The Dilemma(25)

I shouldn’t have said that, my mind is all over the place. Josh hasn’t been here enough to notice that Liv is different around Max at the moment. We’ve known him since he was a child, so he’s like family to us. Max is to Josh what Nelson is to me and, until a few months ago, Livia loved having him around. But suddenly, that all changed. She has this closed look on her face whenever he comes to see us on his visits home from university, and she’s been using avoidance tactics – an urgent phone call to make, an errand to run. When I mentioned it to her, she told me I was imagining things. But I know Livia. And I know that Max has noticed, even if Josh hasn’t, because he’s now avoiding her as much as she’s avoiding him. I should have pushed Livia harder about it, and I will at some point. But not today.

‘No reason,’ I tell Josh. ‘Actually, I might go and lie down for a bit.’ He throws me a look of surprise because I’ve never gone to lie down in my life. ‘Just give me an hour.’

I go upstairs, and when I get to the landing, I notice the door to Marnie’s bedroom like I’ve never noticed it before. I’ve seen it hundreds of times since she left for Hong Kong, on my way up the stairs and on my way down, going into my bedroom, going out of my bedroom, but it’s never really registered like it’s registering now. The way the white paint is scuffed in the bottom right corner. The worn-down brass of its original door knob. The three small nail holes left over from when she’d insisted on hanging a little wooden sign with her name on it, that she’d found in a Christmas market over ten years ago.

I open the door and go in. There’s so much of Marnie here. Her posters are still on the wall – one of them I recognise as an actor from Game of Thrones. Her books are on the shelf – Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, The Northern Lights trilogy, but also books by Jane Austen and Nancy Mitford. Her photos are on the marble mantelpiece – a couple of her with me, Livia and Josh, but the majority with her friends from school and university. Unsurprisingly, Cleo features in most. In fact, there’s a whole section dedicated to photos of the two of them fooling around and pulling faces.

But there’s also so much of Marnie that isn’t here. The pile of clothes that I’d have to move onto the bed so that I could sit on the chair whenever I went in to chat to her, the books and magazines strewn over the floor. Her bed is unmade; there’s a cover over the mattress to protect it from dust and her quilt has been neatly folded into a plastic bag. I should at least make her bed for her.

Pushing the silky blue curtains right back, I open the windows to air the room and see Max arriving on his motorbike. Good. There’s no danger of Josh coming upstairs and seeing what I’m doing. I fetch sheets from the cupboard and make up Marnie’s bed. After a bit of searching I find her pillows on the shelf in her wardrobe.

Her fluffy white dressing gown is hanging on the back of the door and a memory hits me, of her coming into the kitchen wrapped tightly into it. She loves her dressing gown, says it’s the most comfortable thing in the world. It must be dusty from hanging here since she left in August. I take it from the hook; there’s a faint yellow stain on the collar so I take it downstairs to the utility room, almost tripping over Mimi as she makes her way down to the kitchen, and put it on a quick thirty-minute cycle.

Back in Marnie’s room, I sit on the freshly made bed, wishing there was something else I could do to fill in the time until she calls. I’ve been trying not to check my phone, hoping to lessen the worry that isn’t going to stop building until I hear from her. But it’s become like a tic. I take out my phone, look at the screen, curse, put it back in my pocket. I need to stop. When Marnie can call, she will.





Livia


I’ve never had a facial before. The creams the beautician is using on my face smell so delicious I could eat them. But for some reason, the whole experience is making me tearful. I think it’s something to do with the darkness, because the lights are dimmed, and the music playing in the background – gentle breeze and trickling water. Maybe it’s regressing me to when I was in my mother’s womb. They say that, don’t they, that some experiences take us back to before we were born.

The warm blanket covering me is removed and I’m asked to turn over onto my front for the massage. There’s a convenient hole cut in the bench for my nose and mouth so that I don’t suffocate. When I filled out the form before my treatments, I had to say what sort of massage I wanted, strong, medium or soft, and I went for soft because I’ve seen those programmes where they pummel you to bits. But it’s not gentle enough. Her fingers are digging into my neck, kneading away tension which isn’t there because, after my facial, I felt totally relaxed for the first time in weeks. Maybe I should tell her, when she asks me if I enjoyed it, that they should have a fourth category, stroking.

I can’t help thinking that my mother might have been a better person if she’d been stroked a bit more as a child. I didn’t really know my grandmother because she went to live in a home when I was five years old, and we only went to see her once a year, out of duty. I think everything my mother has done has been out of duty. I don’t think there’s ever been any real joy in her life. In the photos of what should have been her happiest times – her wedding day and my birth – she looks as grim and unsmiling as ever. And I realise that I can’t remember her ever smiling, except when she greeted our parish priest on the way out of church.