but I appreciated that she meant it in a complimentary way. And didn’t I have an urge to do some baking earlier? Maybe it was an omen. Perhaps I was meant to leave the library the way I did.
For all I know, Melissa has been waiting for an excuse to patch things up between us. This could be the perfect opportunity to mend bridges.
I’m not even offended that I haven’t been invited. I couldn’t expect her to, when relations were so strained between us.
‘Right, Bertie,’ I say, reaching for my apron, which hangs on a hook on the kitchen door. ‘Mummy had better get busy.’
I’m the older, more mature, person. It’s time to put things right.
The diazepam doesn’t seem to be working. She took it more than two hours ago but she’s still waiting for the blunting sensation to take effect, for all the hard angles in her mind to soften and blur. The sensation of unease she experienced at the hairdressers has clung to her like a succubus.
She keeps telling herself there’s no reason to feel anxious.
Nothing has happened.
All is well.
Melissa stands on the landing and rotates the tips of her fingers into the centre of her forehead. This supposedly wards off headaches, according to Saskia, who picked it up from some alternative therapist. She swears by it, but Melissa remains unconvinced as she gouges hard, rhythmic circles into her skin.
Tilly emerges from her bedroom dressed in pink and green pyjamas that strain across her hips. Her hair is matted on one side and her face is puffy with sleep. She has inherited the distinctive russet brown curls Melissa used to have. It’s a lovely colour and Melissa wishes she herself had been able to keep it.
In every other respect Tilly is her father’s daughter, from the heavyset shoulders and square, blunt-toed feet, to the almost bovine brown eyes, fringed with enviable lashes. Melissa thinks she carries about a stone more than she should, but she is still a very attractive girl when she makes an effort.
Today she has violet smudges under her eyes. Since the GCSE exams finished, she lives in onesies or pyjamas and thick socks and spends her days padding from fridge to bedroom, where she lies like a large tousled cat, tapping at her iPad and dozing.
But today is a party in her honour and she clearly hasn’t been through the shower yet, judging by the cocktail of teenage sweat, stale coffee, and the sickly watermelon-flavoured lip balm she favours rising from her. Her iPad sits lightly on one hand like a prosthesis. Tilly blinks, slowly, as though she has emerged from a subterranean lair.
Mother and daughter eye each other and Tilly attempts an exploratory smile, which morphs into a yawn that smells of sleep. Melissa’s face remains impassive. She doesn’t want to shout at Tilly and yet it would be so very easy to do right now.
‘When are you planning to get ready?’ she says crisply. ‘This is your party, after all.’ Downstairs there is a metallic clatter as the caterers begin to pack away some of their equipment. One of them laughs loudly and says, ‘You wish!’ A song from Melissa’s youth – ‘Babooshka’ by Kate Bush – wails tinnily from the radio on the windowsill. She has already asked them to turn the radio down once. Thank God they are almost done.
Tilly’s eyes are already being dragged towards the abyss of her iPad, where Walter White is paused, staring out at red, baked earth. She has been on a Breaking Bad marathon for the last two days, only pausing to sleep and eat.
‘Soon, Mum. I promise.’
Tilly disappears back into her bedroom.
It’s the gentleness in her voice that has prompted Melissa’s eyes to prickle and ache, unexpectedly. As if Melissa were being humoured. She has made it quite plain that she doesn’t really want a party. But she will obviously play along, just to keep her mother happy. In her own time.
She’d always imagined, in the days when all her tiny daughter did was cry, shit, and feed, that the compensations would come when she was older; when she was a proper person, they would do all the things she never did with her own mother. Melissa pictured her and Tilly cosy on a sofa, bonding over 1980s movies like The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink. Or mother and daughter puffing out their cheeks and complaining good-naturedly about aching feet as they sat down to a good lunch, surrounded by bags from a morning spent shopping.
But none of these fantasies had ever quite come off.
Tilly didn’t like what she called ‘girly’ films, preferring instead to watch violent science fiction thrillers with her father. And the few times Melissa had coaxed her daughter into the West End to shop, they had ended up falling-out and glowering at each other over uneaten salads in Fenwick’s café.
Melissa thought it would be nice to celebrate the end of the GCSEs, that was all. It seemed like the kind of thing a family like them – secure, middle class, loving – should be doing.
Secure.
Middle class.
Loving?
That’s what she’d thought.
Mark is a doctor, specializing in IVF, who had made a decent living by combining private work with his NHS practice at the Whittington Hospital. But two years ago he had taken part in a BBC documentary set in the private clinic in Bloomsbury where he worked two days a week.
The programme was called The Baby Business and it became something of a hit. Every week, thousands of people would discuss the ins and outs of various couples’ reproductive failures and successes (more of the former than the latter) over their morning coffees or at bus stops.
There was Janine and Paul, a young man who had almost died from testicular cancer who longed now to be a father; the Hewlett twins, a pair of sisters who caused a spike in egg donation numbers for a few weeks in late 2013; and a stubbornly un-telegenic, spiky-mannered couple called Trudy and Gary. Every week they bickered with each other on camera and argued with the medical advice given. They were media catnip and Trudy’s lugubrious expression even prompted an internet meme in which her face was overlaid by a bleating goat. When their third attempt at IVF failed, the atmosphere shifted and she became Tragic Trudy.
But Mark was the real star of the show. His salt-and-pepper hair, and warm twinkly manner as he delivered both good and bad news, proved to be a ratings winner. Before long he began to receive invitations onto various daytime television sofas.
The BBC commissioned a follow-up series of TBB, as they called it. At home Mark privately called it BBB, for Babies Bring Bucks. All of this had been welcome in terms of money, but for Melissa, having a spotlight shone into her life, a spotlight that could throw every long-abandoned and grubby corner into the sharpest relief, it felt like a particularly cruel cosmic joke.
Mark couldn’t understand why Melissa wouldn’t accompany him to the various events he was invited to with increasing frequency. She’d always managed to find an excuse. It wasn’t her thing. Or she felt like a night in. No one wanted her there, after all. They’d only be talking shop.
And it was true that she had no interest
