The Family Upstairs(44)

But the moment she opens the door to number sixteen the fantasy dissipates. The house is tainted, blighted.

Miller is sitting in the kitchen at the big wooden table. He glances up as she walks in and says, ‘Quick, look at this. Look.’

He is using his phone as a torch and looking at something inside the drawer. She peers inside.

‘Look,’ says Miller again.

At the very back of the drawer, in black pencil, someone has scrawled the words: ‘I AM PHIN’.





32




CHELSEA, 1990


Sally moved out of our house a few weeks later. Then a few days after that, Birdie moved into David’s room. But Justin did not move out. He kept the bedroom he’d shared with Birdie.

I was never punished for the acid trip incident, and neither was Phin. But it was clear that Phin felt that the loss of his mother was worse than any punishment his father could have concocted. He blamed himself, first and foremost. Then after that he blamed Birdie. He despised her and referred to her as ‘it’. Then he blamed his father. And then, unfortunately, and mainly subliminally, he blamed me. After all, I was the one who’d imparted unto him the terrible, fatal bullet of knowledge which he’d used to inadvertently destroy his parents’ marriage. If I hadn’t told him then none of it would have happened: the shopping trip, the acid, the hideous afternoon of the pig-kissing revelations. And so that bond we’d made up on the roof that day, it didn’t just fade, it kind of combusted in a cloud of toxic smoke.

It was hard not to agree that I’d brought it all upon myself. When I think of my intention when I told him what I’d seen, my keenness to scandalise and impress, my lack of empathy or appreciation of the way it might make him feel, I felt, yes, a sense of personal liability. And I did pay the price for that, I really did. Because in unwittingly destroying his parents’ marriage, I’d unwittingly destroyed my entire life.

Shortly after Sally moved out, I came upon Justin sitting at the table on the terrace in the garden, sorting through piles of herbs and flowers. The fact that he had stayed under the same roof as his adulterous girlfriend struck me as sad and a little subversive. He carried on much as before, tending and harvesting his plants, turning them into little canvas bags of powder, tiny glass phials of tincture, tying on his little tags that said ‘The Chelsea Apothecary’. He wore the same clothes and trundled about in the same way; there were no external tell-tales of any inner turmoil or heartbreak. Suffering as I was with my own sense of heartbreak at the end of my brief relationship with Phin, I was curious to get inside his head a little. And with the departure of Sally and the mating of Birdie and David, not to mention my own parents becoming smaller and smaller shadows of their former selves, he seemed oddly like one of the more normal people in the house.

I sat opposite him and he looked up at me genially.

‘Hello, boy. How are things?’

‘Things are …’ I was about to say that things were fine, but then remembered that they were not fine at all. So I said, ‘Weird.’

He looked at me more closely. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘That’s for sure.’

We fell silent for a moment. I watched him delicately picking buds from branches and laying them on to a tray.

‘Why are you still living here?’ I said eventually. ‘Now that you and Birdie …?’

‘Good question,’ he said, not looking up at me. He laid another bud down on the tray, rubbed his fingertips together and then laid his hands in his lap. ‘I guess, because even though I’m no longer with her, she’s still a part of me? You know, the part of love that isn’t about sex, it doesn’t automatically die. Or at least it doesn’t have to.’

I nodded. This was certainly true for me. Although there was a large probability that I might never get the chance to hold Phin’s hand again, or even have another meaningful conversation with him, that did not diminish my feelings for him.

‘Do you think you might get back together with her?’

He sighed. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Maybe. But maybe not.’

‘What do you think of David?’

‘Ah.’

His body language changed subtly. He drew his shoulders closer together, entwined his fingers.

‘Jury’s out,’ he said finally. ‘In some ways I think he’s awesome. In other ways …’ He shook his head. ‘He freaks me out.’

‘Yes,’ I said louder and more fervently than I’d intended. ‘Yes,’ I said again, quietly. ‘He freaks me out too.’

‘In what way, exactly?’

‘He’s …’ I cast my eyes to the sky, looking for decent vocabulary. ‘Sinister.’

Justin emitted a rumble of laughter. ‘Ha, yeah,’ he said. ‘Exactly spot on. Yeah. Sinister.

‘Here.’ He passed me a handful of small yellow daisy-shaped flowers and a roll of string. ‘Tie them into little bundles, by their stalks.’

‘What are they?’

‘It’s calendula. For soothing skin complaints. Brilliant stuff.’

‘And what’s that?’ I gestured towards the tray of tiny yellow buds.

‘This is chamomile. For making tea. Smell that.’ He passed me a bud. I put it to my nose. ‘Isn’t that just the nicest smell?’