Tessa Hadley: Everything Will Be All Right

— It’s nice to know my own mother is so sympathetic.

— It makes me sick the way you watch this film over and over. I mean when, in real life, have you ever shown any interest in anyone’s suffering outside the immediate orbit of your own tiny circle? What do you care about real disaster? You’d rather sit playing at soap-opera sorrow in an overheated room, calling your friends on your mobile and crying phony tears about it to them.

— It isn’t soap opera. That just goes to show how much you know.

— You and your friends know nothing, you take no interest in the world outside.

— What do you understand about what I feel about anything? When do you ever ask me?

— It’s too pat. Zoe was stony. I’ve heard it all before. You’re young, and therefore it goes without saying that you’re hard done by and misunderstood. But wait a minute. What we’re talking about here is, You trashed my house! You do that and then you whine that I don’t respect you, that I don’t ask you about your feelings? Did you ask me about mine?

— You should listen to yourself one day, hear how you hate me. I’ve had enough of living in this prison house.

— Prison house? What would you know about prison? How can you be so innocent? Don’t you have any shame? Anyway, that’s fine by me, because I’ve had enough of you living here too.

— I’m going to go to Dad’s.

— To Dad’s? Zoe gave a hard hoot of laughter. Oh, yes, wonderful, go to Dad’s. I love it. Let’s see how you two get along.

— He said I could come and stay anytime.

— Then pack your bags. Put your clothes on and pack your bags. Do it now, right now. I’ll give you a lift to the station. I don’t see why he shouldn’t have to put up with you for a while.

— But I’m really ill.

— I don’t believe you.

Zoe stopped the video, threw open the window, and turned off the fire. Pearl stormed resentfully out of the room to run herself a fresh bath. From downstairs Zoe heard a sequence of indignant conversations on her mobile. Presumably one of them was to Simon. (Whatever had Pearl been telling him that had made him offer to have her to stay?) Zoe would be figuring in all these calls as an unfeeling villain. But until she dropped Pearl off at the station she was adamant, she didn’t falter. Then when she fixed her eyes on the retreating back as Pearl pushed through the doors to buy her ticket for Oxford — backpack slung jauntily on one shoulder, dressed up so bravely and deliberately to meet the world with her painted eyes and her costume of bright colors, ripped jeans, embroidered patchwork cap — Zoe had a vision of things from a different angle, and the mess in the house seemed only a temporary problem. But there were taxis queued to stop behind her and she couldn’t wait; she had to pull out and drive on; she couldn’t jump out of the car and run after Pearl and tell her that after all she loved her more than anything on earth.

* * *

— What if she was really ill? zoe asked joyce. (she had stopped by at her mother’s house on the way back from the station.) What if I’ve turned her out of her own home and there’s something seriously wrong with her?

Joyce was ironing Ray’s shirts.

— You can phone Simon and ask him how she is when she gets there.

— I’m horrible. I’m so horrible.

Zoe nursed her coffee cup in her hands as if she were cold; her face was haggard with bruise-colored swellings under her eyes. Joyce worried about her; she gave too much of herself to her work. Joyce was proud when she saw her daughter’s name in the national papers, but she saw how Zoe was eaten up with nervous energy when she had to do one of these big lectures.

— Of course you’re not horrible. Pearl’s impossible. I feel badly myself because I said I’d keep an eye on things. But when I popped in yesterday morning it didn’t look too awful, and she promised me she was going to tidy up. They must have had a party there last night.

— You wouldn’t ever have turned me or Daniel out on the street.

— In Daniel’s case it would probably have been very good for him. How was he?

— Really fine. We had a nice time. You know they’ve got some new girl working for them? From Romania.

— Oh, dear. I wonder what happened to the last one. Those poor little boys.

— I suppose working for Flavia is better than being trafficked here as a sex slave.

— Marginally, perhaps.

— All the way home I was planning on a hot bath. That’s why I went so mad. A long and mindless soak.

— Darling, have a bath here. Eat with us. We’ll go round together this evening and tackle the mess when you’ve rested.

— I’ve got to face up to it. I won’t be able to rest until it’s sorted. I’ll be all right once I get going.

— I’d come with you now, but I’ve got Vera for tea.

— Only, really, Mum, if you could see it! I truly don’t understand her. How can she be so utterly absorbed in herself? It’s not just the mess. It’s her complacency. It’s her unshakable certainty that she’s at the center of everything.

Joyce folded a shirt carefully.

— You’ve always had to be so busy, she said. I suppose if you’d been able to be at home more, she might have felt more secure and not needed to behave badly to get your attention. Of course it’s wonderful the way you manage things. But I do feel sorry for anyone having to juggle family and career. I was grateful, when I was your age, that I didn’t have to work.

— Oh, don’t start that again, said Zoe. We’ve been over that argument so many times.

— And then, she hasn’t ever had a father at home. Which wasn’t your fault.

— She didn’t need one. We’ve managed fine without.

— You should listen to Woman’s Hour. Everyone thinks differently about that now.

* * *

At home alone, zoe burned up with energy. She ran buckets of hot water with disinfectant, she filled black bags with rubbish and fag ends and beer cans and bottles; she put on rubber gloves and wiped and scoured every surface, even the backs and seats of chairs, that they might have touched with their sticky hands. She grew to feel she was in intimate communion with “them,” down in their dirt and their discards: Pearl’s gang, who congregated at weekends around the standing stones on the heath in further pursuit of their ever more incestuously entangled intimacies, probably thinking it was an ancient sacred site although in fact it was a nineteenth-century folly. Their heterogeneous uniform of droopy tops and baggy ripped trousers and dangling scarves and strings and laces was a more mannered rerun of the fashions of Zoe’s own teenage years. Some of “them” she could picture, the inner circle of familiar friends: a few sweet ones she was fond of, a couple of losers and no-goods. Some of them she fantasized, louche and sinister strangers, men mostly, taking advantage of Zoe’s absence and her goodwill, peddling drugs perhaps, hunting after sex. She snooped through the ashtrays and the debris in search of evidence of anything worse than the dope and the pills she knew about (though she wasn’t clear what the evidence might be). She scrubbed the toilet and the bathtub and the sink and the bathroom floor; she put all the towels in the laundry basket. She washed down the wall behind the plants; she scraped the kitchen rug free of flapjack and put it into the washing machine together with the sodden bath mat. After she had tried the dishwasher and heard the horrible noise it made, she stood washing and drying up for what seemed like hours, soaking the pans that were too far gone.

She phoned Simon to tell him what time Pearl was arriving and warn him she might be ill.

— I’ve given her money for a taxi, she said. I don’t know how she’ll get on with Martha.