Beneath the surface, p.2
Beneath the Surface, page 2
Fortunately at this point they were distracted by the sound of raised voices in the garden. They drifted towards the noise to hear what was going on. Through the gap in the side of the door, they observed their parents, aunt and uncle out by the barbecue.
‘You promised you wouldn’t drink. You are so full of shit.’ That was all it took. It was difficult for Lilly to read the expression on Ana’s face because she was sitting in a deckchair under the shade of a rambling rose, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and sunglasses, but there was no mistaking the menace in her tone. Unlike Patrick and Grace, whose marriage was boringly monotone, Rob and Ana had always been fantastically, compellingly volatile. Small words sparked like matches between them, transforming tiny flames into incendiary bonfires. Mia gripped Lilly’s arm with the curious mixture of trepidation and exhilaration that defined the essence of her personality.
‘The Medusa has spoken,’ proclaimed Rob, theatrically. He stood stock still in front of Ana and held the bottle upside down so the beer poured on to the desiccated yellow lawn.
‘Gosh, why’s he doing that?’ Mia asked in astonishment, elbowing Lilly out of the way to get the best view through the doorjamb.
‘Ana’s turned him to stone,’ said Lilly.
‘Really?’ Mia gripped her arm. ‘Like Mr Tumnus? What do we do now? Is there an antidote?’
‘You’re so gullible.’ Lilly giggled.
Rob remained immobile.
Grace ignored them and instead furiously tossed the salad, sending a flurry of rocket and radicchio on to the table before turning with equal focus to the business of picking up every last piece and nonchalantly throwing it back into the bowl. Her T-shirt was splattered with spots of dressing.
It still wasn’t completely clear to Lilly why her aunt and uncle were even in their garden, ruining the hottest day of the summer so far and derailing her plans to meet Cormack. It wasn’t that Rob and Ana didn’t get on with her parents. It was more that Rob was a big-shot music producer with better places to go for the weekend than their ugly new-build estate six miles from the city centre on the wrong side of Cambridge. Lilly didn’t hold this against them. She would never have chosen to come here either unless she was forced to. It was like Toytown. Everything was fake: the houses, the hedges and even the trees had been transplanted on to the wild, bleak landscape.
‘God, you’re pathetic!’ said Ana, spitting out the words, like watermelon pips. Verbal warfare had always been part of Rob and Ana’s relationship. In the past Lilly had seen them squall over anything from song lyrics to whether manatees really existed, and the last time they’d all spent Christmas together, they had argued for two days about whether Die Hard could be defined as a Christmas film. How could anyone care about this stuff so much? Lilly wondered. It was exhausting and compelling at the same time.
She watched as her mum tried to catch her dad’s attention. But Patrick didn’t look up. He was applying the same ferocious focus as Grace had to her salad to the business of methodically flipping the steaks, sausages and veggie burgers on his new barbecue. Because he was an art-history teacher he had a strong visual sense of how everything should look. He bent down to scrutinize the layout from different angles and made a few subtle adjustments.
‘What’s Dad really thinking about?’ Mia asked. It was a constant puzzle to them both. They never called it right. When they thought he was thinking great thoughts about Anglo-Saxon manuscripts it turned out he was reviewing sell-by dates on the spice rack. And when they saw him lining up the spice rack in alphabetical order it turned out he was pondering the Codex Amiatinus.
‘Cycling, probably,’ Lilly whispered, because usually at this time on a Saturday afternoon Patrick would be trying to beat his personal best on his favourite thirty-nine-mile route through Black Fen.
‘And Mum?’
‘That’s easy. She’ll be worrying about how exactly I’m going to re-jig my revision schedule to make up for the time I’ve lost today and how you haven’t done your extra spellings,’ said Lilly, distractedly, trying to piece together the jigsaw of torn postcard.
‘Are you actually talking to the sausages?’ they heard Rob ask Patrick, as he put down the empty beer bottle beside the barbecue.
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Patrick bristled, pointedly moving the bottle on to the garden table.
‘I swear I heard you say the words “peak torque”,’ Rob teased. ‘Or was it “teak pork”? Those chops do look a bit overcooked.’ He prowled around Patrick, rubbing his hands through his dark hair until it stood on end, and took a sausage from the middle of his brother’s carefully ordered arrangement. ‘You are so easy to read.’ He laughed, and took a tentative bite.
Lilly could tell her dad was simmering from the way he gripped the barbecue tongs to manoeuvre the sausages until symmetry had been restored. In the background Grace was telling Ana how Lilly had been picked by her English teacher to join an elite class for Oxbridge candidates and how she could recite chunks of Beowulf by heart. She wondered what her mum would do if she told her that she could read Cormack’s body as well as her own, and was not only familiar with his every scar and dimple but could tell from the rise and fall of his breath exactly when he was about to come.
‘Please, Mum,’ Lilly muttered. She was saved from further embarrassment by her uncle, who pulled a packet of cigarettes out of the back pocket of his jeans.
‘I don’t bloody believe it!’ exploded Ana, interrupting Grace, who was in the middle of recounting how Lilly had recorded the fastest times for 100-metres breaststroke in the county and how this would make her stand out from the crowd on her university application because it spoke of focus and drive.
‘I only smoke when I’m tense and you make me tense,’ said Rob, dismissively.
‘Why can’t you ever show any self-restraint?’ Ana asked.
‘Because that would make me boring.’
‘Think of your sperm!’
‘I am,’ said Rob drily. ‘At the weekend they love nothing more than kicking back with a bottle of Brewdog and a fag.’
‘Can someone please remind me why I married him?’ Ana turned to Patrick and Grace for back-up.
Lilly saw her parents exchange looks. Her dad wiped his face with his hand, leaving a streak of charcoal across his cheek as Rob increased his pace around the barbecue. He had circled the same route so many times that there was now a trodden-down circle of dry grass. Patrick bent down on one knee and unthinkingly combed the grass upright.
‘God, you’re so fucking suburban.’ Rob laughed again. ‘You’re beginning to remind me of Mum and Dad. I bet you’ve even got a Flymo.’
‘This is going to be a bad one, isn’t it, Lil?’ Mia asked eagerly, at the unusual prospect of an argument involving all four of them. Even in the dappled light, Lilly could see her eyes were as wide as saucers.
‘It is,’ Lilly confirmed, trying to sound more composed than she felt.
‘Don’t put your shit on Patrick!’ Ana shouted. ‘It’s not fair.’
‘Come on, Ana, I’ve done everything you ordered,’ Rob said, his voice getting louder, as if someone was turning up the volume, ‘and still it’s not enough. I stand here in loose-fitting shorts, wearing no pants, keeping my bollocks at a steady thirty-four point five degrees to optimize my fertility. I’ve stopped wanking, eating red meat and drinking coffee. I go to work every day, I earn half a million pounds a year. I fulfil my potential. And you can’t let me have one beer with my brother? You’re such a ball-breaker.’
Inside the garage, Lilly watched Mia stuff a fist into her mouth as if she wanted to push back emotions she didn’t comprehend. She evidently didn’t fully understand what Rob was implying, but there was enough tension and swearing for her to understand that this was A Very Big Moment.
‘Lil?’ she whispered. ‘Lil?’
Lilly turned to her, anticipating a difficult question. There was a long pause. Which would it be, she wondered, ‘bollocks’, ‘wanking’ or ‘fucking’, and how much detail should she supply in her response? Would too much honesty get her into trouble with her parents? And too little mean that Mia would ask them anyway?
‘What’s a Flymo?’
‘It’s a lawnmower,’ Lilly explained, trying to keep a straight face.
‘What’s wrong with Dad having a lawnmower?’
The argument in the garden continued to rage.
‘There’s something I want to say,’ said Ana, her voice trembling.
‘Is it because lawnmowers are bad for the environment?’ Mia persisted.
‘Sssh.’ Lilly nudged her. Another of Mia’s worst traits was missing the point because she was obsessing about the wrong thing. ‘Ana’s about to reveal the real reason they’re here.’
Ana removed her hat and sunglasses. Her long dark hair cascaded around her face. Her gaze darted between Grace and Patrick, who instinctively drew towards one another in a sideways crab walk between the barbecue and the garden table until their shoulders were touching.
‘Rob doesn’t like to talk about it.’
‘Please, Ana,’ Rob begged. Lilly saw him glance at Grace. It was a look somewhere between panic and despair. Neither were characteristics she associated with her confidently upbeat uncle. She could tell he wanted her mum to intervene. Grace, however, equally uncharacteristically for someone who spent her life sorting out other people’s problems, remained silent.
Ana took a deep breath, as if she was trying to summon the right words. ‘We’ve been trying to have a baby for almost two years. We’ve done everything we can. Organic food. Ovulation calendars. Cutting out caffeine and alcohol. But nothing works.’
‘This has nothing to do with Grace and Patrick,’ Rob interrupted.
‘We need to try IVF. But Rob won’t even talk about it. He keeps saying if we relax it will just happen. But I’m almost forty and time is running out.’
Patrick stepped forward, as if he was about to mediate. Mia clung to Lilly’s arm so tightly that it started to go numb. Five sets of eyes looked to him to bring them back from the brink. Lilly’s stomach ached with the nervous anxiety of a daughter who desperately wanted her dad to say the right thing but already doubted he could do justice to the emotional intensity of the occasion.
‘I was wondering, Ana, in light of this, if you still like your steak cooked medium rare?’
‘Oh, Dad,’ said Lilly, in disappointment.
Ana’s head dropped. Tiny damp patches formed on her yellow linen dress until there were so many they turned into one giant stain. It took a moment for Lilly to realize she was crying.
‘Can you convince him, Grace? He always listens to you,’ Ana pleaded, in between sobs.
‘I can’t get involved in something so personal to you both,’ said Grace, cautiously.
Lilly was riveted. She tried to disentangle herself from Mia so she could concentrate on the nuances. The way her dad was scuffing his feet in the grass; her mum’s inability to meet Ana’s gaze; Rob’s failure to comfort Ana and his attempt to catch Grace’s eye. Was this how adults behaved when children weren’t around? It was so unexpectedly raw. Lilly wished she had her phone with her so she could film it. That was what Cormack would have done.
‘It’s a shame we didn’t know about this before,’ whispered Mia.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Lilly, impatient with her constant interruptions.
‘You could have given them your baby.’
Lilly gripped Mia’s shoulder and bent down until she was the same height as her little sister. ‘If you mention that again I’ll tell Mum and Dad about the secret hiding place behind your radiator.’
Outside the argument continued to rage.
‘All I want is an ordinary life,’ shouted Ana.
‘If you wanted ordinary you should have married Patrick, not me,’ Rob yelled back.
Lilly tucked the confetti of torn-up postcard inside the notebook and slipped it into the back pocket of her jeans. She inspected the pregnancy test, like her dad might examine an ancient artefact, and stuffed it into a plastic bag. She felt strangely light-headed and blamed it on the stale air in the garage and the musty sweetness of the suede waistcoat. When she turned round to tell Mia she didn’t feel so good, she saw that her little sister had unexpectedly burst out of the garage into the garden and was running over to Rob and Ana.
‘Would you like to see my eel?’ she heard her ask them. ‘Strictly speaking, they reproduce by having orgies. I’m not sure what that means but it might help.’
‘Sounds like a great strategy,’ said Rob.
PART ONE
* * *
1
Two months later
It begins with a tremor. Just like it did last time. Lilly lifts the hand that is meant to be writing notes and holds it in front of her face, fingers splayed. But it’s completely still, as she’d known it would be. The sensation is coming from inside, more tingle than tremble, as if someone is passing an electrical current through the fleshy centre of her hand.
She closes her eyes for a moment and breathes in deeply. Why is this happening again? There is the same heady odour, a drift of some old-fashioned sickly scent, like faded roses or violet creams, that makes her feel instantly nauseous. She scans the classroom for a rotting vase of flowers or a half-open window that might explain the smell. But even in the muggy heat the teacher insists the windows should be closed to avoid any distraction from the outside world, and the only plants in the room are Mr Galveston’s cactus collection.
She looks past the cacti out of the window and thinks about how the view has remained the same but the perspective has changed over her seven years at St Edith’s, as she has got taller and moved up a floor each year. Is this how life works? she wonders. A gradual unfolding? The first couple of years she could only see across the playground to the modern houses on the other side of the road. Now on the top floor her view stretches beyond the housing estate to the dyke, straight as a parting, running behind it and then to the dark grid of fields and the new wind-turbine farm scything slowly through the sky beyond. The land is as flat as the sea from which it was stolen. It’s all about the sky here. Today it is almost completely still, apart from two swans paddling serenely upriver. They look so unruffled.
The tingling in her hand creeps up into her forearm. Still staring out of the window, Lilly massages her inner wrist and half wonders if her artery is conducting the current. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Cormack crossing the playground with a girl who isn’t her. The way he moves, smooth and relaxed, thick hair, black as the peat soil, rucksack flung over his shoulder: it’s the familiarity that hurts the most. He turns his face towards the girl and she can see he is smiling the same smile that he used on her.
She should have done what he did. Shrugged her shoulders and agreed it was a fling. But it wasn’t like her to treat life so casually. She had gone through all their messages and photos at the weekend and still couldn’t understand how, less than a month ago, they had shared each other’s bodies, worn each other’s clothes and sucked on the same cigarette, discussing whether they thought their parents still had sex or when they should tell their friends they were seeing each other. Now she doesn’t even get a walk-on role on his Instagram stories.
She feels the tears start to prick and tries to distract herself by tracing a line with her eyes as far as she can along the dyke to where it connects with the River Cam and the smaller waterways beyond. She loves the geometry of all the straight lines, the monotone fields, the man-made dykes and ditches that frame them. They could have been drawn with a ruler. Which they probably were: almost everything about this landscape was designed by her Dutch ancestors.
Shadowy thoughts play in Lilly’s head, so she focuses on the cacti and forces herself to think of the good things she has done so that she doesn’t dwell on the bad: I gave my entire collection of gemstones to Mia without her asking for them; I joined Mr Galveston’s English class to placate Mum, because she wants me to do Oxbridge, even though every lesson makes me feel sick with nerves; I made cakes to raise money for the Syrian refugees. I’m nice to the new girl. Unlike Hayley.
Lilly looks around to check if anyone else is watching. But, thankfully, her classmates are oblivious. This is the advantage of being chosen for Mr Galveston’s English group. Or twice chosen, as he likes to say. ‘Once to be in the class and twice to stay.’ He demands and generally inspires total focus, especially when it comes to the current text, Beowulf, which he can apparently recite from memory, although no one has been brave enough to challenge him. It’s a class joke that even when he speaks normally he uses Anglo-Saxon metre.
Fortunately for Lilly, he’s reached the apex of the lesson, as he reveals in a voice stiff with emotion that there is good evidence Beowulf has its cultural roots in a village less than an hour from the Cambridge classroom where they now sit. He points out of the window and tells them the Fens were the haunt of Beowulf’s nemesis, Grendel, and that ‘fen’ is an Old English word meaning marsh, dirt or mud that is used all over northern Europe because that was where the Anglo-Saxons came from. He announces that he will be organizing a trip to the British Museum sometime soon to see the burial masks that were dug up there. There is a silence he mistakes for awe.
‘Fuck that,’ mutters Jordy, Mr Galveston’s most reluctant recruit. Lilly knows it’s for her benefit and normally she would laugh but she’s too focused on the way saliva is pooling in her throat to respond. Being sick in front of everyone would complete the humiliation of the past three weeks. Jordy elbows her in the ribs and she’s grateful for the distraction. He quickly loses interest, because while he has one of the most agile minds in the class he is hotwired to lose focus. At least, that is what Mr Galveston claims. Lilly tries to remember what he says about her. Something about how she needs to be more of a risk-taker. Dare to think her own thoughts instead of regurgitating other people’s. Are we who we think we are or who other people think we are? It was the sort of conversation she used to have with Cormack. He is one of the few people she knows who is the same in real life as he is on social media. She searches for him again in the playground but he’s disappeared.
