by Joanna Nadin
Cherry Palmer sticks her hand up so high and with such need that Harry nudges me and whispers swot. I nod, though in my head I’m just cursing her for having the right answer when I have none.
‘Because we can feel him,’ she announces, drawing out the ‘e’ deliciously, in what I see as a direct taunt at me.
‘That’s right, Cherry,’ says Mr Matlock. ‘We can feel him all around us.’
Darren Fraser and Neil Boutwood, who are fourteen, and thus ten per cent barely visible moustache to ninety per cent sex jokes, snicker. But June, Mr Matlock’s Purdey-haired assistant, shushes them, and they, in hormonal thrall to her breasts, even encased in a pie-crust-collar shirt and tank top as they are, shush.
Harry, who is herself in thrall to Neil Boutwood, is nudging me again, but for once I am busy with a man of my own: I am trying, desperately, to feel God. But all I can make out is the hard wood of the chair, and the cold metal of its tubular legs, the paint scratched off by bored children and teenagers during decades’ worth of amens. At home I try to feel him, too, but all I can sense there is the stiff brush of Charles’s fur and crumbs on the carpet. Nor is God in the garden, or the mould-freckled bathroom, or under your bed – my latest hideaway, where I stay sometimes for hours, testing to see how long it takes you to find me, or even look for me. Your record is two hours twenty-two minutes, and that was only because I was jiggling because I needed a wee.
God, it seems, is similarly keen on staying hidden. But still I do not give up on the possibility of faith. I attend Sunday group, and chapel swimming trips and even holiday Bible camp – by which point you’ve decided God is welcome in the form of free babysitting – until, after three years and fourteen weeks of endeavour, Harry tells me that she’s heard from Tina that under the floorboards at the chapel is a massive bath and that, when you’re fourteen, they push you under the water in your actual clothes to baptize you. We leave that very day, claiming we have hockey fixtures for the foreseeable future.
But even without the chapel, it is hard to escape God in a small town. In our primary school He is around every linoed corner, stalking the corridors in the form of our Reverend head teacher, Mr Roe, who watches over us, nodding as we offer up our fruit and vegetables and – in my case – a small tin of mandarin segments and a slab of black cherry jelly at the Harvest Festival; and He seeps into lessons when Mrs Drewery tells us we all have two fathers.
‘One who made you – your daddy at home – and one in heaven, who watches over you all.’
‘Stacey’s got three, then, Miss,’ Trevor Pledger pipes up.
Mrs Drewery looks unconvinced.
‘It’s true,’ Stacey confirms. ‘My dad dad, God, and Barry Benson from the Co-op. He’s my stepdad.’
Mrs Drewery’s face falls and my stomach sinks as I cross my fingers in the hope that no one points out that I can barely muster one. Harry says nothing, for now. But at Sunday lunch the question she’s kept bottled and stoppered finally slips out during dessert.
‘Do you really not know?’ she asks. ‘Who your dad is, I mean.’
‘Harriet!’ Mrs Trevelyan barks. ‘That’s not polite at the table.’
I am unsure whether she means the daddy thing, or the fact that Harry is about to eat a spoonful of clotted cream straight from the pot, and I don’t like to ignore Harry so I shake my head. ‘No. Cross my heart and hope to die. And nor does Edie.’ As if the addition of truth may make it more palatable.
It doesn’t, and the subject is swiftly segued to the height of Mr Judd’s fence (too high, apparently, and the excess shade may wither the floral border). But later, in the den, while Mrs Trevelyan has a lie-down, Harry reprises our curtailed discussion.
We are half watching the motor racing with Mr Trevelyan, but mostly engrossed in a plate of biscuits and glasses of cold milk with Crusha strawberry syrup.
I watch Harry carefully snap the top off a custard cream with her teeth, scrape the filling out, then, glancing at her father, who is usefully immersed in the angry-bee sound of Alain Prost’s McLaren, push the biscuit pieces to the bottom of the bin.
‘I’d have had them,’ says Tom.
‘That’s disgusting.’
‘Waste not, want not,’ says Tom. ‘What about the starving children in Cambodia?’
‘Send it to them, then,’ taunts Harry, picking up another biscuit, and turning to me. ‘So who might it be, then?’
‘Who?’
‘Your dad, duh.’
I pretend to rack my brains, as if I am considering a range of possibilities. But really, it comes down to one person: a nameless man from Manchester. His face changes every time I conjure him, though he always has my Toffo hair and pale, paint-spattered skin. Someone from your art course, or the pub, or who shared your house, even.
‘God, stop asking,’ you beg me on the few occasions I have persisted. ‘You don’t need him. And he doesn’t need you.’ But this only makes sense when I change that second need to ‘want’, and give him a cartoon villain’s moustache to twirl and an alter ego like my current favourite television nemesis, the Hooded Claw.
‘Maybe it’s Prince Charles,’ says Harry, shooting, as ever, for the moon. ‘Or the man from T. Rex. Or Bryan Ferry.’
‘He’s got curly hair,’ Tom says. ‘And anyway, he’s dead.’
Harry pulls a face. ‘Bryan Ferry is not dead.’
‘Marc Bolan is, though, you moron.’
‘I’m telling Mum you said that,’ Harry protests.
‘Then I’ll show her the biscuits in the bin,’ Tom taunts back.
‘Would not.’
‘Would too.’
‘Would not.’
This stalemate – a frequent feature of our Sundays, which, now that Tom is at secondary school, are my only real chance to see him – continues for a few more choruses until Harry gets bored and has a better idea.
‘You could get a new one, Di.’
‘A new what?’ Tom asks.
‘Duh. A new dad.’
It’s as if, then, the world has turned into one of those clever camera close-ups where the background rushes away, while the face itself appears to get bigger, and more significant. Because this is obvious, of course, yet has not once occurred to me. But now my head is whirling with the possibility of it, with the plethora of potential surrogates. Though not the same ones, it seems, as Harry.
‘What about Mr Morris?’ she suggests.
‘From the healthfood shop?’ Tom asks. ‘Are you joking?’
‘What?’ demands Harry, butter not melting. ‘Edie’s always in there and he gives her free stuff all the time so he obviously likes her.’
‘But he’s got a hunchback,’ I say. ‘And a wife.’ (The order of these obstacles being significant, in my assessment.)
‘Fine,’ she concedes. ‘What about Trudy Hewitt’s dad, then? He’s not married to Trudy’s mum and he looks like Luke Duke.’
‘He lives in Harlow,’ Tom dismisses, as if it might as well be Mars.
‘Well, you come up with someone, then.’
‘Michael Nelson fancies her,’ Tom admits with a snigger.
I am disgusted. Both by the idea, and at Tom thinking of it, though I try to overcome the latter by telling myself he is only being honest. ‘He’s twelve,’ I say. ‘And he still likes Bay City Rollers.’
‘It’s illegal,’ says Harry knowledgeably. ‘Not the Bay City Rollers. The being twelve. You both have to be sixteen.’
A fact I do not bother reminding her of in four years’ time.
‘Mr Hunt?’ Tom tries.
‘From the swimming pool? Are you mental?’
The list goes on, as they compete to come up with more and more preposterous father figures, from the black-faced coalman to Mr Ginster who has a squint and a spastic boot, until my presence is long forgotten, faded in the face of sibling rivalry.
I pick up my glass of pink milk and sigh.
‘Ignore them, Dido,’ says Mr Trevelyan.
I look up,
startled, having forgotten he was there.
He smiles widely, benevolently. ‘Not so bad being an only child after all, eh?’
And then it comes to me that I don’t need to look as far as Harlow, nor even the end of the road and Mr Jennings with the bad breath and the Labrador. Because there, in front of me, is the perfect surrogate father.
He is nothing like I imagined, but everything I have ever hoped for: he lets us play on the furniture, and on him too, carting us around as if he is a lolloping shire horse, or a giant climbing his beanstalk, his kidnapped Jack on his back, as we take turns in screaming our way up the stairs. And he’s tall, and handsome, of sorts – at least in a clean and tidy television way – and rich, too: he can afford for Mrs Trevelyan to buy Harry an actual snorkel jacket with real rabbit fur on the collar when I have to make do with an anorak off the Saturday market.
There is Angela to contend with, of course. But they argue a lot, I’ve noticed. And when Tom and Harry are fooling about and she’s getting cross and threatening to send everyone upstairs with only cream crackers for tea, he sometimes looks at me and pulls a face. Maybe he’s thinking he wishes he were at my house, instead. Even though cream crackers is quite a usual kind of dinner in our kitchen.
And then, in a sudden flush of inspiration and desperation, I do something terrible but which I know will render me the centre of his attention.
I bite hard on my glass. So hard that I break it.
This isn’t entirely spontaneous. The urge has been with me ever since I first drank orange squash at their dinner table. Not through daring, but because I dislike intensely the circularity of the glass. The way it fails to lie flat against my teeth and tongue; the tinkle of it when it click-clacks against my incisors. At home we have thick-edged pint glasses hocked from pubs, chipped china mugs, and Tupperware beakers that taint their contents with an undertone of plastic.
But this glass is delicate, and when I rest the rim between my teeth I press to test for give, checking just how much pressure it would take to crack its clean fragility.
‘Don’t you ever feel that?’ I asked Harry once.
The look she gave me said no, duh, though I suspect now she was storing it as a possible habit to acquire, strange and dangerous in one.
In the past, when the urge was overwhelming I always put my glass down to avoid temptation. But today, this is not about my irritation at shape and sound. This is about keeping attention, eliciting love and pity. His love and pity. So that he can be my saviour. And instead of stopping myself at the tipping point, I push my teeth together.
In one swift snap the tumbler cracks, a seam opening down its length, a jagged shard breaking off and pushing into my lower palate. The glass still clutched in my hand, I watch as pink milk spills, forming a puddle on my skirt, then an inkblot test spreads out in deeper crimson, from the drip, drip, drip of blood from my mouth.
‘Dido?’
I look up at Mr Trevelyan.
‘Dido, what have you done?’
Harry and Tom stop their bickering to stare.
I open my mouth and let the glass fall into the lake on my lap, followed by a gob of blood.
At that, the chaos begins. ‘Muuuuuum!’ yells Harry. ‘Come!’
Even in my pain, I am annoyed at her for taking this opportunity away from my possible parent. The man who, right now, is mopping me down with the sports section of his Times, whilst holding my head back. I assume, in my naivety, that this is to help me keep the blood in, to somehow slow circulation. But I now wonder if he was only trying to keep it off the carpet.
Mrs Trevelyan arrives, having woken to possibly her worst nightmare: stains on the Axminster; Tom swearing, ‘Bloody hell, Dido’; and me at the centre of it all.
‘Good God,’ she exclaims. ‘Why ever have you done that?’
I shrug, unable to speak.
‘Harry? Harry!’ she snaps at her daughter, now wide-eyed and mute with horror and, I suspect, respect. ‘Oh, I give up. David, fetch a sodding cloth.’
I start at this – it is as if God himself has sworn in Jesus’ name – and wonder how she even knew that word at all.
But clearly desperate times call for desperate measures, and sodding has its desired effect, sending David and his soaked-through newspaper scurrying into the kitchen for a cloth, the Jif and a bowl of warm water, while I am marched, head back, into the bathroom, the door shut and locked behind us to keep an audience out.
‘Here.’ She hands me a tooth mug full of tap water. ‘Rinse your mouth out and spit. In the sink,’ she adds, as if my feral tendencies might lead me to choose the floor.
I do as I’m told. I gargle and spit still-minty water until it runs from scarlet through squashed-berry juice to the pale translucence of home-made rosewater. Then, one hand clasped around my chin, one across my nose, she holds my mouth open and peers inside. I smell the citrus scent of hand cream, and feel an unexpected roughness. Not like the scars on yours, from knives carelessly wielded whilst chopping carrots and shouting at Toni, or whoever has slighted you this time, but a more profound ridging, as if her skin is literally thicker, has built layer upon layer to counteract a deeper fragility, forming a carapace that no balm can soften. Hands that are at odds with the life they are leading.
‘I can see a cut. But not deep.’
She lets go and washes her hands fastidiously; coats them once again in Atrixo.
‘Here.’ She hands me another beaker now. This time the liquid is pale urine-yellow with the unmistakable antiseptic tang of TCP. ‘Wash your mouth out.’
And I do. I wash my mouth out, but that is all; the bad thoughts I keep to myself.
‘You’d better go now,’ she says when we get back downstairs to a rapturous Harry and Tom. ‘Tell your mother. She can decide if you need to go to the hospital.’
‘You can’t send her home like that,’ Mr Trevelyan protests.
‘I’ll go!’ volunteers Harry.
‘Me too,’ offers Tom. ‘If you want.’
But for once I don’t want. What I want is for Mr Trevelyan to pick me up and carry me down the garden, through the gate and over the threshold of our back door, like the knight in shining armour – or corduroy – that I have decided he must be. And to my utter astonishment, and arousing in me a temporary faith in prayer, he does exactly that.
Do you remember him coming in? You were on the chaise, as ever: the papers strewn on the floor, and dotted with the detritus of your Sunday – a wine glass, the ashtray, an empty packet of peanuts and a half-eaten orange.
‘Edie?’ he asks you.
You look up and see me in his arms, and smile. ‘Dido,’ you say, holding your arms out. Then, realizing the gravity of my return, ‘Did something happen?’
To my delight, Mr Trevelyan keeps hold of me while he tells you. So I get to keep my face half-buried in his jumper; smell the washing powder and faint taint of Hamlet cigar, feel the way his heart beats strong and steady in his chest, a rhythm I repeat in my head until you tell me to stop it, and I realize I’ve sounded it aloud.
‘It was an accident,’ he says.
‘God, I bloody well hope so,’ you say.
‘Of course it was,’ he says. ‘And she’s fine, aren’t you?’
I open my mouth as he lowers me down to your face for you to check.
‘Just exhausted now,’ he says, lifting me up again. ‘Shall I take her upstairs?’
You nod, astonished, I think.
And so, for the first time in my life, a man carries me up the seventeen stairs and across the four steps of the landing to my bedroom. Though he, of course, being manly, does it in two. Then he lays me down on my bed, and tells me to take it easy, and I nod him a promise, and say another silent prayer.
For a long time I lie there, adrift in the comforting soup that I seem to be swimming in, tasting the faint metal tang on my tongue and listening to the hum of the radio left on in the bathroom, and the soft voices from the living room below.
He i
s still here.
I can’t make out words. But I can hear that you are crying, and I realize that the red-rimmed eyes I saw when I came in must have been from the sting of tears. In my selfishness I imagined you’d been smoking funny cigarettes again, though I couldn’t smell the fust of them this time.
I creep out of bed and, keeping to the left of the landing and missing the top step, sneak creakless to where I can spy on you.
Mr Trevelyan is on the sofa, and you – oh happy day! – are in his arms now, your face in the place on his shoulder where mine had lain, soaking salt water into pale-blue lambswool.
‘Tell me,’ he coaxes.
‘I can’t,’ you say. ‘I can’t explain it.’
He tells you to try, but instead you get up and pour yourself another glass of wine.
‘Want one?’ you offer.
Have one, I will him.
But he shakes his head and stands. ‘I should be getting back. She’ll be wondering what’s happened to me.’
‘Thank you,’ you say as you both walk to the door.
‘Any time,’ he says. ‘Though try not to make a habit of crying. It doesn’t suit you.’
‘Does it anyone?’
He laughs. ‘I suppose not, no.’
‘I always thought I wore melancholy well.’
‘You wear most things well.’
There is silence for a second.
‘You should go,’ you say.
‘I’m going,’ he says, his eyes still on you.
Kiss her, I say silently, my head filled with Parent Trap and too many matinees. Kiss her!
But eventually he turns and walks out of the back door, closing it softly behind him. And so my prayer goes unanswered, and my faith dissipates once more.
I wait for seven minutes exactly, then I tiptoe down the rest of the stairs and push in next to you on the sofa.
‘He’s a nice man,’ I hint.
‘He is,’ you say.
‘Like Jesus,’ I say.
‘Hardly,’ you counter. ‘For a start, David’s real.’
‘I wish he was my dad,’ I add.
And though you say nothing, in my childish but fertile imagination I see you nod, make a mental note, and begin to plan a story of your own.
