Almost True (33 page)

My dad slides down to the floor. This room can't really take any more people, and his long legs have nowhere to go. He pushes at Meg's bum to make some more space. She shifts in her sleep, growls softly and then spreads herself a bit more comfortably, leaving him even less room.

I could move up, I suppose, but then I'd be virtually sitting on Helen's lap. I don't.

‘It's OK, Ma. You stay. I don't care who hears this.'

There's this tiny part of me that wants to bury my head in a towel, hide from him and her and the truth and everything about it. I have enough fresh problems in my life right now, without adding some decaying dug-up old ones.

‘Ty,' he says, ‘Ty, it all worked fine at the beginning. We were having an adventure. We liked being independent, looking after you. You were great – you were doing something new and different every day. It was good. A really good idea.'

He's looking at Helen, and I immediately discount most of this. I know when someone's trying to make their mum think everything was fine. I do it all the time.

‘I was trying to balance studying and making new friends at uni, and working – I got a job in a bar – and being with Nicki and you. It wasn't always easy. Nicki was lonely, and she hadn't been able to find a college with childcare, so she was a bit bored. We finished the first term and we came home for Christmas and we missed each other a lot. I went over to her mum's house on Christmas day, and she – Nicki's mum – just didn't want me there. We were really happy to go back to Manchester.'

He's looking at me now. I don't want to fall under his spell again. Get drawn into the way he sees things, start believing in him. I need to keep myself separate. So I concentrate on the tiles on the floor, which are
big and red and someone's had to cut them in half to fit the corners.

‘But then . . . I don't know . . . things started to go wrong. Nicki . . . she got an idea into her head that I wasn't so . . . wasn't into her any more. She got jealous. She thought it was her, that she wasn't attractive. She thought she was fat. She went on a diet.'

I get the distinct impression that he's hiding something. I suspect my mum had every reason to be jealous. Anyway, all women think they're fat. They're all on diets. I'm surprised he doesn't know that, with his vast experience and his
ménage a trois
and his celebrity mates.

Archie sticks his head round the door. His eyes boggle when he sees us all sitting on the floor. ‘What's going on?' he says, ‘I'm hungry, Grandma.'

‘Go
away,
Archie.' My dad and I say it together. He grins at me. I look away.

Helen says, ‘I'm coming in a minute, darling.' Archie retreats. She looks at me. ‘Do you still want me here? Maybe you need some time together on your own.'

I never needed Helen before; I already had too many women in my life. But right now, I don't want her to go.

So I say, ‘No, stay, please,' and she stays. I don't think my dad's really delighted.

‘Oh God,' he says, ‘Where was I?'

‘You were explaining why you had my mum locked
away in a loony bin,' I say through gritted teeth.

‘She just stopped eating Ty. I didn't realise at first. She sort of pretended to eat, or I'd get home and she'd say she'd eaten. She got thinner and thinner. I didn't realise . . . didn't know.'

I yawn. When will he get to the point?

‘And then she got a cold. She was in bed, ill, and I took time off from lectures and work to look after you. I realised . . . from the way you were. . . I'd been blind, hadn't realised what was going on. I was stupid.' He gulps, and stops. I'm amazed to see tears running down his face.

‘You were very young,' says Helen. ‘Maybe I should tell Ty what happened next.'

He nods. He's biting the back of his hand.

‘We got a call from Danny,' she says, ‘He'd got the doctor at the student health centre to see Nicki. She'd cut down too much on her food, become ill. The doctor said she needed treatment, proper treatment in a hospital. She wasn't going to get better without it. He diagnosed anorexia. You get to a point of no return, where you end up starving yourself to death. It's a terrible thing but very common in teenage girls.'

‘Oh right,' I say. I know about anorexia. I've skimmed articles about it in
Cosmo
. But I thought girls with anorexia looked like living skeletons. I can't imagine
my mum ever looking like that.

‘So that's why . . . that's why the hospital. . .'

‘Nicki wasn't just denying herself food,' says Helen. ‘She'd somehow persuaded herself that you needed to diet too. Danny took you to a paediatrician. You were failing to thrive, darling. Underweight.'

‘I thought they were going to take you into care,' says my dad. His voice is flat and sad. ‘I had to call them. I didn't know what to do.'

‘Them' means Helen and Patrick, I think. He must've been desperate.

‘Nicki didn't accept any of it,' he says, ‘I don't think she really even accepts it now. We spent all that time together when you were in hospital skirting around the subject. Not talking about it. I suppose she must have got over the eating disorder now . . . but she doesn't eat much, does she? Louise calls her a functioning anorexic.'

It's like looking in those strange fairground mirrors that squash you and pull you, and everything's the same but totally different. My mum's not got an eating disorder – or has she? She eats a pot of low fat yoghurt in the morning, she makes a sandwich and has half of it for lunch and the other half for supper. If she eats a piece of cake or some chips, she cuts down the next day. My gran was always asking her what she'd eaten, what I'd eaten, filling our fridge with food. I learned at an early
age that I needed to take money from Nicki's purse to meet my own needs.

But she's not ill. She looks as good as a celebrity. She's not sick and dying and in hospital and mentally ill and needing treatment.

‘She had to be sectioned,' he says, ‘to get help, because she wouldn't admit . . . wouldn't accept. . . I knew she'd never forgive me. I'll never forget her face . . . her face. . . Anyway, I called her mum and she came up to Manchester to be with Nicki. I called them' – he jerks his head towards Helen – ‘and they came and took you. And then I just . . . I just. . .'

‘He disappeared,' says Helen. ‘About a month later. Walked out of his flat in Manchester, quit his course. We didn't know where he was and what had happened to him. We didn't hear from him for two years.'

‘I'm sorry,' he says in the same flat, sad voice, and she says, ‘We've waited an awful long time for you to say that. You might want to repeat it to your father.'

Yeah, right,
that's
going to happen, I think, and I bet my dad's thinking the same.

‘It was just . . . you were looking after him better than I could. Even Pa. Nicki made it perfectly obvious she never wanted to see me again. I was . . . I couldn't cope. I didn't think anyone needed me.'

‘Your sister was pregnant,' says Helen, ‘The stress
of worrying about you may well have caused her miscarriage.'

I'm kind of surprised that it's not just my mum and gran who guilt-trip you about stuff that's nothing to do with you. It's obviously a general female thing. Danny rolls his eyes and says, ‘Thanks for that.'

‘What happened to
me
?' I ask, to remind them why we've having this conversation in the first place.

‘Oh, you were sweet, you were gorgeous,' says Helen. ‘We took you to the doctor and he advised us how to feed you, get you to put on weight. I had to cook with you, offer you a selection of different foods. You were very quiet at first, missing Nicki, of course, and Danny. You didn't cry, which was strange for a toddler, you were withdrawn. Sad. But then you got more used to us. Patrick had just retired and he took on the lion's share of looking after you. He would take you to Hampstead Heath for walks. He was trying to teach you to speak French. He loved you so much – it was very nice to see how much you enjoyed each other's company.'

‘He had more time for you than he did for any of us,' says my dad, and Helen shakes her head at him and says, ‘That's not fair, Danny. He worked very long hours.'

‘Where did you go?' I ask him, and he says, ‘Amsterdam, at first. Then I came back to England, stayed with friends. I used to travel around a lot, go to
festivals . . . then we started the band. It's all a bit of a blur, to be honest.'

‘Your mum came out of hospital,' says Helen, ‘And Julie came to us. She demanded that we hand you over. We were worried – not sure what to do. We weren't sure about Nicki's health, whether she'd be able to look after you. Danny wasn't there to stand up for his rights. Patrick talked about trying for custody. But Julie said that she thought Nicki's heart would break if she didn't get you back. She promised she'd bring you back for visits. So we let you go with her.

‘And then they cut us out. I kept calling Julie, asking her when we could see you, but she just said there was no arguing with Nicki, she didn't want to jeopardise her health, there was no way your mum would allow you anywhere near us. In the end Julie changed her phone number, moved house. We'd lost you. Thank goodness for Louise, who would come and see us sometimes, tell us about you, give us photographs. I don't know about Patrick, but that kept me going. She used to send you pictures as well, didn't she, Danny?'

‘I took my own,' he says. ‘I used to go and sit outside your school, Ty, and take pictures with a long lens. Like a paparazzo. I thought about going up to you, saying hello, but I was never brave enough.'

‘You were
spying
on me?'

‘It was all I could do,' he says.

I'm not wildly impressed. Even my gran seems to have behaved pretty badly. Although perhaps it's best not to judge anyone until I hear their side of the story.

Anyway, I'm starving hungry, which is kind of ironic, really, in the circumstances.

I stand up, waking up Meg, who starts barking and jumping and waving her tail right in my dad's face.

‘Umm . . . thanks for telling me,' I say.

‘Maybe best not to mention to Nicki,' says my dad, as he and Helen stand up too. I shrug and say, ‘OK,' and then, ‘Helen, can we have some food now?' And I don't know why she's crying, but my dad wraps her into a big hug, so I go out into the kitchen and find Archie's making himself an enormous turkey sandwich, with mayo, pickles and – weirdly – beetroot. I steal half of it and then we start looking in the fridge to see if there's any Christmas pudding left.

Helen and my dad are still talking in the laundry room – God knows what about – so Archie suggests we take the pudding and go and watch the next
Lord of the Rings
upstairs, but on the way up, Patrick catches us and insists that I come and meet everyone. So I get introduced to my other aunts and uncles, who are all sitting around trying not to look like they've been speculating about what the hell was going on in the laundry room.

There's Marina, who works at the BBC and doesn't look anything like me at all, thankfully, as she's a woman with dark hair and scary black-rimmed specs and a kind of sharp-edged face. She's the one who called her children Ludo and Atticus, so she's obviously a bit strange, and she has a husband – grey hair and beard, specs, unfortunate sweater – called Robin.

Then there's Elizabeth, who teaches Philosophy at London University and her husband, George, a journalist. Luckily, they've got two tiny daughters Mia and Evie who are making huge amounts of noise, so no one can ask me any questions and I can just smile and not really say anything. I completely ignore Tess, who's sitting in an armchair reading
Country Life
. She looks bored out of her skull.

Then Archie and I escape upstairs. We have to evict Ludo and Atticus from the bed, and replace
Shrek Three
with the next
Lord of the Rings
– Archie does a brilliant impersonation of Gollum hissing, ‘My precioussss' – but we explain kindly that
Shrek Three
is crap. They might as well not bother with the last twenty minutes. Then they see our bowls of Christmas pudding and go rushing downstairs to get some too. We don't tell them that we've finished it off.

And it's just me and Archie, and I think I've probably forgiven him for telling Zoe, because, let's face it, I'd
already messed up me and Claire all by myself. Zoe's a nice girl and maybe she won't gossip.

‘What were you all talking about for so long?' he asks, mouth full of pudding, and I say, ‘They were telling me stuff. About when I was little and I lived with Patrick and Helen.'

And he rolls his eyes and says, ‘Oh bloody hell, not that crap again. They were yattering on about it yesterday, my mum and her sisters. So boring. All about how your mum had to go into hospital and then your dad went walkabout, yatter, yatter, blah, blah. It was like an episode of
Holby
frigging
City
. I don't know why everyone has to go on and on about
you
all the time, when it's me who's
suffering
at boarding school. . .'

He's stupid, Archie and he's a pain, but there are times when I quite like him and I even find him quite funny, and that's why I'm still laughing weakly, holding my stomach, when Patrick comes to find us.

‘Everything's all right, then?' he says, standing in the doorway and frowning under his fluffy eyebrows, and that starts us laughing again. He says, ‘I see it is. I'm glad. You'd better come down now, Ty, and say goodbye to Danny and umm. . .'

‘Tess,' I say, and I follow him reluctantly down the stairs. Tess is balancing on one leg, putting her heels back on. Danny's shrugging on a leather jacket. I'm beginning
to suspect his clothes aren't as rubbish as they look. I think they might actually be designer scruff.