Free We've Come to Take You Home by Susan Gandar Page A

in France. And the glass had probably contained more water than wine. But she could definitely remember smoking her first cigarette. Her mother was out, and her father putting up some shelves downstairs, when she sneaked out of her bedroom, down the landing and into her parents’ bedroom. She unzipped her mother’s handbag. She searched through all the tissues, used and unused, the soggy chocolate bars and the crumpled up parking tickets and shopping receipts until she found a lighter and a packet of cigarettes.
    She sneaked back down the hallway into her room. Sitting on the edge of the bed, with the door closed and the window wide open, she smoked first one, then two, then three. It was when Sam was smoking her sixth that she began to feel as if there was a cheese grater lodged inside her chest. She lit and then took a drag on the seventh. She stubbed it out. All she could taste, all she could smell, was cigarettes. They were in her hair, on her clothes; they were everywhere. There was no way either her mother or father, if they came into the bedroom, would not know, instantly, that she had been smoking.
    She opened her bedroom door and crept down the corridor to her parents’ bedroom. She unzipped the handbag, put the cigarettes back where she’d found them and then zipped the handbag shut. She crept back down the hallway into her bedroom. It still stank. And the mug she’d been using as an ashtray was full of cigarette stubs.
    Back out into the hallway, this time into the bathroom. She closed the door, locked it and then emptied the stubs into the toilet. She flushed and then flushed again. The stubs were still there. She closed her eyes, flushed again and then opened her eyes. They were still there, bobbing up and down in the bottom of the toilet. Someone tried the door handle. There was a knock. A voice, her father’s, asked if she was all right. She said nothing. He asked her to open the door. She did so.He walked into the bathroom, glanced down at the toilet and then turned to look at her. And he laughed.
    Her parents hadn’t had an argument. No one had asked anyone to leave. Her mother and father were together and everything was going to be fine. It was somebody else’s father, not her own, who was in the intensive care unit. In just a few minutes, her mother would walk into the room and they would sit, the two of them together, at the kitchen table. Her mother would scold her for drinking the wine and then pour a glass for herself.
    The phone would ring, her mother would answer it and it would be her father saying that he was in his hotel room and he was missing them. Her mother would hand her the phone and he would ask her how she was and what had she done that day. She wouldn’t tell him about the three glasses of wine she’d drunk. But he would guess – and he would laugh.
    For a moment she believed her own lie. She heard footsteps on the stairs, the door opened and there was her mother. But then the feeling of control slipped away leaving her naked to the truth she had been trying so hard to avoid. Her mother was asleep upstairs and, she, Sam, was sitting, very alone and very drunk, at the kitchen table.
    She walked out into the hallway, up the stairs and along the landing to her parents’ bedroom. She knocked on the door, nothing, and knocked again, much louder, again nothing. She opened the door.
    â€˜Mum…’
    She groped her way across the room.
    â€˜Mum?’
    Her mother was lying, fully dressed, on top of the duvet. Her face was blotched and her eyes were puffy. In her hand was a scrunched up paper tissue. Several others lay scattered over the bed and on the floor. Sam stepped back.
    What good would be done in waking her mother up? Whatwas the point in going over and over something which had already happened; even if her parents hadn’t had the argument, her mother hadn’t told her father to leave, he would still have left for the airport,