Lasting Damage by Sophie Hannah Page B

it, and, after a few cursory protests, I went along with it. His full name is Benji Duncan Geoffrey Rigby-Monk. ‘You’re joking,’ Kit said, when I first told him. ‘ Benji ? Not even Benjamin?’ Duncan and Geoffrey are his two grandads’ names – both unglamorous and old-dufferish, in Kit’s view, and not worth inflicting on a new generation – and Rigby-Monk is a fusion of Fran’s surname and Anton’s. ‘As far as I’m concerned, he’s Benjamin Rigby,’ said Kit, after the first time we met him. ‘He seems like a decent baby and he deserves a decent name. Not that his father’s got one, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.’ Kit thinks it’s only acceptable to ‘go around calling yourself Anton’, as he puts it, if you’re Spanish, Mexican or Colombian, or if you’re a hairdresser or a professional ice-skater.
    He tells me I ought to be grateful for my family, and pleased to live so near to them, and then he mocks them mercilessly in front of me, and avoids seeing them whenever he can, sending me round here on my own instead. I never complain; I feel guilty for entangling him. I would hate to marry someone with a family as overwhelming and ever-present as mine.
    ‘Leave the poor child alone, Fran,’ says my mum. ‘It’s not worth the effort, for one measly floret of broccoli. I’ll make him ch—’
    ‘Don’t!’ Fran cuts her off with a frantic wave of the arm, before the fatal words ‘chicken nuggets and chips’ are spoken aloud. ‘We’re fine, aren’t we, Benj? You’re going to eat your nice yummy healthy greens, aren’t you, darling? You want to grow big and strong, don’t you?’
    ‘Like Daddy,’ Anton adds, flexing his muscles. He used to be a personal trainer at Waterfront, but gave up his job when Benji was born. Now he lifts weights and hones his biceps, or sinews, or whatever fit people call the parts of their body that need honing, on various odd-looking machines in his and Fran’s garage, which he’s turned into a home gym. ‘Daddy ate all his greens when he was little, and look at him now!’
    At this point my father would normally pipe up with, ‘The only way to turn children into good eaters is to present them with a simple choice: they eat what everyone else is eating, or nothing at all. That soon teaches them. It worked with you two. You’ll eat anything, both of you. You’d eat your mother if she was on the plate!’ He’s said that, or a version of it, at least fifty times. Even when Fran hasn’t been there, he still says ‘you two’ rather than ‘you and Fran’, because he’s so used to all of us being together in this room, exactly as we are now: him sitting at the rickety pine trestle table that’s been in Thorrold House’s kitchen since before I was born, with the Times in front of him; Mum bustling around preparing food and drinks and waiting on everybody, refusing all offers of help so that she can sigh and rub the small of her back when she finally finishes loading the dishwasher; Anton leaning diagonally – in the manner of someone too cool to stand upright – against the rail of the Aga, which was once red but is now cross-hatched with silver from years of scratches; Fran fussing over Benji, trying to force one Brussels sprout, one leaf of spinach, one pea into his mouth, offering him vats of chocolate mousse, mountains of crisps and endless sugary butter balls as an incentive.
    And me sitting in the rocking-chair by the window, fantasising about wrapping a thick blanket around my head and smothering myself, biting back the urge to say, ‘Wouldn’t it be better for him to have fish, potatoes and no courgette rather than fish, potatoes, a bit of courgette, twenty Benson and Hedges, a bottle of vodka and some crack cocaine? Just wondering.’
    I’m at my most vicious when I’m with my family. One good reason why I shouldn’t live a hundred and fifty yards down the road from them .
    ‘Do you think I ought to run it under the cold