Liv x

The last time she had arrived to comfort her father after one of Caroline’s disappearances, he had opened the door wearing a woman’s Oriental silk robe, gaping at the front, and wrapped her in an expansive hug before she could protest. ‘I’m your father, for goodness’ sake,’ he would mutter, when she scolded him afterwards. Although he hadn’t had a decent acting job in almost a decade, Michael Worthing had never lost his childlike lack of inhibition, or his irritation with what he called ‘wrappings’. In childhood she had stopped bringing friends home after Samantha Howcroft had gone home and told her mother that Mr Worthing walked around ‘with all his bits swinging’. (She had also told everyone at school that Liv’s dad had a willy like a giant sausage. Her father had seemed oddly untroubled by that one.)

Caroline, his flame-haired girlfriend of almost fifteen years, was untroubled by his nakedness. In fact, she was quite happy to walk around semi-naked herself. Liv sometimes thought she was more familiar with the sight of those two pale, pendulous old bodies than she was with her own.

Caroline was his great passion, and would walk out in a giant strop every couple of months, citing his impossibility, his lack of earnings, and his brief, fervent affairs with other women. What they saw in him, Liv could never quite imagine.

‘Lust for life, my darling!’ he would exclaim. ‘Passion! If you have none you’re a dead thing.’ Liv, she suspects privately, is something of a disappointment to her father.

She swigs the last of her coffee, and pens an email to Abiola.

Hi Abiola

I’ll meet you outside the Conaghy building at 2 p.m. All cleared this end. They are a little nervous but definitely up for it. Hope all good with you.

Regards

Liv

She sends it then stares at the one from her bank manager. Her fingers stall on the keyboard. Then she reaches across and presses delete.

She knows, with some sensible part of her, that this cannot continue. She hears the distant, threatening clamour of the neatly folded final demands in their envelopes, like the drumbeat of an invading army. At some point she will no longer be able to contain them, to fob them off, to slide, unnoticed, away from them. She lives like a church mouse, buys little, socializes rarely, and still it is not enough. Her cash cards and credit cards are prone to spit themselves back at her from cashpoints. The council had arrived at her door last year, part of a local reassessment of council taxpayers. The woman had walked around the Glass House, then had looked at Liv as if she had somehow tried to cheat them of something. As if it were an insult that she, a virtual girl, lived in this house alone. Liv could barely blame her: since David’s death she has felt a fraud living here. She’s like a curator, protecting David’s memory, keeping the place as he would have wanted it.

Liv now pays the maximum council tax chargeable, the same rate as the bankers with their million-pound wage packets, the financiers with their swollen bonuses. It eats up more than half of what she earns in some months.

She no longer opens bank statements. There is no point. She knows exactly what they will say.

‘It’s my own fault.’ Her father drops his head to his hands theatrically. From between his fingers, sparse grey hair sticks up in tufts. Around him the kitchen is scattered with pots and pans that tell of an evening meal interrupted: half a lump of Parmesan, a bowl of congealed pasta, a Mary Celeste of domestic disharmony. ‘I knew I shouldn’t go anywhere near her. But, oh! I was like a moth to a flame. And what a flame! The heat! The heat!’ He sounds bewildered.

Liv nods understandingly. She is attempting, privately, to reconcile this tale of epic sexual misadventure with Jean, the fifty-something woman who runs the local flower shop, smokes forty a day and whose grey ankles emerge from too-short trousers like slices of tripe.

‘We knew it was wrong. And I tried, oh, God, I tried to be good. But I was in there one afternoon, looking for spring bulbs, and she came up behind me smelling of freesias, and before I knew it there I was, as tumescent as a new bud …’

‘Okay, Dad. Too much information.’ Liv puts the kettle on. As she begins clearing up the work surfaces, her father downs the rest of his glass. ‘It’s too early for wine.’

‘It’s never too early for wine. Nectar of the gods. My one consolation.’

‘Your life is one long consolation.’

‘How did I raise a woman of such will, such fearsome boundaries?’

‘Because you didn’t raise me. Mum did.’

He shakes his head with some melancholy, apparently forgetting the times he had cursed her for leaving him when Liv was a child, or called down the wrath of the gods upon her disloyal head. Liv thought sometimes that the day her mother had died, six years ago, her parents’ short, fractured marriage had somehow been redrawn in her father’s mind so that this intolerant woman, this hussy, this harridan who had poisoned his only child against him now resembled a kind of virgin Madonna. She didn’t mind. She did it herself. When you lost your mother, she gradually recast herself in the imagination as perfect. A series of soft kisses, loving words, a comforting embrace. A few years back she had listened to her friends’ litany of irritation about their own interfering mothers with the same lack of comprehension as if they had been speaking Korean.

‘Loss has hardened you.’

‘I just don’t fall in love with every person of the opposite sex who happens to sell me a pot of tomato food.’

She had opened the drawers, searching for coffee filters. Her father’s house was as cluttered and chaotic as hers was tidy.