Toffee
Page 4
No, I want my money back.
And another offer.
No, I don’t wanna exchange it.
The girl at the till was hardly older than I was –
hair in long plaits,
green eyeliner –
and I knew how it felt,
to be bombarded by him.
The best I can do is a credit note, she mumbled.
My manager isn’t back from lunch for an hour.
Dad drummed his fingers against the counter
and agreed,
slipping the card with the money on it into my hand
as we walked away.
Get yourself the jeans, he said.
I’ll be in the car. Hurry up.
It was the kindest thing he’d done in ages,
and it made me remember to love him.
Moon Tiger
Marla’s bookshelves are lined
with paperbacks –
classics, poetry, romance, crime,
the spines bent and broken,
pages yellow and weak.
I curl up under a lamp,
reading a book called Moon Tiger,
mouthing the words
like a prayer
while Marla sits looking into her lap,
suddenly spent,
quiet,
withdrawn.
I have no idea what she is feeling
and this not knowing makes me shift in my
chair constantly.
Eventually her phone pings
and it rouses her –
her mind wriggling back into the room.
Bedtime.
At the door she turns.
Are you going home?
Yes. Soon.
I hold the book aloft.
She nods in a sort of expressionless way
and heads upstairs,
flushes the loo,
shuts her bedroom door.
In the half-lit room
I sit with Moon Tiger
until sleepiness creeps through me
and I can’t keep my eyes open
for the last chapters.
Electricity buzzes in the room.
Something crackles.
But Marla does not return.
She stays asleep.
And here I am alone in her home,
reading her books,
pretending to be someone I am not.
She will see through me tomorrow.
But I suppose that doesn’t matter tonight.
I have a bed
and the doors in this house
are locked tight.
I can’t go home.
So I am staying.
Too Long
I hadn’t known he was in a hurry
until he was
behind me in my room,
glaring back at me in the full-length mirror.
I’ve been waiting, he said.
Kelly-Anne loitered on the landing.
Is it cold out?
Are either of you taking coats?
She was wearing a new dress.
Dad ignored her.
Nearly ready, I said,
running a brush through my hair
to the ends,
tying it up high on to my head.
Are you taking a coat? Kelly-Anne asked again.
She was in the room now next to Dad.
He stormed out.
She made a face.
Dad returned
with a pair of scissors,
and before I could jerk my head from him
he had hold
of my ponytail
and was cutting it,
cutting it,
cutting it,
until he was holding the whole length of my hair
in his hands.
Kelly-Anne gasped. Marcus!
Too long, he muttered.
I nodded.
But I didn’t know what was too long:
the amount of time I’d made him wait
or the length of hair
he’d just stolen from me.
Cleaner
As I come out of the toilet,
Marla sees me and screams.
Who are you?
She covers her face with her fingers
for protection.
I step into the hall light,
holding up my hands,
about to tell her
I am Toffee.
Marla steps back.
Who are you?
I stare at her.
Who am I?
Who? Who?
Think, Allison, think.
I was just here to clean, I mutter.
I sit at the bottom of the stairs and
slip on my trainers.
Cobwebs hang beneath the hall table.
Marla reaches for an umbrella,
waves it at me.
I don’t need a cleaner.
Don’t come back here.
I’m well able to do my own polishing.
I understand.
She holds the umbrella aloft
and clumsily,
unluckily,
it opens.
I step closer.
I haven’t been paid.
I hold out my palm.
She seems to smirk at my audacity.
Do I look like a bleedin’ cripple?
I’m not.
I can push a broom around the place
and I’d break someone’s back with it
if they messed me about,
don’t think I wouldn’t.
You haven’t been cleaning.
I’m owed twelve quid, I tell her.
I’ve no idea why I’m insisting,
why I don’t just go away
and come back later.
She chews her tongue.
Your handbag’s in the sitting room.
My voice is lined with ridicule,
my expression hard.
Leave, I tell myself.
What the hell are you doing?
You aren’t getting any money from me.
She isn’t messing around.
I march past her
into the sitting room
where I collect her bag
then come back out and hand it to her.
Twelve. Pounds.
My knees are shaking although
she is watching me less confidently,
perhaps with a thread of fear.
How many hours were you here?
Two. It’s six pounds per hour.
She looks up at the ceiling,
puts the open umbrella aside.
I don’t want you back here, madam.
Don’t let me see you in this house again.
You hear me?
If I see you back I’ll get the guards.
Don’t think I won’t.
She glances at the rotary telephone.
It is black, dusty.
I shrug.
She hands me a tenner and two coins.
See you later, I say.
Caught
I don’t have a waterproof coat,
and quickly it goes from cloudy to torrential,
rain sweeping across the sky in
thick panels.
Cold comes in from the ocean.
My cheek stings.
I wedge myself between
two lopsided beach huts
to keep dry
and look up
only when a pair of Hunter wellies
comes to a halt in front of me.
A girl with a silky Labrador frowns down.
The dog’s tail wags,
flicks rain.
Water drips from the hem of the girl’s hood.
Are you hurt? she asks.
What happened to your face?
Just got caught in the rain, I say.
Beach Hut Number 13
The beach hut has its back to the town,
face to the sea,
a full view of the Atlantic –
a straight line all the way to America
if you had the guts to get going.
The wood smells of mint and mould.
I could live here, I murmur to the girl,
who is drying off the dog with a dishcloth.
She laughs,
tells me about the time her brother
moved in
for a week,
when he was studying for his A levels
and couldn’t stand the sound of drumming.
Who plays the drums? I ask.
I do, she says casually,
like that sort of thing could be ordinary.
Her name is Lucy
and she speaks
as though the world has always listened to her.
I can’t look her in the eye.
I examine the floorboards,
scrutinise the dog’s paws and
the jelly-fish-patterned rug.
She glances up at the mute roof.
It’s stopped raining, she says,
which I take to mean,
You can leave now.
So I do.
Friends
Dad didn’t like me having friends.
He said,
If I pay for your swimming,
you’ll think things come easy.
They don’t.
Make yourself useful.
Start with that dishwasher.
He said,
You can get a Saturday job
when you’ve finished your exams.
I’m a decent father. Don’t you eat?
He said,
It’s too late to go out.
You think I don’t know what goes on?
I could have invited friends over to the house
but also
I couldn’t.
Sophie and Jacq weren’t the sort of girls to
keep schtum if things were weird –
Jacq was a worrier, Sophie was gobby.
I didn’t want them seeing how he was,
huffing and angry,
cruel to Kelly-Anne.
Why didn’t you come to Martin’s? Jacq asked.
He fancies you cos he went on and on.
His brother’s got a new motorbike.
Said he’ll let us have a go next time.
Gotta be careful what you wear though
in case you set fire to your leg on the exhaust.
Allie thinks she’s too good for us, Sophie said.
You already got a boyfriend or something?
What’s his name? Is it Jacq’s dad?
Shut up, said Jacq.
She pushed Sophie.
They laughed.
Jacq’s dad was living with a twenty-year-old
in some bedsit.
We pretended his girlfriend was still at primary school,
that her dad was a weirdo.
Jacq pretended to find it funny.
I wanted to come out, I told them.
Dad’s being a pain.
So come Saturday, Jacq said.
We’ll go down the cinema.
Sneak in.
Nothing worth paying for anyway.
Jacq held on longer than Sophie,
tried really hard to keep me from
slipping
away.
I can’t.
I didn’t have an explanation.
The only reason for not hanging out
was that I was scared.
But even then
I couldn’t exactly explain
what I was afraid he might do.
Waiting
Marla is sitting at the kitchen table
giving a crossword puzzle evils,
a lidded biro between her fingers.
I rap on the woodwork so she won’t be startled.
I’m back, I say,
as casually as I can,
hoping she’ll remember me as Toffee
not the counterfeit cleaner
so I can stay.
Oh, she murmurs, without excitement.
I need help with six across.
Abode: four letters.
I fiddle with my sleeve,
pull it over my fingers.
Home, I whisper.
She counts the tiny boxes.
You’re home.
Yes. Home. OK.
Crosswords
Everything Dad ever said was a puzzle,
blanks and clues,
words crossing
v
e
horizontally,
t
i
c
a
l
l
y,
the answers never evident.
Crosswords I can do.
But I could never work out my father.
Tired
It was just noise.
Loud noise that did nothing.
Loud noise that sounded around me
then vanished.
So why did I shake when he shouted?
Allison! Allison?
How many times have I told you
not to leave your shoes lying around?
I knew my school shoes were next to the couch
cos I kicked them off to read,
and my trainers were still in the bathroom
where I’d left them after my shower.
It was before Kelly-Anne came to live with us
and taught me how to keep out of his way.
I was seven maybe.
I wet the bed sometimes.
Allison? Do your shoes need their own place?
Allison? Where are you?
Not clearing up, that’s for sure.
He was clomping up the stairs,
heavy-footed.
I don’t ask much, do I?
I mean, do I ask for much?
A tidy house isn’t a lot to ask for.
Is it?
Is it?
The walls rattled.
The ceilings came closer.
I stepped on to the landing.
I’m sorry, Daddy.
I’ll do it now.
I was crying.
There was snot.
Choking sounds came from my throat.
And he relented,
just like that,
head tilted like he was working me out.
Jesus, Al, I’m so tired.
That’s all it is.
Don’t blub. Come on, gimme a break.
We’re mates, aren’t we?
He could have hugged me then
to show he hadn’t meant to shout,
to show what love felt like,
but he didn’t.
He opened his own bedroom door,
kicked his shoes and clothes across the floor
and fell down on to his bed to sleep.
And that’s the thing.
He hadn’t lied.
He really had been very tired.
During the Ad Break
Marla dozes for a few minutes.
When she opens her eyes she is afraid.
Where’s Mary? she asks.
She presses herself into her chair.
I don’t know where she is.
I hold up my hands in surrender.
I’m starved.
She points as though I’m the one
who’s starved her.
Well, I can make you something.
What do you want?
I want Mary. Who are you at all?
I want my Mary.
I’m Toffee.
Marla squints and smiles,
forgetting her growling stomach.
For a moment she looks young;
her face is bright, body bouncy.
Toffee! Oh, we should practise!
Practise what? I ask.
You’re making fun of me.
Either that, or you’ve had a bump on the head.
Marla Has Move
s
Marla
grooves and swivels,
jiggles and jives,
not afraid of the high tempo
or the possibility she could trip and
knock herself against the stone mantelpiece.
Come on, Toff, keep up!
Roger said we need to be ready.
I hear Moira’s ready. And Frances.
Those bitches.
Move, Toffee!
She drags me by the arm to join her,
hip dipping one way, then the other,
music roaring around the room
from the record player.
And once the song ends,
needle in a little crane
lifting itself off the spinning record,
she starts the whole thing over.
Routine
Right foot forward,
right foot back,
quick, quick, quick,
slow – slow,
point to the sky and spin,
right foot
right foot
right foot
right,
wink at the crowd and grin.
And again but faster:
left foot now,
quick, quick, quick,
slow – slow,
left foot back and dip,
left foot
left foot
left foot
left,
wiggle three times and skip.
Strictly
Dad worked weekends,
taxiing drunks from pub to club,
charging extra if they puked in his car.
It meant the sitting room was free,
and the TV,
so Kelly-Anne and I ordered pizza