ZOE

I can’t handle raw white meat. It’s to do with the accident, and the things I saw, and Mum knows this so she gets Lucas to bash the chicken breasts flat.

While he pounds them in a crashing slow-motion rhythm that I’m guessing would equate to about forty beats per minute on the metronome, I lay the outside table with Chris. He wipes it down and I set out shiny cutlery and wine glasses and spread Lucas’s tea lights out along the length of it so they look pretty.

There are also wide terracotta bowls on the table, containing yellow citronella-scented candle wax and Chris lights the thick wicks with a long, chunky match that flares in the darkness. The candles smoke blackly at first but then give off a scent that prickles my nostrils in a nearly nice way. Chris looks at me across the table and more or less repeats the question he asked earlier, only he says it slower, as if he wants to give his words more meaning.

‘Zoe, are you absolutely sure you didn’t you know that man?’ he asks me. ‘In the church?’

I look him in the eye; both of us lit by the flicker of the candles, and also by the aqueous blue sheen of the swimming pool lights, which somebody inside the house has just turned on.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I don’t think so.’ If I know anything, it’s that I must do as my mother says. She’s basically a human shield between the world and me. But I’m tempted to tell him the truth; I can’t deny it. There’s a part of me that wants Chris to know, but only if he could handle it. My real dad couldn’t.

‘Are you sure?’ Chris’s voice isn’t pressing, and there’s an encouraging elasticity to his tone of voice that almost coaxes the truthful answer out of me, but the impulse goes when he adds: ‘You reacted very strongly,’ and that sounds sharper.

‘I was afraid of him,’ I said. ‘He looked crazy.’

In the silence I can still hear the steady pounding of Lucas’s meat tenderising and I’m not sure if Chris’s breathing is actually audible, but I feel like I can hear it as loudly as if his lips were centimetres from my ear. For a moment he studies me like I’m the Mona Lisa or something.

‘You would tell me the truth, wouldn’t you, Zoe?’ he asks. ‘You know it’s important that we’re all honest in this family?’

‘Of course,’ I say, and I know I should keep my eyes on him, that’s the kind of thing you talk about in the Unit, how you should keep your eyes on people so they don’t think you’re being shifty, but I can’t help it, I let mine slide away a bit, because Chris’s voice is like caramel and sometimes I want to feel his arms around me in a hug, just like my dad used to do. The urge to tell can be strong.

But Chris turns and strides towards the kitchen. ‘Lucas!’ he calls out. ‘Isn’t that done yet? Are you trying to give me a migraine?’

‘How flat does it have to be?’ I hear Lucas ask my mother. Inside the kitchen, framed by the huge rectangular door opening, the scene looks like something out of an advent calendar window: people preparing food together, talking together. Lucas holds up a bit of roadkill flat chicken for my mother to inspect and she says, ‘That’s fine, darling. Perfect,’ and I have to look away.

I don’t like the pool lights being on at night, because it becomes a death trap for insects. I think of the butterfly I saw earlier and I wonder if it’s still on the mirror and why it didn’t fly towards the light like the moths out here are doing. They’re diving like kamikaze planes towards the candle flames and spinning in circles on the lit-up surface of the pool. There are midges out here too, I can feel them nipping at my arms, and making my scalp itch.

I slip off my shoes, and sit on the edge of the pool and let my feet hang into it.

I’m not happy about the lies I’ve told Chris, but they’re just the usual ones so they create a low-level unease that’s manageable because it’s nowhere near becoming what my mum would call ‘an incident’.

Around my shins ripples shoot off towards the pool edges, distorting the light and creating shadows and dancing shapes within the water. A small bird dives down and takes a mouthful of water right in front of me, or maybe it’s an insect that’s drowned. The bird is gone before it arrived; its flight is the most elegant thing to watch.

‘Did you see that?’ I say, because I can hear somebody coming out of the house, and yet more lights come on, this time a string of bulbs that hang over the pergola that our table is under. They cast a soft white glow into the leaves that cluster above it, and show up the delicate yellow roses that my mum insists on pruning herself twice a year. She’s pleased with them this year because they’re managing to repeat flower after what Chris called ‘a truly fabulous display’ in June, and I think of them as trying very hard to please.

It’s my mum who’s coming now and she’s carrying a plate of bruschetta and a pile of napkins.

‘Paper napkins, I think, for a garden supper,’ she says. She hasn’t heard what I said and I don’t repeat myself.

We sit around the table and Chris pours wine: a full glass for him and Mum, but just a half for Lucas and me. Tessa covers the top of her glass. ‘Water for me now I think,’ she says. ‘It’s so hot.’

You’d think I’d steer of alcohol, wouldn’t you, but you see Chris insists that Lucas and I get use to ‘being around alcohol in a civilised way’, so for us to be offered half a glass of something fine that he’s selected is not unusual. Only half, mind you, because anything more would be ‘excessive’. Not something he has to spell out for me, but he doesn’t know that.

‘Tuck in,’ says my mum and all our hands reach out towards the bruschetta apart from Chris’s.

‘To you, darling,’ says Chris, raising his glass to Mum, ‘the only woman I know who can whip up a feast like this on a Sunday night. What a treat.’ He’s sitting at the head of the table so all of our heads turn towards him as he speaks.

‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘Won’t you have a bruschetta?’

‘I’m saving myself for the chicken,’ he says. ‘As I said, I’m still full from the concert.’

‘Of course,’ says my mum and she breaks a tiny bit off her bruschetta and nibbles at it. She raises her own glass. ‘Can I just say how lucky I feel that we can all be here together tonight. It’s very special.’

We all drink. Nobody speaks. Beside my mum on the table is Grace’s baby monitor, the green light steady like a snake’s eye.

‘So,’ says Aunt Tess in the silence that briefly follows, ‘guess which animal I treated for the very first time this week,’ and she’s about to elaborate on this, but she’s interrupted by the doorbell.

Only it’s not just the doorbell, there’s also a pounding on the door, as if Lucas were still bashing the chicken breasts, and then the bell rings again urgently. All of this noise registers on Grace’s baby monitor; it sends the lights shooting off the scale and back down again, and then we can hear the unmistakable sound of her snuffling.

‘Who the hell can that be?’ says Chris. His chair squeaks as it drags across the pressure-washed flagstones. ‘I’ll get it.’

Mum is up too. ‘I’ll get it,’ she says, ‘you relax,’ but she’s too slow off the mark because Chris is already marching into the house and the hissy intercom is telling us that Grace is revving up for a full-blown yell and he says to Mum, ‘See to the baby.’

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