“It’s fine, go back to sleep,” Julia whispered, and Saskia nodded wordlessly and closed her eyes and the door again.
It was three o’clock in the morning and on the ground floor of the house both of their children were screaming, voluble and operatic. Over James’s shoulder Julia looked down and saw Gwen at the foot of the stairs, dressed in tartan brushed cotton pajama shorts and a faded Rainbow Brite T-shirt. She had worn this at seven or eight years old and called it back into service as an ironic retro item, though it seemed to Julia that she had been seven or eight only yesterday and there was nothing ironic about a child in child’s clothing, however much midriff it now exposed. Gwen’s hair was electric, huge and wild around her pale face and she was pacing back and forth in the narrow hall as if barring the front door, a scrawny and gesticulating Cerberus.
“You can’t! You can’t say that, you can’t, you can’t just rewrite everything.” Gwen’s thick glasses slipped to the end of her nose on a slick of tears and sweat, and she was forced to pause and push them back up with her forefinger. “It’s not fair!”
“Hey. Keep your voices down. What’s wrong with you? Where’ve you been, Nathan? I’ve been calling you, come here, I’ve been worried. We needed to talk today.”
Neither teenager gave any evidence they could hear James speaking. Nathan lurched into view from the kitchen and began to repeat that Gwen was insane, out of her mind, impossible to reason with. His voice was loud, slurred with alcohol and outrage, and he had the hood of his sweatshirt tightened low over his brow so that his face was in shadow and he looked as if he were about to commit a mugging, or an act of light vandalism. Gwen, who had begun to hyperventilate, was gulping back strangled hiccups of rage between each choked word of accusation.
James rushed to pull his son into a tight bear hug as Julia went to embrace her daughter. Gwen did not succumb easily, her long limbs stiff and flailing, her narrow shoulders heaving with jagged, desperate breaths.
“Shh. Breathe, Dolly. What is going on?” Julia pushed back the few damp curls that had stuck to Gwen’s sweating brow just as James, in less compassionate tones, turned and demanded, “What the hell is going on down here? Why are you shouting at him?” He had one arm thrown over Nathan’s shoulder, his hand upon his son’s chest, upon his notionally broken heart. Nathan’s eyes were pink-rimmed and bloodshot. Crying? Drugs, maybe? Julia did not feel particularly sympathetic to either cause. She glared at James.
“Ask her,” Nathan said bitterly, pointing, “she’s having a psychotic break. She’s actually psychotic. I haven’t done anything wrong. My life is officially over now, thank you, thank you very much; you can’t actually keep me chained in this house anymore; I’m not a hostage, I’m allowed time off for good fucking behavior. And I’m allowed to say that the reason my life is over is—”
“Your life is not over, you got amazing grades—”
“Oh yeah, they’re really amazing. They’re amazing for a retard. Amazing for a school like yours where everyone does Goat Milking and General Studies and fucking Art, amazing for you with your accidental, ‘Oh, I only care about rainbows and glitter and oops! I get As.’”
“Art is just as important as what you do!”
Nathan turned unsteadily on his heel and set off toward the front door; Gwen shrieked with incoherent rage, shaking Julia off and chasing him. “Stop walking away from me! Come back! COME BACK!”
“Enough,” hissed James, springing forward to bar Nathan’s exit. Gwen and Nathan paused and looked at him. “Nathan, I want to talk to you, properly. But this is not the way, and you are not walking out of this house again tonight, do you understand? You both sort your asses out like civilized adults.”
Nathan, who had been looking slightly queasy and fleetingly contrite, raised his face in a sneer. “Oh, because we never heard you and Mom yelling, never. It was nothing but raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens in our house growing up. One endless picnic. Like the fucking Waltons.”
James looked thunderous. “Stop. Cursing. Both of you. You will behave like human beings in this house, and like the adults you claim to be. I don’t care if you are sixteen or sixty, this is unacceptable. We need to sit down and talk; I promise you, we just need to—”
“What are you even talking about? Nothing’s going to be okay, and by the way, you can’t promise me shit because my life is over already, because she has chopped my balls off. Literally one by one, my balls have been chopped off, she’s torn them off with her teeth like a Rottweiler. ‘It is all rather unexpected and disappointing, Fuller,’” he quoted, shaking his head sorrowfully and stroking the air beneath his chin as if pulling on a beard, “‘so unexpected and disappointing but under the circumstances’ . . . I knew it was a mistake that you told Markham; now he’s all like, ‘Under the circumstances it’s lucky you’re not in a ditch.’ ‘Under the circumstances it’s lucky you’re not a crack addict eating from the trash under Waterloo Bridge.’ ‘Under the circumstances we’d have been happy if you’d dropped out of school and got a job licking the toilets clean at McDonald’s; we’d have been jolly proud of you under the circumstances.’”
Gwen gave a gasp, outrage mingled with disbelief. “You’re such a snob! And there aren’t any circumstances! Your circumstances are literally exactly how they were before; it’s made no difference whatsoever, your life never changed even one percent. We’ve all been walking on eggshells for you pretending that any of this actually matters, like your school exams were the most important thing in the world; do you even know how stupid that is? Do you know anything about the real world at all? Newsflash—no one cares at all about your A levels, literally no one. And you never let me talk about the fact that we lost our baby; you don’t care, you’ve just had everyone pretend that the whole thing never even happened, like our baby never even happened; it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, it’s the most selfish—and now you’re blaming me and—and you’re the most immature, disgusting—” She broke off, weeping extravagantly. Julia tried to put an arm around her again, to guide her back upstairs, and was once more abruptly pushed off.