‘Thanks,’ Maisie says, still reading the sheets. ‘I’m, like, fifteen per cent Greek,’ she says.
‘That’s right, you’re from immigrant stock,’ says Grandpa. ‘Along with your height, that’s another thing to be proud of.’
‘Yes but look, it’s so specific. It’s not even Greece, it’s like, Southern Greece.’
‘That’s right,’ says Grandpa. ‘My family side are from Sparta. Never mind your Vikings, the Spartans were real warriors. Put me in an arena with that Jules and I’d have him in a headlock in a second.’ He flexes his arms.
‘I’m not telling Jules about being from Sparta! I’d never hear the end of it.’
‘Sorry, what was all that?’ says Becky. An impossible thought is assembling itself, through the fog of too-many-other-things. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said put me in an arena with that Jules …’
‘No, the bit about Maisie and Greece.’
Maisie leaps up and comes round the table to sit next to Becky, pointing to a pie chart. ‘So this is me. I am the pie. And this is all the gene pools that I’m made up of. And this is over, like, a thousand years. They take tiny little mutations and average patterns and loads of science stuff and it says what you’re made up of. Like, there’s a bit of Jewish genes there, like three per cent?’
‘That’s my great-grandmother!’ says Grandma T happily. ‘She married out. Big scandal. This is wonderful!’
Becky looks at Grandma and Grandpa T. Her daughter. ‘And can it be wrong?’ she says. With every breath from her lungs and beat of her heart she hopes, wishes, prays it is wrong.
Becky can’t look at Adam but from the corner of her eye she can see he is looking fixedly at the table.
‘It’s just data,’ says Maisie. ‘But you know, I just feel so Greek. I often prefer to eat olives when crisps are also a choice.’
‘I like this present,’ says Grandpa. ‘Your people grew olives outside Kalamata. My own grandfather used to talk about them being big as apples. Does it say about Kalamata?’
Becky stands, legs weak underneath her, edging past Maisie, gripping the back of chairs as if they were crutches. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m not feeling well. I have to lie down.’
‘Should we wait?’ says Maisie.
‘Help her, Adam!’ says Grandma T.
‘No!’ says Becky, the trembling spreading through her body like a fever she will never be rid of. Adam doesn’t move. ‘No. Go on without me.’
Becky hears a roaring in her ears as she runs up the stairs. It is the sound of the universe ending, of hell opening.
She finds herself standing motionless in the doorway to her bedroom, absorbing the surroundings as if recently killed and now standing outside her own body, hanging onto the last images of life: the rose-pink walls painted in eggshell. Curtains held back with lengths of nautical rope. Shelves refitted twice so they wouldn’t slant. All Adam’s DIY.
He has touched her here, in this room, and now everything that he has ever touched, those shelves, her ribcage, her neck, is damaged.
She hears the sound of the grandparents and Maisie gathering in the hallway, and the click of the front door, and finally those voices receding down the street.
Then a knock on her bedroom door, before Adam steps in.
If he is there, armed with a long-rehearsed emergency explanation, it fails him at their first moment of eye contact. She has known the paralysis of shock, the caving-in feeling of bad news making her legs buckle, but this is different. Why is he here, in her bedroom, when he should be far away and never returning?
At first she cannot speak and it kills her that she can’t get her words out because she wants them to fly out of her, like daggers, landing in his flesh, cutting him into parts.
‘I can explain,’ he says.
She rushes at him with arms raised and, feeling the white heat of grief and anger fill up the space inside her, forms boxer’s fists. Then, for the first time in as long as she can remember, she uses her physical strength to harm someone other than herself.
She pounds away at Adam’s half-covered head as he ducks down, like he is a stake she is trying to bury deep in the earth, her fists like mallets, only stopping when she is exhausted and has not managed to destroy him, has not buried him out of existence. Then she stumbles back, away from him, the bed between them as protection. She stands trembling with her spine pressed to the wall, panic swelling up through her breathlessness. She claws at her own throat, and all she can say is, ‘It was you it was you it was you.’
She sinks now, his mirror image on the far side of the room, on her knees, overwhelmed by the pure misery of love curdling and blackening. Her heart …! Oh God, how it hurts.
For long minutes they stay that way, the room’s length between them, Adam racked with sobs, Becky fighting a new urge to be sick, to be empty, to become a void again, capable of feeling nothing.
It was him. He did this to her and he kept silent. Sixteen years of obsession and hatred and harm – and he said nothing.
Everything becomes stillness. And then finally she can speak. Her heart cooling into iron, closing to him. Speaking to him from a dead place.
‘You let me suffer,’ she says.
‘Please …’
‘You knew that I needed to know. I had to know what happened to me and you knew and you didn’t tell me. Because it was you who did it.’
‘Becks …’
‘Don’t call me that.’
‘Oh shit …’ Adam topples forward, his face pressed into the carpet, a picture of destruction.
‘Sit up,’ she says.
Now there is only room in her heart for the practical things that need to be done. ‘Maisie will be back soon because she’ll want to know how I am, and I don’t want her seeing this.’ Becky wonders whether she will be able to control herself when it comes
