He looks at his dad again. “I’m fine,” he says. “Oh I brought you both these.” He opens up the kitchen paper in front of him I’d not noticed on the table and points to a collection of little baby strawberries, their delicate juice turning the paper pink. “I grew them at home, with Mum.” He shares them out carefully; he’s learned that perceived injustice is at the root of almost all sibling fights, so he takes pains to give the same number of fruits, of approximately the same size, to each of us. Robin scoffs hers in one go but I eat them slowly, trying to show how much I appreciate it.
A big fuss is made of going to buy drinks, with the dads staring each other down. Eventually Drew Granger stops insisting and just walks inside, and my dad follows after him. I notice that the mums aren’t talking to each other, when usually they’re talking at the same time. Instead, Hilary asks me about my dress—it’s a cream embroidered one that I love and am almost too big for—and, noticing that Robin is in jeans and a T-shirt with a dinosaur on it, asks if she likes dinosaurs. Robin looks at her like it’s a ridiculous question. “Everyone likes dinosaurs,” she says. Now it’s Mum’s turn: she compliments Callum on his smart hairstyle and he goes so pink he glows. When the dads come back with two trays, we’re all relieved.
“Who wants to start?” says Mum. We all look at her. Dad looks away first and studies his hands, so Drew Granger half-stands up like he’s a teacher but then sits back down. “I’ll do it,” he says.
All of us kids take a drink of our pop. I’ve taken my straw out like Callum, but when I see how much the line of Robin’s drink zooms down when she sucks, I reconsider and dunk my straw back. Still we wait.
“So,” Drew Granger says, and it sounds like he’s going to run some kind of meeting. “We all have some news.”
I notice that Hilary is shaking a little and she reaches for Callum’s hand. I notice that our usually laid-back dad is fidgeting and irritable. He picks at a knot in the wooden table, shuffles his feet around so his cord trousers make a swishing sound. He doesn’t stop, even when Mum gives him a look. If anything, the swishing grows louder.
“We’ve all been friends for some time,” Drew says, “and we’ve got to know one another very well. And sometimes, when people become friends, they get to know each other so well they realize that actually they should spend more time together.”
This is strange to me, because we’ve spent far less time together in the last few weeks, but the memory of Mum and Drew on the sofa makes my stomach churn. I don’t know what he’s going to say but I don’t like where it’s headed. Robin is clueless. She slurps the last of her Coke and burps.
“Is this about you and Mum snogging?” Robin asks, and everyone gasps.
“What?” Dad shouts.
“In the kitchen, when I had a bad tummy,” Robin says, chasing ice cubes around with her straw. The adults all look at one another. Dad looks like he’s going to pop.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Dad shouts, and he stands up now. “You did that in front of our kids?” He points his finger at Mum, and I notice Drew puts his arm around her briefly before he stands up and faces my dad eye to eye.
“Calm down, Jack,” Drew says. Callum grasps his mum’s arm and she puts her hand over his.
“It’s too late to rake over the details,” Mum says. “Please calm down, Jack.”
“Calm down?” My dad’s eyes suddenly get wet and it’s like he’s taken by surprise, because he sits down heavily and just stares at Mum.
“Yes, it is, Robin,” Hilary finally says in her creamy advert voice. “It is about that. Your mum and Drew realized that they liked each other quite a bit and that they have a lot in common.” She took a deep breath, looked at Dad just briefly. “So eventually they told your dad and me about it. And we were very shocked.” Hilary looks down.
“We were fucking fuming,” Dad growls, looking Drew Granger in the eye and then turning to Mum. Dad takes over: “And we were very pissed off that they’d been running around behind our backs.”
Hilary reaches across all of us to tap Dad on the hands, and he stops jiggling his leg and looks down again, his eyes even wetter than before.
“Well,” Hilary says, her own tears starting to slide through her makeup. “We all talked about it. And that was very tough. We weren’t sure what to do for the best. And Jack and I started to spend a bit more time together while we were working out what we could do.”
I start to feel sick. Robin has stopped moving the straw around and is glaring at Mum. Callum has just wiped his eyes on his shirt and now does it again. I feel my heart get quicker until I can hear it banging.
“You can’t help who you fall in love with!” Mum exclaims dramatically, and we all look at her.
“No,” Drew Granger says in a bellicose grunt aimed at Dad. “You can’t, Angela.”
“We talked about what should happen and how to make it work best,” Hilary repeated, ignoring them. “And the more Jack and I spent time together, we stopped talking about how angry and sad we were and we started to realize that we liked each other too. We have lots in common, like the love of gardening and things—” I see my mum roll her eyes just slightly and I think, No, you don’t have the right, but I squash the thought down.
“How long has this been going on?” Robin says. “All this falling in love and spending time together stuff?” Her eyes are black and narrow, and she’s staring at our mother like she could leap across the table and bite her.
“That’s not what’s important,” Drew Granger says.
“No, ’course not,” Dad says spikily.
Drew opens his mouth to say something else, but Mum must have done something under the table, because he looks at her suddenly and then flashes her a quick smile.
“The thing is,” Mum says, “there’s been a lot to consider. But we’ve decided that we can’t carry on as we are and that Drew and I want to be together.” I look at Robin and Callum, aghast; their pale faces stare back at me. “And Dad and Hilary have decided that they would like to see if they can be happy together too,” Mum says, like she’s reading from a script. “So we’re going to have to make some changes.” Callum folds into his mum. He’s crying openly now and I notice that Drew is looking at him like there’s a sour taste on his own tongue.
“It’s okay, darling.” Hilary rubs Callum’s arms and Callum whispers something about his dad, and Hilary whispers something back and rubs his arms and back even more.
ROBIN|1991
When Robin woke up this morning, it was just like every other boring day in the holidays. But now she would like nothing more than to crawl back through time on her belly, sit on the sofa in her nightie watching Why Don’t You…? and enjoy the feeling that everything was the same as it always had been.
Now nothing was going to be the same. Her parents had just told her, here in this beer garden, that everything was changing. Her mum was moving out and going to live with Callum’s dad, and Callum and his mum were going to come and live with her dad.
“But where will he sleep?” she asked, refusing to use Callum’s name, so that the plan seemed less definite. “There’s no room.”
And that’s when they split the twins’ world apart.