Ever since the day Thomas saw the photo in the newspaper, he questioned where she was, who she was with and how long she’d be. He did it pleasantly, always with a smile, but she was under no doubt that he no longer trusted her.
When Betty arrived back home, she found Martha lying on her stomach on the rug in the front room. She moved her legs back and fro as if kicking through water. Her books and pens lay scattered all over the floor as she wrote in her notepad.
“Oh, Martha.” Betty sighed. “Look at this mess. I want everything to be perfect for when your father gets home.”
“It’s not mess, it’s work.”
“Whatever it is, it needs tidying up.”
Martha swung her plait off her shoulder. “Dad’s not even here. He’s gone for a walk with Lilian. Why do we always have to run around after him? It’s like he’s the king of the castle or something.”
Betty saw the fiery spark in her eyes. Her adolescent hormones had kicked in recently, bringing bouts of sullenness and uncooperativeness. However, when Martha was with Zelda, she was like a small girl again, sweet and smiley. She often heard her own mother’s words when Martha spoke. “Now, come on. Be nice...” she prompted.
“I know that Dad doesn’t like Nana.”
“You’re being silly. Of course he does.”
Martha rolled her eyes. “She hasn’t been over to the house for weeks. Whenever she buys us something, we’re not allowed to have it.”
“Some of your grandma’s presents are...inappropriate.”
“They’re always fun. And you’re not.”
Betty held her breath. She smoothed down the front of her dress, not in the mood for a battle of wills. “If you’re so fed up here, you should have gone for a walk, too.”
“I wasn’t invited, and it’s so obvious that Dad prefers little Miss Perfect to me.”
Betty set her shopping bags down on the floor. She knew that Thomas gave more attention to Lilian, but she wasn’t going to admit it to Martha.
“Your dad and Lilian have similar interests, that’s all.” She walked over and reached out for Martha’s plait, but her daughter ducked her head out of the way. Betty withdrew her fingers. “Now, let’s get this stuff tidied up. Instead of writing your stories, let’s make a list together, of all the things we need to do before your dad gets home. Then we can tick them off when we’ve done them.”
Martha still glowered. “Lilian never gets told off, and she can do whatever she likes. She gets away with everything.”
Betty’s neck muscles grew stringy, at Martha for being so challenging, and also because she spoke the truth. “Don’t talk about your father in that way.”
“Why do we always have to do what he says? It’s not fair.”
“Your dad works hard for us, and I have to put this shopping away.” Betty turned and headed for the kitchen.
“Stand up for yourself, Mum.” Martha got up and followed her. “You said you wanted to find a job...”
“It’s probably too late for that,” Betty said as she tugged a jar of pickled onions out of her bag. She found herself repeating the words that Thomas had drummed into her. “I’ve not worked before. I don’t have any experience.”
Her fingers slipped on the jar and she could only watch as it fell from her hand, crashing to the floor. Vinegar blasted out, splashing her legs and seeping across the linoleum. “Damn it,” she said under her breath. She picked up a cloth and saw that Martha had moved away, towards the front door.
“I’m going out,” she said.
“Where to? Will you give me a hand to clean up this mess?”
Martha shook her head. “I’m going to see Nana. She’s the only one who listens to me around here. Dad treats us like puppets and you can’t see it.”
“He’s a good man...”
Martha shook her head. She opened the door, stormed outside and slammed it behind her.
Betty stared at the onions on the floor. They seemed to look up at her like eyeballs, and she felt her own eyes prick with tears.
Martha was right with a lot of what she said. But it was all too late to turn the clock back.
She threw down a cloth and stamped on it. She mopped the floor, then marched into the front room. To the sound of the ticking cuckoo clock, she dropped to her knees. Pulling Martha’s books towards her, she tried to make a pile. After scooping them together, she hid them behind the sofa, ready to tidy them away properly later on. A pen lay across Martha’s notepad. Her latest story lay freshly written.
Betty put the pad on her knee. A tear plopped onto the page and she wiped it away with the side of her hand. Then she read on.
The Puppet Maker
A puppet maker and his wife had been married for many years but couldn’t have the children they longed for. This made them very sad and each night, the wife cried and pulled at her own hair. “I love you but I want us to have a family,” she said. “I want to give you two daughters.”
One night, as the puppet maker’s wife slept, a bolt of lightning struck down a tree in the garden. The puppet maker decided he would carve the wood.
He shut himself away in his workshop and created the two largest puppets he’d ever made, in the shape of two girls. He attached strings to them and made crisscrosses of wood so he could manipulate their limbs. He added wool for their hair and painted their faces so they looked almost real. When he had finished, they were perfect.
When his wife saw the puppets, she cried tears of joy. “These are the daughters I’ve always longed for,” she said.
The puppets joined them at the dining table for each meal, and each night the puppet maker and his wife put them to bed. They talked to them and cared for them, and the puppet maker’s wife almost forgot they weren’t real.
One night another storm came. This time, the lightning struck the house and the puppet maker screwed his eyes shut. “I wish the puppets could be proper girls,” he said.
In the morning, when he and his wife went to the bedroom, two real girls lay in the beds. They peeped at them from over the covers.
“My daughters,” the puppet maker’s wife cried out and scooped them into her arms. “I shall call you Mary and Lola.”
At breakfast, Mary didn’t like the breakfast cereal and asked for fruit instead. Lola asked to wear a different color of skirt. The puppet maker’s wife was so happy that she didn’t care. However, the puppet maker wasn’t happy. He thought the girls were rude to question what he gave them.
The four of them shared some lovely times as a family, going for picnics and paddling in the sea. However, the girls didn’t need the puppet maker to operate them any longer. They acted how they wanted to.
One night, Mary and Lola didn’t go to bed when the puppet maker told them to. Their disobedience was increasing and it made him feel angry. So, when they had fallen asleep, he fastened strings around their wrists.
“Let them go,” his wife pleaded. “They are real children, not puppets.”
“They must learn to do things my way.”
“I don’t agree.”
The next night, while his wife slept, the puppet maker fastened strings to her wrists, too.
When she woke in the morning, she shook her wrists with dismay. “Fetch me some scissors,” she whispered to her daughters. “I will set you both free.”
“And you must join us,” Mary and Lola said.
But their mother shook her head. “I love your father, so I must stay here. It would break his heart if I freed myself, too.”
Mary and Lola pleaded with their father to let the three of them go, but he wouldn’t listen. So that night, whilst he slept, they asked their mother to cut their strings.
Lola left and never returned, but Mary stayed behind with her mother. “If you won’t leave then I must stay, too,” she said.
“No. You must go,” her mo
ther begged.
But Mary refused.
And the puppet maker’s wife knew that even though Mary was free from her strings, staying at home was like being tied to her crisscross of wood, forever.
18
Boxes
Martha tried to keep busy, to keep her mind off Zelda until she next got in touch, but her nana had a way of invading her thoughts. She pictured the scar on her head and her gap-toothed smile as she laughed on the ghost train. She saw the two of them standing behind the café, as Zelda revealed her time was ticking away.
When she went into the library, she found herself almost blubbing during the children’s storytelling hour. She took out a couple of Nicholas Sparks tearjerkers on loan.
With each conversation Martha had, and with each discovery she made, she felt like she was staring into a child’s kaleidoscope. With each tiny twist, the picture moved and formed a different one.
She should be happy, ecstatic even, that her nana was alive. However, the reality came with a black cloud above it that wouldn’t drift away.
I’ve found something so precious, but I might not have it for long.
She kept thinking about organizing her mum and dad’s funerals.
Thomas died first, on a cold wintery morning. Martha made his breakfast and shouted him to come downstairs. When he didn’t arrive, she found her mum sitting on the edge of the bed. “I can’t wake him, Martha...”
Martha hoped that his passing might bring about a renaissance for her mother, a chance of freedom without the constraints Thomas set for their lives. However, Betty was lost. Her life and routine had been built around him. Everything she did catered for his likes and dislikes, his wants and needs.
Betty had fallen outside, just seven months later, and broken her hip. The doctor said her bones were brittle, from years of dieting. Martha visited her in the hospital twice a day, but her mother didn’t have the will to get better.
It was Martha who visited the undertakers and booked the cars and flowers. She sent out notes to neighbors and organized a buffet in a local pub after the service. Lilian contributed financial support rather than emotional. The two sisters’ worlds, so different, became even more so.
Martha wouldn’t say their parents’ lives were wasted, but they were severely restricted.
I want to support Zelda’s last months, to allow her to be free.
With these thoughts about her parents and Zelda ringing in her head, Martha decided it was time to finally tackle the Berlin Wall of boxes.
She counted them and reached fifty-three. There was an array of different sizes—cat food boxes, washing powder, plain ones from the post office, and she wondered how she had gathered so many together.
She remembered crying as she folded in her mum’s clothes and placed in perfume bottles and ornaments. There were things she should just throw in the bin but couldn’t bring herself to do so. Half-used jars of hand cream and her mother’s scent on handkerchiefs conjured up too many memories. So she had placed things in the boxes and closed up the flaps.
Out of sight, out of mind.
Thinking of Zelda’s words about letting go of the past, she stood on her wooden chair and slid a box off the top of the giant wall.
Opening it up, she found it contained random items, such as an old camera, an Egyptian cat statue, a Russian doll and a few photo frames without prints in them. Although she remembered some of the things, none held any real sentimental value. She repackaged them and marked the box with an X to indicate its contents should go to the charity shop.
Another box was packed full of her mum’s books, the spines all facing upward in a line. Martha ran her finger along them—fashion, astrology, family sagas, feel-good novels. She placed the collection on her To Keep pile, to browse through properly another time. Perhaps she could pass them on to Owen. She liked the idea of other readers getting pleasure from them.
Her fingers lingered on the box before moving it to the side of the room, realizing that her brain had conjured up a reason to contact him again.
With each box she relocated from the Berlin Wall to the charity pile, Martha felt a little lighter, as if she’d been carrying a heavy backpack that she’d just shrugged off. She found the task in her notepad and proudly changed the red dot of lateness to an amber star.
One box contained the rug she used to lie on when she was a girl. As she unfurled it and laid it on the floor, dust motes danced in the air and she ran her hand through them, marveling as they sparkled. She leaned down to straighten the tassels on the rug and then got down on the floor. Lying down on her belly, she grinned as she kicked her legs back and to for a while, with her chin resting in her hands.
The only things missing from the scene were her writing pad and pencil.
* * *
Martha had just wrapped her arms around a fifth box, edging it off the top of its pile, when the phone rang. She peered over the cardboard, down to see her own feet, and stepped off the chair. Dumping the box on top of the dining table, she batted a stripe of dust from the arm of her long-sleeved T-shirt and picked up the phone. “Hello?”
“Good morning,” Gina replied.
“Oh,” Martha said, not expecting her voice. “How are you?”
“Fine. Thank you for asking.” Gina’s words were clipped, as if she was making the call against her will. “I would like to ask you a question, about the fairground.”
“Yes, of course.” Martha wondered if she was about to be berated for breaking the no sugar rule, or perhaps the no excitement one. She had definitely bent the no heavy conversation one. She swallowed hard, as she wondered if her nana had reported her for asking too many questions.
To distract herself from the uncertain feeling in the pit of her stomach, she lifted one of the flaps on a box and spied a pair of binoculars. She remembered her father taking them to the beach and pointing them at Betty rather than out to sea.
“Did Ezmerelda do a Read and Run?” Gina asked. “She left with a copy of Blue Skies and Stormy Seas in her bag, but when I unpacked her things it was not there.”
Martha frowned to herself. “I’m not sure what you mean. What’s a Read and Run?”
“They are something Zelda decided she wanted to do, after her operation. She goes somewhere, takes a copy of her book and reads it aloud in a public place. Then she leaves it for someone else to discover.”
Martha cleared her throat. She didn’t want to implicate her grandmother but felt she didn’t have a choice. “Zelda read aloud from the book and placed it on the ground. It happened so quickly, I didn’t know what was going on.”
“I knew it,” Gina said with a weary sigh. “I wish she would stop them.”
“Why does she do it?” Martha asked. To her, it seemed bizarre that her nana would want to share the stories.
Gina fell silent before she spoke. “Ezmerelda says she wants to bring those stories to people, as many as possible, in the time she has left. I assume she has told you about her situation?”
Martha closed her eyes. “Yes.”
Gina tutted. “She thinks that she is still eighteen years old. You are lucky she did not make you go on any rides.”
With a spike of guilt in her stomach, Martha felt she ought to admit the truth. “We, might have, um...”
However, Gina interrupted her. “Please wait a moment. Ezmerelda is here now and wants to ask you something. Goodbye.” And with that, the phone rattled as she passed it on.
“Martha,” Zelda said, her voice lively. “Are you okay? I’ve rested up.”
Martha’s eyes crinkled at the sound of her voice. “I’m so pleased you’ve called. I was worried you might be tired out. after the fair. I know I asked a lot of questions...”
“Yes, you did,” Zelda said. “I’m not really surprised. Look, I know it’s short notice, but are you free for dinner? There’s a few friends comin
g over.”
Martha found herself grinning. She’d prefer to see her grandmother alone, without having to deal with Gina’s trickiness. And she wasn’t sure how she was going to get to Benton Bay again, but she wasn’t going to turn down this opportunity to see her nana. “This evening?”
“Yep.”
“I’d love to.”
“Fantastic.” Zelda waited a while before she lowered her voice to a whisper. “I told Gina we went for coffee at the fair. No rides. It helped to keep her sweet after my Read and Run.”
“I don’t think you were supposed to do that, either.”
“Tsk. Gina used to do them with me, until she got all careful. Anyway, be here for seven o’clock. Bring tiramisu—and, oh, fetch a friend.”
* * *
Martha stared at her phone. There was one person above anyone else that she should take to meet Zelda.
However, the last time she spoke to Lilian she told her to leave the book alone.
Yet it had opened up this whole new other world. Martha wanted to tell her sister that she had found Zelda, that their nana was still alive. But how would she take it? Even Martha couldn’t quite believe it had happened.
When Lilian answered the call, she sounded tired again. “Hi, Martha. Don’t tell me. You’ve finally finished Will’s trousers?” she said.
“Actually, yes,” Martha said. “I’ll drop them around for you.”
“And you haven’t forgotten that you’re looking after the kids on Saturday?”
“No. I’ll try to clear a space in the house.”
“Hmm, I bet that’s easier said than done.”
“Yes, but I’ve made a start. I’ve unpacked five of Mum and Dad’s boxes this morning. Do you want to take a look through any of their stuff?”
“I don’t think so. It’s been so long, and I have lots of photos and memories. I don’t want to get all misty-eyed about the past. Not at the moment, anyway.”
The Library of Lost and Found Page 14
