by Abigail Dean
Father didn’t look at the child. He touched Mother’s hair and face, waking her; when she saw him, she smiled. Ethan, Delilah and I crowded around the cot.
‘I don’t want her,’ Delilah said.
‘You’re too small to even see her,’ I said. The baby was still asleep. I took one of her immaculate little hands with my finger.
‘She looks just like Alexandra did,’ Mother said, and an odd, unwarranted pride spread across my chest. It had been worth missing my turn to read. Here was a new sister, who was just like me, and one day I would read to her.
‘We’ll call this one Eve,’ Father said.
Delilah didn’t change her mind about Evie. For nearly four years, she had been the youngest child, and she saw the baby as her usurper: a malicious courtier in her kingdom, smuggled in the guise of a child. The plan had been for Evie to sleep in Delilah’s room, but that was no good; Delilah took the baby’s blanket for herself, or left little ambushes for the child. Into the cot she snuck a fork, my pencils from school, the tweezers from Mother’s dressing table. ‘A present,’ she insisted, ‘for the baby.’
The house was reordered. I slept in the baby room with Evie, and Delilah moved in with Ethan.
Delilah didn’t get away with things because she was cunning, like Ethan; she got away with things because she was beautiful, as Mother had been. It was an indisputable fact, like those required by Mr Greggs, and one to which I was becoming resigned. Each year at school, we would be summoned for photographs, including family shots. When Delilah first joined us, the photographer pretended to drop his camera. ‘What a beautiful little girl,’ he said. ‘Here, here’ – he handed her a fat teddy bear, which he had been using to cajole reluctant pupils – ‘a few on your own, first.’
When the photographer had taken a set of pictures of Delilah from different angles, up close and further away, he beckoned for me and Ethan to join her in his frame. Delilah had discarded the bear; I picked it up from the dusty assembly hall floor, but the photographer shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s just for the prettiest little girls. And you’re too old for that, anyway.’
My parents ordered the group photograph. Ethan was nonchalant, and Delilah was crowing, and I was looking up at the ceiling, with a red face, trying very hard not to cry.
Mother placed it in a cheap supermarket frame and hung it in the living room, where it was impossible not to look at it. Delilah, inspired, asked to see pictures of Mother as a child. ‘We’re the same!’ she exclaimed, and, looking at me over the top of the photograph album: ‘And so different from Alexandra.’
‘We have the same hair,’ I said.
‘Yes, but a different face, and different eyes, and different arms and legs.’
When we were children, I considered Delilah to be foolish. Her school reports were damning: ‘Delilah needs to apply herself,’ the teacher would write, or ‘Delilah doesn’t have a great deal of natural ability in this subject, and will need to work harder.’ I had heard two of the teachers talking about her one lunchtime: ‘She’s certainly no Ethan,’ said one, and the other nodded: ‘And no Alexandra, either.’ When Delilah was assigned homework, she rested her head on her arms and reached across the table to Father. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, ‘why I can’t just have one of your stories instead.’ Now, I think of the careful attentiveness on Delilah’s face when Father was talking, and her adoration of Mother as a child, long before The Parade began, and I wonder if Delilah was, in fact, cleverer than me and Ethan – if Delilah was the cleverest of us all.
For some time, I complained about sleeping in the same room as Evie. I was disgruntled with Delilah, and disappointed that I would no longer have the opportunity to talk to Ethan last thing at night, which – ever since he had imparted his knowledge of the Wild West – was when we discussed our days at school. The baby room was crowded with Father’s old projects: a computer slumped on the bedside table, exposing shiny guts; wires coiled beneath the cot. But Evie was a stern, quiet baby, and I began to like her. As Mother had said, she looked just like me. It was easy to allocate a baby’s affiliations, and I badly needed somebody on my team.
Instead of talking to Ethan about my day, I whispered across the room to her. In one of Father’s boxes, I found a torch; when the teacher allowed us to take books home from school, I waited for the house to settle into the night, then began to read aloud. ‘She can’t even understand you,’ Delilah said. I ignored her. The reading wasn’t just for Evie; it was also for me. Sometimes, if I caught her when she was whimpering and lifted her from the cot – just before she really started to cry – I found that I could console her myself. And I was usually the first to reach her; increasingly, Mother and Father were occupied with other things.
Some time between Sunday and Monday, my phone began to ring. When I woke like this, disorientated, from a dead sleep, I thought for a moment that I was in Moor Woods Road. Many years ago, Dr K had formulated a three-point plan to address these awakenings: stretch up to the ceiling; wait for the room to come into view; remember each detail of the day before, as specifically as you can. Soho cast an electric orange glow through the curtains, and the bath and the desk solidified from the darkness. Yesterday’s dress lay on top of my shoes on the floor, as though their occupant had vanished. I thought of Olivia in the taxi, waving her scarf from the window as it went, so when I answered the phone, I was smiling. Just gone four. I waited for the caller to speak.
‘Lex. It’s been a very long time.’
‘Delilah,’ I said. Of course.
‘I’m in London,’ she said. ‘I can come to see you. Where are you staying?’
‘Romilly Street,’ I said. ‘It’s the Romilly Townhouse. When do you want to meet?’
‘I don’t have very long. I’ll be there in an hour. Maybe less.’
‘What?’
‘To see you. I’m coming to see you.’
‘It’s the middle of the night.’
‘I’ll see you soon.’
I tried to turn on a gentle light, but hit the overhead switch by mistake. Kicked off the bedcovers and lay in a stupor on the mattress. Cursed Delilah; hotel lighting; the novice percussion band rehearsing in my skull; the whisky society; the tilt of the earth; London in the heat; the distance from the bed to the shower. Under the cool, clean water, I made myself vomit, and rested my forehead against the tiles. Delilah.
When I had stopped shaking, I opened the window and sat down at the desk, and wrote a brief, broad letter of consent in respect of the house on Moor Woods Road and the accompanying cash, allowing for the establishment of the community centre as Evie and I imagined it. I left the execution block empty. I didn’t even know what Delilah’s name was, now. The first grains of daylight scattered across the room. I ordered coffees from reception and drank them both. She would make me wait.
She arrived two hours after she phoned. She called again to check my room number, and a moment later her footsteps stopped outside my door. She waited a few seconds before she knocked, and I stood on the other side of the wood, thinking of her in the empty corridor, assembling her face.
Father kept the Bible on his bedside table, and whenever he couldn’t divine an evening story, he asked one of us to fetch it. As with the tales of our parents’ lives, we fought to hear our favourite book. I liked the Book of Jonah because of the whale. Ethan liked the Book of Samuel but hated the Book of Kings; it featured his namesake, but only to clarify that Solomon was much, much wiser. Delilah was happy to listen to whatever Father selected, which was usually something didactic. It was, I thought, her way of concealing that she couldn’t remember which book was which.
On Sundays, we dressed in what I thought of as our uncomfortable clothes – high white collars and nipping waistlines – and walked through the town in Father’s wake. We passed other, older churches, with congregations filing steadily inside – there, close to the centre, was the austere stone church at which we had been christened – and arrived at a square, b
eige box of a building, just before the industrial site. There was a white canopy above the door, where somebody had hand-painted: Welcome.
Attendance at the Gatehouse was poor. There was a group of indistinguishable men in overlong suits, all of whom played the guitar. There was a straggle of mothers, picking at the biscuits and the squash, who waved at Father as we arrived. Babies tumbled down the aisle. There were a few silent widows who sat towards the back and enjoyed the music. One of them, Mrs Hirst, was blind. Her eyes rested always on some distant past, which, at four foot five, was just over my right shoulder. We argued over which of us would have to lead her to the refreshments at the end of the service. We were frightened of her, we said, in the way that children say that they’re frightened as an excuse for being cruel.
At the Gatehouse, my parents acquired the status of minor celebrities. Our family filled a whole pew, and the old women stroked our hair as we passed. One of the youngest mothers asked Ethan if we were albinos, which he didn’t dignify with a response. Father delivered guest sermons on certain Sundays, which were just as popular as Pastor David’s. When Pastor David contracted the flu, Father led his Tuesday-evening prayer group – and kept it.
CG Consultants had closed just after Evie’s birth. The fact was that nobody in town – and very few people in the country – owned a computer. ‘It’s the pioneers,’ Father said to us, ‘who get slaughtered, while all of the settlers finish first.’ Father had always been a religious man, but he had also been a businessman, and a teacher, and a man whom women liked to watch. We were learning about pie charts at school, and I saw Father’s life allocated to a circle. As his other identities diminished, the slice of religion eclipsed the rest.
There were theatrics. The first time that somebody fell to their knees on the floor of the aisle – overcome, I assumed, with the Holy Spirit – Ethan caught my eye and looked away again, as fast as he could. I could feel his shoulders shuddering against the pew. It was less funny the next time, and the next; and less funny, still, when Father knelt at the front of the room, his heavy arms stretching to the cross, as if awaiting an embrace. Delilah knew just what to do. She danced in a circle, with her face thrown back to the sparse, wooden ceiling and her tiny fists clenched. At times, holy tears rolled down her face and into her hair.
It was at the Gatehouse that we first met Thomas Jolly. One Sunday, Mother seized Father’s arm as we filed inside, and nodded towards a strange, bald man at the back of the church. During the service, I watched him. He didn’t sing with the same zeal as Father or the men with the guitars, but he knew every word, and when Pastor David was speaking, he leant forward, his eyes closed, and smiled with small, craggy teeth. At the end of the sermon, he blinked and caught my eye, and although I looked away, I sensed his smile widen.
After the service, Father hurried us out of the pew. ‘Jolly!’ he said, greeting the stranger like an old, dear friend. He whispered something in Jolly’s ear, and Jolly guffawed. Mother arranged us behind her, in a single, solemn line. ‘Look at this family,’ Jolly said, to Father. ‘Look at these children! I’ve heard so much about them.’ He shook my hand and placed his palm across my head. He was a slight man, but ropes of muscle wound around his arms, and his whole body trembled with a keen, contained strength.
‘And another?’ Jolly asked, and cupped Mother’s stomach with both of his hands. She looked at Father, to secure his pride, and she, too, smiled.
On the walk home, Father was invigorated. ‘Jolly’s doing amazing things,’ he said, ‘all across the North West. And it’s us he came to see.’ He laughed, and lifted Delilah above his head. A thin rain was falling, and we didn’t have an umbrella; the cold of it sat beneath my clothes. Autumn, trudging in across the moors. I walked faster, and Ethan ran to join me. Father was still holding Delilah, and now he took Mother’s hand from the pram and swept her beneath his arm. ‘My beautiful children,’ he said. ‘My family.’
Jolly was a pastor in Blackpool, just off Central Drive and close to the hotel where Father worked. Father had assisted Jolly in installing new technology throughout the church: there was an advanced projection screen, for videos and photographs, and state-of-the-art speakers, which Father had inherited from the hotel. ‘The atmosphere there,’ Father said, ‘is like nothing else. It’s electric. If you want to see the future of the church, that’s where you go.’
The holiday was booked for late February, just before the new baby would arrive. Jolly was hosting a long weekend of sermons and events, and Father would provide technical and spiritual support. Ethan, Delilah and I were to miss school on Monday. ‘This,’ Father said, ‘this is learning.’
We would have two rooms at the hotel, he said. The best rooms, which overlooked the ocean.
We hadn’t been on holiday before, but as soon as it was arranged, Father was rejuvenated, as if the promise of it was all that he required. He asked for his liquor every evening, and he described the town in great detail. There was a theme park, he said, and a huge Ferris wheel. We would be able to see all of the way home. Mother, watching him talk, smiled, and closed her eyes to join him in the promised land.
Her pregnancy had been difficult. There were complications with the caesarean scar, which hadn’t been allowed enough time to heal before the skin was stretched again. (How long did they wait, I wonder – after Evie – before he wanted her, and did she protest in the few moments before he was inside her, silently, with her limbs, so as not to wake us?) She had shown us the fine, careful line through which Evie had come, sat low on her belly like the print of a waistband. Now, the scar tissue buckled under the new weight, and Mother spent a lot of time in her bedroom, with the door closed. ‘She needs a break,’ Father said. ‘The sea air. She’ll be fine.’
A few days before our departure, Father arrived home with a brown paper package. ‘A family gift,’ he said. Delilah tore open the parcel and held up a thin, red T-shirt, which was imprinted with a verse from Peter: Grace and peace be yours in abundance. A set of identical garments fell to the floor. There were six T-shirts in all, one for each of us and for Mother and Father. On the back, the T-shirts bore our names.
‘Wow,’ Delilah said. She distributed the rest with great care, holding each garment flat on her palms, like an offering.
We set off for Blackpool on a Friday evening, when it was already dark. Mother held Evie, who was grumbling; she would usually be asleep, or in my arms. ‘Why didn’t we go earlier?’ I asked, but the car was quiet, and Father ignored me. It had rained all afternoon, and orange light glittered on the road. Delilah stroked the material of her new T-shirt, her fingers playing absentmindedly over the polyester. Ethan held a schoolbook up to the streetlights and squinted through the darkness. I wished that I had remembered to bring one, too.
‘We’ll need to be quiet,’ Father said, ‘when we arrive.’
I sat up taller. ‘Are we here?’ I asked.
We swung onto the promenade. The cold void of the sea extended from the sky. On the other side of the car was a cataclysm of lights: twinkling arcades, and men and women queuing outside the dance halls, and neon horses escaped from a carousel and suspended high in the night. Ethan rolled down the window. The slot machines chirped. A fat man in a ringmaster’s suit beckoned us towards a doorway draped in red velvet. There was no queue there. ‘Can you see the rollercoaster?’ Ethan said, tugging me across the seat to look. ‘I’m going on that.’ Before we reached the hotel, Father pulled away from the seafront and parked along a side street, behind an ice-cream truck with shattered windows.
‘Quiet,’ he said. ‘Remember?’
We took the bags and the pram, staggering beneath their weight, and followed Father into the dark. Wind skittered from the sea and down the lane. The streetlights here were broken, and I couldn’t see my feet. I stood on something soft, which gave way beneath my shoe, and hurried on. Father led us to a little wooden gate and found the right key. Then we were through it, in the garden of the hotel.
My father
worked at the Dorchester, Blackpool, which is still on the seafront today. When Olivia’s parents took us to tea at the Dorchester on Park Lane, thirteen years later, I looked at my reflection in the vast courtroom mirror – champagne; velvet dress; the scones just replenished – and thought of the other Dorchester, which I had once considered to be the most exciting place in the world. There was a time when I thought that I would return with Evie. Here, I would say, the site of your very first holiday. I envisaged running through the Pleasure Beach from one ride to the next; winning an oversized stuffed animal; fish and chips on the beach, in the evening, when we were salt-battered and drunk. I found the Dorchester on the same sites I checked for business travel, and weekends with JP. But the reviews were terrible (‘Avoid This Disgusting Place’; ‘Vile’; and, at best, ‘OK but needs serious updating’), and I knew, scrolling through the photographs, that the place I remembered no longer existed. If we returned, I would probably find out that it never had.
From the garden, we could see into the hotel’s empty ballroom. Covered tables arranged around a wooden dance floor. Reflected in the wood was a glass dome onto the night sky. On a clearer night, you would be able to dance on top of the moon. Above the ballroom, I could make out the small, square lights of guests still awake in their rooms. Father was looking at them, too.
‘It’s important to be quiet,’ he said. ‘Do you understand?’
He opened a fire door, and let us into a narrow staircase.
The rooms were on the very top floor of the hotel, and reeked of paint. The radiators had been turned up high. ‘See,’ Father said. ‘Brand new, and renovated.’ Ethan, Delilah and I pressed our noses to the glass. Father had kept to his word. You could see out to the pier and to the big wheel, turning slowly through the night.
