The Other Family

‘What would he know—’

Nobody reacted. Chrissie gave a huge sigh and tore off a length of kitchen paper to blow her nose.

‘So it’l be another bil —’

‘No,’ Amy said. She was stil staring ahead, holding the ice cubes to her face. ‘No, no bil . He paid for it.’

Chrissie didn’t look at her.

‘I won’t ask how you know.’

Amy removed herself from Tamsin’s arm.

‘I’m going up to my room.’

Chrissie said, ‘I’l find you some arnica.’

‘I don’t want any arnica.’

‘Amy, please, let me—’

‘I don’t want any arnica,’ Amy said. ‘And I don’t want you to say anything else.’

‘I’l make some tea,’ Dil y said.

Chrissie nodded slowly. She put out a hand to detain Amy, but Amy ducked round it and went down the kitchen, and through the hal , and then they could hear her feet thudding on the stairs.

‘What have I done?’ Chrissie said.

There was another silence. Dil y picked up the kettle, preparatory to fil ing it. Tamsin took her phone out of her pocket.

‘I think,’ she said, ‘I’l just ring Robbie.’

Later, Dil y took a tray up to Amy’s room. She had been in the kitchen on her own for what felt like a lifetime, since Tamsin had gone to meet Robbie and Chrissie had shut herself in the sitting room with her phone and the television. Dil y had heard her on the phone for quite a long time, going on and on about something, probably to Sue, and then she’d come out and made a cup of coffee, and dropped a kiss on Dil y’s head, and gone back to the sitting room without speaking. Dil y hadn’t dared to speak herself. Al the time Chrissie was making coffee she had stared at her laptop screen, stared and stared without real y seeing anything, and when Chrissie had kissed her, she hadn’t known what to do and had heard herself give a little startled bleat that could have meant anything. And then the sitting-room door had closed again, very firmly, and she could hear the EastEnders theme tune, and she thought that she simply had to be with someone else, and not alone in the kitchen with Chrissie shut away and the practice room shut away and this terrible sense that everything was now in free fal .

So she put random things on a tray, pieces of fruit, and pots of this and that, and some sliced bread stil in its bag, and added a carton of juice and some glasses, and tiptoed stealthily past the sitting-room door and up the stairs to the top floor.

Amy was playing her flute. It was something Dil y recognized and couldn’t name, something she knew Amy had learned from her James Galway CD. Amy was playing it wel , Dil y could tel that, playing it with absorption and concentration. Dil y put the tray down on the landing and opened her own door. In a drawer in her desk was a box of chocolate-covered almonds a girl on her course had given her in order to stop her eating them herself. Dil y took them out of the drawer and added them to the tray. The addition went a little way towards Dil y’s incoherent but definite feeling that she wanted to do something to assuage the slap.

Amy finished playing her piece. Dil y counted to ten. Then she knocked on Amy’s door.

‘Yes?’ Amy said. She did not sound helpful.

Dil y opened the door and stooped to pick up the tray.

‘What’s that?’ Amy said.

‘Supper. Kind of.’

‘Did Mum send you?’

‘No,’ Dil y said. ‘Would she have sent al this?’

Amy looked at the tray.

‘Thanks, Dil .’

‘I couldn’t stand it down there,’ Dil y said. She peered at Amy. ‘How’s your face?’

‘The ice did it. Mostly. I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Nor me,’ Dil y said.

‘I keep thinking,’ Amy said, ‘that it can’t get worse, and then it does.’

Dil y put the tray down on the floor.

‘Craig says—’

‘Craig says—’ Amy mimicked.

‘If you’re going to be a bitch,’ Dil y said, ‘I’m leaving.’

‘Sorry—’

‘Don’t take it out on me. I brought you supper.’

‘Sorry, Dil .’