by Fiona Neill
A week after we moved in Dad insisted the television should be moved down into the garage when it became apparent that open-plan living meant listening to us overdosing on Breaking Bad while he cooked dinner. We told him it was a cookery programme but not that it was about cooking crystal meth. He couldn’t concentrate on a recipe with another chef working in the background, he complained as we dragged furniture from the sitting room down into the garage. Cooking was a novelty to him. But then everything was new so we didn’t take much notice of any of Dad’s new habits. Besides, although I didn’t know it at the time, it was one of his old ones that had triggered the Miseries.
Mum said that it was good to have a house without a history because then we could make our own. But she often says things that she doesn’t really believe. Not because she’s a bad or dishonest person. It’s just she hopes that if you say something enough times it will become true. Dad says one of the most exciting discoveries of his lifetime is that the human brain is not fixed and that Mum’s theory is therefore probably scientifically correct.
Hope is the most human of urges, it says in one of my A-level Biology textbooks. What Mum really meant was that we were at ground zero and that the narrative of family life had to be rewritten. But what is a family without history? I asked Luke. A boat without an engine, he said. What does that mean? I asked him. That we’ll all drown in the end, he laughed. ‘Stop overthinking stuff, Romeo. It’s a bad habit.’
Luke is much better than me at laughing things off or laughing off things, as Mum would point out. I used to read his school reports in case there was something about him that I had missed. The conclusions were always the same. ‘Luke’s relaxed manner and even temperament make him popular among his peers but put a brake on his ambition.’ Luke messed around in class, missed deadlines and lost essays. But unlike me he always had a party to go to and a girl to take with him.
It’s easy to blame the Fairports for everything that happened. For a while Mum and Dad did just that. But the truth is we were already screwed before their removal van showed up as the leaves started falling that autumn and they began unloading. Although we didn’t know it at the time, they had arrived just as our life was about to fall apart.
It must have been a warm day because they left their boxes of books in the garden until all the furniture had been taken in. Ben looked through his binoculars and read out the titles. The only ones I recognized from our own house were a book of poetry by Allen Ginsberg and The Hobbit. The rest, Dad declared, was hippy shit. Then later denied he had ever said that. He was meant to be downstairs working on his book but even he was so bored in Norfolk that the arrival of the Fairports qualified as a major event. Poor Dad. He didn’t say it but I knew that he didn’t want to be here any more than the rest of us.
‘The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Doors of Perception, We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us Against,’ Ben continued. There were two boxes of self-help. ‘The Way of the Peaceful Warrior, The Seat of the Soul, Near Death Experiences and Spiritual Growth.’
Dad groaned again. This kind of stuff was actually painful to him.
We were in our sitting room, standing by the huge window overlooking the garden of our new neighbours. We’d spent months complaining about this window because it was always dripping with condensation. Throughout that first winter at Luckmore we had to keep it open for at least a couple of hours a day. When we were really bored, like so bored that we thought we might die, we played a game where Luke, Ben and I would place bets on which drip would reach the bottom of the window first. Now the window came into its own. Suddenly it gave us access to the Fairports’ world. This was part of their magic. Bad turned to good. Boredom to fun. I swear even the sky got smaller.
Dad stood to the side so that he could see without being seen. I knelt down by the window seat and used Lucifer as cover. Ben pulled up an armchair, put its back facing the window to steady his binoculars and knelt on the cushion.
‘Freaks,’ Luke shouted at us. But it was half-hearted. He was wearing a pair of headphones, playing Candy Crush on his iPad, pretending not to be interested. But he had moved the sofa so that his feet faced the window and he had his own sight line. The window was wide enough to give us all an unrestricted view. This didn’t seem significant at the time but I now realize that rather than forming a unified view on the Fairports it meant we all formed our own separate impressions.
‘What’s in the other boxes, Romeo?’ Luke asked me. He had called me Romeo for most of my teenage years because I was a late developer. Until last year, when my breasts magically grew, I had looked more like a boy than a girl. Also I wore braces. When we had to give an example of inverse correlation in a science lesson, I used the example of the upturn in braces and the downturn in teenage pregnancy. There was no bigger turn-off for boys. A girl at my old school nearly severed an artery in her boyfriend’s penis while performing oral sex with a dodgy brace.
But before I could answer, a woman came into the garden. She was wearing an ankle-length skirt and a jacket embroidered with Chinese dragons. Her hair, dyed a colour I recognized as poppy red, was pulled up into a shambolic bun held in place by pens. We knew this because she pulled one out of her hair to sign a piece of paper thrust into her hand by one of the removal men.
‘That must be Loveday,’ Luke exclaimed.
‘How do you know her name?’ asked Dad.
‘Mum told us,’ said Luke.
‘What kind of name is that?’ Ben asked.
‘Cornish,’ said Dad. ‘Although she doesn’t look Cornish.’
‘How do Cornish people look?’ I asked.
‘More run-of-the-mill,’ he said thoughtfully as Loveday sashayed down the garden path, occasionally stopping to stroke the leaf of a shrub or a piece of furniture.
‘She’s like a peacock,’ said Ben.
Wolf was tall and lanky and wore his thick grey hair a little longer than was normal for someone over the age of fifty. He had an impressive beard. His face was tanned for the time of year and wrinkled in the right places. He wore baggy jeans, a white T-shirt several sizes too big that hung off his shoulders and a pair of flat leather boots with pointed toes. There was something light and delicate about him, as if he was made of balsa wood. What I remember most was the black waistcoat because this is what really made him stand out from my parents’ friends. None of them would ever dream of wearing a waistcoat over a T-shirt.
‘Exotic creatures,’ said Ben, who had a habit of saying what everyone was thinking.
Wolf kneeled down on the ground beside a box and carefully started unloading musical instruments onto the front lawn.
‘African,’ said Luke coolly. Luke considered himself a music expert, but really his knowledge was limited to a genre that I called Fifty Shades of Nirvana. He knew for example that ‘Teen Spirit’ was named after a brand of deodorant but not that the larger bongo drum is called the female and the smaller one the male.
I waited for Loveday to go over to Wolf and squeeze his lower arm in the way that Mum did with Dad when she wanted him to stop doing something, but she didn’t.
Their garden was already a chaos of half-open boxes and random objects that didn’t fit into conventional packing schemes. Like, for example, a family of wooden giraffes, taller than Ben, which had been knocked over and now lay on their sides staring at us. Or the growing pile of woven carpets to the left of the back door. The packers already had to pick their way round these objects when they carried heavy bits of carved wooden furniture into the house. But Wolf continued to unpack instruments from the box until he found a set of bongos, which he placed in front of him and started playing. He sat cross-legged with his eyes closed.
‘He’s quite good,’ said Ben.
‘Anyone can play the bloody bongos,’ said Dad. ‘They’re the African equivalent of the recorder.’
‘That’s a bit harsh,’ I said.
‘Four Fairports,’ said Ben, pressing the b
inoculars so hard to his eyes that when he finally put them down it looked as though he was wearing red-rimmed glasses. He carefully wrote this down in one of his many notebooks.
I should probably say right now that Ben has some non-specific developmental issues that can’t be parcelled up in a tidy title like dyslexia or dyspraxia. At least this is what I have heard my parents say to other adults. Basically he’s a bit weird. Instead of labels I prefer descriptions. Ben keeps every bus, train and tube ticket that has ever been bought for him and sticks each one on his bedroom wall in a predetermined pattern. Once Luke removed a train ticket and replaced it with one of his own and Ben noticed immediately. He hoards food. Mum has found packets of crisps at the back of his wardrobe and we got mice at our old home because he had taken up a floorboard to hide biscuits. He also loves manuals and keeps box files of them in his bedroom: instructions for Lego, mobile phones, computers. He isn’t choosy. He mostly beats us all at Cluedo, which is his current favourite obsession.
Sometimes I think that if Dad wasn’t an expert in the adolescent brain Ben might just have been allowed to be the family eccentric instead of being sent off to specialists. Actually, this is what my grandfather said, but I tend to agree with him. Dad said Grandpa resisted labels because he used to be an alcoholic.
‘I am a question with no answer,’ Ben once declared over dinner after an autism expert decided that he didn’t fit the criteria. But Dad is a scientist and believes there is an explanation for everything if you try hard enough to find it. I think that sometimes you just have to accept that there isn’t. ‘Shit happens, and you just have to deal with it,’ as my Aunt Rachel is so fond of saying. Our family has a lot of sayings but they all tend to contradict each other.
I was so distracted by the drumming and Dad’s reaction to it that I missed the moment when Jay walked into the garden for the first time.
‘Two boys,’ declared Ben, squinting through his binoculars again. ‘Bish, bash, bosh.’
Later I asked Ben why he said that. Was it because he once had a Bish Bash Bosh train as part of his Thomas the Tank Engine set? Was it something recorded in his notebook on the page reserved for favourite phrases? Or did he see Jay and Marley shove each other? Did they jostle to see who could get through the gate first? Ben couldn’t remember. He consulted his notebook for clues. But on the page dedicated to the first day the Fairports moved in next door there was nothing but a rough pencil drawing of a huge fire. A vital clue had been lost.
The four of them came together to stand in an arc, looking up at their new home. Just as they were still, the sun came out from behind a cloud, bathing them in a blinding arc of light. A ray bounced off our window and the Fairports all turned towards us at the same time, shielding their eyes from the glare. Jay pointed directly at me. His hair was thick and curly and hid his eyes so I couldn’t see where he was looking. We all ducked down, even Dad, and giggled manically.
‘What on earth are you all doing?’ asked Mum. We were so involved in what was going on in the Fairports’ garden that we hadn’t heard her coming in through the front door. She noisily piled bags of shopping on the table to make us feel guilty and came over to the window.
‘Good day?’ asked Dad, tickling Ben until he pleaded for mercy.
‘The deputy head pastoral, as she insists on being called, needs managing,’ said Mum. ‘Someone with a deep sense of irony put her in that post. But the head of Biology is a great appointment. Even if I say so myself. What are you hiding from? A family of wooden giraffes?’
We looked out of the window. The Fairports had disappeared into their new home. But one of them had righted the giraffes so that they now stared at us. In part it was nervous laughter because we had been caught doing something faintly illicit. We all laughed longer than the joke deserved. But mainly because over the past year Mum had stopped making jokes, and even though it wasn’t that funny it seemed that my parents’ hopes of the dawning of a great new era weren’t so misplaced after all. Dad stepped out from behind the curtain and hugged her from behind. And for once she didn’t pull away. Had they always been like this? I wondered. Or was it that I had just started to notice? In my head I thought it had something to do with my grandmother’s death. Mum tried not to cry in front of us but the sunglasses were a giveaway.
The day after this Marley and Jay started school. They had the wrong uniform but didn’t seem to care. Marley lit up in the playground during break and negotiated his way out of detention by arguing that his old school in Ibiza had a more relaxed policy. Very cool. Jay kept himself to himself, hiding beneath his fringe. I don’t think I spoke a word to him until New Year’s Eve. That’s when everything kicked off.
3
‘Just explain why we are doing this,’ said Harry after locking the front door behind him. ‘I thought the forecast said to avoid unnecessary journeys.’
He put his arm around Ailsa to emphasize this was a joke rather than a challenge and tried to kiss her on the cheek, but at the last minute she moved and he ended up kissing thin air. For a moment they stood together at the top of the stairs locked in a slightly reluctant embrace.
There had been no recriminations over the car. Harry wanted her to acknowledge his tolerance in the same way that he wanted her to respond each time he texted her at school to say that he had put on a wash or renewed the car licence. He had never worked from home before and neither of them had foreseen how their domestic dealings would have to be recalibrated.
Relationships were like amoebas. Constantly changing shape. Sensitive to tiny environmental changes, thought Ailsa, staring down at the shiny cream surface of the trifle she was holding. It was their contribution to the Fairports’ New Year’s Eve party. Harry hadn’t waited for the custard to cool and it was leaching into the cream topping like tiny trails of snot. It had been made for her father, in memory of her mother, by her husband, a sequence of events that was unimaginable less than a year ago. Ailsa wondered what would happen if she plunged her fingers in the cream and shoved a handful into her mouth. She knew her orderly habits irritated those around her. It would be nice to confound expectations and see how that played out.
‘It is a necessary journey,’ called out Rachel from the garden below. ‘Ailsa has to do penance for crashing into them.’ No mention of her role in the drama. Ailsa struggled to conjure up irritation towards Rachel for her latest entanglement but she couldn’t. She never managed to stay angry with her sister for long. Besides, it was no more likely to fail or succeed than any other of her relationships and she didn’t want the burden of disapproval.
‘I was ambushed in a moment of weakness,’ said Ailsa as she carefully negotiated her way down the icy steps into the garden, trifle cradled under one arm, and joined everyone else at the bottom to debate the best route through the thick snow to the house next door. ‘They’ve asked before and I’ve turned them down. I couldn’t say no again.’
‘We need some new friends,’ said Harry.
‘I suppose it’s marginally better than staying at home like a bunch of sad fucks …’
‘Luke,’ warned Ailsa, nudging him in the small of the back with the crystal bowl, but he didn’t feel anything through the layers of thick clothes.
‘I think I’d rather be a sad fuck,’ muttered Romy.
The snow had stopped and the moon was visible for the first time in days. Everything was white and even usually murky corners of the garden gave off a strange luminous glow. It had snowed so much again that the bumper dislocated from the car earlier that day was already buried.
‘It’s radioactive,’ shouted Ben. ‘Like a nuclear winter.’
‘God, you can see for miles,’ said Adam, looking across the street to the fields beyond. His anxiety about getting back home to visit the grave had dissipated as soon as the prospect of a party presented itself.
‘It’s to do with the luminosity of snow,’ explained Romy. ‘The snow albedo is really high. I learned it in Physics.’
‘You are so know
ledgeable,’ said Harry. It was the wrong thing to say. Romy was immune to flattery, and his increasing desperation to maintain the closeness they had once enjoyed only pushed her further away. She had never been a people pleaser.
‘Millions of Physics students know that,’ said Romy with a shrug. ‘It’s in all the textbooks.’
The recently cleared path to the front gate was covered in a thick layer of fresh snow and beneath it was as slippery as glass. Ben gingerly stepped out to test the ground and fell over. He lay on his back, rolling around like a seal and giggling. A half-eaten chocolate reindeer slipped out of his pocket. Romy pulled him up.
‘Let’s go through their back garden,’ said Ben. ‘It’ll be easier for Grandpa.’
‘How do we do that?’ questioned Ailsa, suspicious of Ben’s sudden attack of empathy.
‘There’s nothing wrong with my legs,’ protested Adam. ‘The doctor said I’ve got the flexibility of a thirty-five-year-old.’
‘I’ve created an opening,’ Ben announced. ‘It’s a really good route. But you mustn’t tell anyone.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Harry.
‘I took down some of the fence so that I could come and go into the woods,’ explained Ben. He had timed his revelation well.
‘Wreck head,’ said Romy. It was probably an insult but since Ailsa didn’t know what it meant she could hardly pull her up. Instead Ailsa’s attention was drawn to Romy’s long bare legs. She was wearing a denim miniskirt and fur-lined Ugg boots. Don’t say anything, she warned herself.
‘You’ll freeze,’ Ailsa said seconds after this thought.
‘I’ve thought about the message I’m sending out,’ said Romy. ‘I’m telling people that I have really healthy circulation because I don’t feel the cold, which means I have a good supply of oxygen in my bloodstream.’
