The Good Girl

by Fiona Neill

  ‘It’s good for a man to know how to cook,’ said my grandfather. ‘I wish I had learned.’

  ‘Three and a half whiskies,’ I heard Dad whisper to Rachel. He gestured to my aunt to pour water into my grandfather’s glass but she ignored him. Then Dad tried to pull off the pomegranate seed but she swatted his hand away.

  ‘I’ve existed off Weetabix and baked beans since Georgia died,’ said my grandfather. ‘Plus the odd raw carrot that I’ve pulled out of the garden. It’s played havoc with my lower intestine.’

  ‘At least it’s low fat,’ I said, hoping to distract him from talking about his bowel movements.

  ‘There’s a chicken pie in the freezer that Georgia made, but I can’t bear to eat it. Otherwise I’ll never eat anything cooked by her again. The day before she died I threw away half an apple pie that she had made just because the crust was a little stale and I knew she’d make another one. I regret that now. Just as I regret that our last conversation was an argument. Her last words to me were that I was a cantankerous old fart.’

  ‘She was right of course,’ said Rachel. Everyone laughed.

  Mum came into the kitchen. Her face was flushed and her eyes looked a little puffy. She didn’t look at me. Dad piled food on a plate for her and she sat down beside Wolf.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Dad asked her. And that’s when I knew she wasn’t because parents only ask each other if everything is all right when it isn’t.

  ‘We would have been married fifty years in October,’ said my grandfather.

  ‘That’s an amazing achievement,’ said Wolf.

  ‘None of us thought that Mum would go before Dad,’ said Rachel. ‘There was no forewarning. Just a little tiredness. We didn’t factor in the stress of living with Dad for half a century.’

  ‘Rachel,’ warned Mum.

  ‘Would you boys like some beers?’ Wolf asked Marley and Luke. They waved half-empty bottles in response. ‘Romy?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ I said.

  ‘Romy’s not a big drinker,’ said Mum.

  ‘It’s so annoying when parents think they know you better than you know yourself, isn’t it, Romy?’ said Loveday, smiling at me. At that moment I felt she knew me better than Mum. Or that at least her version of me was closer to who I was than Mum’s version.

  Then Loveday got up and put on the radio. Big Ben rang out midnight. I realized I no longer missed London. We all stood up and cheered, champagne was opened, and even though I didn’t like the taste, I had a glass to prove Mum wrong. Loveday and Rachel shrieked and embraced and then pulled apart, uncertain what to do next. Ben fired a party popper in Luke’s face and burned his cheek. Jay expertly slit open the leaf of an aloe vera plant that was sitting on the windowsill and rubbed the juice on the burn. Dad headed towards Mum, but she put up her arm and he ended up awkwardly shaking her hand as though they had come to the end of a business meeting. Grandpa wiped away a tear and made a weak joke about a man called Wolf giving him a bear hug. Jay and I turned towards each other. I waited for a gesture, a quick hug, his hand on my hand or even a high five. We stared at each other and then he looked away.

  ‘It’s time for a game,’ announced Loveday, clapping her hands to get everyone’s attention.

  ‘I think perhaps we should be getting back,’ said Mum apologetically. ‘I need to get up early to try and get Dad home and Ben is way past his sell-by date. So is Dad.’ She looked at my grandfather, waiting for him to agree.

  ‘Don’t use me as an excuse, I haven’t had so much fun in ages,’ said Grandpa, who looked happier than I’d seen him since Granny died.

  ‘We play it every New Year’s Eve,’ pleaded Loveday. ‘Please. It’s a family ritual.’

  ‘Ben takes after his grandfather,’ said Dad. ‘He’s a night owl. He’ll be fine. And if he gets bored he can watch TV.’

  ‘I’m a night owl that has drunk three cans of Coke,’ said Ben. ‘Can I play too?’

  ‘Open to all comers,’ said Loveday, sensing victory.

  ‘What’s it called?’ asked Ben.

  ‘Resolutions,’ said Loveday. ‘It’s very easy. All of you need to write down four New Year resolutions, put them in a hat and then we go round the table, trying to guess who has made each one.’

  ‘How do you win?’ asked Ben.

  ‘It’s not really about winning, it’s more about what you learn along the way,’ said Loveday. ‘But you get a point every time you guess right first time.’

  ‘What’s the point of playing a game if you can’t win it?’ insisted Ben.

  ‘It’s a psychological game. Should appeal to the neuroscientist in you, Harry,’ explained Loveday.

  Someone turned up the music. Wolf handed round pens and paper and poured more champagne.

  ‘It’s a game about renewal. Makes you think about what you want from life over the next twelve months,’ he said encouragingly. ‘And what you don’t want. Gives you a road map anyway. You can be as silly as you like as long as you mean what you say. Be true to yourself.’

  ‘Sounds fun,’ said Mum, but I knew she was counting the minutes until she could escape.

  ‘Do you get it?’ Jay asked me. It was the first thing he had said to me since we came downstairs.

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t forget to disguise your handwriting,’ he warned.

  Everyone fell quiet as they wrote down their resolutions, folded up the tiny bits of paper and threw them into a hat in the middle of the table. Ben demanded to go first. The hat was passed to him and he pulled out the first piece of paper.

  ‘Grow a beard,’ he shouted gleefully. ‘I guess Luke because Wolf has already got a bit of a goatee going, Grandpa doesn’t trust anyone with a beard and Jay looks as though he’s shaved off even his chest hair.’

  ‘Got it in one,’ said Luke, who had got so hairy over the past six months that I wondered if he was taking a testosterone supplement.

  ‘Very good, Ben,’ said Loveday appreciatively. ‘You’re a natural.’

  Ben unfurled another piece of paper. ‘Learn to use a ride-on lawnmower.’ This one required more careful thought. He stared at the piece of paper, looking serious.

  ‘It’s not Wolf or Loveday,’ he said, ‘because you can’t sit on their lawnmower.’

  ‘How do you know what our lawnmower looks like? We’ve never used it here,’ asked Wolf, looking genuinely puzzled.

  ‘We saw it the day you moved in,’ I said quickly. Ben looked relieved.

  He made a few guesses. Adam. Harry. Luke. All were wrong. Finally when everyone began to wonder whether it was a bluff, Mum confessed that it was her.

  ‘I want to get back into gardening,’ she said, pleased by everyone’s surprised faces. This was significant. Dad effusively welcomed the idea, rashly offering to buy Mum a second-hand one as an early birthday present.

  ‘That’s great, Mum,’ said Ben. ‘I’ll buy you some daffodils. You used to love them in our old garden. Do you remember, Mum?’ Luckily everyone was too drunk to notice the insistence in Ben’s tone.

  The next round was mostly very guessable. After a couple of stumbles Dad correctly concluded that ‘Eat meat’ belonged to Loveday, who for the first time in twenty years had woken up craving rare steak. ‘Make a film’ wasn’t Marley or Luke but in fact Ben, who proudly held up Mum’s old iPod Touch to announce he wanted to be a director. There was a pause while Mum explained to Wolf and Loveday that Aunt Rachel was a script editor who had worked on at least a couple of films they had seen. Wolf sweetly asked Ben if he would make a film of the building he was constructing in the woods at the bottom of their garden. Ben agreed.

  I remember Jay’s resolutions best of all. They were quirky and funny. ‘Stop eating my toenails’ caused collective disgust. ‘Run a mile for every hour of computer each day’ followed nicely from his resolution to get a six-pack.

  ‘Typically egocentric,’ said Marley, whose aspirations centred on a surprising desire to please his girlfriend. ‘Get a Brazil
ian’ was clearly Aunt Rachel.

  ‘Why not an Argentinian?’ questioned Ben. ‘Like Messi. I’d really like him to be my uncle.’

  My grandfather’s first resolution was to show more gratitude to his children. He raised his glass to Mum and Rachel. His second was to drink less. That was slightly ruined when he celebrated by finishing off his glass of whisky and decided to switch to champagne for the rest of the night. His third fooled everyone.

  ‘Take a holiday alone.’ It was Dad’s turn to guess. I could tell he was worried it was Mum because he made a weak joke about it and tried to catch her eye. When she didn’t respond, he asked her directly, except it sounded more like an accusation than a question.

  ‘Why on earth would Ailsa want to go away without you?’ Loveday asked, leaning in towards him to rest her head on his shoulder. ‘If she abandons you, Harry, you can always come to Ibiza with us.’

  ‘I might want to get away from me,’ said Dad.

  ‘It’s not me,’ said Mum a little too quickly.

  ‘It’s me,’ confessed my grandfather, delighted by all the attention. There was a break to discuss where he might go and whether he should join one of those guided trips advertised in the newspaper or find a nice hotel somewhere in Europe. I heard Rachel ask Dad how a tour company might cope with an unpredictable binge drinker and Mum telling Rachel that of course he would never go but it was good he was thinking about the future. I willed them not to start an argument.

  Luke pulled another clue from the hat. ‘Learn to drive.’

  ‘That belongs to you, Luke,’ said Ben. ‘Put it back.’

  ‘It’s not me,’ said Luke. ‘I’ve already learned to drive.’

  ‘Not sure about your use of the past tense,’ said Dad, who had been giving him lessons for the past month.

  Luke looked at Mum, shook his mane of long thick hair and smiled. His intuition was correct.

  ‘Very funny, Mum,’ he said. Everyone laughed as Mum confirmed his hunch.

  ‘Mum and Luke are almost telepathic,’ I explained. ‘Sometimes it’s quite spooky.’

  I think it was at this point that I realized Dad hadn’t joined in the game. I felt guilty for not noticing and annoyed with Mum, who must have realized much earlier and said nothing. I looked over at Dad and thought how sad he seemed. He was pouring wine in Loveday’s glass, and when she put her hand on his to tell him to stop I swear I saw him wince. He gave one of his quick smiles that disappeared so fast you questioned whether you had really seen it in the first place. The diagonal frown line between his eyebrows that used to appear when he was tired was now there all the time.

  And I blamed Mum because his happiness was her responsibility. She was the one who had forced him to come here. I thought about his lonely desk in the basement surrounded by walls of boxes and I blamed her for that too. Because they followed the rules in the good parenting handbook, they had presented the move here as a joint decision. But of course this was never the case. He had actually given up his job, his friends, his poker nights and his place on the football team at the university where he used to work, all for Mum’s sake. And still it wasn’t enough. She was still unhappy. I wish I had written ‘Look after Dad’ on one of the pieces of paper.

  Luke took the last resolution out of the hat, looked at it and then screwed it up into a tiny ball and put his beer bottle on top of it.

  ‘I’m not going there,’ he said. ‘It’s just not right.’ He looked slightly panicked.

  ‘That’s unlike you to know when to stop,’ joked my grandfather, grabbing it from beneath the beer bottle. ‘It must be one that you put in.’

  ‘Leave it, Grandpa,’ said Luke. But it was too late. He was carefully ironing out the tiny piece of paper with his hand. He held it up to his nose and read it out: ‘Get laid.’

  Loveday drunkenly started to list the people round the table who it couldn’t apply to.

  ‘Mum,’ warned Marley. ‘We’ve only just met these people.’

  ‘I think perhaps we should stop here,’ said Dad. ‘It’s a family game.’

  ‘I know what it means,’ interrupted Ben, assuming that everyone wanted the game stopped for his sake. ‘I’m old enough to play.’

  Wolf stood up and carefully put all the resolutions into the hat.

  ‘Let’s go outside and burn them,’ he said. ‘That’s the last part of the game. Otherwise they don’t come true.’

  He left the one that Luke had pulled out last on the table. I saw Mum waiting until everyone else had left the room and then examining the handwriting, convinced that it must be me. But it wasn’t. Which meant it must be Jay.

  My phone buzzed.

  Keep your curtains open.

  5

  ‘Get in the car, Romy. Grandpa isn’t answering the phone. We need to go right away. Please.’ Ailsa rehearsed the sentence out loud a couple of times, experimenting with word order and tone, using Lucifer, who was sitting on the kitchen table, as a substitute for Romy, who had been avoiding her for the best part of a week.

  If anyone asked what was wrong with Romy after New Year’s Eve, Ailsa said that she was about to get her period. Talk of menstruation closed down most unwanted lines of questioning among other members of the family, even Ben, who was the most interested in bodily functions. Ailsa didn’t need to interpret Romy’s icy silence. She knew her daughter was furious with her.

  ‘I messed up, Lucifer,’ she told the cat, this time doing a poor imitation of Wolf’s Texan accent. Lucifer gave a languid yawn.

  She hadn’t told Harry what had happened that night, even though he would have rescued the comedy in the situation. She didn’t want to be reminded of the toxic mix of anger and embarrassment on Romy’s face when she had burst into Jay’s room. Or relive the moment when she had sobbed on Loveday’s shoulder, one hot cheek resting on a lace bra strap as tears slid down that dark cleft between her next-door neighbour’s breasts. ‘You need to tune into the earth’s frequency and release those emotions,’ Loveday had said, holding her hands, palms down and fingers splayed, just above Ailsa’s head to draw out negativity. Mostly she didn’t want to think about the way she had lost her self-control. She blamed the cocktail. Hadn’t Kenny Chesney written a song about tequila sending you crazy?

  She cut herself a slice of bread and put it in the toaster. It could have been worse, she told herself, adopting Ben’s favourite tactic when he messed up. Romy and Jay could have witnessed the scene with Loveday; Ailsa could have done something unhinged like kiss her on those full lips; or the stale sickly smell of Loveday’s patchouli oil could have made her vomit all over the irreplaceable antique Seminole Indian skirt.

  Instead the worst thing that had happened was that when her mobile rang the next day and Loveday’s number flashed up on the screen Ailsa knew she had to take the call and invite her round for a cup of tea. There was always a price to be paid for intimacy with strangers and Ailsa implicitly understood that this was the quid pro quo for Loveday’s discretion. Loveday wanted to talk about what had happened, so Ailsa pre-empted the conversation by quickly explaining before she had even sat down at the kitchen table that it was her first Christmas without her mother and that if she talked about how she felt she would cry again.

  ‘Is this, like, an elaborate ploy to force me into a road trip with you, Mum?’ Romy asked, trying to suppress a smile as she sloped into the kitchen, shoulders hunched and headed towards the fridge. She had obviously overheard Ailsa’s exchange with the cat.

  ‘Good use of ploy. Bad use of like,’ Ailsa responded, recognizing this was a rapprochement of sorts. She tried not to sound too pleased about the exchange.

  ‘Like is a verbal filler. Even the Anglo-Saxons used them. I’m surprised you don’t appreciate that.’ Romy opened the fridge door as wide as it could go. She took out a carton of milk and swallowed the contents in great gulps and then left the carton dripping on its side on the kitchen counter.

  ‘Why is there never anything to eat in this house?’ Romy a
sked, ignoring the loaf of bread that was now soaking up the pool of spilt milk. She said the same thing every morning. Even when the fridge was full.

  ‘I can’t get hold of Grandpa again.’ Ailsa had lost count of how many times this had happened over the past six months. ‘I’ve been trying since seven o’clock in the morning.’ She dialled the landline again and let it ring and ring.

  ‘Try the cleaning lady,’ Romy suggested.

  ‘I did. She told me he’d fired her before Christmas. I had no idea. She was so upset she could hardly speak.’

  ‘Did she say why?’

  ‘Because she kept touching things that belonged to Granny. She tried to tidy her dressing table and threw away a vase of flowers Granny had picked from the garden.’

  ‘They must have been there for months.’

  ‘Nothing left of them but a few shrivelled petals and dead stalks. He’s not himself.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Romy finally. ‘But I’m doing it for Grandpa not you.’

  ‘Where are you both going?’

  They both jumped as Ben popped up from behind the sofa in the sitting room, clutching one of his notebooks. He brought it over to the table and showed them intricate drawings of the building Wolf was constructing in the woods and announced that he was going to spend the day helping to put on the roof.

  ‘Wolf asked me to film the whole process,’ he said proudly.

  ‘How fantastic,’ said Ailsa. Her enthusiasm was less for the film than for the fact that if Ben was next door Harry wouldn’t be able to complain about not being able to work.

  ‘Can you go and tell Dad what’s happening, please, Romy?’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘In his office in the basement. Working.’

  ‘You mean the storeroom?’

  ‘It’s his office, actually.’

  ‘How can anyone work in that mess? Why don’t you make it nice? Why don’t you make an effort for him?’

  ‘Dad can look after himself.’

  ‘Don’t you find the lyrics to this song completely dubious and banal?’ asked Ailsa as they hit the road that snaked along the coast later that morning. As part of her appeasement she had put on Radio 1 as soon as they got in the car. But for the first twenty minutes of the journey Romy had barely looked up from her phone. Her elegant fingers had fluttered across the screen as she sent messages and scrolled up and down.