We and Scarlett have just finished our swimming lesson. It is the worst part of the week, because the pool is freezing, and no matter what the teacher says, it’s never okay once you’re in.
Mum knows we hate the cold, so she is waiting with a towel for each of us at the changing-room door. The two of us wobble over, all plucked chicken skin and white webbed feet and hands, grabbing for the towels and chattering our teeth. Although we’ve started to feel that it’s getting a bit babyish, the Disney print doesn’t bother us right now. We wrap ourselves up in the soft faded blue of 101 Dalmations having fun in a soapy bathtub; Scarlett has her own green towel from home.
Mum has got our stuff out of the locker; it’s waiting for us in a pile on the low wooden bench that runs down the center of the room. We dry our body, and then drop the towel on the floor and reach for our knickers.
“Don’t drop your towel on the floor,” says Mum.
“Why?” we say.
“Because it’s dirty.”
“But you’re going to wash it when we get home.”
“Yes, but some things like floors are really dirty, and the washing machine doesn’t get rid of all the germs.”
(This reminds us of something Dad said a few weeks ago: “Always wash your hands when you get home after taking the Tube, because there’s lots of invisible dirt on the poles from other people’s hands; it’s there even though you can’t see it.”)
“What if you wash it lots of times?” we ask. “Does it go eventually?”
“Yes, probably eventually.” Mum’s not paying attention anymore; she has turned to give Scarlett her socks. “Sit on the bench when you put them on so you don’t get your feet wet . . .”
Our towel is curled on the tiled floor. The lines between the tiles are filled with a spongy green slime we hadn’t noticed before. Is this the super dirt Mum is talking about? No: Dad said it’s invisible. We look at our hands, which are now less waterlogged and starting to look normal again. What about the lines on our palm? Are they filled with spongy green slime too tiny to see?
“How many times would you have to wash it to make it go away?”
“Oh . . . a few . . . Here, put your sweatshirt on.”
“Okay,” we say.
We resolve to wash our hands more often and more carefully.
Our special way of finishing our thoughts changes every few months. There’s never a specific moment where the change is noticeable. At the moment, we tap each side of the chair we are sitting on three times. Then we triple it to make nine.
We smell our fingers one by one, carefully.
We look left, right, up, and down, three times.
We uncross and cross our legs three times and tap our feet up and down together three times.
Dad wishes we would stop.
He tells us he will get us a guinea pig if we promise to stop fidgeting so much, because it is unbearable to watch. We would like a guinea pig. We reason that we can move in a way that’s less noticeable, or perhaps find another way to close our thoughts.
We make the deal with him.
Mum and Dad take Ella and us to a house outside London to get the guinea pig. We pull into the gravel drive of a large red-brick house. We open the car door to get out, and a little gray dog runs past. As we look at it, a thought pops into our head:
I hate that dog.
We clutch our head.
What a horrible thought, says my friend. Why did you think that?
I don’t know, I say. I love dogs. That dog looks friendly and nice.
Ella is shrieking “Where are the guinea pigs? I want to see the guinea pigs!” and the man and woman who come out of the house give us a strange look.
“We don’t have any—”
“They’re in the basement!” interrupts Dad, winking.
Inside the house, there’s a cage with lots of tiny fluffy gray puppies in it.
“We’re getting a puppy!” says Dad.
We feel elated. A puppy! How amazing!
“Can we call him Tuffy?”
And then a pang. The older gray dog we saw on the drive must have been the mum. How can we take one of her children when I had such a horrible thought about her? And how will we look the puppy in the eye, knowing what I thought about his mum?
Our parents are rich now and have bought a wooden ski chalet in Chamonix in France. Everything about the chalet is great, and we are learning to ski, but the problem is, we have to drive to get there.
Mum and Dad have always argued, but it’s getting worse. They argue about the most ridiculous things, and it’s worse when we’re in the car.
We don’t want to take sides, but Dad is always shouting at Mum. According to him, everything she does is wrong. She doesn’t want to fight, and cries, but it doesn’t help, so she gets mad and shouts back. If he repeatedly runs his hands through his hair, you know he is really mad. Then you should keep quiet.
They are fighting before we even get to the end of our road.
By the time we get to France, they’ve argued about a million things. The main problem is that Dad has decided he doesn’t like Mum’s voice. He tells her it is high and piercing, and he hates it. Mum has put her Gucci sunglasses on. Since it’s not sunny, she must be crying.
“And those huge glasses! Those fucking glasses!” screams Dad. “They make you look fucking ridiculous!” He grabs them off her face and snaps them in half.
This is too much for Mum, who sat crying and not saying much through most of the last hour. She grabs a Scotch egg and smushes it in his face. She throws another at the windscreen. Dad swerves the car.
“Fuck!”
“STOP!” we scream. “Dad, stop shouting at Mum. You’re making her cry, and she hasn’t done anything wrong.
“And Mum, put the Scotch eggs down.”
“You shut up, Lily!” says Dad. “We are having an adult argument, and you bloody well stay out of it.”
In the car we used to calm ourselves down by doing our moving-around routines, but we promised Dad we would sit still. So now we either fidget very slowly so Dad won’t notice, or we say our special sentences:
Lately, we’ve found a better thing to do. We’ve realized Dad and Mum are probably bad, because otherwise he wouldn’t treat her like that—and she wouldn’t make him so unhappy. We don’t want to end up bad like them, so we focus on counting up all the things we’ve done that day that could possibly be bad. We make a long list of them and think about whether what we did really was that bad.
Sometimes it turns out it wasn’t bad, and we can excuse it.
Other times it was genuinely bad, and we have to think about it very hard to make sure we don’t do it again. To be certain, we go through the list three times. Sometimes that goes wrong, and we have to go through it six more times to make nine. If that still goes wrong, we start again.
Of course, it’s worrying that we’ve done bad things at all, but my friend reassures me:
The fact that you’re thinking about it and trying to sort it out shows that you won’t end up bad like them. The problem with them is that they don’t care about it. You’re going to grow up to be a good person, I know it.
It’s so relieving to hear this—so thrilling and exciting to know that because She is here to help me, I have potential.
Knowing this makes their argument seem quieter, and though I’m still in the car, I’m not here really.
I’m in the future, ten years from now, living in a stylish flat by the Thames and working in a very cool office with glass walls, a watercooler, and unlimited stationery. I don’t have housemates, because I don’t need them—I have my friend. And by this time we’ve worked it all out, and everyone loves us.
Thank you, I say, thanks for everything.
We’re driving in the car through Chamonix. Mum and Dad are in the front, and we’re in the back with Dad’s sister, Auntie Sam. Dad is screaming at Mum about the fact that she doesn’t even try to be good at skiing and he’s sick of wasting money on her lessons. Mum is saying she does try. What happens next happens so quickly, we don’t take it all in.
Mum unbuckles her seat belt, opens the passenger door, and jumps out of the car. We look to see where she will land. There is a patch of grass by the barrier, and she throws herself at it.
Her body curls in a ball, like a gymnast. Will she make it?
She has made it. She lands, bounces a few times, and rolls away from the impact. Then she is gone from view.
“Ian!” screams Auntie Sam. “Ian!!!”
Dad keeps driving. Auntie Sam clutches our hand.
Mum walks into the chalet hours later. We look her up and down. She looks okay. But what if she is hurting somewhere we can’t see? We wrap our arms round her.
“Are you okay?”
Mum nods. She feels cold.
She has walked back.
She says everything will be fine between her and Dad. “Sorry I did such a stupid thing.”
Then she buries her face in our hair, and our scalp starts to feel like it’s raining.
At night, it doesn’t matter what time we go to bed: our prayers and checks take hours before we can sleep. We share a bunk bed with Ella, and at first we wonder how we can do our checks with her there.
While we don’t think there’s anything wrong with checking things to be sure, we haven’t seen anyone else do it and suspect it should be private.
By now, we’ve perfected the routine. We wait for Ella to be in the bottom bunk, and tell her we are going to the bathroom. Once there, we wash our hands three times, because otherwise we’ll be kept up imagining all the things we can’t see on our hands. We check the cupboard under the sink to make sure there is no one in it. We run our hand across the unsanded shelf, getting splinters in our palms. Then we check with our eyes:
We do the same on the bottom shelf.
We check the bath and sink taps, passing our hand under them nine times and saying:
We take the loo roll out of the holder and check there is nothing underneath, three times.
Then we go back into our bedroom. We check behind the curtains three times, or nine if that doesn’t feel right.
Ella always asks “What are you dooooing?” and we always say “I’m looking at the moon.” She asks why we couldn’t see it the first time and we tell her to be quiet and go to sleep. Then we go over to her.
We feel that she is breathing in the special way and check her pulse.
It’s harder to keep this secret. So we’ve decided to be half honest. We tell her we are just checking to see she is alive and well, like when you go to the doctor. In our head we repeat:
Then we get into our bunk. We check nine times that the duvet is tucked in so our toes don’t get cold and wake us up, which would force us to start checking everything again. We check that our pillow is straight: the top must be a palm from the end of the bed and the sides a palm from the mattress edge.
Then we say the prayer and try to sleep. The problem is, having Ella close to us makes us feel even more like we need to check she is alive.
We creep down the ladder to check on her without waking her up. This must be the last thing we do before we get into bed, so we quickly check the bathroom and curtains again. Then we check Ella, before climbing back into bed and doing the duvet and pillow checks. Then we say the prayer again and try to sleep . . .
We check our watch. It’s 5:00 a.m.
We are.
So.
Tired.
We climb down again to check on Ella. We are checking her chest when she opens her eyes wide and sits bolt upright.
“Lily? Why do you keep doing this?”
“Shhh! Go back to sleep.” We stroke her head to calm her down.
“Lily,” whispers Ella, pulling the duvet up to her chin and looking at us with wide eyes. “Am I dying?”