Keep Your Friends Close

by Paula Daly

  The curtains are pulled around as a young porter positions a bed on wheels alongside her mattress.

  ‘Do you need some help moving across?’ he asks, and Joanne says no. No, she’ll be fine, thanks.

  She gets on to her hands and knees, her boobs swinging pendulously, and she resembles an old graceless Friesian stuck between two points.

  Her muscles are not working as they should, and it’s only now that Joanne realizes she’s showing half her arse, as the hospital gown has fallen open at the back.

  She reaches behind her, pawing clumsily, and touches not bare skin but the scratchy paper knickers she remembers stepping into earlier. Embarrassed, she lifts her head and looks straight into the eyes of the young porter.

  Slurring, she says, ‘Didn’t I arrest you once?’

  ‘Twice,’ he replies. Then, smirking: ‘Don’t worry, Detective, I’ve seen it all before . . .’

  5

  IT’S 8 A.M. AND Felicity is yet to open her eyes. We are in a small private room; Felicity has a drip in each arm and a drain snaking from her stomach, along which putrid liquids flow.

  Felicity’s appendix burst.

  When I arrived last night I was met by the surgeon who’d performed the appendectomy. He said it had been a perilously close call. When he opened her up she was full of gangrene: another hour and she’d have been dead. Now she is receiving IV antibiotics, saline and glucose, and they are monitoring her obs. every hour to check for a rise in temperature – a sign that peritonitis could be taking hold. As things stand, he expects Felicity to make a good recovery and thinks she’ll be out of the hospital in about ten days.

  So I’m calling Sean to tell him not to come to France.

  I’m coping. I can cope.

  There is only one small bed in the room with Felicity and I want to be with her 24/7. As long as she remains stable, it’s best for Sean to stay where he is. He’ll fight what I have to say, I know that, but the reality is – and this is going to sound like cold, hard business sense – I need him to take care of the hotel . . . and Alice, obviously.

  There will be a ton of problems at work if he comes here, problems that will have snowballed by the time we return, and I’d rather focus entirely on Felicity right now. I can’t face panicked phone calls every five minutes from the staff informing us of another disaster and, besides, it’s not fair to ask Eve to stay. She can’t just drop everything to look after Alice, she has her own business to think of, and it’s not as if she’s family, after all.

  I step into the hallway and dial Sean. He picks up on the second ring. ‘How is she?’ he asks immediately on answering.

  ‘Okay. She’s still not awake.’

  I’ve been giving Sean regular updates throughout the night. Neither of us has slept.

  ‘I’m sorting out the last few things,’ he says a little breathlessly. ‘I called your dad, told him the score. I just need to find a set of keys for Eve, and then I’ll be on my way—’

  ‘Sean . . . don’t come.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Stay there, I can manage, I—’

  ‘Of course I’m coming. I wouldn’t leave you there alone. I have to come – why on earth would I stay—’

  ‘Sean, listen, it’s better you stay there and take care of things. Stay with Alice. I can be with Felicity every second, I don’t have to leave her side. If you come, there’s nowhere for you to sleep. You’ll have to check into a hotel; it’ll only complicate things. And then there’s Raymond. He’s got four days off booked from Monday, remember?’

  Raymond’s the general manager at the hotel. His parents are arriving from Slovakia and he’s taking them to London, York, Edinburgh.

  ‘Shit!’ whispers Sean. ‘I’d forgotten about that. Why do they always take holidays when—’

  ‘Sean, it’s okay. We’ll be all right. Really, I need you to stay there. I can’t get internet access on my phone, and they’re already on at me for the medical insurance details. The teacher who stayed with Felicity during her op went straight back to the camp and I don’t know when one of them will return. I’ve got no numbers and no paperwork. You can sort all this stuff out for me . . . you can call the school, and I can take care of Felicity.’

  He sighs, unsure if this is crazy talk. Of course he should come, he’s thinking, but he knows there’s some truth to what I’m telling him. If he leaves without arrangements in place, the hotel will suffer. And it’s not always possible to recover from a hit if there are only junior staff on call; a minor grievance can develop into something insurmountable if it’s not managed appropriately.

  ‘I’ll need you to book our return flights home, too,’ I add, in case he’s still wavering, ‘and keep an eye on my dad for me.’

  After a moment of silence he says, ‘Okay. Okay, I get it. I can see that it makes sense. But you’re sure you’ll be all right?’

  ‘Certain. Honestly, Sean, Felicity’s come through the worst, and you know it’s better to split our resources.’

  He gives a small laugh at my obstinacy and tells me he loves me. Before he hangs up, he says, ‘Thank God it’s you over there, eh, Nat?’

  Sean and I have always done pretty well in a crisis. We’ve never had people to step in, step up, never had that luxury. It’s always been down to us. Back in my early twenties I used to fantasize about letting things fall apart, perhaps the way one might on the way to a big exam . . . ‘If I just take my hands off the wheel . . . if I let the car glide across the road . . . all this pressure will be over.’ But of course I never did. Too conscientious, too diligent.

  Sometimes it felt as if we were being crushed by the weight of responsibility. We’d have guests complaining about there being no mobile phone signal, or the absence of a good fish restaurant in the village, or no sea view (the coast is twenty miles away), and either Sean or I would pacify them, talking them round with good humour while the other would be nursing a sick child with croup in the next room, or else out begging the bank manager to extend our overdraft, or wrangling with the Mail on Sunday to give our advert priority on the right-hand page.

  My dad tried his best to help us out with the kids, but without my mum around to guide him he was pretty lost. And Sean’s parents, though excellent at gushing over the girls on occasion, never once turned up saying, ‘What can we do to help? Any ironing? Girls need a trip to the park?’

  Understand, I’m not whining about this. They’re our children, we had them. They are ours to look after.

  Sean and I developed a way of working together so we could get through whatever was thrown our way. And I think our success was probably due to this attitude of not blaming, of getting on with whatever was in front of us without wondering if the other was pulling their weight. We’ve managed to get where we are without being beholden, without anybody’s help.

  I sit alongside Felicity’s bed as a nurse finishes taking her temperature, her pulse.

  ‘Ça va?’ I ask the nurse.

  ‘Ça va,’ she replies simply, and leaves. For now, Felicity’s okay.

  With my fingertips I gently stroke her arm. Ordinarily, she’s a healthy-looking child. She has Sean’s dirty-blond hair, his golden skin that keeps a little colour right through the winter months. When they’re properly tanned, both Sean and Felicity go that lovely deep-bronze colour, same shade as Farrah Fawcett in her tennis shorts.

  There’s a faint odour of meat on the turn coming from Felicity’s drain site, and my eyes prickle with tears as I realize my poor baby was being poisoned from the inside out.

  She’d been having mild stomach pains for a few months, and I now understand that what I’d casually put down to ‘anxiety about school’ was actually a grumbling appendix. I hadn’t even taken her to the doctor, thinking it was silly to bother him with it when it was simply Felicity going through what all fourteen-year-olds go through: self-doubt, self-consciousness, the fear of not fitting in.

  As I touch her hair I feel myself suppressing a guilty thought. Because i
t’s not the first time I’d held off taking the girls to the surgery. Not the first time I told myself their ailments weren’t important enough to warrant the doctor’s time.

  Now I look at Felicity’s blanched skin, at the black circles beneath her lower lashes, at the freckles not usually visible across her nose, and I’m wondering if it was in fact my time that I was more concerned about wasting.

  Out of nowhere a quote from Jackie Onassis pops into my head: ‘If you bungle raising your children,’ she said, ‘I don’t think whatever else you do well matters very much.’

  Have I bungled motherhood?

  Suddenly, I’m not so sure. Suddenly, it occurs to me that even though I’ve filled my time running around, tending to everything possible, I might just have been focusing on all the wrong things.

  6

  DR EVE DALLADAY sets Natty’s kitchen table ready for breakfast. She arranges glasses of fresh orange juice, slightly stale chocolate croissants (which she’s softened up in the oven) and vanilla cream doughnuts. Eve popped out at 7.15 a.m. and the Co-op had yet to have its first delivery of the day, so this was the best it had to offer.

  She’s dressed in skinny jeans, knee-high suede boots and a V-neck cashmere, lavender-coloured sweater. Her white-blond hair is held loosely in a ponytail at the crown of her head to accentuate her slim neck, and she has applied a fair amount of make-up. Today she’s done it in such a way, though, to appear as if she’s wearing none at all. She’s gone easy on the perfume, too.

  Alice shuffles into the kitchen, half dazed with sleep, and does a double take on seeing the doughnuts. ‘Wow.’

  ‘Thought we could all do with a bit of cheering up,’ Eve says. ‘Can I get you something hot? Coffee? Tea? Chocolate?’

  Alice laughs. ‘My mum would pass out if she saw all this sugar.’

  Eve shoots Alice a worried look. ‘Have I done the wrong thing?’

  Alice shrugs. Her eyes are puffy from last night’s crying and she has a deep red groove across her cheek. Eve doesn’t mention it.

  ‘Your dad’s told you he’s not going to France?’ Eve asks.

  ‘Yeah.’

  Alice takes a bite from a chocolate croissant, licks the flakes of pastry from the corners of her mouth. ‘He’s staying to look after the hotel,’ she says, taking another bite. ‘Big shock there.’

  ‘They’ve got a lot on right now.’

  ‘When haven’t they got a lot on?’

  ‘It’s the nature of the job, I suppose,’ Eve reasons. ‘The hospitality business never sleeps. The main thing is, Felicity’s on the mend. Everything will be back to normal in a week or so.’

  At the mention of Felicity’s name Alice blinks hard a couple of times and reaches for her orange juice.

  She had sobbed pitifully last night. As aloof as she could be around her mother, there’s no doubt where she draws her strength from. Eve had watched carefully as Alice focused on Natty and, with Natty teetering on the edge of nervous collapse, Alice had no compass. No bearing. Simply no idea of how to cope with the news of her sister’s plight. She’d cried uncontrollably for a good two hours, well after her mother had left for the airport.

  Eve senses now would be a good moment to catch her off guard. She can’t leave it too long, as Alice may not be in this fragile state for much longer, and after lying awake most of the night – Eve staring up at the ceiling, mulling things over – she’d arrived at the conclusion that she’d be an idiot not to act upon this serendipitous turn of events. Granted, the circumstances were not ideal. But when were they ever?

  She chooses her words carefully. She stays by the range cooker, giving Alice plenty of distance.

  ‘Alice, I don’t want you to think I’m interfering in any way, but how would you feel if I were to stay for a while?’

  ‘Fine, I guess.’

  ‘I know you don’t need me to look after you, you’re quite capable of looking after yourself . . .’

  ‘My mother clearly hasn’t told you what a total disgrace I am in the kitchen then?’

  Eve smiles. ‘She might have mentioned something along those lines . . . I was thinking it could feel a bit empty here for you, what with your mum and Felicity not around and your dad stuck at the hotel most evenings. I could postpone my flight back to the States and keep you company.’ Eve lifts her eyebrows questioningly. ‘No pressure. I’m not trying to talk you into something you don’t want or need.’

  Alice stops eating. ‘What about your work?’

  ‘I’ll rearrange things.’

  ‘You can do that?’

  ‘Sure.’ Eve shrugs to make light of it. ‘I don’t really like the idea of you spending long periods by yourself, especially with your exams looming – I know how lonely revision can be. I thought perhaps I could stay just until your grandmother returns from Nice.’

  Alice rolls her eyes. ‘Can’t wait for that.’

  ‘She’s not that bad, is she?’

  ‘No, but she’s like, “Did I tell you how clever I was at school?” like it wasn’t, ohmygod, two thousand years ago. And she never stops going on about my dad, and how he was this super-talented kid who was brilliant at everything.’

  Eve smiles. ‘That’s grandparents for you.’

  ‘Yeah, but she can get hypercritical of my mum, and that gets kind of annoying. I’m looking at her, like, “What is your problem?” but I don’t even think she knows she’s doing it.’ Alice folds the remaining pastry in two and pops it in her mouth. ‘Have you told my dad you’re staying?’

  Eve shakes her head. ‘I thought I’d run it by you first . . . but, Alice?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘I’d just like to say that your mum has always been there for me. And I’d really like to help out if I can.’

  Alice slips off her chair and bounds over to Eve. Now that she’s properly awake she’s no longer shuffling and once again has the elegant gait of a dancer: all loose, springy joints, long strides, feet turned out slightly. She plants a kiss on Eve’s cheek and hugs her. ‘I’d love it if you’d stay,’ she declares, the fresh apple scent of her shampoo filling the air. ‘You can tell me loads of really cool stuff about America.’

  Alice goes to get dressed and Eve follows her upstairs. Rechecking her appearance in the bathroom mirror, Eve applies some white, pearly eyeliner to her Cupid’s bow to accentuate her top lip and adjusts her breasts inside her bra. Then she takes her mobile from her back pocket so her arse is smooth and tight, rolls up her sweater a little at the rear. If she can find the opportunity to bend over, he’ll get a quick flash of leopard print.

  And leopard print to man is what shiny tat is to magpies. The response is primal. It’s a reflex response. The image going from retina to dick, bypassing the brain entirely.

  Eve gazes into the mirror until the sparkle in her eyes disappears and her expression is one of suitable concern. She arranges her ponytail for the last time, taking extra care to pull a few strands free so the thin, hairless, scar is not on show, and she’s ready.

  She opens the bathroom door and hears Sean banging around in the kitchen below. She’s about to go downstairs when she pauses, eyeing the empty master suite across the hallway.

  The back-up plan.

  Sometimes all that’s needed for the eventual unravelling is the initial seed of doubt to be sown.

  So, after digging through her overnight bag, Eve takes the black lace thong she wore yesterday and strides over to Natty’s bedroom. She lifts the covers from the base of the bed and tucks it discreetly beneath the flat sheet, ensuring it won’t be found immediately. Then she turns towards the open door, listening for any signs of movement coming her way.

  When there is nothing, she surveys the room again. The décor is white – clean, simple, virginal. The only real colour comes from the antique brass headboard.

  Climbing on to the bed, Eve kneels to face it. She presses her fingertips to her lips, one by one, making certain each has a little of the nude lipstick she’s just applied. Then, grippi
ng the cold brass in front of her, she leaves a neat row of prints – visible perhaps only to a person with a keen eye for cleanliness.

  Satisfied, she makes her way downstairs.

  Sean and Natty have always been very tight, a rock-solid couple since the very start. Because they’ve had to be. If they were to reveal the cracks, the buried secrets, if they were to disclose the blots on their history, then the show would be over and Mr and Mrs Perfect Lakeland Hoteliers’ reputation tarnished.

  They’ve had each other’s backs for as long as Eve can remember. Sean is the type of guy to blow off drunken flattery from women with grace and good humour, never giving anyone an inch. And Natty, being so wrapped up with the girls, being so determined to get ahead, to make something of herself, proving to the world she’s more than just a mother, has never really attracted the interests of other men anyway.

  Together, the two of them make an impenetrable team.

  But now, divided by a thousand miles, the stresses of having a sick child, and with Eve in the house, the one person aware of their weak spot – who knows what might happen?

  Eve’s going to take her chances because she’s running out of time. And if there’s one thing she understands, it’s how to get inside people’s heads. She knows how to get in there and fuck things up spectacularly. To the extent that they doubt everything they once knew to be true.

  ‘How’s it going?’ Sean asks her as she enters the kitchen.

  Eve smiles sympathetically. ‘How are you, Sean? You don’t need to put on a brave face for me.’

  ‘Shitting myself, if I’m honest. I had no idea a person could get so sick in such a short space of time. It feels more like Felicity’s been in a car crash.’

  Poor Sean, he looks exhausted. The skin beneath his eyes is creased, the hair on the left side of his head sticking out at a right angle. If it weren’t for the elegant cut of his suit and the whiter-than-white Italian shirt, open at the collar, you’d not give him a second glance if you passed him in the street this morning.