Anger always wins.
11
She doesn’t sleep that night.Again. The traffic noises, which she had never noticed before, have grown louder. She begins to think that sleep is an affectation, that she can function perfectly well without it. She wonders why she wasted all that time unconscious under the duvet when she could have been busy doing other stuff. Imagine the paintings she would have produced, the commissions she could have completed. She might have written a children’s book of her own. Her work might have been exhibited in the world’s best galleries. There would be champagne toasts to her on white-walled private view evenings where the chatter would be polite and murmured and she would glide easily past other people’s glances, knowing that they were talking about her and looking at her and marvelling at her talent and her success.
‘See,’ she would have said to her mother, standing in front of an abstract work of splattered reds and oranges, dripping across the canvas like butcher’s blood. ‘Iamsomeone.’
She spends the early hours at her desk in the study, waiting for the sun to rise over the garden so that the council estate stairwell would cast its morning shadow over the grass. She takes out a sheet of paper and tapes it down, but instead of painting as she had meant to, Marisa scrawls words across it in black Sharpie. She wants to experiment with a different form. She wants to use typography in her pictures, in the same way as she once saw an American conceptual artist cut out red and white strips of text and stick them across greyscale photographs of women with their eyes closed, of empty houses on dilapidated streets, of rough seas and glowering skies and prostitutes in urban doorways.
She remembers her father had a girlfriend once – the first of many. It was a couple of years after her mother and sister had left and just before she was sent to boarding school. He brought her home late one night, when he must have thought Marisa was asleep. But she heard the car drawing up outside, the slam of the driver’s door and then the passenger’s, and then she heard the key in the lock, the clink of glasses in the kitchen and eventually the whispered footsteps leading upstairs, tracing a path across the landing.
The smell of cigarette smoke. Her father’s gentle cough. His stumble as he reached the bedroom, which told her he was drunk.
She heard them through the thin bedroom wall. An unfamiliar female giggle, bubbling and muffled from the other side of the plaster, and then her father’s steady bassline chuckle. What could the woman have said to make him laugh like that, Marisa thought, and why couldn’t she do the same? Why was he always so sad with Marisa, when he could be this happy with someone else?
From underneath her duvet, she heard sighing and kissing, followed by the shuffling of bedsheets, the creak of a headboard, the low groans of adults trying to be quiet and failing, and then a high-pitched shriek and Marisa’s father shushing the shrieker, telling her he had a child next door and then more adult laughter.
‘It’s all right,’ she told herself, ‘it’s just a dream,’ and in this way, even though she knew it wasn’t a dream, Marisa managed to fall into an approximation of sleep. She was good at telling herself stories, and in the stories things always worked out better than in real life. The next morning, she got dressed in her school uniform and went downstairs for breakfast. Her father was sitting as usual at the pine table, the well-worn wood ringed with imprints of long-ago mugs, and he turned to her as she entered.
‘Marisa,’ he said, his voice formal. ‘Good morning, darling.’
He was wearing a shirt and tie and a knitted cardigan waistcoat and it was this – the effort he had made to appear normal – that alerted her to the other presence in the kitchen. Marisa’s gaze turned towards the other end of the room and came to settle on an aggressively thin woman sitting on the red armchair by the radiator. She had fine darkhair, piled high on her head and held in place with a velvet scrunchie. Her face was angular, the skin pulled taut against prominent bones, and her mouth was masked with red lipstick. She was wearing a white silky blouse, with a bobbled bouclé jacket over the top – it was one of those jackets that looked like a cheap imitation of a designer item and the neckline was fraying, stray navy threads spreading across the woman’s collarbone like weeds.
She was clasping a coffee in long pale fingers, hunched over the cup as if seeking out the weak plume of steam for warmth. Her head looked too big for the rest of her; her body as if it might shatter at any moment. The way she was sitting – legs crossed, spine curved, head jutting outwards – seemed braced for impact.
‘Hello, lovey,’ the woman said.
‘Marisa,’ her father said. He was standing now and the napkin that had been on his lap slid to the floor. ‘This is … um … well, this is my … friend, Jacqueline.’
‘Jackie, please!’ she said with a whoop of last night’s laughter. The white coffee cup was blotted with her lipstick. It was a coffee cup Marisa’s mother had used and it had a picture of a lion on the front. Marisa had not drunk from it since her mother had left. It had been preserved in the cupboard like a museum piece, waiting for the return of its rightful owner. Her father had never mentioned anything but she noticed that he, too, refused to take it out.
‘Hello,’ Marisa said, dipping her eyes so she didn’t have to look too long.
Jackie put down her cup and moved towards her, opening her thin arms widely and Marisa realised, to her horror, that the woman was expecting physical contact.
‘I’m a hugger,’ Jackie said, emitting a throaty smoker’s laugh. ‘Come here, darling.’
There was no escape. It felt like hugging a rotary clothesline.
‘There, there,’ Jackie was saying, patting Marisa’s back. ‘I’ll be seeing a lot more of you, I should think.’
With her head pressed against the cloying patchouli scent of Jackie’s clavicle, Marisa had the strangest sensation that the woman waswinking at her father. She pulled away from the embrace and sat down at the table, cheeks burning. Her father had stayed standing. His face was slack. He seemed uncomprehending, as if the world had begun spinning at a speed he could no longer understand.
Just sit down, Marisa wanted to say. Sit down and start being my father again.
She glanced at the packet of cornflakes and the half-empty bottle of full-fat milk, the thumb-press indentation on the silver lid, and felt revulsion. She pushed her chair back, the table juddering.
‘I don’t have time,’ she said. ‘I’m late for school.’
‘It’s only eight fifteen,’ her father protested.
‘God, they work them hard these days, don’t they?’ Jackie said to no one in particular. ‘I feel sorry for you, sweetheart.’
Marisa turned to Jackie then and smiled.
‘Fuck you,’ she said, the words clear and powerful, landing cleanly in the silence between them. It was the first time Marisa had ever used the F-word in front of her father. She was still so young that he probably hadn’t believed she knew it. And yet he left her in the house on her own without a babysitter while he went out for dinner with Jackie, so she clearly wasn’t that young in his eyes.
There was a moment of shock. Jackie took a step back, stumbling against the armchair. Marisa’s father was rigid. His eyes were pinpricks of fury. She had never seen him so angry. He opened his mouth, about to say something that she already knew would be irreparable, and she ran out of the house before she could hear it, running onto the road and all the way to the bus stop where she realised she had no coat or schoolbag but that she’d just have to make do. On the bus, no one talked to her. She had, without knowing why, radiated weirdness from the moment her mother had left. It was as though she were contained by a force field of loneliness, and everyone knew that she was not worth getting to know.
