Page 85 of If I Could Say Goodbye
She pulls her body a little straighter, glad to be given a purpose. ‘That, I can do.’ Mum gets up but hesitates with her hand resting on the door. ‘Where is she?’
She turns back to me; I nod towards the desk. Mum takes a step towards it.
‘Now you listen to me, Kerry Hargreaves, you need to stop tormenting your sister, do you hear me? Enough is enough.’
I bite down on my lip as I watch Kerry stick her tongue out at Mum in a way she would only ever have dared to do behind Mum’s back.
I follow Mum’s movements as she straightens her shoulders and clears her throat, and I blink back the tears threatening behind my eyelids.
‘Right. I’d best get those jacket potatoes in.’ She gives me a smile, wipes a stray tear from her cheek, smooths down the back of her hair and closes the door softly behind her.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Ed
Jen had a bad day. This is what my mother-in-law explained to me last night.
A bad day.
I’ve been crafting a volcano out of moulding clay for the past two hours with my daughter, who avoids conversations about friends and school like the plague. I’ve tucked the kids in, read out a story to Oscar in my best Captain Underpants voice, all the time questioning what I saw. Is it possible that she is having an affair with Nessa? Because that’s what it looked like. I check in on Hales, who is sleeping soundly, and clear up the detritus that covers the kitchen table. The clay volcano looks somewhat like a giant penis, I can’t help but notice with a sigh, and I worry about how I’m going to fix it.
Jen’s trying to FaceTime me. I take a deep breath, and sit down in the lounge. Jen’s voice is distant and soft around the edges as though it’s hard work to open her mouth. Her phone is propped up beside her, hair messy, no make-up on her face. Not exactly the picture of a woman embarking on her first lesbian affair. I don’t ask her about what I saw. Instead I ask, ‘You OK?’ while I watch her swallow down more pills.
‘Yeah . . . I’ve got a bit of a headache. Me and Nessa had a few drinks after you left yesterday.’
‘So, you had a few drinks with, um, with Nessa?’ I ask oh-so-innocently.
‘Yeah, a few.’
‘It looks like you had more than a few . . .’ My voice is judgemental.
‘It’s not a hangover, Ed. I’ve not slept.’
I swallow down the images of them together in tangled sheets, try to stop the words that want to come out of my mouth. I want to ask, but I also want to give her chance to tell me, because if she doesn’t, I’m scared that I will never be able to trust her again.
‘Kerry is sick, Ed.’
‘What do you mean?’
She’s not real! I want to scream. I’m real, your children are real, your affair—
I stop this train of thought. I can’t talk about this yet.
‘The tablets, Ed. They make her ill, she’s started waking me at night, she has a fever, Kerry—’
‘Well that’s good.’
‘What?’ she asks sleepily, as though I’m speaking another language entirely.
‘I mean, maybe that means the tablets are working. Maybe this is the start of her—’
‘Dying?’ Her voice is a croak, an echo.
‘Moving on,’ I say softly.
‘How are the kids? I’m sorry I missed bedtime.’
‘They’re good,’ I lie. I lie about Hailey becoming more and more impatient with her brother, I lie about Oscar’s night terrors, I lie about how I forgot that it was non-uniform day and didn’t realise until I picked them up, uniforms amid a flood of jeans. ‘Me and Hales are making a volcano.’
