49

Lauren, 2019

Bertha’s squawk rips into time as if it were a sheet of newspaper. And Lauren is stumbling through the conservatory on quivery colt legs again, her dress wet, stinky, smudged with Gemma’s glitter, and Bertha is shrieking, ‘What have we done?’ in a posh girl’s panicked voice, echoing through the years.

Finally, Bertha quiets. The memory flicks off, and Lauren resets; the past and present overlie each other, more gently. Her grown-up sisters have simply whipped away a dustsheet from a shapeless lump of furniture she’s walked around for her entire adult life. Look! Here it is! Yet she senses other things too, still covered, shoved into corners. And conducted along the window seat, up the buttons of her spine, Lauren feels the vibration of gigantic waves that have travelled across miles and miles of mountainous winter seas, their energy building, finally hitting rock. The violence of a tide turning.

‘Excuse me, folks. Something to add.’ Angie sticks up her hand. ‘I spring-cleaned the studio the night before, as a surprise for Charlie. Binned those manky old jars by the sink, dug out some new ones, diluted the alcohol down to safe levels so they wouldn’t combust, or trash his hands. He had fingertips like barnacles.’ She clears her throat. ‘Look, I’ve done a fair bit of recreational experimenting in my time, and I honestly don’t think that new mixture would have done much.’

‘Oh, thank God,’ heaves Flora. Kat tips her head towards the ceiling, muttering under her breath.

With a rush of light-headedness, a scattering sensation, Lauren twists to face the window, the night. Hanging in the indigo sky is the same fat white moon that slipped its shadow, like a card trick, between the earth and the sun twenty years ago. Should she do the same? No one ever need know that after Angie finished her studio reorganization, Lauren furiously, territorially moved everything back to its proper place, including those jars, which she remembers scooping out of the waste bin. Clearly, neither Angie nor Dad noticed, their minds on other things.

‘Lauren?’ Flora’s voice swims towards her. ‘Do you hear what Angie’s saying?’

Lauren also hears the call of a different future, one without her sisters’ guilt. Torment over things that cannot be changed, whose impact will always be uncertain. It was, she realizes, sickeningly, the way many small decisions, words and events were strung together that created the deadly circuit. Not one thing.

‘Lauren?’ Flora says again, more pleadingly. ‘Say something.’

‘Feathers and dander brought on the asthma attack. And if she’d had her inhaler …’ Lauren collects herself and turns. ‘Pete was clear about that.’ Her voice snags on his name, his loss, his need for his sister.

‘Speaking of Pete.’ Angie’s eyes dart nervously. ‘Poor bloke. I don’t want him to take the rap for everything. And since we’re laying our cards on the table tonight …’ she gnaws at her lip, leaving a trace of lipstick on her front tooth, ‘… I did it. The tyre.’

‘Why the hell would you do that, Ange?’ stutters Charlie, shocked. Lauren feels only relief that it wasn’t Pete’s work.

‘I drove all the way down here – seven hours! – and you wanted to turf me out after one night? No, sorry, babe.’ Angie wiggles her hips, bearing down on the sofa cushions. ‘Anyway, I wanted to stay. Show your family I wasn’t Monster.’

‘Interesting way of going about it,’ Kat says, catching Lauren’s eye and fighting a smile.

‘Enough. My blood pressure is about to punch through Rock Point’s roof.’ Charlie takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes.

‘Drink some water,’ instructs Flora.

He takes a gulp of his wine instead. ‘Let’s call it a night.’

‘Really? We’re done, are we, Dad?’ Kat says, in a pointed way. No smile now.

Charlie, fumbling, refills his glass. The wine overspills, trickling down its stem. Lauren’s aware of an odd undertow in the room. Too many moving pieces.

‘Lauren,’ Flora says urgently, interrupting her thoughts. ‘A couple of days before the eclipse, Kat and I caught Angie rifling through Dad’s personal sketches in the studio. And Angie told us she’d seen a study of Viv.’

‘Nude.’ Kat studies their brooding father, watching his reaction.

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Charlie snorts.

Viv. Lauren feels that fragmentation again, a tinnitus buzz, the summer a swarm of bees, constantly reshaping as she tries to grasp it.

‘I wasn’t one hundred per cent certain it was Viv, Charlie,’ Angie backtracks.

‘You saw this drawing too?’ Lauren asks her sisters. She can’t believe it. She won’t.

‘No. You interrupted us.’ Kat looks away, palming her cheek.

Lauren’s insides clench. She knows what’s coming. Sees it written on her sisters’ stricken faces. ‘But you told Gemma.’

‘When you were in the bathroom, and you were gone ages. We teased Gemma about her mum,’ Flora says hoarsely, wiping away a tear on her sweater sleeve. ‘Awful, awful, awful.’

It starts to slot together with a sick sort of sense: the screw-you fire in Gemma’s eyes; Gemma shouting at Kat and Flora. Humiliated, she’d have done anything to prove herself. Sniffed from that jar then – angry, defiant, possibly high, not thinking straight – seeing off their dare and, disastrously, gone into the aviary. Bitches. ‘What did Gemma ever do to you?’

‘You preferred Gemma to us,’ Kat says quietly.

‘You were our sister, not hers.’ Flora sniffs back tears. ‘But you acted like – like the opposite.’

Anger rises through Lauren, a wave of heat. She’s not buying it. ‘But you two didn’t want another sister! You didn’t want me.’

Charlie drops his head to his hands with a ‘Girls, please,’ and a suppressed sob. The burning logs pop. The flames stretch and leap, and in them Lauren sees streaks of cadmium-yellow paint, budgie feathers, late-summer sunbeams. A bonfire of past and present.

‘I internalized my mother’s bitterness towards Dixie and Blythe. But I already had a bond with Kat,’ Flora says. ‘You … you just appeared!’

‘And it was obvious Dad still loved your mum, Lauren, which is why our mothers hated her, and you were his little pet, his cute art pixie, who’d follow him up to the studio. But he was ours first.’ Kat grimaces. ‘Fucked-up sibling logic.’

Sibling logic. Those two words – unqualified by ‘half’ – leave a glittery tail, like a sparkler’s loops of light. Lauren softens very slightly, grateful for their honesty at last. She turns to her father. ‘If you loved Mum, why did you behave badly?’ In her pleading voice she hears the little girl who just wanted her parents to be together, who had to accept her mother’s line about things not working out, things not meant to be. ‘And what was it, exactly? What did you do, Dad?’

Sweat starts to wax her father’s forehead. ‘It’s not the right moment to discuss it, Lauren.’

‘It’s hard being honest, Dad,’ says Kat. ‘Ugly. Painful. But me and Flora managed it. So did Angie. She could have let Pete take the blame for the tyre, but she didn’t.’

‘You did say no secrets, Charlie,’ Angie says, looking at him askance.

Her father starts to look hunted then, the women in his life circling, ready to swoop and bring him down. ‘It’ll be of no surprise to any of you, I’m ashamed to say.’ He seems to shrink as he speaks. ‘I was unfaithful.’

Lauren sucks in her breath. Although long suspected – Dixie never denied it, or offered up details – the confirmation still hurts, and it hurts right inside her ribs, her heart, as it would have her mother’s.

‘You know what, Dad? It’s a miracle me, Flora and Lauren have any sort of relationship at all.’ Kat’s voice shakes, the wound hers too. ‘We’re sisters despite you, not because of you.’ Tears roll freely down Kat’s cheeks. ‘And we’ll always look after one another, despite you too. I’ll make damn sure of it.’

‘I’m very, very happy to hear that,’ Charlie says heavily as Flora pulls a tissue out of the sleeve of her sweater and hands it to Kat. ‘And to all your mothers. You’re a credit to them, all of you, you really are.’ He gets up with an ‘oof’ and prods a glowing log back into the fire. ‘Do you want to know the reason you’re here, right now, at Rock Point?’ He turns, waggling the poker at them, like a long paintbrush. ‘Dixie.’

An unstable hush falls.

‘Reuniting you all at Rock Point was your mother’s idea, Lauren.’ His expression animates as it always does when he speaks of Dixie. ‘A way of healing. Moving forward, she said. Dix called me, not long before she died.’

‘Mum did?’ says Lauren, numbly. Wind blasts down the chimney, sending sparks flying and smoke curling over the mantel, a perfect scroll, like the one on her mother’s violin.

‘Yes. And she hated my house-clearance idea!’ His cheeks are flushed now, filled with life, heat, passion. ‘Forbade me to do it until you’d all been back one last time. I was under strict orders to put that old birdcage back in its spot by the studio sofa. Not to cover the aviary. She wanted you to face that aviary again, Lauren. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if she orchestrated the bloody parrot being dumped back at my flat.’

‘But all my life she tried to protect me from triggers,’ Lauren says, struggling to process this, or imagine such a conversation between her parents. Her sisters look equally staggered.

‘Yes, and she came rather to regret that approach in the end, Laurie. She wanted you, Kat and Flora to spend time together, as you know. I did tell her it was a high-risk proposition, inviting you all back here. That you were all so busy, wouldn’t come anyway. She said it was a risk worth taking. And that I just needed to make it happen.’ He smiles, lightening for the first time that evening. ‘You don’t argue with Dixie Molloy.’

‘She sounds like quite a woman.’ Angie bristles. ‘Did she plan our meeting too?’

‘Oh, no. That night was written in the stars, my love,’ he says hurriedly. Although Lauren wonders if he does put it down to Dixie magic. ‘I wanted you here, Angie. Let’s bring it all to Rock Point, I thought. Smash the past like a piñata! It’s what Dixie would have wanted,’ he adds, less certainly. ‘Anyway. Here we are. It is what it is.’ He reaches for his glass of wine and raises it. ‘To Dixie.’

Lauren listens to them all chanting her mother’s name – Dixie! Dixie! Dixie! – and she’s not quite sure how they’ve leaped from Gemma to her mother, the total eclipse to this winter fire, only that everything in her life seems to be connected by gossamer threads and if you touch one, another bit trembles. And the next moment, Kat’s standing, saying, ‘And now we need to circle back, Dad. Finish what Dixie started.’ And those threads start to shake.