They’d never fallen out. No big Jeremy Kyle-style fights – no great wrongs done. He’d drifted away and, untethered, they either hadn’t noticed or hadn’t minded. They were siblings, not friends. Laura and Nick were friends. He’d always been different. Always felt left out. They’d made him feel dull and wrong when they were all young. It was easier to drift. Maybe it was time …
4
Nick’s left arm was going to sleep. As was he. Room on the Broom was spread on his chest, unfinished. He knew its rhymes and cadences by heart now, and didn’t need to read, but the children loved the pictures, followed the words on the page, and knew if he skipped a spread.
All the running on blustery Primrose Hill this afternoon had done its work. Delilah and Arthur had gone floppy and heavy within his embrace well before the end of the story. Across from the small bed the three of them were lying on, Bea, his big girl, was already spark out on her own, duvet kicked back as per normal, arms above her head in surrender pose. Nick eased his arm out from under the children, and picked Arthur up, laid him gently in his cot, then turned back to Delilah. He lifted her legs, pulled the cover back and over her, deftly and quickly, so as not to rouse her. He made a token effort to extract her thumb from her mouth, but at that, she resumed the strong rhythmic suck that would keep it there a while longer, and he smiled. Stubborn even while sleeping. Arthur yawned noisily, and turned onto his stomach, raising his bottom and scooting his knees up to under his chin. He kissed his elder daughter’s warm cheek, smoothing her curls. Then he stood still in the middle of the room, and waited a minute, gazing at his babies, before he bent down and switched off the light by Delilah’s bed. The room was still illuminated, by two small nightlights plugged in at the skirting, and by the neon stars stuck to the ceiling in a pattern approximating the solar system.
This was Bea’s room. Delilah’s, slightly larger, was next door, and Arthur’s was the box room across the landing. Bea’s had been the first to be decorated when they’d moved in – sunny yellow with bright primary-coloured furniture and a rainbow rug. Delilah had crawled defiantly in the direction of pink and sparkly the minute she’d graduated from the nursery so her room was an unabashed temple to girliness. And the nursery had been repainted sky blue in the excitement post-scan when they’d found out Carrie was carrying a boy.
The rest of the house was a symphony of tasteful greys and soft accent colours – almost out of a magazine in its compliance with trend and fashion. But Carrie had gone to town in the kids’ rooms and they were characterful, vivid and fun.
Moving them all in together had seemed the right thing to do, after their mum had died. His friend Fran had suggested it. Carrie had met her in a yoga class when she was pregnant with Bea, and Fran with Fred. She’d been the first person outside family to ring the doorbell after it had happened, laden with casseroles and toilet rolls, and pretty much pushed her way in, because she had loved Carrie too, and keeping busy helped, and because she knew that Carrie would have wanted her to brush the tangles out of Bea’s hair and Dettox the kitchen surfaces.
In the first strange, wretched days, Carrie’s parents had been there, white-faced and zombied by grief, but at least there’d been three of them at bedtime. One to settle each distraught child. When they’d gone, as they’d had to, back to their farm in Cumbria, Nick had moved between the rooms, running on empty, soothing and holding his babies in turn. The plaintive sound of one, heard in the background to the sobs of another, tortured him. Fran had helped him move Arthur’s cot and Delilah’s tiny bed in there, shifting the displaced doll’s house and toy shop into the space vacated in Delilah’s room. It had worked, too. They’d started sleeping, comforted, somehow, by the presence of each other. He’d wanted to sleep in there with them. Had done, in fact, for a few weeks. Not that he’d slept. He’d lain on a flimsy air mattress for a few hours at a time, not sleeping. Fran had put a stop to that. She’d deflated it and forced him back into his own bed, where she’d also changed the sheets and removed Carrie’s hand creams and eye serums from her bedside table.
Downstairs now, he poured a glass of wine and put Muse on the speaker, quieter than he’d have liked so he could hear the kids if they called. He unloaded the dishwasher and, checking a laminated sheet of A4 paper fixed to the fridge door with magnets, took Bea’s PE bag from a hook in the utility room and checked that her shorts and polo shirt were in it, along with a pair of black plimsolls. He put it by the front door and, while he was there, collected the small pile of post from the brass basket attached to the letterbox. Interiors catalogues. For months he’d been cutting out the small address boxes on the back pages of these, all addressed to his wife, and returning them, but still they came, interiors catalogues, with their embroidered cushions and their seed-pod chandeliers and their carefully curated accessories. She’d call them her porn, poring over them with a huge mug of mint tea, the paper tab of the teabag dangling over the side, sitting at the kitchen table. He’d given up on the cutting and posting. He had less energy, it seemed, than he had done in the beginning. Now the catalogues made the journey from brass cage to paper recycling without anyone daydreaming about owning anything in them. The brown A4 envelope almost did, too, but Nick saved it at the last minute.
Nick,
This is booked, paid for, and happening. I’ve invited Laura and Scott, and their families. We’ll be a gang. A dysfunctional, not entirely simpatico gang, maybe, but a gang nonetheless. So please, please bring B, D and A with you and just come. Be with us. We all love you so much, you know. I haven’t seen nearly enough of you since it all happened. I know I’m not your mum, and she’d know better than me how to help you, but I do care so very much. And it’s my birthday, so you can’t say no, really. It may be blackmail, but there it is …
Dad xoxo
Nick smiled, and flicked through the brochure, with its sunny, stylish pictures, not so very different from all the damn catalogues. And then he cried. It wasn’t unusual. He cried most nights. It was just as much a part of his routine as checking Fran’s laminated lists, and flossing his teeth.
5
Scott was the first to confirm. Charlie imagined himself on a neat to-do list, being ticked off.
‘Crikey. Whatever time is it there?’
Scott paused for a moment, checking his screen. ‘Six a.m.’
‘And you’re up?’
Up, done five km on the static bike, showered, dressed and in the office, Scott wanted to say, but he didn’t. Mum used to say the hours required by his work were ridiculous. ‘It’s all machismo,’ she would exclaim incredulously. ‘It can’t possibly be necessary. You’ll all die young,’ she’d pronounce, in consternation. Dad would let her rant, then nod his understanding at Scott. Dad had been a country solicitor. Maybe never once at his desk at six a.m., in truth, but it suited him to indicate that he understood. It was a curious thing, having a child so successful he eclipsed anything you had achieved professionally, engendering a mix of pride and something like embarrassment. Silly. You should choose it that way. Nevertheless …