LITMIR.BIZ

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no doubt), making you twenty-four to my forty-one. Obscene. The charmed life of a graduate, and a hugely privileged one at that, brazenly stretching ahead of you; a long corridor lined with doors blown wide open by your confidence and your utter gorgeousness. That used to be me, I thought, now it’s other people; now it’s you.

      ‘What’s her name? Just so I can really get on board when you’re bitching about her.’

      I turned my head towards the ceiling, the only clear white space in my whole flat.

      ‘Her name is Lily.’

      ‘Lily. They’re always called something like Poppy, or Daisy or Lily. She sounds like a proper Snowflake, love. You might need to watch yourself.’

      Damnation is a tale of desire, betrayal and despair. I’d agreed to watch it only to humour Iain really, doing a bit of work on the side. But while he was out-cold after the first twenty minutes, I watched to the bitter end. It spoke to me.

      When it was over, I shut my laptop and watched him asleep, or unconscious, his mouth agape in a classic grandad-after-Christmas-lunch way. And I loved him.

      ‘Iain. Iain? Come to bed,’ I shook his shoulder and touched his face, trying to wake him in the same way I did every night. But he never stirred when he was like that. He’d come round in a couple of hours and throw himself down on our bed. So, as usual, I left him, crept to the bathroom, locked the door and inserted two fingers into the back of my throat, letting go of all the fat and sugar Iain had put in me.

      You see, Iain needed to feel he was doing something, anything, to contribute to our life and my happiness. Food was his medium. In the day, I retained the foods I’d chosen for myself. Come the night, I had to let my partner fulfil his role, but I couldn’t have his food pillowing me out into full-frontal middle age. You wouldn’t understand, but this purging ritual was an act of love. It was one of the many secrets of our long and happy relationship.

      When I slept that night, I had the dream where I tried to reach the paddock gate for the first time. I cried out for the child in me; the dreadful sense of my mother’s hate relived for the first time in years.

Lily

       5th March – The First Day, continued

      Stay late in the office. Get a couple of stories up online. Think twice about the picture byline, but I’m actually really proud of what I’ve produced, so I go for it. Asif assumes it’s Gem’s idea, she assumes it’s his. No one tries to stop me.

      I get inside my building as I always try to – without the concierge seeing me.

      When I came down to London with Gem, I was desperate to avoid staying with her or Mum. They want too much from me, from what my life could be, or maybe now, what it could have been. Everything they say wears me down to less than I am. Especially Gem. She’s so over-invested, there’s no way she could ever get a decent return. She always demands the best by reminding me of the worst, ‘You can do better. You can be better.’ It’s too much to keep up with being the version of me Gem expects at work and at home.

      It started the very first day we moved in with her.

      We’d celebrated my eighth birthday by getting evicted. Mum had been late again with the rent, the landlord wanted us out and was keeping the deposit. We packed our things and schlepped from where we were in Newham to Gem’s place in Marylebone. I’d been there before and other people will say it was a completely gorgeous place. Huge. But to me it was like travelling to another planet. All I wanted to do was go back to our old flat and my old school where everyone knew me. When we’d visited the Marylebone place before, it seemed like there was too much space. I never felt comfortable. From the moment we had to live there, I knew I was never going to fill the place. I also knew from the off that was the one thing Gem expected. I was there to plug the gaps in her life.

      Gem’s challenge was that investing in a relationship to produce children was too high risk for her. The chances of getting what she wanted out of it were too open. Owning a child ready-made by someone else took away that risk factor. Enter me.

      I remember us turning up with our backpacks and carrier bags of my cuddly toys. Gem opened the door and scooped me off her step and swung me into her hallway, triumphant. My mum had conceded: she needed Gem’s help to raise me and I was now in her home indefinitely. She would get to be a parent.

      ‘Welcome home, my darling. I’m so happy you’re here. Now, how about you and I make a deal. You know what a deal is, don’t you, Lily?’

      ‘I think so.’ Gem, always with the ‘deals’ and ‘negotiations’, every bit of her life, even the most personal, based on a hustle rigged so she walks away with more than she deserves.

      ‘I’ll be the best aunt in the whole wide world, I will make sure you always have a home with me if you can promise to be the best Lily you can be. Can you do that for me?’

      I nodded. I could feel the weight loaded into the words. I’ve always felt in deficit with Mum, like I owed her a favour and now I guessed Gem was doing the same. I wanted to ask her what I had to do to make things OK, but I could feel the sobs trying to tear their way out of my lungs and I didn’t want to lose it, I guess because I already had an idea that wouldn’t be what ‘best Lily’ would do.

      To my mum, Gem said nothing. She held the door and watched her sister walk in. There was nothing to say. Gem and Mum’s parents were apparently dirt poor, but Gem had ‘pulled herself up by the bootstraps’. My mum, on the other hand, had continued the family traditional of bad jobs and bad housing. She never understood Gem’s belief that stacks of cash were all anyone could desire. All Mum wanted was a simple life – husband, kids, little house, little job, which drove Gem mad; she hated Mum’s life choices. ‘Elaine, your problem is you aim so low. There’s so little margin for error, one tiny wobble puts you on your knees,’ I heard Gem say once, with relish. The final eviction had proved Gem right: my mum couldn’t even do the basics. There she was, homeless and alone with one child she’d apparently ‘waited a long time for’ but whose existence she blamed for pushing my dad out the door.

      Mum and I climbed up the staircase that smelt like a church to our rooms. When we got to my room, my mum told me, ‘Don’t listen to what she says. You don’t belong to her.’

      I told my mum, ‘I don’t belong to anyone. Not you either,’ because I don’t. I was right and she knew it.

      From nowhere, she said, ‘I do my best, Lily. I know that’s not good enough for you, it wasn’t enough your father.’

      Dad the Disappeared. The taboo I was never allowed to speak of, but she could lob at me whenever it suited. I wanted to make her pay for saying his name and for putting me in that big stupid flat and the dumb new school I knew I’d be dragged to soon enough.

      ‘But you can’t look after me. That’s why we’ve had to move in with Gem, isn’t it?’

      ‘Listen to me. She is not your mother. I am, for my sins.’

      I looked at her right in the eyes and asked, ‘What’s a sin, Elaine?’

      She was quiet for what felt like a long time, her rough fingers gripping legs covered by a cheap denim skirt. ‘Come down when you’ve unpacked your things and washed your hands.’

      So, from that day, I knew it was going to be a case of one of them thinking, ‘If I press this button, will she come closer to me than to her?’ or, ‘If I dangle this carrot, promise her this, will she bend my way?’ Gem wanted her trophy ‘daughter’ and Mum wanted to keep control over the one thing she had and Gem didn’t. That’s not love, is it? People assume because I had not one but two maternal figures, I grew up in a kind of paradise. But I was not nurtured, I was experimented on as they tried to beat each other using me. The only way I was going to survive was by pitting the two of them against each other.

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