‘She kept saying I wasn’t the only person going through this, that I should reach out – but I couldn’t. And, you know, we got through it – I survived, Joe survived. Sadly Gareth survived, although these days he just sends me snarky texts and emails that imply I’m a bad mother, and I try not to let those get me down. But … well, Mum was right. I suppose she’s always right – he just sucked the life out of me.’
We have both forgotten our dinner by this stage, and the candles are burning low, and I notice that we are both in tears. Her, understandably, for being forced to relive all of this. Me, for having to hear it.
I mean, I knew some of it – I hadn’t lived in a bubble. Mum told me when he left. But the rest … the control. The slow character assassination. Basically, the emotional abuse? I didn’t know all of that, and I suspect Mum hadn’t either, or she’d have hired a hit man and had Gareth erased. That, I think, is still an option – it’s never too late for revenge.
I love my sister. In fact at times I’ve probably loved her too much – needed to love her too much. I love her so deeply, so fiercely, that I’ve never been right since she kicked me out of her life. I’ve always known this – known that Mum was right when she compared us to three-legged dogs and tortoises stuck on our backs – but I have never felt it as strongly as I do now.
I am devastated for her, and by what she has told me. I am furious with him for doing it, and with myself for putting her in a position where she had to cope with all of that without me, and with the fact that it has taken our mother’s death for me to hear the full story.
Everything I’ve heard about Gareth, everything I suspected at the time, backs up my belief that sooner or later, all of that would have happened, with or without me. I’d always known that he was a monster. I didn’t create the situation – but I certainly exacerbated it, and put her in a position where it all sped up, steam-rollered over her, leaving her like a cartoon character, squashed and flattened on the floor.
And I left her to deal with it all alone – if I’d still been in her life, I’d have been there, at her side, fighting her corner. Looking after Joe, kicking Gareth in the balls when he played up, protecting her. Instead, I hurt her, and made her even more vulnerable.
Now, after hearing all of this, I have no idea what to say. How to console her without risking rejection. How to apologise yet again. How to express my regrets, and show her how I feel. I am frozen, sitting there at the old oak table in the Posh Room, an empty glass of Bolly and a cold Beef Wellington congealing on my plate in front of me.
‘So,’ Rose says, swiping tears away from her face angrily. ‘Is this the part where you say “I told you so”, and look even more smug?’
‘No,’ I answer swiftly, horrified but not surprised that she would expect that of me. ‘This is part where I say I’m sorry, again – because, let’s face it, Bastards don’t have to be male, do they?’
Chapter 31
Rose
Iwake up with sore eyes, a pounding headache, and a champagne glass lying next to me on the pillow, laid there like a boozy rose.
My first thought is: where are the paracetamol? And my second thought is: did we set the garden on fire last night?
After my long, drunken confessional session with Poppy, we basically decided that Mum was right (again) and that our lives needed more fizz. So we finished off all three bottles of the Bollinger, and avoided talking about anything too serious for the rest of the night.
She asked questions about Joe, tentatively at first, as though I might refuse to answer them – but she’d found my weak spot. Like most mums, I can’t resist bragging about my brilliant boy and all of his amazing achievements. Every now and then, as I recounted some tale about his performance in the Year Six leavers’ play, or the way he saved a certain goal, or how good he is at the guitar, I would remind myself of who I was talking to, and temporarily clam up.
It made for a weird stop-start conversation – a constant flow of maternal pride and childhood anecdotes interrupted by stilted silences and awkward moments.
It was during one of these that Poppy suggested we should make an effigy of Gareth, and burn it in the garden. As I lie in bed now – staring at that bloody Boyzone poster – I wonder why on earth we thought that was a good idea. But then I remember that I’ve spent the night spooning with a champagne glass, and it all starts to make sense.
We’d found one of my old dolls in the Hideous Extension, and cut its curly blonde hair off with nail scissors. Then we’d swapped her dress for a pair of trousers from an ancient Rupert the Bear, to make it look like a man – although Poppy decided it didn’t look male enough, and used a marker pen to draw a giant penis on its forehead as well.
Then we held a little ceremony in the garden, dousing it in petrol we found in the lawnmower shed and setting it alight in the barbecue. There may have been chanting, possibly dancing – and there was definitely too much drinking as we watched its already creepy plastic face melt in the flames. It was all a bit pagan, and I was half afraid we may have conjured up some kind of scorned-woman voodoo; that I’d check my phone and see that Gareth had died the night before in a freak chip-pan fire.
I roll out of bed, and grab my phone off the drawers. No. Nothing at all, which is a relief – because while I’ve often fantasised about Gareth getting bumped off, or at least moving to Australia, I wouldn’t like to actually cause his death with my freakish supernatural powers.
I am still fully dressed from the night before, and groan as I make my way downstairs. I am a little woozy, and have to hold on to the walls as I go. The creaky staircase makes so much noise it feels as if it’s being piped directly into my head.
I am expecting to see carnage when I get down there, but am pleasantly surprised to see that Poppy has already been up, cleared the Posh Room, and washed the dishes. There’s a smell of toast in the air, which I react to like a trained sniffer dog, following the trail to the back kitchen door.
I realise when I feel the heat of the sun on my face that it’s not quite as early as I thought. In fact, I see when I bother looking at my watch, it’s just after eleven. I’ve had an unintentional lie-in.
I see Poppy sitting at the wooden bench, a plate of wholemeal toast and a cafetiere of coffee next to her on the table. She’s just nibbled the edges of the slice, as if it might be poisoned. She looks a lot fresher than I do, and is reading a book. I recognise it straight away –Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
I pause in the doorway for a moment, not sure of how to behave. Not sure of how I even feel. Last night was exhausting. Talking about Gareth always drains me, which is why I’ve made an absolute masterwork of avoiding it over the years.
It exhausts me because it is traumatic, and because, after all this time, he still has the power to make me feel bad about myself – except these days, it is different. These days, I feel bad about what I let him do to me. About not spotting the signs earlier. About not facing up to what he was before so much damage was done.
Talking about him is bad enough – but talking about him to Poppy? The sister I cut out of my life so long ago? That is a double whammy of massive proportions.
She didn’t react the way I’d expected. I could see her twitching, see her slow tears, see that she was desperate to reach out to me. To touch me and console me. I’m glad she didn’t – it would have been too much, too soon – but perhaps … well, perhaps one day, things will be different.
For now, I decide on cautious civility as I walk barefoot over the grass to join her. For now, I’ll try and carry on doing what our mother wanted, and see where it leads. It would just all be so much easier if she was actually here to act as a buffer zone, make us laugh, chivvy us along – if she was out here on this gloriously sunny day, chatting and eating toast and making plans. I miss her so much.
