‘I’m a little bit worried about her, I dropped in the other day and she looked tired ...’ my voice trails off.
‘Well of course she’s going to look tired,’ says Scarlett, stirring sugar into her coffee.
‘Not just ordinary tired: tired in her eyes. I mean, Granddad would drive anyone to drink and Granny, though she’s a complete darling, does require a lot of petting and minding, it’s ...’ I stop for a minute. ‘It’s Dad, it’s taking care of him – it’s looking at this man she loves and knowing he’s in another place. That’s heartbreaking.’
Scarlett looks me in the eye. She doesn’t say it but I can tell what she’s thinking: people with heartbreak recognise it in other people. That she and my mother are on one side of the tragic divide. They both deal with huge pain.
I can’t compare mine to theirs.
So I need to fix myself in order to be there for my beloved family. That’s my job.
13
When you can’t find the sunshine, be the sunshine
In the evening, Dan takes one look at me and can tell I’m upset.
‘Babe,’ he says, dropping his briefcase onto the kitchen floor and reaching out. I go into his arms and rest my head on his shoulder, breathing in his scent, feeling the solid muscle underneath his jacket.
‘What’s up?’
‘Scarlett,’ I say, still resting my head against him.
I want to stay here all evening: to not cook dinner, but just stand in this warm circle of comfort and feel healed. No matter what’s going on in the world, Dan can make me feel better.
‘Right. Did you go over to see her?’
I tell him the story of our shopping trip, and eventually, we migrate to the kitchen table where he sets me in a chair, makes me tea, finds my hidden stash of chocolate and puts four squares in front of me so that I can eat them quickly before the kids come in and want some. Eating chocolate secretly is a risky business in our house.
He then looks into the oven to see the progress of dinner.
‘I know you hate when I say this, Freya,’ he says, looking marvellously domestic with gingham oven gloves on as he checks thehome-made fishfingers we are all going to eat because I was too exhausted to make grown upandkid meals, ‘but you can’t take Scarlett’s pain. It’s like you think you’re the family’sbomb-proof chamber and all bombs can be detonated inside you because you can deal with it. You can’t.’
‘I can,’ I say wearily. ‘I’m like Dad: he could take it all and now that he’s gone, I do it. So? You and Zed mind your mother because she has nobody else.’
‘It’s not the same.’
‘It is!’ I protest.
‘No,’ says Dan evenly. ‘We look after Mum but we don’t think we can fix her. Nobody can fix another person. You, on the other hand, try to fix everyone: Scarlett, your mother, everyone. You can’t ...’
He sits back down again, pulls off the oven gloves and takes my hands in his big ones. ‘... we used to talk about this stuff. We don’t anymore. You don’t tell me how you’re doing.’
‘Fine,’ I say, and I am lying. I never used to lie to Dan – apart from that one time I secretly got Botox and hated it, but couldn’t bring myself to tell him, so said I had laser hair removal instead.
‘If you’d let me come to one of your meetings,’ he begins. ‘I’m sure they let family members of people who’ve been hurt in?’
‘They don’t,’ I say.
Another lie. They might only letsingle-celled amoebas in but I don’t know. Dan knows me inside out.Please don’t know I’m lying, I pray. I love him so much and I couldn’t bear his reproach, but I can’t talk about a meeting I haven’t been to yet.
‘The sleeping pills ...’ he tries again.
I decide to come at him with a big lie: ‘I went to see AJ this morning and I’m coming off them. Slowly, obviously—’
Dan doesn’t let me finish. He’s beside me, on his knees, holding me close and he’s muttering: ‘I was so worried, Freya. Any pills are dangerous. It’s so easy to get addicted, and you take such good care of everyone else, I wish you’d let me help you.’
For the second time that evening, I lean against him only this time, I feel like crying.
