Where was this self-control when she let herself beat them? Ramming Nia against the living-room wall because she wouldn’t go and get her what she needed, or slapping Mira’s face repeatedly till the red swelled up in a lurid fan of shame on her right cheek. It was hard for her, bringing them up on her own, Nia could concede that. Sometimes it was too hard.
‘You filthy fucking beast,’ she’d spit out, if she trailed in to find Nia reading in the kitchen late at night, eating toast and ignoring her wails from the bedroom. ‘You filthy fucking bitch.’ In the beginning, the abuse sounded false in her mouth, as though she was trying on a piece of clothing that was an awkward fit, a hand-me-down of extremity for those moments when needs must. But gradually, she made the invective her own.
Mira was resourceful. When they got hungry, she’d perform bizarre acts of faith – find money hidden round the flat because of her persistence (coins under the sofa, in the cracks of the mattress, behind the fridge), or turn frozen peas into a whole meal with butter and pepper. She’d get sympathy food from her friends’ families, walking to and from their homes when there was no petrol money or if the sleep-ins had extended to marathons. Mummy’s got the flu. Mummy’s a bit depressed at the minute. It’s hard doing it all yourself. Thank you so much. That’s so nice of you. Shepherd’s pie! She’ll be so pleased, I’m sure it’ll help her get over this bug. Mummy, Mummy, Mummy.
Nia was working at the McDonald’s drive-in on weekends and through the holidays at that time, it helped a lot. She always saved some of it, though, hiding as much of the money away as she could, maybe fifteen, twenty per cent of her earnings, and when Mira started at a local pizzeria, Nia assumed her sister would do the same. But she never did, just prostrated herself at the feet of their mother with that sunflower smile she had, and gave it all to her like a donation to some crooked guru in an ashram. People were still visiting the flat at the weekend, but now instead of the partying parents and their kids, Mum had a different crowd for companions. They hailed from all kinds of ages and backgrounds – people she seemed to have collected from a particular club in town that ran nights full of lasers and beanbags and considered itself to be alternative. ‘Experimentalist’ was the word on the flyer. Sometimes Nia would look back and try and imagine the visage of her father, Mira’s father too, back into the living room during this period of her life, both of them sketched in like artist’s impressions of wanted people. There were clearly drugs around now as well, and they’d see these people collapsed on the couch and the floor on a Friday night when they came home, Mum floppy with pleasure, barely acknowledging them.
To say it was embarrassing would be to miss the point entirely. Looking back, it’s a picture of herself and Mira sleepwalking through school, their jobs too, always stepping around or over the wilful disarray of their lives, each clamping a fist securely over the heart, and focusing on nailing the basics whenever possible – food, warmth, bathing – no room for superfluous emotion.
There were regulars who only turned up at the weekend, but stayed overnight. A woman in her forties who walked around in her underwear by day, carrying her scarred body in a kind of apologetic way, like a lean shopping bag of goods past their best-before date. A tall gentle lad in his early twenties who always wore a glo-beads bracelet, on whom Nia attempted to have a distant crush for a while. He stole lead from the roofs of empty houses and sold it to the ‘pikeys’, the travellers camped on the outskirts of Newport. A taxi driver, who ran drugs to the rich parts of town on the side – Beechwood and Christchurch. Benign, they were, in some sense, and always figuring out the agreed moral compass – really very judgemental of those who committed violent crime, for example. A guy they knew got vilified, he had walked into the newsagent in the parallel street with a knife when he was clucking, suffering a withdrawal from heroin that became too much to bear.
‘Can you believe it?’ the underwear woman said. ‘It’s awful, I didn’t know he had it in him!’
Their mother was quick to agree. ‘Crazy, just crazy. Poor Ranjit, he must have been bloody terrified. He’ll be feeling so unsafe in his own shop now, he’s open till midnight, fucking hard for him.’
Ranjit was unlikely to be looking at them with such benevolent empathy in return. Their mum had nicked bottles off his shelves more than once. Nia knew it because she recognized the yellow stickers, the clear boxy font of the numbers printed on them. She only did it when she had people coming over, but if Nia ever went in there with Mira, he’d give them an aggrieved frown of a look that basically said ‘My eyes are right on you’, and she didn’t blame him for it. Big family packs of Doritos, small jars of pitted olives would appear with the booze on those days, and they’d feast on them urgently, always worried that the days ahead were going to be scant.
Nia began to remove herself from their company. Instead of dropping out of school, she went in through the gates for every minute she could, as though it was a free spa, literally siphoned every last breath of freedom made available by the timetable and then on to the library. It meant she was out of the house until six-thirty most weekdays at least. More if she went on to her night shifts. She felt bad that their mum was more and more likely to be drinking at home alone, but Mira was with her and in this way, shamelessly, Nia planned her escape. She found out about the special access scheme for people from schools like theirs, and spent months carrying the forms around, figuring out how to square the circle and fit into it. Even then, it was a shock for all of them when she left for university. Politics, philosophy and economics. Three courses rolled into one.
But Nia hadn’t counted on the fact that she loved them, and that this fact would generate a desire to return almost straight away. Love, or you could call it co-dependence, according to how you saw it. She’d always thought them to be much the same thing, really. Those long college halls, teeming with such sleek, gruesomely confident people, all her own age. They were more than a little terrifying. She went back to Newport so much in that first term, missed so much that she was under formal observation from a month into her time at university. Baby I can’t live without you came the texts. Little Mira can’t do it all on her own. She’s crushed without you. We would do anything just to see your face Nia. Please, baby. She had access to proper money now, she had student loans and she was needed.
‘Sent down’ they called it, when you got asked to leave that particular university, and though Nia railed against the hierarchy implied by this top-heavy phrase, she was broken enough by failing her first-year exams that on some level she believed it. No one wants to look in a mirror that is cracked with their own failure, but it felt like she had fractured a dream that belonged to all of them. Especially for Sharon Collins, their dear, paranoid mother, lonely so much of the time as they were getting older, for whom shame was always a hidden possibility, a sly ditch that required navigation on a daily basis. She was proud Nia had done it, made it out of Newport, even though she spent all her time trying to suck her back.
But Nia was so angry when she got thrown out of college, it was all packed in her, tight and burning like tobacco in a pipe. She blamed them, and after the years of dreaming and planning, the loss was too much to comprehend; it was horrific, the idea that she’d thrown it away. She couldn’t forgive her mother either. The last visit home was on a Saturday night. Mira was sleeping over at some girl’s house and the flat was full of Mum’s ‘friends’. She was just lying there, inert on the sofa when Nia walked in, you could have been forgiven for thinking she was dead. A huge parade of empty glass bottles populated the long table at the side of the room, their transparent forms as defiant as nudists on a beach. And no one there seemed to give a shit about her state. They were all just co-existing happily with her long silent slab of a body.