Page 94 of We All Live Here
“Are you okay?”
She focuses. Jessie is looking at her carefully. “Uh…headache. Sudden headache. I get them occasionally.” She rubs a hand across her forehead.
“You’ve gone really pale. Do you want a pill? Let me get you some water.” Jessie is rummaging in her bag.
Lila tries to calculate how quickly she can leave. Every fiber of her being wants to hurl her body out of the door. “I need some fresh air. I—I’m going to head back to school.”
“Don’t go by yourself. You need someone with you if you’re ill.” Jessie starts to gather her things.
“No. No. I’m fine. Finish your tea.” Lila waves a hand. “You’re really kind. I—I just—I’m so sorry. It’s been…really lovely talking to you.”
Before Jessie can get up, she has grabbed her bag and is weaving through the empty tables and out into the bright light of the afternoon street beyond. She can just make out Jessie’s “Maybe see you tomorrow!” as the door closes behind her.
Chapter Thirty-one
Celie
Something is going on at Dad’s. Marja lies on the sofa a lot, or hides in her bedroom when Celie and Violet are there. She used to make special meals on the nights they were staying: big dishes of Asian food or enormous bowls of pasta and salad, all laid out on their little kitchen table, with posh ice cream to follow, like she was trying to use dinner time to make them all feel like a family, but now she just asks them to pick something from the takeaway menu, her face pale and apologetic, and retreats. When she is in the living room, she and Dad are always speaking in low voices. Celie wondered for a while whether it was down to her: she has spent the last eighteen months letting Marja know, in a million subtle ways, that she might have to be there, but it doesn’t mean she’s ever going to consider her and Hugofamily. Marja wants them all to forget what she did, stealing Dad from Mum, and actlike they’re some kind of blended Instagram family. She uses this fake-friendly voice to talk to Celie, and offers her spare skincare samples and things that she’s bought at the shops and apparently can’t use. But Celie does her best never to talk to her beyond one-word answers, and makes sure the moment Dad lets her leave the table she heads to her and Violet’s room to sit on her phone. It’s annoying because Hugo always wants her or Violet to play with him, and Dad is always saying:C’mon, girls, just give him half an hour. But who wants to play with a six-year-old boy? If Marja wanted a babysitter she should have hired one.
She has watched Marja turn from this yoga woman, with her stupid defined shoulders and her Lululemon leggings into a big fat whale, and sometimes she wonders whether Dad feels bad he left Mum for her now that she’s changed, whether it will make him go off her, but Dad still seems bewitched, always hovering round her, checking she’s okay, squeezing her hand when they think Celie’s not looking. It’s revolting, the way they’re all lovey-dovey in front of her, like she’s just meant to pretend it isn’t happening. But now Marja is nearly always upstairs, and Celie is wondering whether her determination not to let Marja have an ounce of affection has finally had an effect. She feels a little weird about it, admittedly, given that there’s going to be a baby, and she isn’t sure whether Mum would even want Dad back after all this time. Mostly she just doesn’t want to have to deal with more stuff.
Because things are also weird at home—Bill is still staying at the bungalow and Gene is away working so the house is really quiet. And Mum is preoccupied, taking extra-long baths or always out, earphones in, with Truant. Her mouth is doing that turned-down thing when she doesn’t even realize she’s making her lips look thin, and you have to ask her twice for anything because she’s not really listening. Celie had looked through her phone once—Mum is hopeless at passwords: they’re always either Celie1 or Violet1 or something like that—but there’s not much in her messages, except for a bunch of times she asks Bill to come home. Atfirst Celie thought they must have had a row, but she keeps telling him she loves him and he keeps saying he just needs some space. Celie asked Violet if she had done something to annoy Bill—she was remembering the time Violet used his personalized note cards to draw space aliens—but Violet swears she hasn’t. So basically they spend their lives shuttling from one weird atmosphere to another.
She talked to Martin about it when they walked to the bus stop after Animation the previous week. He had done a whole storyboard about having a new baby brother and how he had imagined it turning into a ginormous monster that ate his parents before the last frame showed it as a tiny little wormy newborn. He had told the group it was based on his feelings when his mum got pregnant by his stepdad.
“Do you like your brother?” she had asked him. “Your stepbrother, I mean.”
“Half-brother,” he said. “Yeah. He’s okay. He’s a little dude.” He had glanced at her. “I wasn’t sure I was going to like him because at first I thought my stepdad was a bit of an idiot. But it’s weird. Like when I first went to the hospital to see him, he was just—I don’t know. Just this tiny kid. And I’d never had a brother, so I suppose it felt…nice? He can be quite annoying and stuff and he goes in my room when he shouldn’t. But yeah. I like him being around.”
“I think I’m going to hate my dad’s baby,” Celie says, as they sit on the bus-stop seats that are set at a slant, so you always feel like you’re about to slide off. “It just feels like it’s all his fault.”
“How?”
“Well, if the baby hadn’t come along Dad might have gone back to Mum eventually. And now…that’s it.”
Martin considers this. “I don’t know. My aunt went back to her husband even though she had a baby with someone else. Sometimes if people love each other that much they can find a way around it.”
Celie wonders whether her mum and dad love each other that much.She doesn’t really remember them hugging in the last years they were a family, or even smiling at each other. Mum was always working and Dad was always out, and they were a bit snappy with each other apart from when they were on holiday.
“I think I’m just still mad at Dad and Marja. So I guess I’m going to be angry with this kid too.”
“You should talk to your dad.”
Except Celie doesn’t have the kind of dad you can talk to. The one time she told him she hated going to his house he just told her she wouldn’t always feel that way, and when she said she would, he got frustrated and told her she was being “deliberately difficult.” And that when she was older she would learn that life was complicated and things didn’t always work out how you wanted and you had to adapt. She didn’t bother saying anything to him after that. Marja tried to talk to her once, before she got pregnant. She sat down while Celie was eating breakfast and said she understood Celie probably had some complicated feelings about the new set-up and she wasn’t going to try to take her mother’s place. Celie had almost laughed.You couldn’t begin to take Mum’s place, she wanted to say, but instead she just slid silently off the tall breakfast stool and took her bowl of cereal upstairs.
She doesn’t talk to the girls at school about her parents. Soraya’s and Harriet’s families are still together, and she gets the feeling they wouldn’t really understand. She would have talked to Gene about it but he doesn’t bother texting now he’s away working. She doesn’t even know what country he’s working in. Bill sends the odd text saying politely that he hopes she’s well and that she’s doing her homework and he will see her very soon, but it’s like getting a message from a teacher—weirdly formal—and she never knows how to respond beyond just sending him a couple of kisses. He doesn’t even understand emojis.
Celie walks to her dad’s house, dragging her feet and staring at her phone. Her mum will have dropped Violet there straight after school—she tends to pull up in the street and just wait in the car until she sees that Violet has been let in. Celie, being older, has been given a key to the house but always rings the doorbell anyway, just so they know she doesn’t think it’s home. She stands in the porch, wondering whether Mum remembered to pack her overnight bag and drop it with Violet’s. She forgot the previous weekend and Dad had to drive back to theirs so that Celie could pick it up and he was really grumpy about it, even though he didn’t even have to get out of the car. Apparently he doesn’t like leaving Marja alone, even though she has, like, actual months before the baby is due.
Nobody answers the door. Celie rings again, leaving her finger on the bell for a count of five, even though she knows this will irritate Dad. There is still no answer. Finally, she digs around in her bag for the key that he gave her and lets herself in.
Marja’s house is always immaculately tidy, but today the living room is strewn with Hugo’s toys, a plate with crumbs, an open book, a cushion on the floor. Celie stands in the doorway and gazes around. She walks through to the kitchen—the radio is still on, and there is a note scribbled on the kitchen table.
Had to take Marja to hospital. Get Mum to pick you up.
Dad x
Not even a “sorry.” JustGet Mum to pick you up.Celie stares at the note, feeling a simultaneous swell of irritation at her father’s lack of caring, combined with the vague relief that she will be able to go home tonight. She puts the note on the table, and sits for a moment at the kitchen island. Then she stands and opens the kitchen cupboard with the treats in and helps herself to an expensive nut and dark chocolate bar, the kind that costs two pounds in the corner shop. She leaves the wrapper on the side, and goes upstairs. You are meant to take your shoes off at the doorin Marja’s house—she has pale wood floors and cream carpets—but Celie keeps hers on, deliberately scraping her feet on each step, just in case there is any dirt left behind.
