Our Little Cruelties

by Liz Nugent

  There was another pause. ‘You know her, don’t you?’

  I said nothing.

  ‘Oh Christ, don’t tell me you’re having an affair with her? For God’s sake, Will!’

  ‘It wasn’t an affair. We just saw each other from time to time. It wasn’t serious.’

  ‘Yeah? So why do you care if she’s seeing Luke?’

  ‘I don’t –’

  ‘I don’t want to hear it. Kate is the best thing to happen to him. He listens to her. He worships her. She’s not one of the yes people he’s always surrounded with. She’s certainly not after his money because she seems to have plenty of her own. She cares about him.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘I’ve met her. She’s sound, Will. Don’t wreck this for him. When were you with her?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Recently? Please tell me there was no overlap between you and him.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  I had my pride.

  ‘And Susan suspected nothing?’

  Why did he always have to bring up Susan, like he was my moral guardian?

  ‘No, Brian, I was discreet.’

  ‘You are going to get caught.’

  ‘No, I’m not. Susan and I are fine. She doesn’t know anything.’

  ‘You treat her like shit.’

  ‘You must be joking! You should see her shoe closet.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Will, that’s just stuff –’

  ‘Look, I just rang to say hello, I don’t need a bloody lecture.’

  I felt someone tugging my coat. It was Daisy. ‘Who are you talking to?’ she said petulantly.

  ‘It’s your Uncle Brian.’

  Her little face lit up. ‘May I talk to him?’

  I handed her my phone and she talked excitedly to Brian about lizards and crocodiles and giggled at some joke he made. She wandered off with the phone in her hand, while I stood, fuming, looking at the penguins in their smug monogamy. I decided not to think about it. It’s not as if I saw that much of Luke, and his groupies came and went. Kate would disappear from all of our lives soon enough.

  Some months later, Susan mentioned that Brian had invited us all to dinner with Luke and his new girlfriend. ‘Brian says she’s lovely and that Luke is doing really well. Your mom is going too.’

  Susan insisted that we go. She always said that Mum was really cruel and mean to Luke and that we should go to support him. I defended Mum, pointing out that Luke had screwed up so often it was no wonder she found him an embarrassment. Susan baulked at my disloyalty. It was a recurring row. She always said if her sister lived in Dublin, they’d see each other every day. She couldn’t understand why I kept my brothers at arm’s length.

  I was furious with Brian. Did he want to embarrass me, and Kate? Had Kate told Luke about me? Was Brian doing this deliberately? But the fact was, I really wanted to see Kate. I agreed to go. Susan organized a babysitter for Daisy.

  Brian was still living in Luke’s former grand home on Waterloo Road. It annoyed me. Luke had a bedroom there and stayed regularly, but he’d also rented his own small apartment in Rathmines. We collected Mum on the way to Brian’s house. I listened as Susan and Mum gossiped about the new girlfriend.

  ‘He told me he really likes her. You know who her father is? Clive Harris, the barrister who’s always on the news. Luke went to stay with her family for the weekend. They treated him very kindly.’

  ‘Don’t they mind about the age gap?’ said Susan. ‘There must be thirteen years between them.’

  ‘Age gap? There was a much bigger age gap between William’s father and me, you know. I don’t think people worry about that kind of thing nowadays, and besides –’ Mum grew catty, as she always did about Luke – ‘he’s not the most mature of men, is he? He’s not exactly grown up. They might just be evenly matched. She was pretty in the newspaper photo, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Oh yeah, totally gorgeous,’ said Susan.

  ‘Luke has talked about her to Brian, quite a lot. I knew he was smitten. Let’s hope he doesn’t screw this up.’ Mum displayed her usual lack of faith in Luke. But then Luke did screw up all the time.

  ‘What is it she does for a living?’ she said. ‘I can’t remember, something fairly menial, I think.’

  ‘She’s a dental hygienist,’ I said, without thinking.

  ‘How do you know? Did Luke tell you that? When were you talking to him?’ asked Susan.

  ‘Eh, no, Brian told me.’

  They chattered on, oblivious to my reddening face as I concentrated on the road ahead.

  Brian greeted us with the usual enquiries about Daisy. Luke and Kate hadn’t arrived yet. I got him on his own in the kitchen. ‘What’s this all about, Brian? Are you trying to shit-stir?’

  He sighed. ‘Of course not. Luke wants to introduce her to the family. Not everything is about you. You’ll just have to pretend you’ve never met her before. It shouldn’t be that hard for you, Will. You have form.’

  I returned to the living room with a bottle of red I’d brought and filled the glasses. Thank God Susan said she’d drive home because I was going to need alcohol to get through this.

  Luke and Kate arrived five minutes later. I positioned myself by the fireplace so that if my face flushed I could blame the heat. Luke entered the room first, leading Kate by the hand. She beamed at me. ‘Will, how nice to see you!’ Luke was taken aback. Susan and Mum looked at me. ‘Yes, Will was my patient in the dental surgery I worked in last year.’

  I feigned ignorance. ‘Really? Sorry, I don’t remember –’

  I was interrupted as Luke made the introductions, conscious of the fact that Susan was staring at me. Christ, if we were going to acknowledge we knew each other, Kate might at least have warned me.

  Dinner went smoothly. I avoided Kate’s eye. I was angry with her. She could have called me, texted me, emailed me. What was I supposed to think? Brian glanced between the two of us, looking for signals. Mum looked at me with concern.

  ‘William, you’re quiet today. Is everything all right? I can’t believe you don’t remember Kate. You’ve always had an eye for pretty girls. I don’t mind telling you, Susan, before he met you, my William certainly played the field.’ Mum pretended to disapprove.

  ‘I’m well aware of that,’ said Susan coldly.

  ‘I’m fine, Mum, just a bit tired. You know, work.’

  ‘Kate, did you know that Will is a film producer?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, flashing her brilliant, whitened smile. ‘I know all about him.’

  She was brazen, and yet, I realized, she was telling the truth. Nothing she said was a lie.

  Brian never made an effort with food, so dinner was two large shop-bought shepherd’s pies and cheap Viennetta for dessert. He served supermarket wine from a box. Just as I noticed that Kate was barely sipping her wine, hadn’t even got halfway down her first glass, Luke said he had an announcement to make, and Kate said, ‘No, Luke, it’s too soon!’ and I knew before he said it that she was pregnant. Only eight weeks, but Luke was so excited that he couldn’t wait to tell people. Mum jumped up to hug her, feigning delight at the thought of another grandchild. Susan coughed, looked at me and offered a cool congratulations. Brian shook Luke’s hand and slapped him on the back as if he’d won a presidential election. Brian, it turned out, already knew.

  I gulped down the full glass of wine in my hand to avoid saying anything.

  ‘A cousin for Daisy!’ said Kate, and I wanted to kill her. When she excused herself to go to the bathroom, I started to clear away the plates.

  ‘Oh, look,’ said Brian, ‘Will is being unusually helpful,’ and everyone laughed except Susan. I waited in the hall until Kate emerged from the bathroom. I had decided to play it her way, light and breezy.

  ‘So, a different condom rule for my brother, then?’ My smile did not reach my eyes.

  ‘We planned this baby. It’s what Luke wanted. Oh, Will, don’t be like this. We
were never serious. We always said no strings.’

  ‘He’s my brother.’ I couldn’t keep the steel out of my voice.

  A deliberate cough.

  I wheeled around in the hall to see my wife standing there. Kate saw, stepped past Susan and went back to the dining room, whispering, ‘I’m really sorry,’ in a sing-song voice as if she’d accidentally spilled wine on the furniture.

  Susan grabbed her bag from the hall and glared at me. ‘I’m going home,’ was all she said, her eyes glistening with tears. Brian came out into the hall. He understood immediately. He put a consoling hand on Susan’s shoulder, but she violently shrugged him off and turned on him. ‘You knew? You?’ She almost ran to the door.

  ‘What a fucking mess,’ said Brian. ‘Well done, Will!’

  Brian went back into the dining room and I heard him tell Mum that Susan had had to go home because of a sudden migraine. I had to go back and take my place at the table with the happy expectant couple while Luke told us about his house-hunting plans. This time, I tried to catch Kate’s eye, but she stayed beside Luke for the remainder of the evening, gazing adoringly at him. It was sickening. She and Luke drove Mum home. Luke hugged me as he left. ‘I’ll be looking for parenting tips from you.’

  Brian started to load the dishwasher as I opened another bottle of wine. ‘I think you should go home,’ he said, ‘tell her the truth.’

  Brian, the saint, who had never put a foot wrong.

  When I got home later in a taxi, Daisy and Susan were in bed. I tried to talk to Susan, but she yelled at me to get out of our room. I went to the spare room and slept barely at all. I did not want to blow this marriage. It was nice to have an organized house to come home to and Susan was a great mum. She was smart and funny and she loved me. Obviously, the spark that had ignited us twelve years ago had faded, but she was still attractive and I’d never wanted to hurt her. Sure, she had been suspicious before, but even if she had guessed right about previous flings, that’s all they were. The problem now was that this insult to her was going to be a permanent part of my family. Kate would be in our lives with Luke’s child.

  As I stared up at the peeling paint of the spare-room ceiling, my phone beeped. Forgive me, read the text, I fell in love with him.

  Susan told me to find somewhere else to live. I couldn’t believe she was taking this so seriously, but every word that came out of my mouth sounded like a cliché and made things worse: ‘It meant nothing’, ‘It was just one time’, ‘She led me on’, ‘You weren’t paying any attention to me.’

  Susan found me disgusting. ‘She’s practically a child and she led you on?’

  I moved into Brian’s temporarily. ‘You can stay for a week,’ he said.

  ‘Luke has stayed here for months on end,’ I protested.

  ‘Luke is mentally ill. You don’t have that excuse.’

  I collected Daisy from school the next day and brought her home. Susan had told her I was filming at night, but Daisy was unsettled. She knew something wasn’t right. Brian came to the rescue. Her mid-term break was coming up and he offered to take her away to Fota Island for the weekend. Susan and I both agreed it was a good idea.

  I sat in my car outside Kate’s apartment for almost a full day until, finally, I caught her on her own. I jumped out of the car and followed her to the door. She startled a little when she saw me but relaxed into a smile. ‘Will! What are you doing here?’ It was only then that I realized how young she was. She gave no thought to the consequences of our actions. In her apartment, I explained the cold, hard facts to her. My marriage was all but over. I had nothing to lose by trying to save it. Unless she had an abortion and broke up with Luke, I would go public with our affair. I could easily send some private photos to her father, to Luke, to the tabloids. I would ruin her. She clamped her hand protectively over her belly and her eyes grew wide.

  ‘You can’t ask me to do that,’ she gasped.

  ‘I’m not asking. I’m telling you. Have an abortion. I’ll even pay for it. Tell Luke you miscarried and then break up with him but do it as gently as you can. The alternative is my way and if you care about him, you won’t want that to happen.’

  Kate chose wisely. It did not lead to the repair of my marriage and I deeply regret that. It was a terrible thing I asked her to do. But I did it for Susan, for Daisy, and even for Luke. Susan was right about Kate being a child. She was totally wrong for Luke. He needed a mature woman, and if he really wanted a baby, he had all the time in the world. Their relationship would never have lasted. Kate was way too young to cope with his breakdowns. The one he had after she ‘miscarried’ and left him was pretty bad, but Brian was there to pick up the pieces. Good old Brian.

  13

  2016

  My lifestyle wasn’t helping. I was never an addict, but the film business is full of opportunities for indulgences of all kinds. Champagne and fancy dining were expected at certain festivals and cocaine was certainly readily available, but women were my weakness.

  In the year after my mother’s death in 2014, I struggled a bit. It seems shameful now to say it, because it’s not so unusual to be an orphan at the age of forty-six, but once Mum had died, I felt unmoored, like my anchor had slipped. She had always supported me, no matter what I did, but now that she was dead, I was lost.

  Work was going well, we were climbing back from the recession. We had rehired four of the eight full-time positions we’d had to make redundant and were still getting commissions. We were making award-winning TV dramas and feature films, mostly co-productions with European partners and some American investors, but I had to keep a lot of plates spinning. My air miles could have kept me travelling for years, but I’d grown to hate airports with a passion. I was tired and irritable all the time. I got myself into unnecessary rows about small things that would never have bothered me before.

  Daisy had turned into an entitled little madam, who expected everything to be handed to her on a plate. She didn’t stick at any college course she started and drifted from one gang of loser friends to another. She had moved back and forth from her mother’s home to rented flats, which she wouldn’t keep clean – and where the rent money we gave her seemed to vanish on a regular basis for one implausible reason or another. The only thing Daisy wanted to do was play guitar and sing. We discouraged any performance-related career, citing Luke as the example of all the reasons why it wasn’t a good idea. We had rows about this, which usually ended with slammed doors and sulky silences.

  Daisy also ate a lot, in secret. Susan told me about the food detritus she’d found in a cupboard in her bedroom. I tried talking to my daughter about her weight, but she shut down completely. I asked Brian to speak to her about it, but he refused. ‘Leave her alone,’ he said. ‘She’s still growing up, she’ll be fine.’ I blamed Susan for not monitoring what she was eating and setting an example to her. Susan flared back at me and reminded me of all the times I’d cancelled plans with Daisy at the last minute and what a shit father I had turned out to be. I waved my hands around at the Dalkey mansion Daisy had now moved back into. Out of guilt, I had always been generous to Susan. The house was solely in her name. She got everything she asked for and far more than she was legally entitled to, but somehow I was still the bad guy. I paid for Daisy to see a counsellor. She pulled herself out of the doldrums eventually, but all she wanted was the limelight and I couldn’t keep her away from it.

  It pleased me that I had never been replaced in Susan’s life. She had not remarried, and if she had boyfriends, I never heard about them. Occasionally, we still slept together, usually after a boozy family lunch that had dragged on too long. We certainly didn’t like each other, but we knew each other, and sometimes it’s better the devil you know.

  I never went to the doctor when I didn’t have to, but by mid-2016 I was running on empty, muscles aching, general weariness, recurring sore throats, swollen neck glands and sporadic rashes, stomach ache and backache that would come and go. Stress. Work was piling up and I j
ust couldn’t take it any more. I spent the June bank holiday weekend on the sofa and turned off my phone. I opened my laptop and googled Daisy’s name.

  By then she was a social media star, a singer-songwriter who gave TED talks about fat-shaming and body positivity. She didn’t ever mention Susan or me in her interviews but acknowledged that she came from privilege and that people of her background were society’s biggest problem because we didn’t see the need for change, some bullshit like that. I knew she was being manipulated to a large degree by Brian, who was ‘managing’ her media career, against our wishes. I was no longer on speaking terms with Brian and I didn’t miss him. Susan and I were furious with him. Daisy was vulnerable. He knew it and yet he still thrust her into the glare of publicity for financial gain. I tried not to worry about her. She was an adult now, but she was still my kid, even though she barely spoke to me. It was genuinely hurtful.

  On Tuesday morning, I called in sick and made phone calls to placate all the people I had let down over the weekend, claiming a virus had left me incapacitated. I didn’t lie when I said I was going to the doctor that day.

  My GP was a friend whose son I had used as a documentary cameraman a few times. I called round to his house casually because I didn’t want to admit I was sick as a dog. It was kind of defeatist to go to the surgery. Between chats about everything else, I told him I’d been feeling lousy. He listened to my lengthy list of symptoms and agreed I was probably overstressed, but he recommended that I go to the Blackrock clinic and get a full check-up.

  I booked an appointment for the end of the month, went back to work and delegated as much as I could. I cancelled a trip to LA the following week and managed to delay pre-production of the next feature by two weeks.

  I was scared walking into the Blackrock clinic. In the intervening weeks, I had looked after myself, taken a course of multivitamins, stopped drinking, started swimming and exercising, got plenty of rest, let my social life take a back seat and tried to remove all the stress factors out of my life. But the weariness and headaches still remained as well as new digestion issues. I knew there was something amiss. My fear was that it was cancer, primary in the brain and perhaps secondaries in the stomach or liver. Something was definitely wrong.