As I turn back towards the bouncy castle, I spot the flapping tongues of Katie’s Nikes on top of the shoe pile. She isn’t hard to find after that. In spite of all her recent injuries, she’s tumbling sideways, screaming, staggering around gleefully inside, pushing people as hard as they are pushing her.
When the fireworks start, Katie decides to stop playing. I’ve been hovering around impatiently on the edge of the crowd for ages, waiting for her to come down from the castle.
‘Why didn’t you do as I told you?’ I demand as we walk back to our parents.
‘It was boring. You were gone hours. Where’s Helen?’
‘Didn’t you see her get off? Didn’t she say anything?’
‘She just went.’
Rebecca stands with her old donkey-jacket hanging wide open and her feet splayed, craning her neck. She holds a beaker of punch in one hand and, in the other, a baked potato wrapped in a paper napkin. Grease glistens on her fingers.
‘Where’s Helen?’ she asks, spitting pellets of potato at me.
‘Here somewhere,’ I say. Until I have processed what I saw, I’m not in a position to repeat any of it to members of the public.
Mrs Nelson is hilarious. The fireworks make her shout ‘aaah!’ and ‘oooh!’ and stagger backwards, laughing, into Mr Nelson’s body. When she steadies herself, Katie nuzzles into her coat. Mrs Nelson presses her back into Mr Nelson’s chest and wraps her arms round Katie. The three of them watch the fireworks, sardined together in a single warm parcel.
Helen emerges from the crowd at the end of the display and we walk back to number eleven. I can’t believe how moody she’s become in the last few days. The only person who seems happy tonight is Rebecca, who chats and hums and chuckles all the way home.
****
Mon 7th November
I tiptoe over to my bedroom door, ease it open and press my ear against the crack, poised for information.
‘They didn’t get my point. Or rather, they refused to get it.’ Rebecca’s voice is cracked and weary. ‘To be honest, the whole thing was a complete disaster.’
After a seven-second pause which I count on my fingers, she says, ‘very aggressive.’ Straightaway she adds, ‘Professor Aitkens was the worst. You know what he asked me?’ She adopts a posh accent. ‘But what is the literary value of your research? How can you justify this study of crap poetry? You should have seen the way he smirked when he said it in his Oxbridge accent. Crap poetry.’
She pauses for a while, then shouts, ‘snobs! Who does he think he is? I don’t care if he is chairing the selection panel. I told him straight out, these crap poems are an ordinary man’s efforts at literary expression, written in a spirit of sincerity. I said we can learn a great deal from the Edwardians. You know what he did next?’
A fraction of a second passes.
‘He said “sincerity,” “purity” and “expression” very slowly in a deadpan voice. Then suddenly his face broke into a gigantic grin and he laughed out loud. And his laughter was so infectious it spread through the entire place until, from where I was standing, they were all laughing at me.’
After about four seconds, she says, ‘I’m not exaggerating. It was as bad as that.’ Then she adds, ‘they’ll be laughing on the other side of their faces when my book comes out.’
As the phone-call draws to a close, she complains about how much preparation she has to do for classes, how she’s forced to cover for people on leave, how this involves so much extra work she never gets time to finish her manuscript. I’ve heard all this before. And then she tells the person on the other end of the line that my dad hasn’t sent any maintenance money again.
Even though Rebecca’s numerous phone conversations are one of my main sources of information about our family, I wish she wouldn’t discuss the private financial affairs of our family like this with other people.
The phone pings indignantly when she replaces the receiver.
The study door slams.
The whole house is silent.
Helen’s room is suspiciously quiet. I wonder whether she’s been listening to Rebecca’s phone call, too, or whether she exploited the opportunity to creep out of number eleven when my guard was down.
I barge into her room.
My sister’s hunched on all fours on the carpet, staring intently at a length of fine green wire in her left hand.
‘We’ve got to be more helpful,’ I tell her, ‘round the house.’
She tries to balance a miniscule flowerhead on one end of the wire. A tube of Uhu oozes into the carpet beside her; the whole room is full of its acrid smell.
‘Knock before you come in! I nearly tore it.’ She examines the paper flower with concern and then lays it tenderly on the carpet beside the others.
‘We’ve got to be more helpful round the house. Didn’t you hear her on the phone just now?’
‘I’ve been doing this.’ Helen holds up the bunch of flowers for my inspection. ‘I’m making her an all-seasons posy so she’ll feel happy for the whole year.’
She shows me the flowers. I suppose they’re a passable effort. She’s tried to capture the detail of a wide range of flowers: a poppy with wide, lazy petals and a pepperpot seed capsule; a tight yellow rose bud with petals clenched defensively; a floppy michaelmas daisy in lavender blue; a burgundy tulip beaming enthusiastically on top of its stalk. The biggest failure in the bunch is the lonely daffodil. Its head is too heavy for the stem, so it droops and gazes miserably at the floor.
My nose tingles from the smell. ‘Flowers stinking of glue won’t help Rebecca. We need to sort out who does what round the house. Let’s make a contract.’ I look around her room for a piece of writing paper, but apart from flimsy tissue-paper Helen’s only contact with paper is when she sticks those pieces of litter in her diary and decorates them with felt-tipped pens.
‘What’s a contract?’
‘It’s like the Copycat Rules, when you sign an agreement with me and I witness it.’
I fetch two sheets of cartridge paper, a calligraphy pen and a bottle of ink from my bedroom. As I return to her room, the phone rings again. Rebecca starts to retell her story to the new caller.
I wade through the debris and sit on Helen’s bed. Using a traditional copperplate script, I draw up two identical agreements and distribute household tasks between us.
‘I’ll carry on cooking tea when she’s too tired to do it, and I’ll keep buying all the bits and pieces we need from the shop. You’ll be responsible for washing-up every night, by which I mean every night. Not the next morning. And you’ll vacuum-clean the house once a week on Saturdays. You’ll need to focus on your housework on Saturdays.’
‘Okay.’ She signs the contract. I’d expected her to make more fuss, or at least try to negotiate with me, especially over the vacuum-cleaning on Saturdays.
‘I’ll supervise all the household decisions from now on,’ I say as I kick through the tissue paper and plant pots and head for the door. She still doesn’t challenge me. She hasn’t got a clue.
****
Fri 11th November
I make sure that I buy just one item at a time, peas one day, fish-fingers the next. This maximises my time with him. I’ve also been cooking especially sticky things on Monday and Wednesday nights, using as many pans as possible so Helen takes an eternity to complete the washing up and can’t perform her after-dinner vanishing act. She hasn’t been going out at all on those nights.
I think I’ve got everybody in exactly the right place at long last, apart from Mrs Phillips.
****
Sat 12th November
My body lies in the bathtub with me trapped inside. The glands ache in my armpits. Nothing is flat, or still, or smooth any more. My body insists on growing up, oozing, sprouting hairs, and I haven’t been able to do a single thing about it till now.
I’ve seen Rebecca change the blade on the Stanley knife once or twice, but this blade is different: it’s paper-thin, with a strange misshapen hole i
n the middle. I jiggle it around on the stem of the razor, holding the loose section over the top, hoping all the pieces will snap into place and stay put, but the whole contraption falls apart in my hands.
The mirror is cloaked with a protective layer of steam. In the corner, an old ‘H’ slowly becomes visible in the steam, inscribed with a fingertip a long time ago.
An article in Katie’s My Guy said you’re supposed to soak the razor in warm water before using it, to soften the blade, so I remove the tiny blade from the rest of the razor and drop it into the bath. It sinks. When I try to pick it up five minutes later, it speeds along the bottom of the bath like a stingray. In the end, I bind my fingers in my face flannel and carefully lever it up.
Now that I’ve got a rough idea of where each piece fits, and how to tighten the whole contraption in the middle, the razor is quite easy to assemble.
It’s not my legs I’m worried about, but I decide to start with my legs in order to learn a method.
I can’t turn back the clock. But I’m not going to lie here and let all these changes take place without my permission.
I sit up, lift my leg, position the razor on the fleshy calf and drag it down as gently as possible. The blade scrapes my skin, rasping. Tiny spots of blood appear, swelling, poised to fall. I rub soap on my leg to make the surface slippery. Now the blade skates smoothly over the surface, cleaning away all the hair.
I have perfected my method.
I kneel and create a creamy film of soap all over my groin.
Suddenly the door handle rattles and a voice interrupts my concentration. ‘Let me in! I need a pee. Please let me in!’
‘Go away. You’ll have to wait.’
‘Please let me in! You’ve been hours.’
‘No. Piss off!’
I’m at a delicate stage of my operation. A lot of concentration is required. I continue, trying to ignore the noise, but after a few minutes Helen’s pathetic griping turns into a persistent knocking and whinging at the door.
Covered in soap, I lever my body out of the bath, grab a towel and splash across the floor leaving puddles of water in which I hope she breaks her neck.
‘Hurry up then.’
She bolts inside, trousers and knickers already at half-mast, to dispense a noisy, relieved pee. She even does a little fart at the end.
‘Kindly cease your fugitive emissions,’ I say, imitating our mother’s voice.
She gets off the loo and pulls up her knickers with an uppity flourish.
That’s when I see what she’s wearing. Brand new Mr Men knickers. ‘Where did you get those?’
Rebecca never buys new clothes for one of us and not the other. She’s quite fair in that respect, and I haven’t been on the receiving end of any new knickers recently.
‘I got them in a shop with my own money,’ Helen says defiantly, rolling her eyes to the right, where they land on our mother’s open razor box.
‘Where did you buy them then?’
After a pause, she says, ‘Boots.’
‘Liar! They don’t sell clothes in Boots. Everyone knows that. Who did you get them off?’
I’m holding the towel away from my front in a hoop, like a circus clown’s trousers, to protect the lather. Soap dribbles down my legs.
A little cavity has appeared in her mouth as she probes the empty razor box. ‘What are you doing?’
‘None of your business.’
‘I’m telling Mum on you.’
‘Who gave you those knickers?’ Holding the top of my towel together with one hand, I move towards her menacingly and she makes a hasty exit. I lock the door again, drop the towel, and climb back into the bath. I lie in it for ages, bubbling with fury. I don’t like discovering this kind of evidence.
****
Mon 14th November
I’ve been sitting in my favourite place, at the bend in the seawall just before the creek opens out into the estuary, with the sea in the distance. There’s a wrecked barge here, ribs sticking out of the mud, and a sheltered spot where I can tuck myself into a shallow basin out of the wind.
Not a single truck trundled up the flat road today. The only sounds have been the piercing cries of the oyster catchers and the mewing of gulls wheeling over the receding water.
Nobody was out here.
I’ll forge a sick note from Rebecca to hand in at the secretary’s office if I decide to go in tomorrow. I might even use her fountain pen for extra authenticity.
Dad used to bring me here. We’d huddle together for hours playing I-spy, or he would point at boats and birds until I shivered so much we’d have to go home. Helen always tried to come along too, but she would whinge and cry all the way out and all the way back, stealing Dad’s eyes away from me.
Today was windy and cold, and I had to evict sheep from my hollow when I arrived. At least it wasn’t raining.
I watched the creek as the tide moved through the wreck. I could almost feel the mud and the water probing the wood.
For the last week or so, I’ve had the sensation that I am floating outside myself. Whenever I try to focus on somebody, my brain rocks backwards in a somersault and the person drifts away. Last night at dinner, Rebecca and Helen were tiny speck-people sitting at the far end of the kitchen table. I could hardly see their faces in the distance, and their voices were like echoes.
Maybe I need glasses.
Maybe I need a piece of string to attach me to the world, like a balloon. I don’t want to blow away.
At four o’clock I wander back towards the village. The grass on the seawall crunches stiffly under my feet. I feel exhausted as I walk up the hill.
At the Nelsons’ front door I can hear Helen and Katie screeching and crashing around upstairs.
The frantic yapping of the dog gets louder as Mrs Nelson opens the front door. ‘Why weren’t you on the bus tonight with Katie?’ she asks in a screechy voice, and ushers me in. The house throws a blanket of warmth around my shoulders.
****
Tues 15th November
The outside of Helen’s bedroom door is plastered with posters depicting terrible scenes of pain and cruelty: live rabbits with ears pinned back and thick needles sticking out of their necks. Monkeys with wires protruding from their open brains. Dogs in pain, cats in pain, white rats and mice in pain.
All of them have terrified eyes.
Her door is the first thing I see every morning when I emerge from my bedroom, and it’s the last thing I see every night.
Sometimes I can hear the monkeys screaming in my dreams.
****
Fri 18th November
It’s hard to ignore what’s happening at number eleven.
Rebecca watches like a hungry dog when Helen eats. I’ve never seen our mother so alert. She even keeps her glasses clean to help her see more clearly. Helen’s got two people watching her closely now.
The way Helen picks at her food is more annoying than ever. Every night as we eat dinner, Rebecca gazes unhappily at my sister and my sister stares moodily at the table, biting the dry skin around the edges of her nails. Herself: that’s the only thing she’ll eat in the evenings. But I’m pleased to say that, in spite of the outbreak of diarrhoea and vomiting among the kids in her class, she continues to bring back an empty lunchbox from school on weekdays.
Tonight, at the Nelsons’ house, Helen and Katie put on thick layers of lipstick, eyeliner and mascara. Katie looked like a miniature version of Mrs Nelson. But my sister’s only ten. That’s far too young. Our mother should put a stop to it. Clearly my sister’s trying to make herself look grownup and attractive for him. But behind that makeup her eyes have sunk like pebbles in her face. She’s started to look like one of the dead relatives Rebecca’s got hanging in the study, fading off the paper in the sunlight.
I’ll never wear make-up. This is my one and only bone of contention with Mrs Nelson, even though Mrs Nelson thinks I might be encouraged to relax a little if I am given the right kind of products.
I
laugh, because inside my head I just cracked a really funny joke. Now that most of her plants are dead, Helen is using her unemployed trowel to put on her makeup. I might tell that one to Katie some time.
Mrs Nelson says my sister has an attention-seeking personality, and I agree with this. It’s probably brought on by a very early onset of hormonal change. She says the best thing to do with young ladies who have disorders of this type is ignore their behaviour. Then they will snap out of it. The worst thing a mother could do, she says pointedly, is pander to the attention-seeker’s every last whim.
‘Just ignore it,’ Mrs Nelson tells me. ‘Act normally. Your sister’s trying to manipulate your Mum. And it’s clearly working!’
I think it’s time Helen snapped out of it. We shouldn’t be forced to tolerate this self-centred behaviour every night at the dinner table. Rebecca rarely bothers to look in my direction when I speak. Nobody responds if I try to start a conversation with my family.
Tonight Mrs Nelson made me a special cocktail called White Russian. I don’t usually drink milk, but this was sweet and delicious with a sting. It tasted like a really good breakfast cereal. We lined up bottles and Waterford Crystal Stemware. Mrs Nelson’s teaching me all about cocktails. She says vodka is the base ingredient for many different types of cocktail, and that if you put good quality vodka in the freezer, it’ll never turn to ice. I engaged her in a detailed conversation on this topic and successfully drew her attention away from other subjects.
I’ve secretly adopted Mrs Nelson as my mum. She doesn’t know yet. I’ve written up all the paperwork in Gothic Script and used sealing wax to cement the contract.
At breakfast, Helen refuses to eat anything except orange flavoured vitamin pills and the occasional small bowl of muesli if she’s ravenous. But apart from her permanent scowl and sulk, I still haven’t spotted any side-effects from my special powder.
Our mother replaces our out-of-date vitamins with a fresh tube of pills. When I see the new ones, I laugh because they are the size of small biscuits. When my sister takes a tablet out of the tube, she holds it in her bony fingers and gnaws around the edges with her front teeth. She looks like a hamster. All the time, she peeps out annoyingly from under her curls. She doesn’t have a hamster-hoard of tablets in her bedroom, though, because I would have found it by now.
The Third Person Page 12
