Sophie

by Guy Burt

  I am very afraid.

  There are areas—territories—that he refuses to explore. Not yet, at least. And there are things he will not hear from me. The bruise on my face is less painful now, but I find myself half willing it to keep hurting, to remind me of that. There are rules here.

  If I detach myself from the immediacy of what is happening, I find myself curiously amazed—amazed that I could think that I knew someone so well, and yet know them not at all.

  He rubs his face with one hand, pushing hair back away from his eyes, and turns towards me once more. He starts to sit down, then checks himself, remains standing, leaning against the wall. I remember his words: I loved you. I wanted to be a part of everything that you were. Is that true? If it’s an excuse, what is it an excuse for? I don’t believe he was lying; but then why am I sitting here?

  He smiles slightly. He looks calmer.

  My sixth birthday was one of the happiest of my life. The week had begun with salmon-pink clouds rimming the sky at dawn: I knew, because I had been awake as early as possible. The week of my birthday was also the week of Sophie's, and with great secrecy I had been preparing my presents and card for her. It was a ritual that went back as far as I could remember, with both Sophie and I pretending nonchalantly that nothing was out of the ordinary until the actual days arrived. This year, my card for her was an elaborate and time-consuming project, decorated with a good deal of stolen silver foil and milk-bottle tops. I worked on it in the privacy of my bedroom, early in the mornings, when Sophie and my mother were still asleep and the world was silent.

  My mother celebrated our birthdays in her own way. There was a selection of small, pretty-looking cakes after school, carried into the drawing room on a china plate. There was also lemonade, which helped to alleviate the dryness of the cakes, which it seemed to me might have been cooked with the dust from the drawing room; they had the same musty smell. There were presents, too: there was a quality about these that remained uniform throughout my childhood, and which I only later learned to recognize. They were universally expensive, yet out of date—the kind of gifts bought by grandparents with no sense of the current fashions in children’s toys. There was a cupboard in the upstairs hallway where Sophie and I put our birthday presents each year.

  My gift for Sophie was the best thing I could find. There had been agonies of doubt and soul-searching before I resolved to give it to her instead of keeping it for myself, for while I knew what a good present it would make, I was deeply in love with it myself. I had come across it in the quarry one afternoon, and something had made me stop before calling Sophie over to me. All that afternoon I had worried at it, gradually easing it from its firm seating in the grey stone, and when it eventually sprang loose—there was a small section missing on its other side, but nothing too serious—I had pocketed it, instead of surrendering it to the quarry bag with the other shells. It was quite different from anything I had seen before in the quarry: a round, spiralled shell as wide as my fist and perfectly made. Compared to the thumbnail shells that littered the rock, it was a work of art. Prising it out without breaking it had taken me the best part of four hours, but Sophie, making her unintelligible notes in the quarry books, or sunning herself happily under the oval sky, didn’t seem to notice. I took the shell with me to school the next day, a warm, flat medallion in my shorts pocket. During games, when I was left alone in the classroom to read a book, I carefully painted the shell with white glue—the kind that dries clear and shiny. And so my gift for Sophie was complete.

  Seeing her face when she opened the small, untidily wrapped parcel made all the time and effort well worth it. She gave me a huge hug. “It’s fantastic,” she said. “And you’ve made it shiny as well.”

  I nodded happily. “Do you like the card?”

  “I love the card. I’m going to stick it on the wall in my bedroom where I can look at it. You must have been collecting those bottle tops for weeks.” She held the card out at arm’s length to admire it. “It’s really good, Mattie,” she said. “You didn’t do this at school?”

  “No,” I said, feeling proud that I hadn’t. “Mrs. Jeffries always tells us to draw our cards in crayon, and I wanted to make one that glitters.”

  “Well, you’ve certainly managed it. It really shines, doesn’t it? And your writing’s much better, too.”

  A few days later it was my turn. There were more dry cakes and lemonade, and, once these had been endured, more beautifully made, totally unsuitable presents. My mother sat in her chair, not meeting my eyes, tapping one foot slightly against the thick carpet. As soon as we were able to escape, Sophie and I retired upstairs to her bedroom to start the birthday celebrations in earnest.

  Her present to me was neatly wrapped in red paper and tied with blue ribbon. Eagerly, I tore it open. Inside there was a small hardback book, a bar of white chocolate and a badge with I am 6 on it.

  “The chocolate’s for now,” she told me seriously. “I was going to get you the Winnie the Pooh book called Now We Are Six, but we can get that from the library. This is a bit different. What do you think?”

  It was strange; she almost sounded anxious, as if she was afraid I wouldn’t like her present. I turned it over in my hands carefully. On the front of the book, the title read The Observer Book of Fossils—and then, in smaller writing, “In Colour.” But what was most exciting of all was that, below the title, was a photograph of the shell I had given Sophie, almost exactly as it had been when I saw it poking out of the quarry wall.

  “Wow!” I said.

  “You like it? It’s called an ammonite, that shell you found. You can find out all the names of the shells in the quarry, if you want.”

  “It’s brilliant.”

  “I’ve written your name in it. See? At the front.”

  The end of term came in a flurry of rolled-up paintings and bags and boxes of books, emptied desks and lost Wellingtons. Mrs. Jeffries’s cheery classroom was a chaotic jumble for two days, until it gradually resolved into an ordered sterility as more and more of the year’s work was taken home to be stuck on fridge doors and bedroom walls. There was one brief eruption when it was discovered that I had written my name in ink pen on the inside of my desk lid, and another when Chloe Webster stabbed herself with a pair of scissors, but Mrs. Jeffries appeared unwilling to make too much of a fuss. The school playground was bubbling with parents after final assembly. The oldest children—those leaving—clumped into small groups, the boys shouting jokes at each other, boasting and trying to exceed one another’s eloquent swearing, while the girls huddled in tearful clusters, hugging people they’d never liked and would probably see around the village the next day. Elements of carnival combined with grand farewells until the school appeared as if in the throes of an extravagant wake. Teachers, brittle smiles wedged on their faces, shunted children aside as they made for their cars.

  Sophie and I slipped away discreetly in the confusion. We’d finished early, of course, and the sun was bright and thick in the air, so we walked slowly down the lane towards our house. The trees on the hill, surrounding the quarry, were a dark and cool-looking green, and the hedgerows had exploded into masses of weeds and grasses. The summer holidays stretched out in front of us like a journey, and the thought of them was sweet and happy.

  We saw less and less of my mother. In the summer she retired in any case, preserved until the onset of autumn by the musty air of the drawing room, like something in formalin. But this summer it was even more noticeable. As her belly grew, the more she receded into the house, out of sight. The tightness of her dresses must have been uncomfortable. She seemed to be trying to compress the baby, squash it back into herself, reabsorb it before it became too insuperable an obstacle.

  Sometimes, at night, Sophie and I would sit by the window in my bedroom and look out over the landscape, the hill, the trees against the sky. We told stories and waited for the stars and the moon to come out. The moon, Sophie told me once, was a place like the world, but without seas
or rivers or trees or people, where all the ground was white and there was no air to breathe. In the stories, the moon was made of cheese. One man thought he had caught the moon in a pool, but it turned out to be only a reflection. Entranced, I would sit beside her and listen for what seemed like hours, until Sophie decided that it was bedtime. Once or twice, if she was in a good mood, we would have midnight feasts of biscuits and orange squash by torchlight.

  He says, “How are you feeling?”

  The question comes as a complete surprise. He sounds sincere, even concerned. “I’m—OK,” I reply. I keep my voice even.

  “Good. I’m just going to—” He takes a candle from the windowsill, lights it from the flame of the stub burning in the centre of the floor, drips a little wax, and sets it in place. The light in the room is augmented, and the shadows recede, until he blows the first candle out. “I don’t like to let them burn all the way down,” he says, almost to himself, and then laughs a little. “It seems unlucky, somehow.” I don’t know what he means. His tone of voice strikes me as strange, as though the action of replacing the candle has confused him, dragged him out of the past temporarily.

  “You’re comfortable?” he asks.

  “I’m OK,” I say again. The boards over the windows clatter briefly as the storm tugs at them, and the fresh flame streams, dips and trembles.

  He shakes his head, as if brushing away something clinging, and settles himself on the floor opposite me.

  “I wanted so much to be like you,” he says quietly. A draught from under the door catches me, and I shiver.

  In the second week of the holiday, my father came home to us again. The lunch table was laid ready to receive him, and he appeared as if summoned by this ritual at about half past eleven. He was as tall and handsome and clean-smelling as ever, and just as forgettable. He brought Sophie and me small gifts, which we hastily unwrapped—late birthday presents, brought from America, where, we learned, he had been. His presence conferred upon the house a crowded feeling that was not entirely unpleasant; he must have remained in some way a recognized part of our family, even during his long absences. No one mentioned what had brought him back this time.

  After a few days, though, the reason became suddenly obvious.

  I was awakened sometime in the middle of the night by footsteps in the corridor outside my room. For a quick moment my heart leapt with fear, but then the hallway light clicked on. It was Sophie. There was more noise from downstairs, and the sound of a telephone ringing.

  “Sophie?” I asked, still bemused with sleep. “What time is it?”

  “It’s OK, Mattie. It’s—about two o’clock.”

  “What’s happening?”

  She came over and sat on the side of my bed. “Mummy’s going away for a while, that’s all,” she said. “They’re getting her clothes packed and so on.”

  “Why?”

  Sophie frowned. “I don’t know. I think maybe—”

  “Maybe what?”

  “Maybe the baby’s ready. But I don’t know,” she added quickly. “It might not be time yet. Anyway, it’s nothing to worry about. All right?”

  “All right,” I murmured, sleepily. “Will you call me if the baby’s born?”

  She smiled. “Sure,” she said. “Sleep well, Mattie.” She smoothed my pillow for me and straightened the covers. “We’ll talk about it all in the morning.”

  I nodded contentedly, and before I knew it, I was asleep again.

  The morning brought further surprises, however. I had actually made my way down to the kitchen and got the milk from the fridge for my cereal before I began to remember what had happened the night before; and then I couldn’t be sure whether it had been a dream or not. Confused, I ran upstairs to where Sophie was brushing her teeth in the bathroom.

  “Sophie! Did Mummy have the baby?”

  Sophie glanced at me, an amused expression on her face. “Oh, so you do remember. I saw you go shooting down to breakfast and wondered if you’d forgotten.”

  “Has she?” I repeated.

  “I don’t know. She’s not here, though. Neither’s Daddy.”

  “Where’s Daddy gone?”

  She rinsed her mouth out and spat. “Your turn. I think he’s gone with Mummy. There's—”

  “Are we all alone?” I mumbled excitedly through my toothpaste.

  “If you’ll shut up a minute, I’ll tell you. That’s what all the phoning was last night. Do you remember Caitlyn?”

  “Who?”

  “She’s our cousin. She’s come to stay with us and look after us.”

  I dried my hands. “Katy? What’s she like?”

  “You met her a couple of years ago. No? Oh well, maybe you’ll know her when you see her. She’s all right. But her name’s Caitlyn, not Katy. Now push off and let me get dressed.”

  I bounded back down to breakfast full of happy anticipation, and set about finding cornflakes and sugar. If I hurried, I was usually able to put an extra, and secret, spoonful of sugar on the cornflakes that Sophie didn’t see, thus avoiding lectures on fillings and cavities. There was a strange and intangible quality of difference to the house that morning. Now that my mother had gone, it was easy to believe—if you shut the drawing room door—that she had never lived here at all. In the garden beyond the kitchen window, starlings were fighting on the lawn. I was watching them when someone came into the kitchen behind me.

  “Hi, Mattie.” There was a young woman standing in the doorway. She looked very tired, and her hair was a mess. She was wearing a very long, dark blue dressing gown. “What on earth are you doing up this early?”

  “Are you my cousin?” I asked.

  “That’s right. Is there any coffee in here?”

  Silently, I found the coffee jar and handed it to her.

  “Don’t you kids get tired at all? It’s only just half past seven, you know. Little brats like you need their sleep, or something.”

  I giggled. She had a nice voice, although it sounded funny—different. “Have you come to live with us?”

  “For a bit, yeah. I’ve got to try and keep you lot in control until your parents get back to deal with you. Didn’t you hear me last night? I had to drive over at three o’clock. I wasn’t amused, I can tell you.”

  Sophie arrived. “I heard you,” she said. “You’ve got a red car.”

  “Well spotted. Yeah, I have.”

  The strangeness of her voice brought to my mind someone at school. “Are you from Scotland?” I asked.

  Caitlyn laughed aloud. “Hell, no. No, I come from round here like you lot. But I just spent a year in New Zealand. You know where that is? Oh well, never mind. But they talk a different way there. So when I’m in New Zealand, people say I’ve got a British accent, and when I’m here people reckon I sound like a New Zealander. Or an Australian, if they can’t tell the difference. See?”

  “Yes,” I lied. “Sophie says Mummy might have had a baby. Is that true?”

  “Well, I don’t really know right now.” Caitlyn sat down at the kitchen table. “Sophie, love, could you make some toast or something? I don’t know where a thing is in this house, sorry.”

  “That’s OK,” Sophie said, but I could tell from her eyes that she didn’t mean it. I blinked in surprise. I thought Caitlyn was nice.

  “But she might have a baby?” I persisted.

  “Oh, I think you’re right there, Mattie,” she said, mock seriously. “I just don’t know if she’s had it yet. I shouldn’t imagine so, actually. It’ll take a while yet. And they’ll want to keep her in to look after the baby and so on. He’s come a little bit earlier than everyone expected, so it was pretty panicked last night.”

  “Where does the baby come out?” I asked.

  Caitlyn opened her mouth, and then hesitated. Sophie said, “Out of Mummy’s tummy.”

  I realized that Caitlyn obviously counted as an adult as far as Sophie was concerned. “I know that,” I said. “What I meant was, where does she go to have the baby come out?
Why doesn’t she stay here?”

  “Oh, right,” Caitlyn said. “Well, she’s gone to hospital, Mattie. They’ve got some wonderful doctors there who’ll help everything along. You don’t have any doctors here, do you?” She made a show of looking under the table.

  I grinned. “No!”

  “There you go, then. She’s just gone away for a bit so the doctors can look after her.”

  “Here’s your toast,” Sophie said. “It’s a bit burnt, I think.”

  “Never mind.” She yawned hugely. “Look, do you guys think you can look after yourselves for another hour or two, if I just go and catch some more sleep? Then we’ll all get together and work out what we’re going to do.”

  “Sure,” Sophie said. “We’ll go and play in the garden. Shout out the door when you want us to come in.”

  Caitlyn looked relieved. “That’s great. You’ll be OK, won’t you? Don’t fall into any tiger traps or anything.”

  “We won’t!” I said.

  “Then I’ll see you later. Shan’t be long.” With her mug of coffee in one hand, our cousin padded away into the house.

  Sophie turned to me. “I bet we don’t see her before lunch,” she said.

  “Isn’t she too old to be a cousin?” I asked. “Thomas Wright has a cousin who’s in his class.”

  “It’s not important how old you are,” Sophie said. “It’s to do with who your mother is. Mummy’s sister is our aunt, and Caitlyn is her daughter.”

  “What?”

  She sighed. “Do you want to go out and play or not?”

  “Yes please!”

  “Then you’ll need to put some shoes on, won’t you?”

  “I don’t like shoes.”

  Sophie was right, and we didn’t see our cousin again until midday. We spent most of the morning playing by the stream. The gardener was down by his sheds, reeling up the hose pipes and doing other, more inscrutable things, but he ignored us and we ignored him. Sophie pointed out a few slim, fast-moving black fish that arrowed through the water like slender torpedoes. The leaves on the one or two apple trees made irregular patterns of morning summer sunlight on the grass, and the air was still and warm. Most of the morning, Sophie had been a little distant, as though preoccupied with her own thoughts. When we heard Caitlyn’s voice calling us back to the house, Sophie said, “You go on. I’ll be along in a minute. Tell her I shan’t be long.”