She was a little shit, was she?
She’d knocked on her mother’s door to demand that her school skirt be taken up, because no one wore it this long, because really was she trying to humiliate her or what? And she saw from all the smudged mascara that her mother had already been crying, and wow she cried often, wow she didn’t stop; you’d think a normal human being would have dried up by now. ‘Give me some privacy,’ Vivienne had said, or something like that, and from such small beginnings insults escalated. She hadn’t realised parents wanted privacy. It did not seem reasonable that they should want it or get it, and she hadn’t thought that her mother might have bigger things on her mind than the length of her daughter’s skirt. ‘Self-absorbed.’ ‘Selfish.’ ‘You can be a perfect little shit, can’t you?’ ‘Like father like daughter, the world revolves around you!’ So Freya wiped away her own tears, fresh-sprung, hot, and she nuked her. ‘At least I’m not a miserable worthless slutbag. At least I don’t go around fucking ugly old men just because they have stackload of money.’ Quite good. Nice rhythm. And after the tantrum there was silence, many hours of silence, and then her mother asked her how she had known, so she told her: I saw you kissing that man in that bar on New Year’s Day. I saw you through the window. That guy Bob or Rob and the two of you drinking champagne. I was so ashamed. I wish most days you weren’t my mother.
‘To be cynical is a sin.’ That’s what the priest said at church that one time she went, and she’d only gone because she thought God, on the off chance He existed, might see fit to make her mother visit her, actually care. She never meant to push her away forever. Always meant those words to be a nudge rather than a shove. A little nudge, a form of contact, intimacy inviting a response. And her father could have actually gone and got her mother if he wanted. He could have taken control at any number of moments. He could have done the grown-up thing. He could have actually tracked her down and shaken her and said listen, what are you doing, spend some time with your daughter and don’t let the gap grow, or he could have shaken Freya and said the same. But he didn’t like confrontation, did he?
Sarah lost her mum to cancer six years ago. People saw how bad that was and granted a special privilege of grief. But if your mum runs off with someone with a three-letter name — a name that happens to be the most stupid palindrome ever — she’s a slut and your life’s a Carry On film. People want to hear your gripes for a week at most, a quick summary of the dirtier details. After that, something changes in their voices and you realise you’re being a burden. You’ve lost her but people don’t treat it as a loss. On a scale stretching from everyday annoyance right up to Death, it lands closer to mislaid house keys than cancer. And time passes and Friday is Saturday, and Saturday is Sunday, and Sunday night is the need to make your sandwich for school. And you just have to look at your tiny allotment of trouble, so small compared to that owned by others, and you have to say, ‘All right, no worries, I’ll take it, it’s mine.’ You have to acknowledge it’s nowhere near a death even though she is gone, fully gone. And you remember the things she used to say to you when you were small and she thought you were asleep, the room pitch black and she would begin talking and talking, her breath against your hair and she would go on and on, softly chattering for minutes and minutes, and you loved it, you felt all the life in her running into you, the sugar rush of her feelings and thoughts. She existed to whisper into your ear.
At Columbia she’d watched the cheerleaders at the football games and thought how shiny they were, how gloriously unreal. Cheering and cheered. Leading and led. Sexy and giving off the air of having, all the time, sex. Throwing each other up into the air in huge flirtatious twirls and arcing back down with a reckless grace. The furrows of their skirts, the pleats and tucks. The silence between her father’s snores. The gap between the whistle-breaths and the great inward slurps. Was he, did he, if. A daughter never responding to these lonely little postcards.
‘You can reach me on this number if you want.’ A line sometimes included and always ignored. Because how could a conversation like that happen? Like you’d say Hello, what did you have for breakfast today, Mum? How’s the last half-decade been? The question on her mind more and more these last few weeks was how to know when she was choosing a thing as opposed to it being chosen for her.
The fire crackled and wheezed and her father’s head moved forward. He rubbed his face as he looked at his watch and with great feeling he said, ‘Fuck.’ She pretended to be asleep.
VIII
HE ASKED LENA what she thought the barman did in his spare time.
The reply came quickly: ‘Child killer, probably.’
He blinked.
‘Or,’ Lena added, ‘a collector of model aircraft. Tiny B-52s, let’s say. Or maybe, if you really want to know, a Harrier Jump Jet. All laid out on his dining table, next to his sticky stamp collection.’
‘All stamps are sticky, I’d chance.’
‘His in particular,’ she said.
‘Well. Jump Jets.’ He found he was looking at the blue frill of her bra strap. Felt his face gathering heat as he glanced away. After a pause she adjusted the shoulder of her dress and said her father had been with the armed forces. A vicar for a while in the British Army. The family had lived in north Devon.
‘Man of the Church,’ Dan said, though the word on his mind was Anglican.
‘I think he probably would have preferred the RAF. The passion was planes but his eyes weren’t good enough, see. He died last year. Don’t ask if we were close.’
‘I won’t.’
‘Everyone asks, that’s all. It’s the idea that it hurts more if you were close.’
‘Not true?’
She shrugged. ‘It hurts just the same either way. It hurts the same as it’s worth.’ She looked to the wall and drank a good amount of wine. ‘By the way, I’ve strong views on nothing.’
‘Is your ma alive?’
‘Oh,’ Lena said. ‘Always there with an answer. Though like a deaf woman it’s rarely an answer to what you’ve asked.’
He laughed. ‘I know the feeling.’
‘Originally from Poland. She was my father’s cleaner, the vicar’s cleaner.’
‘A scandal.’
‘Not a big one, though, by the standards of the Church.’
‘True,’ he said.
They drank and looked around.
‘You know,’ he said. ‘I had that Latin waiter down as a tango dancer rather than a child killer.’
‘Did you?’
‘I had him down as a tango dancer whose father had a stake in a — a hair gel factory. That’s how he got the ticket to Ireland. His father cashed in some of those …’
‘Dividends?’
‘Know your finances, do you?’
‘And you probably know your knitting,’ she said. ‘It’s almost like we live in the twentieth century.’
‘I didn’t mean —’
‘Fuck off.’
‘Fuck you too, Lena.’
She smiled and drank.
The conversations that went on around them were impossibly banal to his ears. A feature of most nice parts of town was that people spent a lot of time discussing the fact that the nice parts of town weren’t as nice as they once were. The other drinkers gave off an air of negativity, snobbery, paid-down mortgages and — while he couldn’t say any of them looked exactly unkind — Lena was the one that mattered.
Which aspect of her life to probe? They looked at each other. He imagined her past. It contained a year or two of trailing wildly through Europe, modelling for mail-order catalogues, being cornered by a prick in a well-lit Paris attic, sleeping on the streets of Rome and then building a new hard shell for herself here. It seemed a shame in a way to discover what was true.