by Galaxy Craze
The wind blew; the leaves rattled. The dogs lay still on the ground. The sky behind them went light to dark blue. He held his arm around her waist. They kissed slowly, parting for breath, and kissed again.
We had tea by the fire. Eden bunched up pieces of an old newspaper, while Grandfather piled the kindling. He let Eden light the long match and touch the flame to the paper, which sent a sudden blaze of red into the room.
A tray of tea sat on the table; milk, sugar, and a plate of biscuits the dogs stared at, waiting to take one from the plate and swallow it whole.
My father read the Dunblane Daily police report aloud in his actorly Scottish accent.
The reported incidence of women’s knickers stolen from the clothesline has risen to twenty-five. We are advising women not to leave their undergarments unattended on the washing line.
Mum sat next to him, giggling like a schoolgirl. I stared ahead at the flames of the fire.
“Oh, Mrs. Stirling,” Dad said, when she walked in the room. “Haven’t you heard? Don’t leave your knickers on the clothesline, no more. They might get pinched by the knicker thief.”
Mrs. Stirling gave him a disapproving look. “Don’t worry your pretty little head about it, Simon. I hang my smalls over the stove to dry,” she said as she left the room.
“Mind you, the knicker thief would probably mistake hers for pillowcases,” he whispered to Eden. Eden’s face was red from the fire, and now he couldn’t stop laughing. Jokes about knickers and bums were the funniest things.
Our father smiled at our mother as he lifted the teacup to his lips. His eyes went straight to hers—a sparkle, a light, a reflection of the flame in his dark eyes. She leaned her head against his shoulder.
“I was wondering how long it would take you to come and try to woo me back,” she said softly.
“Have I succeeded yet?”
“I think so.”
He had brought Grandfather a bottle of scotch and a box of glazed dates, wrapped in a box with a thin silver fork. I wondered if he would open them tonight, after supper, and if we would stay up late with the fire.
One night, the last time we were here, Dad put a record on and did imitations of Mum and her friends dancing at Annabel’s. We had laughed so hard, Grandfather too, that our eyes watered. Even Mum, who sometimes cried when he made fun of her.
You could never tell with Mum until it was too late. Sometimes she would laugh at first; then her face would break, like a plate, and she would burst into tears. But that night, when he put the record on and danced, we all laughed.
FIVE
We drove back to London Sunday afternoon.
Eden and I had several days’ worth of lessons to make up. Mrs. Jenkins gave me a warning. “If you miss any more school, I will have to hold you back. You don’t want to be the tallest and the oldest in your form, do you?”
We stood outside the classroom door. She wore a necklace made of seashells that fell against her collar bone.
“No. I don’t, Mrs. Jenkins,” I said, holding the sides of my uniform skirt. “But my mum was the one who took us away.”
“Well, I will have to speak to your mother about this.”
“Yes, you should,” I said. “She should be told off, Mrs. Jenkins.”
“That’s quite enough, young lady.”
In the shop, SIMON’S, Mum said she was a glorified salesgirl. When they were deciding on a name for the shop, my father thought that his would be the best. SIMON’S was painted in deep green on the windows. “Quite catchy, don’t you think?” He stood with his hands in his pockets, admiring his name on the storefront windows.
After work, they came home and cooked supper together. She helped me with my French, which she spoke well, because when she was sixteen she ran away from boarding school, where they only let her wash her hair with dry shampoo, and went to live with her French boyfriend. She helped Eden with his reading, pointing to each word on the page.
Our father was a good cook but useless with homework. He dropped out of school when he was thirteen and went to work with his cousins in the East End selling things that “fell off the back of a lorry.”
“There has to be more for us,” our mother said, as she washed the dishes in the sink, “than working in the shop all day. Don’t you think? … Simon?”
He stared at the television; East Enders was on. A half-smoked joint lay in the ashtray, a box of Rose’s chocolates on his lap that he picked the toffees out of, saving them for himself. The bright cellophane wrappers sprinkled the table like confetti.
“What’s that, Lucy?” he asked, during the advert.
“Nothing, Simon,” she said. He had answered too late.
Eden dried the dishes with a dish towel. I wiped the table clean, sweeping the crumbs onto the floor.
Our father stared at the television. “Good advert, this one is. I heard they spent close to a million pounds on it. Blimey.”
Our mother left the dishes in the sink. She turned to him as though she would say something else but only let out a breath. She walked to the garden doors and pushed them open, too impatient to undo them. The latch fell from the frame to the floor as she opened the doors, letting the evening air come through.
“Lucy?” our father said, standing up angrily. “What are you doing? You just broke the latch!” He picked it up from the floor, the bronze hook, holding it in the palm of his hand. She had walked outside to the end of the garden, where she stood in front of the brick wall.
SIX
In June, school let out for the summer holidays. It was a cool summer in London and rained most afternoons. Eden and I wandered through the city, spending hours at the Fulham pool, swimming until our lips and fingers pruned, then buying salt and vinegar crisps from the machines. We walked home with wet hair and the taste of the pool water and the crisps mixing in our mouths.
On weekend nights, Mum and Dad invited their friends around for a barbecue in the garden: Annabel; Suzy and her boyfriend Jim; Rochelle, the fashion designer, her husband, Steven, and their three children. They sat around the table rolling joints and drinking wine while the meat on the grill smoked behind them, talking about how they were going to improve the world with their shops and magazines.
I mistook a square cut of hash for a piece of chocolate and spat it half chewed into my hand. The speakers faced out of the windows so the music played in the garden and I couldn’t wash the taste from my mouth. Upstairs, the three other children, Eden, and I dressed in our fancy dress costumes and rehearsed a play for the grown-ups. As the summer evening grew dark, we dared each other to eat flower petals, thinking they would either be poisonous or make us high, and then fell asleep on the living room floor in front of the television.
* * *
One evening, our father came home from work with a bouquet of tall pale, yellow flowers wrapped in tissue paper, and a bottle of wine for our mother.
“These are for you, my darling,” he said, kissing her on the lips by the kitchen sink.
She held the flowers in her arms, their stems tied with a bow of twine.
“These are beautiful,” she said, as he wrapped her in his arms.
I was standing at the sink washing the green beans, and Eden was sitting at the table with his coloring pencils, tracing airplanes.
“You’ll never guess who phoned today.”
“Who?”
He kissed the back of her neck, then let her go.
“Remember Mitch Carson, the producer, who moved to India?”
“Oh, right. Yeah,” she said.
“Anyway, he phones me at the shop. I haven’t spoken to him in ages, mind you. He tells me he’s selling all his earthly possessions to follow the Maharaji and would I like them for the shop? Well, yes, thank you, I said, and booked myself on a flight to Delhi next week.”
“What? You’re joking.”
He shook his head. “He’s got some fabulous antiques. Don’t you remember his house on Munster Road? He had that beautiful armoire.”
“Vaguely,” she said, her voice sounding lost.
“Dad,” Eden said, “Top of the Pops is on tonight!” A loud happy-sounding sentence, floating like a balloon through the kitchen.
“Maybe I’ll pick up some new dance moves to do at the clubs,” he said jokingly to Eden, but really he was watching her. “Lucy,” he said, the tone of his voice settling. “Lucy what’s the matter?”
“How long will you be gone?” she asked him.
“It’s just for a couple of weeks, until I can ship all the stuff back. Mind you, with the Indian post you never know how long that will be.”
Sometimes, when Dad talked about India or was talking to Raj, the Indian man who owned the corner shop, he put on a comical Indian accent. “Two hundred rupees, it’s cheap! I swear, if you don’t believe me, ask my brother!”
I would look away, embarrassed and worried that Raj would be upset by this, but Raj always laughed, touching him affectionately on the shoulder and giving Eden and me a rose-flavored sweet wrapped in wax paper that he took from a box behind the counter.
She looked at the flowers lying nearby. “Why don’t we all go?” she said. “It’s school summer holidays, and I’ve always wanted to go back to India.”
When they had first met, my mother had been attracted to Dad because he was interested in spirituality. They traveled to India together to meet the Maharaji. When I was younger, I would find them in their bedroom, meditating in front of the mirror or upside down in shoulder stand. India was where Dad had had the idea to import furniture for his shop in London.
“All of us?” he said now, looking from Eden to me. Looking as though she had just asked him to lift the house off the ground. “Lucy, I’m just making a quick trip to do a bit of business. Let’s not make a big thing of it. Besides, who would mind the shop while we were gone?”
Mum let out a breath. “How about Sebastian? He can look after things while we’re away. Is our whole life going to revolve around the shop?”
The green beans sat in a bowl of cool water. She insulted the shop; they’ll fight all night.
A shadow crossed my father’s face. “Excuse me, Lucy,” he said angrily. “I’m about to get on a seventeen-hour flight to India in the middle of monsoon season. I care about the shop. How do you think we bought the house? How do you think we pay the bills? Who pays for May’s ballet lessons?”
“I don’t take ballet, Dad.”
Dad looked at me, confused. He gestured to the wine on the counter. “These things cost money. I work hard.”
“Well, I work hard too, but unlike you I don’t find it as satisfying. Selling overpriced, useless things to rich people.”
“Well, wouldn’t it be nice to not care about money like you.”
They stood facing each other. The silence fell between them like shards of glass. The bottle of wine sat on the counter. Eden held the pencil tightly in his hand.
My mother stepped back. “May, will you set the table?”
I opened the drawer, counting: four knives, four forks.
Dad lifted the flowers from the counter; the wrapping made a rustling sound. He opened the cupboard and carefully, with both hands, took down a tall glass vase, the opening shaped like a flower. He rinsed the vase at the sink and filled it with cold water.
“Nice flowers, don’t you think?” he said, glancing at her. “I bought them from the Covent Garden florist; they were one pound fifty a stem.”
He loved to tell the price of things. His favorite story was the antique Indian crib he found outside an orphanage and paid twenty rupees for. He shipped it back to London and sold it in his shop for three hundred pounds, to a woman who wanted it for her flower pots.
Mum floured the pieces of flounder and laid them on a plate. She stepped back from the stove when the oil sizzled. Was the argument over? I had a nervous feeling. There was a line in the palm of my hand where I’d held the knives and forks.
I walked around the table, from chair to chair, laying down napkin, fork, knife.
Mum took the potatoes from the oven with a mitt, dropping them on the wooden counter. Did she feel satisfied now, cutting open the baked potatoes?
Our father arranged the flowers in the vase, stepping back to view them.
“Dad, will you be back in time for my birthday?”
I put a knife and fork on either side of Eden’s coloring book. “That’s not till August, Eden,” I said softly, as I laid the napkin down. “He’s just going for a couple of weeks. You only think about yourself.”
Eden looked up at me, as though I had pinched him.
Mum carried the plates to the table. “They’re pretty,” she said, glancing at the flowers.
Our father looked at the flowers, their yellow petals reflected on his skin. Did he feel satisfied? Full of himself, the thrill of his own business, counting the money at the end of the day. A working-class boy, he had pulled himself up in the world.
“To us!” he would say with his friends in the pub. If only his father could see him now; turning the key to lock up his shop. On his way home, picking up a bottle of wine from the wine merchant, walking up the street to the house he almost owned. A house in a good location. A house with the lights on.
The little things: turning the windup watch his father had won in a race, a good cup of tea like his mother made, watching the East Enders at the end of the day. Money in the bank. These things would fill him up.
We sat down at the table. The fish and potatoes steamed on the plates. “Delicious fish,” he said.
“It’s from Mullon’s,” she said, as she forked the lemon.
What if then he had said, Why don’t you come with me, Lucy? That’s not a bad idea, after all. What if then he had gone to her and put his arms around her, saying, We’ll go together, have a summer holiday.
He looked at her, checking her face, which had no expression at all, to see if it had changed. The four of us, in a row of airplane seats to India. Like leaves on a stem; our lives pointing in a new direction.
He spread the napkin across his lap. That might be quite nice actually. Even if he had wanted to, his next thought would have been, But then, who will watch the shop? It would have to be Sebastian. The last time he had left an employee for longer than a few days, the shop had been burgled and money had been lost.
SEVEN
Our mother managed the shop while our father was away in India. Sebastian helped out part-time during the week. He played the piano and was the lead singer in a band called Diamond Eyes. Sometimes, he played tape cassettes of his band on the shop stereo and set the fliers for his shows on the counter. He sat on the tall stool, behind the counter, in a thin plaid shirt, suede trousers, and boots, writing lyrics in his journal.
I went to a party
With my friend named Marty.
We kissed by the kitchen sink,
she was pretty, I think.
Sebastian liked working in the shop. Keith Richards stopped by occasionally, and so did Annie Lennox. Because of the famous clientele, Sebastian admired Simon, and because Simon knew he was admired, he liked Sebastian.
Mum paid me five pounds a day to babysit Eden while she worked in the shop and on the weekend mornings so she could have a rest.
For breakfast, I made Weetabix with warm milk and honey, and we let Porridge lick the cream from the foil milk cap. After breakfast we collected any money we could find lying around the house—in coat pockets, under sofa cushions—and sometimes we would sneak into the bedroom while our mother slept quietly taking the change from the dresser, careful not to wake her.
The last time Eden woke her, touching her shoulder and whispering in her ear, “It’s time to wake up, Mum. It’s morning.” She rolled away from him as though he had frightened her. “Why did you do that?” she said, waking angrily. “I was having the most amazing dream. Now I’ll never know what happens in the end.”
At the sweet shop, we considered each jar carefully, debating the cost and what would be the
best mixture. The customers came and went.
“Are you planning on spending the night?” the shopkeeper asked us. When we left, the weather had changed. The day had brightened and the blue sky appeared behind broken clouds.
We walked down the road to the toy shop, Tiger, Tiger. “May, what would you choose?” Eden asked, stopping in front. “If you could have anything you wanted?”
I looked in the windows at the train tracks running through a miniature town, at a box of magic tricks. I was too old for these things now. I stared at my reflection in the glass. I was wearing my denim miniskirt and a white T-shirt with blue dots on it. I tilted my head to the side. I was fourteen but thought I could pass for fifteen.
We walked past an old woman sitting on the bench with her granddaughter. The old woman held a napkin in her hand, smiling as she watched her.
We had always spent the summer days with our other grandmother, our father’s mother Nanny Hannah, but she died this past winter. Sometimes still, when I woke up, I would think, Let’s visit Nanny Hannah today. We’ll take the bus, she’ll cook us lunch and take a Victoria sponge cake she bought at Marks & Spencer from the freezer, and Eden and I will help her hang the washing on the line. I had these thoughts before remembering that she was dead.
On Sundays, Mum, Dad, Eden, and I would go round to Nanny Hannah’s. She lived in a ground-floor flat in Maida Vale. Our father helped her with the bills, after her husband Jacko died five years ago, from drinking too much after a horse race. They found him ice cold on the pavement.
“Hello, my loves,” Hannah would say when she greeted us at the door. My father would hand her flowers and a box of chocolates we had bought for her on the way. She always dressed for our visit, set her hair, put on a bit of lipstick. She was a heavyset woman with a gravelly voice from smoking.
“Flattering ensemble, Mum,” our father would say.
“You like it?” she would ask, turning slightly to the side in her tartan two-piece. “I bought it on sale at Marks the other day.” She would say this as though the shop were an old friend. When she bent to pick something off the floor, she would put her hand on her lower back and say, “Oh, me aching back.” People said she looked like the Queen Mum but with a Cockney accent, a compliment that made her blush and set her hair the same way and dress in two-piece suits and matching hats.
