“Are we ever going to eat today?”
Stan was in the kitchen, glowering at her. It was the first time he’d spoken directly to her in weeks, and this was what he chose to say.
“Well, that’s lovely,” she said. “Not ‘Can I do anything to help?’ but ‘Are we ever going to eat today?’”
“Everyone has been offering to help and you refuse to accept,” said Stan.
She said, “Everyone has not offered to help. You have not offered to help.”
“I am very happy to do anything if it will finally get lunch on the table. I am at your disposal.”
I am at your disposal.
It was like seeing his damned mother come back to life. She used to sit in this kitchen exhaling a long stream of cigarette smoke with amused, malicious eyes while Joy cooked: feeling stupid and banal and talking too much.
Joy didn’t know she was going to do it before she did it.
She picked up the first of his mother’s sneering china cats and threw it with the power of a first serve against the wall, decapitating it cleanly. She picked up the second one and did the same. It caught the edge of the kitchen cupboard and sent a glittering shower of hand-painted china across the bench.
There was silence.
“Feel better?” drawled Stan with his mother’s cruel contempt. “Or do I need to pass you another ornament?”
The smoke alarm once again began to beep its thin, sharp, insistent warning of danger ahead.
Chapter 50
NOW
“So then my father stomped out of the kitchen—well, he sort of stomp-limped because of his bad knee—and went back into his office and slammed the door. It turned out Mum had smashed these two ornaments that belonged to my father’s mother.”
“Oh dear. Did they have sentimental value to your father?” asked Roger Strout.
“Spot on, Roger,” said Amy.
Sometimes he suspected she was gently teasing him. Roger Strout was a former automotive fleet sales executive who had accepted a redundancy package two years ago, completed a Diploma of Counseling, and was now offering talk therapy six days a week. His ex-wife thought that was appalling because who in their right mind would accept help from Roger, of all people? No wonder there was a mental health crisis in this country. In fact, a lot of people not in their right mind would accept help from Roger, of all people, because yes, there was a mental health crisis in this country, and people from all walks of life were desperate for help. He was booked up three months in advance. He was well aware of the limitations of his qualifications and experience and scrupulous about never describing his clients as his patients, because it wasn’t a doctor–patient relationship: it was a collaboration.
Right now Roger and Amy sat opposite each other in the matching oversized fabric-covered wing chairs with the brass stud detailing on the arms that all clients touched with their fingertips when they were about to tell him something important.
Amy’s blue-dyed hair was tied back in the tightest, tidiest ponytail he’d ever seen her wear, as if this was one area of her life over which she could maintain control.
At their last appointment she’d mentioned that her mother had sent an unexpected text message saying she was going “off-grid.” Amy had spent the session talking about how she’d like to go off-grid herself, maybe move to a small country town where everyone knew her name, except she really hated the country. She hadn’t shown up for the appointment after that, and then, last week, Roger had got the shock of his life when he saw Amy with her siblings on the local evening news appealing for information about their missing mother.
“So then my father refused to eat Christmas lunch with us, which my mother finally served at around four p.m., by which time we were all starving and quite drunk, and, well … it was a very dysfunctional Christmas Day. But you know, that happens in lots of families, doesn’t it?”
“Christmas can be stressful,” said Roger, who had begun
Christmas Day with an early-morning screaming match with his ex-wife about the agreed handover time for their two children. Festive indeed.
“None of us were exactly in a rush for another family event, and we were all busy and distracted over January. I’m not saying we lost contact with our parents. I mean, how often do you visit your parents, Roger?”
Roger made a noncommittal sound. Amy preferred not to play by the therapy rules and instead pretended they were old friends catching up for a chat. She tried to catch him out by shooting abrupt personal questions at him, which he normally managed to dodge. (The answer was that he had dinner with his parents every Sunday night without fail.)
“But you’re an only child,” she said.
He had no memory of sharing this information.
“See, because there are four of us, we all assumed that someone had been over to the house. Brooke and Logan are always over there, except apparently they weren’t for a few weeks, which they could have mentioned.”