“Why?” she asks. “Nobody fucking built me up. What makes her so fucking special?”
I pause. We’re here, having the conversation that I’ve been wanting to have for so long, but Jessamine is so, so drunk and so close to the far edgesof reason and sanity that now is not the moment, but suddenly I find myself not caring.
“She’s not ‘so’ fucking special. Jessamine. She’s just a girl who needs a nice mum and some TLC; needs to be told she’s good and important; needs, Jessamine…”—I pause, inhale, and then continue—“not to end up like you.”
The palm of her hand is like flicked elastic against the skin of my cheek, stinging and raw. I clasp my hand to my face and sigh loudly. “Fuck’s sake, Jessamine.”
She goes to slap me again and this time I grab her wrist inside my fist. She pulls my hand toward her mouth and tries to bite it, but I pull away from her, and then she comes for me with everything, every bit of her—nails, teeth, fists, feet—and I curl into myself and I take it, take every last bit of it.
Afterward, she collapses against the wall, on her haunches, panting. “You’re a fucking loser,” she says, wiping drool from her chin. “A loser. All of you are. Especially her.” She jerks her head toward the kitchen. Then she sighs. “Ah well, who cares? She’s nothing to do with me anyway, is she?”
I cock my head, let myself sit down on the arm of the sofa. “What?”
“Nothing,” she says. “Nothing.”
Daisy finds me on the sofa an hour later. Jessamine has crashed and burned in bed. She perches gently on the other end of the sofa. “Are you OK?”
I nod. “I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?” She points at the scratches on my forearms.
I look down at them and smile. “I’m a big boy. I can take it.”
“Yes. But you shouldn’t. You shouldn’t have to take it. You do everything for her; you do everything for all of us. And then she treats you like that.”
I sigh. “It is what it is. She is what she is. She’s very damaged, your mum.For whatever reasons. And my job is to make sure that you don’t get damaged too.”
“Bit late for that, I’d say.”
“Well, OK, then, anymoredamaged.”
She smiles. “I’d really like to meet your daughter,” she says.
“Well, you should come with us! Blaise would love that!”
“Mum would lose her actual shit.”
Daisy used to talk like an Enid Blyton schoolgirl; now, five months into secondary school she sounds like all the other London kids. “Well, yes, she would, but she’s going to lose her shit whatever I do, so we may as well go for broke.”
“What’s she like, Blaise?”
“She’s cool. Like you. Except with an Aussie accent.”
“Is she pretty?”
“Yes, of course she is! I’m her dad after all.” I smile at her and then I think about what Jessamine had said earlier. “Do you think you look like your dad?” I say.
“I guess. I mean, sort of.”
“How well did you know him?”
She shrugs. “Not very. He used to come, like, every other weekend? Take us out for lunch? And then it got less and less and less. Last time I saw him was just before Christmas, two years ago?”
“Why did he stop coming over?”
She shrugs. “It was around the time you came, so I guess he didn’t like you being around very much.”
“Do you ever contact him? Like text him, or speak on the phone?”
