The Bottle of Tears

by Nick Alexander

  ‘Stop it. You sound like a five-year-old,’ Marge says. ‘Now go and make up before you ruin the weekend for everyone.’

  ‘No,’ Penny says. ‘Not until she apologises.’

  ‘Don’t think you’re too old for me to take you over my knee,’ Marge threatens.

  ‘I think you’ll find I am a bit old for that,’ Penny replies.

  ‘Penelope!’ Marge says. ‘Stop sulking and go and make up with your sister. Now!’

  Both Sander and Martin look up at this unusual use of Penny’s full name. For the most part, everyone forgets that Penny isn’t her full name.

  ‘No, Marjorie,’ Penny says, taking her revenge. ‘You go and make up with her if you want to.’ She can hear that she is indeed sounding like a five-year-old, but that realisation doesn’t seem to help her stop. In fact, it makes her angrier. Why does the presence of her sister make her regress forty years? she wonders. What’s that about?

  ‘You’re being silly,’ Marge says.

  ‘Oh, mind your own business, will you, Mum?’ Penny says, exasperated.

  ‘And you’re being rude, now, as well. This is my business. You’re my daughter, and all this sulking is utterly ridiculous.’

  Penny’s anger bubbles over again. It wasn’t so far below the surface after all. ‘You know what’s ridiculous?’ she says. ‘You lecturing me. You telling me that I’m ridiculous when you’re the biggest sulker of any of us.’

  ‘Me?’ Marge says. ‘I never sulk. When did you ever see me sulk?’

  Penny stands to leave, but as she storms from the room, crossing paths with Victoria in the hallway, she lobs her passing shot back into the room like a hand grenade. ‘Well, to start with,’ she says, ‘you haven’t spoken to your brother for forty years. So I’d call that a pretty epic sulk, yeah?’ She then pulls a truly childish grimace at her sister’s shocked face and strides to the coat stand.

  Once the front door has slammed behind her, Marge covers her mouth with one hand. ‘Well!’ she breathes.

  Sander clears his throat and Martin raises one eyebrow. Then they both turn back to face the TV screen.

  ‘Jesus, Bellerín’s fast,’ Martin says as the footballer streaks diagonally across the screen.

  ‘Yes, he is,’ Sander replies. ‘He’s really bloody fast.’

  The evening does not go to anybody’s plan.

  Penny declines Martin’s offer to eat out again, so he and Victoria go alone. Marge, now refusing to speak to Penny, announces that she’s not hungry and retires to their bedroom the second Penny and Sander arrive in the lounge with bowls of pasta and pesto. Chloe escapes the tense ambience and goes to a sleepover at her friend’s house, and Max and Bertie make jam and peanut butter sandwiches (which Bertie has apparently seen on some American TV show) then return immediately to Max’s room.

  Sander waits until they’re in bed that night, bouncing on the inflatable mattress in the studio, before he makes any attempt to intervene. ‘You’ll have to speak to her eventually, you know,’ he says, once Penny has laid her head across his outstretched arm.

  ‘Who?’ she asks, already pulling away. ‘Mum? Or Vicky?’

  ‘Well, both, I suppose,’ he replies. ‘But I meant Vicky.’

  ‘Oh, we never sulk for long,’ Penny says. ‘It’ll all be forgotten in the morning. She does talk some rubbish, though.’

  ‘I think it’s because you make her feel inferior,’ Sander says.

  ‘I don’t make her feel anything.’

  ‘Sorry, not what I meant,’ Sander replies. ‘I just think that, well . . . because she didn’t get to go to college and she hasn’t had a career and everything . . . you know? She feels like she has to fight to the death to prove something every time.’

  ‘Then she should choose a subject she knows more about than I do,’ Penny says.

  ‘Which would be?’

  Penny shrugs. ‘Search me,’ she says. ‘Shopping, maybe?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Sander says with meaning. ‘So maybe you can see why she feels so insecure.’

  Penny sighs. ‘You’re quite good at this when you try,’ she says.

  ‘At what?’

  ‘The psychology business. But like I said, it’ll all be forgotten by morning. Don’t worry.’

  ‘Sure,’ Sander says. ‘But maybe you could just let her score a point from time to time?’

  ‘I do,’ Penny replies. ‘Just not when she’s slagging off war-torn refugees.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Mum’s not gonna be so easy, though.’

  ‘No. You might have to apologise for that one.’

  ‘Yes. Because as we have already demonstrated, Mum can sulk for forty years without coming up for breath.’

  ‘I didn’t know he was still alive, to be honest. You never talk about him.’

  ‘Cecil?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’m not sure if he is. I’m not sure if Mum would even know. He’d be, um, seventy or so. So I suppose he probably is still chugging along somewhere.’

  ‘What did they fall out about?’

  Penny rolls to her side and props herself up on one elbow. ‘I’ve no idea,’ she says. ‘I was only six. Well, five, really. Nearly six.’

  ‘Oh! So it was . . . ?’ Sander says, nodding, not wanting to say the words.

  ‘Um,’ Penny says seriously. ‘Yes. It was that Christmas.’

  ‘He didn’t have anything to do with what happened, did he?’

  Penny pulls a face. ‘Cecil? No,’ she says. ‘But there was definitely some kind of falling-out. I always assumed that it was because he didn’t come back. I mean, after something that horrific, well, you’d have expected him to want to be there. For Mum. To support her.’

  ‘When did your dad die again?’

  ‘When I was two. I don’t remember him at all. Cecil sort of replaced him. For a while.’

  ‘You must have talked to Vicky about it at some point. I mean, she’d know, wouldn’t she? She was older.’

  ‘Oh, no. I’m not sure she knows either. And she wasn’t that much older. But no, we could never talk about Cecil. Or Ed. They’re both strictly taboo subjects. Which is why not only will I have to apologise to Mum for mentioning Cecil, but I’ll have to find a way of apologising without mentioning him all over again.’

  Sander nods thoughtfully. He reaches out and strokes Penny’s forearm gently with the back of his knuckles. ‘So why didn’t he come back?’ he asks. ‘You must have a theory.’

  Penny shrugs. ‘Who knows. People deal with trauma in weird and wonderful ways; they develop coping mechanisms. Everyone reacts differently. Maybe Cecil’s solution was just never to come back. He loved Ed lots. He was kind of his favourite. Maybe he just needed to pretend that none of it had ever happened. That none of us had ever existed.’

  ‘That must have been pretty upsetting for your mum,’ Sander says. ‘I mean, she’d already lost her husband – to then be blanked by her brother . . .’

  ‘It—’ At the sound of the front door, Penny pauses just long enough to ascertain that it’s her sister and Martin who have returned, then continues, speaking more quietly. ‘It was tough for us, too. I mean, he was like a father and Father Christmas and the Good Fairy all rolled into one. Things got really tough once Cecil vanished. There were no piles of gifts under the tree after that. Half the time there was no money for the bloody meter.’

  ‘And Vicky never said anything about Cecil disappearing?’ Sander murmurs. ‘Not one comment?’

  ‘She was probably suffering from PTSD,’ Penny whispers. ‘I mean, she saw everything. She was with Ed when it happened. But she hardly even cried. And she never said a word about any of it.’

  ‘Not ever?’

  ‘Nope. She just went really quiet after that. It was like she’d taken a vow of silence or something. She used to be the funny one, if you can believe that.’

  ‘Funny?’ Sander asks. He pauses to listen, then whispers, ‘They’re in the kitchen.’

  Penny n
ods and bites her bottom lip before continuing softly, ‘Yes, Ed was the serious one . . . Geeky, you’d call him nowadays, I suppose. And I was the little tearaway, always getting into trouble. But Vicky was the funny one who made all the adults laugh.’

  ‘Which is something I’m truly struggling to imagine,’ Sander says.

  Penny nods. ‘I know. I suppose . . . what happened . . . well, it changed her.’

  ‘You really couldn’t talk to her about it? Not even now?’

  Penny snorts. ‘No! It’s a family taboo. And family taboos have to be respected.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘Plus – and this is the psychologist talking, not your wife – there’s no telling what would happen if someone forced her to talk about it. There’s no telling how she would react. She may even have blocked the whole thing out. She might not remember. So it could actually be dangerous for her.’

  ‘Dangerous?’

  ‘Yeah. She could have a breakdown or something, if she wasn’t ready.’

  ‘It was forty years ago,’ Sander says. ‘If she’s not ready now . . .’

  ‘Maybe she’ll never be ready,’ Penny says with a sigh. ‘But if she does want to work on it one day, it will have to come from her, and it would have to be with a disinterested party, not me. Someone outside the family. A professional.’

  ‘How do you know she hasn’t told someone?’ Sander asks, rolling on to his back. The light from the streetlamp falls across his face, giving him a strange orange glow – there are no curtains in the studio. ‘How do you know she hasn’t been seeing a shrink for the last thirty years?’

  Penny shrugs. ‘I don’t. But she doesn’t really strike me as someone who’s been in therapy for decades. She strikes me as someone who’s blanked everything out and done everything she can to forget.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Sander says with a yawn. ‘Your family’s weird.’

  ‘Yours wasn’t much better, from what I’ve heard.’

  ‘No,’ Sander agrees with a laugh. ‘You’re right. God, this mattress is awful.’

  ‘Yes,’ Penny replies. ‘Yes, between the mattress and the streetlamp, I think it’s going to be a long night.’

  ‘I could put a sheet up, maybe.’

  ‘Nah,’ Penny says, now rolling over and spooning her body against Sander’s back. ‘It’s fine.’

  Victoria wakes up with a gasp. She has beads of perspiration on her forehead and an unusual asthmatic whistle in her throat. Beside her, Martin is snoring gently, but she’s confused about where she is. This doesn’t feel like their bed, and the room, unlike home, is pitch black.

  She reaches to the bedside table and fumbles for her phone. When the screen lights up the room with its dim green glow, she remembers.

  She attempts to breathe deeply, but it feels like someone is sitting on her chest. It feels like someone has stolen all the oxygen from the room. Perhaps it’s the fumes from the paint, clogging her lungs or something.

  She had been dreaming about Ed, she realises. She tries to remember the context of the dream but only Ed’s ghostly face and her sense of terror remain.

  There’s still no air in the room. She needs to escape.

  Still wheezing and vaguely hopeful that Martin will wake up (he doesn’t) she bounces from the bed and, still by the light of her phone, dresses in the first items of clothing she finds – her slacks and Martin’s white shirt. Then, after stubbing her toe on Martin’s suitcase (Penny’s wardrobes are full of boxes) and grabbing her handbag from the back of the chair, she leaves the room.

  Downstairs, in the cold, messy kitchen, she fiddles in the bag for a Valium, which she crunches up. It tastes horrible, but it’s supposed to work faster that way.

  She leans over the kitchen sink and attempts to open the window, but it is secured with some devilish anti-burglary lock which appears to require an absent key, so she pads to the back door instead.

  Just as she places one hand on the door handle, Solomon, Max’s ageing tabby, bursts in through the cat flap, startling her.

  She heaves the door open, then stands on the threshold and lets the icy air rush in, but it doesn’t seem to contain any more oxygen than the air in the house – in fact, the chilled air seems to be making her breathing even more difficult – so she shuts the door again and slumps at the kitchen table. She will just have to wait for the Valium to do its stuff. She knows what this is. She has had panic attacks before.

  Solomon jumps on to the table and, though she’s never been that keen on cats – they generally strike her as selfish and unpredictable – she begins to stroke him; she begins to speak to him. It’s at least a distraction from thinking about Cecil, from thinking about Ed.

  ‘So what were you doing outside?’ she asks the cat, then, ‘I don’t know what you want. Food, I expect. Only, I don’t know where they keep it.’ But the cat, it seems, wants nothing more than company and, as she strokes his ears and then tickles his offered tummy, the tightness in her chest begins to ease.

  By four thirty she’s feeling almost normal. OK, not normal – she’s feeling spacey and floaty from the combined effects of Valium and lack of sleep – but that, at least, is a relatively familiar sensation.

  She boils the kettle; she makes and sips a cup of tea. And then she sets about the final phase of her 4 a.m. panic attack ritual: she starts to clean the kitchen.

  Penny is awoken just after seven by the daylight. ‘I should have let you put the sheet up,’ she says to Sander, who she believes is already awake. But Sander just groans, rolls away and pulls a pillow over his head. Her pillow.

  ‘That’s romance,’ Penny murmurs, sensing a new pain in her lower back and rolling from the airbed on to her knees.

  When she reaches the kitchen, she is stunned. She can’t remember ever having seen it this clean.

  She sniffs at the air. There’s an unfamiliar odour of bleach, which is strange, as she hasn’t bought the stuff for months. They say it’s bad for the environment.

  She looks around at the emptied surfaces, at the shiny floor. The cat bowl is spotless, she notices. She feels a pang of guilt that they wash it so rarely but thinks that placing it on folded sheets of kitchen roll is, all the same, overkill.

  She grabs the kettle (shiny, descaled) and crosses to the sink (completely bleached) to refill it. She glances out at the back garden. The window has been cleaned, too. It smells of ammonia.

  The kettle plugged in, she leans back against the worktop and scans the room again, sees the shiny spice jars, the tea, coffee and cocoa pots ranged from large to small.

  ‘Wow, Vicky!’ she says. ‘You can come and stay anytime.’

  As the kettle heats up, she checks the lounge and the dining room, but the miracle-worker is nowhere to be seen. Victoria must, she realises, have gone back to bed. She can thank her later.

  The next person up – at ten to eight – is Marge. ‘Gosh,’ she says. ‘Who did this?’

  ‘Who do you think?’ Penny replies.

  ‘Well, not you,’ Marge says. ‘That’s for sure.’

  ‘It’s nice, isn’t it?’ Penny replies, ignoring, for the moment, the barb. ‘I suppose it’s her way of making up.’

  ‘Yes,’ Marge says. ‘Yes, it’s much better than the usual chaos you live in. But I expect she was just worried about the lack of hygiene. You know what she’s like about germs.’

  Instantly, Penny’s joy at her spotless kitchen begins to morph into an entirely different emotion.

  ‘I know how busy you are,’ Marge says. ‘But you should try to keep it looking like this once they’ve gone. It would do you good to have a nice clean kitchen for a change.’

  One by one, the residents of the house wake up and wander into the kitchen, and one by one their comments sharpen Penny’s sense of injustice.

  ‘Wow,’ Martin says. ‘Someone’s been busy.’ And Penny has to explain that it wasn’t her.

  ‘Gosh,’ Sander says, when he walks in. ‘This is nice. Very nice!’ And Penny has to restrain
herself from pointing out that it could be this nice every day if only Sander cleaned it, too.

  Bertie’s comment sends Penny over the edge into the beginnings of actual rage. ‘It smells like home,’ he says. ‘Has Mum been zapping all the germs with Dettol?’

  ‘Only ninety-nine point nine per cent of them,’ Max replies.

  ‘There are no bloody germs,’ Penny gasps. ‘For Christ’s sake, don’t you two start!’

  ‘Actually, germs are everywhere, Mum,’ Max informs her.

  ‘In fact, germs are good for you, I think,’ Bertie offers. ‘Our biology teacher says it’s bad for your immune system or something. If there aren’t any, I mean.’

  Penny closes her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose. ‘Just get your breakfast and get out, will you?’ she says. ‘I’ve got Sunday lunch for eight to prepare.’

  Once the boys have smudged their jam, scattered breadcrumbs and retired to the dining room, Penny pulls the lunch ingredients from the suddenly half-empty refrigerator. She is unable to restrain herself from checking in the bin to see which items Victoria has dared to throw out. Her annoyance only increases at the realisation that it truly was all rubbish. She can’t find a single item within its sell-by date with which she can accuse her sister of wastage.

  She chops onions and puts minced beef out to defrost. She grates cheese and makes béchamel sauce. And by the time Victoria gets back up, the kitchen is looking perfectly ordinary, which in a way, Penny realises, she is glad about.

  ‘Oh!’ Victoria says on entering. ‘Gosh, that didn’t last long!’

  Penny glances over at her and shrugs. ‘It’s called life, dear sister. It’s called cookery.’

  ‘I cook,’ Victoria says, perceiving the dig even before Penny herself has realised what she meant to imply. ‘I’ll, um, just have a cup of tea and I’ll give you a hand getting it back under control.’

  ‘No, thanks. I’m fine. Everything is under control,’ Penny says.

  ‘It doesn’t look it,’ Victoria retorts. ‘Anyway, every top chef needs a cleaner-upper.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Penny insists. ‘It’s just lasagne. And I’m fine.’

  Victoria crosses to the sink and returns with a sponge. ‘Just let me help you a bit,’ she says, already wiping down a worktop.