by Fiona Neill
‘Dad needs to acknowledge how I feel,’ Rachel insisted.
‘He’ll have forgotten ten minutes later,’ said Dad. ‘His short-term memory is appalling. He’s an old man with a thin grasp on reality who can’t really cope on his own any more.’
‘You need to let go of the past, Rach. It’s not helpful,’ said Mum. ‘You can’t hold him to account for things he can’t remember happening nearly half a century ago.’
‘I know you don’t like talking about it,’ said Rachel, ‘but that was a big part of the problem, everyone ignoring what was going on and sweeping everything under the carpet until the next time.’
‘We’ve talked about it before. He was a dysfunctional alcoholic; it was shit for a while and he managed to put it behind him. There’s nothing more to say,’ said Mum. ‘We need to deal with the current problem.’
‘I still remember the bad times, Ailsa,’ said Rachel. ‘Has she told you what happened, Harry?’
‘Of course she has,’ said Dad. ‘But your dad pulled back from all that years ago. You have to give him credit for evolving, for overcoming his addiction.’
There was a loud crash as a bottle tipped over.
‘Shit,’ said Dad, his chair screeching backwards across the stone floor.
‘Sorry,’ said Rachel. ‘Did she tell you how we had to help Mum haul him upstairs and get him undressed, Harry? How sometimes he shat himself? Do you know about the knife that Mum kept in the drawer to scrape the vomit off his clothes the next day? Or how we couldn’t bring home friends because we never knew what state he’d be in?’
‘Stop raking over ancient history, Rachel. You need to move on,’ shouted Mum.
‘We didn’t have a childhood because of him,’ said Rachel.
‘Bits of it were good and bits of it were bad,’ said Mum. ‘Like the rest of life.’
I lay back rigid on the sofa, making myself as flat and still as possible in case they noticed me. I tried to process what they were saying. We all knew that Grandpa occasionally enjoyed a drink but not that he had ever been a complete drunk. I couldn’t believe that he had ever behaved like this. It was as though Rachel was describing a totally different childhood from the one that Mum had recounted to us. It had gone from Famous Five to Shameless in less than five minutes. I buried myself deeper in the sofa, alert to what was coming next.
‘You believed all his excuses and false promises, just like Mum. It takes courage to face up to our history,’ continued Rachel. She sounded breathless but it could have been because she was wiping up the spilt wine. ‘That’s why Mum had a heart attack, because she tried too hard for too long.’
‘And what’s wrong with trying?’ asked Mum. ‘She was trying to protect us. You only faced up to what was going on when it was all over. I was the one struggling to keep the show on the road.’
‘You should know better than anyone that glossing over a problem makes it worse in the long run. You’ve done the same thing with Harry. You’ve ended up dragging your entire family here so that you can repaint your marriage in pastel colours. And why did you bring them back to the scene of all that childhood misery? God, a therapist would have a field day with you, Ailsa.’
‘Sometimes it takes more courage to forgive someone and move on,’ volunteered Dad when Mum didn’t say anything. ‘It’s the grown-up thing to do.’
‘Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you, Harry?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Because it suits you if Ailsa forgives and forgets.’
‘Well, of course it does,’ said Dad, sounding exasperated.
‘Do you think that just because you’ve moved here he’s stopped communicating with her?’ said Rachel. ‘You’re such an ostrich, Ailsa.’ She got up and stormed out of the room. Open-plan houses don’t have many doors so there was only one to slam.
‘Well, that’s her gone,’ said Dad flatly.
A jolt surged through my body and my stomach listed so violently that I thought I might be sick. Sensing bad karma, Lucifer jumped onto me with his claws out and speared my stomach. I pushed him roughly away.
‘I’d forgotten about the knife,’ said Mum, her voice so quiet that I could hardly hear what she said.
‘She’s trying to exaggerate historical events to justify her current negligence and find an excuse not to help look after your father.’
‘Why do we remember everything so differently?’
‘Memories are ephemeral,’ said Dad. I could tell by the way his voice slowed and deepened that he was going into lecture mode. ‘Your mind isn’t a video camera recording and storing events to review. The act of repeating a narrative corrupts its content, and the fact that Rachel can recall all these details doesn’t mean her account of events is any more accurate than yours. You’ve simply re-transcribed the memory differently.’
‘Have you been in touch with her?’ Mum asked.
There were sounds of washing-up. I was good at interpreting the secret language of low-grade domestic conflict and waited for the stormy clash of plates being stacked and the tap violently spewing too much water into the sink. But it didn’t happen.
‘Do you really think I would have made all these changes to my life and blow it all by communicating with her?’ said Dad. ‘I want to make this work, Ailsa. Moving away from her is part of my commitment to you. You have open access to my phone, my emails. Take a look if you don’t believe me.’
‘It’s difficult to believe you after so many lies.’
They left the room and went upstairs to bed. I thought about Jay’s comment about it being better not to know about things and realized that the main reason for this was that uncovering the truth almost always posed more questions than it answered.
I went upstairs to my room and stood by the window, waiting for Jay to appear. When he didn’t, I messaged him and tried to call. Eventually I gave up and lay down on top of the duvet fully dressed. It was cold but the physical discomfort helped to cool down the thoughts boiling in my brain. Dad had betrayed Mum with another woman. I had to try and reorder the paradigm in my head whereby Dad had been the victim. But both of them had betrayed us with their lies, and it was this thought that proved most corrosive.
I tried to think about things that were much bigger than me: the fact that there are a hundred billion galaxies in the cosmos; that all the matter that makes up the human race could be reduced to the size of a sugar cube; and that the number of possible histories is finite because there has been a finite number of events with a finite number of outcomes. In the back of my mind lay the certainty that the reason we had moved here was because Dad had cheated on Mum. I drew little comfort from the fact that this history had been played out a million times before.
The next day was Saturday. I had to see Jay. I waited in my room until eleven o’clock and then slipped out the back door and headed through the now permanent hole in the fence to the Fairports’ house. On the right was the muddy track that led to the sweat lodge in the woods. I turned left towards the house and let myself in through the back door, carrying a pile of Biology books to add credibility to my excuse that we were doing homework together.
Jay was alone in the kitchen, cracking eggs into a mixing bowl, his back to me. The only scenario I hadn’t anticipated was the one now before me, and I hadn’t rehearsed what to say to him. He began to whisk the eggs with a fork and from behind the motion reminded me of the way his hand went up and down his dick.
‘Hi,’ I said, feeling shy, which was ridiculous given the complete lack of inhibition of the previous weeks. I held the books close to my chest and stared at the wooden floor. He turned round.
‘Hello, you,’ he said warmly. ‘Do you fancy some frittata?’ He didn’t seem fazed to see me. Actually he seemed quite pleased.
‘What’s frittata?’ I asked, staring at the beaten eggs and chopped bacon sliding into the frying pan so that I didn’t have to look at him.
‘A cross between an omelette and a tortilla,’ he explained.
It smelled really good.
He stirred the mixture and urged me to sit down at the head of the table.
‘There’s no one else here,’ he explained. ‘We can pretend that we’re a normal couple sitting down to breakfast. What do you think we’d talk about after twenty years together? Do you think we’d be one of those couples who still talk?’
He fashioned a ring from a piece of tin foil, brought it over and placed it on my finger. Then strolled back to the cooker as though what he had done had no more significance than cracking an egg.
‘I don’t know. I guess it depends on what we’re doing, where we’re living, whether we’ve had kids,’ I said. ‘There are an infinite number of variables.’ I always sounded geekier when I was nervous.
‘We’re in London. We’ve got two children, a boy and a girl. I’m a record producer and you’re a neurosurgeon. It’s all mapped out.’
‘There is no certainty but uncertainty,’ I said, trying and failing to sum up my feelings. ‘What do your parents talk about over breakfast?’
‘Dad talks about how his holistic healing centre will help pay off the mortgage on this house, the advantages of living in a country where hip replacements are free and the ruinous marriages of their friends in Ibiza. Mum wonders if we’ve done the right thing moving back to England. She misses her friends’ ruinous marriages. She thinks you learn more from the university of life than you do at school and that people here are too conventional and conservative.’
‘You mean us?’ I asked, because really who else was there?
‘Probably,’ said Jay vaguely.
‘Not any longer. I’ve just discovered the reason we moved here was because Dad was having an affair with another woman. So maybe your mum will feel more at home with us now.’
‘Shit. Did you find clues in the bathroom cabinet?’ he asked, putting a plate of frittata in front of me.
I cut off a small slice and put it in my mouth. ‘Delicious,’ I said, even though I couldn’t taste anything. ‘I overheard an argument. My aunt gave it away. She accused Mum of being an ostrich for thinking that she can reinvent their marriage by running away from the woman who came between her and Dad. I know they’ve been to marriage guidance so I guess Rachel got that partly wrong. She accused Dad of still being in touch with the woman.’
‘Who is she?’
‘I think she might be someone he worked with and that’s why he had to leave his job. It makes sense. All this time I’ve blamed Mum for moving here when it was Dad’s fault. I don’t get why anyone would fancy him.’
‘My mum thinks he’s an attractive guy,’ said Jay. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear right that moment. ‘At least it sounds as though they want to make things work,’ he added. I was taken aback by the logic of this comment. I wasn’t ready to see the good in anything. Or adopt a measured view. For months I had seen Dad as the victim of Mum’s whimsy and I was now furious with him for going along with this deceit and with Mum for allowing it.
‘Do you like the ring?’ he asked.
I held out my hand and his fingers curled around mine. He squeezed my hand and ran his finger around each knuckle and up my arm.
‘This is the first time since New Year that we’ve touched,’ I told him. ‘Or is touching too conventional and conservative for you?’
He leaned towards me and I could feel his breath on my face. He stroked the side of my cheek and tilted my chin towards his face. My heart was pumping so fast, I wondered if Jay could hear it. I tried to calm myself down by telling myself that it was simply responding to a signal from my brain.
‘You’re so gorgeous, Romy. I love everything about you.’
‘I waited for you last night. I needed to see you. But you never came.’ My voice sounded higher than usual as though I was about to cry. He put his hand on my shoulder and I leaned towards it.
‘We’ve got to stop. It’s not right. You deserve better.’ He said them slowly but I could tell he had practised these lines.
‘That’s the kind of thing Luke says when he wants to let a girl down gently.’
‘It’s way more complicated than that.’
‘How so?’
His fingers ran across my lips to silence me and he moved towards me. I closed my eyes. We kissed, his tongue deep in my mouth. I pushed back against him, tasting the inside of his cheek and feeling the grooves on the roof of his mouth. I kiss, you kiss, he, she or it kisses, I thought, trying to slow my breathing through my nose so that I wouldn’t have to come up for air.
He pulled me onto his lap and we kept kissing. He tugged at my top, pulling it out from my jeans, and I could feel the cold air from the back door against my skin. I curled my body into him and we fitted perfectly together as I knew we would. His hand filled the space beneath my top and skin and I shivered as he explored my back and pulled down a bra strap to cup a breast in his hand. Every part of my body was poised for pleasure. Even my scalp shivered. This was the real thing, I thought to myself. But suddenly Jay pushed me away and stood up, sending the chair flying. I thought maybe someone was watching from our house, but when I looked across to our sitting room, there was no one there.
‘I’m sorry, Romy. I can’t do this.’ His voice was heavy with regret. He walked towards the cooker and turned his back towards me, staring at the floor.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked him breathlessly, putting my arms around him from behind. He was taller than me and my head rested against his shoulder blade. His body was taut with tension. ‘Don’t you want to?’
‘I want to but I can’t.’ I stroked his head in the same way that Mum used to stroke Ben’s when he was upset, relishing the way his hair slipped through my fingers. He didn’t try and disentangle himself from me.
‘I’m really sorry.’ He leaned back into me.
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘Try me.’
‘Properly complicated. You’ll hate me if I tell you.’
I tried to think of something profound and philosophical to say. I experimented with a sentence along the lines of, ‘The web we are weaving around ourselves is too fragile for words,’ but it sounded too much like a Coldplay lyric.
‘Is it because you’ve never slept with a girl before?’ I asked hopefully, because that we could overcome.
‘I haven’t, but that’s not the problem. I like you more than any girl I have ever met, Romy. I think about you all of the time. When something happens, you’re the first person that I want to tell. Like this morning, when I woke up I looked out the window and there was a deer at the end of the garden. Or when Marley accidentally drove the lawnmower through the side of Dad’s sweat lodge yesterday. When I play music I hear you in the notes.’
‘Are you trying to say that you just want to be friends?’
‘God, no. You really turn me on. I love your body. I love the shape of you. I draw it in my head before I go to sleep. I think about your breasts a lot too. They’re so perfect. They’re really the best tits that I have ever seen.’
I considered my breasts, recently escaped from my bra, slightly disbelieving that they could be the object of so much adulation. I mean I liked them, or at least I didn’t feel hostile to them in the way that I did to some other parts of my body.
‘Do you have many points of comparison?’ I asked. He turned round.
‘Thousands,’ he said. I laughed but his expression was deadly serious.
‘Maybe we could sleep with each other once and then go back to being friends. I wouldn’t mind. But I’d like my first time to be with someone like you,’ I said, the words tumbling out.
‘No, you wouldn’t,’ he said. His eyes burned into mine. ‘I’m messed up. Properly messed up.’
‘Are you gay?’ I asked, remembering Marnie’s experience.
‘That would be straightforward,’ he said. He paused. ‘Do you believe in the possibility of change? Or do you think we’re born one way and we’re stuck with who we are, like the way a wa
lnut grows into its shell?’
‘Dad says that the human brain never stops evolving, which means in theory it’s being rewired all the time.’
‘Really?’
‘But 95 per cent of what it does is subconscious, which means that if you want to change a bad habit only 5 per cent of your brain is available to do it. He says this to Luke a lot.’
‘So if I wanted to change something about myself I could?’ He sounded hopeful.
‘Yes, but the odds are stacked against you.’
‘I’m going to tell you,’ he said abruptly. ‘I’ve never discussed this with anyone else. You’ve got to promise two things: one, you won’t say anything, and two, that you won’t hate me.’
‘Promise,’ I said. The melodrama was worthy of Marnie. But I wasn’t expecting what came next.
‘I can’t have sex with real women.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve tried a couple of times but I can’t do it, so I’d sort of given up. Then I met you and I thought you might be the cure for my problem but now I’m not sure.’
I started to feel anxious. Did this mean that he fancied me when he first met me but didn’t any more? Mum always says that if you don’t understand something you should ask questions until you do, so I tried a different tactic.
‘Do you find girls attractive?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you find me attractive?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you want to touch me?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re not making this easy. Can you give me a bit more, please?’
He turned to face me and put his hands on my shoulders and dropped down until his head was level with mine and our foreheads were touching.
‘I’ve got this problem, Romy.’ His left leg jiggled nervously up and down and he chewed the side of his lower lip so hard that when he stopped it was slightly swollen. ‘I can only get off watching stuff on the Internet.’
‘What kind of stuff?’
‘Porn. Basically. Basically porn.’
This was new territory for me. Of course I knew what porn was and some girls in my year were into watching it, mainly to expand their repertoire, but it held no interest for me. I pulled away from him.
