fiction

Just Love The Boys

From The Sleepers Almanac X, 2015.

When my sister rings to tell me that our mother has found a lump in her breast, my five-year old daughter, Poppy, is digging kumara, like tumours, out of Dad’s garden.

‘Well, Mum thinks she has cancer,’ I scoff, turning my mouth from the phone. ‘Again.’

Dad doesn’t hear me. He is deaf in his right ear after his best friend accidentally discharged a rifle beside his head when they were pig hunting. His hand shakes as he lifts a mug of coffee to his lips. He holds his other hand up to shade his eyes from the glare reflecting off the sea. The throbbing of the cicadas is threatening to deafen us all.

Thunk! ‘One!’

There is a smear of mud under Poppy’s eye. Her fingernails are tipped with dark soil. She makes little grunts as she works. ‘Two!’ she announces triumphantly, dropping the kumara into an old cooking pot. Thunk! Thunk! ‘Three! Four!’

Her eleven year-old sister, Lily, is lying on her tummy on the grass reading an old Cosmopolitan. This concerns me. Will she think that she needs to shave offher new wispy pubic hair? I was barely coping with the tiny breasts she has sprouted in the last year, and now this. Where has my little fat baby gone?

‘How is New Zealand?’ Rose asks.

‘It’s the most beautiful country in the world,’ I say, truthfully. ‘But everyone is obsessed with race, and the apples in the shops are from America. Where are all our goddam apples?’

Thunk. Thunk. ‘Five! Six!’

‘Is Dad brooding?’ Rose asks. She is worried that he is depressed after his second wife, Rach, died last year. She had a heart attack, sudden and shocking, after complaining of crook guts that morning. ‘I told her to take the day off,’ said Dad. ‘And if it didn’t get any better, we’d go round to the docs that night.’ He got in from the farm, sweating and weary from a day of fencing, digging, and hammering. She was lying on the couch, with her shoes on. ‘Geez, nice enough for some,’ he grumbled.

Dad squints out at the bay. Is he brooding? His eyebrows, bushy and fat, relax as he watches the waves lunge and drop. A black shape out near the horizon rises from the white sea. A whale? Minkies swim past this shore, on their way to Antarctica for the summer. I squint and the shape softens, melts into the water then takes form as a fishing boat. I look back at Dad. I have his thick, strong, Greek nose. Also his stubble. I feel my one spiky chin hair with my pointer finger and despair. What’s next? A beard?

Dad notices I am looking at him, and his brows knit again. ‘Hi, baby!’ he says, nervously. He always does this: pesters me to come and visit, and then when I do, has no idea how to talk to me. But I’ll catch him looking at me, when I’m busy chopping vegetables, or watching television in my pyjamas, like a child, and his face will be desperate with love. He lights a cigar, and his eyebrows relax as he gazes out at the bay again.

‘Poppa!’ chides Lily, propping herself up on her elbows and looking over her sunglasses. ‘I thought you gave up smoking cigarettes! They’re so bad for you!’

Dad exhales. ‘I did, baby. This is a cigar.’

My dad moved in with Rach just months after my mother left him – and us – for an anorexic, alcoholic woman named Bron. He didn’t know how to be alone and Rach was warm and fat with big, flat cheerful brown feet and ta moko face markings on her broad chin. Cuddling her was like holding a big, stuffed animal. She cooked terrible greasy foods: boil-up – a big salty pot of slop with a pig’s head or feet with disintegrated potatoes, cabbage and puha. We sponged up the greasy juices with sweet white bread.

We spent weekends at Mum’s place. Bron smelt sour and stale, and wore heavy, woollen jumpers in summer. She didn’t cook, or eat. Her head was shaved to the bone, and she wore a shark-bone earring. Mum shaved off her long blonde hair, pierced her left ear, and decorated her flat with blue wall-plates emblazed with naked, entwined female figures. On the walls, she Blu-Tacked photos of her and Bron kissing. They came out from their bedroom only to make chamomile tea or to use the toilet.

Bron was replaced, several times.

Charles, Mum’s latest partner, was meaty and stern-jawed. A retired policeman. He gouged out a protestor’s eye with his baton during a rally against uranium mining. A lengthy investigation followed but he managed to keep a desk job, and the protestor got $18,000 in compensation. ‘Bloody feral!’ Charles spat when he told the story, his red face turning purple. ‘He did it on purpose to get the money. Too lazy to work for it!’ Our mother, now a dedicated disciple of Si Baba, the obese Indian guru who T ime exposed as a rapist(‘Framed by those afraid of the One True Truth!’ she railed) dragged him off to India for retreats.

‘I think she is hoping to change Charlie boy into a kale-juice-drinking hippy,’ Kate says.

‘She is so enthusiastic about things, isn’t she?’ I say, watching Poppy manoeuvre the trowel into the greasy clay. ‘We should be glad she never joined a suicidal cult. Or maybe we should encourage it. Is there any inheritance anywhere? Put this white robe on, Ma. Have you tried the Kool-Aid? It’s delicious.’

‘Oh god, we’re such bad people,’ she says. ‘What if she actually has cancer?’

I snort and hang up, and the day passes in a languid haze of sea swims and the sticky stench of sunscreen.

The next day, Dad drives us to the airport through endless fields of blistering green, broken up with small pubs advertising Lion R ed or puffy white sheep. We eat hot beef pies, the flaky pastry coating out laps like nuclear fallout.

At the airport, we hug violently but Dad visibly slumps with relief as he drives away. The pressure of staying sober for three whole days! He’ll go straight to the pub. I could murder a drink. When I spoke to her last week, my mother refused to pick me up from the airport. ‘Nope,’ she said breezily over the phone and I could hear her bangles jangling on her bony wrist. ‘Nope! I can’t possibly take the time off work. They rely on me so much!’

We both knew that she is annoyed I am staying at Gramma’s house, and not hers.

She laughed, a tinkering, brittle sound. ‘I told them I would be going away for Shawinda retreat – Si Baba is taking the meditation! – and they weredevastated.’

I decided to leave the chance to annoy her by pretending not to know what Shawinda or Si Baba is, and said, instead, ‘I’ll ask Gramma.’

Her light tone hardened. ‘Your grandmother is far too old. It’s selfish of you to even ask her. She’s also worried to death over my tumour. Get a taxi, don’t be so selfish.’ I was pleased that she was annoyed as I know she cannot bear not being in control of me, and, because even after being out of her home for twenty years, I still relish the fact that she’s not. But there was a lump growing in my throat.

She’s a dick, Kate texted me.

Our eternal mantra of sanity. She’s a dick. Thank god for siblings. My phone beeps as the plane taxis down the runway.

Kate: What the hell is wrong with her, anyway?

One afternoon, when I was ten, my mother told me that she had been seeing a regressed memory specialist and that she now remembers that my grandfather molested her as a baby.

‘Maybe he was just putting your nappy cream on,’ I said, trying to make sense of what she was telling me. We spent every school holidays with our grandparents and adored them.

She shook her ash-blonde head. ‘No.’ Her hair had grown back. ‘No, I have a sense-memory of his fingers going further and deeper.’

As an adult, I wonder: was this true? Also, who says ‘deeper and further’ to a kid?

‘Darling,’ my mother said, when I was eleven. ‘I don’t want you to see me as your mother any more. I want you to see me as your iend.’

A decade later, at my cousins Shelley’s 21st, I ate too much hangi and told my uncle Big Lou, my mum’s brother and my Gramma’s favourite, what Mum had said. He swallowed his pork and grimaced then thumped his chest with his closed fist. ‘Look,’ he said, rubbing his chest with the flat of his hand. ‘Life wasn’t easy when we were growing up. You kids don’t know the half of it. And that’s how it’ll stay.’

‘But is it true?’ I pestered, dabbing clumsily at tomato sauce I had spilt on my Kurt Cobain T-shirt. It looked like Kurt had been crying blood.
‘There are special relationships between kids and their grandparents,’ Big Lou continued, then belched loudly. ‘Excuse me. Maybe grandparents get to be the parents to their grandkids that they weren’t able to be to their kids.’ He tapped his cheek. ‘Sauce.’ I rubbed my face with my sleeve – gone? – and he nodded. ‘But I’ve often wondered if that’s why she is the way she is.’

In Auckland, we catch a cab. The driver huffs with disgust at every Muslim or Indian person he sees. ‘Look!’ he says, pointing out the Indian restaurants, shops. ‘It’s everywhere now!’

I am disgusted with myself for not saying anything, for not saying, ‘Hey, that’s racist!’ In my silence, I’m complicit. I think of Niemöller’s poem. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out. Because I was not a Jew. Who will speak for me when they come for me?

The tall Norfolk pines beside Gramma’s house are visible from the road, and I can smell the muddy whiff of mangroves from the harbour. Each year they creep further out to sea. Soon, the ocean will be filled with spiky tendrils. The girls and I drag the suitcases up the gravel hill, panting and leaving slide marks behind us.

Without the threat of my grandfather’s axe, the wisteria has won the battle for the porch, and paint is shedding off the shutters like old skin. We duck under the violet clumps, avoiding the gaps in the porch-boards, and push open the door. ‘Gramma!’

The house smells of stewed fruit and ammonia and the musky smell I associate with op-shops. In the kitchen, her spindly brown legs are standing on top of the table. She is vacuuming, reaching into the top cupboards, her neck craned to see into the dark recesses. She hasn’t heard us. Poppy is electric with excitement. Her black curls are shaking. ‘Gramma?’ I reach out to touch her leg. The skin feels like crepe paper. She shrieks and drops the vacuum. It bucks wildly like a cut snake.

After she has recovered, she lays the old kauri table with a damask cloth. She sets the plates of food out, each dish covered in tiny gauze cloths. It is ceremonial, and I watch with reverence. We eat cold, lanolin-smelling mutton: ‘I got Colin Saunders – didn’t you go to school with his son, Brett? – to butcher old Gertie. She was eating all my lettuces!’ and boiled potatoes. For pudding we spoon globs of stewed plum and custard into our eager mouths. My eyes sting from the sweetness.

After dinner, I brace myself for the phone call. ‘Say night-night,’ I instruct and hold out the phone to Poppy. ‘Night-night!’ she barks into the phone and runs screeching down the hall. ‘Sorry,’ I tell the phone. ‘Ice cream.’

I pour myself a glass of wine and take the cordless into the bathroom so the girls can’t hear. ‘It was fine. Poppy watched Shrek.’

As we speak, my husband, Terry, is scrolling though rental houses online. He is trying to decide whether to get a bedsit in Fitzroy, or look for a share-house. ‘Am I too old for a share-house?’ he muses. ‘Altough, I’m pretty social.’

Ugh, I want to yell. Fitzroy? What a cool guy! But I am being nice so that he might fall in love with me again, and so I agree. Yes, he is social and I return for the rest of the bottle. ‘But, I need my space to figure all of this out, you know?’ he continues. ‘It’s such a hard decision.’

Finally, it is over for the day and I haven’t cried, which is an improvement.

All of this. It’s only been two months since Terry – the father of my two children and the guy who held my hand, and our squalling babies, as they sewed up my broken vagina – stood beside me at the sink, took off his glasses and cleaned the lenses with the bottom of his T-shirt. ‘You’re not happy,’ he said sadly, shaking his head.

‘Yes, I am,’ I said, confused. ‘I’m just a bit tired.’

‘Well, I’m not,’ he said and began to cry. His nose blew up like a large strawberry. I looked down at my sloppy old pyjama pants. My hands were wrinkled from the dish-water. If I had known that this was coming, I thought desperately, I would have at least put a bra on. ‘You never told me you were unhappy,’ I said, weakly.

‘I thought you would notice,’ he replied, sniffing. ‘Writers are supposed to be observant.’

Later that month, an old friend, a geologist and university lecturer who collects space rocks, told me, ‘You don’t know if someone is an unkind person when you are shining in the dazzling beam of their love. It’s not ’til they switch it off that you can see them clearly.’

‘But,’ I spluttered, ‘Who is the unkind one – me or him?’

Now, Gramma wipes the bench carefully with a tea towel. In her white nightgown, she is wraith-like, a deity, haunting the kitchen. The dishwasher hums. She sits at the table and, setting her jaw, nibbles a wholemeal biscuit with discipline. The doctor told her she was too thin. ‘I can’t gain weight,’ she sighs, swallowing painfully.

‘All the women in the world are crying for you,’ I joke.

Her eyes light up. ‘I know!’ she says brightly. ‘I’ll put jam on it!’

I get it from the fridge, wrench the top off, scoop out an obscene amount of jam and ladle it onto her biscuit. ‘Fancy something harder?’ I ask, holding up my glass.

‘You’re a terrible influence,’ my grandmother says, and nods. She matches my drunkenness in two glasses. ‘How is the separation going?’

‘I was so stressed last week that I smacked Poppy,’ I confess. ‘You can get arrested for that in this country, for fuck’s sake! I’m an abuser!’

‘No, you’re not. And don’t say fuck.’ She sighed. ‘I remember the last day I smacked your little sister. It was school holidays and you’d been with me for a month, as usual. Your mother was off gaivanting but had come to get you for school. My hand stung, Kate cried, and the next day, I looked at my hand, and the blood vessels had burst. I felt awful.’

‘What had Kate done wrong?’

‘I’m not sure! Nothing, probably. All I remember,’ she says, ‘is that day, your mother pulled up to the house. And that thing got out.’ ‘Bron?’

Gramma sips her wine. ‘I've had two glasses too quickly,’ she complained. ‘Heavens! My head!’

‘That’s terrible,’ I say, filling up her glass. ‘Then what?’

‘I said, you pop your stuff in your room, Lorraine, close to the kids, and I’ll make up the blue-room for your friend.’

‘For Bron?’

‘Yes. Lorraine scoffed and looked at me scornfully and said, ‘Mum. Just what exactly is it that you think we do?’

She looks at me, her face furious. ‘I’m no prude! In the sixties—’ She paused here and examined my face.

‘Yes?’ I pleaded. My secretly wild Gramma! ‘In the sixties?’

‘Mind your own business! Anyway. Women – she made it about that. It wasn’t about that.’

She sips her wine again. She looks so tired in the kitchen lights. Her cheekbones are jagged slashes across her brown cheeks like mine except my skin is lighter, watered down by my palangi dad – and I’m reminded of Absolutely Fabulous’s Edina saying to her daughter, ‘Your whole face hangs off my cheekbones, darling!’

I’ve learnt from the times I’ve smacked my daughters that I was usually stressed from something or someone else, and their behaviour has just tipped me over the edge. ‘You didn’t want to smack Kate, did you? You wanted to smack someone else.’

Gramma nodded. ‘She just couldn’t see you kids. And you were right there.’ Her face suddenly hardens. She puts her glass down and her voice has a new, prim edge. ‘Look. Whatever your mother’s faults, she’s my daughter and she’s been good with Granddad. And at some point, you need to get over whatever you think was wrong with your childhood.’

The next morning, we visit Granddad in the home. The coastal sun is already obscenely bright at nine a.m.

‘My head,’ complains Gramma. ‘I feel quite out of sorts this morning.’ ‘That’s called a hangover,’ I say.

When we arrive, Lily refuses to get out of the car. ‘It smells like wee in there,’ she says. She knows I won’t shout in front of Gramma. I grit my teeth and leave her, smiling smugly, playing with my iPhone.

‘Not fair!’ stamps Poppy.

‘Granddad has chocolates,’ I quickly bargain.

Gramma is convinced that the staff are too rough with my grandfather. ‘It’s that black man,’ she says, pointing at a tall, Pacific Island staff member. ‘That big,black man. Granddad is terrified of him.’

The home smells of sour, lonely things, and somewhere an old woman is screaming like a child, ‘I want to go home! Get away from me. I want to go home!’

For a second, so do I. Until I remember that Terry isn’t there anymore.

Gramma turns to us. ‘She does that all day,’ she whispers.

Poppy’s eyes turn into black moons. She grips my hand tightly, and smiles nervously. Little trooper.

‘This is it,’ says Gramma, leading us into one of the bedrooms. Granddad is sitting on the single bed staring at the photos stuck to the wall. He looks small and confused. Who are we?

He smiles at us, anxiously, then his eyes rest on Gramma and he slumps with relief. Isn’t she the nice lady who brings sweets?

‘Three people they had on him the other day,’ complains Gramma, as she opens Granddad’s cupboard and puts in the folded flannel shirts and polyester track pants she has brought. Before, Granddad never left the house without his shoes shined, his pressed waistcoat, a gold pocket watch, and his hat.‘Just to get him changed into his pyjamas. It’s too much. I keep thinking of them all on him. He must have been so scared. Why didn’t they just leave him in his pyjamas?’

I do not remind her that at his last rest home, she complained because they let him wander around in his pyjamas all day. ‘If you’re really worried,’ I say. ‘We could get a nanny-bear. It has a spy camera inside it and could record what went on.’

She scoffs. ‘Don’t be silly.’

Granddad’s eyes light up at the chocolate koalas we have brought. Only select memories remain in his brain: not the identity of his wife of fifty years, but the illicit crackle of a wrapper, the stinging thrill of sugar on the tongue.

He unwraps the frog, puts the whole chocolate in his mouth then methodically folds the wrapper over and over, into smaller and smaller squares, until it is a tightly folded cube. Poppy shovels hers into her mouth and they smile goofily at each other with brown and gooey teeth.

Back at Gramma’s, my mother rings. ‘I have something very grave to tell you all.’

I yawn. ‘Is it about the lump? Did you get it biopsied?’

‘I’ll wait until I get there,’ she says, seriously. ‘I don’t want you getting too upset. It’s very grave news. I’m going to fax over my dietary requirements. My naturopath – he’s Indian so he’s very good – has me on a very strict cancer-killing diet.’

‘Can’t you just tell me?’ I ask.

‘I’ll fax it over,’ she says, and hangs up. Who uses a fax?

It takes forever to print out. The list is comprehensive. No gluten. No dairy. No meat. No sugar. No potatoes! For some reason, only potatoes get an exclamation point. Gramma is anxious about the list. She has eaten nothing but white bread, cheese, chicken, potatoes, boiled vegetables and lettuce her whole life. ‘I’ve lasted this long,’ she says, stubbornly, when I try to coach her on the wonders of activated almonds.

I stir-fry vegetables and boil some rice, and after seven p.m, my mother arrives, deeply tanned and thin, lithe like a teen (‘Bikram, darling. You sweat off the fat. You should do it!’), her hair a tangle of blonde and grey waves. She smells of patchouli and incense. She cuddles me tightly, pressing her breasts against mine. She inhales and exhales deeply. ‘Mmmm!’

I am revolted at being so close to her. She pushes me back and holds me at arms length to scrutinise me. ‘What have you done to your hair?’ she asks, her nose wrinkled. ‘Or not done?’

I touch it. My greys are showing, my ends split and ragged. ‘I haven’t had the time,’ I say, widening my eyes and nodding furiously in the direction of the girls. ‘What with everything going on.’

I do not want to say separation in front of the girls. They just know their dad is staying with their Uncle Steve for a long sleepover. Although, when Poppy got home from visiting him last week she said, ‘You know, Mum, some kids have two houses. And that’s okay, isn’t it?’

‘Humph,’ my mother snorts. ‘Now is the time you should be paying attention to it.’ I smile tightly. I’m past the age of snapping back at her, but I feel myself growing tight and false, my real self folded down and wedged inside, like Granddad’s chocolate wrapper

‘Nana!’ Poppy runs into her back and squeezes her hard. ‘Nana!’

‘Hello, girls! Aren’t you pretty, Lily? You look just like your grandmother!’

She has bought Barbies for the girls. Not real ones, but cheap Two-dollar Shop ones with brittle limbs. Poppy collapses in pleasure – ‘I’m going to call mine Lorraine after you, Nana!’ – while Lily, who turned all her Barbies into punks last year by piercing their noses and hacking off their hair, smiles tightly. ‘Uh, thanks,’ she says, and allows herself to be hugged.

Poppy follows mum like a maid in waiting, or a child-beggar, hungry for attention. ‘Nana,’ she says, like a mantra. ‘Nana. Nana.’

As children, Kate and I responded to our mother’s self-absorption in opposite ways. I grew as spitty as a devil, short-tempered and resentful – I didn’t even want her stupid attention. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she asked, and sent me to a child therapist who asked me to draw pictures of a house in crayon.

I drew the same house I’d always drawn: two windows with grand, swooping lace curtains and a little chimney and a winding path. ‘Who lives there?’ he asked. I shrugged and felt confused. No one lives there. It’s a drawing!

All the while, my sweet, passive little sister grew sweeter, and regressed to cloying baby language. ‘Mummy! I wuv you, mamma. You so pretty, mamma.’

My sister is still able to remodel herself so that she reflects back the version of herself that is the most desirable to each person. She’s still goddam adorable.

I know this: if either of us ends up like Mum, it will be me.

‘I’m so scared of being like her that I do everything the opposite,’ says Kate.

Now, my mother throws herself on the couch and lies back on one arm, her long blonde hair trailing on the carpet. ‘The results are back,’ she tells us, sulkily. She looks so disappointed. ‘The doctor...’ She pauses distastefully on ‘doctor’. ‘The doctor says that the lump is just an old milk gland.’

‘What a relief,’ I say, smiling at the girls. ‘That’s good news, isn’t it? Nana isn’t sick!’

Truthfully, I’m a little disappointed, too. If she died, I could mourn her loss. Also, was there any inheritance anywhere?

‘These are my favourite shoes, Nana,’ says Poppy, holding up her foot. ‘They’re silver.’

My mother snorts. ‘Good news?’ She rolls her eyes. ‘Don’t be so naive, Kell.’

Poppy puts her foot down.

‘They’re gorgeous shoes, Popsicle,’ says Gramma. ‘Are they made from real silver?’

Poppy beams. ‘No!’ she says. ‘Of course not! I couldn’t lift my foot!’

On the television, a man is selling knives. I can’t tell from here but he looks a bit like a boy I used to go to school with. Harold Balm. He used to eat orange peel.

‘Is that Harold?’ I say, out loud.

My mother pulls herself into a sitting position and sighs dramatically. ‘My Indian naturopath agrees that – despite what the so-called doctor says – I’m very i. I have hot flushes, I am exhausted. She agrees with me.’ She pauses here and steadies herself. ‘I am pre-cancerous. It’s pre-cancer.’

Pre-cancer.

I catch Gramma’s eye. She looks away quickly, her mouth quivering. We are both being very good. My mother sits up and pushes her thumb and forefinger between her eyes and slumps forwards. Her sobs are long and shaky and punctuated with deep gasping inhalations.

Poppy looks bewildered. ‘Nana?’ she says, her eyes welling with tears. She clings to my knee and her eyes, desperately concerned, swivel up to mine. Lily sighs. She has seen this show before. ‘It’s okay, Poppy, darling,’ my mother whispers between sobs. ‘Nana is just very sick and she’s scared.’

Gramma stands up. Her lips are pressed together in a line. ‘I think we all need a cup of tea.’ As she walks into the kitchen she catches my eye and mouths: ‘Menopause.’

After dessert, Gramma and Mum wash the dishes in the kitchen and my cheered-up mother outlines her cancer-killing regime. ‘Magnesium, selenium, sulphur drinks ever two hours, iron, daily colonics. Honestly, I’ll need to quit work to fit it all in!’

My two jetlagged girls fall asleep in front of the television. In the neon glare, their faces are slack with peace. I suddenly feel a wave of panic so intense that it takes my breath away. What if they feel the same way about me that I do about my mother? Was there any inheritance anywhere? She’s a dick. I have failed them so many times!

When Lily was a few months old, she wouldn’t stop crying. It was high-pitched, like a saw. ‘Shut up!’ I screamed at her, crying hysterically myself. ‘Shut up!’

Another time, I locked a tantrumming Poppy in her room for an hour by putting a chair under the handle. Last month, when Lily was acting like an arsehole, I asked her to stop acting like an arsehole. ‘Mum!’ she reprimanded me, shocked.

I’m terrified of them trying to please me – Poppy will sidle up, stroke my hair and say: ‘Your lipstick is pretty, Mummy’ – but I am equally terrified of them rebelling. Lily told me to go fuck myself last week. Worse – what about all the stuff I haven’t noticed – the times I have been too wrapped up in my own needs to see theirs. The selfish acts I’ve committed, unknowingly. My sarcasm, my body issues – all my poison. Has it touched them, too? A litany of failures, a bludgeon of disappointment they could use against me when they are older.

‘Listen,’ I will say, holding my arms above my head to protect the softest part of myself. ‘Listen, I did the best I could!’

Three weeks before the trip home, I rang an old friend, a pragmatic teacher with four feral kids.

‘Everything I do with Lily and Poppy, I evaluate,’ I confessed. ‘There is a panel of judges holding up numbers, like at a gymnastics competition. I calmly explain why Poppy shouldn’t eat the chocolate muffin she found in her gumboot without losing my temper. They all hold up 8s. I scream at Lily for talking back. They all hold up 2s. Every word I say to them, every action seems weighted and terribly vital. Could this be the sentence that turns them into anorexic, suicidal heroin addicts?’

My friend scoffed. ‘That’s normal,’ she said. A screeching noise in the background. ‘That’s what we do with daughters. The other day, I was priding myself on how well I dealt with Stacey getting herpes.’

‘She has herpes? What is she – like, nine?’

‘Sixteen. Anyway. “You could take vitamin C,” was all I said. Inside I was fucking dying!’

‘I know, but...’

Loud wails. ‘Look, Kell, I love you but I don’t have time to talk you down off of your self-absorbed cliff right now, okay? The dog just ate the cat then vomited on the children, or something. You’re not your mother, okay? The fact that you are worried about it means you aren’t your mother.’

Kate has one of each. ‘Boys are easier,’ she said. ‘There is less fear. You don’t worry about screwing them up. You don’t live in fear of them turning into yourself.’ She sighed. ‘It’s easy to just love the boys.’

I watch my daughters sleep, desperate with love. I should have done better. I should be better! I’ll forgive their cool guy father – that fucker – and beg him to come home. I’ll do anything so that they don’t feel about me the way I feel about my mother.

I look back at Lily. Slumped in sleep, she looks serene – a porcelain-doll version of herself. She opens her eyes suddenly and we both flinch. She squints at the glare of the television, covers her eyes with her forearm and slumps back down. ‘I love you, Lily.’ I say. ‘So much.’

‘Stop staring at me,’ she protests, sleepily.

The knife commercial is back on. It is Harold Balm. He looks as if he’s had work done on his face. ‘I know him,’ I tell Lily. ‘We went to school together.’ Is she impressed? I look at her to see. She is asleep again.

A pair of glossy black stallions are galloping on the TV screen now. It’s a bank commercial. Their hooves are tearing up thick, doughy clots of wet earth and flinging them towards the camera. Their muscles move rhythmically under their glistening skin. Suddenly, the camera zooms into one of their faces. His nostrils flare into great arched caves with every loping lunge forwards and his shiny eye looks wildly panicked, as if he is running for his very life.

I carefully extract the remote from Lily’s warm fingers, point it at the screen and push the red button. With an electric zap, the room is plunged into darkness.