فصل 12

12

Some lives work better with routines, and Liv Halstons is one of them. Every weekday morning she rises at seven thirty a.m., pulls on her trainers, grabs her iPod, and before she can think about what she is doing, she heads down, bleary-eyed, in the rackety lift, and out for a half-hour run along the river. At some point, threading her way through the grimly determined commuters, swerving round reversing delivery vans, she comes fully awake, her brain slowly wrapping itself around the musical rhythms in her ears, the soft thud-thud-thud of her feet hitting the pavements. Most importantly, she has steered herself away again from a time she still fears those initial waking minutes, when vulnerability means that loss can still strike her, unheralded and venal, sending her thoughts into a toxic black fug. She had begun running after she had realized that she could use the world outside, the noise in her earphones, her own motion, as a kind of deflector. Now it has become habit, an insurance policy. I do not have to think. I do not have to think. I do not have to think.

Especially today.

She slows to a brisk walk, buys a coffee, and rides the lift back up to the Glass House, her eyes stinging with sweat, unsightly damp patches on her T-shirt. She showers, dresses, drinks her coffee and eats two slices of toast with marmalade. She keeps almost no food in the house, having concluded that the sight of a full fridge is oddly overwhelming a reminder that she should be cooking and eating, not living on crackers and cheese. A fridge full of food is a silent rebuke to her solitary state.

Then she sits at her desk and checks her email for whatever work has come in overnight from copywritersperhour.com. Or, as seems to have been the case recently, not.

Mo? Im leaving a coffee outside your door. She stands, her head cocked, waiting for some sound suggesting life within. Its a quarter past eight too early to wake a guest? It has been so long since she had anyone to stay that she no longer knows the right things to do. She waits awkwardly, half expecting some bleary response, an irritable grunt, even, then decides that Mo is asleep. She had worked all evening, after all. Liv places the polystyrene cup silently outside the door, just in case, and heads off to her shower.

There are four messages in her inbox.

Dear Ms Halston

I got your email from copywritersperhour.com. I run a personalized stationery business and have a brochure that needs rewriting. I notice your rates are £100 per 1000 words. Would you consider dropping that price at all? We are working on a very tight budget. The brochure copy currently stands at around 1250 words.

Yours sincerely

Mr Terence Blank

Livvy darling

This is your father. Caroline has left me. I am bereft. I have decided to have nothing more to do with women. Call me if you can spare the time.

Hi Liv

Everything okay for Thursday? The kids are really looking forward to it. Were looking at around 20 at the moment, but as you know this figure is always fluid. Let me know if you need anything.

Best regards

Abiola

Dear Ms Halston

Weve tried several times to reach you by phone without success. Please could you contact us to arrange a time whereby we can discuss your overdraft situation. If you fail to make contact we will have to impose additional charges.

Please can you also ensure that we have your up-to-date contact details.

Yours sincerely

Damian Watts,

Personal accounts manager, NatWest Bank

She types a response to the first.

Dear Mr Blank. I would love to drop my prices to accommodate you. Unfortunately my biological make-up means I also have to eat. Good luck with your brochure.

She knows there will be somebody out there who will do it more cheaply, someone who doesnt care too much about grammar or punctuation, and will not notice that the brochure copy contains their for there twenty-two times. But she is tired of having her already meagre rates pushed down further.

Dad, I will call round later. If Caroline happens to have returned between now and then, please make sure you are dressed. Mrs Patel said you were watering the Japanese anemones naked again last week and you know what the police said about that.

Liv x

The last time she had arrived to comfort her father after one of Carolines disappearances, he had opened the door wearing a womans Oriental silk robe, gaping at the front, and wrapped her in an expansive hug before she could protest. Im your father, for goodness sake, he would mutter, when she scolded him afterwards. Although he hadnt had a decent acting job in almost a decade, Michael Worthing had never lost his childlike lack of inhibition, or his irritation with what he called wrappings. In childhood she had stopped bringing friends home after Samantha Howcroft had gone home and told her mother that Mr Worthing walked around with all his bits swinging. She had also told everyone at school that Livs dad had a willy like a giant sausage. Her father had seemed oddly untroubled by that one.

Caroline, his flame-haired girlfriend of almost fifteen years, was untroubled by his nakedness. In fact, she was quite happy to walk around semi-naked herself. Liv sometimes thought she was more familiar with the sight of those two pale, pendulous old bodies than she was with her own.

Caroline was his great passion, and would walk out in a giant strop every couple of months, citing his impossibility, his lack of earnings, and his brief, fervent affairs with other women. What they saw in him, Liv could never quite imagine.

Lust for life, my darling! he would exclaim. Passion! If you have none youre a dead thing. Liv, she suspects privately, is something of a disappointment to her father.

She swigs the last of her coffee, and pens an email to Abiola.

Hi Abiola

Ill meet you outside the Conaghy building at 2 p.m. All cleared this end. They are a little nervous but definitely up for it. Hope all good with you.

Regards

Liv

She sends it then stares at the one from her bank manager. Her fingers stall on the keyboard. Then she reaches across and presses delete.

She knows, with some sensible part of her, that this cannot continue. She hears the distant, threatening clamour of the neatly folded final demands in their envelopes, like the drumbeat of an invading army. She lives like a church mouse, buys little, socializes rarely, and still it is not enough. Her cash cards and credit cards are prone to spit themselves back at her from cashpoints. The council had arrived at her door last year, part of a local reassessment of council taxpayers. The woman had walked around the Glass House, then had looked at Liv as if she had somehow tried to cheat them of something. As if it were an insult that she, a virtual girl, lived in this house alone. Liv could barely blame her since Davids death she has felt a fraud living here. Shes like a curator, protecting Davids memory, keeping the place as he would have wanted it.

Liv now pays the maximum council tax chargeable, the same rate as the bankers with their million-pound wage packets, the financiers with their swollen bonuses. It eats up more than half of what she earns in some months.

She no longer opens bank statements. There is no point. She knows exactly what they will say.

Its my own fault. Her father drops his head to his hands theatrically. From between his fingers, sparse grey hair sticks up in tufts. Around him the kitchen is scattered with pots and pans that tell of an evening meal interrupted half a lump of Parmesan, a bowl of congealed pasta, a Mary Celeste of domestic disharmony. I knew I shouldnt go anywhere near her. But, oh! I was like a moth to a flame. And what a flame! The heat! The heat! He sounds bewildered.

Liv nods understandingly. She is attempting, privately, to reconcile this tale of epic sexual misadventure with Jean, the fifty-something woman who runs the local flower shop, smokes forty a day and whose grey ankles emerge from too-short trousers like slices of tripe.

Liv puts the kettle on. As she begins clearing up the work surfaces, her father downs the rest of his glass. Its too early for wine.

Its never too early for wine. Nectar of the gods. My one consolation.

Your life is one long consolation.

How did I raise a woman of such will, such fearsome boundaries?

Because you didnt raise me. Mum did.

Liv thought sometimes that the day her mother had died, six years ago, her parents short, fractured marriage had somehow been redrawn in her fathers mind so that this intolerant woman, this hussy, this harridan who had poisoned his only child against him now resembled a kind of virgin Madonna. She didnt mind. She did it herself. When you lost your mother, she gradually recast herself in the imagination as perfect. A series of soft kisses, loving words, a comforting embrace.

Loss has hardened you.

I just dont fall in love with every person of the opposite sex who happens to sell me a pot of tomato food.

She had opened the drawers, searching for coffee filters. Her fathers house was as cluttered and chaotic as hers was tidy.

I saw Jasmine in the Pigs Foot the other night. He brightens. What a gorgeous girl she is. She asked after you.

Why dont you see her any more? You two were such good friends? he wonders.

She shrugs. People grow apart. She cannot tell him this is only half of the reason. These are the things that they do not tell you about losing your husband that as well as the exhaustion you will sleep and sleep, and some days even the act of waking up will force your eyelids back down and that merely getting through each day will feel like a Herculean effort – you will hate your friends, irrationally each time someone arrives at your door or crosses the street and hugs you and tells you they are so, so desperately sorry, you look at her, her husband and their tiny children and are shocked at the ferocity of your envy. How did they get to live and David to die? How did boring, lumpen Richard with his City friends and his weekend golfing trips and his total lack of interest in anything outside his tiny complacent world get to live, when David, brilliant, loving, generous, passionate David, had to die? How did hangdog Tim get to reproduce, to bring further generations of little unimaginative Tims into this world, when Davids unexpected mind, his kindness, his kisses, had been extinguished for ever?

Liv can remember screaming silently in bathrooms, bolting without explanation from crowded rooms, conscious of her own apparent rudeness but unable to stop herself. It had been years before she could view anybody elses happiness without mourning the loss of her own.

These days, the anger has gone, but she prefers to view domestic satisfaction at a distance, and in people she doesnt know well, as if happiness were a scientific concept that she is merely pleased to see proven.

She no longer sees the friends she had back then, the Cherrys, the Jasmines. The women who would remember the girl she had been. It was too complicated to explain. And she didnt particularly like what it said about her.

Well, I think you should meet her before she goes. I used to love watching the two of you head out together, pair of young goddesses that you were.

When are you going to call Caroline? she says, wiping crumbs from the stripped-pine kitchen table and scrubbing at a ring of red wine.

She wont talk to me. I left fourteen messages on her mobile phone last night.

You need to stop sleeping with other people, Dad.

I know.

And you need to earn some money.

I know.

And you need to get dressed. If I were her and came home and saw you like this Id turn around and walk straight out again.

Im wearing her dressing-gown.

I guessed.

It still carries her scent. What am I supposed to do if she doesnt come back?

Liv stills, her expression hardening momentarily. She wonders if her father has any idea what day it is today. Then she looks at the battered man in his womens dressing-gown, the way his blue veins stand proud on his crêpy skin, and turns away to the washing-up. You know what, Dad? Im not really the person to ask.