Chapter 5
It’s creepy
Vicky
“Ah, you’re here,”Mum said, sounding disappointed, but I was used to that. I couldn’t actually remember a time when my mother had been pleased to see me. This was just one of a long list of reasons why my therapist, Abdul, thought I should go no-contact with this side of my family.
“They make you sad, Vicky,”he explained in our last session.“I don’t think you realise just how much their indifference affects you.”
That was part of my problem. It wasn’t always easy for me to identify my emotions and label them for what they were. To an outside observer, it might have even seemed like I felt too little, and that I was unaffected by most things. But Abdul helped me see that, if anything, I felttoo much.
It just all brewed around inside me, almost overwhelming at times. And the negativity directed at me from Mum and her family wasn’t helpful at all. I understood that, but I knew I would not be able to shut these people out of my life. I owed my mother. She had taken care of me as a child in terms of food, shelter and education. My father was never very interested in me—but then again, I was a bit of an inconvenience, seeing as I was conceived as a mistake during an extramarital affair. That aspect of myself—the mistake part—had always been emphasised to me by both my mother and my father when he was alive.
Strangely, the one person who never told me I was a mistake was Margot, my father’s wife. And Margot still got very,verycross whenever I mentioned the mistake part now, so I did my best not to do that. Margot absolutely hated my mother, which I could understand, given the whole affair scenario, so I did my best not to mention her either.
“You’re early,” Mum snapped.
“I was told 12:15,” I said as Mum stood back to let me into the house. There were no hugs or kisses with Mum. She’d learned long ago that I didn’t like to be touched, and she’d never bothered to work out what sort of touch worked for me, so there were none of the brief, tight hugs that I got from Ollie and Margot. “It is 12:17,” I pointed out. “That makes me two minutes late.”
“Victoria, most people do not arrive on the dot. It’s actually rude to be pathologically on time. You need to give five minutes or so leeway.”
I pressed my lips together to stop myself from pointing out again that I was, in fact,two minutes late. Luckily, I did manage to hold that bit of information in. It was a trick I’d only just mastered over the last year with Lottie’s help, but it was extremely advantageous when dealing with my family. They found me difficult enough without my penchant for correcting people.
I wished Lottie was with me now, but that would be impossible. Not only would my family be unhappy with me dragging my executive assistant along with me, but the thought of Lottie seeing me with them filled me with horror.
The truth was that I was ashamed of how much my family hated me. It was why I rarely mentioned them to Margot and Ollie, and why I wouldneverbring Lottie here. I knew I was a difficult person to like, but the open hostility and hatred from my own flesh and blood was too stark a reminder of just how unpleasant some people found me.
My mind flashed back to the morning with Mike two weeks ago, and I shook my head to clear it. The last thing I needed was to trigger myself with bad memories whilst creating new likely even more unpleasant ones.
“She’s here,” Mum announced as we made our way into the large kitchen diner.
I cringed at the mess on the work surfaces and the clutter piled up on the table.
My mother seemed to be almost allergic to putting her belongings away, and she loved acquiring new possessions—not a good combination. For a woman who hadn’t worked a day in her life, she had a surprisingly large amount of stuff. Her house was a good-sized five-bedroom, detached in a leafy suburb just outside London, but she had sufficient belongings to fill three much bigger houses. As it was, my late father had only agreed to fundonehouse, so she was stuck filling just this one up with endless material goods. I’d paid for the extension on it two years ago, but it seemed she’d already filled that to capacity as well.
“Hi,” my half-sister Rebecca said through a forced smile. I was so taken aback that I didn’t quite manage one of my own. Smiles from Rebecca, forced or otherwise, were a rarity when it came to me.
“Hey, Vicky,” my stepfather, Gareth, said from his place next to Rebecca at the kitchen table. Now, Gareth did smile at me, but then, that was just his way. Gareth was a very kind man. I’m sure he disliked me just as much as his daughter and wife, but he’d always managed not to show it quite as openly. He was alsothe only one who called me by my preferred name. I’d always hated the more formal Victoria. I knew that I myself could come across as stiff and formal in my interactions with people, so the last thing I needed was a stuffy name to match. “Everything okay with you, cariad? Business going alright?”
I smiled at Gareth. I’d always really liked it when he used Welsh endearments like cariad with me as if he considered me a real member of the family. Mum hadn’t indicated I should sit yet, so I was left standing in the middle of the kitchen, trying not to look at all the mess. Clutter and mess were really difficult for me to deal with. I found it too overwhelming and distracting, and it made my thoughts murky, like I was underwater and couldn’t quite get to the surface.
“Profits in this quarter are higher by seven-point-five percent,” I told Gareth, and then went into some detail about the way the investment structure had improved.
When Rebecca rolled her eyes and faked a yawn, I blinked and snapped my mouth shut. Talking to Gareth about my business with what I considered to be a thorough answer was a mistake. I was always falling into this trap.
I found it difficult to spot a polite question that only required a cursory, brief response. Without Lottie here to squeeze my wrist, I didn’t have a failsafe to stop myself from “banging on”, as Mum and my half-sister would call it.
I felt heat hit my cheeks and looked down at my feet as Rebecca snorted.
“There you go, Dad,” she said in a snide voice. “Aren’t you glad you’ve got the exact percentage improvement? Super important info.Fascinating.Still a fun sponge then, Victoria?”
Fun sponge was relatively mild when it came to the insults Rebecca could throw at me, but it still cut as deep as the rest. I knew what it meant—that I, as a person, extracted the fun out of any situation. That was Rebecca’s opinion of me. All theconfidence I’d built over the last few months with Lottie and Lucy just seemed to crumble with her words.
Did Lottie and Lucy think I was a fun sponge? They gave no indication that this was the case, but then, I knew people didn’t always say what they truly felt. Not everyone went around blurting out uncomfortable truths every five minutes. They were both kind women. They could be putting up with me out of guilt.
Then, an even more horrifying idea occurred to me as I stood there in the middle of the kitchen. What if Lottie only put up with me outside of the office because she was worried about her job and she was trying to please my half-brother?
For some reason, Ollie was ridiculously protective of me. Lottie could easily be under the impression that shehadto see me outside work out of some sort of obligation.
