by Beth Moran
“This is all we have, so I hope you ain’t fussy. I kept it back for Jenna Moffitt, but I’m assumin’ she won’t be requirin’ it. It’s clean, and there are some basics in the fridge to see you through to next weekend. Payday’s Friday. It only takes one eye to see you need some time, honey. But Grace and I are in the blue home. Stop by whenever you’re ready for company.”
She handed me a key, and turned to go. I had a million questions, but managed to find the courage to ask just one: “How is Little Johnny?”
“That hunk of ham! I could cook and eat him as soon as spend half my life in swelterin’ heat chasing him around the wash block. Don’t worry yourself, Marion. That pig will outlive us all.”
I was too tired to manage any more than a cursory glance at my new home. It had one tiny bedroom, with barely enough space to put my bag on the floor, but the bed and the wardrobe contained a multitude of drawers and compartments, more than enough room for my belongings. In one of the bedside drawers I placed an A5-size brown envelope containing a photograph that continually drew me in – my own personal centre of gravity.
Next to the bedroom I discovered a bathroom with a shower. A galley kitchen opening onto a living area took up the rest of the van. Here two sofas flanked a small table. I saw a CD player with a radio, but no television. More cubbyholes and cleverly designed shelving filled the walls. I had nothing left to put in them.
I found bread, milk, cheese and salad in the kitchen. A small packet of pasta and some bottled sauces rewarded my investigation of the cupboards, but even that seemed a challenge too far at this point in my day. The small fridge included a freezer compartment at the top, just big enough for some frozen peas and two ready-meals. I heated up a frozen curry in the microwave, and ate it propped up in one of the plastic sun loungers outside, a grey woollen blanket tucked around my legs. I sat on the far side of the caravan, looking out into the trees beyond the fence. The sound of children playing gradually died down as the twilight faded into night, replaced by the hum of crickets and an occasional burst of laughter from the groups of adults gathered around the dying embers of their barbeques. The air felt deliciously cool following the mugginess of the day, carrying a thousand scents as fresh and new to me as this sitting on my own in the dark. Not once in my life had I faced a night alone. Every thirty seconds I jumped at a movement in the shadows, or rustling in the forest beside me, clutching the blanket up around my face until I could convince myself that it wasn’t Little Johnny, out on the loose again and looking for trouble.
By eleven o’clock, the sounds of holidaymakers had all gone, and the night hung dark and deep. I reached an uneasy state of watchfulness, proud to manage fifteen minutes without goose bumps or white knuckles. Calling this a positive end to a momentous day, I went to bed. Sleep has never come easily to me, but caravan creaks and the lumpiness of a cheap old mattress turned out to be the tonic my restless mind had been awaiting all these years. I slept deeply, and dreamed of my father.
I am six years old. Daddy is sick again. The sour smell of it tugs at the hem of my dress, like octopus arms wrapping themselves around my legs until I can hardly climb the stairs. Ma smiles, smoothing my hair away from my forehead. She tells me everything will be all right; we just have to do our best, be good and trust the Lord. But all the time she is talking, I cannot help staring at the worry behind her eyes. Ma is afraid.
Auntie Jean comes to take me out of the house because it is no place for a child, and for pity’s sake my mother needs a rest. I scream and kick as she tries to put on my baby-blue anorak while Ma shakes her head, holding a handkerchief to her mouth. I struggle free and run upstairs to the bathroom. I lock myself in, even though I’m not allowed to touch the key, and sit on the toilet lid until I hear the front door bang shut.
When I come out, Ma says nothing. She is ironing, her lips pressed together, thin as jelly laces. Auntie Jean’s eldest, Roisin, is sent round with a video, so I know I am forgiven. When Ma is downstairs talking on the phone I do the Naughtiest Thing, creeping into the big bedroom where my daddy is resting under a mountain of blankets in my parents’ bed. He opens his eyes when I climb onto the empty side next to him, placing my cool hands carefully each side of his thin, hot face. I am not allowed to Disturb my father, but this is something I do most days when Ma is busy with her housework. Daddy always says no medicine in the world can beat a kiss from a princess, and if I keep Disturbing him he will be up and about in no time. I show him the video, begging him to watch it with me if I help him down the stairs and promise not to Disturb him tomorrow. He says he will watch it with me only if I promise to Disturb him twice tomorrow, and he can still just about get down the stairs on his own, thank you very much.
The film is about a fox called Robin Hood, who fights the bad lion and gives all his gold to the poor people. The lady fox is called Marion, like me. Robin saves her from the bad lion, who is a king, and we cheer. Daddy whistles through his teeth, but I can’t do that yet, so I clap instead. Ma comes in from bringing the soaking wet laundry out of the rain and finds us on the sofa, Daddy lying across the back in his pyjamas with me curled up in front. She doesn’t shout. She brings in a cup of black tea with three sugars for Daddy, and a mug of orange squash. Even though I have done the Naughtiest Thing, she gives us one of the cakes Mrs Lilley brought round in a tin with snowmen on it. Then, instead of dusting the ornaments or cleaning the floor, she sits on the sofa with Daddy’s feet in her lap, watching the video with us right up to the moment the screen fades to a black crackle.
This is the last time my daddy comes downstairs.
I woke early. The sun burned through the flimsy curtains, blurry shadows dancing across my bed. I showered in the tiny bathroom, and pulled out the coolest clothes I owned: cropped cotton trousers and another T-shirt, deep blue this time. I remembered the day I was given it – my twenty-fourth birthday – and being told it matched the colour of my eyes. A wave of nausea bashed against the lining of my stomach as I thought about the person who had bought it for me. I took it off, squished it to the back of a drawer and put on a plain white top.
I ate outside again, soft brown rolls and butter. Hot tea in a tiny cup. The air already felt thick and warm, and I reluctantly dragged my sun lounger into the shade of the caravan. I watched the woodland, alive with insects and birds darting in and out of the trees. Where meadow grass met the brown forest floor a border of wild flowers grew. I didn’t know what they were called but loved their colours – blue and yellow, rose pink and deep purple. I made a promise to myself that before I left here (tomorrow? next week? a year?) I would learn the name of each one. As well as the names of the small speckled bird hopping about on the ground, and the large grey one swooping and diving from branch to branch. I would understand where the crawling insects were trying to get to and what kept the flies under the shade of the leaves.
I had an hour until I needed to be at reception, and spent as much of it as I could sitting there, soaking it in. Trying to figure out how the forest could be so still, and yet flourish with life and constant movement. On this static canvas a million tiny dramas, a billion scenes, played out unceasingly in every corner, under each rock and crevice. I have always been small, and here my smallness became a good thing. I am just one life in a world teeming with others. My problems, my past, the questions about my future, seemed so inconsequential – insignificant – among all this doing. All this being.
I left it so late I had to hurry to meet Scarlett at eight, breathless by the time I pushed open the door. Scarlett perched on the stool behind the counter, tapping into a calculator and jotting numbers into an accounts book. She wore narrow tortoiseshell glasses today, her hair swept up in a French pleat. She closed the book and set it aside, looking me quickly up and down before removing her glasses, carefully folding them into a leather case.
“Good morning. You look as if you slept well. That’s what the forest air’ll do for ya.” Scarlett moved out from behind the counter, gesturing for me to s
it on the stool. “Could you man the desk again for me today, sweetheart? We have fifteen new guests due in. Sunday is always our busiest day for check-in, and Grace has the mornin’ off. While you wait, you can check the stock for me; make a list of anything that looks low. I’ll send Valerie over to fetch it later. You’ll like Valerie. She’s a little different, needs extra help with some things, but is very special.”
She left me with a notepad and pen, and I set to work. What did she mean, “anything that looks low”? Did three packets of rice count as low if there was no more room on the shelf? What about the boxes of matches? There were eight left, but a big space behind them. I spent a while fluttering in front of the shelves counting the same rows of goods over and over again. When the bell jangled to announce the day’s first arrivals, it came as a relief.
Three check-ins later, the door swung open and a young woman bounced in. She came to land six inches from my face and grinned at me.
“Hi.”
“Hello.” I pulled back, a little disconcerted.
“I’m Valerie. You’re Marion.” She giggled, jiggling up and down on her toes. “You look scared.”
“I’m not scared.” Lie. I’m always scared. But I admitted: “I am anxious.”
She stuffed one of her blonde bunches into her mouth and chewed on it.
“Why?”
“I’m supposed to be making a list for Scarlett, but I haven’t started it yet.”
“Why not?” Valerie gazed right at me, letting the draggly hair drop out of her mouth. Although her childish behaviour was bizarre, something in her eyes, so clear I could almost see right into her soul, dissolved the tension in my throat.
“I don’t know what to do. Look.” I crouched down beside the bottom shelf, and Valerie squatted next to me, a frown creasing her forehead. “There are six tins of tuna, with space for maybe two more. Is that enough, or should I write it on the list? Have these poor six tins been sat here for years collecting dust, down on the bottom shelf where no one will notice them? Are they desperately hoping nobody buys any more new, flashy tins to stick right at the front? What if the new tins are dolphin friendly, or tuna steak, not plain chunks? What if these faithful, trusty tins of chunks reach their best-before date, doomed to never be opened? A mummy tuna fish is swimming around in some sea somewhere, endlessly searching for her lost baby tuna fish. Broken hearted! And if I order too many tins to sit on this shelf, the lost baby tuna fish will have been sacrificed for nothing.”
Valerie looked sideways at me. “The average female blue-fin tuna fish releases thirty million eggs at a time. Each baby tuna has a one-in-forty-million chance of reaching adulthood.” She snorted. “You need help.”
I sighed and shook my head. Her disarming candour convinced me I had an ally in Valerie; I couldn’t help trusting her. “If only you knew.”
It took Valerie five minutes at most to point out what stock needed replenishing. Then she helped herself to an ice-cream from the freezer cabinet, handing a second one to me. She bombarded me with the obvious questions. Where did I come from? How old was I? Did I like her sparkly flip-flops? Where was my mum? As she neared territory I felt uncomfortable thinking about, let alone discussing out loud, I turned the conversation back to her.
Valerie was nineteen. She had lived with Scarlett at the park since her sixteenth birthday. Before then, home had been with her mother in the nearby village of Hatherstone. Her mum had kept hold of her as long as welfare benefit could be claimed. Even then, she told me (between long licks of vanilla ice-cream), most of her evenings and weekends had been spent here, helping Scarlett, for as long as she could remember.
“Mum hates me because she thinks I’m stupid.” She shrugged. “But I’m not.”
If it were possible, my estimation of my new boss grew even higher.
“Do you have a dad?” Valerie dabbed absent-mindedly at a dribble of ice-cream with her thumb.
“I did, but he died.”
Her eyes grew round. She stared at me, blinking back tears.
“It’s all right.” I rubbed her arm, awkwardly. People rarely knew how to react to this information, but nobody had started crying on me before. Valerie screwed up her face, now turning blotchy. “It was a long time ago. I hardly miss him at all any more.” Lie.
She leaned in and put her arms around me. I could smell baby lotion. Her body shuddered as she began to sob. “That’s terrible, Marion. I never had a daddy, and Grace’s daddy was a no-good dirty rotten crook, and Scarlett’s Pop did Bad Things to her and made her run all the way to England to hide from him. And your daddy died. Where are all the nice daddies, Marion?”
We stood like this for a couple of minutes. I could feel the sticky mess from Valerie’s mouth pressing against my cheek. Thinking so hard, processing this new information, I forgot to answer her question. Only when she mumbled it again, “Does anybody have a nice daddy?” did I disentangle myself, pulling her over to the window.
“Look.” I pointed to a grassy space where a young man played rugby with two boys. They squealed with delight as he wrestled the ball off them and they collapsed in a pile of laughter.
On the path to one side a small girl swung from her father’s hand as they ambled across to the toilet block. Another pushed his child on a tricycle, draping his spare arm around the pretty woman walking beside him. As I watched, the ache in my chest swelled, pressing hard against my ribs. Valerie stared through the glass, transfixed. She reached out, absent-mindedly, and wrapped her fingers around mine.
A motor-home big enough to intimidate a space shuttle rumbled up the drive, pulling to a stop in the car park. My new friend beamed again. She raced outside to greet the newest visitors (two nice daddies, and a granddad), and I got back to work.
After lunch, Scarlett ushered me outside. She declared that I would be gardening that afternoon, primarily because my pale, pasty, damp-pickled complexion was screamin’ for some sunshine like a baby for its mother. The garden fork dangled awkwardly in my hesitant grip as Scarlett directed me to a large flowerbed dug in the shape of a heart.
“Here we go. Scarlett’s lesson on weeding. One: remember a weed is just a plant growin’ where you don’t want it to be. Grass here –” she waved at the lawn, her nails deep purple to match her tailored shorts – “wonderful. We love it thick, lush and fertile. Now here – ” she pointed back at the bed – “it is oversteppin’ its welcome. Yank it out!
“Pretty much any living thing is accepted at the Peace and Pigs, with the exception of certain human specimens. But we respect each other’s personal space. And some plants are just too greedy! They reproduce like my old Pop – without a care or a thought for what their offspring are gonna eat or who is gonna suffer because of their greedy, philanderin’ ways. Like these dandelions here.”
I gave myself a mental pat on the back for recognizing the dandelions.
“Exercise some common sense, and dig ’em up. Two: if it’s got shallow roots, it’s a weed. Rip it out! Most healthy, respectful, worthwhile plants need to put down decent roots. They shrivel otherwise.
“Three: just make it look nice and pretty. Everything benefits from a bit of thought, care and attention to tidy it up. A critical, independent eye.”
I wasn’t sure if we were still just talking about plants.
“If it looks dead, pull it up. Brown means dead. Peace and Pigs is a place of life and livin’! No room for dead weight or dead wood or what’s past its time. Haul it up. Four…”
The whole time she was talking, Scarlett had been gazing at the flowers. Now she turned and fixed her strong eyes on me.
“I don’t care an owl’s hoot if you mess it up. Just get stuck in and use those womanly muscles hidin’ somewhere underneath that pale, pale skin. They’ll thank you for it later. And remember lesson number one. Now enjoy yourself.”
Training over, I tried to get stuck in. My womanly muscles were soon swearing at me in protest, but I did begin to enjoy myself, so I pretended to be my new bos
s and told them to quit whinin’ and knuckle down. The first half hour was easy. I pulled up every dandelion. Then I pulled up the stray grass. Then Valerie walked past and pointed out the weeds called buttercups and shepherd’s purse.
“Be careful, Marion. Each shepherd’s purse has an average of four thousand five hundred seeds. And their seeds can last for thirty-five years in the soil. That’s a long time!”
I picked up one of the tiny seedpods and balanced it on the end of my finger. It was the shape of a heart. Thirty-five years. He would have been here then. In the forest. I tucked the pod in my pocket. Even though I knew that heart could only grow weeds.
An hour in and my endorphins were buzzing. I wondered why I had never gardened before, Northern Irish rain notwithstanding. Another hour passed and I realized why. Too much time to think. I had pondered about Scarlett, Grace and Valerie, replayed and analysed the last two days and wondered what I might have for dinner and if there was anywhere in the village I could buy some cooler clothes. I had even designed the logo for Marion’s Landscapers and Outdoor Design, the friendly, stylish garden team with a Celtic twist. But inevitably my thoughts then began scuttling back over the Irish Sea. I only knew one good way to drag them back. Clapping my hands together, adjusting my balance on the knee protector mat, I smiled cheerfully at the flowers in front of me, politely (yet firmly) requesting their attention. I then recited word for word my personally chosen Ballydown Public Library’s story of the week as I cleared their home of greedy, selfish invaders. I think the roses particularly enjoyed chapter three, Escape in the Knickers of Time.
Stories saved my life. Trapped in my prison of silence, doctors and speech therapists and child psychologists could not reach me. The love of my mother was too feeble, too misshapen and deformed to pull me free. I lived alone in a swirling, writhing smog of fear that clawed at my neck and clamped across my mouth with its cold, dank fingers. Stories provided enough light to show me the way out.
