A Gingerbread House

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘Clicky hip,’ Martine said. ‘That’s exactly what my mum always called it. Why didn’t she want him to come?’ She searched Kate’s face and it didn’t take long. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘He was married?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Kate. ‘He was married. He never got in touch again. And neither did your mum, I don’t think. Not in writing anyway. He’d have kept it.’

  ‘And how did you know it was me?’ Martine said. ‘I mean, how did you know it was me you were looking for? There must have been more than one baby born that day in Dumfries? Did you … Do you work for the NHS? Did you find a medical record? About my hip?’

  ‘No!’ said Kate. ‘Heavens, no! I don’t work for the NHS and neither does Gail. If we did we’d lose our jobs for that. We run our own little business, as it goes.’

  ‘Did you check the register?’ Martine said. ‘Was I the only one with no dad on her birth certificate that day?’

  ‘Poor little baby,’ said Kate. ‘Was he not? Really?’

  ‘Well, no,’ said Martine. ‘He’d have had to be there to go on it, since they weren’t married. You learn that quick enough at this genealogy caper.’

  ‘Right,’ said Kate. ‘Makes sense, I suppose. Otherwise …’

  ‘Yeah.’ Martine smiled to show she wasn’t offended. ‘Otherwise … We’d all be putting “Idris Elba”, wouldn’t we? So, how did you know?’

  ‘That it was you?’ Kate said. ‘Because of your name. Martine.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘And his name.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Martin Ellis. Martin E.’

  Martine took another slug and mopped the three drops with the napkin while the glass was off the table. ‘Martin,’ she repeated. ‘Ellis. It seems obvious now. It would have been quite easy to find him. If I’d been looking. But it never crossed my mind.’ She set the glass down again. ‘And what’s his connection to you? And your sister?’

  Kate’s eyebrows rose up until her brow was crinkled. ‘Didn’t I say already?’ she asked. ‘Did I really not say? He’s my dad. Was. My dad. Our dad. Gail and me.’

  Martine felt her cheeks sink down again, her bottom lip turned out this time. ‘I don’t get it,’ she said. ‘How can he be?’

  ‘Why not?’ said Kate. ‘Did you think we’d be angry? Maybe some people would be. Maybe my mum would have been, if he’d gone first, and she’d found the tape. But not Gail and me. We just wanted to find you.’

  ‘Her,’ said Martine. ‘You want to find her. I agree the name’s a bit of a coincidence, and there’s the fact that my mum was single, and her name was Karen – it’s a massive coincidence, actually – but it must be someone else you’re looking for, who was born in Dumfries that day.’

  ‘Why?’ said Kate. ‘What do you mean?’

  Martine stared at her. Then she pushed her jacket sleeve up and stretched her bare arm across the table, laying it beside Kate’s bone-white one.

  ‘I can’t be your sister,’ she said. ‘Obviously.’

  Kate didn’t move. She just stared and stared, goosebumps lifting on her arm. Martine could feel the tickle of the tiny blonde hairs.

  ‘So … your mum was white?’ Kate said, at last. ‘Is that what you mean? Are you showing me the colour of your skin?’

  ‘And my dad’s Black,’ said Martine. ‘Obviously. Whoever he may be.’

  The dots on Kate’s forearm were so pronounced now they made Martine think of that phobia, those people who couldn’t look at beehives or pomegranates. She didn’t share the aversion but she’d heard a podcast about it and understood it. Right now she felt her own hackles rise in sympathy.

  ‘“Whoever he may be”?’ Kate echoed. ‘He was Martin Ellis. Of course he was. I mean, what are the chances of two little Black girls being born in Dumfries to single white mothers on the same day?’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Martine said.

  ‘Me neither,’ Kate said. ‘I can’t work out what’s bothering you.’ Then her head jerked up again. ‘Wait! Oh my God. Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I?’

  ‘Tell me what?’

  ‘We’re adopted. Gail and me. We were adopted when she was three and I was a baby. We never knew who it was that couldn’t have them. Dad or Mum. Never knew till after he was dead and we found the cassette. Obviously it was Mum, right? And that’s why he always kept the recording – you’re the only one that’s actually his, biologically. And it explains why he would never try to add you to the family, doesn’t it? It would have broken my mum’s heart. It would have destroyed her. He was a nice man. A really good man. A great dad and a good husband. One lapse doesn’t change that.’

  Martine nodded. A good man, a good husband, with two little girls at home, went out one night and knocked up her mother.

  ‘I’m sorry it’s too late for you to meet him,’ Kate said. ‘But we’ve got photos.’

  ‘With you?’ Martine couldn’t help the leap in her voice. ‘On your phone?’ She darted looks at Kate’s bag and her pockets. Surely the woman would have at least one picture of her beloved late father with her always. It was probably her wallpaper.

  ‘Not on me, no,’ said Kate. ‘Sorry. But at home. Albums full of pictures and home videos too. You will come, won’t you? Come and spend the weekend with us? Come and stay? We’re only up in Hephaw. You know where I mean?’

  ‘Hephaw?’

  ‘West Lothian. You’ll love our house. Seriously, wait till you see it. Come for the weekend.’

  ‘The weekend,’ said Martine. ‘Videos?’

  ‘Are you OK?’ said Kate. ‘I know this is a lot. We couldn’t think how to approach you. This was my idea. Just going for it. But are you OK?’

  ‘I’m just,’ Martine said. ‘It is.’ She took a deep breath. ‘It is a lot. I don’t understand … How did you find me?’

  ‘What?’ Kate said. ‘Birth records are public—’

  ‘No, I mean how did you find me here. Tonight. How did you know I’d be here?’

  Kate chewed her lip for a while before answering. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I hope this doesn’t make you feel uneasy. We hired a private detective. I’ll show you his report.’

  ‘It doesn’t,’ Martine said. ‘Make me feel uneasy. It’s practical. It’s … it’s flattering actually. It’s amazing. Someone trying to find me. My mum’s dead, you see. And my gran, who practically brought me up, died. And I’m an only child.’

  Kate reached over the table now. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re not an only child. You’ve got sisters. You’ve got Gail and me.’

  EIGHT

  I wasn’t sorry to be out of Fraserburgh, and away from the exciting world of sub-subcontracted medical delivery. I definitely wasn’t sorry to hand back the tracker-logger and know that I wasn’t a moving light on Jamie Morton’s driver-location app. Leaving my locker stuffed with treasure, I packed up and moved the operation south to Lockerbie. ‘Belt cinched,’ I said to myself. ‘Time to twang the braces.’ Did it trouble me that I was still following his rules? Not at all. He was right about some things and I’d be a fool to deny it. Besides, it was more than a back-up plan. It was a calculated move in a game I still couldn’t believe I was playing. It was a great big ‘try me; I dare you’.

  But the big picture was too scary to look at for long. I made myself turn away and concentrate on the details instead: another name for another job. I couldn’t believe it was this easy, but it turns out life in a free country is not nothing. The Protection of Vulnerable Groups form asked for ‘previous first and last names, if any’ and even two of each – Tash Dodd and Nate Dewar – didn’t trip a switch, maybe because neither of them had ever been in trouble. So when Trix Depp – with her no experience but a lot of enthusiasm, her clean licence and that PVG clearance – turned up for interview, RoundnRound Special Pupil Transport Services bit her arm off.

  Once I had started the job itself, I was nearly ready to jack in the plan, forget my vow to bring Big Garry down, and just be a pupil transport assistant
for the rest of my puff. Do this very job, get a promotion, mount a takeover, make changes. Do it better, make it the best it could be. For now, I just did my best, and got a name for it.

  ‘You’ll settle,’ said Ken, my driver. ‘Stop making us all look bad.’ I could see his eyes in the rear-view mirror, cold as gum in a puddle. Not a twinkle in them anywhere.

  ‘I’m not trying to make you look bad,’ I said. ‘If you’ve got a guilty conscience, that’s on you.’

  We were right at the start of the new run, on our way out to the flats beyond the bypass, to pick up Janelle, in her wheelchair, with her oxygen tank, and her service dog for her fits. After Janelle came two brothers with low-functioning autism who needed to be in the van with their noise cancellers before the rest of the seats filled, then Olivia, blind and palsied, wee Freya in her three braces, one for her back and one on each leg, and Jack in his wheelchair, even more fancy than Janelle’s, who couldn’t manage a long trip without stomach trouble, and all the embarrassment a ten-year-old boy in a full bus could feel about it. Ken had kicked up about that, when I showed him a different route and pointed out that Jack could be last on first off, saving us both a lot of mopping.

  ‘You’re not supposed to complain about personal care,’ Ken had said, rootling the last scrap of a fried egg piece from between his back molars. ‘That’s the job.’

  ‘I’m not complaining for me,’ I said. ‘I’m thinking about the lad. Can’t be very nice, every morning in life.’

  Ken shrugged, as if it was nothing to him whether a kid was sick or well. But he could see the point of it.

  ‘Ha’way then,’ he said, slurping the last of his grey coffee that had to be clap cold by now. I shuddered, drained my water glass and got to my feet, re-Velcroing my Hi-Vis as I edged out of the café into the cheerless Monday morning drizzle.

  I met Ken at the same greasy spoon every day and every day I had a glass of tap and a banana and ignored the girls behind the counter glaring at my thermos cup, daring me to take a sip from it so they could chuck me out. I had no idea how Ken had got out of the morning staff meeting and managed to stick me with picking up the day-sheets and specials; all the other drivers were there with their PTAs, only me on my own. I was careful to complain about being left with the paperwork, not giving him even a whisker of a clue that I was thrilled. But thrilled I was. I had thought it would take weeks to build up enough trust with my driver before he’d let me file the sheets without him checking them over.

  Ken dinked the lock open and climbed up into the driver’s seat with a grunt. He had a driver’s figure, and no mistake. Trucker’s butt. When I was a wee girl I thought that’s what men looked like. Short-legged, with a belly that rested on their lap when they sat, round shoulders over ham-shaped arms and no neck to speak of. I had thought that was what happened to boys, like girls getting extra chins and bunions. I had been eighteen before I realized it was self-fulfilling; that no one rangy or bony could stand to sit in a lorry cab all day and no one who minded junk food could stand to eat in service stations the way the drivers had to. My dad was different. He still had the ham-arms and the short legs – for his height anyway – but his shoulders were square, at least when he wore a decent suit, which he usually did, and his belly was as flat as it was on his wedding day. As he always said. I would cringe in advance of the punchline. ‘And Lynne’s is a damn sight flatter!’ he’d say, his voice rising to a shout. My mum laughed like she didn’t mind and if Big Garry caught sight of my stony face, he’d shake me if he was close enough, chuck something at me if he wasn’t and say, ‘Come on! We wouldn’t have it any other way.’

  In the back of the accessible bus I was unwinding a string of fairy lights and draping them over Freya’s seat.

  ‘—hell’s that for?’ Ken was saying.

  ‘It’s her birthday.’

  ‘How d’you know?’

  ‘Because their dates of birth are on their consent forms. I put them in my phone.’

  He stared at me in the mirror, eyes slightly narrowed. He was dying to find fault.

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ he said. ‘When it comes round to Olivia, she’ll kick off. You know what she’s like.’

  I knew exactly what Olivia was like. Nearly completely blind and so wobbly on her pins she needed a walker. ‘Tell me!’ she’d cry out, when the rest of them saw something out the window. She sounded like a baby bird, like a kitten. ‘Tell me! Tell me!’

  ‘It’s a rainbow, Livvy,’ I would say. ‘It’s a horse.’

  ‘Clippety-clop,’ said Freya. ‘Pop-pop.’

  Simon and Damon, the twins, said nothing, but sometimes they picked up on the excitement of a flock of geese against the sky or a vintage sports car overtaking and then they would shoot side looks out of the corner of the eye and enjoy the sight, so long as no one caught them at it.

  ‘When it’s Olivia’s turn,’ I said to Ken, ‘I’ll give her a feather boa and put a bit of music on. Better than fairy lights for a blind kid.’

  Ken said nothing. He was still silent when we pulled into the designated parking space at the foot of Janelle’s building and I jumped down to go up and fetch her.

  The sky was still rosy, as early as this on a spring morning, and the flats were quiet, no more than a burble of telly coming from behind their front doors. The lift wasn’t just working, it was pristine, smelling like the Magic Tree hanging from the emergency stop button and only faintly of the vinegar and grease from someone’s carry-out the night before. I stepped off on to Janelle’s landing and stood a moment, taking in the view. The sky had faded already, while I was in the lift. Now it was pale and pearled like the inside of a shell, dazzling where the sun showed behind thinning cloud. Dumfries looked like a toy town, with Matchbox cars on its tangle of streets, dolls’ houses lining them.

  There weren’t many moments like this but sometimes, when dawn and goodness chimed, I could feel myself expanding, as if sheer resolve, growing inside me, could make me into Wonder Woman.

  Behind me, a front door opened. Janelle’s mum put her head round it.

  ‘Thought I saw the bus. And I heard the lift. You having a fag?’

  ‘Just dreaming,’ I said, turning to face her. ‘I love it how no one ever vandalizes this lift because they know Janelle needs it. Like how no one ever nicks the poppies.’

  ‘What poppies?’ Deeta was busy poking Janelle’s hair into the sides of her anorak hood, such thick hair.

  ‘At the cenotaph. The wreaths sit there for months till they’re bleached in the sun and no one ever nicks them or kicks them to bits. Like Janelle’s lift. Good morning, sunshine!’

  Janelle rolled her eyes and whipped her head back and forth across the back of her wheelchair. Most of the hair Deeta had poked in came bouncing out again.

  ‘If we could harness that, and spread it …’ I said.

  ‘What you on about?’ said Deeta. ‘What’s she on about?’ She bent low over Janelle, kissed her eyes and nose, kissed her cheeks and lips, lifted first one hand and then the other, prising them open and planting a kiss in each palm. ‘For later,’ she said. ‘Here, Mutt!’

  Janelle’s alert dog, a chihuahua called Muttley, came prancing out of the living room, already in his little jacket with the built-in pouch for his poo-bags, carrying the end of his lead in his mouth. He jumped up on to Janelle’s lap, trampling and snuffling and making her writhe against her restraints and let out a string of high-pitched squeals and uncomfortable-sounding short groans.

  ‘The first time I saw her I thought “she bloody hates that dog”,’ I said to Deeta. ‘I’m starting to learn her noises now. See you tonight, eh?’

  The dog kept both its bug eyes trained on me as I rolled Janelle back to the lift. It didn’t trust me yet. Or maybe it knew I didn’t care for it.

  ‘It’s nothing personal,’ I told it. ‘I’m just not a dog person.’ Although it didn’t help that Muttley had crust in the corners of his bug eyes and brown stains at the sides of his snappy little mouth. �
�Who’s a good boy?’ I said. He recognized that sentence and he curled up facing the other way. ‘Your dog’s a pillock,’ I told Janelle. ‘Hey, wait till you see what’s in the bus for Freya’s birthday!’

  The lights and crown were a huge hit with all six of them. Simon and Damon scowled and adjusted their headphones as if they were trying to get a better seal between their ears and the unbearable cacophony of the world. They really did need the seal but it had become code for huffs too now. I even wondered sometimes if they were communicating through it, like courtesans with their fan semaphore. I would ask their dad what he thought when I dropped them off again.

  ‘Can I keep it?’ Freya asked. ‘Trix. Trix. Trix. Can I keep it?’

  I had meant to store the crown and lights in the bus for the next birthday, but I shrugged. It was from the pound shop. I could buy a stack of them.

  We made it to Jack’s school gate without mishap.

  ‘Better luck tomorrow, Ken,’ I said as I locked the chair wheels into the lift, strapped them and checked the barriers.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Oh come off it! You took the Heathhall roundabout on two wheels.’

  But Ken’s eyes in the rear-view looked genuinely troubled. Maybe I was being cynical. Maybe just because he never washed his uniform and the sight of the dandruff collected under the epaulettes of his jumper sickened me, I was unfair to him. Like I was unfair to Muttley with his crusty eyes. What kind of man would want to make a kid sick just to stop a colleague being proud of a good idea?

  He revved the engine as the hydraulics let go and settled Jack’s chair on to the ground.

  That kind of man, I thought. ‘Oi! Exhaust fumes! Cut it out. You shouldn’t even have the engine running when there’s a kid on the lift,’ I said, then muttered, ‘Twat!’

  ‘Twat! Twat!’ Olivia shouted, flapping her hands.

  ‘Ears like a bloody bat,’ I said. ‘That’s supposed to be a myth.’

  I lifted the barriers and rolled Jack out, kicking his brake once he was clear, delivered him to his classroom assistant, then jabbed the buttons to raise the lift again.