by Holly Seddon
We only really went out on the last day. Jim insisted on visiting the thatched pub nearby and drinking a pint of ale in the sunny beer garden. I didn’t want to go but couldn’t begin to tell him why. Who doesn’t like beer gardens? Probably only my sister and me. And I couldn’t tell him that either. I sat on the bench seat, nursing my orange juice and distributing drinks to a still-peaky Violet.
—
But anyway, the blood. Like so many stories, this one starts with my mum.
When we were little, she always had music on, pop music or golden oldies. I can’t help but think that helped inspire Robin’s eventual career, but I’d never dare say that.
In summer, Mum would fold open a stripy sun lounger from the shed carefully, like a safecracker, angling it just so. She’d drag the kitchen radio out through the window, lead dangling, and rest it on the white picnic table. She’d turn it up loud and lie with her skirt hitched, oiled legs gleaming. When she’d finished reading her magazine, drinking Typhoo tea or 7UP, she’d spring up and grab whichever one of us was near enough, put us on her hip and dance.
Robin would kick to get down but I would wave my arms, shake my hair, giggle. I loved those moments. She was the best fun in the world then, our blond hair mingling together, our laughter colliding. I’d just wanted Violet to feel like that about me, that was all.
So one day, I found a music channel playing old songs from the eighties, the kind I’d danced to several decades before. I’d got up from the sofa and started dancing, waving at Violet, who was looking at me quizzically. When Kim Wilde came on, “Kids in America,” I sprang over and plucked Violet from her playmat, where she’d been arranging her teddies and dolls. She gave in to it, started to laugh. We jumped sideways and up and down. She copied my exaggerated moves. I copied hers.
Her dimples were so deep and her smile so big that her whole face changed shape as I gazed into it, laughing and kissing her nose. That little nose. We swung each other round and round. As the song changed to Glenn Medeiros’s one-hit wonder “Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love for You,” I put her little feet on my feet and took big sways, which she found hilarious. She’d thrown her head back, laughing, and her shiny hair—getting so long—had swished from side to side.
At the peak of our fun, her face smacked into the door. She didn’t knock into the wood hard, but she’d caught the edge and split her lip. A thin red line of blood pointed from the door to the television like an accusation while the music blared on and surged into adverts.
She barely cried as I hugged her and cleaned her up, but I bawled.
I cried because she might have ended up with a tiny scar—little lips are so fragile. I cried because Jim would be upset and we would probably have a clipped exchange of cross words, and that always unnerved me. But mostly I cried because we had been having so much fun. And I’d felt so free.
To my surprise, we hadn’t had cross words when Jim came home. That evening he’d scooped her up to brush her teeth, noticed Violet’s lip and asked me the story. After listening, stroking her hair while I told the story, he’d gone off to do bedtime. I’d heard him ask her to tell the story again as they disappeared up the stairs. “We were dancing, Daddy. It was funny…”
A little later, Jim had come back downstairs. “Nice bedtime,” he’d said. Then he’d put the television on and got some papers out for work.
And a few months later, there it was on the list. He hadn’t believed my version of events—or hers. Number seven: the blood.
ROBIN|PRESENT DAY
The Magpies had been fighting a lot recently. It seemed worse at weekends, their house turning into a pressure cooker. The little boy seemed to know when to clear out of the way—just as Robin and her sister had as kids—but the flare-ups were getting more frequent.
Perhaps, Robin thinks, Mr. Magpie needs a little help to see what’s going on under his nose. To shake his cheating wife loose so he could get on with parenting his kid. Right now, they were feuding in a directionless, painful circle. Far better to cut it at the root, cleanly. The longer it goes on, the less healthy everyone becomes, as Robin knows all too well. The last time she tried to steer the course away from disaster, it had been ham-fisted and messy, the results catastrophic. This time would be precise.
She’d ordered a gift to arrive when she knew they would both be home. Something for Mrs. Magpie, to encourage Mr. Magpie to ask some tricky questions. Underwear, something sexy but classy. Something that said “hotels and anticipation” rather than “thanks for the random bunk-up.” She’d dredged her memory for moments of desire, of being desired, and for the gift message had chosen: “The thought of your body in this drives me crazy, X.”
The email had just come through to the dummy address; the parcel had been signed for. Now Robin watches from behind the curtain as it is opened in the kitchen and the fight begins.
She sips her tea and wishes she could hear what was happening. She can see the little boy covering his ears in his bedroom, feels a pang of guilt.
But it hasn’t worked. There’s still an edge. Mr. Magpie hangs back away from his wife and accepts an awkward hug only briefly, but she’s still there. They’re still together. The champagne-colored silks have been put back in the box, bundled up. Robin knows without even checking that her card will be refunded in a few weeks, the box returned under the guise that it must have been intended for someone else.
Maybe he hadn’t asked the right questions or jumped to the right conclusions. Maybe he’d chosen to accept a flimsy lie over the painful truth. Either way, Mrs. Magpie got away with it again. The lies were deepening and Robin hadn’t saved them from the inevitable. Poor Mr. Magpie: it would only get worse.
FOURTEEN
SARAH|1991
After a few long weeks of not doing much, we finally get to meet up with Callum and his family. It’s halfway through the summer holidays, and Robin and I have been kicking about at the park or riding our bikes around the woods that curl round the back of our village. There’s a rumor that a farmer lives in the middle of the woods and he once mistook a child on a bike for a dog coming to eat his hens and that he shot the child dead. I used to be terrified of this, until Robin pointed out that no one telling the story ever knew the kid’s name, which was very suspicious, and anyway, if a farmer had done that, he’d be in prison right now.
Every time we go to the village playground I hope we’ll see Callum there but we never do. So we don’t get to play our intricate three-person games and have to make do with stunted versions. Sometimes, other kids from school come and we all squint into one another’s faces and bark out instructions for games or compete to see who can jump off the swing when it’s going the highest. It’s always Robin. I don’t know why anyone ever bothers going against her.
But today we’re finally doing something different. It’s a Friday, but Dad is home, which is weird, and he and Mum have been locked in their room all morning. When they come out, Mum is wearing one of her good dresses but she looks like she’s been crying. And, actually, Dad looks like he has been too. They squeeze each other’s hands, just a tiny squeeze when they don’t think I’m looking, and then we get into the car to drive to a beer garden in a nearby village.
We arrive and park up at the other side of the car park to the Grangers’ BMW, even though there are spaces nearby. We go through the wooden fence and into the garden, and I see that Callum is dressed in a shirt and jeans and has gel in his hair. He has a Coke and he’s taken the straw out and laid it next to his glass.
He looks at Robin, tries to catch her eye, but she’s too busy nagging Dad for a Coke and a bag of crisps to pay attention. He looks at me and for a moment we share a look that makes my tummy feel funny. I want to ask, “What? What is it?” but he bites his lip, sees his dad watching him and shrinks back down.
My mum and dad stand awkwardly at the table, while Robin and I clamber over the bench seat and wedge in next to Callum.
This means that Mum and Dad have to perch on eith
er side of us, so without saying a word, there’s a big reshuffle among the adults and it ends up that Mum and Drew are sitting opposite us and Dad and Hilary have wedged in at either side of us kids.
“Are you okay?” I ask Callum. “You look a bit weird.”
He looks at his dad again. “I’m fine,” he says. “Oh I brought you both these.” He opens up the kitchen paper in front of him I’d not noticed on the table and points to a collection of little baby strawberries, their delicate juice turning the paper pink. “I grew them at home, with Mum.” He shares them out carefully; he’s learned that perceived injustice is at the root of almost all sibling fights, so he takes pains to give the same number of fruits, of approximately the same size, to each of us. Robin scoffs hers in one go but I eat them slowly, trying to show how much I appreciate it.
A big fuss is made of going to buy drinks, with the dads staring each other down. Eventually Drew Granger stops insisting and just walks inside, and my dad follows after him. I notice that the mums aren’t talking to each other, when usually they’re talking at the same time. Instead, Hilary asks me about my dress—it’s a cream embroidered one that I love and am almost too big for—and, noticing that Robin is in jeans and a T-shirt with a dinosaur on it, asks if she likes dinosaurs. Robin looks at her like it’s a ridiculous question. “Everyone likes dinosaurs,” she says. Now it’s Mum’s turn: she compliments Callum on his smart hairstyle and he goes so pink he glows. When the dads come back with two trays, we’re all relieved.
“Who wants to start?” says Mum. We all look at her. Dad looks away first and studies his hands, so Drew Granger half-stands up like he’s a teacher but then sits back down. “I’ll do it,” he says.
All of us kids take a drink of our pop. I’ve taken my straw out like Callum, but when I see how much the line of Robin’s drink zooms down when she sucks, I reconsider and dunk my straw back. Still we wait.
“So,” Drew Granger says, and it sounds like he’s going to run some kind of meeting. “We all have some news.”
I notice that Hilary is shaking a little and she reaches for Callum’s hand. I notice that our usually laid-back dad is fidgeting and irritable. He picks at a knot in the wooden table, shuffles his feet around so his cord trousers make a swishing sound. He doesn’t stop, even when Mum gives him a look. If anything, the swishing grows louder.
“We’ve all been friends for some time,” Drew says, “and we’ve got to know one another very well. And sometimes, when people become friends, they get to know each other so well they realize that actually they should spend more time together.”
This is strange to me, because we’ve spent far less time together in the last few weeks, but the memory of Mum and Drew on the sofa makes my stomach churn. I don’t know what he’s going to say but I don’t like where it’s headed. Robin is clueless. She slurps the last of her Coke and burps.
“Is this about you and Mum snogging?” Robin asks, and everyone gasps.
“What?” Dad shouts.
“In the kitchen, when I had a bad tummy,” Robin says, chasing ice cubes around with her straw. The adults all look at one another. Dad looks like he’s going to pop.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Dad shouts, and he stands up now. “You did that in front of our kids?” He points his finger at Mum, and I notice Drew puts his arm around her briefly before he stands up and faces my dad eye to eye.
“Calm down, Jack,” Drew says. Callum grasps his mum’s arm and she puts her hand over his.
“It’s too late to rake over the details,” Mum says. “Please calm down, Jack.”
“Calm down?” My dad’s eyes suddenly get wet and it’s like he’s taken by surprise, because he sits down heavily and just stares at Mum.
“Yes, it is, Robin,” Hilary finally says in her creamy advert voice. “It is about that. Your mum and Drew realized that they liked each other quite a bit and that they have a lot in common.” She took a deep breath, looked at Dad just briefly. “So eventually they told your dad and me about it. And we were very shocked.” Hilary looks down.
“We were fucking fuming,” Dad growls, looking Drew Granger in the eye and then turning to Mum. Dad takes over: “And we were very pissed off that they’d been running around behind our backs.”
Hilary reaches across all of us to tap Dad on the hands, and he stops jiggling his leg and looks down again, his eyes even wetter than before.
“Well,” Hilary says, her own tears starting to slide through her makeup. “We all talked about it. And that was very tough. We weren’t sure what to do for the best. And Jack and I started to spend a bit more time together while we were working out what we could do.”
I start to feel sick. Robin has stopped moving the straw around and is glaring at Mum. Callum has just wiped his eyes on his shirt and now does it again. I feel my heart get quicker until I can hear it banging.
“You can’t help who you fall in love with!” Mum exclaims dramatically, and we all look at her.
“No,” Drew Granger says in a bellicose grunt aimed at Dad. “You can’t, Angela.”
“We talked about what should happen and how to make it work best,” Hilary repeated, ignoring them. “And the more Jack and I spent time together, we stopped talking about how angry and sad we were and we started to realize that we liked each other too. We have lots in common, like the love of gardening and things—” I see my mum roll her eyes just slightly and I think, No, you don’t have the right, but I squash the thought down.
“How long has this been going on?” Robin says. “All this falling in love and spending time together stuff?” Her eyes are black and narrow, and she’s staring at our mother like she could leap across the table and bite her.
“That’s not what’s important,” Drew Granger says.
“No, ’course not,” Dad says spikily.
Drew opens his mouth to say something else, but Mum must have done something under the table, because he looks at her suddenly and then flashes her a quick smile.
“The thing is,” Mum says, “there’s been a lot to consider. But we’ve decided that we can’t carry on as we are and that Drew and I want to be together.” I look at Robin and Callum, aghast; their pale faces stare back at me. “And Dad and Hilary have decided that they would like to see if they can be happy together too,” Mum says, like she’s reading from a script. “So we’re going to have to make some changes.” Callum folds into his mum. He’s crying openly now and I notice that Drew is looking at him like there’s a sour taste on his own tongue.
“It’s okay, darling.” Hilary rubs Callum’s arms and Callum whispers something about his dad, and Hilary whispers something back and rubs his arms and back even more.
ROBIN|1991
When Robin woke up this morning, it was just like every other boring day in the holidays. But now she would like nothing more than to crawl back through time on her belly, sit on the sofa in her nightie watching Why Don’t You…? and enjoy the feeling that everything was the same as it always had been.
Now nothing was going to be the same. Her parents had just told her, here in this beer garden, that everything was changing. Her mum was moving out and going to live with Callum’s dad, and Callum and his mum were going to come and live with her dad.
“But where will he sleep?” she asked, refusing to use Callum’s name, so that the plan seemed less definite. “There’s no room.”
And that’s when they split the twins’ world apart.
“Are you going to let her get away with this?” Robin cries at her dad, snot and tears running down her crumpled-up face. “She can’t take Sarah away from us. If Mum wants to run off with him, let her go. I want Mum to go! I hate her! But she can’t take my sister.”
As Sarah hears about her new house and her new room and her new life and the weekends that they’ll all see one another and the pony she’ll maybe get and the new bedroom set she can pick from the catalog, probably, she lifts her hands to her ears and covers them. Robin pulls at her sister—
“Tell them you don’t want to go!”—and Sarah curls herself even tighter into a hard little ball. When Angie reaches across the table, Sarah shrugs the touch on her shoulder away. When her dad reaches along the bench to stroke her hair, she suddenly screams at him: “Get off!” Robin starts to cry and thrash about. Callum climbs away and sits on the other side of his mum, clinging to her like a limpet. He’d got what he wanted. He was getting away from his dad.
Jack grabs Robin’s wrists and pulls her to him, hugging her and restraining her at the same time. The people at nearby tables have stopped talking and are openly staring at the Marshalls and Grangers. Only Drew seems to have noticed and is glaring back at them.
“You don’t understand,” Angie says as she climbs out from the bench and walks around to Robin, trying to hold her shoulders. Robin wriggles free and turns toward her dad, rubbing her face into his top and grabbing the fabric in her fists. She’s never felt so angry, and the red heat of it was pouring from her eyes and her heart.
After a moment, Jack gently pushes her away but holds her in front of him so she can see his face. “This wasn’t just Mum’s decision,” he says, but the tears are balling up in his eyes like when his dad died, and when he looks at his daughter, they fall fast down his face.
“This has been a long time coming, love. And it’s not just Mum who realized that something wasn’t right and that we weren’t happy. We’ve not been happy for a long time, not really.”
“You pretended to be happy, then! You’re just horrible liars!” Robin cries, breaking free of her father’s grip. She notices that, rather than look to Angie for backup, he looks past her to where Hilary is now standing with Callum. But it’s Drew who speaks.
“Now, Robin,” he says, “you need to be a big girl about this. We’ve all sat down and talked it through and we’ve decided that this is the best thing for everyone.”
“This is best for you and Mum, not Sarah and me. Or Dad. Or Callum. Or Hilary. So fuck off!” Robin shouts, and Drew Granger looks like he’s been shot in the head. Then he looks outraged. At a nearby table, a group of young men in paint-splattered overalls are laughing.
