The Family Gift

by Cathy Kelly

  Somehow we whisk Lexi away carrying a carrier bag with Surella written on it in gold lettering.

  ‘Why didn’t she say that she was my birth mother?’ Lexi asks as we head to the hotel car park.

  ‘It could be because I was there,’ I say suddenly, desperately wanting to take away the pain.

  ‘Exactly,’ says Dan picking up on the cue instantly. ‘Mum has raised you, she’s your real mum, so Elisa was being tactful there.’

  We both know that tactful is probably down the list on Elisa’s mind, but she’s back in Ireland and she’s going to be back in our lives on some level, so we need to manage this.

  ‘How about we have a milkshake to celebrate a fun morning?’ I ask, knowing I’m at the shallow breathing point – very bad, according to all mindfulness Apps – and not caring.

  In the milkshake place, I examine the goodies from the Surella bag and feel even more upset. Hot Lips Honey is not really the correct name for any sort of lip gloss that a fourteen-year-old is going to wear, I think primly. Although maybe it is among our social-media obsessed youth and I don’t know. But still, I don’t want Lexi going out and trying to copy Elisa and saying: ‘I’m a Hot Lips Honey.’

  But Lexi looks so upset when I say that perhaps all the products aren’t suitable for girls her age, that I don’t quite know what to do.

  My instincts feel off. Do I hate this stuff just because I hate Elisa? But I don’t really hate her, do I? I just think she’s a bit superficial and desperate. I definitely hate that years ago, she insisted she wanted to stay in touch with Lexi – it was part of the adoption agreement – and then didn’t. Not with any proper routine, anyway.

  Lexi has a plan herself for what to do next – planning is a skill all fourteen-year-olds learn effortlessly: ‘I texted Caitlin and can we go by her house so we can pick her up? Her mum says it’s OK. We want to try the make-up – uh, and do our homework . . .’

  Caitlin Keogh is her best friend from school and her family are like ours: careful with their kids, not the sort to say ‘sure, off you go’ when older daughters head off to discos wearing belts for miniskirts, little skimpy tops and no coats, no matter what the weather. Caitlin is a lot like Lexi: both lovely dark-haired would-be ballerinas who practise endlessly and walk with grace.

  ‘Great plan,’ I say.

  In Caitlin’s house, while our daughters scream with excitement at all the products, I manage a ten minute conversation in her kitchen with Kathleen, Caitlin’s mother. Kathleen is the sort of person I’d like to be when I grow up. She knows the whole story about the dreaded Elisa. And when I tell her about the contents of the bag, she raises her eyes to heaven.

  ‘That’s a tricky one,’ she says, ‘but listen, in my experience, with Sarah and Mairéad, I found that the more I forbade them to use anything, the more determined they were to use it.’ Sarah and Mairéad are seventeen and twenty-one. ‘Give her a little leeway on this, but how about we tell Caitlin and Lexi they can use the make up in your house but they can’t go out wearing it. Does that sound all right to you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘but will you say it because I’m afraid it will come out wrong if I do. I’m all at sea with this Elisa stuff and I’m terrified Lexi will realise it. I’m torn between wanting to kill Elisa and wanting to tell her to get a real job.’

  ‘Right,’ says Kathleen in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘I’d feel the same, but keep the lid on it, Freya – always a mistake to let your kids know that you have murder on your mind.’ She laughs loudly. ‘I’ll tell them that there is no way in hell that they are setting foot outside your door looking like they are nineteen and about to go to a nightclub. Simple.’

  ‘Yes, simple,’ I agree, relieved.

  At home, my head aching, I hug Maura for taking care of Liam and Teddy, whisper that I’ll phone later to tell her all, then put my fake smile in place.

  ‘Pizzas for lunch,’ I say brightly.

  I take out the pizza dough I have resting and make pizzas for everyone. Lexi and Caitlin barely touch theirs. They’re dying to get upstairs to try out their goodies and they are already on Instagram looking up Surella ideas.

  Kathleen’s talk seems to have worked but I still feel anxious. Elisa coming back into our lives is bad luck. I can feel it.

  *

  In the middle of the night, I wake in a frenzy of sweat and fear; the sensation that someone is in the room is so powerful and terrifying that I cannot move. This happens a lot: sleep paralysis. It means you are not quite awake but the dream you’re having is so powerful, it literally makes your body unable to move. Fear grasps me, every muscle straining because I want to move but . . . And suddenly, I can. Still fearful, I sit up and I look around but there is nothing, nobody. There was someone here – I feel it!

  I could wake Dan, but I have to get through this on my own. I leap out of bed and walk around the room, poised, ready to hit someone as hard as I can. I open all the wardrobes, stumble over the few as yet unpacked boxes. I just have to check to make sure there is nobody here. When I have done our room and the bathroom, I race out onto the landing and staring around, hurry into Teddy’s bedroom. Safe. I look under her bed; nothing. In her wardrobe and behind that pile of teddies we still haven’t sorted out. No, nothing. Into Liam’s quickly – it’s all OK. Chaotic, but then any bedroom of Liam’s is always going to be chaotic. I know there is no one here but still I open the wardrobes and I check, look under his bed. OK, nothing. I should have brought my phone so I could see, so I crawl around the other side and look under there too but there is nothing, not even a dust bunny. The woman who owned the house before us had vacuumed the place within an inch of its life before we moved in and the dust hasn’t crept back in yet.

  I’m beginning to calm down a bit, but there’s still Lexi. My Lexi. Into her room; I repeat the routine, opening cupboards, wardrobes, checking everywhere. She’s safe, asleep. I look quickly into the main bathroom, dark in its avocado-ness and still nothing. At the top of the stairs, there is some ugly award that Dan got years ago, which has bewilderingly been left on the top step, probably to hold a door open because it’s heavy and bronze. The perfect weapon. I grab it and creep downstairs quietly.

  I am calmer now but still, I’m going to kill whoever it is. Because if any mugger dares come after my family the way he came after me, I will end it all for them.

  I race into every room and there is nothing, nobody. Finally, I look out into the dark garden and wonder if it was a good idea to move into the house with the now-unkempt garden and the walls because now I can’t see anything in the garden. It’s just a black mass of nothingness. A person could be hiding there. I want lamps outside, lamps that light up if anything moves, anything: a bird, a fox, a mouse, a spider, one of those big ones: I don’t care.

  I switch off the alarm, go to the back door and open it. I stand there menacingly, wielding my ugly bronze statue like a weapon.

  ‘Come if you dare’, I hiss into the night but nothing answers. All I can hear are the noises of the cars from the road and the low mumble of the wind. Maybe the wind woke me, but probably not.

  The wind isn’t the thing that frightens me or wakes me up. It’s the paralysing fear that I’m in the car park again, a simple underground car park, but with corners where people can hide, jump out and hit women on their own, knock them to the ground, stand over them, laugh, stand on their hands, kick them. My collarbone and contusions took a while to heal, but the rest of it, will it ever heal?

  When am I going to be normal?

  Normal’s a setting on the dryer, mutters Mildred in my head.

  Things must be bad, I think, if even Mildred’s on my side.

  It’s half four now, and I can’t even bear thinking of going back to sleep. I’d be afraid I’d go back into the dream again. So instead, I turn on Dan’s blasted coffee machine.

  I admit it: I love it too. I never used to. T
oo much coffee is bad for you, I used to say cheerfully. Drinking herbal tea, determined not to become a hyped-up chef. But now, I drink a lot of coffee: coffee in the middle of the night when I wake up and I know sleep is not coming again. I could take another sleeping tablet but then I’d be like a zombie at seven o’clock in the morning when I have to actually wake up. So I sit and drink my coffee and turn on the TV. Middle of the night TV is not particularly good, but with the curtains drawn and all the lights on in the cosy little den just off the kitchen, I turn on Netflix and find a chick-flick, something gorgeous and funny. The Other Woman with Cameron Diaz, I love her.

  I want her golden skin and her beautiful hair and that wonderful face. So I sit there and I watch it again, hugging my knees in to me. I don’t know how many times I’ve watched this film, but it helps. Because right now nothing else does.

  12

  What would you do if you knew you could not fail?

  On Monday morning, I look at my stash of sleeping tablets. Only four left. So it’s either brave my doctor again or enter a life of crime where I try to buy them illegally.

  You’re not cut out for a life of crime, says Mildred.

  She is, naturally, right. I’ve never even got so much as a speeding ticket.

  Dr A.J. Grant’s waiting room is full of people either coughing and sniffing or scratching. Must be a bad cold doing the rounds or the ‘strange insect bites’ time of year. I sit beside a tall man who is clearly unfamiliar with either deodorant or the shower. On the other side of me, a young mother is holding a very wriggly, very annoyed small baby. I attempt to smile at the young mother but she’s not in a smiling mood. Probably been up all night with the screaming baby: that never makes anyone happy.

  Morning surgeries are always busy. I have been here over an hour and I have looked at my phone, sent a couple of emails, some texts, checked news and I’m fed up of blinking at the little screen. AJ, whom I have known since we were kids in primary school together, always has the worst magazines in his waiting room. He is interested in fishing, while his wife is interested in crafting. If Maura was here she’d be delirious but since I had no interest in either of these things, I just look gloomily at the pile of magazines and wonder if I should pick up the children’s Beatrix Potters and read them to myself.

  A door bangs in the distance and suddenly AJ himself sticks his head round the door.

  ‘Ms Abalone,’ he says, nodding at me.

  I leap to my feet, pick up my stuff and follow him post haste before anyone else can grab him and complain that their leg/lumbago/small child is in dire need of help. I have got to get out of here soon. The door to the surgery is barely shut before I say so.

  ‘Sorry, I don’t have a lot of time, AJ,’ I explain, ‘I’m just in for, er . . . a renewal of my sleeping tablet prescription.’

  AJ looks over his half-moon reading glasses at me. We are pretty much the same age and yet AJ has much more gravitas than I have: it’s probably the half-moon glasses and the fact that he is 150 per cent bald.

  ‘A repeat prescription,’ he says, looking at my file on the computer.

  I wince. I knew this was going to be hard.

  ‘I’m still not sleeping.’

  He just nods.

  ‘And I’m having nightmares.’

  ‘Still?’

  ‘Yes, still. It’s terrible . . .’ I think of filling him in on my hideous dreams but there’s no time. ‘I need to be awake during the day and not crash the car with the kids in it and—’

  ‘How’s the victim support group meeting going?’ AJ asks, entirely ignoring me, which is pretty much what he used to do all those years ago.

  Others used to try and set us up on dates but we were always just friends. I feel something brotherly for AJ, although not at this exact moment.

  I change tack. ‘You know what happens to people when they have a traumatic experience?’

  ‘I do,’ AJ says, and removes the glasses to massage the bridge of his nose, which lets me escape the laser version of his gaze. ‘Is the victim support group helping?’

  My eyes slide around somewhere and land on the wall behind his head.

  When I came in to see AJ four months ago, looking for something to help me sleep, he knew I was serious. But he told me that sleeping tablets can’t be a long term solution.

  ‘I still can’t sleep without them,’ I say wearily, although I only try for half an hour at most on rare occasions. I can’t bear lying in bed, thinking, remembering.

  He says nothing.

  ‘OK,’ I snap, ‘I haven’t gone to the victim support group, happy now? I’m trying to help Mum with Dad, and Scarlett’s going through so much, plus . . .’ I pause because this is the worst: ‘Lexi’s bloody real mother has come back into her life and that’s stressful on a whole different level. I’ve got three young kids, a job, a sick parent, I just don’t have time to go to some meeting with a lot of people who are all going to sit there and cry.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s precisely what they do,’ AJ says mildly.

  ‘I’m sure it is and it’s not going to work for me. Besides,’ – this is a cheap shot and AJ will know it – ‘you know they might talk about me to someone else and it will get in the papers. You know I don’t want that, you know I’ve worked hard to keep it quiet. I don’t want to be “TV chef who was mugged”. That’ll be my job descriptor forever. No matter what I do, I’ll be Freya Abalone, who was mugged traumatically and . . . God knows what else they’ll add in for fun. These stories take on a life of their own.’

  AJ picks up his pen again and begins writing.

  ‘You possibly need to see a psychiatrist then about other drugs, perhaps antidepressants. I would prescribe them myself but I think, given your experience, you may need more expert advice, and then a psychologist to help you work through your issues’.

  ‘I don’t want to talk,’ I explode.

  ‘Freya,’ says AJ cosily, ‘the Zimovane is drying up soon.’

  ‘But I get nightmares,’ I say desperately.

  ‘Freya, you’ve got to come at this from another angle, meet me halfway. I just can’t keep doling out sleeping tablets forever, that’s not the answer. You have to deal with what’s stopping you sleeping. You think talk therapy or group therapy is a load of old rubbish, but it isn’t, it’s worked for so many other people who have come into my surgery.’

  ‘People who are mugged?’ I say crossly.

  You give it to him girl, shrieks Mildred.

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ I say. Out loud.

  ‘Shut up?’ says AJ.

  ‘Not you,’ I say, mortified. ‘You know the horrible little voice in the back of your head that tells you you’re useless at your job and should have got up half an hour earlier to get working on your to-do list and not to have that toffee-filled muffin if you want to have a flat stomach? She’s working overtime at the moment.’

  ‘You were saying “shut up” to the voices in your head?’ says AJ.

  ‘Not voices!’ I shriek. ‘It’s the classic inner critic, nothing else. I’m distancing myself from the inner critic by calling her Mildred: that way I can tell her to shut up when she’s annoying me and it works, because the voice says nasty things and undermines me, the way all our inner voices do. When that happens, I say shut up, Mildred. I know it sounds mad but it helps.’

  ‘I understand but why Mildred?’ says AJ.

  ‘It seemed innocuous,’ I mutter. ‘Come on,’ I add desperately, because even with a doctor I’d known for years, this could sound bad, like I was having a—

  ‘It’s not a psychotic breakdown,’ I said urgently. ‘I’m as sane as you are, AJ. Just stressed and talking to myself, which we all do. If Dan thought I was truly losing it, don’t you think he’d drag me in here and make you section me to a mental hospital?’

  AJ eyed me.

 
‘Suidical ideation?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Other voices?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Times when you can’t remember what you’ve done or where you are?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If it was anyone else sitting here,’ he says, ‘I would have them in hospital seeing a psychiatrist as soon as I possibly could. But it’s you, Freya, and I understand the way that weird mind of yours works, so I’ll give you a pass. Yes, many of us talk to ourselves but giving your inner voice a name is not one I’ve heard before.’

  I shrugged. ‘Keeps me happy. Mildred is bad tempered but I can cope with her. Look,’ I stared down at my hands. ‘Not sleeping is hideous and I have bad nightmares. It is affecting my work in that I’m not coming up with new recipes, but creativity does slow down with anxiety. However, I am working, doing cookery demos, taking care of the children, helping out with Dad. I have no history of mental illness, no depression, nothing. I’m not hiding some big disaster or . . .’ I’d run out of reasons to prove my sanity. ‘I get sad; that’s not a crime, right? It’s normal human behaviour. Humans get sad, AJ. My sadness is made worse by a variety of things and no, I don’t want to be on sleeping tablets forever. But I need them to function right now.’

  I eyeball him fiercely.

  AJ sighs. ‘Fine. We’ll keep going on the sleeping tablets. But I need to see you next month to see how you’re doing. I’d be neglecting my duty if I didn’t. We need to set up a plan not too far in the future to get you off them, which will take a while. You’ve got to come off them gently, detox. But I’ve one stipulation: you’ve got to go to a group for help with this, Freya.’

  ‘You won’t tell Dan?’ I say. ‘He thinks I’m already going to a group.’

  ‘I can’t. Confidentiality, remember. But you’ve got to do something or I will. You can’t live on sleeping tablets for the rest of your life and I won’t prescribe them. If I didn’t know you, I’d be worried.’

  ‘No, OK.’