It seems to be a year of incredible debuts and this one is definitely going to stay with me. We open at a dinner party. Robyn and her wife Cat are hosting an evening for their friends Willa and Jamie, Robyn’s brother Michael and his partner Liv, and Cat’s brother Nat and his new girlfriend Claudette. It’s the first time the group will meet Claudette and Robyn hopes to make it a chilled, relaxed evening. Robyn and Michael grew up in a rambling and ramshackle farm house in the south west of the UK. Their father Chris was a potter and it was a bohemian, relaxed place to grow up. Robyn had a scholarship for a private girl’s school and she ‘buddies’ with Willa who was a new sixth former. They shared a study bedroom and Robyn soon learns that Willa’s life is overshadowed by the disappearance of her sister Laika. Her boyfriend Jamie is a wine merchant who lived in South Africa and his confidence can become overbearing. Michael’s girlfriend Liv is a psychologist and she begins a discussion about implicit and explicit memories. Our explicit memories include times, dates and places and they tend to be formed by older children. Implicit memories are usually from unconscious emotional recollections and can be an amalgamation of several memories, as well as a few bits of what others have told us. These are memories created when we’re very small, usually pre-school age. Jamie isn’t convinced and Liv’s assertions seem to unsettle the party. As Jamie gets louder, Willa tells a memory of being tickled until she wets herself. She has always hated being tickled. However, someone in the party knows this isn’t actually Willa’s memory. It’s her sister Laika’s.
One of Willa’s other memories is that her sister called their dad’s personal assistant his ‘sexetary’ but doesn’t know why. This shows us that we only ever know part of the bigger picture. The author uses several narrators to show us that we can be present at the same event but see it totally differently. Laika had a memory of knocking over a tiered cake full of sugar flowers. In fact she’d stepped into the pantry to pick off the flowers and let them melt on her tongue. Then her dad and his secretary stepped into the cupboard and start to fool around. Laika is horrified and tries to get out, but then her dad notices her and is furious. He grabs her arm and yanks her out from under the shelf with so much force there’s an audible snap as he breaks her arm. Laika is screaming from pain but also because her dad is naked from the waist down. When her mother appears she’s confused by his explanation that her arm just broke; ‘things don’t break on their own’ she replies. Willa is a witness to her father’s abuse of Laika and her mother, but she is his ‘PP’, short for prized possession. I hated this sense of ownership. In her own narrative Laika talks about feeling rage and there were places where I really felt it. On one occasion, when Laika has tried to trim her own fringe, her father pins her down and hacks her hair off with the scissors. The sense of powerlessness that comes across in this scene made me feel physically sick. At a family gathering Laika finds a baby bird and takes it to her parents for advice, but her aunt snatches it from her and throws it into the waiting jaws of her dogs. Willa submits and doesn’t provoke her father, but Laika won’t and this makes his treatment of her even worse. Willa doesn’t even realise they’ve spent their childhood utterly controlled, because she’s never been anywhere else. She thinks all families are the same until she stays with Robyn’s parents in the school holidays. Their easy way of being, the gentle nurturing love and the emphasis on people not things is a revelation to Willa. By contrast her home is a sterile mausoleum to her father’s achievements with pictures of him with important people and shelves of prized Chinese ceramics without a speck of dust.
Another theme in the book is that of kintsugi, a Japanese practice of putting broken pottery back together with glue mixed with liquid gold. The broken pot becomes more beautiful because of it’s cracks. Robyn’s family is like this. They each show each other their broken parts and that familial love, acceptance and non-judgemental compassion is the glue that makes a person whole. By contrast, Willa’s father’s ceramics are distant and pristine, not to be handled. They have the same brittle beautiful exterior he expects from the women in his family, because their behaviour reflects on him. When we move into Laika’s narrative, we see another show of love and what it can do for someone who’s never had it. As she leaves home that morning she hides at a house she’s often seen in passing. It stands alone and is the home of an elderly lady who has many cats. She plans to sneak in and stay just one night to think about her next steps, but ends up staying for a while. The lady, Frieda, has nobody. There’s a carer who’s supposed to stay till lunchtime but only stays half an hour. Laika feeds Frieda properly, cares for her and she also listens. Frieda’s last living relatives are avaricious and only come round to see if they can find the family jewellery. Frieda knows what it is to powerless at the hands of a tyrant. As a German Jew she had to escape to the UK during WW2, but her sister didn’t make it. She knows that people only leave their friends and family if they’re desperate.
At school Willa needed the closeness of another person and enjoyed the physical comfort of sleeping next to Robyn. This blossomed into a relationship. For Robyn this was first love and their break-up just before exams was hard for her. She didn’t get the grades she’d wanted for medicine so instead she studied radiography. As an adult, Robyn has found Cat, a woman she knows she can build a life with and maybe become parents. Willa comes back into her life fifteen years later and has made a website about her sister Laika where people can post any sightings and Willa can write to her. When someone claims to have seen her she comes to Robyn for support and they fly to Thailand at a moment’s notice, much to Cat’s surprise. Cat wants a commitment and not to be second best. So she makes a choice to keep Willa as a friend, but to put Cat and their family first. When the couple visit Willa’s home it’s like an out of body experience. Crammed into a tiny flat in London, the couple are overwhelmed by the scale of the house. The wealth on display is slightly shocking, but the women, including Willa’s mother, have a great time. They read by the pool, visit local landmarks and cruise around in their convertible with George Michael on full blast. When her dad appears unexpectedly, Cat and Robyn look on open mouthed as Willa and her mother run to get changed into flowery dresses and start to wait on his every whim. They have become Stepford wives. We realise that Willa has always conformed, whereas Laika disrupted the picture perfect family. After her visit to Robyn, Willa tries to push her father a little but it takes Frank Zappa at full volume to really get under his skin. It’s clear at the dinner party that Jamie is Willa repeating a pattern. He’s so like her father and the pair get on well, with Willa’s weekends filled with visits home so they can play golf together. In fact Jamie spends more time with her father than he does with Willa. They share so many attributes and behaviours: the drinking and womanising, long trips abroad, strident right wing views, lack of empathy and he breaks things. In fact it’s his assertion ‘it just broke’ that wakes Willa up and makes her realise this is not normal.
The psychological dynamics of the dinner party are explained by the narratives from Robyn, Willa and Laika. This is a thriller, finding out what happened to Laika, complex in its psychology and often philosophical too within it’s twisty thriller structure. We each carry hidden histories within us, some aspects of which are subconscious. There are parts of that history that give us strength and resilience, others that give us an outlook of loving life, and others that help us fulfil our potential. Other parts of our history can unravel us. In counselling there’s a brick wall analogy. Something happens to us that we don’t process or resolve, so it sits there like a faulty brick. We continue to build our wall, but because of that dodgy brick the wall isn’t stable, it wobbles and might even collapse. In order to rebuild a strong wall, we must use the counselling process to slowly take away each brick until we reach the one that’s faulty. Then we remove it and replace it with a much healthier brick that comes from talking therapy, helping the client process trauma so their new wall stands the test of time. I loved the analogy of the natural pool where Robin’s parents take everyone to bathe. It’s a direct contrast to the sterile and man made pool at Willa’s home, that her mother turns into a rose garden. By contrast the natural pool at Robyn’s family home is filled with this self-made family that includes their friends too. Robyn and Michael’s family have so much love that it can easily take in others, old friends and new generations. Their love is like the natural spring that feeds the pool, constantly flowing and endlessly replaced.
‘I think about my duties and obligations […] as a decent human being. The things I have always known and understood , the things I’m prepared to stand up for, put my name to, hold myself accountable for. I think about my beautiful parents and how their love has helped me grow into the person I am.’
Meet the Author
Sarah Easter Collins grew up in Kent and studied at Exeter University before moving to Botswana and later Thailand and Malawi. A mother to a wonderful son, she now lives on Exmoor with her husband and two dogs. She is a graduate of the Curtis Brown Creative novel-writing course and holds a diploma in creative writing from Oxford University. When not writing, she works as an artist.
The Lotus Readers 