined passive aggression into an art form. Usually, I ignore it, as I did with the backhanded compliment about my dress, but the flagrant injustice of this statement is too much, even for me.
‘You invited him to your anniversary party,’ I say tersely. ‘Even though I asked you not to. And what about dinner, the night of Bella’s play? I had no intention of crashing it until you interfered!’
‘I did it for my granddaughter,’ Mum says. ‘I thought it’d be nice for her to have both her parents together on her big night.’
‘It was. But—’
‘I like Andrew, but despite what you might think, I neither want nor need the two of you to get back together,’ Mum says. ‘If it’s what you want, I’ll do anything I can to help, but the only thing I truly care about is whether or not you’re happy.’ She pauses. ‘I need you to be happy, Louise.’
She loves me, I know that. Since we lost Nicky, she’s poured everything into making Luke and me happy. But she adores Andrew; she’d do anything to get us back together. She sees my divorce as a personal failure on her part. ‘Mum, I got over Andrew a long time ago,’ I say evenly. ‘We’re not getting back together, and I’m happy with that. He’s Bella and Tolly’s father, that’s all.’
‘I’m not judging you, Louise,’ she says, washing her hands. ‘I don’t mind if you lie to me, but don’t lie to yourself.’
It’s not that I’m lying, exactly. But if you tell yourself something often enough, you start to believe it.
Two weeks before the party
Chapter 23
Caz
AJ is already waiting for me at the table when I get to the Mexican cantina, a dubious-looking cocktail fringed with
umbrellas and glacé cherries on the table in front of him. When AJ officially came out at a Christmas party four years ago, a grand total of zero people were surprised.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ I say, sliding into the booth opposite him. ‘Got caught in a meeting with Nolan. What on earth are you drinking?’
‘Sex in the Woods. It’s like Sex on the—’
‘Never mind. I don’t want to know.’ I turn to the waitress. ‘I’ll have what he’s not having. Vodka martini, straight up, two olives.’
‘You’re so sweet to do this,’ AJ says, nervously twirling his cocktail umbrella. ‘Mum’s been dying to meet you. I promise she won’t stay long. She’s got to get a train back to Crawley after lunch.’
The waitress returns with my drink. I pull the olives from their plastic stick, and squeeze them into my martini. ‘It’s fine. I’m looking forward to it.’
I’m not usually the kind of person people want to take home, but I suspect AJ doesn’t have many friends he feels comfortable introducing to his mother. To be honest, I don’t think he has many friends at all. Whitefish is his life. He’s always the first one into the office, and the last to leave, which may be one of the reasons his relationships don’t last. He started in the mailroom here straight out of school, and somehow managed to earn a place on the ad team through sheer commitment and determination. His temporary secondment as my assistant is his big chance to shine. If he does a good job, it’ll be made permanent.
I recognise Mrs James the moment she comes into the restaurant. She looks exactly like AJ, right down to the pink nail polish her son is also wearing. ‘You must be Caz!’ she exclaims, throwing her arms around me as I half-rise awkwardly. ‘AJ talks about you all the time! You didn’t tell me she was so pretty,’ she adds, throwing her son a mischievous look. ‘Now I understand all the late hours.’
‘It’s lovely to meet you, Mrs James—’
‘Please, call me Annie. Everybody does.’
She scoots into the booth next to AJ. ‘So, is my boy working hard?’ she asks. ‘Staying on top of things?’
