Page 7

7

It’s past nine by the time Nicole lets herself into the house she used to call home, and she’s immediately unnerved by the disconcerting silence.

“Hello?” she calls out from the hall, the simple word so full of apprehension as she waits for a response. When none comes, she bounds up the stairs, two at a time, but then stops outside her mother’s closed bedroom door, her bravado suddenly diminished.

She takes a deep breath, forcing the choking fear away as she pushes the door open.

“Hello?” she says again, into the darkened room, where only a dim light reaches out from beneath the tassel-fringed shade on the bedside cabinet. She can just make out the silhouette of her father, standing beside the bed.

“Leave us!” barks John, throwing an outstretched arm in her direction.

Another man is bent over Gigi with a syringe in his hand.

“Is-is everything OK?” Nicole stutters.

“Everything is fine,” snaps John.

“M-mum?” Nicole calls out, feeling like a little girl who just needs to hear her mother’s voice. She used to covet it for reassurance and to feel secure. Now, she realizes, it’s to know she’s still alive.

“I said go!” John shouts.

She softly closes the door and leans her ear to it.

“There must be something more we can do,” cries John’s pitiful voice. “Something else we can try.”

The doctor’s silence speaks volumes, and Nicole’s heart breaks.

She tries to busy herself with making dinner, hoping that she’s misconstrued her father’s desperate words, but she accidentally puts raw sausages in a saucepan of boiling water and uncooked potatoes into a frying pan laced with oil.

“Shit!” she says, burning herself on the pan handle as she drops it into the sink, her mind clearly as mashed as the potatoes she was intending to prepare.

“What’s going on? Where’s Cassie?” asks John, coming into the kitchen. His voice may sound as forthright as usual, but Nicole only has to take one look at his face to see that inside he’s a broken man.

“I guess she’s not in from work yet,” says Nicole.

“But it’s after nine,” says John, looking at his watch.

“Maybe she’s clocking in some overtime,” says Nicole, knowing it’s unlikely.

He nods, temporarily assuaged, but the real elephant in the room looms large. Nicole knows that it’s down to her to address it—if she’s brave enough.

“So, what’s going on with Mum?” she asks, avoiding eye contact by looking in the fridge for something she doesn’t need.

John makes a strange grunting sound and Nicole waits to see if it’s to stifle a sob or to clear his throat to speak.

“The doctor’s wrong” is all he says, before roughly pulling open the cutlery drawer, noisily collecting knives and forks and taking them through to the dining room.

Nicole waits a beat. “What did he say?”

She watches through the serving hatch as her father’s shoulders convulse, and she can’t help but let out a whimper that escapes from deep within her chest.

“He… he thinks she’s had enough,” says John. “He thinks she can’t take any more.”

Nicole swallows the implication.

“But he doesn’t know my Gigi,” he says, laying the table with increasing vigor, as if he’s attempting to power his wife’s resilience with his own hands. “He doesn’t know what she’s capable of—the strength of her mind, what her body can do…” His voice breaks and Nicole instinctively wants to go to him, but knows he would rather brush her off than show any vulnerability.

“So, what’s next?”

“We keep going,” he snaps, as if she shouldn’t need to ask. “We take the medicines. We do the treatments. We don’t give up, because one of them is going to work and when that day comes, these doctors will realize that they have no idea who they’re dealing with. Your mum’s going to show them that miracles really do exist.”

His jaw is set and his eyes are locked as he wills himself to believe his own sermon, but an unrelenting despair is etched into every crevice of his furrowed brow as the reality of losing his beloved wife bears down on him.

Nicole is grateful for the sound of the key in the front door, if only to bring him back from the brink of where she fears he’s going.

“Hey,” gushes Cassie, her curls bouncing as she runs to hug her sister. The sense of relief that she doesn’t have to manage her father alone tonight is palpable. But it only adds to the weight of responsibility on Nicole’s shoulders.

“You look like a stick of rock,” says Nicole, forcing a laugh as Cassie stands there in her work tabard and striped blouse. “I bet if we cut you open, you’d have ‘Woolworths’ running all the way through you.”

Cassie checks that their dad is still in the dining room. “It’d say ‘Secret Oktober,’” she whispers, with a wink.

Nicole rolls her eyes. Sometimes her little sister displays such levels of maturity that she forgets she’s only sixteen, but this whole obsession with a pop group, which seems to have ramped up a gear in recent months, makes her seem younger than her years. There’s a part of Nicole that gets it—to a degree. It’s a bond that she shares with their mother—an excuse to recall memories of a time gone by and an attempt to re-create them—and Nicole supposes that, right now, Cassie is looking to garner as much of that as she can. But to the detriment of everything else?

“I wouldn’t push it tonight,” she says.

“Why?” presses Cassie, seemingly oblivious to what’s going on. Nicole wishes she was as blithely ignorant.

“It’s not a good time, as you well know…”

“Has something happened with Mum?” asks Cassie, her eyes widening.

Nicole blinks back the sting of tears. How will life ever be the same if anything happens to her? Who will Nicole turn to when her mother’s voice is the only one she heeds?

She would never have got through the past few months as unscathed as she was, if it weren’t for her mother’s unswerving support and heartfelt advice. While John was threatening to kill Nicole’s ex-boyfriend Aaron for daring to cheat, it was Gigi’s more measured approach that their daughter had harnessed.

“One day he’ll wake up and his heart will hurt, and he’ll not know why,” she’d said, stroking Nicole’s long hair as she lay on the sofa. “But eventually it will dawn on him that it’s because he lost the best thing that ever happened to him.”

It had only taken two weeks for the epiphany to present itself, but, thanks to her mother’s incessant determination to drill into her that she deserved better than Aaron, Nicole was more than ready when he came begging for forgiveness. And every time she’d been tempted to capitulate since, it was her mother who lifted her onto a pedestal so that her perspective wasn’t skewed by the empty promises he was throwing her way.

Nicole can’t stop a tear from falling. How will she hold herself up without her mother? And more important, how will she be able to keep Cassie’s head above water while she herself is drowning?

“There’s no change,” lies Nicole, under the guise of protecting her. “But Dad’s not in a good place, so I would advise you to tread lightly.”

The three of them sit at the dining table in silence, the News at Ten presenter the only voice in the room. The TV is on more often than not these days. In fact, it almost never gets turned off, as they attempt to fill the void of Gigi’s absence, even though she’s still upstairs.

“So, how was work?” John asks Cassie, as he pushes sausages around his plate with no intention of eating them.

“It was good,” she says, nodding enthusiastically. “They put me on pick ’n’ mix today.”

John does his best to feign interest. “What does that entail, then?”

“Well, I’m on the scales, taking money, trying to stop everyone who walks past from thinking they can pocket a sweet without me noticing.”

“What, stealing it?” asks John, with an expression of disbelief.

Cassie nods. “The pick ’n’ mix is notorious for it. People seem to think it’s one for the bag, two for the mouth.”

John shakes his head. “And that’s down to you, is it? To try and stop it from happening?”

“Yeah,” she says. “It’s a lot of responsibility, but I think I held my own.”

He nods, as if he’s almost proud of her. “So, they’re beginning to trust you? That’s good. It’s important that you can be trusted—it goes a long way.”

“Yeah,” says Cassie absently.

“And finally,” says the newsreader, cutting through the forced at mosphere, “Britain’s boy-band sensation, Secret Oktober, were given a hysterical send-off at Heathrow Airport earlier today, when over one hundred screaming girls turned up to wave them on their way.”

Cassie’s face freezes and she jumps up like a cat on a hot tin roof from the table. “Let’s get the washing-up done so we don’t have to do it later,” she says, taking her plate through to the kitchen bin and noisily scraping it clean.

Nicole struggles to swallow the lumpy mashed potato in her mouth as she dares to contemplate what might be about to ensue. She throws Cassie a questioning look through the hatch, hoping her fears are unfounded.

“Look at this,” says John, derisorily. “All these girls making a fool of themselves over some fly-by-nights who they’ll be embarrassed by this time next year.” He tuts. “God, what must their parents think?”

Cassie clangs the cutlery even more loudly. “Come on,” she calls out. “Come and help me.”

Channeling Cassie’s rising panic as if it were her own, Nicole races to turn the TV off, but it’s too late.

“What the…?” starts John, squinting at the TV.

Nicole closes her eyes and holds her breath.

“Please tell me I haven’t just seen what I think I’ve seen,” John bellows. “That that wasn’t you throwing yourself all over those boys.”

“ What? ” says Cassie, looking at him incredulously, as if the mere suggestion is so far-fetched that even she can’t believe it.

“I saw you! You were hanging off some chump who looked even more embarrassed than I feel.”

“I-I…” starts Cassie, desperately looking to Nicole for help, now that their mother can no longer stand up for her.

“So not only have you made a complete and utter fool of yourself, heaping humiliation on me and your mother, but you’ve also spent the last fifteen minutes telling me barefaced lies.”

Cassie’s nostrils flare. “If you’re embarrassed to be my father, then that’s your problem, but don’t you ever suggest that Mum would be anything other than proud of me!” she cries, before storming out of the room.

“Come back here right now, young lady—”

“Don’t!” Nicole warns her father as she holds him back from following Cassie. “I’ll go.”

“Well, you’d better talk some sense into her,” he barks. “Because I will not have her behave the way she’s behaving.”

As Nicole climbs the stairs, her limbs weary with worry and fear, she wishes more than ever that she could slip in beside her mother like she used to. It takes her until she gets to the top that she realizes she still can.