By the Shore

by Galaxy Craze

  I ran down the hall. Things are changing, things are changing. My father’s here from London; the world is coming to me. I thought, He can take me to Barbara’s party.

  I ran a bath, but only filled it halfway, so there would be enough hot water for him, my father. I used my new lavender soap. I had one fancy dress, the one my grandmother gave me last Christmas. Deep red velvet with a white collar but it looked old-fashioned, too old-fashioned for him.

  When I looked at my teeth in the mirror, I wished I had the kind of toothpaste that makes your teeth white. I practised smiling with my mouth closed, but then I remembered that Patricia had “whitening tooth polish”. I’d seen it on her sink.

  I dressed and went downstairs. My hair was still wet, dripping down my back.

  I could hear the radio coming from Patricia’s room when I knocked on the door. She was lying on her bed, looking through a magazine, her ankles crossed in front of her.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. She was wearing a scoop-neck T-shirt dress with miniature pink hearts on it. There was a pile of cards in green envelopes next to her.

  “Writing my Christmas cards. I was halfway through my list when I got bored.”

  A fire was burning in the fireplace. She tapped her toes to the music and turned the pages of her magazine.

  “I love this coat. Oh, God! I want this coat.” She was pointing to one of the models. I walked over to look. “Your dad’s handsome. What does he do again?” she asked, moving her eyes to look at me.

  “He works in London at a business.” It sounded wrong after I said it. So I said, “But he’s going to open a wine bar.”

  “A wine bar? That’ll be nice.” She turned over on her side and rested her head on her hand.

  “Does Rufus still want you to leave?” I asked, just so she knew I remembered.

  Her smile went and her body looked stiff.

  “No, and he never really did. It was all a big misunderstanding, May.” Then she smiled at me in that way again, wide and big like a gate.

  “Can I use your toothpaste?”

  “My toothpaste?” She sat up cross-legged on the bed.

  “I saw it in here before. The kind that makes your teeth whiter. My father’s taking us out to dinner.” That’s all I had to tell her— she would understand wanting to look good.

  “You’re going out to dinner? Is your mum going too?”

  I nodded.

  “May, I know! I know!” she said, jumping up. “I’ll blow-dry your hair and put some blusher and shadow on you. You’ll look gorgeous!”

  “But what can we do about these front bits?” I tugged at my overgrown fringe, the one I’d cut myself. I acted like this, a little bit sulky, so she would want to help me more.

  She jumped up and went into the bathroom, humming along with the song on the radio. It was easy to see why men liked her, why Annabel liked her, why anyone would. Everything she did seemed like fun. I couldn’t imagine her tired, dragging a cloth across the kitchen table.

  There were rows of different-coloured lipsticks and nail polishes on her dresser. She held a spray bottle in one hand, a hair dryer in the other, and sat me down in front of the mirror. She brushed my hair, starting at the ends, the way my mother does, so the knots don’t pull at my head. See, I thought, she is nice. There were other things on her dresser—a little blue china box tied with a white china ribbon, like a present. I lifted the top. Inside was a thin diamond cross on a gold chain.

  She wrapped my hair around the hairbrush and pulled it straight out, away from my head. Then she pointed the dryer at it and turned it on high. She was still humming the same song from before. I looked at myself in the mirror. I liked the way I looked with my hair wet and flat against my face. My eyes looked big, like something new.

  There was a knock on the door, I heard it through the blow dryer.

  “Hold this.” She switched it off and dropped it on my lap.

  “Did you just get back? You must be exhausted,” I heard her say. Her voice sounded different, softer.

  I turned to look. Rufus was standing in the doorway in his coat and brown woolen hat.

  “I thought you were going back to London,” he said to her in a low voice, almost a whisper. His face looked long, fallen.

  “I’m just doing May’s hair. Her father’s come down from London, and he’s taking Lucy and her out to a fancy dinner.” Hearing it made it sound real, like a present I could hold in my hands.

  Rufus looked at me from the doorway.

  “Did you get lots of work done?” she asked again, in that kind of birdlike voice.

  “So, are you leaving tomorrow?” he asked her. It sounded like any other question, just a little shorter.

  He walked past her towards me, where I sat in front of the mirror.

  “Your father came? Your father or Eden’s?” That was Rufus, standing near me with his hands in his pockets, his hair messy from his hat. Asking because he wanted her to know that he knew things about us, things my mother told him. Everyone else thought Eden and I had the same father.

  “My father,” I said, as though it were the beginning and the end. My father, Amen.

  “Oh.” He looked down at his feet, nodding long, slow nods, up and down. “Is he staying here?”

  “He’s come for Christmas,” I said. He looked away from me and sat down on the edge of the bed.

  Patricia came over, carrying a handful of lime-green plastic curlers. She separated my hair into thin pieces and wrapped it around them, so it would go under at the ends. It pinched in places but I sat still.

  “Lucy seems so happy now that he’s here. She looks radiant,” Patricia said, turning slightly towards the bed, where Rufus sat looking down at his hands.

  She turned the dryer on, holding it close to my head. It felt like it was burning my scalp, turning it red. I wrapped my hands around the sides of the chair and counted to ten. It will be done then, I said. But she just stood there holding the dryer in one hand, her other hand on her hip. I tried to think of cool things, like swimming, to make the burning stop. I remembered Annabel saying, “You have to suffer to be beautiful.”

  “Have you seen Lucy?” Rufus asked loudly from the bed.

  “Mmm-hmm,” Patricia said. She turned off the dryer and leaned over me as she put it down on the dresser. She smelled of something sweet.

  “Lucy told me she didn’t . . .” he stopped himself, remembering I was there, but I knew what he had been going to say—“that they don’t get along.”

  “Really?” Patricia asked, her voice going up. She took a tall metal bottle and sprayed it around my head. It smelled like bug spray. “Annabel told me she thought Lucy would always be in love with him. That’s what it’s like with your first love; you never really get over it.”

  Her voice was loud in my ear, but she wanted it to reach him on the bed.

  She picked up the dryer to finish, quicker now, pulling harder. I heard the door shut, and when I looked back Rufus was gone. When she was done, my hair fell around my head softly, like a silk scarf. The blond streaks left over from the summer looked brighter. I moved my head from side to side. My hair swung back and forth, then landed neatly against my shoulders.

  …

  Annabel was in the kitchen with Eden, making him dinner.

  “Don’t mind me, I’m just the nanny tonight. Nanny Annabel! Right, Eden?” He nodded his head, his mouth full of something white and doughy, a piece of cake.

  “Your hair looks nice, darling! Very sophisticated.”

  My mother came in, clasping a beaded earring to one ear. She looked taller. It was her shoes, black suede with a small heel. She wore a tight rose-coloured crocheted top and a black velvet skirt that went to her knees, with a long slit up the side, her hair in a loose twist.

  “I hope you two have a good time. Don’t bother about me, I’ll just be here with my friend Eden, watching a bit of telly and reading Mother Hubbard,” Annabel said, waving goodbye to us.

  My mother
walked down the stairs slowly, pulling up her stockings. Her shirt sparkled under the light.

  “Maybe I should just run downstairs and check on the heat. It gets so cold down there.”

  “Okay,” I said, smoothing down the front of my dress.

  She looked down the hallway. She wanted Rufus to see her, dressed up like this, but he wasn’t there. No one ever sees you when you want them to.

  My father was already outside, wiping his car down with a cloth.

  “Look at you two, don’t you look lovely?” He moved his eyes up and down my mother. He was wearing a wide-collared shirt under a tweed jacket that was tight in the waist and grey trousers with turn-ups.

  “I’m taking my girls out to dinner,” he said, opening the only door on the passenger side, making a half bow and swinging his arm out like the men do with a red cloth in front of the bulls. There was no seat in the back. There was no back at all, just a tiny corner under the sloped top.

  “There’s really no room for her back there,” my mother said, looking back at me. It was like lying under a bed. My head pressed up against the side.

  “She’s fine,” my father said. I nodded, but my neck hurt.

  “No. It’s too dangerous. She can sit on my lap, and we’ll put the seat belt across both of us.”

  “It’ll make the car look crowded,” he told her. His mouth went tight.

  “So?” My mother kept looking towards the house. I was afraid we’d never get to the restaurant.

  “Let’s take my car,” she said. I saw him turn his head slowly, looking it over.

  “All right, just bung her on your bloody lap then.” He got in the car and slammed the door behind him.

  Fifteen

  The restaurant was in the Red Lion Hotel. The tables were covered with ironed white tablecloths, one red candle in the middle, next to a silver thimble of salt with a tiny doll’s spoon and a silver pepper grinder. Two brass chandeliers hung from the ceiling; heavy red velvet curtains surrounded the windows; a fire burned in an old brick fireplace. It was warm and full of dressed-up people, sitting up straight, holding glasses of wine.

  A man in a black suit led us to a round table in the back. My father stopped him just as he was pulling out a chair. “We would prefer to sit at a banquette.”

  I thought, What is that, a banquette? The waiter tucked the menus under his arm and quickly led us to one of the long tables with cushioned benches that lined the back wall.

  My mother squeezed in, then my father, and I sat across from them on an ordinary wooden chair. The menus were long, written in black script, too much to read. I couldn’t concentrate. I was going to order a Coca-Cola: we were never allowed it at home; it was a treat, something for restaurants.

  My father looked around, nodding in approval. “Not bad, not too bad for the country,” he said to us. My mother seemed tired, lost next to the dark wooden wall. She yawned and brought her hand to her mouth.

  “Why are you so tired?” I asked. It made me angry that she was tired tonight, with him, in this restaurant. I wanted her to be fun.

  The waiter put down a basket of white rolls and a plate full of thin curls of butter on sprinkles of ice. They looked like white shells, ridged and curved. I took a roll; it was still warm.

  “Do you work on a farm?” my father asked across the table from me, low and rough. I looked up at him. I thought it was the beginning of a joke.

  “What?”

  “Your fingernails.” He pointed with his little finger, his pinky; there was a gold ring on it.

  The roll was between my hands on the small plate, almost broken. I looked down and saw dirt under my nails.

  “Why don’t you go and scrub them before we eat our meal?” He picked up the small silver spoon and tapped it lightly, so that a few grains of salt sprinkled over the butter on his roll.

  “It’s just country dirt,” my mother told him, sitting up, putting her napkin on her lap. I couldn’t see her face clearly; a shadow fell over her.

  I got up from the table and went to find the loo. I kept my fingers curled into my palms so the waiter wouldn’t see. “To the back and down the stairs,” the waiter told me. He had blondish-red hair and skin that looked like dough. I thought he was nineteen. He gave me the directions like a palace guard. His shoes were old but shiny, trying to look new, tricking everyone, unless you looked at the heels.

  When I came back to the table, my father was ordering a bottle of wine from the red-haired waiter. I thought my father was going to take my hand, spread my fingers out to inspect, but he didn’t. After he ordered the wine, he turned to my mother, who was buttering a piece of her roll, and said, “I was telling May about it earlier when I took her for a walk.”

  “She’s not a dog,” my mother said.

  “What?” He looked at her, a little startled.

  I held my lips tight in a smile so I wouldn’t laugh. My mother looked over at me and smiled too. You couldn’t laugh at him; he wasn’t that type of man. It would make him angry.

  “Telling me about what?” I asked. He kept looking at my mother, talking very slowly, like each word he said was a piece of gold.

  “I found this little house,” he said. We both stared at him with very serious expressions. “Beautiful, an old carriage house. Fred is going to be my partner on the premises, help me handle things. We’ve found some very prominent backers: Keith Richards, Ozzy Clark. That will attract an exclusive crowd.” He put a cigarette between his lips and lit it. “We want it to be the new place. Not just anyone can come in, only if you know someone.”

  “That sounds fantastic, Simon.” She said it in one flat line, like a wooden board.

  “We’re thinking of calling it Dandelions.”

  The waiter came and took our order. He didn’t write it down, just locked it away until he reached the kitchen.

  “I was thinking I would give you an opportunity to be one of the main investors—you know, before the word gets out and everyone wants a piece. It’s going to be a great place, really fabulous, only the best beer and wine and some little savouries.”

  “Savouries?”

  “Escargots and things. No chips.”

  “It sounds really great,” she said.

  He nodded, and touched the top of his hair lightly.

  “But I don’t have any money to invest. You know that.”

  I squeezed my toes under the table, I hated it when she said that. It seemed like we could fall right over the edge. No money.

  The waiter held a bottle of wine with a white napkin wrapped around it. He poured a drop into my father’s glass. My father lifted the glass by the stem and held it to the light, then stuck his nose over the glass as though he were about to dive in, sniffed it, then sipped it. It took a long time. The waiter watched, waiting.

  Finally my father nodded at his glass. “Quite nice, actually,” he said, and something soft settled in his face, a small white feather falling through the air, rocking to the ground.

  The waiter poured the wine, but my father stopped him with his hand when the glasses were half-filled. And the waiter, carrying the wine in both hands, walked away from our table.

  He looked at me and said, “Darling daughter, will you pass me a roll?” He put on a fake upper-class accent, making his face long. I handed him the roll with my clean fingernails. He took my hand and bent over to kiss the top of it like a prince, but instead he kissed the top of his own hand. It was the first time anyone had done this to me, and I laughed the way I have seen women laugh at men’s jokes: a little louder, a little longer, touching them on the shoulder—but I couldn’t do that, I was too far away across the table. My mother sat forward a little, into the light. I could see her face now; her cheeks were red from the wine. She had finished her glass already.

  He started showing me a trick. He held his hands out in front of me and pretended to take his thumb off, then put it back. He had shown me this trick before, when I was little, and it had looked so real I made him do it over and ov
er again. I didn’t want him to have a missing thumb, it made me feel sorry for him. But now I knew how he did this trick, it didn’t look real to me any more. I could even do it myself, but still I asked him to do it again, saying, “How do you do that?” to make him think he hadn’t missed that much, that things hadn’t really changed since the last time I saw him. I was a few inches taller, a few years older. He could use the same trick forever, and I would never figure it out.

  Our food came on big white plates with a thin gold band around the edge, steaming. I had shepherd’s pie. The potatoes on top were a crispy gold, but too hot to eat right away. If I had been alone with my mother, I would have picked off the top part with my fingers, waiting for the rest to cool. Instead, I sat up straight with my hands in my lap.

  “You’re a great conversationalist tonight, Lucy,” he said to my mother in a sarcastic voice, as he cut into his roast beef. She squeezed lemon over her fish, not looking at him. “I can’t get a word in edgewise.”

  I laughed at everything he said.

  “I’m tired,” she said, pushing her hair behind her ears. She looked like she was trying to remember something, the way I sit over my maths book, trying to figure it out, to solve the problems.

  “Who are you dating these days?” my mother asked him.

  “A few too many! That’s who.” He smiled at me and winked. “It’s getting to be a problem. The other day Lindsey was over when the other one stopped by.”

  My mother nodded, looking down, a half smile on her face.

  “What did you do?” I asked. My voice sounded like a squeak. But I was interested. I wanted to know what he’d done when two of his girlfriends showed up at the same time.

  “Oh, I told a few little fibs. White lies.” He ruffled his hand through the air, like he was mixing it up, shuffling girls in and out. “Mind you, I think they caught on.”

  I imagined him running up and down the stairs. Lindsey lying on the bed upstairs, under the covers, eyeliner around her eyes, her hair spread out over the pillow. Him running downstairs in his brown towelling robe to answer the door and seeing the other girl. Making an excuse, nervous, but a little bit excited.