Make or Break

I spent Sunday rearranging my things into the empty spaces so I didn’t feel so depressed when I saw Pete’s unoccupied side of the wardrobe or his bare bathroom shelf. I checked in on Annabelle but she was the epitome of that overused ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ saying that was on every mug, tea towel and meme. She and Marcus were taking the kids on a walk along the Thames and then having a cosy pub lunch. I was kind of hurt that she’d kept her relationship with Marcus a secret from me, but my happiness at her happiness overrode that hurt. I told myself that I had enough to contend with without adding ‘miffed’ to my list of new emotions. After Dave left for his night shift I donned a onesie, curled up on the sofa with a snack and FaceTimed Jimmy.

‘I’m just on my way out so I hope you don’t mind if I keep getting dressed,’ he said, setting up the phone on what I thought was probably the top of his drum kit and removing his T-shirt.

‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ I said, my expression, I’m sure, the extreme opposite of minding.

Jimmy grinned and dropped his shorts.

‘Where are you going?’ I said, nibbling on my snack and watching Jimmy zip around his room in his boxers locating clean clothing items.

‘Up Lion Head with Ian and Diego,’ he said, referring to a peak next to Table Mountain that Pete had said was supposed to be stunning and that Google had said was dangerous.

‘But it’s going to be dark soon,’ I fretted, noting the colour of the sky out of Jimmy’s balcony doors behind him. It was the burnt orangey-yellow of a gloriously hot Cape Town sunset. I ached to be back there.

‘It’s the full moon hike. We take torches.’ He pulled a T-shirt over his head. ‘Hundreds of people do it. It’s totally safe. Kids do it!’

‘Hmmm,’ I said, nibbling some more.

‘What are you eating?’ Jimmy said, picking up the phone and putting his face closer to the screen. His grey eyes sparkled.

I looked down at my bowl. ‘A salad.’

Jimmy narrowed his eyes. ‘That’s a bowl of cookies.’

‘Yes,’ I squared my shoulders. ‘It’s a cookie salad.’

Jimmy gave me a look.

‘A salad is merely a mixture containing a specified ingredient,’ I held up a cookie, ‘and served with a dressing.’

I received another look.

‘For the purpose of this conversation I researched the definition.’ I sniffed.

‘Right.’ Jimmy shook his head with a wry smile. ‘Well, you have no dressing.’

I held up a pot of chocolate sauce I’d been dipping the cookies into, poured it over the bowl then grinned into the screen.

While Jimmy found shorts and socks and batteries for his head torch we discussed my mother and father and my life of lies, then when he had to go, his bustling activity had me feeling slothful so I pushed my cookie salad to the side and spread my running gear out for an early-morning run. Don’t be stupid. Of course I went back and finished my salad. I’m no quitter.

After work on Monday, a day in which I stared at the computer achieving nothing, I went to Annabelle’s, as I had done every evening for the past three and a half years, but this time I’d called first to make sure Mum and Dad weren’t going to be there. Annabelle had said they were going to one of their friend’s houses for dinner. They were having a normal couple’s night out at another normal couple’s house, doing normal couple-y things like a normal, non-lying couple would do. Oh, how the deceit continued!

After feeding and bathing the kids, Annabelle and I sat cross-legged on her living room floor playing Monopoly Deal with Hunter and Katie, who were both sitting inside a polyester pop-up Frozen tent in the shape of a castle. Hunter played all card games from inside the purple and turquoise tent so he could strategise in secret. It also meant he could run all his moves past Katie in sign language.

‘Have there been any updates on . . .’ I glanced at the tent. ‘On the “situation”?’

‘Derek . . .’ Annabelle began, looking up at me for confirmation she’d said the right name, ‘hasn’t told the A Team yet.’

‘What?’ I said, placing down a card. ‘They’re just sitting over there in the sun not knowing anything of this is going on? They’re probably planning Derek a seventieth party as well!’

‘Probably,’ Annabelle said, frowning.

‘What if Derek tells the A Team everything and they decide they don’t want him?’ I said, placing my money cards on the floor. ‘Then what? Derek and Magdalena stay together and everything just continues as it was before except over in Cartagena a whole A Team is falling apart?’

While Annabelle blinked and tried to decipher what I’d said Hunter’s hand shot out of the tent, grabbed the cards and disappeared back through the polyester door flaps.

Eventually she just shrugged and I didn’t know if it was because she didn’t know the answer, or was struggling to follow the code I’d created so we could discuss Mum and Dad in front of the kids without them knowing what we were talking about. Magdalena was Mum, Derek was Dad, the A Team was his first family, and Annabelle, Mum and I were the B Team. And Cartagena was Cape Town for no other reason other than I liked how the ‘g’ was pronounced as an ‘h’, and saying it made me feel like I was in a movie about drug lords.

‘How do you think the A Team will react once they find out about the B Team?’ I said, and then had a sudden and horrid realisation. ‘The B Team will be the A Team’s dirty secret!’

I’d prided myself on never having dirty secrets and now I actually was one. Gross. I felt like showering.

Annabelle placed some cards down and Hunter’s face peeked out of the flaps to assess the play then disappeared back inside. She rubbed her temple. ‘This code is giving me a headache.’

After we put the kids to bed we did the dishes while continuing our assessment of the situation, but not in code so the conversation moved faster and nobody needed migraine medication.

‘Her name is Annika and she’s sixty-seven,’ Annabelle said of Dad’s wife. ‘She’s an interior designer and travels a lot. She does up rich people’s holiday homes in places like the Seychelles and Zanzibar. She’s apparently quite highly regarded in South African design circles.’

I shook my head and placed a clean pan on the dish rack. ‘This is so weird.’

Annabelle picked up the pan and dried it while telling me about the rest of his family. His daughter, Maryna, was forty-one, and also tall and blonde. But I already knew that. She was a stay-at-home mother, a nutritionist and blogger, and was working on her first healthy-eating cookbook. Her husband, Dad’s son-in-law, worked in finance and was apparently a really great guy. Annabelle then moved on to Dad’s grandchildren, Scarlett and Renzo, but I stopped her when she started listing what sports they did.

‘How are you able to have this information in your head and not go crazy with anger or jealousy or feel that you are living in a David Lynch TV series with a parallel universe?’ I said, genuinely mystified.

All this knowledge made me more and more mad. Dad had a very real life in another country with another family, and Annabelle seemed to be OK with it all. Or in denial. I was worried that she was compartmentalising a little too hard and this was going to come out later as a drug abuse relapse. Or worse; strict religious-ness (is that a word?). It was flipping me out.

‘Why aren’t you more . . .’ I did a four-limbed crazy seizure-type dance, which, if I’m totally honest with myself, was exactly the same as my normal dancing, and a cricket-ball-sized floof of suds fell from my soapy hands into my hair. ‘Aren’t you mad? Don’t you feel, I don’t know . . . ashamed? I know I do.’

Annabelle wiped some suds from my eyebrow. ‘Who am I to judge?’ she said. ‘Look at my family.’ She waved in the direction of her fridge, which was covered in photos of the kids, their artwork, play-centre newsletters and magnetic letters spelling words like ‘cat’ and ‘truck’.

I placed the last dish in the dish rack then dried my hands and sat down heavily on a dining chair.

‘Jess,’ Annabelle said, after putting away the last dish and sitting down next to me. ‘Do you love Hunter and Katie?’

I glared at her. ‘How can you even ask me that?!’

‘Well, they aren’t in a mum and dad/son and daughter family from a Ladybird book, are they?’

‘No,’ I said, picking at a groove in the table.

‘And I know you know that family doesn’t only come in one format.’

‘But we’ve been lied to,’ I said. ‘Don’t you have questions? Shouldn’t Dad be making a decision so we don’t have to sit around in this horrible limbo situation? I feel sick, like, all the time. And I just don’t understand why you aren’t angry. I’m furious!’

Annabelle put her arm around my shoulders and I leant into her. ‘Things are starting to go right for me,’ she said. ‘And it’s taking all my energy to keep it that way. Also,’ she released my shoulders and leant back to look me in the eyes. ‘You haven’t seen him, Jess . . . Dad is frightened. He’s terrified he’ll lose both families.’

I blinked away a tear. It hurt to think of my gentle-hearted, loving father afraid his families, whom I knew he loved fiercely, would reject him. Yet I couldn’t see how I would be able to forgive him. How any of us would be able to forgive him.

‘But you’re still talking to them both. It’s like you’re condoning it!’

‘I’m not condoning it. I’m just aware that people make mistakes.’

Another tear ran down my cheek.

‘You don’t understand because you don’t make mistakes,’ Annabelle said, passing me a tissue from a box with the Frozen characters on the side.

‘I do too!’ I said, blowing my nose. ‘I drank weed smoothies, I slept with a musician, I skip to the end of crime novels.’

Annabelle gave me a look that said ‘you don’t know the meaning of mistake till you’ve woken up in the Gare Du Nord with a Latvian Dubstep band, a ferret in a box and three extra earring holes.’

‘I post photos of myself on Facebook that make it seem like I’m having a great time when actually I feel shit, so am feeding into the FOMO culture that is causing one of the biggest spikes in mental health problems society has seen since the war. See? I’m a total rebel.’ As I blew my nose I was suddenly stuck by a thought. ‘Do you think Maryna is on Facebook?’

Annabelle and I looked at each other, then at my phone sitting on the kitchen table.

‘We shouldn’t,’ I said, but Annabelle was already typing in my passcode.

‘She’s really pretty.’ Annabelle clicked through the photos while I looked over her shoulder.

‘I know,’ I said, remembering seeing her in the thin-handed flesh.

Maryna didn’t seem to use Facebook often but she’d been tagged in plenty of group photos. One image showed her with her daughter, our half-niece, Scarlett. I recognised her from that horrible day at Sylvie’s restaurant. Annabelle lingered on the photo, staring at Scarlett with her long blonde hair and her sweet pre-teen face.

‘This feels a bit . . . icky,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think?’

Annabelle nodded yet continued to click through the images.

‘It’s weird to be looking at pictures of our half-sister when she doesn’t even know we exist. I think we should—’ I stopped.

Annabelle and I saw it at the same time. It was a family Christmas photo. About twenty-five people of all ages were gathered around a vast outdoor table, wearing shorts and vests and looking tanned and merry. Maryna, holding a platter of what looked like lobster, stood behind Dad, who, with a paper hat from a Christmas cracker on his head, was sitting on a chair with a little boy not much older than Hunter on his lap. Renzo. Dad’s other grandson. Annabelle and I stared at the photo for a long time. Dad’s arms were around Renzo’s waist and they were both looking down the lens laughing, like the person taking the photo had just said something hilarious. Renzo was wearing a Thor T-shirt just like the one Dad had brought home from Dubai for Hunter. I slipped the phone out of Annabelle’s trembling hands. She looked up with tears in her eyes and let out a shaky breath.