“But you’re definitely taking me, Mummy?” Rebecca pressed her head against her mother’s chest.
“Of course I’m taking you, you silly-billy! I couldn’t go anywhere without my precious little Becka-Boo.”
Happy and secure in the knowledge that her mother loved her, Rebecca relaxed, smiling, and let herself be hugged and petted. It would be hard to leave Daddy, who wasn’t to blame for the fact that he had to work so hard and neglect Mummy but, as long as she was with her mummy, then things would be all right. She began to look forward to the adventure.
“When are we going?”
“Why, today, of course.” Mummy stared at Rebecca, as if it were obvious and she was surprised to be asked.
That made sense. Mummy always did everything ‘today’. It was as if no other day existed for her but the one she was living right now. Rebecca vowed to be just like her when she was a grown-up, and always do everything ‘today’.
While Daddy was at work they packed their things. Mummy sang out of tune at the top of her voice while she carefully packed all of her dresses, shoes, jewellery and cosmetics. She was in a rare high good humour, despite the never-ending rain, and it gladdened Rebecca’s heart to see it. Mummy had so many dresses, many of them vintage, carefully sourced from second-hand shops over the years. Some of the dresses were from as far back as the twenties or claimed to be. Mummy simply loved the twenties. She said the fashions then would have suited her tall thin body down to the ground, although the dresses themselves would have barely scraped her knees! (That was one of Mummy’s terrible jokes and Rebecca dutifully laughed at it every time she made it.) She even kept her blonde hair short and bobbed like the women back then did and painted her lips in the style of Clara Bow. She was always lying on her back on the couch with her long, bendy legs dangling over one arm, smoking cigarettes and bemoaning the fact that she’d been born in the wrong era. She could just see herself, she’d say, in a silvery flapper dress with matching shoes, silk stockings and a diamanté headband with a feather on it, smoking a cigarette in a long silver holder and flirting with a roomful of beaux who would be dazzled beyond measure at how utterly fascinating and bewitching she was. She owned two or three antique candy-striped hatboxes in which she stored bits and pieces of costume jewellery and floaty scarves among other things, and a gorgeous little cream-coloured beaded handbag she said was ‘pure vintage twenties’. Rebecca had always loved being allowed to go through the special things Mummy kept in her hatboxes. She was allowed to look at them and even handle them just as long as she was careful. They were very precious to Mummy and so, by extension, to Rebecca. It was like lifting a lid onto another world, a magical world in gracious miniature.
“What about our furniture, our beds and couches and things?” she asked Mummy at one point while they were packing to go to Uncle Vic’s.
“We don’t need those, silly,” Mummy replied gaily. “Uncle Vic has all the furniture we’ll need.”
Rebecca would be sad to say goodbye to her bedroom, because Mummy had made it so pretty over the years, but she tried not to mind too much. Mummy had already told her that she would have her own little room in Vic’s house and that it would soon feel like home because she could bring all her toys, teddies, dolls and books with her.
“Try to be grown-up about it,” Mummy had said. “Mummy and Uncle Vic aren’t bringing a crabby little baby to live with them surely, only a big grown-up girl like you, Becka.”
So Rebecca had tried to be grown-up about it and not mind that, by the end of the day, she would be sleeping in a different bed in a different house and Mummy would most likely be sleeping in a big bed with Uncle Vic. All the Uncles had seemed to enjoy being in bed with Mummy. Rebecca had no idea what transpired between them and Mummy in Mummy and Daddy’s bedroom, but the Uncles had always left the house later in the day whistling and singing tunelessly, as if they were in a good mood, so whatever had happened upstairs must have been fun for them. Mummy had always been in a wonderful mood afterwards too. She’d call for Rebecca to come up to her, and the two of them would cuddle in the bed together and giggle and Mummy would ask her what she wanted to eat for dinner and, whatever Rebecca wanted, if Mummy had it, she would cook it. The Uncles were all nice, but Rebecca was always glad when they left because then she would have Mummy’s undivided attention again and she’d get a hot cooked meal, which was a big improvement on the jam sandwiches. Rebecca’s jam sandwiches never tasted as good as the ones Mummy made her, anyway.
“That’s because I make mine with a very special secret ingredient,” Mummy would say with a knowing smile when Rebecca asked her about why this was.
“What is it?” Rebecca’s big blue eyes would be wide with wonder.
“Love,” Mummy would reply, while blowing her a kiss.
When Rebecca blew one back, Mummy would pretend to catch it and hold it to her heart.
But now, on the afternoon of November the second, 1993, the rainiest day Rebecca could ever remember, the bags were packed and they were both dressed and nearly ready to go. Mummy had ordered a taxi for them for two o’clock, because Uncle Vic had to meet someone and couldn’t take them to his house himself. While they were in the big front room waiting for the taxi to come and drive them to Uncle Vic’s house on the other side of Dublin, Mummy asked Rebecca for a sheet of paper and a pencil so that she could write Daddy a goodbye note. She showed Rebecca afterwards what she’d written.
Dear Stephen, I’m leaving you and I’m taking Becka with me because there is no room in your life for a wife and child. Please don’t try to find us. All you need to know is that we will be safe and looked after by someone who actually cares about what happens to us, which is more than you ever did. I’m sorry that things between us have to end this way. No hard feelings? Joanna.
Mummy got Rebecca to add the words ‘Goodbye Daddy’ to the end of the note, and then she left the note on the table in the living-room under the heavy glass ashtray, so it wouldn’t blow under the table and get lost. Then she went upstairs to check her face in the bathroom mirror one more time, warning Rebecca to be on ‘taxi-watch’ in the meantime.
Rebecca dutifully climbed up on to the window-seat with Baby Audrey in tow and looked out at the rain-washed street. No way was she packing her favourite doll in the dark cramped luggage, to get scared and squished in the boot of the taxi. Baby Audrey would be sitting right there on her lap with her when she was in the taxi, being driven away from Sycamore Drive in Terenure for ever. Rebecca’s eyes widened when she saw the big white van with the words ‘STEPHEN JAMIESON CARPENTRY’ printed in big letters on the side of it suddenly pull up to the garden gate where the taxi was soon going to be. She knew that somehow this meant danger for Mummy’s lovely plans, the plans that included her daughter Rebecca, whom she loved so dearly.
Rebecca scrambled down off the window-seat, leaving Baby Audrey behind her in her haste. She bolted into the hall and up the stairs, shouting, “It’s Daddy! Mummy, it’s Daddy! Daddy’s here!”
Mummy stuck her head out of the bathroom door, a loaded mascara wand in her hand and an expression of annoyance on her face. “What on earth are you yelling about, Rebecca?” she said irritably. “Haven’t I told you a thousand times that young ladies don’t shout?”
“Daddy’s home.” Rebecca was red-faced at being told off by Mummy.
“What!” Mummy, by contrast, went chalk-white.
“He’s outside the house,” said Rebecca. “I saw his van from the window just now.”
“Fuck!” breathed Mummy, before tearing down the stairs to see for herself. “What the fuck is he doing here in the middle of the day? How does he know? Who told him? He’ll spoil everything! He’ll spoil everything!”
She reached the hall at the same time as Daddy, who’d just put his key in the door. They said nothing as they stood and stared at each other. Daddy took in the little pile of suitcases in the hall, topped by one of Mummy’s antique candy-striped hatboxes, bursting at the seams with pre
cious treasures.
“Rebecca, go up to your room,” Daddy said in a quiet voice that was somehow scarier than if he’d been shouting.
“But, but, Daddy, Baby Audwey!” Rebecca reverted without realising it to the lisp she’d had when she was younger.
“Now, Rebecca.” Still in those dangerously quiet tones.
“But, but Daddy –”
“Now!” he roared, and with one last pleading glance at Mummy, whose face was pale under her make-up, Rebecca fled.
For a while, it wasn’t hard to make out what was going on downstairs. There was an almighty row going on, that much was clear. Mummy was screaming and crying and hurling bitter accusations at Daddy, stuff about him being neglectful and emotionally distant. Rebecca already knew what those words meant because Mummy used them about Daddy all the time. Rebecca knew lots of grown-up words that meant ‘bad husband’ which she’d learned from Mummy. Mummy was always complaining about Daddy to Rebecca and saying what a bad husband he was, selfish in bed and selfish in other ways as well. Rebecca always felt vaguely guilty about hearing Mummy say such nasty things about Daddy when Daddy wasn’t there to defend himself, but she usually managed to dismiss these thoughts because it felt so wonderful to have Mummy confiding in her like she was a fellow adult. In later years, Rebecca would learn that adults weren’t supposed to confide in children as if they were fellow adults, especially about sexual things. It was something that adults today called ‘inappropriate’ but, when she was a child, she’d felt proud and grown-up to be the main repository of Mummy’s important secrets.
Downstairs, Daddy was shouting and yelling and doors were being slammed shut and it was horrible. Rebecca climbed into bed and pulled the covers over her head to block out the noise but she could still hear it. She thought of Baby Audrey alone and abandoned in the living room, directly in the line of fire, and she trembled. Poor Baby Audrey! She would never forgive Rebecca for leaving her downstairs all alone like that. At one point, Rebecca thought she could hear a loud banging on the front door and then Daddy shouting even louder than he had been. She wondered if that was the taxi-driver arriving to take Rebecca and Mummy to Uncle Victor’s house and then being sent away, amidst much angry yelling, by Daddy.
Then, at some point in the afternoon, everything went quiet downstairs. For some reason, this worried Rebecca more than the shouting. She was too afraid to come out of her room to see what was happening and, as the afternoon progressed, she grew more and more hungry.
At about six o’clock, a full four hours after Mummy and Rebecca’s taxi was supposed to take them to Uncle Vic’s house, Daddy came to her room with a tray bearing a meal he’d obviously put together himself. There was a cheese sandwich, a packet of crisps, a chocolate bar and an apple, together with a glass of milk in the blue sippy cup Rebecca hadn’t used in over a year now. She used a proper big-girl beaker now, the one that had the teddy bears on it. Daddy mustn’t have known this. He clearly didn’t know either that Rebecca loathed cheese sandwiches and preferred jam ones. If Mummy had made up the tray, she would have done everything perfectly. Thinking about Mummy suddenly made Rebecca afraid.
After Daddy had put the tray down on the bedside table and turned to go without saying anything, Rebecca said shrilly, “Where’s Mummy?”
Daddy seemed to hesitate, then he said, his voice tired and flat: “She’s gone.”
“Gone? Gone where?”
“Just gone, Becka. Now eat your dinner like a good girl and don’t make a fuss, okay?”
“Where’s Mummy?” Rebecca’s voice rose dangerously high. Daddy sighed heavily and sat down on the bed beside her, taking both her small hands in one of his own big, work-calloused ones. “She’s gone away with . . . with one of her men.” He looked like it hurt him to say it.
“With . . . with Uncle Victor?” gulped Rebecca. If Daddy already knew about Uncle Victor, then it was obviously okay to mention him. He mustn’t be a secret any more.
Daddy winced as if she’d cut him. “Yes, with Uncle Victor,” he said dully.
“W-without me?” Rebecca’s eyes were filling with tears.
“It looks like it,” Daddy said. “Now, won’t you eat something?”
“But . . . but thee would never go without me!” The tears spilled over and down her face and the lisp worsened. “Thee thwore thee wouldn’t. I’m her – her pwecious widdle Becka-Boo.”
“Well, I guess you didn’t know exactly what kind of a manipulative, lying cheating bitch you had for a mother.” Daddy was getting up off the bed now and making for the door. “Now eat your dinner and get yourself to bed, okay? I’ve got some work to do.”
Rebecca cried for hours. She cried until her eyes were red and sore and her throat felt raw. Mummy couldn’t be gone. She couldn’t have left the house without her baby girl, her best friend and her little confidante, as she was always calling her. It just didn’t make any sense. Daddy could say what he liked, but Mummy wouldn’t have left without her precious daughter. She was always telling Rebecca that she was much more Mummy’s child than Daddy’s anyway. They liked all the same things, like girly chats about fashion, jewellery and make-up and Mummy’s ideas about how she might like to design her own jewellery some day. She was even going to call her home business ‘RJ’s Jewels,’ the initials of each of their names, an ‘R’ for Rebecca and a ‘J’ for Joanna. Rebecca couldn’t bear to think that now they mightn’t be able to do Mummy’s idea for her own business some day. After sobbing until she was exhausted, she fell into a fretful sleep that didn’t make her feel rested when she woke, only hoarse, with a croak like a frog’s and with terribly sore, heavy eyelids.
When she woke, it was pitch dark after the heavy rain that had fallen all day. Daddy hadn’t bothered to plug in her nightlight so, with trembling fingers, she did it herself, feeling relieved when at least part of the huge room flooded with light. Starving now, she wolfed down the packet of crisps, the chocolate bar and the apple, leaving the cheese sandwich untouched (it was curling up at the edges, yuk!) and declining with a wrinkle of her nose the milk that was now warmish and no longer fresh and cold from the refrigerator the way she liked it. After finishing her small repast, she tiptoed to the door, realising now that she really needed the toilet. To her surprise, the door wouldn’t open. Had Daddy . . . had Daddy locked her in? But why? And where was he? If Mummy was really gone, then Rebecca at least needed her daddy to be there in Mummy’s place.
A horrible thought came unbidden into Rebecca’s head that made icy fingers of fear claw their way down her spine. What if Daddy was gone too? What if he’d just decided he’d had enough of the nonsense – the bullshit, Mummy had called it – that came with being married with a kid and he’d just packed up and driven off in his van? What if she were all alone now in this big, echoey old house, with Mummy gone off to Uncle Victor’s house for ever and Daddy disappeared God knows where in his van, and Baby Audrey, poor poor Baby Audrey, still down in the cold darkened living-room on her own?
Who would look after Rebecca now? Mummy didn’t have any relatives. She’d told Rebecca that she’d split from them years before because they were too stuffy and old-fashioned to appreciate her more modern outlook on life and what they’d called her ‘flighty’ personality. They’d called her ‘unstable’, she’d told Rebecca indignantly once. Daddy’s parents were dead and he didn’t get on with his remaining relatives either. So Rebecca didn’t really have grandparents, therefore, or the aunts and uncles that she’d read about in storybooks and knew other families had. The Uncles who’d called to the house to visit Mummy wouldn’t, of course, have any reason to call there any more, not now that Mummy had left. If both her parents were gone, there would be no relatives to take Rebecca in, no family members to look after her. She’d be all alone in this big scary house for ever, jumping at shadows and the slightest little noise.
Unable to hold it in any longer, her bladder relaxed and let go and she wee-d where she stood, shivering violently with cold and fear by
the bedroom door. She started to cry with the shame and fright of having wet herself. She was nearly six years old, much too old to be having this kind of ‘accident’. She’d get in trouble for it for sure. There was a big stinky patch of wee by the door now. She went to her dresser where her mummy put her clean nightdresses and lifted one out. When she was dressed once more in a clean nightdress, something made her turn and peek out the window. Her bedroom window overlooked the long grassy back garden lined with trees on two sides and on the third one with a big brick wall. Mummy loved – had loved, Rebecca corrected herself miserably – the fact that you couldn’t be overlooked by the other houses on Sycamore Street when you were out in the back garden. Mummy had taken advantage of this on numerous occasions to sunbathe naked while Daddy was at work. Rebecca wasn’t supposed to tell Daddy that Mummy did this, because Daddy was a – what was it again – a big boring old fuddy-duddy who just wanted Mummy to stay at home knitting socks all day or something like that, and he thought Mummy was too much of a bloody exha – exhib – exhiba –? Rebecca couldn’t remember the long word Daddy had once angrily used to describe Mummy.
The back garden certainly wasn’t sunny and bright right now, a place where butterflies chased one another around the treetops and a grey squirrel or two (rodents, Daddy called them, though Rebecca thought they looked adorable and not at all like rats, who were the real rodents) sometimes climbed down from the trees for a curious look-see at the crazy humans. It was dark and still raining, though not as heavily as earlier in the day, and Daddy was standing stock-still on the wet grass, on the place where he later built the summerhouse, staring up at the black moonless sky. He looked like himself, but he looked strange too, and different. Rain drenched his hair, his beard and his glasses and he wasn’t wearing a coat, but he didn’t seem to mind that he was all soaking wet and Catching His Death Of Cold, as Mummy was always saying to him when he came home from a job all wet and mucky. A shovel lay on the ground at his feet. What was he looking at, wondered Rebecca, because there was no moon tonight and only more rain to see? As Rebecca stared down at him, careful not to be seen by him because somehow she felt that he wouldn’t want that, she saw him shudder, as if he were giving himself a shake or something, and snap suddenly out of his trance-like state. She watched as he bent to pick up the shovel, then turned himself around and headed towards the house, out of the rain. Rebecca stayed at the window for several more minutes, looking out at the deserted, rain-washed garden. Only when she was satisfied, or as satisfied as she could be, that her daddy wasn’t returning to the back garden to stand once more looking up at the black sky in the rain, did she scurry, cold and uneasy, back to her bed.
Thirteen Stops Page 28
