‘Look, sweetheart.’ The father tries to help his daughter raise herself slightly, but she can’t.
Shelly offers to put Max up on the bed.
‘Is he allowed?’ Ruby asks Leone, in a very quiet whisper.
She shrugs and tells her that he must be.
Shelly lays a towel down and taps the side of the bed. Max is up, his leap quick and light, and then he lies, close against the girl’s body as she utters a tiny, and very drugged, laugh.
‘Oh,’ she croaks to her father, as she runs a hand down Max’s fur.
And they leave him there as Lulu gets ready for her turn.
Annie is friendlier than Shelly. Small and spry with brilliant blue eyes, she enjoys showing Lulu off.
The curtains around Bed 3 are pulled back, and the mother sits perched on the edge of the mattress while her daughter lies behind her, curled into a ball. She doesn’t even attempt to rouse her or encourage her to enjoy the show. She just stares blankly as Lulu begins to prance on her hind legs, delicate like a ballerina. Ridiculous, in fact.
‘Now backwards.’ Annie clicks her fingers, and Lulu is down on all fours, walking the wrong way, round and round in a circle.
‘How does she know how to do that?’ Ruby asks, as she asks every week.
Next is the skateboard trick, Ruby’s favourite. She sits forward in the purple vinyl hospital chair, and Leone brushes her lank hair back behind her ears. It’s been a few days since she’s been able to get her in the shower. The times between fevers are becoming shorter, and she is always tired now.
‘Can’t I just sit?’ Ruby usually asks, and most of the time Leone gives way, sponging her with a wipe from the storeroom.
Annie puts a skateboard down on the floor and clicks her fingers.
Bed 3 uncurls, lean legs in tight jeans, her oversize T-shirt doing nothing to hide how thin her body is. She tries to close the curtain, but her mother has it firm in her grasp.
‘I want to shut it,’ Bed 3 complains.
Leone can see the white of the mother’s knuckles as she clutches the nylon and mutters to her daughter. They will pull it off the railing, Leone thinks.
Lulu is on the board now, and she and Ruby and even Bed 4 (who has been surprisingly silent, since she made it clear she didn’t want a dog near her) are all staring at her, but they are also attuned to the conflict opposite, recognising that the show could suddenly move to a different stage.
‘Close it,’ Bed 3 insists, while Lulu does her best, one leg down on the lino floor, pushing herself along with bright, perky dexterity — round and round she goes — but no one is really paying attention.
The mother does not move.
‘I want to go home. I don’t want to be here.’
Oh god, Leone thinks.
‘Why won’t you let me leave?’
The clasp on Lulu’s collar tinkles as she stands on her hind legs. The board wobbles, but she doesn’t topple.
‘I don’t want to watch a poodle.’ Bed 3’s voice is close to a shout, and they cannot pretend not to hear.
Leone tries to catch the mother’s eye and grimace in sympathy, but she remains with her gaze fixed on the floor.
Bed 3 swings her legs down and stands up, all bones, her mousy hair hiding her face. Ruby reaches for Leone’s hand, anxious, her fingers frail and slightly sweaty, as Lulu lowers herself back onto all fours. She is waiting for the applause. There is none.
‘I don’t care about a fucking poodle.’ Bed 3 takes her mother’s shoulders in her hands, wanting her mother to face her. ‘Can’t you hear me? I don’t care about a fucking poodle.’
It’s all Leone can do not to join her, not to say, None of us care about a fucking poodle, all of us want to get out of here, god in heaven help us, but she just holds Ruby’s hand tight and tells her it will be okay, it’s nothing to worry about, nothing at all.
The male nurse comes in and takes Bed 3 by the arm, trying to calm her down, soothing her, as the mother walks out of the ward.
Annie packs up Lulu and the board, and Shelly clicks her fingers to Max, who leaps down, his job done.
Opposite, the father of Bed 1 glances up from his crossword. His daughter reaches for her morphine button, and he kisses her on the forehead.
‘Think we could all do with a go of that,’ he says.
And Leone tries to smile.
Later, in the evening, as Leone sits at home alone, she weeps. This is what she does most nights, sometimes as soon as she gets inside the front door to the empty house, a meal left by a friend on the kitchen table, everything clean and tidy; other times not until the depths of the night, when she wakes with a start, aware that her daughter and her partner are not there with her, but are in a ward under fluorescent lights, the television on, Jacob sponging Ruby’s forehead, cooling her in the hope that she will sleep.
On the floor of the kitchen, Leone holds her knees to her chest and she is terrified.
She no longer knows what to google. Unexplained fever, prolonged temperature, post-operative infections, pericarditis + complications — none of them gives her the answer she desperately wants to the question she hardly dares ask: Will it be alright?
And so she cries, all of her sick with fear, each nerve ending spliced and raw, the bile rising as she rocks backwards and forwards, weeping, unable to stop until Harry the dog slinks over, anxious and unsure of what to do.
He noses her, nudging and whimpering, forcing her to stretch her legs out. He is a large dog, the size of an alsatian, but he tries to curl up, smaller than Lulu, desperate to keep his entire body on her lap, and she holds him tight until she can breathe without sobbing, until she is still.
It is late and she hasn’t sent the picture to Ruby.
Wiping at her eyes, she gets up, exhausted. There is nothing immediately at hand, no outfit she can think of that will work, and she feels so very tired, but she knows Ruby likes the dress-up photographs best.
Then she sees it, Ruby’s football scarf hanging on a hook in the kitchen, and in her room there is the jersey that she made Jacob buy her last season.
Harry the Brownlow Medallist. She hangs a medal around his neck to complete the look and then texts it off. Ruby will like it, and tomorrow is Thursday, Leone realises, football day, when the players come to hand out plastic crap and have their photos taken with the sick kids. Not even vaguely entertaining the first time round, but she knows that when she goes into the ward in the morning, she will tell Ruby that the Swans or Tigers or Eels are coming in today, and they will both try to be excited, grateful for the team bag and drink bottle, the autographs and teddy bears dressed in team colours. As soon as the players leave, Leone will put all the junk in a bag, ready to bring home, where it will wait, unpacked, in the corner of Ruby’s room.
Intelligence Quotient
Just before I turned forty, my mother, who was the only other member of my family still alive, died from a stroke. She left me a small amount of money, enough for a deposit on a semi in a suburb not too far from the city, a place where the streets were hilly and treeless, and the houses that hadn’t been knocked down to build huge brick villas remained unrenovated.
I’d never had my own place, nor had I lived by myself, and when I first received the key, I held it tight, hesitant about putting it on the ring with the others. And then I slotted it through the steel loop, its bright, shiny newness marking it out as different from the rest.
I had no work at the time, so I stacked most of the little furniture I owned into one room and began to remove the remnants of the lives that had been lived here before me. I lifted carpets weighed down by years of dust; I pulled back linoleum, finding faded patterns of flowers on tiles that were cracked with age. I scrubbed down walls and painted. I listened to the radio as I worked, hours of music and talk that wafted over me as the
days passed.
One morning, when I was out on the street putting an undercoat on the front fence, a car pulled over, the engine rattling as it idled. A woman reached across the passenger seat and wound down the window.
‘I heard you were in the neighbourhood.’ Her blonde hair was pulled back in a scrappy ponytail and her tanned skin was lined. As she pushed her sunglasses up on her head, I could see that her eyes were pale green, a startling colour beneath lashes that were brittle with clumps of mascara. ‘You don’t remember me.’
Balancing the paintbrush on the edge of the can, I took a step towards the car, shaking my head as I did so. ‘I’m sorry.’ At first I’d thought she might have recognised me from one of the occasional ads I’d done. Most of these were now old repeats that rarely aired, but I’d recently played a teller in a bank commercial and I’d seen it only the other night.
‘It’s Juliette.’ She rested her hand on the top of the open window, a ring on each of her fingers, three or four heavy silver bangles jangling on her wrist. ‘Juliette Acott.’
I wiped my hair from my forehead, breathing in the acrid paint on my skin.
‘I used to babysit you.’
I shaded my eyes from the glare. ‘Really?’ And I leant a little closer.
‘The Acott sisters. There were five of us. You sometimes played with Susie, my youngest sister.’
I could sense something tugging at the thick shroud that always cloaked the past: a house on the corner, the sandstone wall covered in jasmine, and Juliette — was it her sunbaking in our garden and smoking cigarettes, while she supposedly looked after us?
‘How extraordinary,’ I said. ‘Do you live around here, too?’
She did. Up the road and next to Alison, the only person I knew in the neighbourhood.
‘No, I didn’t just recognise you,’ she explained as I began to ask how she’d known it was me. ‘Although I read about that film you made, and told people that I used to babysit you.’ Her voice was husky, deep and cracked.
I asked her how Susie was, and Juliette told me she was living in New York. ‘An investment banker, earning a shitload of money.’
‘And the others?’
‘All doing their thing,’ she said, and then, inevitably: ‘Your brother? Eddie?’
‘He died,’ and, because I thought she would probably ask me how, I had to elaborate. ‘Killed himself, actually.’
‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t have picked it.’ She stared at me with those pale eyes. ‘You always seemed the one headed for trouble.’
I was uncertain as to how to respond.
‘Do you want to come in?’ I eventually asked, glancing down at the paint tin and the half-finished fence.
She’d already pulled the car over and switched off the engine. ‘I’ll make us a cup of tea.’ As she stepped out into the bright glare of the day, I searched for something familiar, a reminder of the girl she’d once been. She was tall and strong, her jeans close-fitting, and her cotton shirt a delicate print of soft blues and crimsons. The fine bones in her face and the remarkable colour of her eyes marked her out as a one-time beauty.
‘Milk in yours?’ she asked as she made her way through the open front door.
I watched her disappear down the hallway, and I put the brush in a bucket of water and closed the lid on the paint tin.
When I bought my house, Jono had assumed he was coming with me. I guess I did, too. But as he began to talk about building a studio out the back for home recording, I saw him, standing in my kitchen, surveying it all with plans in his eyes, and I wasn’t so sure. I was tired of waiting for him to agree to having a child; of waking in the middle of the night, hollowed out by the realisation that I was kidding myself when I thought he would change his mind. I would watch him sleeping, peaceful, and I would hate him.
He was shocked when I told him I was going to live on my own. He didn’t want me to go. We could work it out.
It was hard breaking the habit of trying to believe in him, I confessed to Juliette, surprised at how readily I was talking to her about my life.
Her bangles clanked as she lit a cigarette. ‘I’ve met the type.’
Jono never gave much to the people he supposedly loved. He was the kind of man who’s closer to his ex-partners than his current girlfriend, I explained.
‘I saw him the other day.’ I reached for the milk, smelling it to check it hadn’t gone sour. ‘He wanted to see a movie together. Afterwards we had dinner. He told me he was with a woman called Sally. Just a casual thing, he said. She wanted a lot more, but he wasn’t ready.’
Across the street, a neighbour’s cat was lying in the sun, her sleek body stretched out on top of the wall. ‘I suddenly realised that was probably how he’d described our relationship to each of his old girlfriends when we were together.’
Juliette was squinting in the brightness of the day. ‘Never known a man who was worth it. Sounds like you’re better off without him.’
Maybe, I conceded, although I wasn’t entirely sure. My desire for a child crippled me at times, particularly now I was completely alone. At least with Jono there’d been some hope, no matter how false. Now I spent a lot of time trying to face the strong likelihood it wouldn’t be fulfilled.
‘But I like it here,’ I said, looking at my house behind me. And I did. After years of drifting from place to place, I felt comfort and relief at this sense of ownership. I am home, I would tell myself. At last, I am home.
Juliette was a painter. Before that she’d been a cook, a nurse and a childcare worker. There’d been a few men, but none had stayed around. She’d lived by herself in a semi not that dissimilar to mine for the last ten years. ‘I’m better off that way.’ She laughed throatily. ‘People like us’ — and I was surprised at how readily she grouped us together — ‘we never really learnt how to play the game. You know, not like them.’ She waved her arm in a sweeping gesture that took in the rows of streets and houses in a suburb peopled by families. ‘But it’s not all bad,’ she continued, tightening the knot in her hair as it threatened to come loose. ‘Swimming against the tide.’
A few days later, I saw her again, out on the street. She was walking briskly down the hill towards the station, one hand clutching a cigarette, the other holding a phone to her ear. As I raised an arm in greeting, she stopped. ‘I never said I’d be ready by then,’ she told the caller, and held the phone away as she mouthed the words: Beer, my place tonight? I could only nod as she returned to her conversation. ‘Listen. It’s not possible.’ She kept walking, without even stopping to see whether I’d agreed to the invitation, dropping her cigarette on the pavement and leaving it smouldering behind her.
That night, Juliette told me she had a great idea for a film. We were sitting in her courtyard, slapping at mosquitoes as they whined close to our ankles and arms. I was only on my second beer but I felt drunk.
‘Five sisters.’ She tilted her head back, blowing out a thin plume of smoke that was swallowed by the darkness, and took the last swig of ale. ‘Arsehole father. Starts with each one of them on her twelfth birthday, until finally, when he gets to the youngest, the other four are all there hiding in her room that night, ready to stop him.’
I didn’t know what to say. Looking at her in the glow from the inside lights, I was about to open my mouth and express some puny form of sympathy, when she laughed again.
‘It’s not my family.’ She began to cough. ‘Jesus. You remember what my dad was like. Mr Meek and Mild. Wouldn’t hurt a fly.’
I didn’t. I remembered very little, in fact.
I asked her if she had some photos.
‘Somewhere,’ she replied. Was I interested in her film idea?
I tried to explain that I didn’t work like that. I only ever wrote when it was my own idea; otherwise, I was a director for hire on other people’s scr
ipts. If she had written something, I could read it. Alternatively, if she wanted someone to write the story, she’d need to find a screenwriter; they’d have to raise money. As my words amassed, she got up to go to the kitchen.
She brought a couple more beers out, along with half a frozen pizza that had been reheated. I took a slice. She didn’t touch it.
‘I told Suze about bumping into you again,’ she said. ‘She remembered you and Eddie doing Mum’s IQ test.’
I smiled, the first clear memory falling into place, casting light on others that clung to the edges of our conversation: Susie, Juliette, all the sisters; and that house on the corner, the one I had vaguely recalled with the high stone wall that stopped you from seeing into the garden, although you could still make out the top storey and the slate roof from the street. The bedrooms had been upstairs. Camille and Juliette shared, and then there was Deborah (who had been in Eddie’s year at school) and Amanda and, lastly, Susie in a room on her own.
It was Camille who’d looked after us most often. She, too, had blonde hair, loose and silky smooth. When she babysat us during the day, she’d strip down to a string bikini and sunbake lying on her back, and then her side, and then her front, lifting the edges of the crochet to check on the progress of her tan. Sometimes her boyfriend came with her, and Eddie and I would spy on them as his hands worked their way into her bikini bottoms, until she pushed him off and sat up again, leaning across him to reach for her pack of St Moritz cigarettes in the grass.
He would roll joints, carefully spreading a fine line of tobacco and dope along one edge of the paper, rolling it between the thumb and first two fingers of one hand.
‘Want some?’ he once asked Eddie, who, at a couple of years older than me, was just twelve — almost too old for a babysitter, but because he and I had a tendency to argue, our parents didn’t like to leave us alone.
Cross-legged on the emerald-green lawn, Eddie tried to measure up to the adult status that was being offered. Voice cracking as he reached out a hand and told the boyfriend (whose name I couldn’t remember) that yeah, sure, a toke’d be good; Eddie didn’t dare look at me watching him. Breathing deep, he held the smoke in, holding it, holding it, until unable to bear it any longer, he bent forward, coughing out a choking cloud, while the joint kept burning.
The Secret Lives of Men Page 3
