The Betrayals: The Richard & Judy Book Club pick 2017

by Fiona Neill

  ‘Is he a good flatmate?’

  ‘The best. He’s a bloody good cook and that is the easiest way to win a man’s heart. He uses spices and shit like that. Impressive.’

  ‘After our parents got divorced, Max basically took over the cooking. Mum can only make one dish,’ Daisy explains. ‘She undercooks fish and overcooks vegetables. It’s a family joke. That’s why I’m so thin.’

  He crosses his arms and slightly leans back on his haunches to review her. ‘Then maybe I could take you out for a meal one day. If Max agrees of course.’

  I smile and shake my head at his audacity while secretly wishing that I had the minerals to be like him with girls. I check my phone to see if Connie has messaged. Nada.

  ‘I don’t go out that much right now,’ Daisy explains. ‘I’ve got a lot of work for uni, and when I’m not studying I’m tutoring to earn money. It’s pretty full on. But if you like you could come over and cook a meal for me and my boyfriend.’

  It’s a great put-down, vintage Daisy, even if it’s not quite true, and we all start laughing. I like the way Carlo isn’t bothered by the sore on her shoulder, and how he’s good at teasing away her anxiety.

  ‘Don’t break my heart, Daisy,’ Carlo begs.

  She looks at her phone. I hate the way the illness always makes demands when it looks as though she might be making a small bid for freedom. I don’t want her to break the vibe, so I cave in and reassure her. Surely once can’t do any harm.

  ‘She’ll either be at work or at home and, wherever she is, Mum is strong and healthy and will live a long and happy life.’

  The special words come back easily, like a language learnt as a child. I just need to find the right moment to include the same phrase another couple of times and Daisy will have a reprieve for at least a couple of hours. She looks at me with such gratitude that for a split second I wonder if it’s so easy for me to make her feel better why I don’t do it all the time.

  ‘Mum is strong and healthy and will live a long and happy life.’ As I say it the second time I’m overtaken with a deep sense of shame that starts on the surface of my skin, seeps through my pores, the layers of fat and tissue to my organs, until my entire body feels feverish.

  I remember when she was ill last time that I eventually spent almost all of my free time with Daisy, reassuring her and helping her deal with all the checks. If I had friends round I would always have to interrupt football or playing with my Match Attax cards to go and help her, and eventually it seemed easier not to invite them at all. Sometimes I pretended to be ill so I could skip school. When we stayed with Dad and Lisa, he used to comment on how well we got on together, as if this reflected well on his parenting. He had no idea how the balance of our relationship had tilted on its axis and I had become the one looking after Daisy, even though Daisy would maintain that everything she did was to keep Mum and me safe. Mum suspected and mentioned it to Daisy’s therapist but Daisy was adamant I wasn’t meaningfully involved. That’s the insidious thing about mental illness. It’s like an iceberg; the most dangerous part is hidden beneath the surface. Now I wish I had told someone, so that I was better equipped to understand how to resist her demands second time round. I realize Carlo is staring at me as if he’s waiting for an answer to a question.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What’s wrong with your mum?’

  He’s either being polite or kind or self-interested. Carlo doesn’t usually ask questions about other people unless there’s something in it for him, and I’m grateful for his sudden attack of basic manners around my family.

  ‘She’s picked up a virus from work,’ says Daisy. ‘She fainted a couple of times. Nothing serious but we need to keep an eye on her.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound so good,’ says Carlo. ‘When did it start?’

  It’s always a mistake to mention illness to a medic, especially if there’s some sense of mystery surrounding the diagnosis, but especially to Carlo, who likes to show off his diagnostic skills.

  ‘A couple of weeks ago. She has low blood pressure so maybe that makes a difference.’

  Daisy is a surprisingly convincing liar. We learnt to be together. However, Carlo isn’t listening. I follow his line of sight and see Connie has appeared in front of me. Even though I was expecting her she still manages to surprise me. She’s engulfed in an enormous padded jacket that makes her small frame appear even tinier. More significantly, she’s bleached her dark hair blonde and cut it short so she looks nothing like the person I described to Daisy an hour ago. Even her eyebrows have changed colour. It’s irrational but it makes me feel even less secure in the relationship than I did already. If she was really into me, surely she would have asked my opinion before making such a radical change to her appearance? It’s almost as if she doesn’t care what I think. It works the other way too. If I cancel plans or I’m late, she doesn’t require explanations.

  ‘You like?’ she asks, twirling in front of me.

  ‘Why didn’t you warn me?’ I ask.

  ‘Don’t be salty, Max,’ Carlo says. ‘She looks gorgeous.’

  Connie is watching this exchange with the detached amusement of someone used to being the centre of attention. She peels off her coat, one arm at a time, fixes me with her gaze, and I flip from despair to elation. I want to take her outside into the alleyway beside the pub, push her hands against the wall, and rub myself against her like a dog. I remind myself that Connie’s here so I can try and normalize our relationship by introducing her to my sister.

  ‘Go get a room,’ Carlo mocks us.

  Connie ignores him for the most part, which is completely gratifying. She turns to Daisy and introduces herself.

  ‘I’m Connie,’ she says unnecessarily, holding out her hand.

  ‘It’s unbelievable! You’re the exact replica of someone we used to know.’ Daisy turns to me anxiously. ‘She’s the spitting image of Ava, isn’t she?’

  Of course she is. I’d never thought about it but with her hair cropped short the likeness is obvious.

  ‘Who’s Ava?’ asks Carlo, anxious to be part of the conversation again.

  ‘She was Max’s first crush,’ says Daisy.

  ‘That must have been some hot fantasy if you’re still repeating it now,’ says Carlo.

  ‘I was ten,’ I say, desperately trying to win back control of the conversation. ‘She was fourteen.’

  ‘So you’ve always gone for the older woman, have you, Max?’ Carlo teases. ‘Shy in the streets but a freak in the sheets.’

  Everyone laughs apart from me. I don’t understand how he has the capacity to make me feel so thin-skinned.

  ‘Here. I brought you a present from work,’ Connie says, pulling a papaya from her bag. ‘I know how you love them.’

  ‘Thanks, babe,’ I say.

  ‘She works at a health food shop,’ Carlo explains to Daisy. ‘On the exotic fruit counter. Very appropriate.’

  I try not to bristle. I have only just learnt where Connie worked myself. It was one of my hard-earned questions.

  ‘I’ve been working there for almost a year. I want to get into marketing but everyone says working behind the counter is the best way to learn how to sell,’ Connie explains to Daisy.

  But Daisy’s not listening because she’s looking at her phone again to see if Mum has been in touch. Come on, Daisy, make more effort.

  ‘I think I might go back to New York after that and hang at my dad’s for a while. Unless I can get a proper job here.’

  ‘You never mentioned you might leave London,’ I say too quickly.

  ‘You can come too, Maxi,’ she suggests, stroking my hair.

  She knows that’s impossible. Even if I wasn’t in the middle of a medical degree I had fought hard to win a place on, there’s no way I could leave Mum and Daisy at the moment. She leans over and kisses me on the lips. I close my eyes and breathe in to inhale her scent but all I can smell is the heavy stench of my flatmate’s aftershave on her coat, along her neck and in her hai
r. Fucking Carlo. I kiss her back and she slides on to my knee and nuzzles my neck but I suspect it’s for Carlo’s benefit. Daisy abruptly gets up from her seat on the other side of the table.

  ‘I need to get going,’ she says, giving a quick smile. ‘It’s great to meet you all but I’ve got to nail the conclusion of my essay.’

  I walk her to the door of the pub.

  ‘You tried, Maxi, but it didn’t work. I’m so sorry. I’m angsting about Mum. Not a word from her for four hours. I feel so worried I can’t concentrate on what anyone is even talking about.’

  ‘Please. Don’t go, Daisy.’

  ‘Watch out for Connie. She’s going to crush your heart.’

  ‘I’ll walk you home,’ I say impulsively.

  I can’t leave her in this state. I go back to Connie and Carlo who are deep in conversation and tell them I’ll catch them up at the party later. I put my arm through Daisy’s like I used to when we were little and start walking. I pick up speed. There’s malice in my stride. I curse everyone who is keeping me apart from Connie. Mostly I curse Lisa because I blame her for all of this.

  Daisy tugs on my arm.

  ‘There’s something I need to tell you, Max,’ she says.

  15

  Nick

  Instead of a hen or stag party, Lisa and I find ourselves attending a healing retreat in Somerset the weekend before our wedding with ‘friends’ Lisa has met at Gregorio’s Surviving and Thriving support group. There’s something I never thought I would hear myself say. Still, life with Lisa has never been a straight line and I love her for it (mostly).

  I mounted a reasonable defence, arguing that Gregorio and his merry band of snake oil salesmen had already hijacked our honeymoon and personally I would rather opt for a couple of days in Norfolk or dinner with the friends we salvaged from our messy divorces. When Lisa resisted, I spent half a day researching luxury spas up and down the UK so I could present her with a more seductive alternative, but no amount of massage and meditation could convince her we should go anywhere else.

  ‘It’s not about the place. It’s about the people,’ she insisted, pushing a leaflet into my hands. ‘This could be a turning point for me.’

  I can’t ever say no to her. Especially now. So I tried hard to pretend to be enthusiastic about the healing properties of systemic constellation, tachyon, and Tibetan pulsing, even though I had no idea what Gregorio was talking about. The only upside is that I’m relieved of juicing duties for the next three days. Everything at the retreat is focused on abstinence. There are three plant-based meals a day and optional green juices. I say a silent prayer that I had the presence of mind to stock up on packets of ham, sausage rolls and Pot Noodles at the motorway service station, otherwise I would have starved or shat myself senseless. Gregorio is so preoccupied with our bowel movements that I am convinced he has an anal fixation. After breakfast there are various therapy sessions, alone and in groups, coffee enemas for the chosen few, and more plants for lunch.

  There’s no alcohol, no sugar and no coffee. The worst thing, however, is that during daylight hours Lisa and I don’t spend a single minute alone together, although she gets plenty of attention from Gregorio because he does the advanced Spiritual Awareness workshop that Lisa attends with one other woman, whilst I’m with everyone else in the beginner class run by a man called Reyansh from Essex via Pune who insists on calling me Niko. When you don’t know how much time you have left with someone, every minute together counts.

  It’s all so relentlessly awful that yesterday I put the processed ham on the radiator for the day, to provide an optimum environment for bacteria to multiply, and ate it this morning, hoping that I would get food poisoning and be confined to bed or sent home. Then I realized that Lisa would end up spending even more time with Gregorio so I made myself sick.

  ‘What are you doing, Nick? Everyone is waiting.’ Lisa comes into the bedroom.

  You wouldn’t guess she was ill unless you knew. She’s a little pale and walks more slowly perhaps, but that highlights her natural grace. She has an ethereal quality that makes her more beautiful than ever. I see the way Gregorio looks at her and know that at least we both agree on that.

  I encourage Lisa to lie beside me on the bed. She flops down, leans into me, and I enfold her in my arms. For a moment we are perfectly happy. I wonder if I could suggest we cut loose to the four-star hotel up the road and order juices from room service in a deluxe suite. I resent every minute that we spend with these strangers.

  I dared express this sentiment at the group session on the second day, after Gregorio encouraged us to share our fears and worries. I was rewarded with a public mauling by him for my ‘self-sabotaging beliefs and selfishness’ because the collective energy of the people in the room was a vital part of Lisa’s recovery. He informed everyone that his regime has pretty much stopped the cancer in its tracks.

  ‘Pretty much doesn’t sound very scientific,’ I pointed out. ‘Do you mean you have ended the replication of the faulty DNA and therefore prevented the cancer cells from multiplying? Because that sounds as likely as Canute holding back the sea.’

  ‘Nick has a number of roadblocks in his subconscious,’ Gregorio told everyone calmly. ‘We’re hoping to dismantle these over the next few days.’

  No one said anything. I would argue their energy has been totally sapped by a diet more suitable for a rabbit and their minds addled from lack of sleep. Also, you don’t want to get into a row with someone who has persuaded you to share your darkest emotional secrets with a room full of strangers.

  Except they aren’t strangers to Lisa because she has met most of them before, at the support group I refuse to attend, which makes me the bad guy. I am beginning to wonder if Gregorio is the leader of a cult but I can’t even google Cultwatch to check because they’ve taken away our mobile phones.

  ‘Didn’t you hear the Tibetan chimes calling us to the day room?’ Lisa asks me. She makes no effort to get out of bed so I stay put.

  ‘Only in my nightmares,’ I mutter.

  ‘Please can you try a bit harder, just for me?’

  I hug her tight. She should be eating food that gives her energy and protein for cellular regrowth. I could cook delicious meals for her instead of endless juices. But Gregorio is not a logical thinker. Everything is about feelings rather than knowledge. It’s as if thousands of years of scientific progress have been thrown out of the window. It’s completely terrifying.

  ‘You have to work on resisting those self-sabotaging beliefs, Nick,’ says Lisa, pretending to be Gregorio.

  One of the few things that give me hope is the way she ruthlessly imitates his slightly nasal mid-Atlantic drawl. She peers over the edge of the bed and finds the half-eaten packet of sausage rolls and threatens to grass me up to him.

  ‘Don’t shirk the work, Nick,’ she says, using one of Gregorio’s jingoistic phrases.

  ‘Please, Lisa,’ I say dramatically, getting down on my hands and knees on the floor beside her, ‘the sausage rolls are helping me rediscover my true spiritual nature! He’ll make me do a thousand sun salutations as a punishment or, even worse, attend sessions of Tibetan pulsing through the night.’

  We both start laughing, and I feel completely content. I cherish these moments as never before. I forget the way the carpet crunches with the remnants of dead insects and dried dog biscuit and trace my finger around her lips. I wonder if we could have sex. Gregorio has banned it because it saps our essential energy, which is as good a reason as any for trying.

  ‘This weekend is a vital part of my treatment. Gregorio says it could be the tipping point so we need to give it our best shot. He thinks the juicing and enemas are really starting to work. He sees real progress after the first six weeks.’

  ‘I think we should go back to the oncologist we saw in Norwich for another opinion,’ I say, trying to rein in my emotion. ‘So he can monitor your progress and confirm that Gregorio’s right, because I’m not sure his treatments have been peer revi
ewed.’

  ‘He’s curing me of cancer. The juices and the positive thinking are working. I feel amazing. Gregorio is amazing.’ She looks radiant. Her eyes always go watery when she mentions his name.

  ‘Lisa, you’re a trained lawyer. You spent your entire career weighing up facts and on some level you must know this isn’t possible. Rosie trained for nine years before she was allowed near someone with cancer. What qualifications does Gregorio have?’ I try not to sound as panicky as I feel. I keep thinking that if she had followed the oncologist’s advice, she would have started conventional treatment five weeks ago and the cancer cells might have had a fight on their hands.

  She turns to me. ‘You have to believe, otherwise it won’t work. Please don’t question him because it makes me feel anxious, and anxiety inhibits the healing process.’

  The irrational logic reminds me of Daisy, long before she was ill, worrying that the Tooth Fairy wouldn’t come because she kept thinking she wasn’t real.

  ‘If you imagine how it is to be healthy, you will be healthy,’ she says, getting off the bed and pulling me up. ‘Come on. They’ll all be waiting for us.’

  She takes me by the hand and we head out of our bedroom and back downstairs into the sitting room below. We are in a large Georgian country house, on the crest of a valley just outside Shepton Mallet. The windows at the front all have long views across gentle valleys and hills, where sheep graze peacefully on a diet not dissimilar to the one Gregorio has prescribed for us. In the idyllic garden, there are trees with arthritic branches and thick, sturdy trunks that I now regard as friends for the comfort they give me when it all gets too much. They have a sense of permanence now sorely lacking from my own existence.

  It is home to some wacky local aristocrats, whose attendance has been heavily discounted. Unlike ours, which cost almost a thousand pounds – to pay for facilitators, who are apparently ‘all world-class leaders in their field’. How many Tibetan pulse experts are there in the world? I questioned Lisa. Especially after I learnt the practice isn’t Tibetan at all. Their field is probably smaller than a handkerchief.