Читать книгу Precious You - Helen Monks Takhar - Страница 14

5th March – The First Day, continued

Stay late in the office. Get a couple of stories up online. Think twice about the picture byline, but I’m actually really proud of what I’ve produced, so I go for it. Asif assumes it’s Gem’s idea, she assumes it’s his. No one tries to stop me.

I get inside my building as I always try to – without the concierge seeing me.

When I came down to London with Gem, I was desperate to avoid staying with her or Mum. They want too much from me, from what my life could be, or maybe now, what it could have been. Everything they say wears me down to less than I am. Especially Gem. She’s so over-invested, there’s no way she could ever get a decent return. She always demands the best by reminding me of the worst, ‘You can do better. You can be better.’ It’s too much to keep up with being the version of me Gem expects at work and at home.

It started the very first day we moved in with her.

We’d celebrated my eighth birthday by getting evicted. Mum had been late again with the rent, the landlord wanted us out and was keeping the deposit. We packed our things and schlepped from where we were in Newham to Gem’s place in Marylebone. I’d been there before and other people will say it was a completely gorgeous place. Huge. But to me it was like travelling to another planet. All I wanted to do was go back to our old flat and my old school where everyone knew me. When we’d visited the Marylebone place before, it seemed like there was too much space. I never felt comfortable. From the moment we had to live there, I knew I was never going to fill the place. I also knew from the off that was the one thing Gem expected. I was there to plug the gaps in her life.

Gem’s challenge was that investing in a relationship to produce children was too high risk for her. The chances of getting what she wanted out of it were too open. Owning a child ready-made by someone else took away that risk factor. Enter me.

I remember us turning up with our backpacks and carrier bags of my cuddly toys. Gem opened the door and scooped me off her step and swung me into her hallway, triumphant. My mum had conceded: she needed Gem’s help to raise me and I was now in her home indefinitely. She would get to be a parent.

‘Welcome home, my darling. I’m so happy you’re here. Now, how about you and I make a deal. You know what a deal is, don’t you, Lily?’

‘I think so.’ Gem, always with the ‘deals’ and ‘negotiations’, every bit of her life, even the most personal, based on a hustle rigged so she walks away with more than she deserves.

‘I’ll be the best aunt in the whole wide world, I will make sure you always have a home with me if you can promise to be the best Lily you can be. Can you do that for me?’

I nodded. I could feel the weight loaded into the words. I’ve always felt in deficit with Mum, like I owed her a favour and now I guessed Gem was doing the same. I wanted to ask her what I had to do to make things OK, but I could feel the sobs trying to tear their way out of my lungs and I didn’t want to lose it, I guess because I already had an idea that wouldn’t be what ‘best Lily’ would do.

To my mum, Gem said nothing. She held the door and watched her sister walk in. There was nothing to say. Gem and Mum’s parents were apparently dirt poor, but Gem had ‘pulled herself up by the bootstraps’. My mum, on the other hand, had continued the family traditional of bad jobs and bad housing. She never understood Gem’s belief that stacks of cash were all anyone could desire. All Mum wanted was a simple life – husband, kids, little house, little job, which drove Gem mad; she hated Mum’s life choices. ‘Elaine, your problem is you aim so low. There’s so little margin for error, one tiny wobble puts you on your knees,’ I heard Gem say once, with relish. The final eviction had proved Gem right: my mum couldn’t even do the basics. There she was, homeless and alone with one child she’d apparently ‘waited a long time for’ but whose existence she blamed for pushing my dad out the door.

Mum and I climbed up the staircase that smelt like a church to our rooms. When we got to my room, my mum told me, ‘Don’t listen to what she says. You don’t belong to her.’

I told my mum, ‘I don’t belong to anyone. Not you either,’ because I don’t. I was right and she knew it.

From nowhere, she said, ‘I do my best, Lily. I know that’s not good enough for you, it wasn’t enough your father.’

Dad the Disappeared. The taboo I was never allowed to speak of, but she could lob at me whenever it suited. I wanted to make her pay for saying his name and for putting me in that big stupid flat and the dumb new school I knew I’d be dragged to soon enough.

‘But you can’t look after me. That’s why we’ve had to move in with Gem, isn’t it?’

‘Listen to me. She is not your mother. I am, for my sins.’

I looked at her right in the eyes and asked, ‘What’s a sin, Elaine?’

She was quiet for what felt like a long time, her rough fingers gripping legs covered by a cheap denim skirt. ‘Come down when you’ve unpacked your things and washed your hands.’

So, from that day, I knew it was going to be a case of one of them thinking, ‘If I press this button, will she come closer to me than to her?’ or, ‘If I dangle this carrot, promise her this, will she bend my way?’ Gem wanted her trophy ‘daughter’ and Mum wanted to keep control over the one thing she had and Gem didn’t. That’s not love, is it? People assume because I had not one but two maternal figures, I grew up in a kind of paradise. But I was not nurtured, I was experimented on as they tried to beat each other using me. The only way I was going to survive was by pitting the two of them against each other.

This rule applied for years, all the way up to Gem buying Leadership. I’d planted the idea of Gem thinking about her legacy. What was she working towards? What was she leaving behind and who to? I carefully led talk of ‘legacy’ towards the idea of ‘dynasty’. ‘Gem, don’t you think it would be incredible to find something we could both take a role in growing, not just to sell it on, but to become our family business? For me, then maybe even for my children, your grandchildren …? I’ve read about this magazine that’s in trouble but has massive potential.’

Mum could see what was happening and didn’t like it one bit. ‘School fees are one thing, Gemma, but buying a company so she can have a go at playing journalist? Isn’t that a bit much, even for you?’ To which Gem said, ‘At least my hard work has bought her an education and more. How have you ever helped her? How were you planning to get her out of the mess she’s in?’ (Once it was done, Gem never discussed what happened to me at uni in terms that actually described the events. Always ‘the mess’, ‘the problems.’) Mum said, ‘How dare you say I don’t work hard? And if she’s got into a mess, it’s trying to be someone like you who’d flog their grandma for a quid.’

When we knew the Leadership buyout was definitely happening, I let both of them know I needed to move. My mother had only just managed to get away from Gem by moving to a miniscule rented flat in Mile End. She didn’t want me staying with Gem anymore, but she didn’t want me living with her either, not really, although she told me I could ‘have the living room’ at her place if I ‘really wanted it’. She made a seriously half-baked attempt to look like she actually cared where I lived, ‘Get your own place, keep on with Gemma, it’s your choice, but do not make out you couldn’t have stayed with me if you wanted to, Lily.’ Ok, Mum, you can say you tried to help me now.

I told Gem I didn’t think it was a great idea if I lived with her once we started working together. ‘It’s going to look so much more professional for us if we don’t introduce ourselves to the business as a “mother and daughter act”, but two individuals serious about making the magazine a success.’ She didn’t quite buy this, telling me, ‘Do let me know when you’ve touched down in the real world. I’ll keep your room made up in Marylebone.’

Of course, there was no way I could afford anywhere on the meagre allowance she gives me to keep me from ‘working in jobs like your mother’s.’ But I had to show her she wasn’t right about everything. So, I am now fully immersed in the real world, thanks Gem.

I knew I had to be away from both of them and somewhere I could focus on what I need to do, but I was about two minutes into my search when I realised rent, even in unsexy Zone 3 North East London, is completely insane. I mean, I couldn’t even afford to live in one of those places where you’re the one sleeping in the living room, let alone somewhere with a real room of my own and a proper space where I could eat a meal with a flatmate, sit on a sofa and talk, maybe even make a friend. Today, living rooms are another basic that’s become a luxury for my age group. Why aren’t we rioting, people?

I googled ‘Rent-free accommodation N4’ in an act of hopeful desperation, as I’m sure hundreds of others like me must have done before. I saw this:

Sympathetic homeless female 18-24 req. for discrete rent-free use of mod high-rise apartment N4. Apply w/ photo.

I went to see the place, to see the concierge who’d posted the ad. He is in his forties and completely repulsive. I negotiated the ‘erotic arrangement’ with him down to one hour every Wednesday in exchange for the use of the flat and the promise to keep it quiet from the absent owner, a Singaporean, he tells me. The time with him seems to come around so fast. Sometimes it feels like a week of Wednesdays.

When he’s sweating on top of me, behind my eyelids I imagine a map of London with tiny little flashing red lights for every one of us swapping the use of our bodies for the use of a home. Were all of them damaged like me? Or were some of them normal, with friends who worried about them, mates who would eventually say, ‘That’s enough. You need to come and crash with me’? Maybe they would one day find themselves somewhere warm and not toxic, protected from it all – dysfunctional parents, exploitative rent and ‘erotic arrangements’. Was it ever possible that one day we would all find ourselves safe, in jobs that pay us money, with the possibility of a real future?

I honestly don’t know why more people my age aren’t more like me. Why aren’t they angrier? We’re not much more than playthings to those older than us, to people exactly like KR. Her so-called Generation X are the worst. KR and her contemporaries think it’s their right to take us for everything we have, everything they think they can get away with, then minimise our pain and undermine us for our choices over the few things we can control.

Each week, when the concierge goes after his hour, I swallow my tears down like a meal, something to make me stronger. Afterwards, when I take my shower and scrub my body down with salt and honey, it’s very hard not to give in and cry. But I never do.

I’ve just pulled over the deadbolt and safety chain and put some soup on, my mum’s words ringing in my ears, a last-minute plea to create the impression she really did want me to stay with her: ‘You’ll never manage on your own. You can’t even boil an egg.’ To which I reminded her, ‘I don’t eat eggs.’

I log on and start to type, only remembering the soup when I smell the pan burning dry. I just hate it when the adults are right.

Time to show one of them how wrong they can be. In the morning, I’ll pop my head into Gem’s office and tell her I’ve thought of a great way to help Katherine Ross get back to her best, like she and I talked about.

I know I’m paying a high price to stay in this flat. But I can see KR’s place from here. I’m less than 100 metres away but from the darkened glass of the tenth floor, I am invisible to her.

For four weeks now, I’ve got to see her spill out onto her front steps every morning. I know what times she comes and goes. I know how weak she’s feeling before she puts on her daily ‘I’m doing fine!’ mask for the rest of the world as she drags herself to the end of her road and across Green Lanes to the bus stop at the foot of my block. I know on Sundays she tears around the park like something is chasing her, and in the afternoon strides to the pub with The Partner like they’re late for an important appointment.

All this insight makes the price for this apartment worth paying.