{ Commentary: Ophelia's Flowers, Part 4 }

[delga]

ophelia's flowers.
original fiction; of love
I have never felt so betrayed.

 
 
 

OPHELIA’S FLOWERS

 

Kayley Steiner

I’m not going to lie – I’m slow on the uptake with most things and I’m usually the last to know when something’s going down. But to know that it was Kate who was hiding secrets from me? That hurt. I mean that really, really hurt. Especially considering other people knew – Mum, Martina, hell, even Simon of all people. You think it was difficult finding out about Dad and his whore of a girlfriend? (What? You want me to be nice about that witch? I do not think so). That was nothing compared to walking into that club and seeing my sister with that man. I have never felt so betrayed and you know what? I hate her a little for that, I really do. Because I always thought there were no secrets between us. I always told her everything I knew, everything I felt and she just, she cut herself off from me. And I blame Jet Watson for that. Not Mum, even though I know her part in all of this. I blame him. Because he took my sister away from herself and her proper senses and he took my sister away from me.
Kayley gets left behind in this story and the shame of the telling is that I never get to tell people that Kate loved her so much. The secret hiding has less to do with Maria’s depression and more to do with the fact that Kate knew that anything her sister heard about would instantly stop being a secret. This is the part of the story where Kayley gets truly angry; all the repressed bitterness that she has comes flooding to the surface. And at the end of the day, she can’t even blame Kate. So she blames Jet.

The worst part of the whole thing? God, he was so into her. He wasn’t dancing with her, he was just sort of stood there in the middle of the room, kind of awkward and self-conscious, and he was watching her with this half-smile on his face as she tipped her head in. She was dancing so slowly, moving in on his personal space but they weren’t touching and I remember thinking how intimate that was and how dirty it felt to be watching them, like I’d walked in on the two of screwing up against a brick wall.
Time for some vanity and we’re only two paragraphs in! I really, really love the idea of Jet being mesmerised by Kate, and more than that, I love the image of jazz and smoke and sex which is what this entire paragraph is about. Jet is watching Kate tenderly. He’s this fifty-something cigarette-smoking, whiskey-drinking, weight-gaining, moody son of a bitch and this girl, this young woman sees something in him other than that. They’re so comfortable with each other that nobody else matters and they don’t need to be touching to be feeling. It’s more than sex, but the dancing is a metaphor for sex, too. I don’t know if that (a) makes sense or (b) comes across, but that’s the intention.

I don’t think people get it, you know? Like, they think we’re overreacting or something, but we’re not – I’m not overreacting. He was old, okay? Do you get that? He was really, really old. I know the rents like to think they can still swing youth if they have to but we only let them believe that because it would be mean not to. Truth is, these people are OLD. Okay? Jet Watson is older than my dad, for fuck’s sake. My sister? Was barely twenty-four. Girl in her twenties decides it would be an awesome idea to sleep with a guy in his fifties – you know what? That is not cool, that is disgusting, okay? I said it. It’s gross. It’s like sleeping with Dad, or Bobby, or Uncle Paul. It’s just wrong.
Kayley misses the point.

Oh, we didn’t finish partying, by the way. Instead I just yelled, you know? I was like, “What are you doing?” I felt dirty, you know, like it was porn. I couldn’t believe it, I still can’t believe what I saw, you know? It’s just so far out of the range of cool, and I was like, it can’t be real, you know, it just can’t be happening, I’m not seeing this, but I was seeing this and it was so wrong, so, so wrong. And you know what she did when she saw us? Gentle, “judicious” Katie. She panicked for all of half a second, then she dropped her arms and sighed. That’s it. Then she shrugged. “I guess it’s time to fold my hand, right?” I don’t even know what that means. Diego said it was some sort of poker thing but I don’t play cards and I didn’t know what the hell it meant, okay?
This is unintentionally funny; Kayley being annoyed and half-way through, missing the punch line. Even though I wrote this, I can’t tell if she’s angry because she was lied to, or because it’s actually something that disgusts her, or because it’s something that she lacks. You never meet her boyfriend in this piece but for those that care, Tyler is so daft that he looks at Kate and thinks she’s Kayley. Even though Kate has long hair and Kayley really doesn’t.

Kate’s reaction, by the way? Is meant to signal that she has an air of maturity above and beyond the others. She doesn’t fuss or protest, she just sighs – they’ve been made. Now they have to deal with the fall out. Compare that to Kayley who proceeds to wig the fuck out. Hmm. Actually, I don’t know if that makes her more mature or just more reserved, or lacking in time for the others.

She tried to pull me into a booth, all “Let me explain what’s going on here,” and I was like, “Does Mum know what you do at the weekends?” and then she didn’t answer and I figured it out, you know, that Mum knew, and that Kate hadn’t told me. She hadn’t told me, okay? Do you know what that means? It means she kept it a secret. From me! Her sister. Her identical twin sister. Her best friend, hell, her only friend most of the time and she didn’t tell me. She didn’t tell me. I still don’t really get the logic there, okay? Like, I don’t know what any of that bullshit means. I totally don’t get it and nothing she said could make it make sense to me. Reason? Because it does not make sense for her to lie to me. But I guess it made sense to her because she did lie to me and she did hide her super-secret boyfriend from me, so what does that say for us? One of the questions I’ve wanted to ask her ever since is, do you love me? Do you truly, actually love me as your little sister or am I just another person to you? Sometimes I wish I could have asked her that before she left and then sometimes I wonder if I don’t actually want to know the answer, you know? Because I’d rather not know anymore.

I’m just angry at her. I could have gotten used to the idea of her and Jet if she’d just given me a chance. She didn’t, like, have to lie, you know. She could have just told me off the bat and then locked me in my room until I calmed down. Because I would have, eventually; I would have gotten over it in the end. I wish I hadn’t flipped out so awesomely, you know? Then maybe she wouldn’t have been so disappointed in me, and maybe she would have started to talk to me again. That didn’t happen though, obviously.
Re-reading this, it’s actually really sad how bitter Kayley is and, again, it’s a shame that Kate never speaks because she would say right now that she never loved Kayley more than in the moment when she finds out about her and Jet.

I still remember it really clearly, though. I dream about it, too. I can’t shake that picture of her dancing and of him watching and damn it, the look on his face – I just can’t get over it. It was like there was nothing else in the world other than Kate, like nothing else existed. Just him, the music and my sister, lost in the sound of the saxophone.

Diego Martinez & Zach Kerby

Dude, it was whacked out. Like, totally. For like five minutes, I didn’t actually register what I was seeing, you know? And now it becomes obvious that I’ve spent too much time in the company of Kayley Steiner. I’m even talking like her. But seriously, though, I didn’t know what I was seeing; then I thought, huh, that actually makes a lot more sense. It wasn’t until he fell on me that I remembered Zach.

--I did not fall on you.

Dude. You fainted. You fainted like a little girl, do you understand?

--That is a gross mistruth. I collapsed. In, in a manly fashion.

In a manly fashion? You collapsed in a…manly fashion?

--It was very distressing.

So you were a damsel in distress?

--Does that make you my knight in shining armour?
I love Diego and Zach as a bizarre double act because they don’t make any logical sense but they fit. And I like the idea that Diego is possibly gay, or at least hugely camp. He gossips like a girl and not just because I can’t write male voices (ok, that’s more than a little the case here) but because Kate was his best friend throughout uni. That makes me laugh outrageously. I think he tries to hard to be a guy and then wimps out on it. I think he likes the idea of having a girlfriend like Kate more than the idea of having Kate.

Stop talking. No, stop talking now. So, anyway, Zach takes a fall and Kayley starts to lose it. Fia goes after Kay who goes after Kate. I’m trying to drag this dead weight outside when the guy in question comes over and gives me a hand. He’s got a bottle of water from out of nowhere and after a little while, Zach is back in the land of the living, or least the land of the semi-conscious. He went to sit in the car which, you know, I don’t blame him for that. What? It’s a tough blow when you find out you were ditched for a guy twenty years ahead of your league. What I hadn’t figured by that time was I was double-ditched for a guy twenty years ahead of my league. All that time I wasted trying to pull one over on Kerby and I was battling the wrong guy? Stupid, stupid me is all I’m saying.

He sat with me for half an hour, offered me a cigarette. I wasn’t stupid enough to take it, yo. That shit’ll kill you. So he lights up and he’s like, “So… you’re Diego,” and I want to know how he knows who I am, and he’s like, well, I’ve seen Zach before, so whatever. I figure that’s a pretty good reason so I let it pass. We’re sitting there, the two of us, on the steps outside The Creek, and he’s smoking, and I’m wondering whether I should stick around for the girls or go and see if Kerby’s pumping the car exhaust into the car when the doors swing open and Kayley bolts out, Fia less than a second behind her. I get up to go after them but then I wonder if I shouldn’t, you know, say something to the guy when he holds out his hand, the hell? Whatever man, I just shook it and took off. I’m guessing he took care of Kate because she didn’t come out of the club.
Oh, Diego is hilarious to me.

I kind of wish I’d said something to her because we never really spoke after that except from opposite sides of the room. I wish I’d had the chance to just hand with her, you know, catch a film, have a drink, that sort of crap. But Zach and me? We didn’t get that chance. That night was pretty much the last time we saw Kate in neutral territory. After that Zach spent a fortnight not wanting to know, and three months being told by various Steiner and Gorsch women where to stick it. I saw Kate properly once before she left; she stopped by to talk to Zach just before she ditched town but he wasn’t in so she wrote him a note and slipped it in my pocket. If I’d had the balls, I would have told her to come in, I would have asked her what was wrong, but I got stuck. I’m forever getting stuck around that girl. Whenever she’s around, I just stop functioning. She’s snooty, snobby, rude. She’s pretentious, irritable, really easy to piss off. She’s got a superiority complex if ever I saw one. But she’s Katie, you know, she’s our girl. She’s smart, she’s funny, she’s pretty. She’s the girl with long hair and longer legs. She’s Kate and I don’t get what was going through her head when she picked Jet Watson over everyone else but I figure she had her reasons and for that, I got her back. Any guy Katie picked out had to be a real champ, she wouldn’t have picked him else.
Diego’s the good guy, he’s got Kate’s back. I love describing Kate through other people, and the reason I love Diego is that he’s so truthful. There are elements to Kate that are pure meanness, and Diego says that’s okay. It’s okay that she’s mean because she’s also just a girl. A pretty girl; a smart, pretty girl who he’s little in love with in so many ways. Diego’s description of Kate is forgiving and I liked how his character turned out. (Note: there’s a whole side-story here that I’ve just not written, this gradual building of a maybe-relationship between the two of them, and then it turning out that they know too much about each other to be a working couple. Diego leaves for Europe, Kate finds Jet and it just falls apart. That’s why Zachary is wary of Diego when he resurfaces [part 2]).

Kayley Steiner

Oh man, Dad totally flipped. I mean, like, one-eighty flipped. He flipped so hard the earth shook. It was colossal. I’ve never seen him mad, you know? And then all of a sudden, everyone’s talking about Kate and Jet and shutting up when he walks in the room, and we figured maybe we’d gotten away with it and, like, we thought he was at work, and this was back when we were still trying to figure out, like, who knew what, right? And then Dad comes home early and he hears us and dude, he wigs out. Like total A-bomb wigs out. The apartment was officially ground zero.
Kayley’s voice became more and more insane as I wrote it because at the beginning she’s trying to tell a story properly and then she gets to the end and she just wants to tell it and be done with it. So she starts using slang and idioms and by this point she’s talking like someone on too much sugar and/or caffeine.

Dad kicks Diego and Zach out the house and me and Sofia were grounded for, like, ever and Dad figures he’ll just wait until Kate comes home because it’s a Friday night and we had a competition the next day and Mum had said she was going to drive us. So it’s eight o’clock and Rocha got back twenty minutes ago; she’s cooking in the kitchen and David’s up in York visiting his parents, which is where Joachim and Bernardo are – it’s like some Gorsch family male tradition thing that I don’t really understand. Pater-filius bonding or whatever. Anyway, car draws up outside and Dad’s wearing holes in the carpet, and Fia’s practically glued herself to Rocha’s side in the kitchen. Rocha yells food’s ready. Dad is still pacing.

Enter Mum, looking like she’s been dragged backwards through a bush. No kidding, Mum looked like trash. Dad’s all, oh my god, I have something important to tell you, I think you need to sit down and Mum’s like, whatever dude, chill out whilst I take a shower, except Dad’s not having any of it and he’s pretty much dragging Mum to the couch. In the kitchen, Rocha moves closer to the door to keep an ear out in case Mum needs a hand. So Dad sits Mum down in the one-seater and he lands himself on the coffee table, and he takes her hands, looks into her eyes and says, “Sweetie, I want you to stay calm, okay, but I have something to tell you that is going to upset you.” Mum’s not even responding anymore, there is no whiskey-tango-fox-trotting, she’s just staring at him like he’s finally gone and lost it and maybe life is about to get easier on her. Dad’s invoking some sort of yoga breathing ritual, all deep and meaningful breaths or something, and you can tell, you know, that Mum’s winding up to walk out of the room, so he reaches forward and grabs her arms I do not know and he looks her in the eye, takes another deep breath and just fires.
Long sentences, lots of commas, lots of colloquialisms and idioms. Kayley is talking fast. I was typing this pretty past, too. I didn’t realise it before but she uses a military-esque metaphor.

“Katherine’s been sleeping with Jet Watson.”

In the kitchen, Rocha drops something and it shatters. Sounds like the casserole dish, which would make sense because I haven’t been able to find it since. In the living room, Dad’s trying to stroke Mum’s hand, again, I don’t even know, and she snatches her arm away, stands up and makes for the door to the bedroom. Dad’s all, “Ria, honey, did you hear what I said? Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?” like Mum’s mental disposition is leaning more towards retarded than depressive, and she’s doing an awesome job of pretending like Dad’s just a bunch of empty see-through molecules because she is not answering him and Dad gets up to follow her through to the bedroom, all, “Honey, are you okay? Do you need me to call the doctor?” and Mum stops. Call the doctor? What was he thinking? Oh man, I can see this go down in my head like a Vin Diesel movie. It’s all bad.
Oh, what was I thinking with that line? I like the idea of the external sound, of Rocha’s realisation. More than anything, David as the ‘enemy’ figure makes sense to me in a different way now. I didn’t mean to imply that Kate had some sort of Oedipal complex issue and turned to Jet because her father was inept and inaccessible…yet that’s how this can be read. Oh well.

“What do I need the doctor for? Have you been skimping off my meds because I don’t think I need a refill just yet?”

Dad’s all, this must be a shock, blah blah whatever cakes. Mum is leaning on the doorframe listening to Dad and his awesome impression of motor mouth. She’d stop him from digging the hole he’s in except it’d make such a nice grave for when he’s done and why pay out for crappy labour? By this time, I’m not even pretending not to listen and Rocha’s in the kitchen doorway, open-mouthed like a guppy. I timed him, you know. It took him, like, seven minutes to work out that Mum was not going mental on the receipt of this apparently earth-shattering news. He’s talking about co-operative strategies, about the two of them providing a united front against Jet and Kate and Mum is just standing there, and for every word he says, Mum gets back a little bit of her dignity, the same dignity she lost when Dad decided it would be awesome to start screwing around. Seven minutes of non-stop crap.

You know, I love my daddy, I really do. I even kind of forgive him for what he did because it’s not like I get what it’s like to be married to Mum or to see all the evil things he’s seen. But you got to love how because Dad ditched the mistress to stay with his missus, suddenly in his mind he’s the noble hero who did the right thing and Mum’s the one who overreacted and is mal-intentioned because she didn’t want to work at repairing their non-existent marriage. I’m just saying, this is the way my dad thinks about life. It’s all back-to-front. Kind of like Rocha’s name.
Maria’s revenge is satisfying to me, not because she loved her husband but because ultimately, David loves her and he still fucked up. By the way, Kayley calls David “daddy”; she was closer to him than Kate and that’s because Kayley is more like her dad than her mum.

Finally, Dad stops talking. Nobody says anything, nobody moves. And then it happens. Dad finally gets a clue. He’s looking Mum up and down, and he’s shaking his head like he can’t believe it and you know what, freaking déjà vu, because I’ve seen this scene before, just like when Mum found out about Jenny, and Dad’s still shaking his head and stepping away from Mum like he doesn’t know who she is and Mum— Mum just turns and walks into the bathroom. She didn’t even say it, you know? She didn’t even have to confess out loud. Silence speaks a thousand words, right? And that’s what it turned out to be for Mum. Not a secret Kate would be keeping for her own good, not a way to stop me from turning Kate into local gossip, no. For Mum, it was all about that moment when Dad got it pegged. Mum already knew. Mum knew before everyone else and she didn’t tell him because as far as she was concerned? Dad had no right to her children past the money he owed them and the best way to get that is to play happy families. I still don’t know what it means that she did that, you know? I just, I don’t know.
And this is the reason why people should feel for Kayley – at the end of the story, Kayley’s the one who’s lost out on everything. She’s the only one who was invested in the family. I’m quite proud of the implied mirroring, of this revelation being equal to the one about Jenny. I like that Maria gets what she’s due.

Simon Steiner

That night was unsettling. Unsettling in the disconcerting sense. I got back just a little bit after Mum and one look at Dad and I figured out that he knew. He didn’t say anything to me; he was just sprawled out in the one-seater, staring at the door. He was waiting for Katie, waiting for her to come back so he could make the biggest mistake yet.

This is the part of the story everyone remembers but no-one really saw. Fia ended up with me and Kayley in Kayley’s room, Mum went to sleep, and Rocha hid out in the kitchen wondering what to do next. Out of everybody, she and Bobby somehow managed to be the only people other than Dad who didn’t have a clue. I thought Mum would have told her but apparently things don’t work that way anymore.

Kate didn’t turn up until ten, which is fairly usual. I guess she used to go out with Jet before coming home – Friday was the one night you’d be guaranteed to have Mum and Dad in the same place and Kate hasn’t had a proper conversation with Dad since she went to university. Dad was annoyed because Kate went to stay with Grandpa Don and if she was going to move out at all, he would have rather she’d gone into halls or with Grandma Lil. Except Kate never really did take to Dad’s side of the family and she was much happier living with Grandpa Don and Ashley because they’re the people Mum grew up with.
Simon is peculiar. He comes across more mature than Kayley but he’s the youngest; at the same time, he himself can sound very, very young. He’s oddly devoted to Kate and it’s like the sibling relationship is completely warped there. These aren’t kids that used to squabble, this is his second mother-figure. He had Kayley to mess around with; Kate was the one that took care of him. It’s messed up. I don’t like these first three paragraphs because they’re clumsy and lack skill. Actually, everything until the moment Simon starts talking about active and passive vocabulary is crap because I’m just rushing to the finishing line. But you need to build-up, I think, to Simon’s sudden clarity. I could have done it better, though. Simon is my exposition machine, obviously, and poorly used at that.

Like with most things, we don’t really know why Kate had zero respect for Dad. I mean, after we found out about the affair, sure, yeah, that makes sense. But even before then Kate never really wanted to know what Dad had to say about anything. When we were younger, Dad wasn’t really around. I mean, he was there until he was re-enlisted which was when I was four – that’s the year before Kate met Jet for the first time. Huh. Then, after we moved in with the Gorsches, Dad and Bobby were back on tour and they’d come back every now and then when they caught leave, which wasn’t all that often. After that, I guess Dad must have been preoccupied with Jenny because even though Bobby would be back every night, Dad would always call to say he was going to be home late from work. I don’t know what he was working on back then but it must have been a plausible enough excuse because Mum never questioned him.

They’d been having problems for years, by that time. The way Kate explained it, Mum wanted out the RAF and got it with a bit of kicking and screaming; Dad didn’t want out of the RAF but he agreed to tone it down a little and ended up with a desk job in the centre of London with one of the political offices or something. But then the re-enlistment came up and Dad was given the option to join up again and Mum had a fit. That whole thing was supposed to be over with as far as she was concerned and it was time for Dad to settle down and start playing happy families for real. Except Bobby was called up and there was no way Dad was going to let him go by himself. So Dad went with Bobby and Mum and Rocha moved in together, and that was that for them, really. Kate always reckoned Mum never really loved Dad anyway and I’m not too sure about that but I know she doesn’t love him anymore. Dad loves her. He doesn’t know what to do with that information, but he loves her and he knows it. That’s why they don’t divorce. Because as long as Dad’s still in the bargain, Mum knows we’re well-kept. Kayley says everything she’s done for the past twenty years or so has been just for us. I find that some what redundant, which Kate’s dictionary faithfully tells me means “exceeding what is necessary or natural” which I guess is long-hand for “useless”.
Heh, I do like the dictionary thing; that was my vanity.

Did you know that when you’re about five, your vocabulary grows at an average of twenty words a day? And that your passive vocabulary is about 2,000 words? The passive vocabulary of the average adult is 17,000 to 40,000 words. An L2 learner (that is, a second language learner) needs to know a minimum of 3,000 base words in order to understand the language with any degree of success. I’m trying to build up my vocabulary so that it’s at least as big as Kate’s. Because Kate grew up speaking English and her vocabulary was at the high end of the scale anyway but then she was learning loads of other languages, European mainly, and that’s what, 3,000 plus words for each of those? She’s fairly proficient in all of those so let’s say her average vocabulary for each of her L2s is, what, 4,000 plus? The languages she slips in and out of are French, Spanish and German, and she was learning Japanese when she left here. So that makes an extra 12,000 to 16,000 words in her vocabulary, not to mention all the random Russian and pseudo-Slavic swearwords she’d leeched off one of her translator friends at work. Do you see what I’m getting at yet or do I have to spell it out? You’ve got Dad with his average vocab of probably closer to 17,000 than 40,000 and you’ve got Kate with her vocab of at the very least, 40,000 and you’ve got Dad’s anger, Kate’s lifetime of stored up resentment and our apartment. Shit, fan, hittage, as Kate likes to say.
And after five paragraphs of utter crap, this is quite possibly my most favourite paragraph in the whole fiction, mostly because it speaks to my inner geek. I learned these stats two years ago and I can still reel them off. On top of everything, Kate’s weapon turns out not to be the violence of war but words. A vocabulary of over 40,000 words in her arsenal. The speech that I give her is not enough and is not the speech that I was supposed to give her. When I eventually rewrite this fiction, Kate’s words will reflect those of a forty year old woman in a 20 year old girl’s body.

So, anyway, just before ten, we finally hear Kate coming up the stairs and I looked at Kayley because I knew we had to do something to stop whatever was coming next. But Kayley just held a finger to her lips and shook her head. I suppose some things just need dealing with as and when they happen otherwise we’d just procrastinate until it’s too late to do anything about it. Did that make any sense? Can you tell I’m procrastinating now? Yeah.

Kate comes into the living room, and she’s humming something. I can’t remember what it is but it was something I like. Not your usual radio pop rubbish, this was something she’d picked up from her uni mates. She’s so absorbed in locking the door behind her and putting her key away that she nearly misses Dad sat in the corner of the room and she jumps when she notices he’s there. She says hey, how was your week, and all the usual small talk people say just to make themselves more comfortable with silence, and she’s about to head into the kitchen when she twigs that something’s wrong and she comes back into the room and asks Dad if he’s okay, which, if you ask me, was a weird thing to do because it’s not like any of us much cared what kind of mood Dad’s in most of the time. But something must have warned her because she came back and she actually sat down so that she was facing him, and she asked again, you know, what’s wrong?

To his credit, Dad did start of with one hell of a non-sequitur. (Love that word, by the way; it’s one of Kate’s favourite). “I’ve got this mate from the RAF whose family’s from China.”
Confession: when I want to win an argument with my mother, I do this. I start on a fact that seems unrelated just to throw her for a loop. When I’m arguing with my dad, I either try to say as much as I can before I hit his rage threshold or talk calmly, or stop arguing. Random trivia for you there.

Yeah. We don’t know either. And it threw Kate off balance because she sort of shook her head the way she used to whenever she was nervous or confused. Or both, which used to be a regular thing for her. Anyway, Dad’s talking about his Chinese friend and how he’d known this guy for most of his life and if Kate asked Mum, Mum would say she knew him too, and that this mate had a sister who used to live with the family in China but she was disowned by her father and ended up whoring on the streets of Beijing where she died of a cocaine overdose. Kate’s really confused now, and we can hear her shuffling which means she’s about to stand up and go into the kitchen where Rocha is. If she’d managed it, maybe things would have gone differently, but she didn’t because the next thing Dad says is, “Do you know why her father disowned her?”

Three things happen and they happen very, very quickly: Kate suddenly works out where Dad’s going with his little monologue, she bolts from the chair and backs a little towards the door in surprise, and Dad stands up, knocking his seat back a little. Dad is furious and the way I can tell is he’s talking really softly, so softly that we can’t hear him although the three of us have our ears pressed to the gap in the door. “Don’t!” he snaps, and he starts muttering something about being disgusted, and how he couldn’t believe what he’d heard, and I’ve got my ear on Kate and she’s standing still, stock still like she’s too scared to even think about making a run for the door, which is locked anyway and she’d tossed her purse on the sofa when she came in so even if she got to the door she couldn’t get out quickly enough; and Dad’s really getting into his stride now, asking her if she has any idea what it is she’s been doing or what the consequences of her actions would be and did she even think about what this could do to Mum? What it could do to Kayley and me? What it could do to the family if people found out that Kate was, and I quote, “Jet Watson’s little whore?”

It was surreal, the way the air shifted in the house. One minute Dad had the upper hand and the next it was gone. Just snatched from his hands without him having a single chance to get it back. Because as soon as he mentioned the word “family”, you could practically hear Kate straightening up and “whore” was the icing on that metaphorical cake.

“Well, I’m sure you know all about prostitution, don’t you – Daddy?”
It’s mean that she uses “daddy”. She never calls him that, and that’s the signal that the tables are about to turn. Kate’s horrible. (I’m now reading Lolita and I think the thing I love about it most is that Humbert is a horrid character, but Lolita isn’t, in herself, all that attractive. Kate, too, can be horrifying. In my mind, that is).

Bang, bang, you’re dead, Dad. I wonder if he realised his mistake and tried to rectify it, tried to fix it up. He never got the chance, of course, because once you set Kate off, there’s no stopping her. Forty thousand words and twenty plus years of bowing to paternity and this is where it led the two of them.

“I don’t believe you, do you know that? I absolutely don’t believe you. What about the ‘family’? Did you honestly just say that to me? Did you? I don’t, I don’t—there are almost no words to express how much of a complete imbecile you are, Daddy dearest. I’m the whore? I’m the disgrace? What about you and your pretty little counter wench from the co-op? What about your little tart on the side, what’s she then? Go on, Dad, I’m all ears. This’ll be good, this will; a nice little story to tell at Christmas. I’m the whore and she’s what, window dressing? Just a friend, hey? Well? I didn’t cheat, Dad, I didn’t walk out on our family as soon as things got a little bit cumbersome. I didn’t break my marital vows, I didn’t walk out on the one person I was supposed to love ‘til death did us part. I’m not the one who ditched Mum for a woman whose sum total of intelligence wouldn’t be enough to fill a postage stamp, forget a college application! She must be insane, though, right? I mean, how much did you pay her? Didn’t you buy her house for her? Her car, too, right? Right?”
This would have been so much better if the argument had been structured. The next paragraph tells the truth, though.

Kayley started to cry around this point. Think of all the things you never want to hear, all the silent secrets that keep a family running and then imagine them broadcast to the world on the ten o’clock news. That’s what this was for us. And don’t think Kate had even come close to starting on what she had to say.

“Where were you, hmm? When Mum was popping aspirins once an hour and running a house with six kids in it? Where were you when we had school plays or parents’ evenings? What were you doing? Don’t tell me you were off serving Queen and country because god knows you were back home by then. Where the hell were you? Visiting your girlfriend? Which one, Jenny the whore or Maxine the mayor’s wife? Yeah, thought no-one knew about that one, didn’t you? But I knew. I’ve always known when you were lying to us. Don’t you dare tell me that I’ve let you down. How could I let you down? You are never here; you have never been in our lives. I’m ‘disregarding Mum’s feelings’, am I? So, what, when you had your girlfriend’s legs spread open on a dirty bedspread at the Services motel, you were thinking about Mum’s feelings, were you? You were thinking about how it would look for the family, were you? You make me sick, Dad, you make me want to retch. I’m a whore? I’m a slut? I don’t think so. You know what I think? I think next to you I’m a fucking nun, and you, I hope, you know, I really, really hope you stuck good to Grandma Lil’s Catholic expectations because you are going to hell. I have done nothing wrong, you disgusting, pathetic, horny old bastard and even if I had, you – you! – have no say over what I do anymore. You forfeited your right to judge me the minute you betrayed us. Ever heard of fidelity, Daddy? It means not fucking every woman from here to Trafalgar Square, okay?”

By this point Kate was practically choking on the words. I’ve never seen her so mad; she was crying so hard, and Kayley was trying not to make a sound because she was crying too, and it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to us. I was scared – I was scared of my own sister. How crazed is that? I was actually scared of Kate.
Argh, clichés! This next part would be better if I was more fluent in a language that isn’t English or Guajarati.

“Vous n'êtes rien mais un vieil homme vil, et je vous hais! I hate you! You don’t know anything about me, about Kayley; hell you barely even know Simon and you’ve actually spent time with him! How dare you? How dare you talk to me as though I’m some sort of degenerate criminal? You should have done us a favour and left years ago. Then we wouldn’t be left constantly cleaning up the mess you made of ‘this family’!”

She sat down then, and I think Dad was shell-shocked because he didn’t say a word. I couldn’t move and Fia was hugging Kayley because neither of them could stop crying. Kate’s voice went really quiet, like Mum’s used to whenever she was completely exhausted. “How could you, how could you do that to us? How could you do that to Mum? That was your wife. You promised to love and to honour and to protect her and you have done none of those things. Do you even look at her anymore? Or do you just ignore the bruises under her eyes, and all the weight she’s lost? Do you think because you said you’re sorry that makes everything alright now, everything’s kosher? Because it’s not kosher, Daddy, it’s not ‘okay’. You’re the reason she’s ill. The only thing she ever wanted from you was love and you couldn’t even give her that. You couldn’t even love your wife.”
The irony being that he really does love his wife and she stops loving him. I don’t know why I wrote this relationship in this way. My trend is pretty uniform. Either they are truly, madly, deeply in love and their lives are happy or they’re truly, madly, deeply in love and they can’t get it to work. This is not the way I write relationships, and I’m not even sure if it’s plausible.

That’s the moment Rocha chose to finally step in and break up the ruckus, and a good thing too because by this point every one was crying. From what I could hear, Kate was so mad she could barely breathe and Dad quietly left the apartment. That’s when Kayley got up to leave the room and Fia and I would have gone with her except she snapped at us to keep our noses out of it, so we ended up sleeping in Kay’s room that night. I heard Rocha soothing Kate, and Kayley brought her some water, and then we heard Kate dash for the bathroom and retch emptily over the toilet bowl for half an hour before Rocha took her to their flat and put her to sleep in their spare room.

Dad didn’t come home that night, and Mum never came out of her room. Next day Kayley said she wasn’t feeling well so they didn’t go to the competition, and Mum suggested that she and Kate could go shopping. Rocha didn’t say anything to Mum but I remember that before they left she gave Kate a hug and whispered something in her ear. I still don’t know what she said to her. I just know that was the end of it for us. Dad’s still living in the flat but he sleeps in the guest room. Kayley and Fia live together on the other side of town, with Kayley’s boyfriend, Tyler, and I’m in Edinburgh most of the time. The Gorsches still live in the other half of the apartment. The Steiner family has ceased to exist; it is dead, deceased, defunct. It is an ex-family. The Steiner family, such as it was, no longer is.
And this story is nearly done being told. The reason Rocha finishes the actual storytelling is because by this point neither Simon nor Kayley have the heart to tell how their sister abandoned them. Rocha is a firm voice, someone who found out even after Kayley, someone who has a best friend in Ria and a partner in Jet Watson. She’s the woman who comes out with the life Ria wanted. Rocha can be rational because all her tragedies happened at war and she survived it. Rocha is a survivor, she’s fighting for both sides, and the idea is that maybe she can bring a bit of peace to the story.

Rocha Gorsch

That’s enough, the lot of you. You shouldn’t be talking about this. Not a one of you knows what you’re talking about. It’s just been one great big mess, the whole thing, and I’m fairly certain Kate doesn’t need you four making mountains out of molehills. It happened, it’s done with. Now you have to move on. Go on, Diego, Zach, it’s time to go home. Give Simon a lift home, too. Fia, have you cooked yet? Well, go do that. Kayley and I have to finish this story once and for all.

Alright, what have you covered so far? I see, yes. Yes. Alright, I know. You were nearly through, then. And what were you going to tell everyone, that your sister ran off in a haze of grief? That your poor Mum’s ready to be hospitalised? Well? Not a one of you has thought about what it is you’re doing in telling this.
Rocha gets angry, but it’s controlled. That’s the key to understanding Rocha – control. The aim is to be refined. She’s fought and won her battles; she has the self-control she needs to live life fairly happily.

Jet lost his job when this came out. Not good press to have one of the CID “openly seducing an innocent young girl.” Those were David’s words, by the way, when the Herald came to ask for the family’s response to Jet’s “actions”. Complete bullshit. Did they ask Jet for his opinion? Or Kate? No. In fact, the two people who never got to answer questions were the two stuck slap bang in the middle of everything.
Oh, I think it should be noted that I love Rocha Naomi.

I was surprised to find out about their relationship. I didn’t know they’d seen enough of each other to be actively dating, and then to hear David openly confront Kate was a shock to say the least. Since we moved back from Singapore I’d seen Jet once or twice a month; he didn’t seem much changed to me, but then, that was always the way with Mr Watson. He liked to keep himself to himself, and I approved of that, naturally. I think the biggest surprise out of the both of us was that I was no longer a nutcase. The wonders of a secure and happy marriage have long since cleansed me of my obsessive-compulsive demons. It’s endlessly amusing to me the varying responses I get to that comment. I know women who feel I’ve abandoned the sisterhood. Well screw them; I’m happy as is, thank you. This is what I wanted when I left CID the first time and everyone – Jet Watson included – knew that. I don’t know what to say about Jet other than he was a wonderful person and an excellent detective. He was very – how do you lot put it? Oh yes, “old-school”. Very “retro”. He worked the way he wanted to work, rules be damned. Used to drive me batty. To say I was fond of him would be a gross understatement; he was a good man, worthy of respect and admiration. I worked with him for three full years; I put up with his mood swings, his ridiculous temper and his insatiable need for a decent cup of coffee. He was a good man. Don’t ever forget that, please.
Her description of Jet is precious to me because I think once upon a time, Rocha saw Jet as a tiny bit of a hero figure, and maybe if they’d had a chance, there would have been a disturbing and misguided relationship there. You should all know that Rocha’s husband, Bobby, is a sweetheart.

As for Kate, she’s a darling. Tired, lonely, misunderstood – no, don’t look at me like that, Kayley, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. They say some kids grow old before their time, that they skip their childhood altogether. Kate was one of those children. She was quiet and withdrawn when she was little, and there was never a day when she wasn’t the older sister, the one who looked after the others. It didn’t help that Maria always treated her as a friend rather than a daughter. The girl saw more than she was supposed to. How do you expect a five year old to cope with seeing her mum cry night after night? It’s not feasible. It’s not practical. But Maria hasn’t been thinking straight in over twenty years. I lost a neurosis, she gained one. This is what we call karma. Balance to the earth and what have you. Kate’s karma is very simple. She grew up too quickly so she was always living her life five steps ahead of where she should have been. But it didn’t matter how mature she came across, inside she was the same scared little girl she’d always been. Kate’s motto was fake it ‘til you make it and she dedicated a lot of time to faking it.
Rocha’s description of Kate is the closest to what I would say about her. I like my tragediennes, okay? And Kate is one of them. The tortured pretty girl, the dancer, the linguist. We can project onto Kate because others project onto her. And more than anything, I trust Rocha to be truthful. Two things she says about Kate that no-one else even thinks of – tired and lonely. Everyone else thinks that Kate is cool, calm and collected. Rocha knows different. Why? Because once upon a time, Rocha was a lot like Kate.

Getting out of the house was my idea. Oh, I told Maria about it, and she liked the idea of Kate going to live with her grandfather. Maria and her father were always very close. Putting Kate in that environment gave her the chance to be the little girl she always was and god knows Don Jacobs indulged her. It was the perfect plan – three years for her to live her lost youth. And then she met Carmeline Dubuque and instead of turning life down a notch, she revved it up. Next thing anybody knows, Kate’s as old as the rest of us, and lonely, too. There’s only so much you can share with your family without the conversation becoming distinctly uncomfortable; Kate’s known that for years. But other than Kayley, who was Kate supposed to talk to? My Fia? I don’t think so. Not Maria, that’s for sure and okay, I’m supportive, but ultimately? I’m not Kate’s friend, I’m her mum’s alter-ego, the slightly less demented half. I’m not making excuses for anything Kate did or did not do with full propriety. I’m just suggesting that maybe people shouldn’t be so quick to judge her.

Let’s say it’s been eight months since David and I found out about the relationship. You might wonder what right David had to criticise Kate, not just because of his affair but because Kate is an actual adult now. She is physically and actually no longer a child. She’s been a legal adult for six years. David holds no sway over her, in so many ways. I think the shock of that night was him finally realising that his daughter despises him. David loves his children, no matter what Maria’s conned herself into believing, and after all the horrid and cruel things he’s been guilty of, he loves Maria too, which is why he’s sticking it out. Brave man to do that, especially considering Maria doesn’t love him, not anymore. There might have been a time, once, where even if she didn’t love him he could have won her over but that time’s long gone. If I’m honest, Maria’s long gone. We’ll never get our Ria back; she’s beyond repair.
Hmm. When I rewrite this (which, by the way, is a given; I’m already trying to work out how I can), we’ll see Kate’s interest in Jet start when she’s fifteen. Earlier than people expect, I think. It was difficult to make these characters seems disgusted, or annoyed by Kate’s actions because in my twisted head it makes perfect sense that Kate would fall for Jet, and early in her life, too.

Jeremiah is dead, Jet Watson. Jet is dead. I don’t have any other way to lead into it except to state it for the fact that it is. He’s dead. It wasn’t even anything as dramatic as a shoot out, he didn’t die on duty, or as the result of a gang vendetta. He wasn’t murdered for information, he wasn’t an innocent bystander to a bank robbery. He just…died. A heart attack. Six months ago, Jet Watson was sitting at his desk and he had a heart attack and died. He wasn’t even in his sixties yet and he had a heart attack. Which, if you saw the way he was living, makes more than a little sense. You can’t smoke that heavily, drink that much and eat that much without suffering for it. If your body’s not a temple, it’s a house of sin and sooner or later, karma’s going to come and bite you in the behind. Jet Watson got bitten. If anything, he’s the silent victim here because no-one can tell his side. His friends have long-since left town and the ones that are left don’t know him as well as a friend should. There’s Tina, sure, but she’s like a kid to him. She was good for Kate, actually, really brought her out and let her become comfortable in herself. That’s why Jet told her about Katie. But there are only two people who can tell Jet’s side in full, and one of them’s dead and the other one hasn’t been seen for months.
The dead one is Jet; the missing one is Kate. I don’t think people got that.

It’s a good thing, I think. I mean she wandered about like a ghost for a while, threw herself into her work with a real passion. She tried so hard to pick up all the pieces but she’s her mother’s daughter and her mother is a lot like me, so believe me when I tell you she failed. You can’t fix things by ignoring them. Out of everyone, I know that best. Kate moped about, came home every weekend to spend time with Maria and maybe try and patch things up with Kayley, not that she was having any of it back then. They got a bit better, the three of them. They’d go shopping or they’d cook together. Simon, bless his heart, he took to calling Kate twice a week, just to check in on her. She appreciated that, it was very sweet. As for David, he moved into the guest room, and Kay and Fia bought an apartment across the city so they weren’t in anymore. If David was in the house, Kate just ignored him. She’d walk around like he wasn’t there. That hurt him, you could tell. But those bridges were broken. There was no way David could redeem himself in Kate’s eyes, not after every thing that had happened. Kate couldn’t look at him and David couldn’t look Kate in the eye so between the two of them no-one was exchanging glances.

Then three months late, Kate took Maria out. They went shopping, they had dinner, rented out some romcom chick flick – the whole shebang. At the end of the night, Kate kissed her mum on the cheek and left. That was the last we saw of her. You know, when we didn’t hear from her during the week, we weren’t too worried because in all likelihood, she was probably working. But when she hadn’t called by the weekend, Maria said we should go knock on her door, in case she was ill or something. So she picked up her jacket and I grabbed my keys, and half an hour later we’re knocking on Kate’s door. The building manager was this sweet little Polish man by the name of Newman and he saw us and he came up, and he asked us how we were and if he could help us, and I said sure, do you know if Kate left the building this morning and he took off his little doffer cap and said, “I’m sorry ma’am. Ms. Steiner hasn’t lived here for two months now.”

We called Tina, then Carmeline Dubuque and the boys; we called Kayley and Fia, and we called Simon – nothing, no word. We checked Jet’s old lease, and then we called the landlady who looked after his place in the Lake District and she said no, she hadn’t seen Kate, and anyway, the cabin was being rented out to a family of four so there wasn’t any chance she was hiding out there. We tried to track down the removal company she used but it turned out she just sold all her furniture. We tried to contact her bank and the post office to find out where all her mail was being forwarded to but all her mail was directed to an empty PO Box and all her accounts were shut down. She just disappeared without a trace. I didn’t think it was possible but the more I wonder about it, the more I’m certain she and Jet had a back up plan to just…vamoose, and when she couldn’t take it by herself anymore she put that plan into action.

That was five years ago.
The story is removed; getting the time frame right was horrendous. I still don’t know how to get it to fit properly. Maybe this will get written when I’m Rocha’s age because then I can get the years right.

It’s a good thing, though. Maybe away from people’s expectations she’ll get a hold of who she really is. Maybe she’ll find someone else. I hope so; she deserves a little peace. I hope she comes back, too, but I want her to be okay before she tries that. Mostly, I hope that she’s healthy and that she’s happy, and after that, well, que sera, sera is fairly appropriate, don’t you think?

Kayley Steiner

When we were doing our GCSEs, the Shakespeare we had to read was Hamlet. Except I didn’t go to most of the classes and I’d always end up using Kate’s notes because, hey, what are big sisters for if not to drag your arse through a pass grade?

Kate always had this thing for Ophelia, who I always remember because I saw that film version with Ethan Hawke and she was played by Julia Stiles who randomly jumped into a swimming pool and then it turned out she hadn’t jumped into a swimming pool and I didn’t get it. Kate said it was foreshadowing but I don’t know what that means. Anyway, there’s like that part in the fourth act when Ophelia goes nutty and I really should have been there for that class because it came up on one of the essay options in the exam, but that’s beside the point at the moment, because the reason I remember those notes in particular was that after that, Kate went into a frenzy over flowers and stuff. She was like manic obsessed, you know? She used to buy tiny bouquets from the local florists and she’d press them under heavy books, and then she’d put them into a little notebook that she had and on the opposite page she would carefully write down the flower, the day she had bought it and what it meant. She printed off like dozens sheets form the internet all about flower messages and how they were used as a secret code between young Victorian lovers within a “private courtship” which I think is long hand for going steady. I was looking for that book the other day, and I couldn’t find it but like I did find out that Kate has never thrown away a single piece of paper in her life. Like, she just kept it all filed away in the cupboard in her bedroom and it’s like this mini library of Kate. Would be more useful if she kept a diary because god knows it would have every single detail in it. Stickler for details was our Kate. But no, no diaries because that would be personal and Katie doesn’t do personal, didn’t you know? Like by maybe talking to people she was performing like some great act of almighty sin. God forbids thee to open your mouth Kate Steiner! Wouldn’t want you to come across human, would we? So no. No diaries or calendars. Just school books reaching back to year seven and huge A4 binders full of hand-written notes – six for GCSEs, eight for A-levels and two for every year she spent at university and everything labelled and colour-coded for easy reference. And we always figured Rocha was anal.
I don’t know if people got this even though it’s fairly explicit – I was trying to draw a straight line from Rocha’s actual OCD to Kate’s O/C tendencies.

I found those notes, the ones on Hamlet. Next to all the school stuff, in the margins next to where she’d copied out the passage, Kate had scrawled this little message in bright pink ink. Actually, I think it must have been red ink that’s just faded because, like, Kate didn’t own pink pens, she only wrote in blue, black or red, standard biro colours. Anyway, in the margins she’d left herself little notes, mostly like little bitchings, as we used to call them, snarkiness. A lot of them say things like “just make your mind up!” or “Why? Why would you hide in the CUPBOARD?” and “dude, so gay”. But next to the Ophelia passage it says: Ophelia’s flowers, signs of madness, signs of sadness you can’t place, and in her flowers, dead and dour, all the miseries of her face. My sister, the closet poet. Who knew?
Yeah, who knew. And that’s the point of this bizarre ending, because Kayley almost gets it now, that her sister wasn’t real in their world, and that makes even more sense because she never speaks for herself in this story. Kate is almost a ghost. I don’t think the metaphor is all that subtle but in case people don’t get it – nothing of Kate exists but for her reflection in the people around her. Kate is just a composite of other people’s memories and descriptions. Kate = Ophelia’s flowers, symbols of Ophelia’s state of mind post hoc, after the fact. Nothing of Ophelia remained but for her flowers; nothing of Kate remained but for the traces she left on other people’s lives.

But you know, I think I get it now. Because everyone thought Ophelia was beautiful and they thought they had her all figured out because she liked to sing about flowers and she had a crush on the Prince, but she wasn’t at all what they thought she was because on the inside she was just a wreck and all it took was some flowers and a swimming-pool dream sequence to show that, you know? Everyone said she was crazy and then she was dead and there was nothing left to prove otherwise. Nothing but her flowers, asking you to remember, asking you not to like, not forget. And what’s left of Kate, you know? We thought she was crazy too, but she wasn’t, not really. We’re the crazy ones; Kate was just living her life. And now there is no Kate, there’s just all these A4 binders full of years old exam prep notes and my sister’s rough teenage humour. Nothing but paper and memories, and bits of floating verse.

You know, I just realised? Mum’s really the only person who understands this, any of it and she’s so fucking wretched about it that she’s not going to say anything. Since Kate walked out, Mum’s been more of a headcase than ever and I’d blame my sister but I don’t even think that’s fair anymore. I mean, she spent her life protecting me from this version of our very sick mum and now, I guess, you know, it’s my turn to take care of Mum. Dad helps, you know, he tries to help.
What a redundant paragraph. I’d skip it if not for that last line,

Nobody can talk about Kate and Jet because nobody knows what that was all about. Like, we’ve all been sitting here trying to piece it together like we’re doing Katie a justice by telling “her side” but we’re not doing that, not really. We’re just gossiping like old biddies with cups of tea and too much spare time. Like, we’re all bitter because she didn’t confide in us, not a single one of us and she didn’t do that because if she had, she would have made us special. Everybody was like five paces behind Kate; she was completely, like, other to us. It doesn’t matter that her life wasn’t all plain-sailing; we liked to think that it was and we’d have liked to think that she favoured us, you know? But at the end of it, Kate didn’t talk to anybody but Jet and he’s gone now, too, and there’s no-one here to explain to us why she left. We’re all like, none of us were going to judge her, you know, they were both consenting adults, yadda, yadda, and that’s complete bullshit because the first thing we did when we found out was turn around and scream at her for making the biggest mistake of her life, like she hadn’t thought about it when all Kate ever did was think about things, you know? Kate was a real adult, you know, and for her to just walk out on us, well, that stings. Of course it does. Kate was everything we wanted to be. She was infectious, leading us on with smiles and flirtations. She’d dip her shoulder, look up at you from beneath her eye-lashes and toss her hair as she walked away and you’d follow, even if her eyes weren’t pointing at you, even if you were her identical twin sister who looked just like her. But I’m not just like her, am I? And none of us came here today to set the record straight because at the end of the day, we’re all just selfish.

Kate? Kate, if you’re listening to this, like, please don’t judge us harsh. We miss you, you know? We miss having you around, and we’re sorry that we were so mean and that we didn’t pay attention the way we should have done. But you’re so much older than the rest of us, you know, and we don’t always get these things right the first time around. Katie? Kate, please? Are you there? I love you—
The end, cut-off because I can’t write. But also because her pleas go sort of unanswered. And I chose the sad ending over Rocha’s optimistic one because I think Kayley’s sense of loss is tragic and based on misunderstanding. She feels unloved which is so untrue.

 

fin.

So. Finally, done! I’m in the process of rewriting this, and writing a story with Tja now. It’s hard going because I don’t have that much discipline when it comes to my writing. I bounce around on Ophelia’s Flowers because I love the idea behind it, I’m just annoyed that I couldn’t get it written down in the right way. Most of all, it was really difficult trying to show that Jet and Kate were normal people but that they caused a lot of gossip. I’m not sure I succeeded on that front.

Thank you for reading.

With effusive thanks to my wonderful beta and much cherished friend, tigertrapped. I wouldn't be writing if it wasn't for you.