The Other Family (26 page)

Chrissie said nothing. She heard Sue’s booted feet going rapidly and resolutely down the stairs, and then the sound of the flat’s front door opening and shutting decisively. She went slowly over to the window and looked once more at the view. Their house had no view, only the prospect into the street one way and the garden – not of great interest to either her or Richie, ever – the other. She wasn’t used to views. She gazed out at the improbable distances. She wasn’t, she told herself, used to any of this. And that was the problem.

*    *    *

Amy had put flowers on the kitchen table. They weren’t much, just the ones the guy with a stall by the tube station let her have, as the last, slightly squashed bunches in the bucket, for fifty pence. They were those Peruvian lily things, with spotted throats to their petals, which made them look slightly exotic, and they were a gloomy purplish red and the flower guy said give them some warm water and a bit of sugar, or an aspirin, and they’ll perk up. Amy had dissolved a sugar cube in water in the blue jug with cream spots that she knew Chrissie liked, and stuck the lilies in there. They still looked sad, and sort of gawky, so she took them out again, and chopped off a length of stalk and picked off all the floppy leaves, and put them back again. They looked better, but still not right. Maybe flower arranging was like hair plaiting, something that some people could make look really cool without even trying, and other people just couldn’t. Whatever, the table looked better for having flowers on it, and not just papers and jars of peanut butter and the cables for Dilly’s laptop.

When Chrissie came in, she looked at the flowers, and the mugs Amy had put out, and the milk in a jug rather than in its carton and she said, ‘What’s all this about?’

Amy was filling the kettle. She said, without turning, ‘Just felt like it.’

Chrissie put her bag on the kitchen worktop.

‘How was today?’

‘OK.’

‘How was the exam?’

‘Didn’t have one today,’ Amy said. She plugged in the kettle and switched it on. ‘Music theory tomorrow. Revision today. Revision, revision, revision.’

Chrissie was looking through her post. She said absently, ‘But worth it.’

Amy let a pause fall, and then she said, ‘You?’

Chrissie glanced up.

‘Me?’

‘Your day OK?’

‘I don’t know. I really don’t know—’

Amy took the Earl Grey tea caddy out of the cupboard.

‘Another interview?’

‘No,’ Chrissie said. She put her letters down. ‘No. A flat.’

‘Oh,’ Amy said.

Chrissie came to stand close to her. She watched her detach a couple of tea bags from the clump in the box and drop them into the teapot.

‘I’m afraid,’ Chrissie said, ‘we can’t stay here.’

‘I know.’

‘And I don’t want to buy anything just now.’

‘I know,’ Amy said, ‘I know all this. You’ve said so. We all know we can’t stay here, we’ve known for ages.’

‘I’m finding it hard, deciding—’

The kettle gave a small scream as it came to the boil, and switched itself off.

‘Where’s the flat?’

‘Almost in the Village. Up by the school.’

‘Cool—’

‘It’s a flat, Amy. A rented flat. The rooms are small and everything feels very thin and fragile. It’s the top two floors of a house. You can see practically to the sea.’

Amy poured water on top of the tea bags.

‘Did you take it?’

‘Course not,’ Chrissie said. She sounded faintly shocked. ‘I wouldn’t take it without you seeing it. You and Dilly.’

Amy opened her mouth to say, ‘We’ll be fine, we won’t be there much anyway,’ and thought better of it. Instead, she said, ‘Did you like it?’

‘Darling, at the moment, I don’t know
what
I like.’

Amy carried the teapot across to the table. Maybe the
flowers were beginning to look a shade more energized by their sugar. She said, ‘Sit down.’

‘Thank you, darling.’

‘Is it cheap?’

‘Is what cheap?’

‘The flat.’

‘Not particularly,’ Chrissie said, ‘but if we sell this even halfway reasonably, that’ll help.’

‘Good, then.’

Chrissie looked at her. She was pouring tea. She had left her hair loose, and it had swung round her face, obscuring it.

‘Aren’t you interested?’ Chrissie said.

Amy hooked one side of her hair behind an ear.

‘Kind of.’

‘Don’t you care where we live? Doesn’t your home matter to you?’

‘Course—’

‘It doesn’t,’ Chrissie said, ‘sound much like it.’

‘If you’re OK with where we live,’ Amy said, ‘I’ll be OK. So will Dill.’

‘I’m not sure I can choose alone—’

‘Why not?’ Amy said. ‘You always have.’

‘Ouch—’

‘Well, you have. You said, and then Dad and us did it.’

Chrissie picked up the milk jug.

‘Maybe,’ she said carefully, ‘I’m trying not to be so bossy.’

Amy pushed a mug towards her.

‘Does that mean we all get a bit of say-so?’

‘Well, I’d like you to have an opinion about this flat—’

‘I mean, about more than the flat. About what we want ourselves and stuff—’

‘I – well, I suppose so.’

‘Good,’ Amy said with emphasis.

Chrissie looked sharply at her.

‘What is all this about? What are you asking?’

Amy bent over her tea mug, cradling it between her palms.

‘Well, I’m not exactly
asking
—’ She stopped. Chrissie waited. Then Amy said, ‘I’ve been asked to go up to Newcastle when the exams are over. I’ve been invited. To see where Dad grew up. And things.’

There was a silence. Chrissie picked up her mug, drank, and put it down again. She looked at the flowers. Then she looked at Amy.

‘Who invited you?’

‘Scott,’ Amy said. She was sitting up very straight now, her hair tucked behind her ears.

‘When did you speak to him?’

‘He left a message,’ Amy said, ‘to wish me luck in the exams, and so I rang him back, and he was playing the piano and he said he’d send me the train ticket to come up to see the places Dad knew. And see the piano. Where it is now. And I said yes.’

‘You said you would go—’

‘Yes,’ Amy said, ‘I said yes, I’ll come.’

Chrissie took another swallow of tea.

‘This – is very hard.’

‘I’m not going for ever. I’m going for a few days.’

‘Where will you stay?’

Amy said, ‘In his flat, I should think.’

‘I don’t think you
can
stay in his flat—’

‘Where I stay,’ Amy said, ‘is a detail. The point is, I’m going. I’m going to Newcastle.’

‘You realize—’

‘
Yes
,’ Amy said. She sounded as if she was reining in considerable impatience. ‘Yes, I realize this is awful for you, but
this has nothing to do with my loyalty to you, that’s a given, that’s there whatever happens, but I really,
really
want to see where Dad came from, where half of me comes from. Can’t you just try and understand that?’

Chrissie closed her eyes.

‘I am trying—’

‘OK.’

‘Those people—’

‘Don’t call them that,’ Amy said sharply.

‘You might like it up there—’

Amy sighed. She put a hand out and squeezed Chrissie’s arm.

‘Yes, I might. But I’m your daughter and I grew up
here
.’

Chrissie gave herself a shake.

‘I know.’ She glanced at Amy. ‘I never thought you’d want to.’

‘That’s unfair—’

‘Is it?’

‘Yes,’ Amy said, ‘you know it is.’

‘Darling, it’s just that I—’

Amy put her hands over her ears.

‘Sorry, Mum, but don’t say it. Don’t say it again. We know how it is for you. It isn’t much of a picnic for us either.’

‘No.’

‘OK, then?’

‘About Newcastle?’

‘Yes.’

Chrissie said reluctantly, ‘I suppose so.’

‘Good,’ Amy said. She picked up her tea mug. ‘Because I’m going, anyway.’

Sitting on the tube on the way back from college, Dilly read Craig’s text probably twenty-five times.

‘Sorry babe,’ it started, and then, without any punctuation,
it went on, ‘sorry cant do friday sorry cant do have a nice life,’ and two kisses. Of course she knew, at about the second reading, what he was trying to say, trying to tell her, but it wasn’t until she read it ten more times, scrolling endlessly back to the beginning, that she allowed herself to realize that she was, unceremoniously, being dumped. That Craig, lazy, undependable, fanciable Craig, was taking the ultimately cowardly way out of an unwanted situation and was telling her that their relationship, as far as he was concerned, was over – by text.

Once she had permitted full recognition of both his message and his conduct, Dilly waited to fall to pieces. After all, that is what she did when faced with something unwanted or unexpected, what she had always done, and even if this news was hardly unexpected, it was certainly not what she would have chosen. It was also outrageously humiliating. Dilly sat in her seat between a girl with her MP3 player plugged in and an old man in a fez reading an Arabic newspaper and waited for the full horror of what she had just read to sink right in and reduce her to tears. It didn’t happen. She reread the text a few more times and waited a bit longer. Still, nothing happened. She glanced around her and saw that the world she would have assumed to look entirely distorted and unfamiliar through her own shock appeared perfectly normal. She looked down at her phone again. Perhaps she really was in shock, and in a few minutes or hours the reality of what had happened would kick in, and she could react as she usually did with all the attendant panic and sobbing.

She reached Archway station still in one piece, and got off the train. On the way up to the street, she found she had put her phone in her pocket, as if it was a perfectly ordinary day in which she had received perfectly ordinary messages. Once outside, she resisted buying a gossip magazine and a packet of M&Ms – economy, economy – and started to walk up the
hill, past the hospital, past the entrance to Waterlow Park, where, on a bench soon after Richie died, Craig had presented her with a pretty – but cheap – bead bracelet, which was, she reflected, about the only thing he had ever given her, towards the estate agent’s office where Tamsin worked.

It did not cross her mind that Tamsin might not be there and so she was not in the least surprised to find her behind the reception desk, hair in a neat knot behind her head, being busy in a way peculiar to herself. Dilly put her forearms on the high rim of the desk and leaned forward.

‘Hi.’

Tamsin did not take off her telephone headphones. She flicked a glance sideways, towards the big modern clock on the wall.

‘Not till half past five—’

Dilly took her phone out of her pocket and held it for Tamsin to see.

‘Something to show you—’

‘Not now.’

‘Tam, it’s
important
. It’s Craig.’

Tamsin leaned forward.

‘I don’t care,’ she said in a loud whisper, ‘if it’s Brad Pitt. I am not talking to you till half past five. Ten minutes. Go and sit down.’

Dilly sighed, and put the phone back in her pocket. She trailed across to a pair of red upholstered chairs by a glass table bearing brochures featuring photographs of houses with ‘Sold! Sold!’ excitably printed across them in scarlet. She sat down and looked about her. There were eight desks that she could see, two occupied, the rest suspiciously tidy. At one of the occupied desks, a young man in a sober suit and an exuberant tie was talking earnestly to a middle-aged couple, who looked as if they were having trouble believing anything he said. Every so often, they looked at each other,
as if for reassurance, and when they did that, the young man leaned a little bit further forward and redoubled his exertions. Dilly wondered if the couple were thinking of buying a house or trying to sell one, and then she thought how completely useless Craig would have been in any situation like that, which led to a renewal of her amazement that she hadn’t yet wanted to cry. She looked at the clock. Eight minutes left to go. Perhaps when she showed Craig’s text to Tamsin she’d want to cry then; perhaps that would be when reality kicked in.

The middle-aged couple got up. The young man rose too and held out his hand to shake theirs in a way that forced them to take it in turn, whatever their inclination. Still talking, he escorted them across the room to the door, and ushered them out. On his way back to his desk, he said loudly to Tamsin, as he passed her, ‘Waste of bloody time,’ and Dilly heard her laugh. It was weird, hearing her laugh in a work situation. Or maybe it was just weird hearing her laugh at all. There hadn’t been much laughing at home lately. Breda, from south of Dublin, on Dilly’s course at college, said that there’d been so many jokes after her father died that they’d almost forgotten he wasn’t there to share them. Dilly couldn’t picture that. Richie had been the one for jokes in their house – too many jokes, Chrissie sometimes said – and when he died, the jokes seemed to die with him. Dilly had managed to laugh a bit with Craig when he fooled about, but that was relief mostly, relief at being with someone not connected to Richie’s dying. Would it, she wondered, be a relief to cry now, or was it more of a relief not somehow seeming to want to?

At the two occupied desks, the computers were being shut down. Tamsin took her headphones off and began switching and stacking in a practised manner. A door to an office at the back opened to reveal a middle-aged man in rumpled
shirtsleeves holding a mug in one hand and a mobile telephone to his ear with the other. He crossed the room, still talking into his phone, paused by the reception desk to bend and say something to Tamsin and put his mug down, and then he retreated to his office at the back and closed the door. Dilly got up and went over to her sister.

‘Who was that?’

Tamsin said, with a hint of satisfaction, ‘Mr Mundy.’

‘Is he your boss?’

Tamsin looked round the room. The young man and a middle-aged woman from an adjoining desk were deep in conversation.

‘Tell you later,’ Tamsin said.

‘What?’

‘Shh,’ Tamsin said. ‘Good news.’