Yikes.‘I don’t know what this is, honestly,’ I venture. ‘Right now, it’s definitely a vacation.’ She seems assured, but only just.
‘Can I ask you about something?’ I say, keen to change the subject.
‘You can ask me anything,’ she says with real sincerity.
‘What was David like?’
‘Ah,’ she replies, pulled towards warmer memories. ‘Whatwashe like. No one has asked me that in a very long time.
‘He… had integrity,’ she says after a while. ‘He could never say anything mean about another person. Hated others being treated badly. He was incredibly loyal.’
‘Well, that strikes me as a really fantastic quality.’
‘Yeah, he was a solid guy, you know? Totally stand-up,’ Naomi says with a slight catch in the throat. ‘It was only after he passed that I realized he was the thing holding everything together. You know, we always think that it’s the mom doing stuff like that, but really, he was this family’s mom.’
‘I wish I’d met him.’
‘I mean, I wasn’t even really looking to meet someone but there he was. There was probably something in my upbringing that made me latch on to someone like him.’
Something spidery in me reawakens. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, like my step-father was not a good person,’ Naomi says softly. ‘It all looked pretty good from the outside, we lived in a nice house and we went to good schools, but inside the house, things were pretty hellish.’
I feel a pang of protectiveness over Naomi. Poor Ted, too.
‘Oh my God. Me too.’ I am almost shouting in my haste to show that we have this in common. I’d completely forgotten that I’d read about Ted’s childhood in that magazine article.
‘Really?’ Naomi squints at the coincidence, but not strictly in a bad way.
‘Yeah, I mean, my mum was his punching bag.’ What I say next surprises me. ‘Sometimes I was a bit jealous of that, because it meant he was at least noticing her.’
‘Oh wow, that’s awful,’ Naomi says.
‘No one thought we were the respectable house on the block or anything though,’ I add. ‘People on the road used to call our house Hiroshima.’
‘My brother got it way worse than I ever did, I think,’ Naomi reflects. ‘Oy, the poor kid was left black and blue.’
‘That’s so shit,’ I say, because it really is. Trying to sound casual, I add: ‘Well, maybe we could all meet up and trade war stories one day, I dunno…’
‘He’d be one to talk,’ Naomi says almost to herself.
‘He’d be one to talk?’
‘Forget I said that,’ she says, straightening herself. ‘What I mean is, I don’t think talking about these things is my brother’s strong suit.’
I want to draw more out of her about him. Instead, I decide to keep counsel. Let the hare sit, as my mother would say.
I’m sitting at Naomi’s kitchen island, pretending it’s mine. I am casually browsing baby buggies on a department store website on my laptop, trying to choose which one I might like if money were no option. I get as far as fur inserts for prams when Violet pings me a message. ‘Hey, do you wanna Skype?’
I don’t want Violet to see Naomi’s house– equally, I don’t want her to know that I don’twant her to seethe inside of Naomi’s house. I want all of this to be just for me, for now at least.
‘I’m on the move, but I can be in a Starbucks in ten minutes,’ I type.
Later, as I settle in front of a grande macchiato, Violet and I have our first face to face in a while. She appears to be in a hospital corridor, or at least somewhere cold andawful and sterile. Glasses sit on a face that looks swollen from crying, and her shoulders are even more rounded and hunched than usual now that she’s out in the wider world.
‘You all right?’ I say to her in my best mum voice.
‘Not really. I don’t really know what’s wrong with me.’
