Bad Fruit, page 6
I jump up. The stethoscope falls off the table. By the time she retrieves it, I’m out the door.
* * *
THE WAITING ROOM for the blood tests is the same for appointments so there are no seats left, it’s packed. Patients are fanning themselves with medical leaflets, and windows have been flung open to let in a breeze that doesn’t blow. I squeeze sanitizer onto my hands, trying to ignore a child at a grubby activity cube winding the gears as fast as he can. Mama would never let me play with toys laid out at the dentist or in a child-friendly café, she’d tell me stories to distract me from all those primary colors. With Julia, it was different. Mama would pin Julia’s arms behind her back to stop her: “It’s full of germs, do you want to get sick?” But the tighter she held her, the more Julia struggled, and when she broke free, a fever would take hold of her; she touched everything—board books with their chewed corners, prams with gray-faced dolls. Once, she even ran her tongue along the frame of a tambourine. Mama dragged her out kicking and screaming.
The nurse assembles a tray of tools after she calls my number—tourniquet, needle, plaster, test tubes, then asks for my arm. I give her my left and turn away. Julia was always fascinated at the needle disappearing into the skin, the dark draw of blood, but not me. Why look at what’s hurting you?
In the seat across from me, another nurse is checking the details of a girl dressed in expensive gym gear with thick blonde hair in a low, side ponytail. She trails the strands languidly between her thumb and index finger, shakes out her fringe, and then I know who she is, I went to primary school with her—Charlotte Warren.
She has retained the same horsiness in her face that she had as a child, and watching her, I come to the same conclusion as I did when I was younger—she’s a stupid girl. It didn’t matter though. At nine, I wasn’t friends with her because of her intelligence. I was friends with her because of her hair. She wore it in a thick braid flung over her shoulders, or in a French plait that drew in the honeyed strands from the top. I was obsessed with it—how did it stay in, how had she done it? Julia could braid, but the end result was always bumpy and messy, never that effortless rope.
Eventually, she told me that her mother spent fifteen minutes every day doing her hair. It was an after-breakfast ritual, she’d bring down her box of accessories and sit perfectly still, while her mother wove in devotion and fastened it in place with a silver, sparkly hair tie. I was done with her when I heard that. I ripped off her hair tie and called her a baby until she cried, pure joy jolting through me at making her ashamed of what I coveted.
Is it strange to know at nine who it was safe to be friends with and who it wasn’t? The girls with shiny braids and lunchboxes of crudités and hummus, whose daddies threw them up into the air, whose mothers would ask why you were wearing makeup, they weren’t safe. They would invite you to their houses for sleepovers and would expect an invitation in return. These girls would want our parents to be friends. No.
The nurse snaps off the tourniquet and asks me to press a cotton ball over the puncture. I watch her name the test tubes.
Charlotte catches up with me as the doors of the surgery swing open. She puts her hand on my arm and smiles. “I’m sorry, do I know you?”
I look into her clear, blue eyes. What is it like to be that naive, that simple? All that hair-brushing has made her soft. Know me? She could never know me. I peel her manicured fingers off my arm, watch her smile vanish. “I don’t think so.”
7 / PARTY
MAMA SAYS THERE’S A BIRD tapping at her window, but when I check, it’s not there. She called me down from the attic to get rid of it, her shouts razing my thoughts until I can think of nothing beyond, Why is it raining, run my bath, deal with that bird. Now I can hear it too.
“Can you get me a towel?” she calls, sitting up from the bath. She’s on her period, there’s meat in the air, so I brace myself not to smell but also not to look. I know an object by its edges now, I only need to see a corner to recognize a sodden sanitary towel unfurling against sheets of toilet paper, or two unswallowed Tylenol tablets.
“Did you get rid of the bird?” she asks, drying herself.
“I couldn’t find it.”
Wrapping a towel around herself, she steps toward the window, peers timidly left and right. She hates birds. It’s why she’ll never walk on the heath, because of the swans and moorhens and ducks. She screamed once when a gaggle of Canada geese flew overhead, threw her arms over her head and rocked. I had to call Daddy to pick her up in the car.
She seems to return to herself after confirming the bird isn’t there, sitting on the bed and rubbing in body lotion. “You’ve forgotten, haven’t you? The engagement party? I spoke to Jonathan yesterday. Your sister really frightened him. Worthless whore, behaving like that, everything she has is mine, everything she has I gave her, I paid for her medical school, I paid for her apartment. She better not let me down this evening.”
Mama has been looking forward to Felipe Christofidou’s engagement party for months. Felipe is the founder of one of London’s largest hedge funds, and Mama is convinced that attending his party is hitting the financial advisor jackpot. But we’ve only been invited because of his daughter, Chrissy, Julia’s best friend, and after Julia and Mama’s fight at my birthday, Mama thinks Julia will ask Chrissy to pull the invite, or worse, embarrass her in front of all those rich venture capitalists.
She examines her face in the mirror above her bedside table before unscrewing the most expensive skincare item she owns, a tiny pot of Korean whitening cream. She places five dots on her face, rubs it in sparingly. “Has she said anything to you?”
“No, Mama.”
She turns around and puts her palm to my forehead. Her face glistens. “You’re warm.” Mama is always a little paranoid when she thinks I might be ill, a legacy of the virus I had as a child. “Are you feeling OK?”
I nearly say “no,” I hate parties, the stilted conversation, the suffocating feeling of pretending to have fun. I’d rather hunker down in the hole and research flashbacks. But Mama needs me, Daddy needs me, there’s no choice. “Just a little warm.”
“OK.” She strokes the shape of my chin. “I almost forgot. With all that silliness on Sunday, I didn’t give you your birthday present.” She reaches under her bedside table for a red, silk jewelry pouch embroidered with gold dragons. I sit on the bed, unzip it. It is an emerald ring surrounded by tiny diamonds. Another piece of jewelry worth a chunk of unpaid school fees. “Do you like it?” she asks anxiously.
When Mama and I go shopping, I play this game. I give myself a choice between two things and ask myself if she weren’t here, what would I choose? An opal wallet or blue? Black boots or brown? But my instincts are elusive. If choosing is a muscle, mine has atrophied from disuse and although I keep practicing, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do it. You have to picture yourself when you choose an outfit or a piece of jewelry, imagine yourself wearing this or that, but when I think of myself, I see only my made-up face and pink jumpers, me in Mama’s image, and then I don’t want to think anymore.
I slip the ring on. “I love it, thank you.”
“Only the best for my daughter.” She kisses me on the cheek. “I’m so proud of you, do you know that? You were always the smartest, the best. My baby girl, going to Oxford.”
I hug her, inhale the scent of her skin. This is the Mama Julia and Jacob never see, the Mama that is just mine, the Mama who looks after me. She strokes my hair, and then I feel her stiffen. “Lily, your roots. The brown’s showing.”
“Sorry, Mama, I’ve run out of dye.” How could I be so stupid? This evening more than any other, Mama needs me not just to be her perfect daughter but to look her perfect daughter. She blinks rapidly and I wonder which incident she’s thinking about—in London, when the late class monitor wouldn’t release me because she didn’t think Mama was my mother, or in Singapore, when fruit-stall owners would lift my hair to catch the brown in sunlight or tilt my chin up to get a closer look at my single hazel eye: “So white, barely any Chinese.” Her solution was simple. Change my hair, my skin color, my eyes. No one would question whose daughter I was.
I cover my hairline with my hands, hating myself for ruining the moment, hoping I can bring her back, but it’s too late, she’s slipped off the bed and has opened her wardrobe. “Help me get ready.”
She’s proud of the blouse she’s planning to wear this evening, purchased after months of trawling through Selfridges and Liberty’s, the boutiques of New Bond Street. Rose-gold sequins cover a bustier shape stiff enough to conceal her burgeoning stomach, and the sleeves are sheer, gauzing over her scarred arms and flattering each wrist with a triplet of pearls. I retrieve Mama’s Spanx from her drawers—mammoth nude knickers and a black strapless bodysuit that extends into cycling shorts. I hold them up to her. “Higher power panties or full body?”
“What do you think?” She appraises herself in the mirrored wardrobe door, tracing the scars on her arms, stroking their shiny surfaces, and then moves to put her bra on. She sucks her abdomen in, the light catching the crisscrossed stretch marks.
“Higher power. You don’t need more than that.”
She falters after she puts them on, the enormity of the panties ridiculous. “Do you think Francie wears Spanx?”
“I know she does, Mama. Full body. Every day.” She smiles, and I’m exultant thinking this will last, this will hold. But then the bird pecks, and she startles and I remember. Any magic I have is glass-slippered, half a fairy godmother’s, less. It’s a daughter’s. It’s already gone.
* * *
TWO HALVES OF an onion. Splinters of glass. Milk spreading between toes. The woman. The images kept catching me off guard while I helped Mama get ready, startling me when I slid a diamanté pin in her hair, fastened the clasp of her necklace. Now, on my own in the attic, they eddy and surge, a washing cycle without end. Why am I seeing these things?
Think, think, think. Doctor Aiden said they were flashbacks. And even though I don’t remember these events, I know I hold the answer. My eyes fall on the dust sheets covering my family’s possessions, everything I’ve camouflaged against the walls. I fling off the material and start searching.
My boxes are crammed with report cards, records of achievements, exercise books. I flick through each of them, pass my eyes over my eleven-year-old flair for language, my intellectual curiosity (although there is a mention of my “unconventional appearance”). What the teachers never understood was that I wasn’t like the other scholarship girls, I didn’t have talent. What I had was a physical revulsion to a problem, the chaotic mess of it. Once that took hold of me, I was obsessed with carving a path through it, that snarling, overgrown forest, slashing it down, trampling it into place.
I find a diary I made when I was seven. It was a school project and I pore over it, hoping to find a reference to a smashed glass of milk, but there is nothing except entries about movies I’d seen at the cinema (complete with ticket stubs) and park games I’d played with Jacob and Julia. I pause over an entry of Daddy taking us out for milkshakes and burgers. I’d forgotten that. Where was Mama?
“What are you doing?” Julia leans against the doorway rubbing the side of her nose, her bag slung over her shoulder. She is stunning in a full-length silver lamé maxi dress, long-sleeved, the sharp shoulders, the dramatic jewelry toughening up the ruffles of the skirt. “This place is a bomb site.”
“Sorry,” I say, and then hate myself for apologizing. I slip my diary back into a box. Currents of dust billow through the room.
She heads toward the dressing table, hauls her bag up against the mirror. “Can I get ready here? My room is filled with Mama’s stuff.”
“I thought you were staying at Chrissy’s.”
“Mama thought it would be nice if we arrived as a family.”
“And you agreed?”
“Sure.”
There’s a dynamic between my sister and my mother I could plot on a graph. It lasts about a month. Mama will cajole, threaten, bribe Julia into being the kind of daughter she wants. Julia will go along with it. Mama will ask Julia for something she will not give. Julia will snap. Mama will punish her. Julia will retaliate. Mama will buy her off.
That’s what happened this summer. Mama asked Julia if she wanted to go on holiday with her. Julia freaked out and went to Greece with Chrissy. Mama sublet Julia’s flat while she was gone. Julia came on to Jonathan. The way Julia is shaking her foundation identifies exactly where we are in the cycle—at its most dangerous point, just before Mama buys her off.
“What’s she said this time?”
Julia buffs the liquid across her skin angrily. “She won’t let me move back into my flat, unless I behave.”
“Can’t you stay with Chrissy?”
Her fingers don’t stop moving but her reflection is lifeless. “Do you know what it’s like always asking your friend for something? To be the one taking, taking, taking? It’s embarrassing.” She thumbs her dress and I know she’s borrowed it from Chrissy. “It’s—” she breaks off, not because she can’t think of the right word but because she can’t bear to say it. “Humiliating” from the Latin, humiliare, “to humble,” from humilis, “lowly,” from humus, “earth.” To be brought low. To be brought to the ground.
I sit on the floor next to her. She strokes my hair for a second and then carries on with her makeup, her tremble palpable through her skin. I lean my head against her thigh. I’d do anything to make her feel better, but I don’t know what that is.
“Whad’up, guys?” Jacob arrives in a tux, twirling around, throwing shapes with a brittle confidence that isn’t his, borrowed from a drink or a pill, some pick-me-up to make our family outing more bearable. “Ready to see those vulture capitalists?”
Julia stands up abruptly. “Have you been drinking?”
He rolls his eyes at her. “Oh come on. I’m going to a party with my Dad, who’s in love with my ex-wife. I need a little help.”
“You can’t drink with your antidepressants. You’ll feel worse.”
He takes four minibar vodkas out from the inside of his jacket and shakes them like castanets. “Lighten up, Jules. It’s a party!”
Julia snatches them from him. “Everyone just needs to behave.”
* * *
THE CAR MAKES everything worse, the steel hulk a carnival mirror distorting ordinary objects. The driver’s seat is a throne Daddy isn’t entitled to assume. He hesitates before putting the key into the ignition, jangling them at Mama in case she wants to drive. The back seats are a time warp. We pull out of the drive and slip into younger versions of ourselves—hyperalert, skittish, vigilant. How have we let this happen? I clutch my rucksack and glance at my brother and sister to check if it’s just me. It isn’t. Jacob’s knee bounces manically up and down. Julia claws back her panic the only way she knows how: she goes on the offensive.
“Felipe is going all out on this engagement party,” she says as Daddy brakes at the crossing. “Definitely check out the champagne, it’s nine hundred pounds a bottle. Chrissy says the whole evening is costing him at least two hundred thousand pounds. Can you imagine spending that much on one party?”
She’s punishing Mama for holding hostage the rent on her flat, daring her to pay it—This is what your clients do, the people with real money. They don’t barter with their daughters. They don’t make them beg.
Mama ignores her. She presses the wand of her lip gloss deep into her cupid’s bow until a single clear drop appears.
“It’s almost the cost of my flat.”
I drive my elbow into Julia’s arm. I will spend the entire evening on high alert as it is, I don’t want to be on call for a disaster. She ignores me and re-pins a loose strand of hair. “The cost of your mortgage.”
Stop, I mouth to her.
She doesn’t. “Do you ever feel like we’re invited to these events, but we never really belong? Doesn’t matter what we look like, what we wear. We’re worthless to them. Nothing.”
Mama snaps her compact mirror shut and a silence falls over the car because we all know: with those words, Julia has sealed the fate of the evening. Under her sequined bustier, her Korean makeup, her Jimmy Choos, Mama’s worst fear has been unleashed, and with it, an unpredictable, whipping jealousy. Bring low, bring to the ground. How dangerous it is to play our humiliation games.
* * *
THE ENGAGEMENT PARTY is at one of the few locations in London large enough to hold 250 people with outdoor space for fireworks—the Christofidou mansion on Blackheath’s private estate. Everywhere, there are wildflowers. An arch of foxgloves frames the front door, and as we step into the hall, goldenrod, sweet williams, and cornflowers stream down from the central chandelier so that the light is a midsummer gold, pink, blue. In front of us, hollyhocks and daisies trail over a staircase that can only be described as palatial.
Mama gasps. I know what she’s thinking. The hallway alone is bigger than our entire downstairs and even if we had this space, what would we do with it? We certainly wouldn’t adorn the walls with actual art, or display a sculpture we didn’t understand, or lay down an impossibly thick Persian rug. It is suddenly preposterous that we’re even here.
Mama deflates by my side. I take her hand quickly and squeeze. Don’t think about this anymore. Do what you’ve come to do.
Hours later, I’m in the center of the ballroom trying to keep everyone in view, but it’s like playing chess with traitorous pieces. Daddy, who Mama usually lets duck out of these events, has been dispatched to fetch drinks, but he’s using the bar queue as a pretext to scroll through BBC News. Jacob keeps disappearing into the garden. Each time he emerges, his cheeks are more flushed and he grows more unsteady on his feet. Julia, at least, is behaving impeccably. She swipes Jacob’s drinks from him, and otherwise joins Chrissy flirting with black-tied bankers, the pair cutting striking figures in their matching metallic, floor-length dresses.
