I straightened, looked at the dressing table. Not sure why it caught my eye; perhaps it was the only exposed hint of disorder in that cleaner-controlled room. Peeking out from the third drawer down was the corner of a patterned headscarf. I reached for it, pulled the drawer out. The headscarf billowed up into a silken cloud of ironic paisley. There was a small block of something underneath it. I dug my fingers under, pulled and … yes, Golden Kings cigarettes. We smoked the same brand. If Thomas had the first idea … I planned to have a word, put her straight. A drawer of secrets, then. More scarves – none I could imagine her wearing – and when I pushed through to the bottom, a blue book; an A4 exercise book with a dolphin postcard taped to the cover. The dolphin in its sea was a similar blue-grey so that it seemed as if the creature were swimming out at you from the depths of an ocean which was balanced upon the word HAWAII. Also on the book’s cover, in large neat underlined capitals:
DONE LISTS
There was one entry – DONE LIST 1 – several pages long.
I read it; of course I read it. And then I smiled, dropped my head.
Just a child, I reasoned. A girl alone with her pen and her angry, angry words. I got it, we all needed an outlet. Angry child, angry words. Love would win.
Everything was wrapped, wedged and replaced. Five minutes later the three of them were pulling into the drive. I had texted Thomas about the cancelled shift; Stevie almost skipped to me in his KAFOs.
‘Stevie, careful.’
Lola did not look at me. She would not meet my eye and when I examined Thomas he also seemed to be holding tense words an inch behind the jawline. Our backs to the kids, my expression asked him the question; he responded with the slightest shake of the head.
We readied ourselves for bed. I listened to one message – it was always the same one – then I deleted the seven missed calls, put my phone on vibrate as usual. Enough already.
‘So now, what was that earlier?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The atmosphere.’
‘Nothing.’
‘Really? But—’
‘The kids had bickered a bit, that’s all. Nothing big, everyone’s just tired.’
It did not take a mother to know that his sixteen-year-old girl and my five-year-old boy would get nowhere near arguing, but I said nothing more.
Soon we were locking limbs around each other, never that tired, not then. But even as we stroked our bodies brighter and pushed on through to that grasping, eyes-shut, giving, gasping place where no child could ever find us, I wondered. Lola had changed.
It was as if she could read, in my eyes, what I had read in her room. But of course she could not and, in the end, I did not let it keep me from tumbling into the grave-deep sleep of the satisfied woman.
When I woke, I felt the childish urge to skip the whole breakfast routine and slip us out of the door. But Lola was the teen, and moody by definition. I was not. I swung out of bed, leaving Thomas to snore, went downstairs to my bag to get my phone and – before I had tripped the wire that triggered the brain-alarm ‘Stop, in the name of your flaws’ – I was reaching for the pack of cigarettes, giving it a hopeful shake. I had been almost certain it was empty, but in fact it contained one final stick of tobacco. I ran the cigarette along my upper lip as I breathed it in. I weighed it in my pinch. I rolled it between thumb and finger. I held it between my lips, closed my eyes and waited for the dirty billow of longing to overwhelm me. It did not come. Moved by this lack of feeling – triumphant even – I dropped the packet into the dustbin.
Over breakfast, silence was broken only by exasperation. A wall-faced Lola, with ‘Screw You, Darling’ graffitied all over her. Stevie upturning his bowl in a rage because his KAFO had got wedged between the chair and table:
‘They so annoy me, Mummy!’
Thomas soothed us all but my embarrassment soared as the milk dripped to the floor and then, after a quick wipe around, I gathered my son so we could totter – clack-clack – out of their smart door and drive home.
‘No, she totally hates me, I’m serious. Huh-ates me!’
That weekend I pretended not to listen through the old serving hatch as Lola complained into her mobile for long minutes, muffled by a cushion; you could make out the tear stains on the silk. I sprinkled radishes through the all-Littleton Lodge salad. The lettuce, cukes and curlicues of pea shoots made a fine bed in their bowl. I’d left Thomas and Stevie in the garden, devouring the pièces de resistance: cherry tomatoes plucked straight from the vine.
‘I know, how could she say that to Jess and not have told me?’
I figured she had to be talking to Ellie. I tore up a few more butterhead leaves, picked five minutes before from the Waite patch. Lola went on:
‘Ellie Motte-Ryder is a complete and utter bitch.’
I rummaged for a jug, found one so well designed that it almost annoyed. I glugged some olive oil into vinegar, added mustard, seasoned and whisked. She had not seen me, could not hear me, did not know I was there.
‘I can’t believe she said that!’
It still needed parsley. I slipped out of the back door to the herb garden, snapped a stem or two and crept back in.
‘No … Oh my God, did she? Well just kill me now.’
The herbs in a colander, I turned on the tap, only for the water to explode in a great gush.
‘Hello?’ she called.
‘Only me,’ I said.
‘Got to go,’ she told her phone.
No time to waste. I walked into the sitting room where she was curled up under a throw, limbs unstirred as if under a layer of custard, no matter that the windows were open and it was 78 degrees outside.
‘Can I get you anything, Lola?’
‘No thanks.’
‘Nothing at all?’
Darling White is rude. She’ll get fuck-all of me.
Lola did not speak, stared straight ahead.
‘Nothing?’ I repeated.
‘Perhaps a new life?’ She would not be seen to cry, refused, but her voice caught, a downward glance.
‘Ah, now …’ I moved closer, ready to sit. ‘Why don’t you tell me about it?’
She raised a hand before her face, hiding her eyes, blocking me out.
‘Actually, just a hankie would—’
‘Sure, let me get you one.’
I hurried back to the kitchen; I had to keep trying. I loved to care. Nursing was love – that simple and that complicated – love, time-stamped and dished out to strangers. Caring for your sick child could be similar but it did not vary with precisely the same frictions and erosions and unwanted quickenings and surprise softenings, with the rough incidents that abraded you when tending the wounds of the unknown many. Your love for your child was relentless, and joyous, and painful. But all of it – nursing, caring, loving – there was nothing better, nothing else I ought to be doing with my life.
Grabbing my handbag, I pulled hard at a corner of cotton and there, once again, was a packet of cigarettes that I did not remember buying, was sure I had not bought. The box was light. I shook it, flipped it open and there, once a-bloody-gain, lay a lonely smoke.
Ah, got it now, Lola. Her Golden Kings, all of them, were for me.
I snatched up the hankie,