On Top of Everything

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  It was all quite tricky really, but I couldn’t stand there another second contemplating the trickiness because the smell was making my eyes water and I’d only just finished an extensive bout of eye watering and did not fancy another one.

  I stomped tiredly up the stairs, leaving the putrid stench of rotten whatever-it-was behind me, and to my great dismay found Crystal in the kitchen making a cup of lemon and fresh mint tea.

  ‘Would you like one?’ she offered me but I shook my head. ‘Monty’s gone for a job interview in the West End,’ she told me, ‘so it’s just me here.’

  Despite my overwhelming bone weariness, I felt a terrible almost electric urge to be bitingly snippy, but remembering my promise to Poppy, struggled to suppress this.

  ‘So, he didn’t take the scooter?’ I asked.

  ‘I hate that thing,’ Crystal said, frowning for the first time since I’d met her, as she stirred a teaspoon of honey into her drink. When did sugar become public enemy number one? ‘Fastest way to do yourself a serious injury, if you ask me, which he didn’t when he bought it or I would have begged him not to.’

  Don’t expect me to gang up against my son with you, I thought to myself, even though it fell into the snippy category and I totally agreed with what she was saying.

  I made myself an instant coffee and loudly poured lashings of full fat milk into it while Crystal got about the business of marinating tofu in a low sodium organic soya sauce and some strange foreign-looking herb that looked a bit like green armpit hair.

  ‘Nick March, your doctor, has probably rung six times over the past few days,’ she said, quite matter of factly. ‘He’s pretty stressed out that you haven’t called him back. He wanted me to pass that on. You might want to consider giving him a call?’

  I was so shocked that Young Nick had dobbed me in like this, with Crystal of all people, that I could not think of a single thing to say. He had left a message or two before I’d gone to Tannington Hall but I had not been in the right frame of mind to answer them and still wasn’t.

  ‘I haven’t mentioned anything to Monty’, Crystal continued, threading cubes of tofu onto a bamboo skewer, ‘because I don’t want to worry him — but I get the feeling Nick wasn’t just ringing to remind you the verruca clinic is coming up.’

  My mouth opened, but still nothing came out.

  ‘If there’s something wrong, you can tell me, Florence,’ she said evenly. ‘I may even be able to help.’

  As if I would tell her! Crystal? As if she could help me! I was suddenly overwhelmingly furious. Furious at Nick for talking to her, furious at there being anything to talk about, furious at the hole in my house, at Poppy, at Harry, furious at this strange woman spraying soy around my kitchen and stealing my lovely gorgeous beautiful son.

  ‘What on earth makes you think you could ever help me?’ I snapped. ‘What on earth makes you think anything at all to do with anything about me in any way whatsoever? You’re just a bloody interloper bloody well interloping in my life! In my house! Doing stupid bloody things with your stupid bloody tofu!’

  I knew that this was snippy gone wild, that Poppy would be ashamed of me, that it was not really Crystal I wanted to shout at, yet I seemed unable to stop.

  ‘You know nothing about me,’ I raged. ‘You have no idea, you can’t begin to fathom what it feels like to, to, to …’

  ‘To what, Florence?’ Crystal asked, remarkably unmoved by my hysterics although she had stopped making the tofu kebabs.

  Where could I start? Oh, why was my life like this? ‘To lose a son!’ I cried, plucking at the closest excuse I could find.

  ‘That’s what! To lose a precious son! To someone like you!’ This was not the me I had always tried to be. This was the opposite. So much for minding my manners and doing the right thing. I was lucky she didn’t clock me on the head with the meat tenderiser but then she probably didn’t know what one was.

  A shutter came down over her face though and she leaned back against the kitchen counter and looked at me pretty coldly, for her. Whether I liked her or not, there was no denying she was a warm person. As a rule, she positively radiated warmth.

  ‘Not to someone like me,’ she said with glacial calm. ‘Yes, that’s true, but otherwise I can definitely fathom it.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I shot back. ‘You can’t possibly know what I’m talking about. You don’t have a son.’

  She kept looking at me in such an expressionless way then that it occurred to me that I might perhaps be approaching back-foot territory. Her eyes were landed steadily on mine as if waiting for me to reach some sort of conclusion. My anger started to dissipate and I began to feel that slow, creeping, hot sort of frost that crawls over you when you start to realise you have said or done something really, really awful.

  ‘You can’t possibly know,’ I said again, all the same, although the conviction was missing and I was no longer sure I was talking about losing a son. I was talking about losing in general. Actually, I didn’t really know what I was talking about.

  ‘Well, you say I know nothing about you but you know nothing about me, either, Florence,’ she said. ‘You’ve jumped to your own conclusions without bothering to ask me so much as one single question about myself, about my life. But for your information, I did have a son but he died.’

  The hot creeping frost spread down from my face to my chest, my heart. I didn’t want to hear another word. I wanted to know what happened. I ached for her. I hated her. I hated myself.

  ‘How old was he?’ I finally asked, even though it was the wrong question.

  ‘Seven and a half months,’ she answered.

  A baby? Oh, why was the world, my world, so cruel?

  ‘When?’

  ‘Six years ago,’ she told me in a voice devoid of its usual upbeat twang. ‘Six years, two months, three weeks and four days ago.’

  The heartbreak of counting those days.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘Truly, Crystal.’

  ‘Cot death,’ she told me then, ‘if that’s what you call it here. I got up to feed him in the night and … well, anyway. We couldn’t wake him up. We called the ambulance but we already knew.’

  A ghastly silence filled the room and throbbed in my ears. I felt sick to my stomach. She had actually lost a son? A baby? Who was ‘we’? She’d been married before? I was a horrible human being and I deserved everything I had coming to me. But why hadn’t anybody told me? How was I supposed to know that this foreigner who had pinched Monty away from me was a, a, a … A what? A real live woman with her own hideous torments, just like me?

  I slid into a chair, my good legs no longer able to hold up the horrible rest of me. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said again.

  Crystal’s eyes flickered, and she too pulled out a chair at the other end of the table and sat in it.

  She looked totally different to me now. That serene smoothness I had taken to be some sort of Aussie default position now seemed a veneer as obvious as an alpaca poncho. She perhaps wasn’t the cocksure blasé son-snatcher I had initially taken her for.

  I was evil. That’s why I had cancer.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ I told her. ‘I can’t imagine how you even …’

  ‘Survived?’ She finished my sentence.

  I nodded. She was silent, then: ‘It took six months before I could even truly believe he was gone,’ she said. Her voice changed again, as though she still couldn’t believe it. She looked out the window, into the patchy blue sky, as if expecting to see a little cherub perched on a cloud out there. ‘I checked his empty cot about fifty times a day. Wouldn’t let Steve change a thing in the room. And I felt him in my arms sometimes, when I was daydreaming, you know? Actually felt his skin on mine, for a long time. Then after a while I couldn’t even remember exactly what his cry sounded like or how he smelt. That was almost the saddest of all. The not remembering.’

  There was nothing I could say to her. Nothing.

  ‘Yep, that was almost the
saddest thing,’ she said again, smiling, but it wasn’t a happy smile, it was the sort that you force on your face to keep it from crumpling. ‘So don’t tell me I don’t know what it’s like to lose a son because my son is actually lost, Florence, forever, whereas yours is right here, just with someone like me.’

  I deserved her disdain. I deserved much worse. ‘And you know what?’ she continued although her voice faltered, making me hate myself even more. ‘I make Monty happy, I know I do.’ A tear slid out of one clear green eye and travelled determinedly down her cheek. ‘And he makes me happy, which I never thought anyone else in the world would ever, ever be able to do.’

  I wanted to tell her right then that I was dying of cancer to show her that I was not a spoiled bitter housewife or a frightful old bitch, just not my usual self. Blurting it out now though would only seem like I was trumping her in the tragedy stakes and I couldn’t do that.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Crystal,’ I said again. ‘I didn’t know. Monty never said.’

  ‘If you don’t want to get to know me that’s fine,’ Crystal told me and I admit I admired her strength then; her ability to survive her baby dying and stand up to a prickly old sourpuss like myself. ‘Really, that’s OK, up to a point. But I am a human being with feelings just like you are, Florence, and we need to find a way to somehow exist together in some sort of harmony while Monty wants to stay here.’

  I felt a glimmer of something vaguely joyful at hearing that Monty wanted to stay, but it was quickly overshadowed by the grief I felt at her dreadful loss and my awful behaviour.

  ‘Poppy tried to kill herself,’ I said, feeling only slightly ashamed at pulling this out of my hat. I would have told her anyway, most likely. ‘I’ve been at Tannington Hall with my parents as she begins the, you know, healing process.’

  I coughed, although it could have been a choke. I never used words like ‘healing process’. I wasn’t stooping, I told myself, and I don’t think I altogether was. I was trying to speak Crystal’s language. And I think she got it. Her face returned to its usual understanding self.

  ‘That’s terrible,’ she said. ‘What did she do?’

  This question took me by surprise, I admit. It seemed so practical.

  ‘She slit her wrists in the bath,’ I answered. Hearing it out loud like that, in the kitchen of my house, having just learned that this woman I’d been so horrible to had lost a child, I felt shocked to the core all over again.

  The world was an appalling place and I was an appalling person.

  CRYSTAL

  I could see that Florence was struggling with something huge. I saw it in her aura actually, that first day at the train station although I don’t think she was aware of it herself then. Her colours were fuzzy greys and browns then whereas by the time she came back from Tannington Hall they were crisper but much, much darker.

  The grey was the emotional upheaval of having her sister try to take her own life, as well as the marriage break-up and me, I suppose, but the brown, I believe, was related to her health. I suspected that from the beginning but then when her doctor kept ringing, well, it seemed obvious.

  But we’re all responsible for our own bodies and Florence was definitely passing the buck on hers. Even she would agree with that, I think. She hadn’t been eating properly, that was pretty clear. She seemed to live on white sugar and bacon and egg pie. And not enough of either to put much meat on her bones, if you’ll pardon the expression. She looked hollowed, is how I would describe it. She’s a beautiful woman but it’s as though she was wearing the shadow of her beauty, if you know what I mean, not the beauty itself. She didn’t fit her skin.

  Of course, it wasn’t just her physical self that was suffering. Her unhappiness, I think I can call it that and not off end anyone, was as clear to me as her hip bones, her cheekbones, her long slim arms and legs. Her unhappiness was so obvious I could almost reach out and touch it. That’s what I was trying to do when I told her about Jamie. I wasn’t emotional game-playing or trying to make her feel guilty or anything like that. That’s not me, I would never do that. I was just opening up to her in the hope that she could then feel able to open up to me. To be honest, I was also a bit sick of her shit by then and I wanted to put a stop to it. I knew I wasn’t really the enemy but I didn’t realise then just who, or what, the enemy was.

  I don’t tell everyone about Jamie. I keep him locked inside me most of the time. I express my feelings about him, of course I do, or I have in the past, and it used to feel like I thought about him every minute of the day but with time that’s actually changed so my thoughts about him are more fleeting now, not all-consuming the way they used to be. It’s like he’s a thread in my tapestry, not the whole wall hanging, if you know what I mean. I don’t cry when I think of him any more, but if I happen to be crying I make sure there are some tears for him. And if I happen to be smiling, I make sure he gets a bit of that as well. He’s my angel. And I wouldn’t bring him out like that and introduce him to someone unless I thought it would be of some help.

  You don’t need a diploma in intuitive therapy to see that Florence was in trouble back then and I was probably the last person she thought could help her but I could.

  I knew from what Monty had told me that she had led a more or less blessed life up till then, apart from the passing of her grandmother before Monty was even born. While this charmed existence had made her the wonderful mother he has told me she always was, it had not prepared her to deal with the shit hitting the fan.

  The fact is, and I’m not sure if Florence got this to begin with, in my experience nobody gets to lead a totally charmed existence. Nobody escapes the pitfalls of being a human being. It’s what separates us from the zebras. Or that’s my theory anyway, formed when my first husband Steve and I went on safari in Tanzania after Jamie died, when we still thought that our relationship could withstand what we’d been through, when we thought going on an expensive trip as far away as possible could get us away from ‘it all’, which was a crazy notion but it was a crazy time.

  I think I already knew it was over. We’d had a good relationship, a good marriage by most standards, but I don’t think I was really myself until my son died and stripped away everything that didn’t matter. The house, the car, the suburbs, the coffee mornings. I couldn’t remember why I’d ever wanted those things, what I had ever liked about them.

  ‘It’s grief, you’ll get over it,’ everyone said, including Steve. I had my doubts but I trusted everyone else more than myself then and so we went on this African trip, which was amazing, which made everything crystal clear.

  We were standing in the back of a truck watching a lioness in the long grass of the Serengeti staking out her newborn prey when I realised my old life was over. The lioness started to track this female zebra and her baby, peeling them away from the herd. Steve was going nuts with excitement, the driver had to tell him to stop hooting, and he was taking a million photos as he watched it all happen, while I was just standing there crying.

  Did you know that when a lion takes down a baby zebra in the wild, its mother doesn’t fight for it for even a moment? She doesn’t miss a hoofbeat, doesn’t even stop to look, she just runs to rejoin the herd as though nothing has happened, disappearing into a sea of black and white stripes, and suddenly everything is just the way it was before.

  Steve wanted me to get pregnant again, straight away, to disappear into the sea of stripes myself, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t the same person. It could never be the way it was before.

  But I’m OK with that. I mean, if we are all going to have tragedies, if none of us can escape them, then surely we have to learn from them, we have to gain something.

  And we have to use what we have gained. Those of us who have fought tooth and nail to overcome tragedy are, after all, if nothing else, proof that such things can be survived.

  So we can actually help others survive their tragedies too.

  As long as they’ll let us.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN


  I toyed with being a bona fide alcoholic after I got back from Tannington Hall, after Crystal’s heartbreaking confession, after I felt I had exhausted all the sensible possibilities for coping with a depressed sister, a wreck of a house and a looming afterlife.

  I wanted that bliss of not knowing; that escape from the pain of reality that drugs and alcohol promise. The trouble being that as Harry had always told me, I wasn’t a natural. DCI Jane Tennison made it look so easy in Prime Suspect — a swig here, a gurgle there, a glass or two of something at lunchtime — but honestly, you have to have the stomach for it.

  The night I got back, after talking to Crystal, I tried throwing down a glass of whisky from a bottle I found hiding in the pantry along with three lots of triple sec (don’t ask me how they got there, I don’t even know what it is) but it was foul. It made my eyes water before I even got it to my mouth. It tasted like a filthy old puddle that donkeys had peed in and rusty nails had soaked in for centuries.

  I spat it out on the floor, then Sparky licked it up and he spat it out too. That’s how foul our whisky was. Then I started on the cooking sherry but that wasn’t much better. I hadn’t noticed when I’d downed it during the early stages of the Harry debacle how much it tasted like vinegar. And not the fancy deli sort of vinegar made by comely virgins on some otherwise uninhabited island off the coast of Sicily or wherever, but the bulk-bin cheap-as-you-like strained-through-the-sweaty-sock-of-a-hormonal-teenage-boy sort. Mind you, I’d had it since 1993 so maybe that’s what cooking sherry is supposed to taste like when it’s that old. Either way, I threw it out and the next day went to Tesco to stock up on expensive New World wine instead: Chilean reds and New Zealand sauvignon blancs and Australian chardonnays.

  It was a Saturday. Tesco was a zoo, and catapulted me into such a black mood with all the healthy people being so unriddled with disease and alive and well yet insisting on moving with glacial speed and bringing their caterwauling brats to run up and down raising merry hell in the booze aisle that when I got home I took to my bed with Sparky and the latest Hello! magazine.