Bad Fruit, page 16
“I agree.” Mama gets out her phone, takes a screenshot, hits send.
“What are you doing?”
She smooths back a strand of her black hair. “Sending everyone the evidence.”
The photo pops up in the “core family” WhatsApp group.
Jacob types ?
Mama types with a smirk across her face. Your ex-wife showing your father her vagina.
Jacob replies, When was this?
Mama tells him it was a month ago, a month after Francie suspected. Now do you believe that F SEDUCED your FATHER?
On a call, replies Jacob instantly, his status changing to “Away.”
I want to change my status.
Something hurtles through the air before smashing into the mirrored door of Mama’s wardrobe. I crouch down, fling my hands over my head, emerge only when she starts crying. “No one believes me, no one does.”
She’s thrown her phone. The glass has splintered, a firework burst of mirror.
“She did it. She seduced him.”
My phone pings again. It’s Julia, replying with two photos. The first is of Francie in her green bikini, the exact one Daddy has in his porn collection. The second is of Mama in a fuchsia bikini, not the photo she sent us from Santorini, but one Julia had taken a few years back, of Mama’s fleshy stomach spilling over the low band of the knickers. I clutch my phone to my chest.
Don’t think F needs to seduce anyone do you?
“What is it? Who’s replied?”
“Mama, I don’t think you should—” but she snatches it from me. Her jaw quivers, she casts off the covers. Her dinner crashes to the floor, but that doesn’t stop her; she’s at her wardrobe flinging open the doors, scooping out armfuls of pink and purple swimsuits. The wind howls. Daddy appears at the doorway, we’re both powerless watching her whimper: “Find it, find it, where is it?”
I shake my head at Daddy, a silent plea, relieved when he steps toward her, annihilated when he says, “Tell Lily what you’re looking for, May. She’ll help you.” But she ignores us, crying and muttering to herself, flinging out swimsuits. When she locates the fuchsia bikini, her rage is physical. She falls on it, tries to tear it apart with her teeth, her bare hands. When she can’t, she rips into it with a pair of scissors. The pieces flutter to the floor. A tremor of thunder brings a terrible privacy to her violence, as she turns from the bikini and attacks other items in her wardrobe—dresses, skirts, trousers.
“Stop, Mama!” I try to prize the scissors from her, but she twists them behind her back. “Please, it was a stupid thing she did, she didn’t mean it—” and then, suddenly, the scissors are pointing at me.
“You’re defending her?”
“No, Mama—”
“You’re defending your sister to my face?”
“I’m sorry, Mama—”
“You better be clear where your loyalty is. Me or her, me or her?”
“You, you!”
“Then say it! Why did she send those photos?”
I know what she wants me to say, I’ve said the words hundreds of times before when I didn’t know the brutal man who’d said them, or the child they infected. They’re words, just words, but I’m in pieces saying them about my sister. When will I stop telling lies? In the distance, lightning strikes. “She’s nothing, she’s worthless, she’s a whore.”
Daddy’s eyes slide away from me.
Mama steps back. “Clean this mess up.”
I scoop up the salmon with my hands. The flakes slip between my fingers.
* * *
AFTERWARD, IN THE bathroom, I pick fish out of my fingernails. I can’t stop seeing the glint of the scissors, her dead eyes behind them.
Mama loves me, I’d said to Julia and Jacob, I’m her favorite, she loves me the most, but even I can see that Mama is turning against me, and then I need stop the avalanche inside. I fill the bath with just the hot tap until it’s about to overflow and then I plunge my left elbow straight down into the water, my hand hovering like a white sail, and think when Theseus sailed home from killing the minotaur, he forgot to change his sail from black to white and his father thought he was dead and killed himself.
My sails are white, Mama, live.
My sails are black, Mama, die.
23 / DATE
IT STORMS ALL NIGHT, WHISTLING between the houses, whipping against the windows, and at four in the morning, I let it in. Water rushes in from the deep, dark black, through the skylight onto my singed arm.
It isn’t until the morning that I realize how protected we’ve been. The park gates have been bolted; a sign blows in the wind: “Greenwich Park is closed.” I text Lewis to see if the orchard still needs volunteers. He replies, Meet me at the main gate.
Along the outside of the park, there is little sign of the storm except the fresh, loamed smell and the dull pearl of the sky. But once I pass through the gates, I see the park has been ravaged. The road down to the lookout is flooded, water pooling where the paths gutter into ditch. Bins have blown over, spilling bottles and juice cartons over the grass, and hundreds of branches have fallen, grasping at the air like spectral hands. Toward the Royal Observatory, two horse chestnut trees have been uprooted and are blocking the road.
“I didn’t think it would be this bad.”
“No one did. Otherwise, they would have secured the trees.” Lewis isn’t wearing his baseball cap today and his brown hair is almost black with rain. He holds out bin bags. “We’ve been redeployed.”
All the volunteers from the orchard are along the main avenue; Lewis seems to know each of them. He’s some sort of impromptu manager, directing some to pick up litter, others to take up the branches. I stay close to him, filling up bin bags, cowed by the damage. Just one fallen horse chestnut has pulled up writhing ecosystems of earthworms and centipedes. Near the base, the trunk is split; its pale heart giving me a sick feeling. I want to fling something over it, cover it up.
“Was she all right yesterday?”
I breathe in the last vestiges of the storm. “No.”
“What happened?”
I sit on the fallen trunk. “Julia happened.” I tell him about the photo Mama sent of Francie, the photo Julia sent in response.
It’s raining a little now, but under the tree canopy, it’s dry. He crouches next to me, tracing the ridges of the bark. A piece comes apart in his hands and he drops it, astonished that, however accidental, he’s a part of the tree’s destruction. “I’ve met your sister before, she’s Chrissy’s friend. I found her, on the surface, charming”—Lewis is exactly the kind of person she would flirt with—“but brittle. Is she cruel?”
“Cruel? No.” A memory comes to me: Julia washing my hair in the bath when I was two or three years old. She would pull her knees up and tell me to lay my head against them, cupping her hand around my face so the water didn’t splash into my eyes. She bathed me until I could wash myself. “She just goes on the offensive—that’s how she protects herself.”
“Protects herself from who?”
I shrug.
“Lily,” he says, “what’s your mother like with you?”
Outside the planetarium, men are busy tying up the other horse chestnut to haul onto a lorry. Our tree will be next. There’s not much time.
“Lily?” He touches my arm and the sound I make surprises me, a gull’s cry. I clutch my arm to my chest.
“What’s wrong with your arm?” he asks quietly.
“Nothing.”
“If it’s nothing, show me.”
“It’s not what you think.”
“What do I think?”
“I don’t know, that I’ve hurt myself.”
“Have you?”
It was an accident, I burned it in the oven, I burned it on the stove, there are thousands of things I could say, but his eyes blaze at me, and then there’s only one thing to say: “It made me feel better.”
There is a liquid quality to Lewis’s face, a complete softening. “Drinking made me feel like that. On the streets, it kept me warm, but even when I reintegrated, well into my twenties, I still did it. I’d drink all Saturday until I blacked out, then spend most of Sunday sobering up.” He is just beyond the shelter of the horse chestnuts. Rain trickles down his head, forms tributaries at his neck, but he doesn’t notice. “I did it to stop thinking about my father, just for one day. I was the one who found his body,” and I know what it has cost him to say that to me, that he is seeing, right now, the very image he fought to obliterate. Conkers fall around us. I pull him onto the trunk.
He stares at my hands on his jacket.
I unbutton my cuff and peel back my sleeve.
“You can tell me anything,” he says.
We stay in the park for a while, the bright strawberry of my skin between us.
* * *
THE ACRIMONY BETWEEN my parents has bled out because of an inspired move by Daddy I could never have predicted. After Mama put her scissors down, Daddy wrapped his arms around her. She fought him for a few seconds before slumping against his chest. He rocked her like a child, buried his lips in her black hair. “You’re beautiful, May, you are always so beautiful,” he cooed.
Now, my parents have a date.
The message I’ve just received from Mama is very clear, find my lingerie. If Julia and I were talking, I’d message her, and we would have laughed. The three of us used to talk about it endlessly, our parents having sex. Saturday mornings, Daddy would make the climb from his easy chair, the fourth step creaking under his weight, and then he’d cross the landing and shut Mama’s door behind him. Julia wanted to spy on them. “He’s in!” she cried to wake us up, and we took turns staring into the keyhole, but we didn’t see anything. Later, Julia sent me in to Mama’s bedroom to determine what the obstruction had been. It was Mama’s bra, slung over the handle.
I lay out some slimming lingerie that would cover the full spectrum of Mama’s mood—a grapefruit pink slip she always felt comfortable in, a cranberry bra with high-waisted knickers, a yellow camisole with powder-blue appliqué in case she feels like branching out of pink. I stall over a bustier, sheer tulle embroidered with cherry red flowers with a matching suspender belt and stockings. Whose perspective should I be looking at this from, my mother’s or my father’s? I shove it into the back of the drawer.
“What did you pick out?” asks Mama, coming into the bedroom, and I’m so happy she isn’t angry at me, I throw my arms around her. She pats me lightly on the back. “You’re in a good mood.”
Because you’ve forgiven me, right, Mama?
Over my shoulder, she glances at my selection. She steps away from me and slides her index finger under the strap of the sunny yellow camisole. “These aren’t right.” Her voice climbs the room. “Sexy, I need it sexy. Don’t you know what sexy is?”
She takes in what I’m wearing, one of Jacob’s old T-shirts—I haven’t had time to change into pink.
“What are you going to do in Oxford if you don’t know what sexy is?”
I blink like an idiot. My brain screams say something, but I’m bewildered at the myriad possible responses, aware that there is only one right answer, and if I were smart enough, clever enough, I would know what it was. Instead, I use that old familiar tool. “I’m sorry, Mama—”
“I don’t have time for this.” She sweeps the lingerie I laid out for her off the bed. “Take everything out of the drawer!” I obey. The cherry red set is the last to come out. She snatches it from me. “This. This is perfect.” She undresses. I try and turn away, but she gestures impatiently to me, tie the ribbon, fasten my stockings, fetch my lipstick. When we’re finished, she stands in front of her mirrored wardrobe. “What do you think?” she asks.
I think you look like a prostitute.
But she’s not asking me. She’s asking her reflection, which pouts and smiles.
* * *
I’M MAKING MAMA’S all-time favorite snack, tu tu kueh, a steamed, jasmine rice cake, but my mind is on what’s happening upstairs. It’s been ten minutes. I imagine Daddy’s face when he sees Mama, how he’ll have to reconfigure shock into a flawless pretense of pleasure. What are they going to do with that suspender belt? Mama can’t unfasten the clips. Could Daddy employ his scalpel precision?
A haze of green feathers
Biting beaks
Black eyes
Mama’s screams call me out of the flashback quicker than it takes me to recover. There’s a thud. I think she’s hit him at first, but the sound is small and dull—it’s the vase. Daddy came in with a bunch of roses, the expensive kind, twenty heads at least, the flowers on the edge of bloom. He presented it to her in her bedroom and asked me to fetch a vase. I put it on her bedside table.
I wash off the rice flour and rush upstairs, my heart still pounding from the flashes of beaks and feathers. Mama’s bedroom door is open; Daddy is closest to it. He gives me a look of profound weariness and then tries to close the door on me. Mama stops him.
“Let her in! Let her see what you’ve done, how low you’ve brought me. Then she’ll know what men will do to her. Are you watching, Lily? This is what men do.”
Mama is not wearing the knickers or her bustier, just the suspender belt and stockings. She is slumped against the mirrored wardrobe, her misery multiplied to infinity—her smudged lipstick mouth, the hang of her breasts. Between my parents are the roses, some intact, the others missing petals. Did Mama advance on Daddy with the flowers or hurl the entire vase at him? Unclear. I press a towel against the darkening patch of water, fetch a dustpan and brush.
When I return, Daddy is heading across the landing. “Was she better than me, Charlie?” rasps Mama after him.
I catch his arm as he squeezes past. “Please, Daddy, don’t leave me with her, don’t go. Can you stay? Just this once?”
His face is savage. He wrenches his sleeve away. “I can’t do this.” He rushes downstairs. The front door bangs shut.
I half-lift, half-haul Mama onto the bed, unfasten the clips to her suspender belt, roll down her stockings. She says nothing, but she hates sleeping naked, so I get her a fresh pair of black hi-rise briefs and her nightie. She changes into them silently and lies down.
I tuck her under the Peranakan quilt, slip Sapphire between her arms. A single tear rolls over her cheekbones. “He doesn’t want me. Not the same way he wants her.”
“Did he say that?”
“Didn’t have to. I could see it in his eyes, like he was making himself. I’m not beautiful like I once was, not compared to her. I tried to carry on, but I couldn’t. I just kept thinking of him and her, him and her, those photos Julia sent.” Her eyes are numb and unblinking.
“What can I do for you, Mama? What would make you feel better?”
She doesn’t respond.
“Some juice? Some tu tu kueh? I made it exactly how you like with the coconut filling. Shall I get it for you?”
Mama sits up. The room is electric with threat. “You’re plotting with her, aren’t you?”
“What?”
“You want me to be fat. You want him to leave me.”
“Mama, please—”
She pushes herself to the edge of the bed, holds out a finger at me. “Do you think I don’t know? Do you think I don’t see? I see. I see everything you’re thinking. May’s nothing, she’s worthless.” She leans toward me as she speaks, and in a very deliberate way, she rubs her thumb across my cheek, looks from the smear of makeup to the color of my skin, and then to my brown roots. A small, dangerous silence falls. “Ang moh gui, white devil. Get out.”
* * *
I DO IT again when she’s asleep, run the bath hot. The skin is peeling off my left arm in sheaves, the new skin bright underneath. My right then. I lower it into the water. The pain is white and complete, Yes. Beyond this, there is nothing.
24 / THE ROYAL OBSERVATORY GARDEN
Her father clawed at her mother, but she still managed to shove the girl into her bedroom and turn the key. Sylvia, the parrot, was in the girl’s room. She glared at the girl, the stripes on her face vicious as a tiger’s. The girl pounded against the door. She heard:
Her father shouting
Her mother begging
All the bad words
A body slammed against a wall
Trousers unzipping
Fabric tearing
Her room was a haze of green feathers
Biting beaks
Black eyes
She didn’t know
Who was squawking
Who was screaming
She couldn’t remember
Her name.
Something is screeching, a bird being torn apart, a rabbit being slaughtered. A hand goes over my mouth. I bite down. My teeth sink into my own skin.
Not my memories, not mine. I’m fine in the attic, here is my skylight, here is Julia’s bed, here is her dressing table, but then I’m frightened of my arms, the fraying edges of skin, the voice inside that says, Scratch, peel.
I change quickly, grab my rucksack, go. My skin prickles.
It’s the middle of the day, I’ve overslept, and there are no messages. No one wants me, no one needs me. My hand trembles calling Lewis. I keep saying “please”: Please come, please meet me.
He tells me he’s already in the park. He says we can meet in the Royal Observatory Garden, another garden of my childhood, although I doubt I’ll ever visit it after this.
