A Game for All the Family Read online

  Lisette, Allisande and Perrine had been brought up very differently from their friends. Bascom and Sorrel Ingrey couldn’t agree about anything, as I have explained above, and this included how to bring up a child. Bascom firmly believed that children need fixed routines and strict rules if they are going to grow up to become civilised people. If you let a child do what it wants, he thought, it will never learn virtues like hard work, obedience and self-discipline. Also, if you let children eat what they want, and sleep when they want, they will end up exhausted all the time with greasy spotty faces. Grown-ups, he believed, must impose their will on children.

  Sorrel (you will not be surprised to discover) strongly disagreed. She thought that parents who insisted on routines and tried to control what their children did were neurotic loons whose offspring would probably end up hating them while struggling to shake off anxiety disorders. Sorrel thought that as long as you loved your children, fed them (whatever they want to eat, especially crisps!) and provided a happy and secure home for them (even a really messy one), everything would work out okay. But when she tried to say this to Bascom, he always contradicted her and said, ‘That’s all very well if you want to bring up a troop of gamblers and jazz musicians. I’m afraid I don’t.’ Sorrel laughed at him when he said things like that.

  Do you remember I mentioned that Bascom and Sorrel Ingrey were brilliant at compromising? Well, this is how they solved the dilemma of how to bring up their children. ‘Let’s have two,’ Sorrel suggested. ‘We’ll bring up the first one your way. I will help, even though I think your way is crazy. And then we’ll bring up the second one my way, and you will participate enthusiastically even though you disapprove.’

  Bascom agreed, but he made another suggestion too. ‘What would be really fascinating,’ he said, ‘is if we then had a third child, and brought it up using a blend of our two approaches – exactly half and half.’ Sorrel liked this idea. ‘It would be so useful to be a family of five instead of a family of four,’ she said. ‘Just in case the your-way child always agreed with you about everything, and the my-way child always agreed with me, the both-ways child could have the casting vote.’ ‘Only when it’s eighteen and old enough to vote,’ Bascom pointed out. ‘Oh, don’t be so stuffy!’ Sorrel teased him. ‘As soon as he’s old enough to voice his wants, he can have a vote.’

  But the third Ingrey child, as we know, was not a ‘he’. She was Perrine the murderer.

  Lisette and Allisande came first, of course. Lisette had a strict timetable, set by Bascom, which she followed from the day she was born. Sleeping, eating, music lessons, reading, homework, physical exercise, helping with housework – Bascom had made a special chart with boxes for all the time slots in the day, and he wrote in each one which activity Lisette was supposed to do between these times. Allisande had no such routine. From the minute she was born, she was allowed to mill around doing whatever she wanted. She could watch TV all day long if she fancied it, and no one ever told her to do Maths, practise the piano or finish her green vegetables when all she wanted was a chocolate Mini Roll. Allisande could have crammed a whole packet of Mini Rolls into her mouth while lolling around in her pyjamas at six o’clock in the evening if she’d wanted to – neither of her parents would have stopped her.

  At this point, I hope you are asking yourself who you would rather be: Lisette Ingrey or Allisande Ingrey. I would much rather be Allisande, because there is nothing more annoying than being bossed around by a parent who thinks they know best.

  If Sorrel and Bascom Ingrey hadn’t loved her as much as they did, Allisande might have felt neglected, but they did love her, and she knew it. So she was very happy to have so much more independence than most children. Lisette was also happy. She’d had a stimulating and interesting routine to follow since birth, and it was one that allowed her to do everything she wanted to do without worrying about when she was going to do it. There were no decisions to be made, so she could concentrate on enjoying all the activities in the boxes on Bascom’s chart without having to arrange them herself. Freedom was something she had never had, so she didn’t know she ought to want it. She had no desire to sort out her own life. And Allisande never felt the need to have a full schedule like Lisette’s. She liked making her own decisions far more than she would have liked any number of music lessons or gold stars for getting her homework in on time (Allisande never did her homework, always got in trouble, and didn’t care), and so she regularly decided to do as little as possible, and never regretted her decision.

  If you’re waiting for me to tell you that the two sisters hated and resented each other, prepare to be disappointed. Each one was content with her lot in life, and neither one ever said, ‘Why aren’t I doing what she’s doing? Why is it different for me than it is for her?’ Don’t forget, these two girls grew up in a home that could have been a museum of difference! They were used to seeing their father sitting at the dining-room table eating home-made roast beef with roast potatoes, carrots and peas, while their mother ate pears and wheels of camembert from a horizontal position on the sofa. Lisette and Allisande grew up seeing their parents do everything differently and never envying each other, and so they followed this example. Such was the brilliance of Bascom and Sorrel Ingrey’s strange parenting that each girl believed she had the far better deal! Imagine that!

  The really strange and interesting thing is this: although they were brought up in completely opposite ways, Lisette and Allisande Ingrey were startlingly similar. They did not fill their days with the same activities, but their basic characters were like replicas of one another. They were both happy, polite, nice girls with relaxed temperaments, and everyone who met them liked them. And for years and years and years, they liked and loved each other. Even when trauma and horror struck their family, when their little sister Perrine killed poor, lovely Malachy Dodd, Lisette and Allisande remained close and the best of friends.

  It took the murder of Perrine herself to split them apart and tear their sisterly love to tatters.

  2

  There’s a text from Alex on my phone when my alarm goes off in the morning: ‘Soz I didn’t ring yest. It’s mad my end. Talk later? A ’

  Lying in our bed, my eyes not yet fully open, I send him a quick reply: ‘All fine here. Speak tonight. J xx’. I don’t have the energy for more at the moment, only for the easy white lie: all fine. Will Alex continue to believe that even after he’s heard everything I need to tell him?

  Which is what, exactly? Ellen’s too wrapped up in herself? She wrote a story with a family tree in it, and the characters’ names were strange? So what?

  Nothing is quite significant enough in itself; I have nothing concrete to point to. All my instincts tell me something is wrong and has been since … No, not since the day we moved here. My reaction to seeing 8 Panama Row was an aberration. Our first month in Speedwell House was idyllic. Then …

  Then what?

  Something happened, and it changed everything. To Ellen. I’m convinced of it. But what? What could that something be?

  I climb out of bed and pull on my dressing gown, wondering what time I finally fell asleep. I remember hearing distant church bells at 4 a.m., so it must have been after that. And now it’s six thirty, and I could sleep for nine hours straight, but I have to go and haul Ellen out of bed, which gets harder each school-day morning.

  Swallowing a yawn, I head downstairs, thinking about hot water with a slice of lemon and a spoonful of honey in it – my new morning drink now that I have given up coffee, the favoured fuel of those with too much to do – and what to put in Ellen’s packed lunch. This will be the biggest decision I’ll make today: tuna mayonnaise or roast chicken and pesto? Once that’s sorted, I’ll have the whole day free to do what I want, and, as luck would have it, I don’t want to do anything.

  The best thing is that whatever choice I make about the sandwich, it won’t matter. Ellen won’t notice the difference; she eats everything. My decision will affect nothing, which makes me won
der if it counts as a decision at all. Probably not. I find this idea profoundly calming.

  I stop in the hall when I see, framed in the kitchen doorway, a cereal bowl on the table with a half-drunk glass of orange juice and a carton of milk next to it. Splashes of milk on the wood: Ellen’s trademark.

  Impossible. Ellen, awake and finished with breakfast by half past six?

  She’s curled up on the kitchen sofa, already in her school uniform, typing on her laptop. I walk into the room and she shifts her body round so that I can’t see the screen.

  This is unheard of. Normally I have to drag her out of bed at seven.

  ‘Story?’ I ask.

  She nods from behind a curtain of hair. It’s not only her creative efforts she’s keen to conceal; she doesn’t want me to see her eyes, either.

  ‘You’ve been crying.’

  ‘No. I’m just tired. I woke up at five and couldn’t get back to sleep.’

  ‘Ellen, I’ve known you all your life. I know what tired looks like, and I know what recent weeping looks like.’

  I’ve asked myself more than once if Speedwell House might be the problem. Does Ellen feel lonely here? Is it too isolated, too grand to feel like a proper home? Alex laughed when I put this question to him, and said, ‘Never say that in front of anyone but me. It sounds like passive-aggressive boasting: “Oh, it’s such a nightmare – my new house is so intimidatingly stunning.”’

  But it is. I don’t mind being far away from other people – I love it, in fact; people are overrated – but I do sometimes feel as if I’m living inside a rare work of art and don’t belong here. I grew up in a red-brick council-owned semi in Manchester with mould on the walls. The house we sold in London was nothing special, though we loved it: it was exactly like every other house on our street: a two-up, two-down Victorian terrace with one bay window at the front.

  Is that why I had that strange fantasy about 8 Panama Row when I saw it: because it felt more familiar, looked more like the sort of house someone like me ought to live in?

  ‘Can I have the day off?’ Ellen asks. ‘I don’t want to go to school. If I stay here, I can blitz my story and finish it by this evening. Look, I’m being honest – not faking illness, not saying I think I’m coming down with something.’ She twists her mouth into an exaggerated smile. ‘If you want me to be happy and not cry, letting me miss school will do the trick.’

  ‘Why don’t you want to go to school? You’ve always wanted to before.’

  ‘I’m getting really into this.’ She nods down at her computer. ‘I don’t want to have to stop. I don’t believe creative work should be interrupted for the sake of an oppressive work regime that dictates I have to do this kind of work, at this time, in this place.’

  So this is how she plans to block me in future: with a rat-a-tat-tat of impressive words, devoid of all emotion. There’s a new brittleness to her voice that makes me want to howl and smash my fists against the wall. I’m scared that if I can’t think of a way to get through to her in the next twenty seconds, I might lose her forever.

  ‘If I let you stay home, will you tell me what’s wrong? I’ve got no plans for the day. We can talk it all through – really talk.’

  Ellen snaps her laptop shut. ‘Way to make me want to rush to school,’ she says. ‘Have you considered a career in truancy prevention? Oh, sorry, you don’t want a career, do you?’ She pushes past me on her way out of the room. I watch her in the hall as she pulls her bag off the peg by the door, thinking of all the things I absolutely mustn’t say. All right, you fuck off to school, then. I’ll just stay here all day and worry about you while you have fun with your friends.

  Does she have any friends at the new school? She’s never asked to bring anyone home.

  ‘Ellen, wait … Don’t … Where are you going?’

  ‘School, Mother. I believe we’ve covered that. If I don’t go now, I’ll miss the bus.’

  ‘Where’s your coat?’

  She stiffens and stops near the door, as if she’s been zapped by invisible rays. ‘I don’t know. Maybe at school.’

  ‘Will you have a look for it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Ellen, wait! Turn round and look at me!’ My Strict Mother voice. I haven’t needed to use it for well over five years. ‘I haven’t seen your coat for at least a week. I should have spotted it was missing before. Where is it? You need it. It’s chilly outside.’

  ‘I told you: I’ll look at school.’ Her bag slides off her shoulder, drops to the floor. I see uncertainty in her eyes.

  ‘I get that you’re scared of telling me what’s going on,’ I say. ‘But you’re going to because I need to know. If you want something to fear, start being scared of not telling me. That’s what’s going to make me angry. Tell me the truth and I promise you won’t be in trouble.’

  ‘I’m going to miss the school bus. Shouldn’t I be hurrying to school to track down my missing coat? Isn’t that what you want?’

  Her callous tone nearly breaks me. It also reminds me of how much I hate to lose any battle.

  Burying the hurt I feel, I say, ‘Tell you what, forget the school bus. I’ll drive you in. I’ve nothing else to do today.’

  ‘No. No way! I’m getting the bus. Goodbye.’ Ellen reaches for the door handle.

  Two can play the nasty smirk game. ‘Fine. I’m going to drive to school anyway. I’ll look for your coat on my own, and you can devote your full attention to being oppressed by the regime. How does that sound?’

  Her eyes fill with tears. ‘No.’

  ‘Face it, Ellen. You can’t stop me going into school if I’m determined to. What are you going to do, bash me over the head with an umbrella? Knock me unconscious, lock me in the cellar? If I want to wander the corridors asking everyone I pass about your coat—’

  ‘All right.’ She bursts into tears. ‘You want to know that much? I’ll tell you! See how much you enjoy knowing.’

  I want to hug her and promise that everything will be okay. I stop myself. It’ll be easier for her to talk if I remain impassive. Please, please, let this be the moment when it all changes. Let this be the beginning of the end of Ellen’s pain, whatever its cause.

  ‘Go ahead,’ I say. ‘If you’re being bullied, we can tackle it however you want. If you’d like me to go in all guns blazing, I will. If you want me to find you a different school, I will.’

  ‘Bullied?’ She blinks, as if the possibility hasn’t occurred to her. ‘No, it’s nothing like that. I’m fine.’

  So someone else isn’t?

  ‘Then what?’ I ask.

  Ellen shakes her head and walks past me, back into the house. Too important a conversation to have in the hall.

  I stand still for a few seconds, then follow her. I find her in the kitchen, filling the kettle with water. Wow. This is a first. Now she’s putting a teabag in a mug. Ellen doesn’t drink tea or coffee – she thinks both taste disgusting.

  She’s making me a drink: something that hasn’t happened before. I watch in stunned silence as she adds the milk, then squashes the bag against the side of the mug with a teaspoon before throwing it in the bin. It’s going to be orange and revolting, but who cares. My daughter has made me a hot drink, unprompted. This is a historic occasion.

  She brings the mug over to the table and puts it down where she wants me to sit: opposite her. ‘My best friend in the whole world was expelled yesterday,’ she says. Then, rolling her eyes, ‘To which you’re going to reply, “I didn’t know you had a best friend in the world.”’

  I didn’t. I’m relieved to hear that such a person exists. Unlike most fourteen-year-olds whose parents announce a sudden house move, Ellen was excited about the prospect of leaving her old school and social circle. ‘I can make new friends,’ she said, and it was as close to a sigh of relief as words can be. In London, she’d been part of a close-knit gang of four: Ellen, Natasha, Priya and Blessing. Blessing and Priya were lovely, but they were also inseparable, and Ellen found herself, at
an early stage in the gang’s formation, forced to be the official best friend of Natasha, who was a devious, undermining backstabber with ultra-competitive parents. ‘Are you sure you’re okay sitting next to me for Maths?’ Natasha would ask Ellen, all wide eyes and fake concern. ‘It’s just that I know you find it so hard, and I don’t, and I don’t want you to get upset when I get more answers right than you do.’ At least three comments of that sort every day, and other nonsense like random periods of withheld eye contact – strenuously denied when pointed out – soon led to Ellen disliking her supposed best friend intensely.

  As she regularly explained to me – and indeed, as I remembered from my own school days – you don’t get to choose your friends at that age. I suggested booting Natasha out of the gang, but sadly Priya and Blessing were both far too nice to authorise anything like that.

  Before Ellen started at her new school, I warned her about cliquey groups of girls. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said in a world-weary drawl, ‘I’m going to keep my distance from everyone until I’ve sussed them all out. I’ll be bland and smiley and friendly, but I won’t be anyone’s friend. No way.’

  Since then she’s mentioned a few names – Lucy, Madeline, Jessica – but there’s been no hint of a change of policy, nothing to herald the arrival on the scene of anyone significant. ‘So who is this “best friend in the whole world”?’