Quietly, I ease back the covers and leave the room, glancing at my reflection in the tall gold mirror as I do so. My silky white nightie looks old and tired, my hair is full of split ends that dangle onto my shoulders. A mosquito bite stands out on my arm, red and itchy. Although I’ve only just got up, I already feel tired at the thought of the day. Another day of pretence.
I pick up my phone, standing on the dresser, but it is resolutely silent, the top right-hand corner devoid of any signal. We are disconnected, I think, and the thought makes me feel a wave of relief. It is strangely refreshing not having the usual cacophony of noise first thing – the news alerts, the updates from the uber-mothers, the concerned voicemails from the school headteacher about Emma’s worsening grades, her fallouts with the girls in her year. The bad behaviour that nobody can quite explain. Instead, there is silence, a blank screen. I glance at Callum’s phone, on charge over on his side of the bed. My fingers itch for a moment, the desire to unlock it and rummage through his electronic life again is strong, but really, what’s the point? I know everything there is to know, now. His passcode is Emma’s birthday – sweet, until you realise it’s all a sham.
Downstairs, there’s a pile of Maria’s new wares in the living room, unloaded from the car: a stand-alone lamp with a twisting, ornate base; a pile of rugs in rich, warm colours; a bookcase painted in a soft teal colour. I run my finger over it gently, wishing I had my sister’s eye. And her freedom.
In the kitchen, I select one of Maria’s blue ceramic mugs that she got from the pop-up market in the village and pour myself a much-needed filter coffee. I wanted to take Emma to see the market, try to use it as a bonding opportunity for the two of us, but my sister says it’s not there this week; it seems its opening hours are as random and sporadic as the little bakery.
Taking a long sip of coffee, I select the sharpest knife from the rack and begin to slice fruit for my daughter: dicing the apples, skinning the kiwis, pitting the cherries. I pile it all into a small blue and white bowl, drizzle fresh yoghurt around the outsides and dot fresh raspberries on top. It looks so pretty that I almost want to take a photo. I would, if I were one of those people. Emma says there are lots of them – food bloggers, Instagram influencers who only need to post a picture of their breakfast to get hundreds of thousands of likes. My daughter’s own social media channels are private, closed, especially to me. Believe me, I’ve looked.
Of course, Emma isn’t interested in my efforts. When I tap on her bedroom door before gently pushing it open, she pulls the white sheet over her head, but not before I catch a quick glimpse of her: the pale face already scowling, the low-level teenage anger that seems to radiate from her every limb these days. I stand still for a second or two in her doorway, watching her, but she doesn’t move. Silently, soundlessly, Callum appears behind me. His hands go to my waist.
‘Let her sleep,’ he says softly, and semi-reluctantly I back away, close the door. I feel the familiar tug of guilt that I always feel around my daughter, the worry that Callum does know better, that he and Emma share something that I, for some reason, do not. Does my husband know what’s right for our daughter? Am I failing so badly as a mother that it’s pushing their bond even closer?
My feet are bare on the tiles and I’m still clutching the bowl of beautiful fruit. Callum has a hold of me, and, not knowing what else to do, I smile at him as he bends down and kisses the tip of my nose. He used to kiss me on the mouth, always and without fail, but lately he has started to choose my nose instead, or my forehead, occasionally my hand. When did it begin, I often think to myself, did it begin around the same time as everything else? I look down at my hands, avoiding his gaze; my fingers are stained red from the raspberries. Little flecks that look like blood.
‘I’m going to take a shower,’ he says. ‘Is Maria up?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I say – the door to my sister’s room is resolutely shut. I smile to myself; Maria never did handle hangovers very well. When we were teenagers, she’d always drink more than me, encourage me to join in. I can still remember the sharp scent of vodka as she pushed it towards me in our bedroom, and the funny taste of it from the china cup. Mum never knew, I don’t think. Maria made sure of it. She washed the cups in the sink and put them back on the shelves in the morning, soap suds covering up the smell of spirits.
I watch now as Callum retreats away from me, back to our en suite. I go upstairs, open the huge sliding doors that lead out onto the terrace. It’s already hot; the sun is white in the sky. I know we were thinking of driving to Rouen today – Callum does like a plan, an itinerary – but I can feel the pull of the swimming pool already, am visualising myself stretched out on a sun lounger by the water, my husband and daughter twenty miles away wandering the streets of France.
It’s not that I don’t love my daughter. I do. More than anything. But bit by bit, I am losing her, and for all intents and purposes, my husband is already lost. Sometimes that hurts so much that I simply cannot bear it. Instead, I detach: I disengage from them both, retreat into the corner of my mind that still thinks of myself as an individual, rather than part of a three. It doesn’t always work.
Emma has become more and more withdrawn over the last eighteen months, her slide into adolescence much harder on me than I’d ever imagined it might be. I have wished so many times that her hormones would manifest themselves differently; that I could bandage up a wound, administer doses of medicine like I did when she was a little girl clamouring for Calpol. But of course I cannot.
A friend of mine once told me drunkenly that her own teenagers are exactly the same – hissing with an inexplicable rage one moment, all smiles the next, a seemingly impossible merry-go-round of emotions that reverberate around the family. We were sipping white wine in the kitchen of our house in Ipswich, the only two left after a gathering one Christmas. We used to be a lot more sociable, Callum and I. My friend – let’s call her Kate – had valiantly drunk the best part of two bottles by the time she began talking about her children (she has one of each – a son and a daughter, not far off Emma’s age now) and it was clear she’d wanted to open up to someone for a while.
‘Sometimes I just wish they’d disappear,’ she had said, gazing gloomily into her glass of Pinot, and I’d felt myself nodding, even though I didn’t really agree. I wouldn’t swap Emma for the world, in spite of all her moodiness.
‘God, I’m sorry,’ Kate said, almost immediately after she’d finished speaking, clapping one hand to her mouth, the gesture a little bit sloppy due to the wine. ‘That was a terrible thing to say. Please Siobhan, forget I said it.’ I watched as a look of panic came over her face. ‘You will, won’t you? You will just forget it? God, me and my big mouth.’ She hiccupped. ‘I’ve had way too much wine.’
It must be said that at this point I was not sober either, but I wasn’t as far gone as my friend, whose eyes were beginning to take on the blurry sheen of someone who might be about to cry.
‘Don’t worry about it, Kate, it’s forgotten,’ I said to her, the words coming slowly. I was wearing a long white cardigan, and I wrapped it around myself, feeling chilly despite the warmth from the fire in the living room and the twinkle of our Christmas tree lights. We’d gone all out that year in an attempt to cheer Emma up, ‘bring her out of herself’ as the school headteacher had helpfully suggested. My body felt strange beneath the cardigan, as though it belonged to someone else.