Bad Fruit, page 3
“—Stop it.” I squeeze her wrists. “It’s not true.”
She sinks heavily into my shoulder, her chin pressing into my clavicle, but I don’t edge her off even though it hurts. I let her stare out into the garden. It’s the beginning of August. Sweet peas bloom under pear and apple trees, but no flower or fruit is enough to stifle the shadows thrown by the sprawling oaks of the dell beyond. Closer to the house, a garden swing rusts under a tarp, and just beyond the garden gate is the shed. I called it our oubliette, from the French oublier, “to forget,” our family’s forgotten dungeon, because it was overrun with ivy, the dingy window a hatch. This summer, Daddy’s started putting my bike in the shed to protect it from the storms, even though I tell him not to. Now, the door is unlatched, and it swings open like the innards of a beast—Daddy’s gardening tools, the deck chairs darkly visible, and then an image flickers in my mind, not frightening in itself, although I’m frightened.
Milk spreading between toes.
My heart is racing, my lungs powerless to fill or dispel air. I break away from Mama, plaster myself against the kitchen wall.
Her hand is against my forehead, her voice comes to me from a distance. “Are you OK? What’s wrong?”
“I can’t breathe.”
She runs a tap, puts a wet dishcloth over my forehead. Water drips over my shoulders. I shut my eyes, press my hand to my heart.
3 / BIRTHDAY
BIRTHDAYS ARE LIKE CHRISTMAS, ALL family and hugs and disaster lapping at the presents. The table is elaborately set for dinner—cut crystal glasses, cyan Peranakan plates, silver cutlery carved with phoenixes. Mama said I wasn’t to lift a finger on my birthday, especially after feeling unwell, but Daddy didn’t know where anything was, so when she went upstairs to get dressed, I laid everything out exactly as she liked. Daddy caught me folding the napkins, face like a demolished building. I put a finger to my lips.
Mama blames Daddy for my “dizzy spell.” “Too worried about me, too worried about your father,” she said rubbing circles over my back as we waited for me to catch my breath. “You mustn’t do that. Mama’s going to sort it out.” She sent me to bed, which helped; I did feel better. But not well enough for this dinner.
Mama’s pièce de résistance is the seating plan. The dining table seats six, but she’s asked her friend, Jonathan, to play Watson to her Holmes, so there are nine of us—Daddy, Francie, the twins Leo and Albie, and Jacob on one side, and Mama, Jonathan, Julia, and me on the other. The squeeze plays in Mama’s favor, intensifying the silence between Daddy and Jacob and the squabbling between the twins, which wears Francie so thin, she appeals, unsuccessfully, to Jacob for help. Daddy, Julia, or I would usually step in, but not today. None of us move.
Francie’s outfit doesn’t help. She’s wearing an off-shoulder black top and gold tassel earrings that flatter her collar bones but snarl around her hair so that she is in a constant state of perfecting her appearance, which, of course, draws attention to it. Mama took one look at her and asked if she wouldn’t mind sitting in the extra chair, a deck chair Daddy dragged in from the shed. Francie agreed without the slightest hint of being set up. The result is that to Mama, Jonathan, Julia, and me on the other side of the table, Francie looks deliberately, decoratively naked. Mama was always going to play judge and jury. But it shouldn’t be this easy.
She starts before birthday cake and pineapple tarts. Leo is stuffing peas down Albie’s trousers, and Albie, smaller, less boisterous, is on the brink of tears. “I think Leo’s finished his dinner, don’t you? Jonathan, help Leo down.” The command, designed to humiliate Francie, doesn’t have the desired effect. As soon as Jonathan lifts Leo out of his high chair, Francie sighs with relief. She places a hand on Jonathan’s arm and mouths a “thank you.” Mama glares at the impression of Francie’s fingers on Jonathan’s shirt and ratchets it up a notch: “I always thought Jonathan would make the best husband, the best father.”
Jonathan blushes. He’s Mama’s “best friend”; they met while she was studying for her master’s. Since then, he’s come to every family event—birthdays, Christmases, New Years, and never says a word, just grins and does exactly what Mama tells him to. Mama says he’s her type, a more “obedient” version of Daddy—single, introverted, too shy for girlfriends, well paid from writing code. Whether Mama is actually sleeping with him is a matter of constant debate. Jacob thinks he isn’t with Mama for her scintillating conversation. I think he’s asexual, completely uninterested in Mama or anyone else. Julia agrees that Jonathan isn’t a viable option, but not because he’s asexual, because he’s gay.
“Always so considerate, so loyal, don’t you think, Francie?” Mama swirls spoilt juice in her glass as if she’s circling prey. She’s overdressed for a family dinner in a black sarong kebaya and intan diamond flower earrings. The fact that she’s wearing black is enough to make me dizzy with panic, but she’s also swapped her pink lipstick for a dark red that tears against her foundation like a slashed throat. “Fuck, Lil,” whispered Julia when she saw Mama. “She’s worse than I thought.”
“Did you tell Jacob about the poems?” I whispered back. I told Julia that Mama had found out, and she was supposed to break the news to him.
She nodded.
“Did he tell Francie?”
Julia glanced at Francie smiling at Mama. “Doesn’t look like it. Ready for a storm?”
But Francie isn’t schooled in forecasting Mama’s weather. From the minute their shotgun wedding was announced, we shielded her from how bad Mama could get, inventing excuses for why she can’t come to the boys’ events, diverting her from seeing the boys when she was in one of her moods. So it is, in part, our fault that Francie is distracted by Albie pulling at her earrings and Leo ramming his lorry against the table legs. She hasn’t realized the threat until she looks up and sees Mama staring: “Sorry, May, did you say something?” She purses her lips.
Mama punishes her just for that, for the pretty twist of her mouth. “Let’s play a game, shall we? Just a little bit of fun.”
Is it “game” or “fun” that blares the sirens? Perhaps it’s “a little bit” because what’s coming is not little but a deluge, a flash flood—blink and you’ll drown. Daddy sits upright. Jacob clenches his jaw. Julia looks up from her phone. I grip the dining table as if it’s a life raft, but it’s just wreckage, a plank of a ship before it explodes.
“A question for the girls. Hypothetically, who would you marry out of Charlie, Jacob, and Jonathan?”
“Our cue to leave!” announces Daddy. “Jacob and I will get the cake.”
Jacob shakes his head. Never the white knight, he saves his sons but not his ex-wife. “Actually, I need to check on something for work. The twins can help you.” They file out. The dining room door closes.
“Come on, Francie, you first,” says Mama, smiling.
Slowly, it dawns on Francie that she has been abandoned. She stares after the forms of Albie and Leo, willing them to come back. “I don’t really know, May.”
“Interesting,” says Mama, cocking her head. “So you won’t say.” She slides me a knowing glance. This moment, the point of Francie’s resistance, will occupy her for days.
“It’s just not …” Francie starts, her earrings agitated birds rustling against her collarbones “… an appropriate question.”
“What do you have to hide?”
“What?”
“It’s just a game. Just for fun. Why won’t you play? Lily and Julia would play, no problem. Lily, you go first. Francie can be such a spoilsport.”
I keep my eyes fixed on my knuckles, the rips in my cuticles. “Jonathan, of course. He’d make such a good husband.” Jonathan emits a high-pitched squeak.
“Why do you think Jonathan would be such a good husband?” says Julia.
She’s beautiful, my sister. Jacob looks the most like Mama, the most Chinese, and I look most like Daddy, but Julia is an arresting combination of both. Tall and slender, she has Daddy’s pale skin and pointed nose with Mama’s dark features. Even now, dressed in her old, school sweatpants, lazily separating last night’s smudged eyelashes with her index finger, my sister could turn heads, but beauty is not a good thing in our house. In more ways than one, Julia’s had it worse than any of us, and it makes her unpredictable, brittle, likely to snap. She raises her glass, a toast to me, to Mama, I can’t tell, except I know what Julia we’re about to see. The Molotov cocktail Julia. The improvised incendiary weapon.
“Don’t get me wrong, Lil, I agree with you. I just think it deserves more … explanation,” she drawls. She swallows three inches of liquid and slams her glass down. It’s almost certainly gin. “He can certainly provide, make a secure home.”
“That’s true,” says Mama, approvingly.
Jonathan is sitting slightly back from the table. Julia drags her chair in line with his. She loops her arm companionably through his. “And then there’s his looks.”
Mama’s smile wipes from her face. “Stop it.”
She doesn’t. She leans towards Jonathan and kisses his cheek. Jonathan squeaks.
“Julia!” erupts Mama. She stands up and slams her hand against the dining table. The cutlery jumps. “Why are you such a whore?”
Julia’s eyes are flicked blades. “Oh, I don’t know, Mama. Like mother, like daughter, I suppose.” She steps her fingers slowly, deliberately along Jonathan’s leg. Mama starts screaming while Jonathan defends his territory, hairless hands pattering against my sister’s moves. Julia rears back, laughing. “I knew it. No reaction. Here, Lil, have a birthday kiss, see if you can get a rise.” She shoves my head and Jonathan’s together. My skull meets his jaw. “Perhaps not a good trade-up, Francie. Or is it Mama that wants to know?” She smiles sweetly at Mama, who levers back the dining room table and climbs over Jonathan to reach her. “I get confused with all our little games.”
The force of Mama’s slap sends Julia off the chair. In the midst of Mama’s insults (“Worthless, nothing, whore, everything you have is mine, you hear me, everything you have is mine”), Julia fixes her lipstick but not her smirk.
“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you—” sing Daddy and the boys. They freeze at the sight of the upturned chair, Julia on the floor, Mama looming over her. Francie pulls the twins out of the room. I escape to the attic.
* * *
JULIA’S COMING; I hear her on the stairs. I pretend to be tidying my room.
She steps inside, her eyes sweeping over her furniture, the cobwebbed beams, the bare lightbulb. “I forgot what this place is like,” she says in a hushed, reverent whisper. She strokes her dressing table with one finger and then draws back quickly, as if touching it, loving it again, might bind her to us like a curse. She opens her armoire and flicks through the clothes, pulling out an old pair of jeans, a T-shirt.
I wrench them out of her hands.
Julia laughs, chipped nail-polished fingers pressing against her heart. “Let it out, Lil, it’s about time you grew a backbone. What do you want to do, call me a whore, slap me around too? Here, have this side.” She twirls her hair back into a makeshift bun so that her jawline is exposed. Under her skin, her veins pulse. “The other side’s a little red, I’m afraid.”
The jerk of her chin deflates me. She’s always been a good sister: she got me dressed, cuddled me, read me stories, except when it comes to one thing—our mother. When Mama gets to Julia, a trigger pulls in her brain and in that split second, she’d shoot Jacob or me as long as the bullet hits Mama too. The last couple of months, she’s only become worse, all our conversations are sparring matches where she is attacking and I’m defending. A headache falls over me like a shroud. I slump on the bed. “How many times do I have to tell you? Don’t involve me in your games.”
“All right, all right, it got a little out of hand.” She sits next to me. “Mama’s too easy to fuck with, especially with all this Daddy–Francie shit. And Jonathan. Dangling him in front of everyone as if he’s Daddy’s competition. I couldn’t resist.” She stretches her arms out like a cat and lies down. “She’s really pissing me off.”
“You mean with your flat?” Mama sublet Julia’s flat over the summer because Julia refused to go on holiday with her.
She nods. Her eyes are closed. I put the back of my hand on her cheek. When we shared a room, we used to do this to each other, practice tenderness. Now, the heat of the slap emanates from her skin, and she winces. “You’re not a whore, Jules.” Out of everything that’s happened this evening, that’s bothered her the most.
“Hmm …” She bites her lip.
“She shouldn’t have done that.”
“There’s lots of things she shouldn’t have done.”
“Just tell her what she wants to hear. It’s not worth it—” I lie next to her “—her doing this to you.”
A smile breaks across her face and I remember that aside from being a total train wreck, Julia is the most fun out of anyone in this family. “It kind of was. I just wanted to know once and for all if he’s gay.”
“Just because someone isn’t attracted to you doesn’t mean they’re gay!”
Then we’re both laughing, everything shrugging off us like scales, until a knock sounds at the door. It’s Jacob. “Chrissy’s here.”
She scrambles up. “I’ve got to go.”
“But you only just got here.” I thought it wouldn’t be that bad this summer, even with the poems, because Julia would be home with me. I didn’t expect to be alone. I watch her sling her handbag over her arm. “Did Mama throw you out?”
“Something like that. Doesn’t matter, I’m staying with Chrissy until the sublet ends.” She refuses to meet my eyes and then I know she never planned to return for the summer. She staged the scene downstairs, set a trap within a trap, but why is it me who’s snared? I stare at their heels—Julia’s smooth skin, Jacob’s striped socks, the growing distance between us. “Wait. Mama’s really bad now.”
My brother slows down. My sister keeps going.
“She scratched Daddy.”
That makes them turn. Because we all know the rules. Slapping Julia’s one thing. Scratching Daddy is another thing entirely.
“She’s lost it,” says Jacob, rubbing his forehead with the back of his hand.
Julia is silent. She appraises me over the expanse of her rug. She’s making a calculation, a complicated arithmetic. “You don’t have to stay here. Come with me,” she says. Her words are kind, but the set of her face is a challenge.
I twist the end of my sleeve around itself. “I can’t leave her. Not when she’s like this. I just don’t want to do it alone. Can you stay? Please?”
Jacob caves, he would stay if I asked him, but he’s the most fragile of us, it’s not him I need. He puts his hand on Julia’s arm, pleading with her on my behalf, but she won’t relent. She shakes him off and speaks very slowly, very deliberately, “Either you come with me, or you stay here with her.”
Courage, courage, I say to myself, but what does that mean? Cor is “heart” but what is rage? Perhaps it’s what it sounds like, a fury, a madness. Am I heart mad to go or heart mad to stay? I shake my head and watch them leave, disappearing down the steps and then vanishing altogether.
* * *
I CLIMB INTO the hole. No one will come. I’m the comforter, not the comforted, and just this once, on my birthday, I’m excused. I listen to my family through the floorboards, matching the sounds that float up from downstairs with the pictures in my head: the door slamming as Julia leaves; the rising and falling tones of Jacob mollifying Mama, the staccato of Mama’s rage. Nothing from Jonathan, Francie, or the boys—they must have left. Daddy’s voice is absent, but he’s in other sounds: the beep of the dishwasher, the click of the kitchen door as he carries the deck chair out. I imagine being right up against the chair’s mottled frame, eyelashes catching against the wood, and then, suddenly, fragments flash across my brain.
Splinters of glass.
Milk spreading between toes.
My palms are sweating. I scramble out of the hole and yank open the skylight, gulping down the warm summer air, count five, four, three, two, one, over and over until my eyes focus on the slanted rooftops, the absolute dark of the park. What was that? Why am I so frightened?
4 / NELSON’S COAT
MAMA DOESN’T MENTION MY BIRTHDAY the next morning, but what Julia did is in the press of her lips, the way she shoves her arms into her suit jacket, the list she messages me the moment she shuts the front door: 1 Shop for travel insurance; 2 Renew the parking permit; 3 Tidy wardrobes.
The list isn’t unusual, I don’t mind helping Mama in the holidays, but item 3 signals a deep turmoil, the message of which is clear: the wildness in one area of her life must be atoned by order in another.
I rush through the chores and finish by one. I could have taken a whole day sorting her wardrobes—languorously folding her underwear into thirds, dipping in and out of podcasts—but after last night, I need to get out. The house feels too still, too threatening. Outside, Daddy has moved my bike from the shed to the front. I jump on and head to Greenwich Park.
At the gate, I tie my bike up and scan for a man, the practice calming me. It’s a pleasant twenty-four degrees Celsius on an August afternoon, so the grass is teeming with them, students mostly from Greenwich University cracking open beers, lying out topless, listening to music through enormous headphones—there are even two male ballet dancers pirouetting in the shade. But I don’t want any of those. He must be walking. He mustn’t have children. Ideally, he should be in his thirties, but I’ve chosen one in his twenties before. On one rule, I’m inflexible: he must be alone.
There, to the right. He’s dark-haired, broad-shouldered, a smattering of freckles across his nose. He’s on a parallel path trodden into the grass that follows the eastern wall, a route you wouldn’t take unless you knew the park well. He isn’t on his phone. He watches for his dog who he’s let off the lead—a dappled cocker that darts into bushes and emerges with a stick, a tennis ball, an empty carton of juice. I track him from the main avenue.
