The Family Gift Read online

  ‘She doesn’t want a hat like that,’ says Eddie.

  ‘She might. Ooh, roses,’ says Bridget, who has noticed the flowers on the table, sprigs of lavender and rosemary threaded in amidst the blooms for added scent. ‘I love these ones.’

  ‘I know.’

  I pat her hand and help her sit in her place, with Delilah on a be-cushioned stool beside her. Delilah has plenty of food in her bowl but has already turned her adorable pink nose up at it and is looking wistfully at the human food.

  ‘That cat’s ruined,’ said Eddie.

  ‘She’s an assistance cat,’ I say. ‘She sits on Dad’s lap and he likes it.’

  ‘He does, doesn’t he?’ says Eddie, smiling suddenly.

  ‘He likes Miss Marple too,’ says Bridget.

  ‘The Battle of Britain series is his favourite,’ Eddie retorts. ‘That Marple woman’s always got her nose in other people’s business . . .’

  Nellie, a carer from Uganda, has arrived and refuses dinner because she is about to feed Dad.

  ‘You eat,’ she commands the others and even Eddie takes up his fork.

  Now Nellie is a woman who’d be able to command armies, I think with a grin.

  ‘I’m just running upstairs to see if Mum is coming down. She was doing something upstairs, organising, tidying or something,’ I say. I heard her slip upstairs with Scarlett an hour ago when Nellie first got here after a hasty phone call from Mum. I imagine they’ve been talking and I want to see if Scarlett is able to face the family downstairs.

  You’re a fabulous liar, says Mildred, as I rush up the stairs.

  Why is it, Mildred, I say, that the only time you ever said anything nice to me is when you are encouraging me in badness?

  That was a covering-up lie.

  ‘I’m only putting up with you until I train you to be nice to me full-time, and stop telling me I’m too fat in certain outfits, or that I’m no good as a chef.

  You always look good. Plus women have bellies because that’s where their uteruses live, Mildred said. Basic biology.

  At that exact moment, I’m passing the hall mirror. I look at myself and think that a) Mildred has a point and b) I do look good.

  Mildred, I don’t know what drugs you’re on, but you’re making great strides with the being kind to me thing. By the time I’ve managed to erase you altogether and replace you with some harmonious angel who only tells me I’m wonderful, I’m going to miss you.

  Scarlett and Mum are upstairs sitting in the tiny spare bedroom. Scarlett looks more at peace, but I’m still shocked again at how thin she is. How did this happen so quickly?

  ‘Come on,’ I say, putting my arm through Scarlett’s. ‘I dithered over an omelette or French toast but went for the toast. We have to fatten you up somehow. You look like you’ve been doing one of those crazy juice and nothing else for five days diets.’

  ‘Oh, French toast: I love it,’ says Scarlett.

  ‘Yes, food for the broken hearted,’ I say and instantly want to kick myself.

  ‘Well, that would be fine,’ says Scarlett with a hint of the old Scarlett in her voice, ‘except I’m not broken hearted. I’m here to help for a couple of days.’

  ‘Eggs, then,’ I say. I have just the recipe.

  Break-Up Scrambled Eggs

  Use free range eggs because they have the richest, yellowest yolks and they will give your immune system a boost when you need it. A broken heart has many physical manifestations – this is not pseudo-science: it’s real. And we’ve all been there! So go free range for this.

  A good quality wholewheat toast is a must, too. Forget about giving up gluten for this meal – unless you are a card-carrying coeliac or happen to be on the gluten intolerance spectrum. We all try so hard to do the right thing that we forget to feed our bodies the right way. Stick your wholewheat toast under the grill, whisk the eggs, add a hint of milk – I like a smidge of grated parmesan but that’s just me – a pinch of salt and pepper and stir into a heated pan already hot with a smearing of butter all over the bottom.

  Keep stirring. It’s simple, rhythmic, comforting.

  Think of nothing but this. Stirring. Making these eggs beautiful. From a happy hen straight to you.

  Once the eggs are in delicate lumps but still have a sheen upon them, take them off the heat. They’ll cook in the pan for another minute while you butter your toast.

  Pile on and feed your soul. Right now, be your own best friend.

  19

  If you put everyone’s problems into a bowl, you’d probably take yours out again because everyone suffers

  This time when I wake in the middle of the night, I feel utterly awake. And hungry. I have again fought through the Zimovane to have only four hours’ sleep, so I think that tonight, I will try half a tablet.

  I fear this concept because I’ve looked up the whole withdrawal from sleeping tablets thing and I could turn into a raving lunatic (withdrawal may turn you into a werewolf) or else have headaches, nausea, depression and sweats. Not to mention damn all sleep.

  But it has to be done. From now on, half a sleeping tablet a night. They’ll last longer too. I might get the summer out of them before I have to give them up and learn to sleep on my own again.

  Plus, maybe if I’m very tired, I will sleep.

  And yet that’s not first and foremost in my mind: chocolate is.

  Chocolate helps people sleep, like hot milk and valerian, which does admittedly smell like lettuce at the botton of the crisper when the fridge has gone feral. But chocolate . . . I yearn for the lush, velvety taste of chocolate cake. Right now.

  I slip from the bed, quickly check on the children, and then pull on yoga pants and a sweatshirt.

  Moonlight lights up downstairs with squares and rectangles of light in through the windows but it doesn’t scare me.

  Instead, I head for the kitchen, grab my pen and laptop and begin to research. I feel strangely like myself again.

  By morning, I think I’ve cracked it. There are two chocolate cakes sitting on the counter, and I’ve swept all the offcuts into the compost bin. I sit looking at them with pride. This glorious confection has a name:

  Fear of the Dark Chocolate Cake

  If you can’t sleep after eating this, then at least you’ll lie there with a sense of wellbeing in your heart. No bad dream can get past it. Like warriors guarding your heart, you can take comfort in that one glorious thing today because sometimes that’s all you can focus on: one glorious thing. Everything else might be dreadful, but you’ve got mouthfuls of your chocolate cake to give your courage.

  As I run upstairs to wake everyone, I think of telling Dan about my plan with the sleeping tablets but . . . I’ve already told him I’m trying to cut down, so he’ll know I’m lying. And what if I do sweat and go nuts during it all? But I have to tell him the truth. Just when?

  It’s weird how I look forward to the Thursday evenings and my victim support group. For a start it’s cheaper: I had been going to shopping centres and idling around, trying on bits and bobs and then having to leave the shop without buying them because we really are broke. But I had to buy a coffee, right? And even a bun. Cream.

  You might consider exercise, Mildred points out mildly. She is definitely kinder lately.

  And for a second thing, the group is so comforting because there is some magic in this not particularly beautiful little room with other people, talking. Honestly. My family has always been brilliant – we discuss everything. But I know that’s not necessarily normal and that for a lot of people, talking about their deepest inner fears is really unusual. Here, I can talk about my fear of January and what I still call The Fear, although I am considering downgrading it from capital letters to just the fear.

  ‘Progress, right?’ I say to Ariel on the phone.

  ‘Progress,’ she agrees.

&n
bsp; One day, I think, I might be able to talk about January, the garage and The Fear with my family. I might not feel that I have to protect them from it. It’s not as if we haven’t had a lot of talking about our deepest inner fears this last year, what with Dad.

  And now Jack’s leaving is out in the open, we can talk – cautiously – about that. Scarlett is doing marvellously at Mum’s for a whole week now.

  ‘She’s eating, she’s tidied out Eddie’s room and she dyed Bridget’s hair,’ Mum reports on the phone. ‘Of course, she’s treading water but right now, that’s a result. It’s better than drowning.’

  Lexi and Caitlin are involved in a ballet camp for a lot of the summer, so Caitlin’s mother and I are organising pick-ups and drop-offs, a complex system because it also involves taking Liam to soccer camp and getting Teddy to a small children’s play camp that includes art.

  Anyone seeing Teddy after a session would think it entails redecorating the interior of a bordello because she comes out every day covered, and I mean covered, in paint at the dark purple and red end of the colour spectrum.

  She has paint in her hair, on her clothes and another pair of shoes are totally ruined.

  ‘Don’t they wear old shirts or aprons for the painting bit?’ I ask one day, when we are laundried out of clothes because none of the stain removers appear to be working and Teddy’s wardrobe has been seriously depleted.

  ‘Teddy is such a natural artist,’ says Carly, the teacher in charge of the camp, an enthusiastic woman in her thirties who wears – no, not making this up – loose dungarees and has hair as curly and red as Little Orphan Annie’s. She could audition for a children’s TV show right now. With her beaming face, dusting of freckles and all round good- natured loveliness, I know she is exactly the right person to run a camp for someone as energetic as Teddy. I just wish they didn’t paint every day with such abandon.

  Carly holds up Zoom, her own tortoise, who is one of the camp’s pets. ‘Today, we’re having a nature day,’ she says happily. ‘We’ve got Zoom and Fluff, the guinea pig. And some ants.’

  I have a vision of Teddy holding Zoom upside down and shaking him to see if he falls out of his shell. Fluff had better look out for herself. But, guineas can bite. Only thing is, if anything bites Teddy, she tends to bite it back.

  And if she comes home with any ants she’s secreted in her lunch box, I am going to euthanise them with my shoe.

  Elisa is due back in Ireland at the end of July for the second round of Surella publicity blasts. Summer is fake tan madness, apparently, or so Dan says to me that evening, when the day has gone well for everyone and no ants have made it home.

  ‘You have got Instagram?’ I say.

  ‘No, Con’s doing it for me. He says it’s brilliant. There’s make-up, underwear, all sorts of gorgeous women showing you their outfits for the day. He says it’s the new way to hunt for girlfriends.’

  ‘Con is like a fourteen-year-old boy with a hormonal surge,’ I say sternly. ‘You are enabling him. I can follow her myself but—’

  ‘But you can’t bear to let her see you follow her?’

  ‘Exactly. Would one of Maura’s girls do it, do you think? They could tell me what she’s up to without me having to actually look.’

  ‘Good plan. Ask them. See you later, babe,’ he says, as I leave.

  I head off for my support meeting in cheerful form.

  Talking helps, I tell Mildred.

  No shit, she replies.

  And there was me thinking you were kinder lately, I tell her.

  I speak as I find, Mildred says.

  Speaking as you find is code for being rude, I remind her.

  This evening however, when I walk up the stairs above the phone repair shop, I see a newcomer sitting beside Eileen on the couch. Her hair is a wonderful dark auburn colour and she’s wearing make-up, lipstick and really elegant clothes. I walk over to introduce myself to her because that’s what everyone does here and I realise with absolute shock that it’s Farrah. Farrah of the mousy hair who almost hides in her chair during the meetings.

  ‘Farrah,’ I say, actually taking a step back with astonishment, ‘you look . . . just . . .’

  ‘Amazing,’ says Eileen enthusiastically. ‘You wouldn’t recognise her, would you?’

  ‘I certainly didn’t recognise you, at first,’ I say and sit down on the other side of Eileen. ‘Not that you’re not always lovely but this—’

  Foot in mouth. Stop talking, Mildred points out judiciously.

  Farrah touches her hair self-consciously.

  ‘I thought I needed a change,’ she says.

  ‘Change,’ I say smiling. ‘It’s wonderful, it’s not a change, it’s a . . .’

  I search for the words.

  ‘It’s a transformation.’

  Farrah grins.

  ‘I used to have this hair colour years ago,’ she said, ‘when I was younger.’

  ‘Oh, and you’re one hundred now,’ I say with amused irony. Everyone laughs at that.

  ‘I just got out of the habit of making an effort, I thought if I didn’t draw attention to myself that—’

  Ariel has come into the room and she interrupts.

  ‘If you didn’t draw attention to yourself, then nobody would know it was you and it wouldn’t happen again,’ she says in her light little fairy voice.

  ‘Exactly,’ Farrah says wryly, ‘but that’s not going to work, is it? I was walking to work the other day and somebody bashed into me, by accident. They were running for the tram and bam! It shocked me, frightened me, and then I realised they didn’t mean to hurt me. They even yelled sorry. But I was shaking because it brought it all back and then I thought, I’m going to keep shaking forever if I don’t do something. Walking down the street is like being in a war zone when your head’s in this place. That’s no way to live.’

  ‘You’re coming here,’ I say carefully, because just coming here was helping me.

  ‘I think it’s not enough just to come here,’ says Farrah with determination, ‘I think you have got to really try to make a difference. Do things in another way, because I’m different now. A different Farrah. I don’t know if I’ll ever be that person who can walk down the street entirely without fear but,’ – she looks at all the faces who are nodding, understanding the way people on the outside can’t. ‘I could completely lose myself and try not to let it happen again, but I’d have to live in a tower and get food delivered. How real is that? Stuff happens and I’ve got to keep on living.’

  Eileen, who is so affectionate and wise that she reminds me of Mum, reaches out and hugs Farrah.

  Steve comes in, apologising for being late, and we start the meeting. Ariel says she has had a good week and she’d gone to a friend’s party. The friend’s brother had walked her home and she had felt pretty safe.

  Steve had gone to see the counsellor at work again. He’d been nervous of doing it, nervous it would affect his promotion prospects in some way, although everyone kept saying, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t be penalised because your bank was held up.’

  ‘I know,’ he says. ‘It’s just the voice inside me telling me I will be. That I have to pretend.’

  Mildred, you got relatives? I ask.

  She doesn’t deign to answer.

  Eileen is still Eileen, smiling, making an effort but I can always see it in her, that huge loss. How could there not be a huge loss. Her daughter Daisy is gone. I’m sure I’d never recover from something like that.

  But even as I think of how much Eileen has lost, my mind is working on another level – dancing around as people talk.

  And then the thought begins to trickle into my brain. Farrah had done something different, she’d changed the narrative. She was refusing to get stuck in this one. Yes, she’d been coming to the group for two years and I had been coming for such a short lengt
h of time but she’d said something that resonated with me: I want to live my life.

  ‘I’ve changed, for sure,’ she says, when it’s her time to speak in the group, ‘but I have to live with that change and make it work.’

  Her family and friends all know that she came to a victim support group, they know about what had happened to her, they know when she could or couldn’t cope. Mine didn’t.

  I didn’t tell Scarlett because she was dealing with the loss of Jack, and all her hopes and dreams of being a mother. I didn’t tell Maura because she was trying to coax Gilly through her State exams and deal with a busy job and besides, she worries enough about Mum as it is. And I don’t tell Dan because . . . I don’t tell Dan because I don’t want to be different. I don’t want our lives changed by this thing and yet they have been changed.

  Shit happens, says Mildred in my head and I smile.

  ‘Yeah, shit happens, Mildred,’ I say and everyone looks at me.

  ‘I said that out loud again, did I?’

  Everyone nods.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘No, go on,’ says Farrah, ‘you need to speak. I was done anyway.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I was just thinking that I have all these little compartments in my life and one of them is being mugged and the fallout of what that’s done to me. I keep that compartment away from my family because I don’t want to upset them. There’s my Mum and how she takes care of my Dad, you know that. My sister’s husband left her and I think he couldn’t cope with the pain because they’ve spent years trying to have a baby. And finally . . .’ I stopped. Did this hurt the most without me realising it? ‘There’s my daughter’s birth mother coming back and having the power to hurt my daughter—’

  ‘I don’t know what that woman is up to,’ interrupts Eileen fiercely. ‘She truly is the most selfish person ever.’

  I grin. Eileen really is the sort of person you wanted in your corner.

  ‘I happen to agree with you on that, Eileen’ I say, ‘but I have to deal with it. I can’t change it. I worry about what it’s going to do to my daughter; what infertility and now marriage breakdown has done to my sister; I worry about my mother; I worry about my career and if we’ll be able to pay the mortgage; I worry about everything.