The Family Gift Read online

  ‘Then I’m presenting this happy front to everyone in public. Look at me doing some cooking in the kitchen. Aren’t my pancakes beautiful?! Happy! I spend half an hour a day doing social media to prove how happy I am. Sick or what? Do you know, until I had to cook for my darling sister, I hadn’t come up with a single recipe since I was mugged. Not one. I was just broken. But now, now I am cooking again except I’m being honest in a new way with this work.’

  Nobody speaks. It isn’t a silence of shock or horror. It’s the silence of people giving me the space to talk it out.

  ‘Do you think sharing more of your life with the people in it would help?’ says Eileen, ‘Because you can’t keep all this pain inside, otherwise it just eats you up. I tried that and it doesn’t work.’

  ‘I know you’re right,’ I say, ‘I’ve got to share it, I can’t keep it in the box, because the box is never big enough. I’m different now and that’s fine. OK, total disclosure: I have this voice in my head.’

  Shane looks alarmed.

  ‘I know a few lads who’ve had that problem after they have done too much really strong skunk,’ he says, ‘or taken a few too many mushrooms. It wrecks them, sometimes for years. You . . . you haven’t done anything like that? I could tell you who to talk to but it takes a long time to get over it—’

  ‘No, Shane,’ I say. ‘This is not lots of voices in my head telling me I can fly after an acid overdose – this is that critical voice that says you’re an idiot or why did you do that? You know that voice?’

  ‘That voice,’ say Farrah and Ariel at exactly the same time, and they both laugh.

  ‘Well,’ I go on, ‘I’ve given my voice a name, I call her Mildred, because it makes it easier and when she’s been very negative I say, shut up Mildred. So Mildred was just telling me that shit happens.’

  ‘Mildred has a point,’ says Eileen. ‘Shit happens.’

  ‘I’ve never heard you swear,’ says Ariel, astonished.

  ‘I have been known to swear on occasions,’ says Eileen primly, ‘but as everyone in this room knows, shit happens and you keep going. You have no choice. I don’t know if I’m the best or the worst person to demonstrate this because I can never, ever get back to who I was. I’ve lost too much.’

  Farrah cries. She often cries when Eileen talks.

  Eileen continues. ‘I’m not saying my losing Daisy is worse than anything else in your lives, but I do think you have some chance of going forward. You’re changed now, for sure. But you go forward, changes and all. I come in here once every week and I cry and I can tell you all exactly what I’m feeling. And then I go back out to my family and I try to get on with my life as best I can. There’s a Daisy-shaped hole in it and that will never be filled. But I have other people I love and I need to be there for them. I need to be there for me. So, if I pretend everything is OK, then I’m lying to all of us and I’m lying to me.’

  We all sit in silence.

  ‘I think that’s what Mildred was trying to say.’ I agree. ‘Shit happens to everyone.’

  ‘And it’s how you pick yourself up that matters,’ chimes in Farrah. We all looked at her.

  ‘Somebody really said that to you after you’d been mugged?’ asks Steve.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Farrah, and we all laugh with recognition. ‘It’s amazing the platitudes people come out with. This person hadn’t been mugged but they thought they knew what I was going through.’

  ‘You create your own happiness or some rubbish like that. From a guy I work with who’s never had anything happen to him,’ she adds.

  ‘But nobody knows what you are going through,’ I say crossly at the notion of some do-gooder saying exactly the wrong thing.

  ‘It’s taken me a long time, but I now tell people,’ says Farrah. ‘I say, I’m going through a difficult time and if they try and say, I understand and try and compare it to oh, I don’t know, getting a flat tyre when they were late for work, I say, no that is not the same thing.’

  ‘Farrah is right,’ says Steve, ‘maybe you should tell the people you love how you feel. It helped me.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ariel chimes in, her face lit up suddenly, her eyes sparkling. ‘And you could tell people on your social media accounts – it would be brilliant. Stop the fake, stop pretending everything is OK. That’s what I do, my friends know what happened to me and that’s why my friend’s brother walked me home from the party. He knows I’m scared. He doesn’t bang into me when we walk. He’s kind, gentle and knows I’m scared of noises and being touched. That helps: that people I care about know.’

  I rolled the idea over in my mind. Imagine if people really knew, what would it mean? Imagine if I told Dan? Imagine if I told everyone? Imagine if I stopped trying to pretend I was happy Freya Viking Chef and said ‘shit happens’.

  Hey, said Mildred irritably. I don’t think Mildred likes these meetings. What’s the worst that could happen?

  20

  Sometimes people with the biggest smiles are struggling

  On Monday, Angela is having the day off, and I’m picking up the children from camp.

  First up, it’s Teddy who insists she is not sitting in the back of the car in her special seat and wants to sit in the front. She is covered in paint again but clearly the reds have been put away and she is very yellow. I idly wonder what colour Zoom the tortoise is.

  ‘I’m sitting here like a big girl,’ she says.

  ‘You are quite a big girl,’ I say choosing my words carefully because every battle with Teddy is a bit like fighting with a senior counsel in court. ‘But you are still not big enough to sit in the front seat or to sit without your special seat. What if Mummy bumped into . . .’ I search around for something suitably non-threatening, ‘a tree. Imagine we banged into the tree and the poor old branches got a bit squished and the front of the car got squished and you hurt your lovely head.’

  Teddy looked at me. ‘Don’t bang into any trees,’ she said. Like, duh!

  ‘Correct answer,’ I replied, controlling my laughter, ‘but you still have to get into the back and into your seat.’

  It takes about three minutes to achieve this and Teddy screams and shouts quite a lot. To any onlookers it would appear as if I am trying to strangle a small child, but the people outside the camp are used to this type of behaviour. Other parents nod with understanding as they try and attach small wriggling people to car seats with those small wriggling people shouting, kicking or demanding treats. To outsiders, it looks like a mass kidnapping.

  ‘Want sweeties, want buns from George and Patch’s bun shop!’ shrieks Teddy. She ardently wants to go to Giorgio and Patrick’s and have buns. They would have to laugh at having their exquisite café called a ‘bun shop’.

  ‘We are going to go home first and have a lovely snack,’ I say, using my Calm Mummy voice, which has a failure rate of about 75 per cent with Teddy, ‘and then maybe if you are very good we could go to Giorgio and Patrick’s.’

  ‘No!’ she shrieks.

  ‘How about I put on the soundtrack to Frozen and you can sing along to Elsa and Anna?’ I say in my happiest voice.

  ‘Yes,’ says Teddy delightedly.

  Thank goodness small children can sometimes be easily distracted.

  I can now tune out Frozen. That’s progress.

  We get home and I manage to get a snack into her.

  ‘Don’t want the rest of it,’ she says, looking at her homemade fish fingers with a tiny can of baked beans that has cartoon people on it.

  ‘Now darling, you like fish fingers,’ I say, crossing my fingers behind my back. She always has up to now . . .

  ‘I want a dog. A dog would eat the yucky fish fingers. Timmy in school has a dog and when he doesn’t want to eat his food he gives it to his dog and his Mummy can’t see.’

  I know Timmy’s mother. Should I pass on this bit of important intel o
r should I let it ride? I dare say Timmy’s mother has already noticed the dog delightedly eating half of Timmy’s dinner. And indeed when Teddy was younger we could have fed a whole fleet of dogs from what she threw on the floor around her high chair.

  ‘We can’t really look after a doggie but maybe when you’re older,’ I say, which is what I always say. Teddy slams down her cup.

  ‘George and Patch’s, now,’ she demands.

  In the end I give in. I am writing recipes again but I’m slooow doing it and besides which the only way I could get any work done would be to park Teddy in front of the television.

  ‘OK,’ I sigh. I know when I’m beaten.

  We head round the corner and into the café which is mercifully empty. There is no sign of Miss Primrose, Patrick or Giorgio and one of the stand-in baristas, a handsome young Argentinian student named Matteo is behind the counter. His English is flawless, his skill as a barista amazing and he’s even patient enough to carefully help Teddy choose her favourite bun, which requires the patience of Job.

  ‘Half now, half after dinner,’ I say fiercely. I have to win some battles or I will lose my Mother badge altogether. ‘Won’t you cut it up into two bits, Matteo, because Teddy and I have an agreement.’ Teddy eyes me like a hawk watching a mouse it’s about to kill.

  I eye her back.

  She realises that this is not going to work because I’m wearing my steely face. So she turns to Matteo, giving him the small child version of an ‘I have not been fed in a very long time and I’m beaten’ look. Given that she’s still a bit paint-splattered, this is very effective.

  ‘Vewwy hungry, Mattie,’ she adds.

  ‘Go on,’ I said to Matteo, sighing. ‘Give it all to her.’

  I’m just not strong enough. At four, Teddy has broken me. I will have to hire Supernanny for her teenage years or else the house will be full of unsuitable boyfriends who sneak in late, stay overnight and I will be able to do nothing apart from be a Granny to quadruplets.

  An hour and a half later, we are on our way to pick up Liam, who is delighted because he scored four goals today. Dan has been helping him with football because this is definitely not my area of expertise.

  ‘Aren’t you brilliant,’ I say, then follow this up quickly with ‘and you worked so hard!’

  He’s sitting in the front seat because he’s tall enough now and says he’s not moving when Lexi gets in.

  I sigh. Despite the front-seat rota, there is a constant battle between my two eldest for the shotgun seat and Lexi might get a little irritated when we roll round to the hall where she and Caitlin do ballet. For a long time, she was always the person who got to sit in the front seat: the eldest child’s prerogative. I remember the arguments when I was growing up and I, Maura, Scarlett and eventually Con were old enough to sit in the front seat. There was an actual rota stuck on the dashboard and we had to mark everyone’s goes off in pen. It was that bad.

  How patient my parents were at going along with this. But they did, and eventually at some point they put us in charge of the rota, so we had to make sure it was all fair and square.

  By the time we make it to the ballet school Liam and Teddy are chattering away to each other, Teddy discussing her bun and how a dog would be very helpful around the house for eating yucky things like scrambled eggs, and Liam explaining how one of his new soccer friends got a puppy and it can already offer up a paw.

  There’s a lot of dog in this conversation, I think, wondering how I’m going to nip this in the bud.

  I like dogs but I just don’t think I could cope with an extra soul in our currently-complex world.

  And then we pick up Lexi and Caitlin. I can instantly tell my daughter’s angry or upset from the way she walks out to the car. You notice stuff like that about your children: their walk, their movements. They don’t have to say a thing but you know when there’s something wrong.

  ‘Hi, darling,’ I say cautiously, as she opens the back door of the car and lets herself in, shooting Liam an angry glance at the very nerve of him for sitting in the front seat, her seat this time round.

  ‘Fine,’ she snaps. I wait until she and Caitlin have put on seatbelts and Teddy resumes the conversation about buns, dogs, Peppa Pig, Mattie, what she did in camp today and how tortoises look nice painted orange. Lexi sits there in stony silence, staring out the window.

  ‘How was it, Caitlin?’ I ask.

  ‘Fine.’

  OK. Monosyllables. Never good.

  ‘Did you have an OK day, darling?’ I ask Lexi, knowing that whatever happened it was not an OK day.

  ‘Fine,’ she repeats.

  ‘OK,’ I say. Two fines from two girls. Not good.

  I drop Caitlin off with a mention to her mother that something happened in ballet camp but I don’t know what. Then, I head for home.

  After I unhook Teddy, the three of them escape into the house and Lexi races upstairs to her bedroom and slams the door so hard that I wonder if we have ever checked the hinges on the doors in Kellinch House. Knowing I’m relying on the television babysitter, I plonk Teddy in front of it, turn it on to something she likes, stick a load of Sylvanians on the floor in front of her in case the TV isn’t interesting enough, give her two biscuits to add to my parental guilt, and belt upstairs at high speed. The house is pretty much child-proof, but still you have to keep an eye on four-year-olds or else give them things to amuse them totally for the five minutes you look away. One moment for catastrophe is all it takes.

  Lexi’s door is shut and I knock.

  ‘Lexi, honey, you OK?’

  ‘Fine,’ says the voice again, only this time it’s shaking.

  ‘Darling, what’s wrong?’ I ignore all the recent rules about knocking and privacy and just push open the door. My beautiful little girl is sprawled on her bed face down and she’s crying. Her face is stained with tears and the look of utter misery in her eyes makes my heart break.

  ‘What is it,’ I say with horror, ‘what happened?’ I sit beside her and gather her to me. ‘Tell me, tell me, Lexi, did somebody hurt you, were you bullied, what, what is it?’

  ‘No, none of those things,’ she says, ‘none of those things.’

  ‘You have to tell me, Lexi, it’s really important. Did anybody hurt you?’

  The things that are going through my head are horrific. There’s rage boiling up inside me. Someone has hurt my daughter and I just want to find out who they are and rip them apart with my bare hands.

  ‘It’s, it’s nothing,’ she says.

  ‘It is something because you are lying here sobbing,’ I say.

  I hold her close to me and let her cry until she’s cried out. I stroke her hair the way I used to when she was little and I croon her name and kiss her head until the shuddering stops.

  The joy of motherhood is exquisite but the exquisiteness has an equal match in pain and the pain of being a mother is sometimes just too much to bear. I’d be mugged ten times over, I think at that exact moment, as long as Lexi goes through life without pain. But everyone has pain and I have to teach her how to cope with it.

  Right now, I need to know what happened.

  Finally, she straightens up and looks at me, her lovely face tear-stained and blotchy, her eyes swollen.

  ‘Just one of the girls in the class, she knows about Elisa and that I have . . . that she’s . . .’

  ‘Your birth mother,’ I fill in before it gets even trickier.

  ‘Yes,’ nods Lexi. ‘She showed me this thing on an entertainment site and it’s got Elisa on it and some guy she’s going out with and . . .’

  ‘Yes . . .?’ I say hesitantly. What has Elisa done now?

  ‘And there’s an interview with her and she’s so happy, she said, she’s never ever been happier in the whole of her life. It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to her,’ Lexi is saying and the tears star
t to flood again.

  ‘What’s the best thing that’s happened to her?’ I ask tentatively, having a sick feeling that I know the answer to the question.

  ‘She’s having a baby.’

  My heart stills.

  Instinctively, I pull Lexi back close because she’s sobbing again and I think that if I had Elisa right here, right now, I would carve her up with some of my ultra-lethal kitchen knives to make her understand the damage she is doing to my beautiful daughter. How can I undo this?

  My baby in in pain and all because of a woman who clearly can’t have a relationship with anyone except herself. Lexi was so determined to have some sort of rapport or friendship or something with Elisa, and now Elisa has just destroyed it all.

  If only she’d told us this. Let Dan and I tell Lexi: let Lexi be ready for it.

  What do I do next? I just don’t know.

  And then Mildred speaks up.

  What do you mean you don’t know what to do next? You’re a mother, a good mother. Cop on to yourself. You know how to handle this.

  It’s slightly startling to have my own inner voice stop bashing me but I realise that Mildred’s voice is giving me courage – I do know what to do. I am a good mother. I have raised this beautiful child for twelve years, have given her huge love, care, courage, self-belief – everything I can think of. I have two other wonderful children for whom I’ve done the same, even if Teddy is on the way to breaking me.

  Dan and I have built a family.

  We manage. And I always know what to do. I sit up a little bit straighter.

  ‘Now, darling,’ I say, ultra calm as if we are discussing what to have for dinner. ‘That’s lovely for Elisa that she’s going to have a baby . . .’

  ‘But, but, but . . .’ sobs Lexi ‘I’m, like I’m her baby.’

  She says the words as if she’s been afraid to say them to me before.