Charlotte Philby - The Most Difficult Thing

Stella would be fine. Stella was always fine, always the one to take the best from a situation, and make it hers. But Rose. My eyes prickled.

There was something about Rose that demanded you take care of her, from that first day at the hospital. Even when it was Stella who had needed me. Even though it was Stella who had been the one to give everyone the fright, it was Rose whose cries, when they came, small and unsure, unnerved me. Everything about her was milder, from the delicate features to the way she hung back, always letting her sister wade in ahead, gung-ho. The truth is, I see more than just my own face in Rose, and that is what scares me most.

‘Can I interest you in any duty free?’ The flight attendant flashes a fuchsia smile, beside the trolley.

I am grateful for the interruption.

‘Thank you, I’ll take a packet of Marlboro.’

My fingers are shaking as I hand my card to the outstretched hand before me. Taking the cigarettes, I feel the weight of them in my hands.

SMOKING SERIOUSLY HARMS YOU AND THOSE AROUND YOU.

The warning on the cigarette carton goads me. Toxic. Just like you . I hesitate. Not me, I remind myself. This is not my doing.

I imagine Clive, the outline of his face filling my mind as a jet of stale air seeps through the vents above my head, the thought of him powering me on. A few moments later, I lean my head back, allowing my thoughts, once more, to drift to the girls. It is like that story Maria used to read to them when they couldn’t sleep.

We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it … We’ve got to go through it.

I think of the three of them, she and the girls, perched on their bed along the hallway from mine. Sometimes, in those early days when I could still hardly bear to look at my daughters, I would lower myself into the nook of the doorway, listening to her sing or read to them. Closing my eyes, I would imagine their little faces staring up at me instead of her, their tiny fingers resting on mine.

‘Anything else?’ The flight attendant’s eyes are fixed on me. Briefly, I imagine myself lurching forward to grab her by the starched collar of her shirt, my voice curdling in my throat as I scream so close to the woman’s face that she can smell the fear on my breath. I can almost hear the words I might say: Turn back, I’ve left my children and I don’t know whether they’re safe .

But my voice, when it comes, is clipped and courteous, the strains of Queen’s English I’ve assimilated over years of working under Clarissa providing the perfect camouflage for the cracks in my confidence.

‘That’s all, thank you.’

As she turns, I feel tears prick behind the folds of my eyelids, and this time I let them come.

Closing my eyes, I picture the girls seated next to me on this very flight as they have been so many times before. Their ears immediately clamped shut with padded headphones. The sound of cartoons seeping out from the side. David, as ever, oblivious to the sound.

I feel my throat close. Letting the tears roll, I turn my face to the window of the plane, giving myself a minute before I wipe my cheeks with the sleeves of my shirt, pushing my back straight upright and forcing the tears to stop.

Open the box, place the thought into the box. Close the box. Just in time.

I open my eyes again just as the roar of the engines kicks in.

‘Madam, would you mind putting your seat forward for landing?’

I manage a congenial smile, and swallow.

‘Of course.’

Then

The newspaper office at South Quay stood at the end of an otherwise barren street, set back from the road, not so much insalubrious as unloved.

‘You look smart.’ Meg winked at me after a moment as we made our way up the front steps, a piece of gum rolling lazily against her tongue.

She was being kind but still I felt my cheeks flush, cursing the cheap suit-jacket and shirt I had hastily bought the moment she told me about the internship she had secured us, picking it out in the shopping centre in Guildford, only to discover on the first day that no one at the paper wore suits to the office apart from the news editors and the receptionists.

It had been both baffling and also completely believable when Meg announced, within six months of leaving university, that she had secured us both a placement at a national newspaper. That was the kind of power she had in those days, the kind that meant she could do anything and it should never surprise you.

She had met one of the editors at the members’ club she had been working at since moving to London; she shrugged when I pressed her on how she had got me a placement too.

‘But he hasn’t even met me …’ I countered reluctantly, trying to balance my gratitude with the sense that something was not right.

‘I sent him your CV.’

‘You don’t have my CV.’

‘And?’ She grinned, lifting her chin as she pulled on her cigarette, and I left the matter there, knowing how easy it was to write a fraudulent résumé. Knowing how willing people were to believe.

The wind snapped at our heels as we crossed the bridge, Meg leaning into me, the warmth of her body soothing my nerves. How I envied the ease with which she moved; how comfortable she was in her own skin, her nylon mini-skirt hitched around skinny thighs, thick black tights, DMs.

Noting my expression, she snatched my arm and squeezed it against her own. ‘I’m serious! You look hot. You’re like Maggie Gyllenhaal in that film David made us all watch in Freshers’ Week, but less slutty, obviously.’

We had still been practically strangers then, the three of us, wedged awkwardly together on cushions in the hallway of our shared house, watching Secretary on David’s laptop, busying our fingers with a bowl of nachos. Unaware of the roots that were taking hold, blind then to how tightly they would bind us together.

Feeling my cheeks flush, I changed the subject as we made our way through stiff automatic doors.

‘Have you been given any actual writing to do yet?’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Just more transcriptions for the Arts desk, it’s bullshit. I tried to talk to the Environment guy about a story idea but he just fobbed me off.’

I tried to hide my relief.

‘Still it’s better than a real job, I suppose. For now, at least.’ She moved towards the door.

My nails pressed into my palms as the familiar panic rose in my chest, fingers searching for a ledge to break the fall.

For now? The thought of how much I had already spent on the month-long train ticket from Guildford to the Docklands – almost all of the little money I had saved while working double shifts at the bakery in town – all that I had already done, on the basis that there would be a paid job at the end of this, a career, a chance to get away, made my gut twist.

‘You don’t really think that?’ I tried to sound calmer than I felt. Despite three years of friendship, I still could not let Meg see the true extent of my need. Had she spotted it, the day we left our shared flat in Brighton, she heading to London to chase the career she had always known was rightfully hers, while I returned to Surrey, my face burning with the loss of a life that had always felt borrowed?

I pictured it now, the flat we shared at the top of a crumbling Regency town house, wedged beneath two more of its kind on a thin strip of side-street leading from St James’s Street down to the sea. I loved that flat, with its slanting floorboards and faded magnolia walls; I loved my bedroom, which overlooked the back of the house and a tiny courtyard below – more of a pit than a garden, a dry rectangle well speckled with cigarette butts and seagull feathers. I loved the way I could look out of the window from our battered Chipperfield sofa, onto Kemptown with its bars and pubs which throbbed with noise no matter what time of day or night, and not recognise a soul.