‘I guess I believe what someone once told me. Some things are valuable just because.’
Then, despite the shame, the snarling coil of humiliation, I am lit up inside, I am buzzing. He’s done this because he understands. He’s done thisfor me. The need to touch him is overwhelming. It is such an easy thing. To cross the space between us.
‘Lauren, what happened last week—’
I shake my head, I don’t want to go back there, I want to stay in this moment, holding his gift in my hands. But he carries on in his low, gentle voice. ‘It’s okay, nothing’s wrong. It was just a mistake.’
‘Was it?’
For what seems like an age, he says nothing. Then, he backs slowly away. ‘I’m with your mother.’
I don’t reply.
‘You’re her daughter.’
I don’t move.
‘She’s going to tell you tonight but it’s important I tell you now. We’re getting married.’
His words come to me from a distance, I understand what he’s saying and I also do not. When Mama talks about him, he is someone who knows about property in Kensington and Chelsea, chamber music, French wine, but when he and I are together, he is butterflies and terrariums and colour. So, I am struggling to connect the Daniel in front of me with my mother’s Daniel. Yet I know what he’s saying must be true. This is why Mama wanted me to see him. So he could give me the display case, show me he cares. In the opposite way I want.
The butterflies glitter beneath the glass, poppy red, sunflower yellow, I’ve wanted them back for so long. But now, I understand that they are nothing more than a consolation prize. A stand-in for something else.
After I get home and Mama tells me she’s engaged, after she and Daniel leave to celebrate (she begs me to come, I tell her I don’t feel well), I go to Mama’s room. The spritz of her perfume lingersin the air – patchouli, vanilla – but it is her wardrobe that holds the distillation of her, her distinctive musk.
I open the doors. Her wardrobe is neat like mine; ‘You must look after your things,’ she drilled into me. Which is fine, neither of us have much, just clothes from charity shops, although every single piece is good quality. Mama, with her eye for style, is adept at picking out clothes, she doesn’t wear tracksuits like the other mums, she wears shirts with lace collars, silk trousers, woollen car coats. I grab a fistful of her concert dress, press it to my nose. Then, I start yanking things out, whatever catches my eye, a silver lamé dress, a black robe, a patterned shirt. The wrench of cloth quells the fury inside, the noise a relief against the terrible silence of the lab, the quiet way he backed away. I try them on, one after the other, all the clothes I’ve seen her wear for him – a violet dress with lace panels, a peach silk wrap, a gold sequin halter, the heels growing higher as I grow more desperate because it is painfully clear that I look nothing like my mother. These dresses, which she has tailored exactly to reach her knees or ankles, cut awkwardly across my thighs or calves, I cannot fill them, the material sags over my flat chest, my boyish hips. I thought the dresses would make a difference. But it isn’t the dresses at all. Mama is attractive in them, shapely, becausesheis attractive and shapely. I have never felt uglier in my life.
I stumble to her dressing table. I’ve never tried on anything but mascara but I’ve watched Mama so many times, I think, foolishly, that observation is a substitute for practice. Her foundation on my skin is shockingly dark, her lipstick too red, her eyeliner, drawn by my inexpert hand, is thick and jagged. I look at myreflection. I am something from a horror movie. A pageant girl who’s applied her own make-up.
No wonder he doesn’t want you, I think.No wonder.
From: Kit McDermott
13:29
I’ve just found the pasta you made Mills. I can’t stop crying.
15
Prodigals
Now
I’m shaking so hard when I reach the tube, I can’t hold my Oyster card steady, I swipe twice before the gate swings open. I think of one of my trainees who had obsessive-compulsive disorder, she’d disappear into the toilets every hour of the day, when she returned, her hands were wet and raw. Now, I think I understand. I’d do it all the time if it worked, plunge my hands into the burn of hot water, the enveloping cloud of soap. I’d wash hundreds of times for the certainty of being purged.
I loved you.
‘Stop being so easy,’ I say out loud to the open tracks, and then I know what will turn the traitorous tide of my thoughts, the untamed part of me that still hasn’t learnt. I get onto the tube, take four stops to Hammersmith.
The church is open, through an extension that wasn’t here eighteen years ago. I step inside. I’m greeted by an eager volunteer in a red T-shirt who asks if I’m here for the debt advice centre. I glance round. Opposite the bookshop is a café where peopleare being paired up with volunteers. I shake my head. My voice trembles. ‘I just wanted to visit the church.’
The volunteer nods, this is, apparently, completely normal. She waves me through the double doors. It’s cool inside. Light filters down from the stained-glass windows. I cast around, vigilant for memory, but the grey, stone walls, the high arches, the navy ceiling don’t ring any bells. So, when I finally see the triptych at the front, it is a double blow. ‘They haven’t finished it,’ Daniel whispered to me all those years ago, as the vicar showed us round. Only two of the panels were painted – a blacked-out cross in the centre, an old man flinging his arms round a skeletal prodigal son on the right – but the left was blank, just gold leaf. Later, while Mama and Daniel exchanged their vows, I stared at that panel, trying to feel nothing, trying to feel as blank as it was.
I don’t make it to the triptych. I crawl into the nearest pew, press my head to the polished wood. I held a bouquet of tulips as I walked down this aisle. Daniel beamed. I willed him to give me something, something that felt like our museum afternoons: herbariums and cacao pods, stormed beaches and butterfly cabinets. But as the congregation rose for Mama, he lifted his eyes to her. His expression changed for her.
What would she say if she were here, if she knew everything that happened after? I stare at the panel of the old man pressing his lips into the matted hair of his wayward son and think that’s how Mama used to hold me. Everything else falls away.
You were a child.Just a child.