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And you only date younger men
•••
Stuart Parkes
13:07
I’ll stay up for your call tonight
•••
Stuart Parkes
13:08
I can’t promise I’ll be sober
THIRTY-ONE
When they returned to the yellow house, they found Gabby sitting in the living room with Orion on her chest, looking showered and freshly dressed. Hank was in the kitchen making banana pancakes – ‘Don’t get excited,’ Gabby said, ‘it’s just banana and egg, not real pancakes. It’s a throwback to his paleo days’ – and everything was as it was before the day in bed.
Gabby let Orion finish feeding then handed him to Richard, grabbed a pancake off the plate and ate it on the way up to her nap. Hank told them they’d all had a relatively restful night and now he felt energised enough to go outside and mow the lawn, explaining that he had to get out there early before the bugs got bad. Diana asked Ada what she was thinking of making for dinner and Ada said, ‘Well, I don’t know, are we going to be allowed to go shopping today or will Gabby be having another breakdown?’ And Diana and Richard gave her a look she hadn’t seen in years and then continued discussing dinner options. So maybe things weren’t exactly as they had been.
Ada was angry with them and she had forgotten the sensation of being angry with her parents. She let it roll through her body, deliciously dripping into all the open spaces, the vacuums she’d been ignoring. She felt like she was built to contain this rage, no need to explode when you have endless plains inside you for the malice to scream through like a windstorm in a desert.
These people and their denial disgusted her. Couldn’t they see that a tan and a baby hadn’t changed Gabby? And poor Hank didn’t know, couldn’t possibly know the hurricane he had trapped himself inside. Destruction, that was all Gabby wrought, and no one here could see it but Ada. She remembered when she was ten and Gabby had stopped eating chocolate for a whole year so Ada’s birthday cake had to be vanilla and how she, Ada, pretended that tasted just as good and she pitied Orion growing up in this house. And then she drank some water straight from the kitchen tap, tipping her head underneath and letting it run into her mouth and then she said, ‘I could grill some fish? What kind of fish is good here? Something white, I’ve kind of gone off salmon,’ and she was complicit too.
They went shopping and to the beach and Ada swam away from her parents until she couldn’t hear their chatter about one or the other of Ada’s uncles. She rolled onto her back and closed her eyes, the sunlight so bright that it burned through her lids. She thought about Stuart. She couldn’t not think about him.
After his messages this morning she had read back over their exchanges this week, holding Orion in her arms and scrolling over his head. They weren’t even exchanges, really, just thoughts they were having at each other, picked up too late to make sense. And she realised his had been getting shorter and shorter. If she’d been in London she would have showed Mel and they would have pored over them for signs of what was wrong, of where her offence lay. But she was here, for Gabby, and she had let her vigilance slip and now maybe Stuart was letting her go. She couldn’t let that happen after how hard she’d worked to get him back on-side after the Sadie revelation.
Ada rolled over so she was treading water and opened her eyes. Her parents were back on the sand, sitting with their feet in the shallows, her mum having retrieved her large straw sunhat and put it on her head. Their section of the beach was quiet apart from a pair of mothers with three young children between them and a man sunbathing who Ada had seen every day. He was either twenty-five or sixty, she had never got close enough to figure it out, and his skin was glossed and sheened and the colour of rust.
She knew, really, that Stuart was playing some sort of game with her, becoming distant for a couple of days and returning with a list of demands. She didn’t begrudge him that the way she had begrudged him ignoring her when she first told him about Sadie because he had earned it, a little, now. Their relationship was still amorphous enough to absorb these lumps and disappointments and she knew that whatever happened next would be shaped by how completely she could prostrate herself. She knew from experience that he wanted debasement and she was willing to give him that. Hadn’t she been giving that to Sadie all along? Maybe it was his turn. Or maybe it was nothing to do with Sadie and the comparison wasn’t fair.
Ada paddled towards shore and stopped when she could stand in the water. The tide was barely perceptible here, unlike the violent riptides of her childhood. It could get boring, she thought, this affectless ocean, but only if you gave it time and she would be gone in two days, back to the stinking canals. She remembered being thrown to shore with her junior boogie board still strapped to her legs and coughing up salt and phlegm into the sand. Coming home with her cheeks and shins rubbed equally raw by the bottom that the waves dragged her over repeatedly. She thought that if she could still do that every day maybe she wouldn’t be so restless or maybe she would smoke a lot more weed or maybe both.
Mel had said that Sadie hadn’t come home one night and then she didn’t come home the next night either and Ada didn’t know how to feel about that but she settled on ‘suspicious’. She didn’t assume it was for someone else, only because Sadie seemed driven by desires Ada couldn’t access. She felt sure that Sadie expected so little of her, wanted to possess her only in fractured moments that felt like they lasted forever but in reality disappeared when both of them were spent. Ada was a rebound that would never have lasted this long if London Airbnbs were cheaper and that should bring her shame, probably. But she stood in the warm, flat water and she felt that she was simply smarter than other people. Why question something good that moves into your bed when you can instead enjoy it until it goes away again?
