Tables. They carry a lot of memories, don’t they? I feel I’ve known this kitchen table for an age. At Christmas, we used to put the extra leaf in for guests, which Dad had to get out of the garage, and someone always got the dubious task of wiping the cobwebs off it. There’s the mark where Meg spilt nail polish and Mum tried to remove it, taking off the lacquer. There’s the one where Beth went through her jewellery-making phase and scratched the surface with her craft knives. That time Dad put down a hot pan without a placemat. Oh, there were fights that day. I still remember the feeling of hearing my parents scream at each other. That fear and worry it sends down your spine at such a young age to see two people you love the most rage at each other. I clung to the sister next to me. Emma. It’s all right, she said. It’s just what grown-ups do sometimes. Love doesn’t mean liking someone all of the time. Now, I trace my fingers along the burn marks and bend down to look at the underside of the table. Mum never found this one. I was angry with her when I was fourteen and she told me off for piercing my upper ear. I wrote I HATE THIS CRAP HOUSE in red biro. Still there, still raging with all that anger. The lounge light goes on and I jolt on the floor.
‘Crapping hell, Lucy. You almost scared me witless. What are you doing up, love? Why are you under the table? Do you need anything? Are you in pain?’
Dad. There are so many things to love about Dad. He’s a crier, which remains endearing, but I love how he lets his guard down and makes himself vulnerable to show all these women he lives with that it’s not a personality flaw. He cries when we’re watching The X Factor and someone says they’re singing for their dead gran and he cries at weddings, exam results and when his youngest is run over on London bridges. Since I’ve been back – well, since we’ve all been back – he hugs us all randomly and I’ve caught him arranging the shoes by the front door and smiling when we’re all clattering over dinner and bantering back and forth like he’s missed this soundtrack. Right now, he comes over, kisses me on the forehead and pulls me to my feet, encouraging me to sit on a chair. I look at the carriage clock on the mantlepiece: 6.45 a.m.
‘I actually woke up and thought I had a shift at work. It’s Thursday, right? I usually did the breakfast shift on Thursdays. And I got up and went to the loo and then looked at myself in the mirror and realised that was twelve years ago.’
Dad comes to sit in a neighbouring chair and puts an arm around me. I’m still in one of Grace’s hoodies and some brief watermelon print jersey shorts that I found in my belongings. My legs are curled up into me. I couldn’t go back to sleep after that so I came down to stare at this table, to indulge in my daily ritual of trying to rack my brains for something, anything.
‘Have you had breakfast? A cup of tea?’
I shake my head.
‘Then let’s get the kettle on at least.’
I love how Dad can sense my confusion but wants to solve it all with tea. He gets up and bumbles through to the kitchen to retrieve some mugs. Three mugs. One for me no doubt but the other’s for Mum and he’ll bring her tea in bed like he always does. This still feels like the one way to show someone you love them dearly, the pre-emptive strike of a hot beverage brought to someone before they’re even conscious is the biggest show of emotion I can think of.
‘That gastro-café-pub place you worked in isn’t there any more, you know? They turned it into one-bed flats,’ he says.
‘Really?’
‘£450K for one bed. I had a look, too. Couldn’t swing a cat in them.’
‘You looked?’
‘Semi-retirement gives me time to be nosey. Speaking of cats… I think your one’s been licking the apples in the fruit bowl…’
‘Oh…’
Pussy and I still have yet to bond. I don’t know how I’d tell her to stop licking the fruit. Going through my belongings, I also found Pussy’s adoption certificate. I got her from a shelter. Apparently, she’d been the longest serving occupant of that place. No one wanted her.
‘I do think it’s mildly amusing to see your mother so riled though so don’t get rid of the thing whatever you do.’
The other thing about Dad is that I am not sure he knows how to deal with any of this. For years, he’s always been a silent observer in this family. It’s like he knows his limits and he’s happy to just offer his help when approached, as opposed to Mum, who bulldozes in there regardless. He’s a quiet and reflective gent who we all value for the constancy, the resilience of having lived through all the bedlam.
The front door opens and I arch my head to see Emma come in, returning from a night shift at the hospital. She senses action at the back of the house and comes in to find us. Dad gets another cup out of the cupboard.
‘You’re up?’ she asks me. ‘Are you feeling OK?’
I nod. ‘I just got up a bit confused.’
‘She got up to get ready for work,’ Dad explains. ‘Her old job at the pub.’
Emma comes and pulls a stool to sit in front of me. ‘Any dizziness or pain?’
‘Only because I’m up at six bloody forty-five,’ I say.
She smiles and takes off her hospital badge, leaving it on the kitchen table.
‘Emma Callaghan-Kohli. That’s a classy name, sis.’
‘You told me that once. You said it made me sound worldly and global.’
‘I was right. Did you do good doctoring today?’
‘It was pretty eventful. A teen got stabbed and brought in to us. Right through the lung. He’s lucky to still be here.’
I pause for a moment to think of Emma at the heart of something so critical. I only knew her as a medical student who I felt didn’t make the most of her university experience. Medics seem to be part of this clique who study together, and drink in fancy dress and in moderation but do little else. She used to come back here regularly during her degree as some sort of base camp. To sleep and eat, to allow Beth to stroke her hair on the sofa while she complained to us about Simon, her new boyfriend, who looked like George Clooney but flirted so heavily with everyone that she didn’t know whether to trust him. The answer was no but she married him anyway. Apparently, Mum broke his nose some years later and that is something I wish I could recollect.
‘He was lucky to have you as his doctor,’ I tell her and kiss the top of her head. She studies my face, I guess to see if my recent brain fart is a result of blown pupils or facial paralysis but it’s not. She then looks down to my leg. That was something else that was split open when I went flying across Waterloo Bridge, and she checks the scar regularly. It’s her way of helping, coping, to pour all her doctorly knowledge on me. I catch her reading articles, looking up brain and memory specialists on her laptop, printing out things of interest for me. I read them on the toilet.
‘So let’s run through what you would normally do on a Thursday. You’d go to work. Then what? Go on, try and remember…’
Dad brings over mugs of tea and sits down at the table, watching this little exercise.
‘I’d finish at three. I’d have done lunch and breakfast service so I’d be knackered but I’d have made myself a lot of espresso to fuel me so by the time I finished I’d be buzzing. I’d take party clothes with me to work and then go get dressed at Farah’s and we’d start drinking early. Thursdays were dead in most places so we usually rang people and ended up in Hammersmith or Richmond, except they were full of people in rugby shirts and posh accents, or Kingston…’
For some reason, my words trail off as I say Kingston, and Emma smiles at me.
‘But you still don’t remember coming to my first wedding, dancing on a table, falling off and Meg having to pick splinters and rose thorns out of your arse?’
‘I do not… Was it a complete rager?’
‘It was a good band. They were a swing band from Hampshire. Their singer was like a young Dean Martin,’ she says, looking into the distance. I know when I have to change the subject.
‘Before the summer came, I also used to go to sixth form on a Thursday. Whole day of lessons that day. Compulsory PE in the morning, double English Lit, then I’d spend two periods in the library, drama workshops till home.’
Emma laughs. ‘I think I could tell you my timetables too. They seem to be etched into me.’
The five of us all went to the same school, a bus ride away from here, called King Charles’ Grammar, affectionately known as King Charlie’s. It’s one of London’s best, which I always thought hilarious as it’s named after one of our worst kings, but if you want to know about a place that laid foundations for all us girls then this is the one. Those walls hold our secrets, they saw us succeed, fail and blossom or, in my case, walk them corridors with enough notoriety to be remembered for the next five years at least.
‘School is probably what’s freshest in my mind. I found all my study notes in my room yesterday. They’re old and yellowing but I could still recite bits of Henry V to you. I remember all my lines from my soliloquy for my drama practicals.’
Dad chuckles. ‘I remember that. Your mum and I went to watch. You never heard this from me but she may have shed a tear that evening. You were very good.’
‘Grade A, thank you very much. Superbly moving, pace of delivery was sublime,’ I remind them of my moderator’s comments.
I pause for a moment. The memory of that night sears through my brain, the anticipation, the energy and time I spent preparing for those ten minutes. Adrenalin bubbled through my veins to be on the stage, some deep sense of belonging, wanting to perform forever. But look where it got me. There is something slightly painful to know that love never came to anything.
‘How do you drink tea so fast?’ mutters Dad, watching Emma as she downs the cup next to her.
‘Asbestos tongue.’ She shifts a look over at me, almost worried to see me so pensive, out of the default settings she’s used to. ‘So, I was going to catch some shut-eye but maybe you and me should go on a little drive first.’
‘At this time of day?’ I ask her.
‘Before the roads clog up. Maybe we should go back to school.’
‘Really?’
‘It might bring some things back.’
‘It might make me want to defecate on the doorstep.’
‘Please don’t do that.’
The one thing I’ve noticed about Emma that has not changed is that she’s still very into her porridge. She needs fuel and fibre to keep her going. Even now, she’s come back from her shift and she’s there with her porridge but it’s jazzy porridge now with rice milk and seeds and fruits on top. I don’t do porridge. Porridge is for bears and it sits in my stomach like cement. My breakfast of choice was a Twix that was dipped into a cappuccino from the school vending machine. Sometimes I had a weekly banana for health.
We were different students, much to Emma’s chagrin. She was the brightest of stars. They would have made plaques for her if they could. Emma Callaghan (who is now a doctor and got the highest Biology A-Level marks in the country) once sat on this bench and walked these halls as head girl. My name would be in small print, somewhere. Lucy Callaghan (who is superbly moving and got four As in her A-Levels, which was a bloody surprise to everyone including her parents as she spent most of her teens fighting the system in a skirt that wasn’t regulation length) once attended this school. She once entered the school elections and named her party the Old El Paso Party in which she gave a rousing speech that every Tuesday would be Taco Tuesday and she’d force all the staff to wear sombreros because in her own words ‘some of them are dull as balls and need the help’. She won that election but was promptly taken out of contention by the head teacher, who gave an assembly berating the whole school community for not taking the issue of politics seriously enough. Natalia de Vante ended up winning for the Liberal Democrats, whose manifesto included the mundane like recycling bins and bus monitors. Lucy may have lost her shit at the whole debacle. She made placards. She protested, goddamn it, that it was an infringement of election by-laws and shat all over true democracy. Her mother was called.
It feels like I was only at this school a matter of months ago but, as we drive up now, it already looks different; there are fancy glass extensions to the foyer, new windows and what look like solar panels on the languages block. Some things still feel the same. The field to the front where we’d haul our asses round for the 1500m in the summer, the red brick of the main building where you can peek into the science labs. A skeleton stands at the window who some lab tech has kept there for the longest time, all dressed up. He had a name. Spud. You’re still here. I mean, you weren’t going anywhere, but still.
‘If you do a doughnut on the field, I’ll give you a tenner,’ I tell Emma as she drives through the school gates.
‘I have new tyres on,’ she says, edging her car into the most sacred of spaces, the staff car park. ‘Shall we park in the deputy head’s space instead?’
I laugh and don’t discourage her. Through our whole schooling career, there was a deputy head called Mrs Willett who carried an incredible dislike for all us Callaghan girls because when Meg started school there, was bullied and had her lunch money taken in the first week, Mum stormed in (a teacher herself with many years’ experience) and called her an ‘absolute amateur’. After that, our name was like mud to her.
‘I haven’t been back here for years,’ Emma says, peering out the car window. ‘How does it feel? To see it? To be back?’
‘It’s had a facelift.’
‘Oh, someone tried to burn it down a few years back so it was necessary. I say someone. They blamed an electrical fault but the rumour was it was arson. Mum actually double-checked where you were that night…’ I widen my eyes at the revelation. ‘You were in Edinburgh, touring with a show, don’t worry…’
‘How do you feel to be back?’ I ask her.
Emma shrugs. ‘My memories are mixed. It was a high-pressure, high-achieving place but I don’t think they looked after us very well.’
It’s strange to hear Emma talk like that about a place where I’d always assumed she’d thrived. She opens the car door and I follow, linking arms with her, walking around the car park, gazing into windows of empty classrooms. Is this trespassing? Perhaps but it’s a thrill to be doing it with the goody-two-shoes sister. Emma pushes against a front door that seems to swing open. She stares at it, knowing we can’t go in, but hey, she’s with me. I walk straight in and pull her hand.
‘Lucy…’
‘Emma, live a little,’ I reply, winking.
The foyer is as I remember. I sat here a lot on the blue polyester chairs by the office, usually waiting while they rang our mother for crimes I may or may not have committed. There still remains a bronze bust of King Charles that sits on a pedestal and I go over and study his gormless expression and take out my phone.
‘Here, let’s take a photo of us and Charlie, we’ll send it to the sisters.’
Emma’s eyes dart in five thousand different directions for fear of being caught. I push her into position and work out my phone camera, styling out the photo so I’ve got my tongue out trying to lick old Charlie’s cheek. I take the shot and cackle at Emma’s panicked face.
‘We shouldn’t be here…’ she whispers.
‘Why? It’s not like we’re going to steal anything. There are no kids about. Chill.’
‘I don’t chill. What if an alarm goes off? The police show up?’
‘Then we will run from the police and move to the south of Spain and change our names. You never got into any trouble here, did you?’
She shakes her head at me. ‘You made up for that though.’
‘It wasn’t just me. Beth got caught smoking by the long-jump pitch once. I’m pretty sure Grace has told me she gave a handy to one of the German exchange lads in the art rooms too.’
Emma rolls her eyes for all of our misdemeanours and peers into the school hall that opens up from the foyer, the parquet floor still glaringly bright. She pushes the door of the hall and it squeaks eerily.
‘Weren’t you forcibly removed from an assembly?’ Emma asks me as we walk in.
‘I was – it was a thing of legend. You can’t sit there and preach about God. It was very disrespectful to the other religions and beliefs that make up the school and I took a stand.’
‘The way Grace tells that story, you flashed the school.’
‘Because the teacher who manhandled me off the stage picked me up and showed everyone my knickers.’
I take her hand and try to spin her under my arm. Look at all the space we have, Ems. We used to be squashed in here like sardines, all suffering the collective indignity of having to sit on the floor and belt out the school song like we meant it.
‘Audete Magnus and forever more…’ I belt out at the top of my lungs, a hand reaching to the ceiling.
Emma spins around immediately. ‘Shush yourself! It’s like you want to be caught.’
‘It’s the school song. Come on, be game, join in…’ I jest.
She gives me a look. You don’t remember my daughters but you remember the words to that wretched anthem of our youth?
‘Excuse me, are you here for the day camps? They’re not in here,’ a voice suddenly booms across the parquet, making us both jump. A figure is standing by the doors, peering over at us. Emma still has her smart workwear on but I literally threw on some cycling shorts and have a three-day-old hoodie hanging over my frame with a T-shirt I slept in underneath, no bra, sliders on my feet, and a baseball cap on my head to cover the mess of my post-op scars and shorn head.
‘I’m sorry. We were just having a look round. We used to be pupils here,’ Emma says, flustered. ‘It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, I’m sorry… we should have called ahead. My name is…’ But as she goes to shake the woman’s hand, she stops for a moment. ‘Gemma Chadwick and this is my sister, Victoria.’
The teacher has a harsh silver bob, tinted glasses and wears a boring navy skirt suit with in-between nude heels. She studies our faces closely. Please don’t recognise us, please don’t recognise us.
‘It’s lovely to see you again after all this time, Mrs Willett,’ Emma says. ‘I can’t believe you’re still here.’
‘They’ll have to prise me out of here…’ she says, laughing, still trying to place us. ‘I stayed so long, they made me head teacher too…’
Please don’t look at my flared nostrils. Please don’t. She narrows her eyes at me, her eyes drawn to the tattoos on my ankles, obviously making assumptions about me.
‘You were pupils, here?’ she asks.
Emma’s eyes climb to the top of the building. ‘Yes, I was here a few years ago for the centenary celebrations actually. I made a donation to the funds for the new sports hall.’
Mrs Willett seems less suspicious now, like we’re not here to rob the place of whiteboard markers and benches. ‘Well, do come in and I can give you a brief tour perhaps.’ She turns for a moment and Emma/Gemma upturns her palms at me in confusion. We’re going in? After this bitchface? To shank her? I mean, I could do the shanking and Emma could sew her up afterwards. I guess we’re going in.
‘Remind me, what years were you here again?’ she asks. I’m glad I came with the sister who’s decent in maths and can help us fake this.
‘I left in 2002, Vic left in 2011.’ I nod. I’m Vic now, we got casual real quick. I know it’s my middle name and it was an easy go-to but if we’re reinventing ourselves then at least give me a more exotic name like Magdalena or Emmanuelle. That said, it’s mildly hilarious to see Emma doing this. Emma doesn’t fib, she’s as straight as they come. Has this more mischievous side emerged in the last ten years? I’d like to think so but she’s also sweating hard to play along here.
‘What line of work are you in?’ Mrs Willett asks.
‘Oh, Gem became a doctor. She’s a paediatric heart surgeon,’ I say, on the brag. Mrs Willett looks mildly impressed. She waits to hear what I’ve done for the last ten years since leaving this place. I don’t want to give her the satisfaction so just hope I’ve retained all my skills as a convincing actress.
‘I, too, went into medicine but I went to live abroad. Médecins Sans Frontières. I’ve just spent the last years working in different refugee camps.’
‘Oh yes,’ she exclaims. ‘I remember you both. Such talent in the sciences.’ You old lying goat. ‘You are both a credit to this school, we obviously did right by you then.’
We nod. Seriously? I was rubbish at science. It was something that never really computed and I once burnt off part of my fringe on a Bunsen burner. I wouldn’t let me near a sick person. I smile though, glad I can dispel her initial assumptions of me. She’s still full of her own self-importance and prejudices then. She was the teacher who used to have the biggest go at me about my skirt. She’d follow us around with a thirty-centimetre ruler and tell us short skirts meant we were looking for trouble. I think I once retorted that it went against my rights as a woman not to wear what I want. I got a term’s worth of weekend detentions for that.
‘So, I heard you built a new drama block here a few years ago?’ Emma asks.
‘Oh, we did. The old drama studio was literally a room and a broom cupboard full of props. It was time to develop the department as a whole. The productions we put on now are really quite tremendous and the girls’ grades really reflect that. Let me show you.’
Emma eyeballs me. It really feels like we’re being led deeper into the dragon’s lair and I’m literally only in sliders and bare legs.
‘Are you all right?’ Emma asks me. ‘With the walking. Tell me and we can head back.’
‘It’s all good. Just remember to log this with Igor in case he tells me I’ve not been doing the work.’
I link my arm into hers tightly, encouraging her to keep close, but Mrs Willett hears the conversation.
‘Are you ill?’
‘She’s just had an operation.’
‘Cancer?’ she asks, a little too brazenly.
‘No.’
‘Oh, I assumed with the shaved head.’
‘You assumed wrong…’ Emma adds, holding me even closer.
‘It’s not a contagious illness, is it?’ Mrs Willett asks, taking a step back, her face scrunched up. I should cough in her general direction now, shouldn’t I?
‘It was a very aggressive type of malaria, I was lucky my constitution was strong enough to recover.’
‘Obviously, something you got from being a King Charlie’s girl,’ she states.
Yes, a constitution I developed from having to deal with virulent people like yourself. We continue to take a slow walk through the school. The air. The air hasn’t changed: this heavy air of expectation in its foundations. We wind around the corners past the school gyms until she heads out to where the old sports blocks used to be. I scan my eyes up its super-white walls and light wood exterior. Sod’s law that I would leave and they finally realised the worth of the arts, how drama ignited something in some of us.
‘Come in and have a look… we are running some workshops over the summer and sports camps over on the astro pitch so there are some children around.’
We walk in and I’m immediately drawn to the high ceiling, knocking my head back. It doesn’t look like the old room. The old room smelt like face paint and feet but I think Mrs Willett wants us to fake some admiration and surprise. I’m not so easily impressed. Inside, a group of girls are in a white T-shirts and leggings working on some sort of warm-up and I smile to see their bare feet, to feel the vibrations as they stamp across the floor. Their teacher comes over to introduce herself, her face completely unfamiliar to me.
‘Mrs Willett. Is everything OK?’
‘Oh, I was just giving a tour to these ex-alumni. Both doctors.’
The teacher smiles but studies my face closely. ‘Lucy?’
‘No, her name is Victoria.’
Her eyes bounce towards Emma and I.
‘No, this is Lucy Callaghan.’ She turns to me. ‘I was three years younger than you but you were here. You were a legend. You were the reason I went into drama. I saw a performance with you in As You Like It and you were breathtaking. Your last monologue was a masterclass. You had sisters, lots of sisters, right? I’m Maisie Henderson.’
If Emma wasn’t sweating before, she now looks like she’s run a marathon, a panicked look in her eyes like we need to escape and evade capture. You can’t run, you’re an invalid. I’ll have to carry you. On my back. Mrs Willett stops in her tracks and looks me straight in the eye. Yes, it is I. Where’s your ruler now, bitch?
‘Callaghan!’ she says in a slightly sinister Scooby-Doo villain voice. ‘You lied!’
‘Kind of but mostly out of fear,’ Emma tells her, putting her body in between mine and hers to try and defend me in some way. ‘And she didn’t lie. I am a surgeon.’
‘I will expect that your sister is not though,’ Mrs Willett replies, her tone sarcastic and bitter.
‘She’s an actress. A bloody fine one too,’ Emma retorts. The girls in the middle of the room stop to take in the minor drama.
‘I feel very uncomfortable that you tried to dupe me into giving you a tour. I think you need to leave my school…’
‘I’m sorry… this is my fault,’ Miss Henderson says, trying to interject.
‘No, it’s ours. We did lie and I’m sorry… we will leave,’ Emma says, trying to pull me away.
‘Just a quick question though before we do…’ Emma’s fingers literally tense into wire in my hand. Not now Lucy. Not when you’re literally wearing pyjamas. But old habits die hard.
‘It’s not your school. You never realised that, did you? It belonged to us, it belonged to all these girls.’
Mrs Willett glares at me, like she’s getting all her ammunition ready.
‘You’re saying I should have let the likes of you run riot in this place?’
‘The likes of me? I think that would have been a fine idea. Why did you hate us Callaghans so much? Myself and my sisters?’
‘I am not sure where you got that impression… Lucy… Callaghan…’ she says, accentuating my name. And just like that, it’s clear that I am still on this woman’s radar, she still knows the name, she still knows to fear it. That is bloody excellent.
‘Was it because my mum called you an amateur? Did that sting?’
Mrs Willett’s eyes widen at the thought and Miss Henderson has to take a step back to bite her lip.
‘It’s a shame you decided to hold a grudge like some bitter old cod because we’re bloody awesome. I wish you’d got to know us rather than thinking we were the problem.’
Emma coughs, actually she looks like she might throw up on the spot from the confrontation.
‘But you were. You were one of the most forthright and defiant young ladies we ever had in this school. You questioned everything we put in front of you,’ Mrs Willett continues. I smile wryly, pleased I left a mark.
‘You say that like it’s a bad thing,’ I state.
‘The apple did not fall far from the tree, let’s just say that.’
‘Hold up now,’ Emma suddenly interjects, her fight-or-flight response clearly kicking in. We’re not leaving now, Lucy. ‘That’s my tree you’re talking about.’
‘Well, some of the apples came out beautifully… others…’ Her eyes turn to me. But before I have a chance to reply, Emma chips in.
‘Others grew exactly how they needed to. They had to rename the fruit because she was so different, so superbly unique to all the other apples in that tree.’ Emma grabs my hand tightly.
‘If that’s how you want to put it. I found your sister in a storage cupboard once with a groundsman. She made a French teacher cry.’
She’s not half wrong. The French teacher was a pervy old tosser though.
‘We all had bets where you’d end up. I put my money on prison myself.’
Emma’s face contorts in shock. I suddenly think about something Mrs Willett said to me when I was in my last year of sixth form, causing havoc, questioning the status quo. It may have been at the time of my Old El Paso antics. You’ll never amount to anything. Those words are still fresh in my mind and maybe carry even more gravity after everything that’s happened. What am I remembered for? A decent monologue? The fact I was gobby and caused these teachers a fair bit of trouble? That’s not something you put on plaques. Christ, was she right? Emma sees that I’ve run out of steam. My back hurts but she’s not done, the purpose of coming over here wasn’t to have some old battleaxe lay into me, especially when my memory of her is a lot fresher than she thinks.
‘When we came in, Mrs Willett? The first thing you asked was what we became. All you are interested in are labels. But you never asked about the human sides of us – the mothers we grew into, the people we married, the places we’ve been,’ Emma explains.
I don’t think I want to answer that either though, Ems. Yeah, Mrs Willett – I got my vajayjay pierced, am wildly promiscuous and all I seem to own is a cat who eats sanitary wear. But the big sister has a point. Even when we were just children, this woman weaponised her authority.
‘Girls!’ Emma shouts, gesturing to the drama crowd in the corner. ‘Don’t be one of her apples. You grow exactly like you want to. Don’t let this one farm you to look like all the others. Bloody shine however you want…’
Of course, this comment has no context so they look at Emma a little confused but I like seeing my sister making a fuss, releasing something into the air that has obviously been bugging her for a decade and more. You tell them. I hear angered voices float in and out of my consciousness. A disagreement of sorts. Emma says she’d never send her daughters to this hellhole. I think Willett is threatening to call the police on us. The girls in the corner congregate and watch. Their faces are all shiny and young. That was me, literally a few months ago. Feel the floor under your feet, girls. Let it ground you. You’re all shiny young apples.
The words of that final epilogue of As You Like It suddenly come to me. I adored the energy, the message for all to love who they wanted, to defy convention and embrace the complexity and wonder of real life. There was a line there about conjuring the audience, about kissing as many people out there that pleased me. The speech is embedded in my brain, it felt like the beginning of something, not an epilogue. I mumble the words under my breath. I remember every word. God, I’m good. They were so bright, the lights in that studio. I couldn’t see the faces of the crowd, only hear their applause. And suddenly, my legs just go from under me. Emma catches me.
‘Shit! Lucy! LUCY! Call 999, tell them we have a person who’s collapsed suffering from a traumatic brain injury. Lucy! Lucy!’