Читать книгу We Are Not Okay - Natália Gomes - Страница 13

LUCY

I remember the day my dad left.

Branches creaking, slight bounce in the back door that hadn’t been closed properly, it was a windy day. It howled and moaned, and dragged through our town like a rake in weeds, surfacing the weak roots in the soil. That was us that day. A weak root.

I hadn’t always thought that. I’d thought we were a strong unit. That the three of us were a family, unbreakable to the core. We’d been happy. We watched films in the evenings during the week when I wasn’t allowed to go out with my friends or Rhys. The weekends were mostly our own. Mum and Dad went to the golf club with the Greers, while I went to the cinema with Rhys or occasionally drank cheap white wine from a cardboard box and gossiped with Lily, Cara and Mollie about the hideous outfits people wore to high-school parties. Short skirts, tied-up tops, low-cut necklines, bright-coloured tights, sequins that sparkled a little too much, fake leather skirts that were more fake than leather. But during the week, where homework, early bedtimes and nutritionally dense dinners took precedence, my time was our time. Family time. We always ate at the dinner table – TV off, phones on silent. We talked about our day, our weekend plans, things that were bugging us. I talked and they listened. Now I talk and no one hears me. Mum’s in a place that I can’t reach, and never will, and Dad’s ‘busy’. He says that a lot now. ‘Sorry, Luce. I’ve just been busy at work…Sorry, Luce, I can’t this weekend. We’re just so busy with the baby…’ Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Everyone is just so sorry, but nothing changes. Not even my memory of that night changes. I replay it sometimes. It makes me stronger.

I think.

My parents had been up all night – talking, arguing, crying. I don’t know. I wasn’t there in their bedroom. But I heard them. They never made me a part of the discussion or even considered me when making a decision. My dad had been late from work the evening before and his dinner had sat cold on the kitchen table for almost two hours before he walked in, navy coat strewn over his arm. They’d bickered about why he was always late from work, and my mum walked out of the living room. The bedroom door slammed upstairs and my dad had plopped down on the sofa beside me. I’d been texting Rhys so my phone had been in my hand. I remember that because after my dad said what he did, I’d dropped the phone and it’d hit my foot.

He’d wrapped his arm around me, his fingers lightly resting on my upper arm. His voice was different, gravelly like he had a cold. He asked me how my day at school had been, and I told him about our social studies assignment and how I’d practised for the dance society’s next performance at the arts centre on the high street, which of course I’d got the lead for. But when I asked him how his day had been, his face turned pale and he looked like he was going to cry. He didn’t respond to my question, instead he coughed gently and turned his gaze to the yellow shaggy rug that I often lay my belly on while I finished my homework for the evening. I don’t do that anymore. I don’t do a lot of things that I used to.

He didn’t look at me once while he said nine simple words. ‘Everything is about to change. Please don’t be scared.’

Change.

I didn’t want anything to change. Why did it need to? We were doing just fine how we were. But it was no longer about us. There was suddenly someone new in this family. Another voice, one that hid from us in the shadows and slowly poisoned my dad’s thoughts. One day there were three of us. Then the next, there were four. And soon, just two remained. The two left behind. The unwanted two.

That’s why I hate Trina so much. Not because of what she wears, how she acts, what she says. But because all of a sudden she was just there. She became my Amber. And when Rhys ended it with me, saying we’d ‘grown apart’, all I thought about was how my mum must have felt being dumped, being tossed to the side for someone else. And I became angry. Really angry. And I started thinking about what people would say if they knew I’d been rejected by my dad and then by my boyfriend.

Before then I never had to think too much about what people thought of me. I didn’t care. I did well at school, I had best friends, I had a boyfriend who treated me well, I was invested in after-school activities like the dance society and Amnesty UK. I was doing a good job at being me. Then one day Dad left the family and in a way, Mum left too. And I suddenly became aware of other people, and more importantly what they might think of me, be saying about me behind my back. What if they pitied me like the other ‘children of divorces’? ‘Poor Lucy has no dad anymore’… ‘Aww, Lucy’s dad left them…’ Or worse, what if I became the topic of gossip? ‘Did you hear, Lucy’s dad walked out on her and her mum?…Did you know Lucy’s parents are getting a divorce?…Guess what I found out this weekend?…’

I became consumed with what other people thought about me, terrified that they’d find out that my perfect life was all a lie, that my dad chose his new family over us, over me. That despite all the happy meals we shared together at that big oak table, all the movies we curled up on the sofa to watch with frozen banana chunks dipped in dark chocolate, that despite the holidays we went on every year where we took family selfies and posted them on social media, that fundamentally my dad was unhappy. That hurts me more. That he took into consideration all the years, all the memories, all the love, and still came to the conclusion that he’d be much happier with another wife and another child. That. Kills. Me.

So I decided that I wouldn’t be the focus of hushed conversations, the words on scrunched up paper notes passed along in class under tables, the target of people’s pointed fingers. And the only way to ensure that was to always be putting other people in that position. If I pointed the spotlight at others, no one could turn it on me. I’m not proud of who I became after my dad left, after Rhys left. But for now, it works. For now, I’ll keep going and no one will find out my secrets. Never. But I’ll keep finding out theirs.