Greenwich Park by Katherine Faulkner (primary phonics .TXT) 📕

Ruby is still jumping up and down on the sofa when I walk back in, her hair braid following her up and down in the air, thumping against her gap-toothed grin. She is telling me about how she lost another tooth, and the tooth fairy came, and then it came again at Daddy’s, because it must have got confused, and they are doing the Romans at school, and do I know what a charioteer is, and Nora isn’t her friend any more and can she stay up late? I tell her it’s already quite late, and she’ll have to ask her Daddy, and that I need to go to the bathroom.

From the bathroom, I hear the muffled sound of Charlie telling Ruby it’s bedtime, that she needs to brush her teeth or they won’t have time for a story. As I wash my hands, I notice a pink pair of Disney pyjamas warming on the radiator.

I make myself a cup of tea and stay in the kitchen, listening to Charlie reading The Twits to Ruby in her bedroom. Within a few minutes, I hear him creeping out, flicking the light off. The flat feels still and quiet. I walk into the living room to see Charlie slumping down on his sofa, cracking open a beer. I sit down awkwardly next to him. His spider plant needs watering. The blinds on his window are broken.

‘So. How are things?’

Charlie shrugs. ‘Fine. Same as always.’

‘Ruby seems happy.’

‘She is happy.’ There is a snap in his voice.

‘You don’t need to say it like that.’

‘Well, it’s just so obvious what you’re thinking, Helen. I don’t know why you don’t just come out with it.’

I sniff, set my mug down on his coffee table. ‘I just … I don’t know why you insist on living here. Not when you have all that money. You could live somewhere better. Somewhere with a garden. That roof terrace isn’t even safe. It’s like you live here on purpose, to prove something.’

Charlie looks at me, and I recognise the anger in his face, from when we used to fight, when we were children. But it is a man’s face, now. We are not children any more.

‘Anything else you want to tell me about parenting?’

The words sting me.

‘I live here, because Ruby lives here,’ he says. ‘Her school is here. Maja and Bruce live here. My work is three streets away.’ He gestures into the air. ‘I don’t know what you want, Helen. Normal children don’t live in mansions on Greenwich Park with seventy-foot gardens. Normal families live like us.’

He takes a deep swig of beer, puts the bottle down harder than he needs to.

‘We take her to the playground. We take her to Brownies and football and forest school and karate. She loves her school. She has friends. She has hobbies. Occasionally she even eats fucking vegetables. She is happy. We are happy, Helen.’

I look at my younger brother. I see that there is a sticky chocolate smudge on his jeans, bags under his eyes. I think about the home-made pasta sauce, the pyjamas on the radiator. And I realise I don’t know how to do this. Any of it. And my brother, my useless, naughty little brother is doing it already.

Charlie’s face is so like Mummy. I think about when Ruby was born, how tiny she was, how perfect. The picture they sent of her with her little hands and feet, her rosebud lips. A picture I could barely look at. I think about all the times we said we’d go and visit, all the times I said I was going to do it, this time. That this time, I would get there. But then when we got to the car, I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. I think about Charlie’s voice on the phone. ‘It’s cool, Helen,’ he’d say. ‘We understand. I hope you’re doing OK.’

Then I think about when I’d gone to see Ruby with Katie, on her third birthday. How the present I’d got her was too babyish, and she didn’t really like it. How she’d run to Katie, and not me. I think about later, all the times they came to Greenwich and I tried to take her to educational things, and she’d been bored, fussing at Charlie’s feet, asking if she could go and splash in the fountains, or watch the busker and the bubble man at the park gates, or ride on the merry-go-round, or get an ice cream from the van. Why didn’t I just say yes? Why was I always trying to be like Daddy?

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘It’s just. Sometimes, you feel … so far away.’

I see his face soften. His eyes. Mummy’s eyes. And then he does something he hasn’t done in years. He puts his arm around me. After a moment, I hug him back.

When I sit back into the orange sofa, Charlie rises and plucks an Action Man from the beanbag, and throws it into the toy box, then sinks into it, so that he is now opposite me.

‘You didn’t need to come all this way, Helen,’ he says eventually. ‘You must be knackered. I’d have come to see you, if you’d said. If you’d wanted to talk.’

I nod. I say nothing.

‘Why did you come?’

I pass him the photograph Katie took from the club. He looks at the picture, and I see his pupils dilate. He inhales sharply.

‘Where did you get this?’

I don’t answer the question.

‘I need to know the truth, Charlie. About you and Rachel.’

41 WEEKS

HELEN

Daniel and I get to Serena’s exhibition late, and it is busy, glasses of wine clinking, the hum of chatter spiralling up into the high roof of the warehouse. The room is dark, except for the white beam of the light boxes that display her photographs. There are eight on each wall. The pictures cast blurry white reflections in the shiny floor, like a moon over water.

‘What do you think?’ I ask