Chapter Text
and don't your feet get cold in the winter time?
the sky won't snow, the sun won't shine
it's hard to tell the nighttime from the day
On the morning of Jen’s sixteenth birthday, Jamie finds Malcolm on the tiled floor of the loo pale and quite still, eyes half-open and fixed with vague disgust on a pool of his own vomit. The first doctor sees far too much Ambien and Restoril in Malcolm’s sluggish pulse and Jamie babbling about insomnia; a psychiatric institution is recommended gently, for later; curtains snap shut on Malcolm, head lolling, his gaze wandering unfocused after Jamie, and they’re told politely to fuck off for a bit.
Martha’s at her mum’s for the weekend – for the first time since the divorce, Jamie thinks, this is an actual fucking blessing. It’s very abruptly just him and Jen, his beautiful selkie-haired quiet bespectacled fucking brilliant too-tall mystery of an oldest daughter who sits with her arms locked ‘round her narrow knees in the passenger’s seat and glares at the Glasgow grey day. She’s wearing her favourite purple and orange striped jumper, Jamie notices after about five anxious sideways glances. Because it’s her fucking birthday. Jen’s often totally fucking beyond his comprehension, a deep-space Moons of Fucking Iego angel alien even to the Planet Teenager, but Jesus, sometimes she’s still just his wee girl who wants to grow up to be Hermione Granger and she’s not hard to read at all. She’s his girl, and she just wanted her fucking birthday, and fucking Malcolm – Malcolm, who knew what day it was – has gone and made Jamie want to kill him, provided he doesn’t fucking die of his own accord first. Christ.
He pulls off a chip shop near the Clyde on blind panic-instinct. It’s a shit chip shop really – Jamie studies the peeling plastic sign and the telltale empty carpark but for an old woman walking a half-rat dog. The car goes off and takes the temperature with it in about thirty seconds flat, this being Glasgow in November.
Jen hunches her shoulders and seems to curl into herself, cat-like.
‘Has he tried to kill himself, Da?’
Jamie looks over at her, meets her quiet green stare, and nearly has his heart Truly Fucking Broken for the third time in his life.
‘I dunno, sweetheart. I really dunno what he’s done.’ Malcolm’s never trusted the Best Policy Is Honesty approach with the kids, but Jen is sixteen – practically a grown-up, Jamie’d say if she were anyone else and not his occasionally petulant daughter who still writes stories about unicorns (she hides them under her jewellery box; Malcolm recently found a very good one, solemnly replaced it, and told Jamie once he was confident she’d moved them).
She’s trying to keep her cool journalist kind of voice on, the one she gets from Malcolm, as she stares down her nose at the dash. ‘He didn’t say anything weird t’you last night?’
‘No.’
‘He seemed fine to me. Really fine.’
‘I know.’ Jamie swallows – four times, he got up last night to go the toilet after tossing around in bed, and he hadn’t said a fucking word. ‘I know he did.'
‘He said he was going to make me breakfast.’
Her voice wobbles and in an instant Jamie’s twisted in his seat to wrap his arms around his good girl who looks just like her fucking mother when she’s trying not to cry and sets her jaw just like Malcolm when she’s trying to be brave and can turn him homicidal in a fucking second with this suggestion that Malcolm’s hurt her, only then he has to remember where Malcolm is. Jamie rests his chin on her curls and rubs her back briskly and tells her it’ll be all right, he’ll be fucking all right, they just need a bit of time to sort things out and it was probably a fucking accident anyway.
They get out of the car, Jamie with every mad intention of buying Jen a birthday lunch of all the fried haddock she can fucking eat, only to find that the chip shop is closed. Jamie has a brief mental episode kicking the door, which makes Jen go frigid and silent, then steps away to pant and swing his arms helplessly. Jen folds her arms across her chest and watches him, cold breeze tugging at her mad dark hair, weight even in her scuffed black Converse.
‘Shall we go for a walk?’ she suggests shortly.
‘Oh Christ, Jenny, it’s your fucking birthday-’ Something large and fish-hook-shaped snatches at his throat now, and he’s not going to fucking cry…
‘Aye, an’ I want to go for a walk.’ She presses her full lips together and tilts her chin. ‘C’mon, Da. Please. You cannae cry on my fucking birthday. It’s no’ cool.'
It’s down to the river, then, Jen wearing Malcolm’s grey fleece from the back seat over her birthday jumper. She’s so fucking tall – the top of her head’s level with Jamie’s ears, which makes him feel about six hundred, and on the concrete steps leading down to the bank she’s occasionally higher than him when she lets him step first. Martha’s like Jamie, the wean, scrappy and small, but Jen’s growing up into a proper fucking model – he’d remarked this last time he saw her dress up nicely, and Malcolm had said Or the best-looking director of the BBC by several hundred miles, if they’re not careful, which had made Jen smirk. She still walks like a kid, though, flinging her arms out, trotting down to the wee beach knock-kneed and gangly, pausing a little ahead of him to roll up the bottoms of her jeans and turn rapt attention to a flock of brown seagulls fighting over an empty Haribo wrapper.
‘Your present hasnae come in the post yet,’ Jamie informs her as they go along. This feels normal – he somehow feels less to blame for this, given the circumstances.
‘That’s okay.’
‘Does it feel different, being sixteen?’
She stuffs her hands in the pockets of the fleece and does an adolescent shrug. ‘I dunno. A bit. I feel a lot older than Martha than I did before.’
‘Well, she’s catching up to you – thirteen in two months, Jesus. She’ll probably celebrate by setting fire to the house. Set a good example, okay?’
‘Da.’ Jen stops short and looks up at him, squinting a little in the weak cloud-sun; Jamie pauses obediently. ‘You know that mate of Malcolm’s in London, the Guardian reporter with the ginger beard, who I did that internship with last summer?’
‘Aye.’
‘He told me Malcolm had a history of depression – tha’s true, isn’t it?’
Jamie closes his hand around his phone (a downgrade from the government Blackberry; one of those Star Trek communicator types that beep when you flip them shut, which if he’s honest he much prefers) in his pocket and briefly considers calling in a fucking Pompeii on the hack in question’s house, which is on the nicer end of Marylebone Road. He breathes and does a little turn in the wet sand. ‘Tha’s exactly none of his fucking business.'
Jen nods impatiently. ‘I tol’ him that. But he does, doesn’t he? You cannae do his job and not be depressed or mental or something.’
‘Did that soon-to-be-post-mortem Guardian Weasley say all this?
‘Yes, but I’m not stupid, Da, I grew up with the two of you – he wishes he knew half of what I do.’ She flicks a grim half-smile, and every work-related expletive Jamie regrets uttering in front of her before she reached the tender age of ten flashes in neon letters before his eyes. ‘But that’s right, isn’t it? He’s depressed?’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’ Jamie turns abruptly to look out over the slate grey slapping water, running a hard hand through his tangled hair. He tries to take a calming breath, which works about as well as it usually does. ‘It’s – very fucking complicated, okay? I’m no’ trying to be-’ A quick mental flick through their last proper shout as he fiddles with the buttons of his anorak ‘-condescending, or whatever you think I am, honestly. He’s having a hard time adjusting. We all have, haven’ we. You can’t do a job like that for as long as he has and not come off the rails a bit, and knock over everyone else around you on the way – it’s no’ a nice clean stop like one of those proper high-speed trains.’
‘So he did try to kill himself, then.’
‘Jen – I’m no’ lying, I dunno. He might’ve done. He hasn’t been fucking sleeping.’
Jen pushes out her jaw again in a way that reminds Malcolm, though he’s never said to either of them, most of her father. ‘He’s got it easier than you did,’ she says flatly.
Jamie glances up sharp from his shoes and looks away as soon as she fixes him with a proper challenging stare. ‘No, he doesn’t. You trust me on this – it’s not the same thing at all. I wanted to get out.’
She snorts angrily through this last very possibly false statement. ‘He’s got us. You didn’t have him, and you needed him more, and if he thinks he’s allowed – I love him too, Da, but Malcolm’s a proper fucking coward sometimes. I won’t have him taking you for granted again.’
They so rarely talk about this – it’s delicate, strange territory, and treading it now makes Jen seem even more dangerously adultish and foreign than ever. Malcolm has technically been part of the kids’ lives for over a decade – never legally, of course, nor will he fucking ever be, but financially first, then as a friend all the way up to what he is now, which objectively speaking is something like Full-Fledged Stepdad. Martha and Jen have always been content with this; they rarely ask questions about Jamie’s relationship with Malcolm, either out of the fucking creepy pagan sixth sense inherited by all Macdonald children or just total lack of concern. Assuming both and fearing anything approaching The Talk, Jamie’s never really pushed the issue.
He has a quick glance towards the bridge for Inner Strength and makes himself meet her gaze, his tall fierce sixteen-year-old with her nose dripping slightly and a defiant pink coming to her cheeks trying her level best to be unreadable and unfuckable, part Tucker.
‘That’s all done with, now.’
‘Da-’
‘I know,’ Jamie says gently, and shakes his head once. ‘I know, I know and I know you know. You’re far too smart and fucking sensible for me, di'you know that? You’ve got your mum and the auld fucker rolled into one – you could win the election in an afternoon with tha' psycho brain.’
She quirks a thin eyebrow.
‘But we’re here now, either way. I know it hasn’t been alright – it hasnae been fair on you, or your sister-’
‘-or you.’
Jamie bites his tongue. ‘Maybe, aye, okay, maybe. But we’re a family again, and right now he’s no’ well. It’s not fair but that’s how it is.’
Jen hesitates. Jamie notices she’s shivering despite Malcolm’s too-big fleece with its sleeves tucked in to cover her hands: he moves in a step, raising an inquiring arm, and after a moment’s pause she darts in to his side and lets herself be folded into a big warm hug like a bairn. Jamie’s stomach twists in on itself once, twice, and settles briefly in the space between them.
‘He’ll be alright,’ he mumbles again, mindlessly, like his own genius sensible child hasn’t just told him off in specific and accurate terms. ‘I am going to fucking kill him, but I’ll get him to make your breakfast first. I promise. It’ll be alright.’
‘No.’ Jen turns her head against his chest. ‘We’ll all be alright, this time.’