Page 43 of The Girl You Left Behind
She types a response to the first.
Dear Mr. Blank, I would love to drop my prices to accommodate you. Unfortunately my biological makeup means I also have to eat. Good luck with your brochure.
She knows there will be somebody out there who will do it more cheaply, someone who doesn’t care too much about grammar or punctuation, and will not notice that the brochure copy contains “their” for “there” twenty-two times. But she is tired of having her already meager rates pushed down further.
Dad, I will call round later. If Caroline happens to have returned between now and then, please make sure you are dressed. Mrs. Patel said you were watering the Japanese anemones naked again last week and you know what the police said about that.
Liv x
The last time she had arrived to comfort her father after one of Caroline’s disappearances he had opened the door wearing a woman’s Oriental silk robe, gaping at the front, and wrapped her in an expansive hug before she could protest. “I’m your father, for goodness’ sake,” he would mutter, when she scolded him afterward. Although he hadn’t had a decent acting job in almost a decade, Michael Worthing had never lost his childlike lack of inhibition or his irritation with what he called “wrappings.” In childhood she had stopped bringing friends home after Samantha Howcroft had gone home and told her mother that Mr. Worthing walked around “with all his bits swinging.” (She had also told everyone at school that Liv’s dad had a willy like a giant sausage. Her father had seemed oddly untroubled by that one.)
Caroline, his flame-haired girlfriend of almost fifteen years, was untroubled by his nakedness. In fact, she was quite happy to walk around seminaked herself. Liv sometimes thought she was more familiar with the sight of those two pale, pendulous old bodies than she was with her own.
Caroline was his great passion, but she would walk out in a giant huff every couple of months, citing his impossibility, his lack of earnings, and his brief, fervent affairs with other women. What they saw in him, Liv could never quite imagine.
“Lust for life, my darling!” he would exclaim. “Passion! If you have none you’re a dead thing.” Liv, she suspects privately, is something of a disappointment to her father.
She swigs the last of her coffee and pens an e-mail to Abiola.
Hi Abiola
I’ll meet you outside the Conaghy building at 2P.M.All cleared this end. They are a little nervous but definitely up for it. Hope all good with you.
Regards
Liv
She sends it, then stares at the one from her bank manager. Her fingers stall on the keyboard. Then she reaches across and presses Delete.
She knows, with some sensible part of her, that this cannot continue. She hears the distant, threatening clamor of the neatly folded final demands in their envelopes, like the drumbeat of an invading army. She lives like a church mouse, buys little, socializes rarely, and still it is not enough. Her cash cards and credit cards are prone to spit themselves back at her from the ATM. The council had arrived at her door last year, part of a local reassessment of council taxpayers. The woman had walked around the Glass House, then had looked at Liv as if she had somehow tried to cheat them of something. As if it were an insult that she, a virtual girl, lived in this house alone. Liv could barely blame her: Since David’s death she has felt a fraud living here. She’s like a curator, protecting David’s memory, keeping the place as he would have wanted it.
Liv now pays the maximum council tax chargeable, the same rate as the bankers with their million-pound wage packets, the financiers with their swollen bonuses. It eats up more than half of what she earns in some months.
She no longer opens bank statements. There is no point. She knows exactly what they will say.
•••
“It’s my own fault.” Her father drops his head to his hands theatrically. From between his fingers, sparse gray hair sticks up in tufts. Around him the kitchen is scattered with pots and pans that tell of an evening meal interrupted: half a lump of Parmesan, a bowl of congealed pasta, aMary Celesteof domestic disharmony. “I knew I shouldn’t go anywhere near her. But, oh! I was like a moth to a flame. And what a flame! The heat! Theheat!” He sounds bewildered.
Liv nods understandingly. She is attempting, privately, to reconcile this tale of epic sexual misadventure with Jean, the fifty-something woman who runs the local flower shop and smokes forty a day, and whose gray ankles emerge from too short trousers like slices of tripe.
Liv puts the kettle on. As she begins clearing up the work surfaces, her father downs the rest of his glass. “It’s too early for wine.”
“It’s never too early for wine. Nectar of the gods. My one consolation.”
“Your life is one long consolation.”
“How did I raise a woman of such will, such fearsome boundaries?”
“Because you didn’t raise me. Mum did.”
Liv thought sometimes that the day her mother died, six years ago, her parents’ short, fractured marriage had somehow been redrawn in her father’s mind, so that this intolerant woman, this hussy, this harridan who had poisoned his only child against him now resembled a kind of virgin Madonna. She didn’t mind. She did it herself. When you lost your mother, she gradually recast herself in the imagination as perfect: a series of soft kisses, loving words, a comforting embrace. “Loss has hardened you.”
“I just don’t fall in love with every person of the opposite sex who happens to sell me a pot of tomato food.”
She had opened the drawers, searching for coffee filters. Her father’s house was as cluttered and chaotic as hers was tidy.
“I saw Jasmine in the Pig’s Foot the other night.” He brightens. “What a gorgeous girl she is. She asked after you. Why don’t you see her anymore? You two were such good friends.”
