by Galaxy Craze
The girls were let out half an hour earlier than the boys, so every day she would sit on the steps and wait for him. One afternoon she waited until one of the last boys in his class said, as he walked down the steps, “He got sick.”
He’d been in a running race with some other boys. It had rained that day, and the floors were wet from the Wellingtons and coats: wet green stone school floors. They had begun near the window and raced the whole way down the corridor to the radiator. They took off, each with a silver ball of determination, and ran to the end. When he tried to stop he slipped forward, crashing into the edge of the hot radiator with his head.
He couldn’t speak; he couldn’t remember anything. He was put in the special children’s hospital. Later that year my mother’s parents moved to London, and she never saw him again.
Four
One night the phone rang. It was late; everyone was asleep. The phone rang and rang because my mother couldn’t find it in the dark.
Paul, my mother’s rock-star boyfriend in London, used to do this: Phone at three in the morning, ring the doorbell at six in the morning. He didn’t care about waking us up. He would leave the flat in the middle of the night when we were asleep and leave the door unlocked behind him. I would hear him putting on his shoes, walking to the door, bumping into things. When I was sure he was gone I would get out of bed and lock the door. There was no safety with him around. I went to make sure it wasn’t him phoning us here.
I stood next to my mother in the kitchen. She had the phone in her hand. The light was on, making us squint.
“We’re terribly, terribly sorry. The taxi company is closed.” I heard a man’s voice coming through the receiver. It was the writer and Patricia; they were stranded at the station.
When she put the phone down, she looked at me and said, “Who takes trains this late? Come to the station with me.”
I shook my head.
“Please! I don’t want to drive all alone in the dark.”
“Wake up Annabel,” I said.
“She’ll take too long to get ready. Anyway, she needs to stay here in case Eden wakes up.”
I crossed my arms in front of me.
“Please come with me. Come on. It’ll be fun, we’ll listen to the radio. We’ll stop off and get a bun and tea.”
I have heard her like this before: desperate, needing company. “I’ll pay the taxi if you come over. We have ice cream,” she would say, trying to bribe her friends.
I was looking at my toes. I had my blue nightgown on with white lace around the collar. When I first saw it I thought I could also wear it as a dress. But everyone could tell; everyone knew it was only a nightgown.
“The stupid bun shop won’t even be open yet,” I said.
This stopped her for a moment; then she said, “Just put a jumper on over your nightgown. Come on, darling, hurry up!” She was speaking loudly, trying to make me think this would be exciting.
I was too old to walk around in my thinning nightgown in front of a strange man. People watch my body now with a steady curiosity, the way I watched tadpoles in a jar. It makes me shy and I slouch, and then my back aches. There are girls, in my form, who like to show it off.
“My feet are cold,” I said, and went into my room to get dressed. I wore a vest under my shirt and put on my corduroys and a striped cardigan.
We walked across the gravel to the car. It had rained, and now the air was damp. I could see the moon on the wet shiny ground, and the last orange and yellow leaves.
I waited outside the car while she turned the engine on. I wanted to see the lights go up and reflect on the ground but I didn’t tell her this, it was too small a thing. I knelt down and pretended I was taking a stone out of my shoe.
As we drove to the station, the raindrops on the windows stretched and blew away. The overgrown hedges on the side of the road scraped against the windows like fingers in a scary movie. For a long time we were alone, the only car on the narrow winding lanes.
This is what it was like here: handing out keys, walking guests to the bedroom, changing the sheets, putting keys back on their hooks, and now this—driving in the middle of the night to pick them up from the railway station.
Everything—the sea, the house, the rocks, the clean towels— was for them. Not good enough to live in, too far from the city, too damp in the winter, but nice enough for the weekend, the week, the month.
They were standing in front of the beamed station house, a pair in raincoats in the night, standing together.
My mother stopped the car and moved her head forward, looking at them through the glass. She would have stared all night. She stares at couples on the street; she turns her head and looks, the way people who have lost a dog must look at every dog that passes by. Checking, making sure it’s not theirs.
“That’s them, obviously,” I said, annoyed. They were the only ones there and so were we. She opened the door and stepped out.
“Come on, then,” she whispered to me.
I shook my head and stayed in the car. She was wearing her moccasins, the grey T-shirt dress she slept in, and an old tweed coat over it. All the buttons had fallen off the coat, so she held it closed with one hand and waved hello with the other.
I saw him lean forward to shake my mother’s hand. He was tall and had dark brown hair. Then they picked up their bags and walked towards the car. I could hear him apologize. “I am so sorry,” he was saying. “Our train got stuck for five hours. Do you want me to drive? You must be tired.”
“No. Thank you,” my mother said. I heard the car boot slam shut. I leaned against the door with my hair flung over my eyes, pretending to be asleep. I could still do things like that: pretend to fall asleep and not wake up. It was easy, especially in front of people who didn’t have children, and they didn’t. I knew that, I could tell; they wouldn’t have taken such a late train.
They sat in the back seat. Someone put a seat belt on; I heard it click into the buckle. I heard Patricia yawn, and he apologized again.
My mother said, “This is my daughter, May.”
“I know May. Is she really asleep?” Patricia asked, leaning forward to look at me.
The car was muggy. Hot air was blowing from the vent and the windows fogged.
“Should I move my seat up?” my mother asked. His knees must have been poking into the back of her seat.
“No, I’m fine. Thank you.” He had a nice voice. It wasn’t demanding to be heard, it was sitting in a corner, not thrown out from the head of the table.
It was quiet in the car; on the drive home no one spoke. The only sound was the engine and the wind coming through the cracks in the windows and Patricia’s little yawns. It made me nervous when no one spoke. I was wide awake with my eyes closed. I opened one eye a tiny bit and peeked out. My mother was sitting upright, staring straight ahead of her with both hands on the wheel. This made me feel safe. She usually sat in the driver’s seat as if she were lounging in a hammock, with a mug of tea in her hand, looking around, turning the knob on the radio. I saw her open her mouth as though she was going to say something, but she didn’t.
Finally I could smell the sea. I only notice it when I’m gone and then come back. We were close to home.
“I can smell the sea,” he said, from the back.
“Sand is the best pumice stone,” Patricia said. “Walking on the beach barefoot. It’s just the absolute best.” The car was finally still, the engine turned off. I felt the cold air coming through the open doors. I was tired now. Someone opened my door and bent over me.
“Should I carry her?” It was him. I felt his breath on my face; it was warm. I wanted to be carried, I tried to look small. He bent down and put his hands underneath me, the way you lift a small baby or a seven-year-old whose head is flung back and who’s really asleep. He lifted me carefully out of the car, I felt his fingers against my back ribs.
“No, don’t worry, you don’t have to carry her,” I heard my mother say. Her voice sounded soft again
st the sea.
“You’ll hurt your back! Put that girl down. She’s too big to carry!” Patricia said, whispering in his ear.
“Where’s her room?” he asked my mother, as he moved away from Patricia.
He walked towards the house. My mother opened the door and led him up the three flights of stairs into our flat. He put me down on the bottom bunk, gently slipping his hands out from underneath me. I heard him hit his head on the top bunk when he stood up.
“Are you all right?” my mother asked.
“Ouch.” He thought it was funny. I could hear him trying not to laugh. Someone took off my shoes, I think it was my mother. I was trying to keep my eyelids very still. If you are really asleep, your eyelids don’t flutter.
Five
The next day Jolene came home with me after school. It was Friday, and she was going to spend the night. As we walked towards the house I saw Annabel standing by the hedge, talking to the writer.
“I come up here to find antiques for my decorating business,” I could hear Annabel say, as she wrapped and unwrapped a paisley-patterned shawl around her shoulders. “And then I take them back to London and add a zero.” Her voice was like a hat full of feathers when she spoke to him.
“It’s beautiful here,” he said. “Such a strange old house.” There was something about the way he looked, like a hollow tree, standing there staring at the house.
Jolene and I stepped forward. The gravel crunched underneath us; our satchels hung over our shoulders. I saw him look towards us and I looked down, away from him. I couldn’t look up. He had held me in his arms; he had carried me into bed like a baby, and I had let him. I had wanted him to.
I led Jolene the long way round so I wouldn’t have to walk near him. “That’s the man who’s staying in my room downstairs.” We walked very close to each other, side by side, our shoulders touching. She looked back at him, over her shoulder. We went to the side of the house where the tallest trees grew, three of them in a circle. We put our satchels down on the grass and stood in the middle and waited for the wind to blow. We had to catch twelve falling leaves by the end of autumn. It would bring us good luck. What I wished for when I looked up at the golden and orange leaves was that something in me would change, that I would be different in school, louder and fun, and not have a twisting feeling in my stomach whenever I walked past girls like Barbara Whitmore and her friends. I held my hands out waiting, looking up. So did Jolene, her hands and her eyes towards the tree. She started laughing, her round face and her perfectly straight hair, cut just below her ears, shaking from her laughter.
“What?”
“Remember when we were singing and that man put cotton in his ears—” She broke off suddenly. Patricia came jogging towards us.
“Hi, May,” Patricia said. She stopped running. She wore a pink unitard and bright white shoes, with her straight blond hair in a high ponytail and a towelling band around her forehead.
“This is Jolene, my friend from school.”
“Best friend,” Jolene said.
“Where’s your mother? I went upstairs to look for her but she wasn’t there,” Patricia said.
“I haven’t seen her.”
“Oh.” She looked over at the ground where our satchels lay at the bottom of the trees. “Is that kitchen downstairs for the guests?”
I nodded.
“All right, then.” And she jogged off around the house. I thought she must just be running round and round the house.
“She’s pretty,” Jolene said. She had stopped laughing and stood very still, looking after Patricia as she ran away from us.
“She’s that man’s girlfriend,” I said.
“She probably has lots of lipsticks and perfume bottles and things like that.” Jolene’s voice sounded as though it were getting further and further away, and she kept staring.
When we were inside the house, instead of going upstairs we walked towards the passage that led downstairs. We just wanted to look inside her room, Patricia’s room, to see it. The air felt cold against the stone walls. I thought, Now my mother will have to turn up the expensive heat.
There were only two rooms downstairs and they were across the hall from each other. The door to one of the rooms was half open, and when we looked inside there was someone in it. It was my mother. She had her back to us. I waited for her to move, to turn around, to do something. I thought, What is she doing? She was just standing there in the middle of the room.
“Mum!” It echoed against the stone walls. She jumped the way you do when you touch an electric fence.
“Don’t do that!” she said, turning around, catching her breath. She was wearing jeans and a navy jumper. Her hair was off her face in a ponytail, neatly, no bumps and no pieces hanging down.
“Sorry,” I said, but only because Jolene was there. “What are you doing?”
“Checking. Making sure they have enough towels and everything.” She held her hands together in front of her. They were shaking.
The bed was made, the quilt pulled over the pillows, the sheets folded over and tucked in at the corners as neat and tight as a kid-skin glove. There was a suitcase on the floor, unzipped, the clothes shoved in, not folded. On the desk was a pile of large books, dictionaries and maps, a typewriter, and pens.
On the bed were two brand-new white towels with embroidered pale blue stars around the edges. They were from Bloomingdale’s in New York City, America. My grandmother had sent them to me.
“What are you doing down here?” she asked us, smoothing the bedspread with her hands.
“Those are the Bloomingdale’s towels.” I couldn’t take my eyes off them. They were mine and I had plans for them, hanging neatly in a bathroom of my own, one day when I was older, with matching blue and white soaps.
She took her hands off the bed. “What is that smell in here? It smells like . . . it reminds me of something.”
Jolene and I stepped to where she was standing in the middle of the room. We took deep breaths through our noses.
“What is it?” my mother asked again.
“It smells like the soap in art class,” Jolene said.
My mother carefully picked up a dark green shirt from the suitcase and held it up to her nose.
Jolene and I looked at each other, standing by the end of the bed with our arms at our side.
“Where are her things?”
“In there.” My mother pointed to the closed door across the hall.
“Why aren’t they staying in the same room?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She was chewing on the skin next to her nail.
We went upstairs. My mother moving slowly behind us.
“What are you doing?” I asked. My mother stood still, one hand wrapped around the banister.
“I’m just trying to remember something,” she said softly, as though she were talking to herself.
“Oh, there you are.” Patricia stood at the bottom of the stairs. Her voice sounded so full to me, so sure. “I’ve been looking for you.”
I couldn’t tell who was younger. My mother’s face was more like a girl’s, but the way Patricia moved and the way her voice went up, excitedly, made her seem younger.
“I just wanted to make sure I told you, before I left, not to bring Rufus breakfast in the morning.”
“Oh . . . didn’t he like it? The milk wasn’t rotten or anything?” my mother asked.
“He doesn’t want to be disturbed while he’s working for any reason. He’ll use the guest kitchen downstairs.”
My mother shook her head, as if to say, Of course, of course. Anytime someone tells you they don’t want what you have given them, no matter how small, it feels like a long pinch.
Jolene and I went upstairs to the kitchen. It was Jolene’s teatime. Every day her mother made her something: cheese on toast, beans on toast, something hot. There was a loaf of brown bread on the counter. I cut two pieces of bread, buttered them, and put them on a tray with a jar of Marmite and a bottle of
fizzy lemonade.
I put the food on a tray and carried it into my bedroom. Jolene sat on the bed, eating bread and Marmite and sipping her drink. I wasn’t hungry. I walked around my room looking at my things. I had eight miniature china animals lined up on a thin wooden shelf nailed to the wall. It was my only collection. The other girls had collections in tins, stickers and things. Some had rosettes pinned to their walls: prize-blue, purple, white, and red ribbons. I thought they meant concentration and interest.
“Do you have any biscuits?” Jolene asked, looking up from the book.
I picked up the empty tray and carried it out of the room. I could hear laughter coming from the kitchen.
“Oh, shush!” Annabel said as I walked in, putting her finger up to her lips. “Tiptoe, tiptoe! God forbid you disturb him.”
My mother was chopping up a plate of potatoes and vegetables for Eden’s supper, her face red from laughing.
“Shush. We’d better whisper,” my mother said, whispering. Eden sat in a chair next to Annabel. He was laughing too.
“We’d better whisper,” Eden said, imitating them.
My mother put the plate down in front of Eden.
“Oh, don’t chew so loudly, Eden. We don’t want to disturb Shakespeare downstairs,” Annabel said, and then they both started again, their shoulders shaking, cheeks turning red.
When they had calmed down, my mother took a deep breath. “Did he tell you what he’s writing?” she asked.
“He’s translating some old poems,” Annabel said, rolling her eyes.
“Poems?”
“I was all excited. I thought Anthony Burgess was going to show up!” Annabel said.
“I think he’s quite handsome.”
“Quite.”
“Patricia’s only staying for the weekend,” my mother said, but Annabel just looked at her.
I went back into my room with the biscuits and the radio. I had a picture of my father that he had given to me. He was sitting on the back of a motorcycle in white trousers, smoking a cigarette.
