Seven Days of Us(41)
“It’s the boat song!” said Phoebe, but Olivia was shaking with silent laughter.
Finally she composed herself and lay on the floor, gasping. She felt lighter, like when she was holding Sean’s hand.
Andrew
THE SMOKING ROOM, WEYFIELD HALL, 10:00 A.M.
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Andrew sat in the smoking room with a bowl of porridge, feeling banished. He had been eating in the kitchen until George came in and helped himself fulsomely to breakfast—even frying eggs. The boy had then sat down with a stack of toast (Andrew had resisted a comment on quarantine rations), and begun munching through it without speaking. Andrew had never known anyone to eat toast so loudly. It sounded like fireworks going off. When the noise became intolerable, he had claimed a work call and taken his porridge to the smoking room. Scraping the last mouthful, he did what he always did when he was frustrated—e-mailed his editor about the subs.
FROM: Andrew Birch <andrew.birch@the-worldmag.co.uk>
TO: Sarah Gibbs <sarah.gibbs@the-worldmag.co.uk>
DATE: Mon, Dec 26, 2016 at 10:05 a.m.
SUBJECT: RE: copy Dec 27th
Sarah,
I’ve just seen my proof for the 27th—too late, I might add, to have any input. May I ask why subs (I’m presuming it was Ian Croft) saw fit to remove the word “briny” from the phrase “flap of briny irrelevance”? I need hardly spell out that, without the adjective, the entire sentence falls flat. It pains me to have to explain that I paired “briny” and “flap” precisely because, as a couple, they convey a certain double entendre (pertaining to the female genitalia). “A flap of irrelevance” is meaningless—and, as such, entirely unfunny.
I work extremely hard to write prose that people will want to read, and then reread, and I don’t appreciate it being mucked about with. If you absolutely need to cut words, as a fit issue, then please e-mail me and I will gladly oblige. What maddens me, Sarah, is having my words butchered by illiterate subs. No doubt, in this instance, someone decreed that only the sea, or contact lens solution, may be accurately described as briny. Which is why their powers should be limited to hyphenation.
I know you will think me precious. But what you all seem to forget is that it is MY byline on the page. The buck stops with me, as dear old Barak might have said.
Happy Christmas,
Andrew
PS: Not wild about the schmaltzy headline, either. What about the quarantine angle?
He pressed send and waited to feel better. He’d been on edge all morning, after a clammy dream about Jesse Robinson shinning down the chimney, dressed as a sniper Santa Claus, and shooting Phoebe. Preposterous, but the fear it had triggered had been all too real. Looking at his desktop calendar, he remembered that today was Jesse’s birthdate, according to Leila Deeba’s letter. The letter—the attic! They were all up there, rifling through everything. Bugger. Andrew shot up the stairs. He needed to get to the briefcase before Emma or his daughters. Bounding up the final narrow flight, he heard everyone in the biggest room, and burst in to find his daughters convulsed with laughter. It was so unlike them that he was momentarily distracted. And then he saw Emma, holding his briefcase and adeptly flicking the locks.
Emma
THE ATTICS, WEYFIELD HALL, 11:00 A.M.
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Emma relished Boxing Day. The buildup to Christmas was such fun, of course, but it was always a relief to collapse in an armchair on the 26th. This was the day when everyone could potter about, read their books, and help themselves to leftovers. It saddened her that Andrew never seemed to embrace it, as she did. The year Phoebe was born he’d gone haring off to Beirut on the 26th. They’d had a vicious row as he left for the airport, and she had placated Olivia with Frosted Flakes so that she could scream into a cushion unseen. She remembered ranting to Nicola about how everything fell to her, and how Andrew had taken no interest in Olivia’s presents, and Nicola saying that perhaps she felt “abandoned” (this was when Nicola had begun couples therapy). Looking back, Emma saw it had just been his incurable restlessness—and his discomfort at Weyfield. They didn’t fight like that anymore. At some point she had accepted she couldn’t win, and so the shouting had stopped, along with the kissing and making up, and the holding hands, and the talking in bed. They still had a few shared jokes, always instigated by Andrew, usually at someone’s expense. But when she’d mentioned this to Nicola, hoping for approval, Nicola had said that humor was a defense mechanism—a way of keeping emotion at arm’s length. She was right, Emma feared. Andrew’s irreverence only seemed to highlight the gulf between them. Even her book club knew more about her daily concerns than her husband did.
She had woken feeling more than usually tired. She prayed it had nothing to do with the lump, knowing it almost certainly did. Dr. Singer had classed her asymptomatic, and she clung to this like a buoy in choppy water. She might have cancer, but she didn’t feel like she had cancer. She didn’t even look cancerous. Although what one thought of as “looking cancerous” came later, she supposed, with chemotherapy. She had lain in bed for ages, fighting the fatigue that seemed to have settled behind her knees and shoulder blades, before wrenching herself up. If she collapsed in an armchair, she might stay there indefinitely, so she had rallied the girls to tackle the attics. She had been longing to have a session up there for ages, since both girls seemed to use Weyfield as an unofficial storage hangar. She was so glad she had—even though they kept getting sidetracked. Phoebe and Olivia were truly laughing together. She realized she hadn’t seen them like that for years. She watched them doubled up with giggles over some box of treasures and found her eyes blurring. When she died, and left them to fend for themselves, she needed them to be each other’s family. She hoped they realized that. What if she had just had her last Christmas?