‘You say that like it’s a bad thing,’ I state.
‘The apple did not fall far from the tree, let’s just say that.’
‘Hold up now,’ Emma suddenly interjects, her fight-or-flight response clearly kicking in.We’re not leaving now, Lucy. ‘That’s my tree you’re talking about.’
‘Well, some of the apples came out beautifully… others…’ Her eyes turn to me. But before I have a chance to reply, Emma chips in.
‘Others grew exactly how they needed to. They had to rename the fruit because she was so different, so superbly unique to all the other apples in that tree.’ Emma grabs my hand tightly.
‘If that’s how you want to put it. I found your sister in a storage cupboard once with a groundsman. She made a French teacher cry.’
She’s not half wrong. The French teacher was a pervy old tosser though.
‘We all had bets where you’d end up. I put my money on prison myself.’
Emma’s face contorts in shock. I suddenly think about something Mrs Willett said to me when I was in my last year of sixth form, causing havoc, questioning the status quo. It may have been at the time of my Old El Paso antics.You’ll never amount to anything.Those words are still fresh in my mind and maybe carry even more gravity after everything that’s happened. What am I remembered for? A decent monologue? The fact I was gobby and caused these teachers a fair bit of trouble? That’s not something you put on plaques. Christ, was she right? Emma sees that I’ve run out of steam. My back hurts but she’s not done, the purpose of coming over here wasn’t to have some old battleaxe lay into me, especially when my memory of her is a lot fresher than she thinks.
‘When we came in, Mrs Willett? The first thing you asked was what we became. All you are interested in are labels. But you never asked about the human sides of us – the mothers we grew into, the people we married, the places we’ve been,’ Emma explains.
I don’t think I want to answer that either though, Ems.Yeah, Mrs Willett – I got my vajayjay pierced, am wildly promiscuous and all I seem to own is a cat who eats sanitary wear.But the big sister has a point. Even when we were just children, this woman weaponised her authority.
‘Girls!’ Emma shouts, gesturing to the drama crowd in the corner. ‘Don’t be one of her apples. You grow exactly like you want to. Don’t let this one farm you to look like all the others. Bloody shine however you want…’
Of course, this comment has no context so they look at Emma a little confused but I like seeing my sister making a fuss, releasing something into the air that has obviously been bugging her for a decade and more.You tell them.I hear angered voices float in and out of my consciousness. A disagreement of sorts. Emma says she’d never send her daughters to this hellhole. I think Willett is threatening to call the police on us. The girls in the corner congregate and watch. Their faces are all shiny and young. That was me, literally a few months ago. Feel the floor under your feet, girls. Let it ground you. You’re all shiny young apples.
The words of that final epilogue ofAs You Like Itsuddenly come to me. I adored the energy, the message for all to love who they wanted, to defy convention and embrace the complexity and wonder of real life. There was a line there about conjuring the audience, about kissing as many people out there that pleased me. The speech is embedded in my brain, it felt like the beginning of something, not an epilogue. I mumble the words under my breath. I remember every word. God, I’m good. They were so bright, the lights in that studio. I couldn’t see the faces of the crowd, only hear their applause. And suddenly, my legs just go from under me. Emma catches me.
‘Shit! Lucy! LUCY! Call 999, tell them we have a person who’s collapsed suffering from a traumatic brain injury. Lucy! Lucy!’
9
‘So you’re telling me that you, the doctor, let your sister leave this house wearing next to nothing, and went to your old school and took on the headteacher?’ Mum says, as she stands over me in bed having actually tucked me in. There’s a towel in a plastic basin on the dresser which is Mum’s default go-to bowl when someone needs to throw up. That bowl has seen things. That bowl should be in therapy.
‘We weren’t meant to go in but we did. I thought she was fine. We took her blood sugar in the ambulance, it’s just low. She’s fine.’
‘So you took her on this adventure and didn’t even feed her?’ Mum adds.
‘I will take full responsibility for this,’ Emma says, still sweating slightly at the events of the last hour when she cried on the floor of the school’s new drama studio thinking I’d stroked out. Of all the places to die, Ems. But hell, maybe this is how I’ll get my plaque and it’ll be the perfect way to oust Willett from the place: the teacher who’d literally argued one of her ex-students to death.
‘Mum, go easy on her. Had she not been there I’d probably still be on the floor. We’ve called Mr Gomes, the brain man, and he’ll see us tomorrow. Please don’t worry,’ I say, grabbing onto her hand.
‘Well, you’re not to move. Only for the toilet. We will bring food to you. I don’t want you anywhere near the stairs and a sister is to bathe with you.’
‘Bathe with me? We won’t fit in the bath. Meg’s pubes would float around the bath like seaweed.’
‘As in I want them supervising you. Sitting in there with you so you don’t fall or anything.’
‘Really?’ I ask. ‘It’s got an air ofLittle Womenabout it. Please assemble around my bed, tell me your tales and plans of the world, we can quilt while I recover from my fevers.’ I break open my American accent for that. This does not amuse my mother in the way that it should.
‘Please don’t joke, Lucy.’
‘It’s all I have, Mother.’
She comes to arrange the pillows around my back and I catch her eyes examining my scar. It wigs her out, I know. Whereas Meg is fascinated by the grotesque nature of it and Emma cleans it daily, it serves as a reminder to my mum at how easily humans can break. How her daughter broke and they had to put her back together again like Humpty Dumpty. I want to say Mum is stoic but the truth is I don’t know how she’s dealing with any of this. Every time I see her, by my bedside or over a plate of pasta, she’s quiet for once. She shrieks about the cat but she doesn’t break into random sobbing like Dad. She doesn’t engage with me like she normally does, which is to criticise and for our banter to go back and forth like rocketing tennis balls. Instead, she remains like some wall of strength, her eyes willing me to get better, to get through this. This is her Lucy. She gets herself out of scraps, this daughter of mine; this is just another scrap.
‘All that hair gone,’ she says, her eyes tracing my fuzzy scalp.
‘Hair grows,’ I tell her.
