Читать книгу The Drowning Girl - Margaret Leroy - Страница 14

CHAPTER 8

I hunt around in my kitchen. I’m out of chicken nuggets, which are Sylvie’s favourite dinner, but there’s cheese, and plenty of vegetables. Tonight I will make something different and healthy, a vegetarian crumble. I fry tomatoes and onions, stir in chickpeas, make a crunchy topping of breadcrumbs and grated cheese.

Sylvie is in the living room, playing with her Noah’s Ark. She has lots of plastic animals, and she’s putting them in long straight lines, so they radiate out from the ark like the beams from a picture-book sun. She sings a whispery, shapeless song. She’s wearing her favourite dungarees that have a pattern of daisies. When she bends low over her animals, her silk hair swings over her face.

While the crumble cooks, I clean and tidy everywhere, so the flat is gleaming and orderly. There’s a rich smell from the oven, a luxurious scent of tomatoes and herbs, like a Mediterranean bistro. My jaw still aches, with a blunt, heavy pain: perhaps this is something more serious than neuralgia. I work out the date of my last dental check-up. Four years ago, when I was pregnant, when you get treated free.

I bring the crumble to the table, serve up Sylvie’s portion.

‘We’re having something a little bit different today,’ I tell her.

I start to eat. I’m pleased. It tastes good.

Sylvie moves a chickpea around on her plate with her fork.

‘I don’t like it,’ she says.

‘Just try it, please, sweetheart. It’s all there is to eat today. We’re out of chicken nuggets.’

‘I don’t want it,’ she says. ‘It’s yucky. It tastes of turnips.’

‘You don’t know that. You can’t know what it tastes of. You haven’t even tried it. Anyway, when have you had turnips to eat exactly?’

‘I do know, Grace.’ She pokes a chickpea with her fork and raises it to her face and smells it with a noisy, melodramatic sniff. ‘Turnips,’ she says.

I hear Karen’s voice in my head, brisk and assured and sensible, knowing just what she’d say. You can’t let her have her own way, just because she doesn’t like vegetables. Children need boundaries, Grace. You can’t always let her get away with everything. She’ll run rings around you…

‘Sylvie, look, I want you to eat it. Just some of it, just a bit. If you don’t at least try it, there won’t be any pudding.’

She puts her fork on the table, precisely aligned with her plate, with a sharp little sound like the breaking of a bone.

‘I don’t want it.’ Her face is hard, set.

‘Sylvie, just eat it, OK?’

My chest tightens. I feel something edging nearer, feel its cool breath on my skin. But I try to tell myself this is just an everyday argument—a child refusing to eat, a parent getting annoyed. I tell myself this is nothing.

Her eyes are on me. Her gaze is narrow, constricted, the pinpricks of her pupils like the tiniest black beads. She looks at me as though she doesn’t recognise me, or doesn’t like what she sees.

‘I don’t like it here,’ she tells me. Her voice is small and clear. ‘I don’t like it here with you, Grace.’

The look in her eyes chills me.

I don’t say anything. I don’t know what to say.

‘I don’t like it here,’ she says again.

I stare at her, sitting there at our table in her daisy dungarees, with her wispy pale hair, her heart-shaped face, this coldness in her gaze.

Rage grabs me by the throat. I want to shake her, to slap her, anything to make that cold look go away.

She pushes the plate to the other side of the table, moving it carefully, not in a rush of anger, but very controlled and deliberate. She turns her back to me.

‘Stop it. Just stop it.’ I’m shouting at her. I can’t help myself. My voice is too loud for the room, loud enough to shatter something. ‘Jesus, Sylvie. I’ve had enough. Just stop it, for God’s sake, will you?’

She sits quite still at the table, with her back to me. She presses her hands to her ears.

If I stay, I’ll hit her.

I go to the bathroom, slam and lock the door. I sit on the edge of the bath, rigid, my fists clenched, my nails driving into my palms. I can feel the pounding of every pulse in my body. I sit there for a long time, making myself take great big breaths, sucking the air deep into my lungs like somebody pulled from the sea. Gradually, my heart slows and the anger seeps away.

I’m aware of the pain again. It’s worse now, drilling into my jaw. I find two Nurofen at the back of the bathroom cabinet. But my throat is tight, they’re hard to swallow, I’ve sucked off all the coating before I get them down. They leave a bitter taste.

In the living room, Sylvie is on the floor again, busy with her Noah’s Ark, humming softly to herself, as though none of this had happened.

‘I’ll make you some toast,’ I tell her.

She doesn’t look up.

‘With Marmite?’ she says.

‘Of course. If that’s what you’d like.’

I make her the toast, put milk in her cup. I eat a few mouthfuls of crumble, though my appetite has gone. I clear the table.

‘Shall we watch television?’

She nods. We sit together on the sofa, and she curls in close to me, taking neat bites of her toast. If she drops a crumb she licks her finger and dabs at the crumb and sucks it from her fingertip. It’s a wildlife programme, about otters in a stream in the Scottish Highlands. She loves the otters, laughs at their quick, lithe bodies, the way they slide across the rocks as sleek and easy as water. As we sit there close together, it feels happy again between us, the bad scene just a memory, faint as the slight bitter taste in my mouth.

‘Sweetheart, I’m sorry I shouted at you,’ I tell her. ‘I don’t feel well. My tooth hurts.’

She’s nestled in the crook of my arm. She looks up at me.

‘Which one, Grace?’ she says.

‘It’s here.’ I point to the sore place. ‘I’ll have to go to the dentist—he’ll probably take it out.’

She reaches across and rests her hand against the side of my face.

‘There,’ she says.

The tenderness in the gesture melts me. I hug her to me, bury my face in her hair, in her smell of lemons and warm wool. She lets herself be held.