Living With It

by Lizzie Enfield

  ‘Organic,’ Harvey corrects him, and smirks.

  ‘That’s what I said.’ Vincent looks peeved, clearly aware he’s said something wrong but not quite sure what. ‘He says that kind of meat is better ’cos the animals have had happy lives so it’s OK to eat them.’

  ‘I think it’s worse,’ Harvey retorts. ‘If I’d had a happy organismic life – ’

  ‘You wish,’ said Gabriella.

  ‘If I’d had a happy life,’ he continued, ‘I’d want to carry on living it, not be killed and eaten. But if I’d had a miserable life, I’d probably want to end it and end up in a burger.’

  Harvey could be a lawyer if the industrial design idea founders. Maybe I should tell him about the mess we’re in now. Maybe he could come up with a better defence than the solicitor I paid five hundred quid to, to send a letter to Ben’s.

  I wonder if Harvey is aware that something is going on. Gabs knows, and I am sure Vincent has no idea, but maybe in his quiet way Harvey has absorbed some of the tension in our house, and is just as confused as Gabriella but hasn’t said anything.

  I look at the letter in the manila envelope lying on the side. I am almost certain it’s a response from Ben’s solicitor. I tell myself I’ll open it in the evening, when Eric is home, after the kids have gone to bed. I don’t want to spoil Vincent’s birthday if I can help it. The letter can wait.

  Ben, Tuesday morning

  ‘What time do you have to leave?’ Maggie asks, as I bring her tea in bed.

  It’s seven-thirty and Iris is still asleep. Maggie could have slept in a little longer, but she woke when my alarm went off. I’m taking a Year Nine group on a trip today, to the Globe Theatre, and my needing to be at school by eight has blown Maggie’s chance of a lie-in. I can make up for it, a little, by bringing her tea. She can sit and think her own thoughts for however long before Iris wakes.

  ‘I’m going in a minute,’ I say, putting her cuppa on the bedside table and sitting on the edge of the bed. ‘And I’ll be back a bit later than usual.’

  I love the Globe but I’ve already decided I’m not going to enjoy the trip. It’s never easy having fifty-plus kids on the loose anywhere other than school. I know there are a few who are liable to wander off and I won’t relax until we are back at school again.

  And then, as soon as I get home, we have to go out again.

  ‘Don’t forget we’re going out this evening,’ Maggie reminds me now.

  ‘I hadn’t,’ I say, in as even a tone as I can muster.

  Maggie has arranged for us to meet a couple of young deaf adults, adults without hearing aids or cochlear implants, who communicate only by signing. It’s the latest stage of her mission to find out as much as possible about what the future might hold for Iris. But she’s going too fast for me. I’m still slowly getting used to the fact that Iris is deaf. I’m not ready to fast-forward to what she might be like when she’s a twentysomething deaf adult.

  But Maggie has her way and I have mine.

  ‘It will be fine,’ Maggie says.

  ‘It’s not that,’ I reply. ‘I’m not really looking forward to this trip.’

  I have a strange relationship with theatre these days. The older I get, and the more jaded I become with teaching, the more irritated I get with the young actors plying their Romeos and Hamlets on stage, when I never got the chance.

  You think I’d be over it by now, the being a failed actor, and sometimes I think I am. But at other times, especially when life seems a bit shit all round, which it does right now, I still wish I’d had a break, wish I’d had a different life.

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ Maggie says again, kindly.

  Iris starts to holler.

  ‘Shall I get her?’ I ask Maggie.

  ‘No, leave her a bit longer,’ she says. ‘She’s not distressed yet. She’s just talking to herself.’

  ‘Talking?’

  I can’t help myself. I know it doesn’t help Maggie, I know she’s trying to come to terms with how Iris is, and my pointing out how she isn’t doesn’t make it easy, but I still can’t help myself.

  ‘Ben, please,’ she says.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I kiss her and get up to go. ‘Can’t I bring her in now? I won’t see her before I go if I don’t.’

  ‘OK.’ Maggie smiles. My wanting to see her is at least an admission of something, that I do love her, even though I’ve not yet accepted the way she is, or the way she is going to be.

  ‘Hey!’ I say, popping my head round the door of Iris’s room, and she looks up, sensing the motion of the door and me coming through it.

  ‘Ork.’ She makes a peculiar noise, which sounds more like a dolphin than a human being.

  ‘Hello, bottlenose,’ I say, going to her cot.

  I know it’s a cruel thing to say and, although she can’t hear me, I wish I had not said it.

  ‘Ork, ork,’ Iris says as I carry her along the corridor to her mother.

  ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart,’ I tell her, kissing the top of her head. ‘We have our own way of dealing with things.’

  And I think of the letter Hedda should have sent to Isobel and Eric and wonder if they’ve got it.

  ‘Here’s Mum,’ I say, putting Iris down on the bed next to Maggie.

  ‘Hello, lovely girl.’ Maggie smiles and cooes and carries on chatting to her, the way she always did. Neither of us is used to the fact she can’t hear us, so we carry on talking to her, as if she can.

  I remember doing the same to my grandfather before he died. He’d come to stay with us for a few days at a time and spent most of his time sitting in a chair, reading or staring into space. ‘Why don’t you go and talk to Pops?’ my mum would ask. And I would. I’d go and sit next to him and chat away, tell him about my day. Strangely, he was one of the few people I could speak to with perfect fluency. It was as if there was some trip in my brain which flicked my stammer off if the person I was talking to couldn’t hear me. He was aware I was there, chatting away, and he smiled at me benignly from time to time. But I don’t think he ever heard a word, not at that stage of his life, just as Iris clearly hears nothing her mother is saying now.

  ‘By the way, Ben,’ Maggie says as I’m about to go, ‘you know it’s Vincent’s birthday today?’

  Naturally, I do not know that. I can barely remember the date of Maggie’s birthday (actually I have recorded it in my phone so that I don’t forget and have an alarm set to remind me a month, a fortnight and a week before). I realise birthdays are important to people and forgetting them is a terrible slight, especially if it is your partner’s. But until Maggie came on the scene I hadn’t taken note of when Vincent’s birthday was, and I should have, because he is my godson.

  ‘Men don’t really do birthdays,’ I’d told Maggie once when she asked me if I’d remembered Eric’s. ‘They have homosexual overtones!’

  Eric wouldn’t care that I’d forgotten his and he’d appreciate the joke, but I ought to remember Vincent’s.

  It had kind of annoyed me, before I was finally given the job, that I’d not been asked to be a godparent to any of Eric and Isobel’s children. I’d thought I was the obvious choice, when they announced that they were having a bit of do ‘to celebrate Gabriella’s birth’. Bel told me she wasn’t being christened but they were going to have godparents and they’d be at the party, with a few other close friends.

  ‘Will you come?’ Bel had asked.

  ‘I’d love to,’ I’d replied, but I’d felt a bit miffed. Who the fuck was the godfather?

  It was Eric’s brother, which I suppose was fair enough but a bit of waste if you ask me. Eric’s brother was already his uncle, so Gabs was missing out on another present at Christmas.

  And for Harvey they chose Paddy, which also pissed me off a bit. I mean, I was a closer friend, surely? Why did they never ask me? Was it because I’d already had the best man role? Or because they thought I’d be crap at it?

  If that was what they thought, they were right.

  Bey
ond the first formal-ish get-together when I presented Vincent with a silver chip fork – a perfect present given that they lived in Brighton, I thought – I’d failed to remember a single birthday, and sent him unimaginative notes of varying denominations tucked inside a Christmas card for years. It was only when Maggie arrived on the scene that the presents became a bit more inspired and I/we/she endeavoured to get him something he actually wanted.

  This year he’d given me the heads-up on ideas.

  ‘What do you want for your birthday this year, Vincent?’ I’d thought to ask him while we were in France. The two of us were cooling off in the pool, one afternoon. ‘Have you got any ideas?’

  ‘A straitjacket,’ he said, splashing around in the shallow end.

  I thought I had misheard him. ‘A life jacket?’

  ‘No a straitjacket. So that I can learn to escape. I really want one.’

  ‘Right.’

  I quizzed Eric about this later.

  ‘He really does want one. He’s into magic and all sorts at the moment,’ he told me. ‘He’d be made up if you remembered.’

  I did remember, and when we got home I searched for straitjackets online. But the only things that came up were in online sex shops and I knew Bel wouldn’t be entirely happy if I gave him anything made from black rubber.

  So I abandoned that idea and forgot all about Vincent and his birthday until now, when Maggie brings it up.

  ‘What do you want to do about it?’ she asks.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘We shouldn’t involve him in all of this,’ Maggie says.

  ‘I’ll have a think,’ I reply, as I make for the door.

  Maybe I’d pick something up in the gift shop at the Globe. There must be something there that would appeal to him. I could buy something, even if I never gave it to him.

  ‘We need to leave by five-thirty tonight,’ Maggie reminds me about this drink again. ‘Have a good day.’

  Isobel, Tuesday evening

  Vincent is happy. Eric is home early and also seems happy. In fact, everyone has relaxed into Vinnie’s birthday, and the atmosphere in our house is normal to good.

  I know it won’t last. But I don’t yet know how stressed things will become, or that, when they do, that will feel almost normal too.

  Jack has gone home and Vincent is buzzing from the day.

  ‘We had music and Miss Rusbatch played “Happy Birthday” to me on the piano,’ he tells Eric.

  ‘So you’re glad you went?’

  ‘Yes, but you are still a pushy parent for making me!’ This is aimed at me. ‘And Max gave me a packet of Maltesers at school. Can I put them on my ice-cream?’

  ‘You’ve already had ice-cream, Vincent, when Jack was here.’

  ‘But it is my birthday!’

  ‘Oh, go on, then,’ I say. ‘Ask Harvey if he wants some too.’

  ‘Harvey, do you want ice-cream with Maltesers?’ Vincent shouts in the direction of the sitting room where his brother is watching Dragon’s Den. He’s decided he wants to go on it. He wants to show them the full range of his inventions: the trolley chairs, the vinyl bowls, the fruit carton spectacle cases, the band shooter and more. He thinks he might be able to persuade them to invest in him, if he gets his pitch and presentation right.

  ‘OK,’ comes the reply to the ice-cream offer, as if he’s doing him a favour.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ Vincent says, pulling out the bottom drawer of the freezer and taking a tub of vanilla ice-cream over to the work surface, spooning it out. ‘The Maltesers are in the sitting room,’ he says as he carries the two bowls out of the kitchen.

  I wonder if he will be sick tonight, but after eating his second pudding he goes into the garden to kick a ball around with Eric and then suddenly zonks out, sits on the sofa and looks as if he might fall asleep.

  ‘Why don’t you go and get a shower now, Vinnie? You look shattered.’

  Any other day he would resist tiredness, but today he accepts it. ‘Will you come up with me?’ he asks, which means he wants me to accompany him to the top of the stairs, but part company as soon as he enters the bathroom.

  ‘Of course I will, birthday boy.’ I get up and ruffle his hair as he drags himself slowly up the steps and I put the bathmat on the floor while he hovers, unwilling to undress in front of me any more.

  ‘I’ll shout when I’m done,’ he says, as I exit the bathroom.

  A few minutes later he shouts down that he’s ready. Eric and I both go up to tuck him into bed.

  ‘I had a really good day, thank you,’ he says, looking much younger the instant his face touches the pillow, as if the state of unconsciousness wipes some of the knowingness off his face. Eric too, when he is asleep, looks more boyish, but today he looks tired as he kisses Vincent, and I don’t know whether to tell him about the still unopened letter.

  ‘Well done, Bel,’ he says to me, kindly, as we go back down and into the kitchen to clear up after dinner. Gabs is sitting at the table, looking through Vincent’s birthday cards.

  ‘What for?’ I ask Eric.

  ‘For raising such a great kid and giving him such a good day today.’

  He often says something like this on their birthdays: expresses some sense that he thinks I’ve done a good job of bringing them up.

  ‘Thank you,’ I reply, and I touch his arm.

  He doesn’t pull away, the way he has been recently if I try to make any sort of physical contact. It’s not much, but it’s a start, and I am loath to do anything which will destroy the mood.

  Gabriella does it for me.

  ‘What about that other letter that came this morning?’ she says, putting Vincent’s cards down and looking at me.

  ‘What was that?’ Eric asks, more as a reflex than a question.

  ‘Another letter came this morning,’ I say, as we stack the dishwasher together. ‘I think it’s from the solicitor.’

  ‘Didn’t you open it?’

  ‘Not yet. I had a lot to do and I thought I’d wait for you to come home.’

  ‘I’m going to have a coffee,’ Eric says, going to put the kettle on. ‘Do you want one?’

  I nod. Coffee will be the accompaniment to us finding out whatever the latest development is. I fear we may need something stronger.

  ‘Do you have any homework?’ I ask Gabriella.

  I want her to leave but I don’t want to tell her to.

  ‘She might as well stay,’ Eric says. ‘She knows what’s going on.’

  ‘It might be better – ’ I begin, but Gabs interrupts me.

  ‘I’ve a right to know what’s happening too.’

  I take the letter from the side, where I put it earlier, while Eric fills a cafetiere with grinds and hot water and brings it over to the table. ‘Open it, then,’ he says, standing behind me so he can read its contents over my shoulder.

  There’s legalese to start with: a few paragraphs before it gets to the point. Ben’s solicitor doesn’t accept that we are not responsible for Iris’s deafness. She says they have evidence that we are responsible for causing it and are inviting us in for a meeting to discuss the damages they intend to pursue, in court, if we cannot agree out of it.

  There is a figure, and I am thankful I am sitting down when I read it. It’s a six-figure sum, way in excess of anything we could possibly afford. Ben knows we don’t have that sort of money and could never find it.

  ‘Jesus Christ.’ Eric sits down too.

  We look at each other, unsure what to say.

  ‘What does it say?’ Gabriella asks.

  ‘They’re asking for a lot of money,’ Eric tells her.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘A lot more than we could afford,’ Eric says and begins folding the letter.

  I am thankful that he does not show it to Gabs. He may think she has a right to know what’s going on, but I don’t want to worry her any more than necessary.

  ‘Why won’t you tell me?’ she persists.

  ‘Actually, Gabs,’
Eric says, ‘I’m sorry but maybe it’s best if Mum and I discuss this together first. I’m sorry, love. Do you mind leaving us for a bit?’

  Gabriella looks put out, but she goes.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ I ask, and for a while Eric says nothing.

  ‘The whole thing is ridiculous,’ he says, eventually. ‘Ben knows we don’t have that sort of money, unless we sell the house.’

  ‘You don’t think we’d have to, do you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think they could make us. We’d need to ask our solicitor. Jesus Christ,’ he says again. ‘What a fucking mess.’

  ‘Why are they doing this to us, Eric?’

  ‘Maybe it’s not personal,’ he says, ever the optimist.

  ‘How can it not be? We are their friends. Ben’s friends, anyway. It’s ridiculous.’

  I am almost certain Maggie is behind this now, and am about to say so, but we are interrupted.

  ‘Mum!’ I hear Gabs shouting from the living room. There’s an urgency to her voice I can’t ignore, so I get up and follow it.

  Harvey is slumped on the sofa. His face is red and he is struggling for breath. ‘I think there must have been nuts in those chocolates,’ he says, wheezing terribly.

  ‘Where’s your pen?’ I ask. ‘Is it in your school bag?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Gabriella, go upstairs and get the one from the bathroom cabinet,’ I tell her. We have several epipens for such an eventuality.

  ‘I feel sick,’ Harvey says, as I rummage in his school bag.

  I can’t find his pen.

  ‘Gabriella!’ I shout.

  I don’t know if she can hear me from upstairs, but she comes back down with the pen in her hand and thrusts it over. ‘Here.’

  I know what to do, I’ve been shown, I’ve watched the video a thousand times, but still I hesitate. There’s something about thrusting a needle into your child’s thigh which you instinctively recoil from, even if you know it will save his life.

  ‘Just do it, Bel,’ Eric says. ‘Or let me.’

  But I do it myself. I pull the safety catch of the pen and push it against the fabric of Harvey’s trousers, so that the needle releases and pierces through them and into his outer thigh.