Meg Rosoff: How I Live Now

It’s a shame, starting out your first day on the planet as a murderer but there you go, I didn’t have much choice at the time. Still, I could live quite happily without the labels I picked up because of it. Murderer or Poor Motherless Lamb.

Which one would you choose, the rock or the hard place?

Dad was one of those Never Mention Her Name Again type of fathers which if you ask me was extremely un-psychologically correct of him. Leah’s father worked on Wall Street and shot himself one day when he lost $600 million of someone else’s money and they never shut up about him in their house. Which, as Leah likes to point out, is not the perfect answer either.

I sometimes wished someone would just fill me in on the simple boring things like did she have big feet or wear makeup and what was her favorite song and did she like dogs or have a nice voice and what books did she read etc. I made up my mind to ask Aunt Penn some of these questions when she came back from Oslo but I guess what you really want to know are the things you can’t ask like Did she have eyes like yours and When you pushed my hair back was that what it feels like to have your mother do it and Did her hands look serious and quiet like yours and Did she ever have a chance to look at me with a complicated expression like the one on your face, and by the way Was she scared to die.

Then Edmond and Piper came and lay down on the blanket, one on either side of me with Piper holding my hand as usual and Isaac still standing in the water looking peaceful and they started arguing about what flies trout liked best in a quiet lazy sort of way, and Edmond blew smoke rings in the air and I closed my eyes and wished they were mine.

Ihardly saw Osbert that week because he went to school, unlike Isaac and Edmond and Piper, who were supposed to be homeschooled, which as far as I could tell meant reading whatever books you happen to be interested in, and every once in a blue moon having Aunt Penn say Have you learned any geography? and them saying yes.

Now this was clearly one of the greatest improvements on the education system since time began and I was greatly looking forward to being enrolled but Aunt Penn said that I didn’t have to do much of anything until autumn term, which didn’t start until September, and by that time no one was going to school anyway due to the You Know What.

Without anyone making a big deal of it or punching me on the shoulder and saying You’re OK Cousin Daisy like they do on TV, Piper and Edmond and Isaac and I started doing pretty much everything together, though sometimes I forgot to count Isaac because he could go days without saying a single word. I knew Aunt Penn wasn’t worried about him because I heard her say to someone that he’d speak when he was ready to speak, but all I could think was in New York that kid would have been stuck in a straitjacket practically from birth and dangled over a tank full of Educational Consultants and Remedial Experts all snapping at his ankles for the next twenty years arguing about his Special Needs and getting paid plenty for it.

I went quietly down to Aunt Penn’s office a few nights later hoping I might be able to send some e-mails to all the people who must have thought I’d disappeared off the face of the earth and there was a light under the door and Aunt Penn’s voice said Edmond? I thought at first I’d say nothing, just sneak away, but at the last minute I changed my mind and said No, it’s Daisy. Aunt Penn said Oh Daisy please come in, and she looked so happy to see me and said Sit by the fire a minute. Even though it was April it was freezing cold at night and she said You wouldn’t believe what it costs to heat this drafty old house.

I huddled up close to the fire and she put her work away saying she’d done more than enough for one night and when she saw I was still shivering she got up from her chair and wrapped a blanket around me, all the time with a look on her face like a smile only sadder and then she sat down next to me on the sofa and started telling me about her sister and it took me a second to realize the person she meant was my mother.

She told me things I never knew like how her sister was all set to go to university to study history when she fell in love with my father and decided not to go after all, which made their father furious. When she went away to live in America hardly any of the family was speaking to her. Then from the top of her desk Aunt Penn took down a framed picture of two young women looking almost the same, one of them laughing and one looking serious and holding on to the neck of a huge wild-looking gray dog Aunt Penn said was called Lady, As a joke because she had no manners at all, but look how your mother adored her.

I’ve seen plenty of pictures of my mother at home, but almost always with my father and not a single one taken before he knew her, so this was strange because she looked so different, happy and young like someone you’ve known in another life. Aunt Penn said I could keep the photograph but I said No thank you because it seemed to belong to that desk and that room, and I didn’t want to drag it away to a foreign place.

Aunt Penn rubbed one hand across her eyes and said it was late and we both needed to go to bed but just as I was getting to the door she said When your mother phoned to tell me she was pregnant, she sounded happier than she’d ever sounded in her whole life about that baby. Which was you, Daisy. Then she told me to run upstairs before I caught cold but it seemed like hours before I stopped shivering.

The next day Aunt Penn set off for Oslo and we didn’t think much about it except that we were in charge and pretty happy about it, but later when you look back on the whole story you realize that the moment she left was exactly the moment we all started skewing off into crisis like how Archduke Ferdinand getting killed started WWI even though the connection, to me at least, was never that clear.

At the time she just kissed each of us and smiled and told us to be sensible and there was something about the way she didn’t even miss a beat when it came to kissing me that made me feel better than almost all the nice things that had happened since I arrived.

We didn’t get much of a chance to sit back and enjoy being orphans before things started happening.

The first thing that happened wasn’t our fault. That was a bomb that went off in the middle of a big train station in London the day after Aunt Penn went to Oslo and something like seven or seventy thousand people got killed.

This obviously went over very badly with the populace at large and was pretty scary etc. but to be honest it didn’t seem to have that much to do with us way off in the country. How it did affect us was it made them close all the airports, which meant no one could get home for the foreseeable future, namely Aunt Penn. None of us dared to say that having no parents at all was pretty cool, but you didn’t have to be a mind reader to figure it out. Basically we couldn’t believe our luck, and for a little while it felt like we were on some big train rolling down a hill, and all we cared about was how great it felt to be going fast.

That same day after the first bomb went off everyone just sat glued to the television and the radio, and the telephone kept ringing asking us if we were OK, but given we were about four million miles from the epicenter I’d say we stood a pretty good chance of surviving.

Of course everyone was talking about food shortages and shutting down transportation and calling up all the able-bodied men and basically all the Gloom and Doom stuff they could possibly think up in the limited time allotted, and the guys on the radio were talking in solemn voices asking anyone they could drag off the street Whether This Meant War and then we had to listen to all the solemn experts pretending to have the inside track when any one of them would have given his left arm to know the game plan himself.