On Top of Everything (18 page)

Things got very strange over at the Dowling house there for a while, I’ll tell you that for nothing.

I’ve known Will for years, he’s a good lad is Will, the very best. And a ruddy good builder too. But the day the boss headed off to see her family in a bit of a lather, it occurred to me that Will had a bad case of the galloping hots for her.

Well, in some ways, you’d be mad not to fancy her — she’s a corker — but the poor girl had been in such a state, what with all that had been going on in her personal life, not to mention the effing dry rot. That was a shock to me and Will and all. Who’d have guessed? We was both gutted when we found it but these old places, honestly, you don’t know what’s lurking about down below until you get in there and have a look.

We’d already decided to help her out, me and Will, call in a few favours, get the materials on the cheap and throw in the labour for next to nothing. Frankly, I already had all the money I needed and it was worth coming to the Dowling house for the company. Will, he didn’t have tuppence to rub together but as I say, my guess was he was mad for Florence.

Good luck to him, that’s what I reckoned. It probably wasn’t the best idea in the world to get involved with a lady with quite so much on her plate but there’s no such thing as the perfect woman, so they say, and she’d be closer than most.

Of course, her giving us the sack, even though we were working
for free anyway, was a bit of a fly in the oinkment, as my uncle Jimmy (a pig farmer) used to say. But I’ll hand it to Will, it did not make a dent in the lad.

He’s a dark horse, is Will.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

An eerie sort of stillness descended on me as I stepped away from the car and moved toward my parents’ house, my own turbulent concerns retreating to the corner of my anxiety vault, whipped into submission by whatever dreadful news the ambulance heralded.

Such moments tell a girl a great deal about herself, a great deal about her lot. I had long joked about not really belonging to my family. It was what someone who felt like an outsider did to deflect the twinge of feeling that way. But as I loped along the empty hall, swept through the deserted kitchen and mounted the gloomy stairs, I realised I would be lost without them. Especially now. They were bonkers, they really were, yet I suddenly needed them in a way I had never needed them before. Dress code and lentil preferences aside, I was one of them, we were all part of the same nutty unit. If something was happening to me it was happening to them too; and if
something was happening to them, vice versa, although I already had quite a lot of somethings to be getting on with, but still … Together perhaps we could get through the worst of whatever the universe had to throw at us. Even if one of us thought vegetarian burgers tasted like wet toilet paper and the other three thought salt was the work of the devil.

‘Mum, Dad!’ I called up the stairs. ‘Mum!’

It would be her, I was sure. The measles would have got to her first. They were in our genes, our filthy bloody genes, and she had never had a camera up her colon and was probably riddled with it and didn’t even know and now it would be too late and I had been such an awful daughter. Such an ungrateful girl, woman, person.

Then she appeared at the top of the stairs, looking terrifyingly frail, for her. Her yoga posture had gone to pot; her shoulders were slumped, making her look unrecognisably small, even in her voluminous peasant blouse; and her lovely face was lined with worry, her organic mascara that was prone to smudging anyway blotched beneath her eyes.

‘Oh, Effie,’ she cried, bursting into fresh tears. ‘I can’t believe you’re here. We haven’t called a soul.’

I threw myself into her arms, which is not something I usually did, and she clutched me as though she would never let go.

‘What’s happened?’ I whispered, my voice faltering. ‘Is it Daddy?’

He was such a trouper, my Dad. I mean pretty much all he ever did was go along with my mother, no matter how twitty her persuasions, but really what was wrong with that? He was happy if she was happy. And he had nearly always been happy. Without him …

But then he came out of the corner bathroom, alive and
upright, and he too was crying.

‘Oh, Eff,’ he said, brokenly, in a repressed sort of a gasp. ‘Oh, Beth.’ He came up behind my mother and caught us both in a heartbroken bear hug.

‘They think she’ll be all right,’ he said, into my mother’s hair. ‘They think they got here just in time. They think it will be OK. Oh, Beth!’ And he wept as if his heart would indeed break.

I stood back from them then. They moved in closer to take up the space where I had been, clasping each other desperately as though each was stopping the other from toppling off the edge of a cliff.

Now I could hear the sound of shallow murmurings from within the corner bathroom and as if in a dream, a nightmare, I moved slowly down towards the open door. When I looked in, all my fears for myself, for my health, for my future, slithered away.

Poppy lay in the bathtub, which in this bathroom was dramatically stationed in the middle of the room, with two ambulance men kneeling on either side of her. Someone had emptied the bathwater and covered her with a towel but there was still blood everywhere. One of her wrists was bandaged with a mass of cream crêpe, and one of the ambulance men was attending to the other.

Poppy’s head was leaning back against the end of the
old-fashioned
claw-foot bath. Her eyes were closed but tears slid down her white, white cheeks, those crazy freckles now seeming to float a foot above her miserable face.

‘Poppy?’ I knelt beside her, one of the men moving aside to let me in. I took her hand, the one that belonged to the already bandaged wrist. Her fingers were icy cold. I squeezed with all my might.

‘It’s me, Poppy. It’s Effie.’

She opened her eyes and turned slowly to look at me, the tears not stopping for a moment.

‘I just wanted to die, Flower,’ she said in a tiny, tired voice. ‘I just wanted to be done with it all.’

I saw one of the ambulance men raise his eyebrows as he fastened the bandage on her other wrist and for a moment I felt an anger so pure I could have slit his wrists for daring to react like that. But then he looked at me with such sympathy that the anger slid down the drain with the rest of Poppy’s blood. Poppy’s blood!

‘It’s OK, precious,’ I said kissing her fingers the way I remembered I had when she was little and I very first adored her. ‘It’s OK. Don’t worry. Everything will be OK.’

‘We can help get her out now if you’d like,’ the other ambulance man offered.

‘No, I’ll do it,’ I said. ‘Thank you. But I will do it. Mum and I will do it.’

I kept holding her hand while they cleared up and quickly left us. Then Mum came back in, her eyes falsely bright and her mascara smudges gone, and we picked my little sister’s curvy white body out of the bath, wiped her down till there was not a trace of her dreadful attempt left, other than those tell-tale bandages, and we dressed her in a pink flannelette nightie with big orange flowers that she had made at school when she was fifteen.

She let us lead her to her room and over to her bed, under which Sparky lay, looking too sympathetic by far if you asked me. Poppy barely registered him, just slipped under the covers and sank into the mattress, sighing with a deep teary flutter that just about did in my over-plucked filaments yet again.

‘We’ll let you rest, my petal,’ Mum said, softly, as she put
a little bottle of rescue remedy on the nightstand. ‘Unless you want us to stay.’

‘I want Effie to stay,’ Poppy answered, wanly. ‘Will you get in with me, Eff?’

I wanted to go with Mum. I wanted to find out how this had happened, why my parents hadn’t seen this coming. I wanted to yell and scream and stamp my feet with violent unadulterated rage at Poppy for being so stupid, so selfish, so bloody cavalier with her precious life, but of course I didn’t. I slipped off my shoes and got into bed next to her. She reached for my hand and I took hers in both of mine, turning on my side to look in her big blue cornflower eyes, avoiding the feel of the crêpe beneath my fingers.

‘Why did you do it, Poppy?’ I asked as softly as I could manage. ‘Why would you want to do something so terrible?’

‘I’m so lonely, Florence,’ she burst out, with an accompaniment of fresh tears. ‘I’m just so lonely. I’ve got no one to love. I’ll never find anyone to love. And I’m here with Beth and Archie all the time and they’ve got each other but I’ve got no one. And I just can’t bear it any more.’

I was so shocked by this I couldn’t come up with a quick response. I’d known she wanted a man, a ‘life partner’, but I had never for a moment imagined she was lonely. Poppy had more friends than anyone else I knew. She collected them without even noticing. The mother of one of Monty’s friends whom she spoke to for half an hour at his sixth birthday party still sent her Russian fudge every Christmas. The postman’s sister-in-law wrote to her regularly from Rye after meeting her one summer a dozen years ago. Yoga enthusiasts the world over corresponded with her by every means known to mankind, including psychic ones. She still had tea twice a year with her kindergarten teacher. She belonged to every club within
chanting distance of Tannington. How could this insanely popular bundle of joy and enthusiasm be so lonely she wanted to die?

‘But you have lots of love, Poppy,’ I told her, although I was still so stunned I lacked appropriate conviction. ‘Everyone loves you. You must know that.’

‘I don’t want everyone to love me!’ she cried. ‘I want one special person to love me. Even if it’s just for a while. I don’t need forever.’

‘But, but, what happened to the chap from the face-reading course?’ I asked. ‘Mum said you were seeing him and it was going fabulously.’

‘He has a perfectly lovely wife in Swingleton Green,’ Poppy cried. ‘And two little babies! Which I only found out about after we’d had sex three-and-a-half times. What sort of a person would do that, Effie? To me? To his wife? To those dear, sweet little babies?’

‘Oh, Poppy. He’s only one bloke.’ If the face reader had been within reach I would have rearranged his features, never mind the lovely wife and dear sweet babies.

‘No, he’s not,’ she wept. ‘He’s every bloke I’ve ever known. They’re all married or not ready for commitment or just want to be friends or in the wrong head space or the biorhythms are out of sync. There’s always something, Effie, and I know what it is. It’s me. I’m the problem. And I don’t want to end up all on my own, I really don’t. I’ve tried to prepare myself for the possibility, you know, positive reinforcement and chanting and visualisation — I went to a whole weekend workshop on visualisation, for heaven’s sake. I could visualise better than anyone else there. I
excelled
at it — but where does it get me? Nowhere! Nobody! And I know this is awful for you because of Harry being gay and everything but at least you’ve had
Harry. At least you’ve had
it
. At least you’ve known
it
. You’ve had all those wonderful years with him and you have Monty.’ She started to really wail then. ‘Lovely, gorgeous, beautiful Monty.’

What little extra room I had inside me for emotion, and I was understandably quite jam-packed at that minute, instantly filled with guilt.

I had been so busy supping on my self-pity, and not without reason, that I had not stopped to appreciate what I’d had, even though I no longer had it. Poppy had a point. My life had turned to guano, but I’d had plenty of lovely years when I believed it to be perfect. I might have been blind and as it turns out possibly unfulfilled, but at the time I’d thought I had it all. At the time, I’d been unbelievably happy.

And there was lovely, gorgeous, beautiful Monty.

‘Yes, well, lovely, gorgeous, beautiful Monty isn’t actually speaking to me right now,’ I said, thinking this might make Poppy feel better. ‘We’re sort of agreeing to disagree on quite a few things. Crystal, of course, being one of them but I am trying, Poppy, because of what you said I really am trying.’ This was a lie but I resolved then and there to attempt to make it the truth from then on. ‘But he’s given up his plans to do a business degree and wants to be a film maker which we think is …’ Oh God, it sounded so awful now I was saying it out loud. What kind of a mother had I turned into? The sort that foisted her own stubborn opinions onto a child that had hopes and aspirations going in a different-but-who-was-to-say-not-just-as-viable direction? Yuck.

‘He’s such a great boy, you’re so lucky to have him,’ Poppy wept.

All I could do was hug her because she was right. He was a great boy and I was lucky to have him.

‘The truth is I don’t even care so much about a life partner any more,’ she sobbed, ‘but I want a baby, Effie, I really and truly and completely want a baby.’

Poppy had always been fantastic with children and I knew that like most women she hoped to have some one day but I don’t think it had registered that this was her be-all-and-end-all.

‘A little girl,’ she wept. ‘I just want a little baby girl. I can see her, Effie, I really can. I think about her all day long and when I go to sleep I dream about her and she’s so beautiful, she’s just so utterly beautiful. She’s perfect.’ I felt goosebumps emerge head to foot. I could actually picture the little ginger-haired dot nestled in my sister’s arms myself.

‘And then every morning I wake up and she isn’t there, it’s just me, there is no baby and most days I can keep breathing and I smile and I tell myself “You can do it” and I visualise getting up and feeling positive about the universe then I put my feet on the floor and get up and do my Pilates and have Beth’s Bircher muesli for breakfast and go about my business but not every day, Effie. Not every day. Some days it’s just too hard and I can’t do it and I can’t imagine keeping doing it and today was one of those days.’

I knew that sensation. I had recently had some of those days when I was so lonely and scared I’d felt my own life was too hard and that slipping away would be easier than carrying on.

But I could not bear to think that Poppy felt the same way.

Despite the measles situation, I was stronger than my sister. I think I had always known that but I never knew it more than in that moment. Yes, my life was in the toilet, literally, but as hard as these recent times had been, as the world after Young Nick’s phone call in particular had been, it had only fleetingly
felt unbearably hard. If only by a hair’s breadth, it had always been within the bounds of what I could manage, even though I didn’t want to manage it, thought it cruel and unfair that I had to do so. Still, I had managed. It had never been as hard for me as it was for Poppy.

She had spent her lifetime being so sweet, so lovable, so kind and caring towards everybody within her radar but now I saw that those very traits that made her so giving to others had left her bugger-all resources to fend for herself.