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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
'Breathless, exciting debut.' SUNDAY TIMES, Best new crime books of 2022 'Totally engrossing.' JO BRAND 'Beautifully observed.' DAILY MAIL 'A must read.' SOPHIE HANNAH, author of HAVEN'T THEY GROWN A compelling, darkly amusing debut.' CD MAJOR, author of THE OTHER GIRL 'Liz Webb creates a dark tangled web in The Daughter.' The Irish Independent _______________ FAMILIES CAN BE MURDER I lean in and whisper the question I have never let myself utter in twenty-three years. "Dad, did you murder Mum?" Hannah Davidson has a dementia-stricken father, an estranged TV star brother, and a mother whose suspicious death opened up fault lines beneath the surface of their ordinary family life. Hannah is disturbed by the uncanny resemblance she now has to her glamorous mother. She begins to exploit this arresting likeness to force the truth into the light, but in doing so is propelled into a fatal standoff she could never have foreseen.
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THE DAUGHTER
LIZ WEBB
For Andy and Archie
CONTENTS
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
Genesis 2:16–17
CHAPTER ONE
Normal people don’t eat raw quince. But I sink my teeth into the smooth skin of a fat yellow specimen, and the astringency of the hard pulp floods my mouth, making me grimace. I plucked this one from the tree in Dad’s front garden at around 2 a.m. last night, as I followed his stretcher to the ambulance. It’s been touch and go, but Dad’s stable this morning, dozing in his high, precisely made hospital bed. The view’s spectacular up here on the ninth floor of University College Hospital, but Dad’s oblivious. I lean my forehead on the big wrap-around corner window and fog it with a wet circle of quince spittle.
‘Where’s Feynman?’ Dad says suddenly.
I plaster on a smile and turn to face him.
‘He’s at your house,’ I say.
‘Have you walked him?’
‘Yes, I walked him round the block this morning.’
Dad nods.
I lift a scratched plastic cup from Dad’s untouched lunch tray and position the bendy straw by his mouth.
‘Where’s Feynman?’ Dad repeats.
‘He’s dead,’ I mumble.
‘When did he die?’
‘Twenty-three years ago.’
Dad nods again.
As I replace the cup on the easy-wipe table over the bed, I glance across at the motionless old man in the bed opposite and the perspiring woman sitting beside him, sheathed in thick woolly tights, despite it being mild for September.
‘Where’s Feynman?’ Dad repeats, yet again.
‘Who’s Feynman?’ I snap.
‘Our dog!’
‘I’ve never heard of him.’
With this last exchange, I see panic in Dad’s watery eyes. Christ. So what if we’ve had this same conversation ten times this morning. My brittle, bruised Dad still engages for the fifteen seconds that these conversations take place. Swiping my arm across my face leaves a watery snail’s trail of my tears.
Feynman was a gorgeous golden Labrador that my brother Reece and I had when we were growing up. He was named after Dad’s hero, the jovial quantum physicist Richard Feynman. Both Feynmans are long dead. Both coincidentally succumbing to kidney failure. Feynman the physicist died in 1988, his final words being that dying was boring. Watching Dad’s disintegration over the last six months since I moved in with him, I can only agree wholeheartedly. For me anyway. Given Dad’s goldfish mind, he’s either completely unaware of his impending death or it comes as a horrible shock daily. I really hope it’s the former. Reece, always my opposite, would hope for the latter.
Feynman the dog died in 1996, as a result of canine kidney failure. This was precipitated, according to our bastard of a vet, by ‘poor oral hygiene’, despite my religious commitment to brushing his drool-coated teeth. After Feynman was peacefully put to sleep by the vet, we held a family funeral in the garden. I wore one of the many black knee-length T-shirts I sported at fourteen as I threw Feynman’s favourite (and clearly redundant) teeth-cleaning chew toy into the grave. Reece, dashing in the new designer suit that Mum had recently got him for his eighteenth, threw in a Snoop Dogg album. Dad, his hands plunged into his maroon cardigan’s pockets, wept at the wrenching loss of his beloved companion. And my beautiful mum, stunning in a tight black dress, leant on Dad’s shoulder for balance, as her vertiginous, red-soled stilettos sank into the grass. It all felt so traumatic at the time – but then I had no idea of the jamboree of hatred and accusations that would, just three weeks later, constitute Mum’s funeral.
‘How he doing?’ calls Woolly Tights woman from the other side of the pristine ward, indicating Dad.
‘M-mm,’ I grunt, with a shake of my head, hoping that if I don’t make eye contact, she’ll leave me alone. Just my luck that Dad’s bed is opposite the only other bed, on this fully occupied eight-bed ward, to have a visitor.
‘Your dad?’ she enquires.
‘Mmm.’
‘Dementia?’
‘Mmm.’
‘Just like my dad,’ she says, gesturing to hers. She speaks in a heavy accent I can’t place. Her dad is unresponsive, lying under a non-regulation bedspread of yellow, green and red stripes, which looks garishly out of place alongside the other seven blue-blanketed beds.
How has my vibrant, athletic dad joined this male cloister of reverie?
‘Is terrible thing, dementia,’ she continues, ‘cuts people off.’
‘Mmm.’
How many ‘mmm’s will it take to cut her off?
She’d be horrified if I blurted out that dementia is not in fact all bad. But it does have one dark upside for Dad: he doesn’t remember much of the last twenty-three years. He’s often time-travelling back to when Mum was still alive, when I collected interesting pebbles, not nervous tics, and when Reece only called Dad deranged for saying Spurs could win the league.
Anyway, Dad’s got bigger problems. When the paramedics arrived at his house last night, he was spreadeagled at the bottom of the stairs, barely breathing, his left arm bent under him at an unnatural angle. This morning, I was told that he’s snapped his collarbone, but he’s so old they’ll just let it fuse wonky; also that it’s too soon to tell if his present confusion is concussion or just his regular dementia; and worst of all, though nothing to do with the fall, his doctor was surprised that, as his carer, I was unaware of Dad’s advanced prostate cancer. It’s beyond hope of treatment, but they’ve put him on morphine as they think he’s in considerable pain.
‘Nice pear?’ enquires Woolly Tights, gesturing at the quince I’m munching. She’s got the same pointy nose as her unresponsive dad. They’re like Mr Pointy Nose and Miss Pointy Nose in a set of Happy Families cards. I’m not part of a recognisable family set. I’ve inherited Dad’s once-brown hair, but not his original fine features or his tight cyclist’s body. I’ve never looked like either of my parents – not my handsome, wiry dad, nor my beautiful, willowy mum – although the pressure of hiding my shameful secrets this year has jettisoned more than half my body weight, and I’m occasionally disconcerted to catch Mum in my silhouette in a shiny shop window.
‘The pear?’ Woolly Tights repeats, her little white boots squeaking on the lino as she swivels towards me. ‘Is juicy? I get all my fruit at market. To feel before I buy.’
‘Mmm,’ I respond.
‘Got any more?’ she asks, still upbeat despite my wall of ‘mmm’s.
‘M-umm,’ I say, shaking my head.
I’ve got four more in my bag, but why make her day even worse. These aren’t sweet, juicy pears; these are hard, nasty quinces. Quince is usually only eaten cooked. In gooey pink jam, which no one in their right mind would choose if strawberry, raspberry or any-bloody-berry was available as an alternative. Raw quince is even more disgusting. And this is especially unpalatable as it’s early season. But I’ve been impatiently watching these growing in Dad’s front garden over the last six months, desperate for them to ripen as they remind me so much of Mum. She was a terrible cook, but every autumn she would announce ‘the crops are in!’, theatrically wrap a scarf around her head and make a big pantomime of ‘harvesting’ our quince with a wicker basket. Then she’d stack them carefully for a few weeks to mellow, constantly checking, like they were fragile treasure, and finally, wearing a ridiculous frilly apron and singing along to the radio, she’d spend hours boiling them with mountains of sugar to make vats of jam.
I’ve no desire to produce that slimy concoction but to connect with my vibrant, larger-than-life mum I relish eating this quince raw. It makes me feel – here – in this moment: the taut skin splitting under my front teeth; the granular flesh crumbling as it rolls around my mouth like cement in a mixer; the bitter juice stinging my cracked lips and searing my dry throat. I should market this experience as a shortcut to that mindfulness crap.
‘Hen,’ Dad mumbles as he flails his right hand out, banging the table, spilling the water and sending shrivelled peas in all directions.
‘Careful, Dad. No hens here, just me,’ I say as I roll the table further down the bed so he doesn’t hurt himself.
‘Een,’ he continues, staring at me intently.
‘I don’t understand, Dad. What are you saying?’ I lean in, inhaling soap and gravy.
‘Jen.’
Oh. This is new. I guess my weight loss has confused his poor vision.
‘No, Dad, I’m not Mum. I’m Hannah. Han-nah.’
‘Sorry,’ he rasps.
‘It’s OK, you don’t need to—’
‘I’m so sorry, Jen,’ he says, reaching for me. I jerk away, unnerved that he’s touching me as if I’m Mum. But as a loosened tendril of my hair flicks across my face, I realise it’s the longest it’s ever been. Mum’s length. I had a short brown bob as a child, razored it army-short after Mum’s death and then rattled through shaved, permed, green, blue and spiky tiger stripes as I tried to get a grip on my spiralling life with drastic rebranding. But since embracing the course of least resistance, I’ve got a brown version of Mum’s long blonde hair. Combined with my pronounced weight loss, it’s clearly working like a Mento sweet dropping into the Diet Coke of Dad’s mind, foaming out a splurge of locked-in memories.
‘Sorry for what?’ I murmur. Flattered that Dad could possibly mistake nervous, twitchy me for my confident, charismatic mum, I momentarily indulge the outlandish idea and my usually hunched stance softens into her loose-limbed ease. Moving like her, whilst simultaneously inhaling the exotic scent of quince coming from my bag, sparks an intense visceral memory of Mum feeding Dad some of her quince jam with one of her little ornate crested spoons. He’d laughed and inadvertently spat some out, making her throw back her head, her long blonde hair flying out and her high-pitched laugh exploding out of her, sounding like a yelping fox. Reece and I had rolled our eyes at her antics, but she’d kept on spooning the jam into our spluttering dad like she was a busty, disapproving matron doling out medicine. Soon all of us were crying with laughter, clutching ourselves and begging her to stop.
I miss her antics. Miss the way she ignited a room. Miss who I used to be around her. Time hasn’t healed me. It’s just hardened me.
‘Aaagh,’ cries Dad. His thin lips part, his tiny pupils expand into black counters, and the trace of colour in his cheeks washes away to grey clamminess.
I gently pat his good shoulder, feeling his birdlike frame under his worn striped pyjamas.
‘It’s OK, Dad, everything’s OK.’
He breaks into a broad smile.
Except it isn’t a smile.
It’s a grimace. His thin skin stretches taut around his open mouth; his yellow teeth bare; his tongue sticks out, pointy and reptilian.
Thoughts of Mum have induced a heart attack.
‘Help, please help us,’ I shout.
But as I step away, his right arm shoots out and he grabs my upper arm with uncanny force. His ragged fingernails scratch me as he lurches up, spittle dripping down his chin, and as he rises, I’m simultaneously yanked towards him and our foreheads clash. The searing pain makes me lose my footing, and I collapse onto the bed, jarring my elbows. I try to right myself, but Dad’s pushing down on me, his nails ripping into my arm.
‘Jen,’ he pleads.
‘Stop it, Dad,’ I beg, struggling to stand and twisting to try to loosen his grasp.
‘Are you OK?’ calls Woolly Tights, rising from her seat in alarm.
‘Get help,’ I call and she rushes down the ward.
As I stand, I lift Dad with me, forcing my fingers under his, trying not to hurt him, but he scrabbles them back on.
‘I’m so sorry, Jen,’ he whispers, his lips brushing my ear, his sour breath on my neck. ‘I didn’t mean to.’ He twists his head so I’m eyeball to eyeball with his wide, staring eyes.
‘Didn’t mean to what?’ I cry, still scrabbling to loosen his rigid grip.
‘To—’
But before he can say another word, I finally succeed in unlatching all his fingers simultaneously and he collapses onto the bed. I stagger back, struggling for breath and clutching my throbbing arm, blood oozing between my fingers.
‘I’m Hannah, Dad,’ I sob, ‘I’m your daughter. Mum’s … not here.’
Woolly Tights is shouting in the distance.
Dad’s lying motionless across the bed, staring up at the ceiling, as if the last minute never happened.
But it did.
He thought he was talking to Mum and he begged for her forgiveness. That could be forgiveness for anything – for not putting the bins out, an argument, even an affair – but the rigid dam in my mind is cracking and memories are cascading through the crumbling barricades: looking at Dad’s scrawny legs, I remember when they were muscular and fast; staring at his mottled gnarled hands, I remember them broad and powerful; and raising my tear-hazed sight to the purple vein snaking across his right temple, I remember it livid and pulsing, at moments of exertion – or anger.
I lean in and whisper the question I have never let myself utter in twenty-three years.
‘Dad, did you murder Mum?’
CHAPTER TWO
‘Hannah Davidson?’ says a sharp voice behind me.
‘Yes?’ I say, twisting round. It’s a slim, middle-aged woman with a blonde bob and that not-there-but-there make-up sheening her face. Woolly Tights must have called her to help me. But she doesn’t look like a nurse – with her pencil skirt and her beige silky shirt that seems formal, but is casually sexy in the way it lolls across her chest. Perhaps she’s a consultant.
‘Thank you, but he’s fine now,’ I say, trying to slow my breathing.
‘Could I have a word, Ms Davidson?’ Her eyes flick to Dad lying half off the bed.
‘We’re OK, honestly,’ I say, settling Dad back onto his pillows. How much of that did she see?
‘I need to talk to you in private,’ she continues, her eyes darting to my bleeding arm. ‘Please could you follow me.’ Not a question – an order.
‘But why?’
She gives a half-smile, like a baby pooing. ‘This way,’ she says, walking off.
I’m thirty-seven, but feel like a kid called by the headmistress. I pull on my shapeless grey sweatshirt to cover my arm, hitch up my cartoonishly loose jeans and shove my feet into my trainers, not getting the heels fully in, so that I have to shuffle awkwardly after her clicking beige shoes.
I glance back at poor Dad. Why did I suddenly doubt him? He’s already asleep on his hill of pillows, looking like a warped version of ‘The Princess and the Pea’. Unlike that fragile princess, I have no pea-of-doubt bruising me. Dad’s befuddled sorry to ‘Mum’ momentarily sparked my hungover brain to spiral, but I know Dad’s innocent – every cell, every atom, every particle in me thrums with certainty.
Ms Beige-heels has entered the small room by the nurses’ station. I clocked it before – a ‘bad news’ room. Oh God, she is a consultant – with awful news. It’s Friday the thirteenth: of course it’s happening today. I follow her into the scrupulously tidy little room. She sits down at the desk.
‘Take a seat,’ she says briskly, gesturing to a grey plastic chair. The door has swung in behind us, but she reaches over and pulls it firmly to engage the latch.
‘So, your father is Philip Davidson?’
I nod. This is it. And it’s not the dying-lite Dad’s been doing recently. This is the full-fat version. Now Dad and his kind brown eyes, his awkward glancing kisses, and the way he dances exuberantly, making castanet motions, will all be burnt in a box. Like Mum. Everything around me is very defined: the screen and keyboard precisely perpendicular; the zigzag of the white anglepoise light; the grooves between the durable grey carpet tiles. This is the final moment before no going back. Five, four, three—
‘So, Ms Davidson, in the case of an injury like your father’s, when concerns are raised—’
I jerk my head up. ‘What?’
Her face is a mask of non-reaction.
‘—it is hospital protocol to consider the domestic situation. The paramedics who accompanied your father noted that you seemed’ – she checks her notes – ‘confused.’ Her matt-beige lips part slightly as she tilts her head.
‘Me? No.’
‘Confused and’ – she glances down – ‘disorientated.’
‘Well, it was the middle of the night, so I guess I was a bit spaced.’
She scribbles in her file with her glossy maroon fountain pen. I shift on my hard seat.
‘And it says here you smelt of alcohol?’
‘No! Well, I’d had a few drinks earlier.’
She scribbles.
‘But that’s not illegal.’ My voice is too loud.
‘And you told the paramedics that you “found” your father at the base of the stairs.’
I cough and thump my chest.
‘Would you like some water?’
I nod and she pours me a glass. I gulp it down and take a breath.
‘I didn’t “find” my father – I found him. At the bottom of the stairs. Where he’d fallen.’ Wakey, wakey, Hannah, this is formal, with real consequences.
‘It’s hospital policy to follow up domestic injuries, if a flag is raised,’ she says, arching a stylishly plucked eyebrow, ‘in order to rule out elder abuse. I’m sure you understand that protocols must be followed.’
I nod, trying not to look bug-eyed with panic.
‘But I’m here to consider both the safety of the patient and the needs of the carer. Could you explain your father’s living situation?’
Boy, she’s got this ‘not engaging’ thing down to a tee. But maybe she’s right to talk to me. Perhaps my chaos has bled into Dad’s real world. Certainly, none of this would have happened if good old Reece had been in charge – and painful though thinking of him is, to combat this beige threat, I try to summon Reece’s swagger.
‘I live with my dad at the moment,’ I say slowly. Since moving back to London, away from my Brighton doctor’s prescriptions of antidepressants, my mind spirals at the best of times but under stress like this I’m on a roller coaster. So, remembering Reece teaching me to combat carsickness by focusing on a spot in the distance, I stare at two indents in the grey tiled carpet. ‘His health has declined gradually and I’d arranged carers for the last year but he was struggling – remembering stuff, getting about, looking after himself.’
‘U-huum,’ she says, giving me enough ‘time to explain’ slash ‘rope to hang myself with’.
Reece said he got into Cambridge with eye contact and selling himself, so I look straight at her and fillet my recent life story to present the best cut.
‘Dad needed me. So six months ago I gave up my home in Brighton, left my job and moved in full-time to care for him,’ I say, blinking past my glaring omissions. ‘I know Dad’s been avoiding the doctor, but he kept saying everything was OK. I can’t believe I didn’t know about the prostate cancer.’
‘So, talk me through exactly what happened last night.’
‘Well, it was all the usual, we went up at the usual time, he had water by the bed, had a commode and he always calls me if he needs anything. I sleep directly above him and keep all the doors open. He’s never wandered at night before – I have no idea why he did last night.’
She nods, then I catch her eyes flicking to her watch. She wants to get on. ‘Believable detail,’ Reece whispered to me as we blamed our dog Feynman for eating the end of the banana cake Dad had just made.
‘Dad probably fell over the cat,’ I say. ‘He’s got this ancient cat called Schro, who literally sticks himself to your legs every step you take – I’ve nearly fallen over him loads of times.’
She half-smiles. Is the beige tide turning?
‘I came downstairs to get some water in the middle of the night and found Dad at the bottom of the stairs – I guess I was pretty stressed when the paramedics got there, I thought he was dead.’ Reece cried on cue on finding Juliet’s dead body in his sixth-form Romeo and Juliet, by plucking nose hair. As Ms Beige looks down, I swiftly pincer my nails and rip. Christ.
‘Would you like a tissue?’ Ms Beige asks with concern as she looks up, handing me a nearby box.
‘Thanks.’ What’s wrong with me, that I’m having to injure myself to evoke emotions I actually feel?
‘It can be hard adjusting to the role of carer,’ she says. ‘You should seek advice from our care team – if your father returns home.’
If?
‘I can give you leaflets about the care that’s available.’
‘Thanks.’ The energy has definitely tilted. I’m forms and hassle for her if she stays on the attack. I’ll be out of here soon.
‘Do you have any family,’ she asks, ‘siblings?’
‘No.’ I grip the metal edge of the chair.
‘Oh?’ she says, tilting her head as frown lines bunch the flaky beige patch of skin between her eyes. Can she check this?
‘Oh, yes, sorry,’ I say, burping out a strangled laugh, ‘I do technically have a brother, as in, I have a brother – but, we’re not close.’ Understatement of the millennium.
‘It’s a lot to handle alone. Surely your brother would help out in the circumstances?’
‘I’m sure he would.’ Ha.
‘If your dad returns home, he’ll require round-the-clock care. And eventually—’ We both pause, solemnly being adults, silently noting the unsaid imminent eventuality. ‘I see nobody’s taken over power of attorney?’ she says, checking her notes. ‘The hospital didn’t need permission for emergency treatment last night, but there’ll be more decisions coming up about’ – she does her momentary pause for effect again and I want to cuff the back of her head to knock out the words – ‘whether to intervene medically in the future. Given his rapidly declining health, it would be prudent for you and your brother to organise that.’
She passes me a folded leaflet headed ‘Power of Attorney’ above a photo of a woman smiling down at her aged relative as she passes him a cup of tea, but with a glint in her eye as if to say: ‘Sip that tea carefully, cos now I make all your medical and financial decisions and if you choke, I’m letting you snuff it in front of me to get to your cash’.
‘You should talk to your brother.’
Haven’t seen him in the flesh for fifteen years.
‘Your other family.’
Nope.
‘And your wider social circle.’
Social what?
‘People say “it takes a village to raise a child”, but it also takes a village to help people die.’
But what if your dad’s the witch who’s been ejected from the village?
‘You don’t have to face this alone, you know. Most people are fundamentally well meaning.’
Are they really! Well lucky-plucky-you to have had a life that lets you state that as a fact.
‘Do you have a partner who can help you?’
‘Oh yes,’ lie,‘and friends,’ lie, ‘honestly I’m fine,’ lie. ‘I need to reach out more I guess.’ Ugh.
She smiles. My words seem to be the right shapes for the holes in her block of expectation.
‘And you intend to stay at your father’s?’
‘Of course.’ Where else can I go, after the mess I’ve made of my life. ‘For as long as – he needs me.’
We make eye contact. Fuck these knowing looks. I’m a child, I want to scream, can’t you see I’m faking all this adult composure. How are you going along with me? But the bubble of her spirit level has centred itself. She can tick her box, submit her file and have done with me.
‘OK,’ she says after a final scribble. ‘Given that there’ve been no prior incidents and you seem to have an awareness of your situation, I won’t be escalating as long as there are no further concerns.’
‘There won’t be. Honestly. This has been a wake-up call for me to seek more help,’ I say with fake-humble warmth.
We shake hands.
I hope she’s slammed by a speeding lorry as she totters too slowly across the road on those beige heels.
I take the lift down to the hospital shop, where I buy a multipack of breath-disguising extra-strong mints.
CHAPTER THREE
‘And up we pop.’
As I walk back to him, Dad’s being enthusiastically encouraged out of bed by a young nurse with short black pigtails, whose badge reads ‘Valeria’. She’s got the covers back and is lifting his legs to the floor.
‘We’re doing very well, Mr Davidson,’ she trills.
I feel I should do something, but I just watch helplessly, like they’re enacting a film: Valeria flourishes her hand with the enthusiasm of a Russian inviting their lover for a sleigh ride, but Dad stares beyond her like Dr Zhivago inscrutably assessing the snowy Russian hills. Then they channel hop to Laurel and Hardy: she pulls him up to sitting, the instant she lets go he falls back flailing theatrically, and she makes a ‘doh’ face; and again: she pulls him up, lets go, he falls back, ‘doh’; and again. Final channel hop to a Bergman film: she sighs and looks at the wall, ignoring Dad who has slumped face down on the bed, his skinny nakedness visible through the back of the loosely tied gown, a crusty smear of shit dried on his left thigh. Jesus.
‘We’ll try again later,’ she says brightly, helping him back into bed, then striding off. The white plastic squeaks as I settle into the high-backed patient chair, chewing my extra-strong mints, crumbling the nose-clearing white chalk two at a time. Dad mistaking me for Mum makes me feel like she’s hovering inside me, looking at him through me – tutting that he’s let himself go, that his hair’s too long and straggly and that he needs to shave those uneven white hairs on his chin. Mum adored clothes and preening and she was always buying natty new stuff for Dad and fussing with him. Since her death, I doubt he’s bought a single new piece of clothing, he’s completely avoided the barber and cut his own hair, and he’s never again had one of those professional wet shaves that he used to love.
‘All right, Dad?’
He’s looking at me, but who is he seeing? His freaky new response to me as if I were Mum was so unnerving. Surely it was just a singular synaptic malfunction? I don’t think Dad’s ever confused us before, but we’ve been coexisting in such a blur. I’ve watched helplessly as he’s slipped further and further away from the present these past six interminable months, since I moved back in with him, into what was once our family home. When we were a family. Since he’d only eat small meals like spaghetti rings or cereal, I’d given up serving much else. I tried to get him to walk, but he refused point blank. I tried to get him to the doctor but he said he was fine, never told me about any pain. I’d just gone along with it all, drinking to blank off. I’m a joke, not in any way a fit adult for this responsibility. I’m so far out of my depth with my lovely, time-travelling, shit-stained, dying dad. I am exhausted by what a pathetic cliché I’ve become, my anger at Ms Beige being so obviously my own fear and panic reflected outwards. She’s right. I do need help. But I don’t know anyone in London, haven’t done for years.
Except for Reece.
These last six months, I’ve debated whether to make contact with him again, so he could see Dad before he dies. Perhaps Reece’s disdain for Dad might have dulled by now, I thought, as I kidded myself that I could orchestrate a Netflix-worthy deathbed reconciliation. At the very least, I reckoned I would have to get him to the funeral so that we will have stood side by side at both parental incinerations. But I’ve dithered and avoided and obliterated the thought in alcohol and endless Netflix and Amazon Prime.
Is it finally time to face him?
There is the slight problem that I don’t have Reece’s phone number, email or address. I’ve had no way of contacting him for fifteen years. When my curiosity did occasionally get the better of me, I easily discovered what he was doing via Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, the press, or fan sites – because my brother, who I called Reece Davidson for fourteen years, is in fact the actor Ryan Patterson. So far, he hasn’t been famous enough for anyone to join the dots. He changed his name by deed poll at university, telling me it was a better stage name, but I knew he wanted to reinvent himself, to throw off any connection with our infamous family. I know his breakfast routine (hot water with lemon, run, green protein juice), his political beliefs (Labour centrist) and the part of his body he likes least (hairy feet), but I don’t actually know him any more. He has an ever-expanding Wikipedia page detailing his career. Normally I’m annoyed by the omission of a personal tab – the absence of all those juicy details of cheating, failed marriages, bankruptcy and bizarre crimes – but in Reece’s case, I’m relieved.
But then just after I moved in with Dad, I was at the supermarket till, waiting to pay for our cereals and spaghetti rings, when I registered a side panel on the front of the newspaper in the rack before me, with Reece’s photo. The poisonous rag was serialising some puff-piece autobiography he’d written about how wonderful it was to be him, calling it ‘Solving Me’, like he was some fascinating puzzle. I already had a deep loathing for the tabloids after how they treated us, and now Reece was publishing his celeb drivel in the newspaper that had skewered Dad most grotesquely as a murderer. I didn’t waste my money and vowed to avoid all media references to him, which wasn’t hard as Dad and I descended into our insular domestic routine. But while I could block out the present ‘Ryan’, I always have the past Reece rolling around my mind, however much I drink.
I grew up alongside him for the first fourteen years of my life in a regular boring family. Then Mum was murdered on Friday 4th October 1996, the day before Reece, four years older than me, was due to leave to take up his place at Cambridge. In the following weeks, Reece and I morphed from emotionally conjoined siblings – to strangers. I knew that my lovely dad had nothing to do with Mum’s death. Reece, primed by his already tense relationship with Dad and pumped up by teenage hormones and seismic grief for his beloved mum, had his thoughts fatally skewed by the outlandish press accusations about Dad. He decided that he ‘knew’ Dad was guilty. Neither of us could prove our certainty. Then, two weeks later, the day after Mum’s funeral, Reece left for university. And never came home or spoke to Dad again.
Reece (I can’t call him Ryan, cos that’s not his name and it makes him sound like an American secret service agent, bodyguard to the President) kept in occasional contact with me as I watched his professional rise: he was in the Cambridge Footlights (the good-looking butt of the jokes of a group of future comedy stars); he did regional theatre (classics, farces, edgy new writing); he worked for a spell at the RSC (with a highly revered Iago in an Othello set on an Israeli army base); he landed a small role in Emmerdale (young farmer trying to find a wife), and a sidekick role in an edgy British film that did unexpectedly well on Netflix release (undercover policeman seducing eco-terrorists). His increasing fame had me worried.
Meanwhile, I sleepwalked through four years of barrel-scraping GCSEs and thin-ice-skating A levels, going up three dress sizes as I blanked my grief and Reece’s accusations with Tunnock’s Teacakes, Wagon Wheels, Pop-Tarts, Yoyos and Iced Gems, burning acrid holes in my clothes by sitting too close to fires as I could never get warm enough, however thick the layer of flesh I encased myself in. I was endlessly tortured on the rack of my family – on one end was my destroyed dad who I knew was innocent, and on the other, my belligerent brother, vehement that Dad was guilty. With one person I loved murdered and the other two people I loved hating each other, it became excruciating to think, to feel, to even function. I was a seriously fucked-up Goldilocks: Mother Bear was dead and Baby Bear hated Daddy Bear – nothing could feel ‘just right’ ever again.
I applied to the University of Brighton because Mum and Dad had honeymooned there, and I thought I might be able to ‘find myself’ in a different place. Of course, I couldn’t escape being me, but there I did discover that alcohol was an infinitely more efficient brain-wipe than food. Not only did it erase pain, it actively promoted pleasure, albeit with a pesky hangover payback, rendering study laughably pointless and alienating my so-called friends. I dropped out in my first year, but stayed on in Brighton to continue my early morning swims round the pier in the rough sea, revelling in the peace of the freezing, life-threatening buffeting. I topped off the anaesthesia of food, alcohol and dangerous swimming with a busy job single-handedly running a stationery shop in The Lanes called ‘Write to Life’, living in the low-ceilinged bedsit above, and got into a safe routine: six days a week busy at the shop, drinking slowly in the evenings, one day a week blind drunk. I was efficient and numb. It felt safe, but infinitely fragile. I could not let my pattern be disturbed, except for one day a month when I visited Dad in London in the dusty memory-laden ‘house that stood still’. As a tidiness freak, I was appalled, but for Dad to change anything would have been for him to move on without Mum.
‘You’re looking so well,’ Dad would say during my visits, my cheeks flushed from vomiting outside the front door.
‘Any news of Reece?’ he’d ask coyly as if as a vague afterthought; but I saw the pathetic hope in his eyes.
‘He’s good, Dad, just very busy.’
And he would nod, his eyes sparking at the thought of his worthless prodigal son. What an inexplicably dumb parable that is – joy at the return of the deadbeat sibling and ignoring the stay-at-home patsy. But Dad never got to kill the fatted calf for Reece, because he never came home, rigid in his certainty of Dad’s guilt. But I knew, riven through me like a message in a stick of Brighton rock, that my lovely dad was innocent.
Reece and I kept up a tenuous link for the first eight years after Mum’s death: the odd meet-up (not talking about Dad), the occasional phone call (short with long pauses), texts on birthdays (mine and Mum’s, never Dad’s) and Christmas presents (his shop-wrapped with a generic message in a generic card). Our meetings got more and more spaced out, with me endlessly analysing the delicate power play between us.
Reece gained a bit of a cult following for his supporting role in the ITV series Man On, about a League Two football team with dreams of the Premier League. He was the team physio, playing his charming athletic self: rushing onto the pitch to resuscitate a young player having a cardiac arrest; attending a gay club with a player too scared to come out; helping an older player accept the end of his career and transition into TV punditry. The first series had just aired when I saw him for the very last time, fifteen years ago. Meeting Reece was always hard: with each year I became fatter, sadder and more reclusive, whereas, as if we were on a cosmic see-saw, he become slimmer, happier and more famous.
I hated breaking out of my safe marble-run existence, but Reece ‘only had a brief window’, so I hunkered down in the train to Victoria and followed Google Maps to Bar Italia in Soho. We sat on high rotating stools at the long thin counter, the walls awash with Italian cycling magazines. His dark brown eyes were bright, his curly brown hair especially long like some Spanish gigolo, and his jeans were rolled up pretentiously with no socks in his loafers, making him look louche and European, and simultaneously like a big kid. I caught my reflection in a mirror – hooded eyes, fleshy cheeks and heavy jowls, my generous flesh encased in taut layers of black lace, my short blue-black hair slicked from my plump face, black lines round my eyes, and dark purple lipstick against my white pallor. I was not the brooding, fascinating outsider I imagined myself to be, but a twitchy fat goth, only too aware of the irony of Reece’s childhood name for me being ‘the itty bit’. Reece had a double espresso in a little white cup; I had a latte with an extra shot in a tall glass with a tiny handle.
‘How’s life in Brighton?’ he asked after knocking back the espresso in one gulp, trying not to stare at how much extra weight I’d slathered on since our last meet.
‘The shop’s doing well.’
‘You’re still there!’
‘Yep,’ I said, arranging the sugar packets to face the same way, ‘I’m the manager now.’
‘Hey, if you’re happy in the mecca of coloured pencils and Hello Kitty rubbers.’
‘Deliriously. And you? Haaappy?’
‘I guess. We’re waiting to see if we get a second series of Man On. Which we should do, given the reviews.’
I straightened up the serviettes in the silver dispenser and girded myself.
‘Reece, we have to talk about Dad.’
‘No.’
‘But he’s virtually housebound now.’
He shrugged. ‘Appropriate, since he never went to prison for killing Mum.’
‘You have zero proof of that,’ I hissed, slopping my coffee.
‘Lack of evidence doesn’t prove innocence. He did it or he drove her to it with his angry outbursts.’
‘That’s ridiculous. I totally don’t recognise your description of him.’
‘What is the point of going round and round again? Do you ever feel better after?’
He slid off his stool and I thought he was leaving, but he returned with another espresso.
‘Did you like Man On?’ he asked, as if we were just doing chit-chat.
‘Didn’t see it,’ I lied to annoy him.
‘Well, it got four stars in the Guardian,’ he said petulantly.
‘Not five?’ I said, in mock horror.
‘No one gets five.’
‘Then why do they have five?’
‘An impossibility to aspire to? Not that you …’
‘What?’
‘Forget it.’
We both sat silently.
‘You know, I should have cake!’ I announced, swinging violently round to glower at the array of cakes in the body of the old-fashioned counter behind us: gooey cheesecakes, stacked gateaux, stuffed cannoli. ‘And if I have a heart attack from overeating, you can resuscitate me, like you did that footballer in the trailer!’
‘I could resuscitate you actually, I got proper training from a real physio for authenticity.’
‘Could or would?’ I said, narrowing my eyes at him.
‘Oh whatever,’ he snapped, ‘I’m trying here.’
‘I’m not not trying,’ I said, shifting my bulk on the ridiculous seat.
‘You’re just so …’
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Go on. Say it. I’m what?’ I lifted my spoon and flicked his knuckle.
‘Ow,’ he cried, rubbing his hand. ‘OK. Self-involved. You’re so self-involved. If you looked around outside of yourself for just two seconds and took part in the real world, you’d be so much happier.’
‘Real world!’ I spat at him. ‘That’s rich coming from you – Ryan!’
He winced.
‘Not only do you have a fake name, but your job is actually faking being other people.’
He sucked in a sharp intake of breath, then reassembled his composure like the Terminator 2 cop reforming from a silver puddle.
‘Don’t make a scene,’ he said, glancing round. ‘I really don’t need this. You have no idea the pressure I’m under.’
‘Sorry,’ I mumbled. We were back in our roles. He was the star, I was the audience, heckling was forbidden. I turned his cup so its handle was in line with my handle and with the metal serviette dispenser.
‘You like everything just so, don’t you,’ he said, ‘tidy, tidy, everything the same, God forbid life should move forward.’
He lifted one of my parallel spoons to rap my hand but I pulled away just in time, so he threw the spoon down, messing up my pattern.
And that was it. I was so angry I didn’t make contact for a couple of months. Then I left the occasional chirpy message on his answerphone, which didn’t get returned; then I sent texts, but they pinged out into the air, unanswered; then his mobile went dead; then my emails bounced back. Finally, I posted an old-fashioned letter, after carefully crafting multiple drafts and weighing up every word. It was returned marked ‘Not Known at this Address’. And I finally got it. There was no carefully balanced power play between us. I was the only one endlessly analysing our relationship. He wasn’t even thinking of me. He’d moved on. From Mum’s death. From Dad, who he blamed for Mum’s death. And from me, the last reminder.
I’ve tried not to check out what he’s doing over the years, unless I’m especially drunk, but proof of his existence was easy to access: low-budget film trailers, Christmas lights pressing in Slough, pulling impressive muffins from an oven with other C-listers on Celebrity MasterChef, skits for Comic Relief with his more famous comedy friends, and even reading to kids on bloody Jackanory. I even know where he is tonight. With that awful synchronicity of thinking of something then seeing it everywhere, I picked up a discarded Evening Standard from a visitor’s chair as I left the beige inquisitor’s office – and there he was in the Culture section: Solving Me, which was previously serialised in the paper, is now being forced on the world in book form. He’s doing a reading at 9.30 p.m. tonight at Foyles, just down the road from the hospital. So near and yet so far. I skim the newspaper copy, which babbles on about how fabulous Reece is. Then I jolt as I read the final line, a direct quote from Reece: ‘Like a beginner solving a Rubik’s cube, I’ve only ever shown one completed layer of myself to the public, but with this book, I’m taking my fans backstage to solve the whole puzzle.’ That pretentious, thieving git. I was the one who excelled at solving Rubik’s cubes when we were kids, despite being four years younger, and Reece always ridiculed my skill.
‘Look at this,’ he once said, smiling impishly and holding out a cube with the top layer completed, but covering up the lower mixed sections. ‘Done it.’
‘But the cube’s not complete,’ I bleated. ‘You have to follow all the steps to solve it.’ He laughed and tossed it aside.
Reece was gleeful when he caught me secretly finishing it later. ‘You couldn’t bear to leave it unfinished, could you? Had to “follow all the steps to solve it”,’ he joked. ‘You’re an itty bit crazy.’
I jolt back into the present of the immaculate white ward, registering a hand on my shoulder, which I violently swat away.
‘Sorry – didn’t mean to scare you,’ says Woolly Tights, backing away. ‘Is home time.’
She’s looking at me as if I’m … dangerous. What’s wrong with me?
‘Oh, OK,’ I cough. After three packets of extra-strong mints, my throat’s horribly dry.
She turns, but I catch her arm. Her eyes widen in panic.
‘Thanks for letting me know,’ I falter out.
She nods, frowning, and I let go of her.
‘Hi, I’m Hannah. Sorry I’ve been so quiet.’ I feel like my skin is cracking with the effort of basic decency.
‘Is OK. Is so hard. I understand,’ she says, offering her hand. ‘I’m Loreta.’
‘Hi, Loreta. I … I like all the colour you’ve got going on over there,’ I say, gesturing to the non-regulation multicoloured blanket over her dad.
‘Thank you. Is our Lithuanian flag,’ she says, ‘to remind him of home.’
Of course: the bedspread’s one giant flag of mustard yellow, school-skirt green and brick red.
‘Nice idea.’
She smiles, and the simple human connection is overwhelming.
‘I didn’t want to wake you,’ she apologises, ‘but is eight o’clock, time for home.’
‘Oh, gosh, I have to go,’ I say, giving Dad a quick kiss and willing him to survive the night.
‘Hot date?’ she asks.
‘No. I’m off to see a film star.’
CHAPTER FOUR
It’s been fifteen years, but Tottenham Court Road’s still all furniture shops: puffy comfy chairs, sleek minimalist desks, black Balinese chests, formal Regency beds, and huge geometric lights; so many ways to furnish a home, if I had one. Dad’s home isn’t mine any more – it’s a historical exhibit and I’m the scary wax doll propped up amid the detritus of Reece’s and my childhood.
I’ll just hunker down at the back of his reading and see whether I can face going to him for help. He’ll never know I’m there and he wouldn’t recognise me anyway: I’m fifteen years older and rougher, he only knows me with short hair, and best of all, I’m inadvertently some kind of ‘after’ of a slimming magazine’s ‘before’. But without any of that teeth-jangling grinning the ‘after’s do, as I don’t feel better thinner, just less moored. My drastic weight loss has changed not just my size, but the whole structure of my face and the proportions of my features. I’d already dropped four stone over the last six months in Brighton, with all the stress of my imploding life and my increased drinking, and since being back home I’ve joined Dad in barely eating and had frequent stomach ache and diarrhoea from the truckloads of fruit I’ve been gorging on. I’ve been copying Mum’s fruit obsession, but in my own feral way. She loved making a ceremony out of eating it, nibbling on thinly sliced Granny Smiths, sensuously swallowing elegant depulped globules of orange and licking her delicate pink quince jam from her tiny spoons.
I’m far less refined in my fruit annihilation, hoovering up mountains of unwashed, unchopped fruit, but I’m slim for the first time in my life – the perfect disguise.
At a Tesco Metro, I buy a small bottle of vodka. In the next-door chemist’s window, I see rows of severed heads topped with multicoloured wigs and buy a blonde one and some large-framed dark glasses. I’m embracing the role of Extra Number Three, a non-speaking part, for which the directions are: ‘blend into the crowd and actively don’t stand out’. It’s a role I’ve been perfecting for years.
As I reach the intersection of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, rain falls like a sky-sized bath has been upturned. I run on down the road, searching for the familiar doors of Foyles. But as I arrive at the corner where the shop is, I’m in The Matrix. It’s not there. Literally not there. How is Reece having a reading at a non-existent shop? Looking up and down the street through the sheeting rain, I catch the familiar glowing red letters of the vertical Foyles sign, but further up the road than it should be. The big solid there-for-ever building that I visited as a child has somehow floated up the road. I walk on in a daze and stand in front of not the old heavy doors of my memory, but sleek sliding panes of glass which swish open to present an endless wall-free savannah of books, all surrounding a central glass core. It’s a completely new shop. I expect the whole thing to shimmer into a sea of binary code at any moment.
I back out, and look up at the rain-drenched window. And there’s Reece, less than a foot away, smiling at me with his famous lopsided smirk. I stumble backwards off the kerb and a car screeches to a halt inches from me. I lurch back onto the pavement, but Reece seems totally unfazed. How can he not even register my existence?
Then a young woman picks him up. He’s a life-size cardboard cut-out. As she repositions him, I step closer. After fifteen years, he’s the same, but more defined – his brown mischievous eyes, his narrow straight nose, his thick eyebrows and his mop of dark curls. But his smile is crafted into a curious lopsided grin; he never smiled like that as a kid. His body is so languid, like he should be smoking a long cigarette in a Madrid square. He’s wearing a soft loose blue suit, slightly over-shortened at the ankle, and a pale pink shirt, the top two buttons undone. He’s much taller and broader than Dad, less wiry, but has his dark hair. His real charm comes from Mum, that effortless ease and fluidity – and those intense eyes. But it’s his familiar boyish hunch that jolts me – that tiny rounding of his shoulders, that jutting of his chin and pitching forward of his weight – that brings all my memories viscerally alive. In an instant, I’m his little sister again, a ‘me’ I thought had been totally erased.
It was good to get a dry run at seeing him, given my slack-jawed amazement. I’m usually shellacked to numbness – but this reminds me that I’m only ever a pigeon-step away from losing it. I step back in through the sliding doors and approach a tall sales assistant wearing a paisley waistcoat.
‘Hi, umm, the Reece – Ryan Patterson reading later?’ I ask nonchalantly.
‘Just join the conga line,’ he says, gesturing at a queue of women snaking up the inner glass staircase.
‘Oh, OK. Is there a toilet here?’
‘Fourth floor.’
I walk up, appalled to be lumped in with all these excited middle-aged fans. Yet of course my body is middle-aged, however childish I feel. I don my long blonde wig, and in the toilet’s stark mirror see an ageing version of that Thor actor from the Marvel films – well, him if he had a drink problem, after years in brutal captivity. Christ. I pull up my coat collar, ram on my dark glasses and have a big swig of vodka. I join the end of the queue, behind a grey-haired woman in a purple padded jacket, who is clutching Reece’s book to her bosom.
‘Exciting, isn’t it?’ she gushes.
‘So is,’ I say.
‘I’ve seen him live several times – at recordings of Man On at Pinewood.’
‘Awesome.’
‘Of course, Muerte is filmed in Spain with no studio audience. It’s filmed, “on film”,’ she says with awe.
The cherry on the icing of the many-layered cake that is Reece’s career is that he’s finally got a lead role, playing a bloody detective: Ralph Pennington, in a new BBC series called Muerte (Spanish for ‘death’; bet those execs took the rest of the day off when they came up with that corker), a light drama about murders in the expat community in Spain. The show’s credits have an annoyingly memorable jingle over a montage of Reece prancing about in various clichéd Spanish settings: riding bareback on a palm-treed Spanish beach; dressed as a matador outrunning a bull; disrupting a stage of shocked flamenco dancers. It finishes with a shot of a manila file being stamped ‘resuelto’. If you were making up a ridiculous comedy version of a language, that’s how you’d translate ‘solved’, but that actually is the Spanish for it.
It’s a long hour’s wait. I pop back to the loo a couple of times for more vodka. My padded compatriot gets into conversation with other fans and it’s so weird hearing about Reece as they know him – his shows, his skits for Comic Relief, his Twitter posts, his girlfriends. They giggle over a celeb questionnaire by him:
Who do you most love?
‘My dog, Baxter.’
Not me then? Or Dad?
What trait do you most dislike about yourself?
‘Being a perfectionist.’
So not breaking your father’s heart … pretending you don’t have a sister.
If you could change one thing about your life, what would it be?
‘How can you improve on perfection?’
Oh, I don’t know – you could get back in contact with your estranged family maybe, you arse.
Amongst these adoring fans, I experience how worryingly famous Reece is becoming. He’s a real person – writ large. I’m a troll under a bridge.
Finally, we file up the polished wooden stairs into a big industrial-looking loft, with a low ceiling festooned with snaking silver pipes and overlapping electric cables. An elfin girl in a short black tunic is taking tickets.
‘Oh, I didn’t realise it was ticketed,’ I say.
‘You’re lucky – I’ve just had a return,’ she says. ‘This sold out in minutes – Ryan’s like Glastonbury!’
I swallow.
My padded friend dashes to a seat at the front while I hunker down at the back, taking a surreptitious swig of vodka. There are images of Reece everywhere with the glossy red background of the book cover: two more cardboard cut-outs, a huge projected image behind the stage, and on two large vertical banners either side of a table piled high with books. Red may be the colour of blood, but Dad would be disgusted by this nod to Arsenal.
There is a palpable, simmering anticipation. Eventually a slightly hunched middle-aged man with tastefully shaved receding hair steps out of a white door to the left and onto the painted pallet stage.
