Earth to Daniel

by Gwyneth Rees

  It turned out Mum wasn’t just selling the cheese plant. She had loaded all our house plants into the car and now she was bringing them into the hall one by one.

  ‘Mum, you can’t do this!’ I gasped as I watched her place Dad’s favourite cactus plant – which sprouted pink flowers in the winter – on the table.

  ‘I can do anything!’ she grinned. ‘I’m the head, aren’t I?’

  She went over to the homemade-cake stall next. That looked like the part of Mum’s idea that had really caught on. Lots of people had brought stuff for it. Mum had bought six jam-and-cream sponges from the supermarket and got me and Martha to ice them last night and now she was telling everyone that my sister and I had been up all night baking them. It was going to be really embarrassing if we got found out, and I just hoped Martha wasn’t going to open her mouth and give the game away.

  Mum had this other idea for the cake stall too, which wasn’t anything to do with cakes. She’d bought a whole load of eggs and left some of them whole, and broken the others and emptied out the insides. She’d put the upturned empty eggshells back in the box with the whole eggs and people had to pay to have a go at choosing one. If they picked a whole egg instead of an eggshell they got the egg and a rasher of bacon to go with it. She’d got the idea because it was something they’d done at the Christmas fair when she was at school.

  ‘Mrs MacKenzie, I really don’t think we can do that,’ Mrs Lyle said, looking worried when Mum pulled the packets of bacon out of her bag and started to rip them open. ‘There are food hygiene regulations for things like this. We don’t want to give people food poisoning and get the school into trouble.’

  ‘Yes, Mum – people might die!’ I blurted out, eager to back up Mrs Lyle, because I thought it was a crazy idea too.

  Mrs Lyle flushed. ‘Of course if people were to die that would be more important than the school being in trouble,’ she said, as if she thought I was implying that she valued the reputation of the school above human life.

  I hadn’t meant it like that. I’d only been trying to help. Trust Mrs Lyle to take it the wrong way. She was clearly a lot more sensitive than I’d realised. Anyway, at least Mum was taking the eggs and bacon off the stall.

  At ten o’clock Mrs Lyle opened the doors and people started to come in.

  Mum stood behind the cake stall for a while, then she said her main role as head teacher was to mingle. She told me that while she was mingling she was going to distribute some leaflets she’d made and she wanted me to do the same. She gave me a bundle to hand out and disappeared off to speak to the parent who had just purchased Dad’s favourite cactus.

  My stomach flipped over when I saw what was on the leaflets. Do you want to change our school uniform? it said. If so, please tick preferred colours. There were boxes for green, purple, red, orange, yellow and blue (NOT navy).

  I stared at my mother, who was wearing a red dress with a bright orange cardigan over it, which actually looked quite nice in a traffic-lightish sort of way. Was this a joke? Apparently not, because she was handing out leaflets to everyone within arm’s length and also trying to stick one to the front of the nearest book stall.

  ‘Hey! Daniel!’

  I looked up. Abby was heading towards me. A young woman with short dark hair was with her.

  When Mrs Lyle saw her she rushed over. ‘Susie, you’ve come back to visit us! How lovely!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘That’s my big sister,’ Abby explained to me, breaking away from Susie and Mrs Lyle. ‘She was sort of like Mrs Lyle’s pet, though she goes mad if you say that to her!’ She looked at the leaflets in my hand. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Mum told me to give these out.’

  ‘Let’s see.’ She took one from me. ‘Wow! Is she serious? I’m going to show this to Susie. She’ll think it’s a laugh.’

  ‘Abby – wait!’ I put out my hand to stop her from taking the leaflet over to her sister, who was still deep in conversation with Mrs Lyle.

  Abby looked at me expectantly.

  ‘So does your sister still live at home then?’ I blurted, desperate to keep her here – and Mum’s leaflet away from Mrs Lyle – for a bit longer.

  ‘Susie’s the only one at home,’ Abby answered. ‘Dad’s up north somewhere. We never see him. My mum lives in her own place. I used to live with her but it didn’t work out, so now I live with Susie.’

  ‘Right.’ I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t expected my question to generate quite that much information and I felt like I ought to make a suitable response, only I couldn’t think of one. ‘Umm … Do you want a cheese scone?’ I shoved the plate under her nose. They had been baked by Mrs Lyle and they looked like the best thing on the stall.

  Abby picked up the biggest one. ‘You buying?’

  ‘Sure.’ I dropped enough money for two into the ice-cream tub we were using to collect the cash.

  Abby grinned suddenly, looking across at Mrs Lyle’s cosy corner. ‘I can’t believe your mum really brought in your sofas.’

  ‘I know,’ I muttered gloomily.

  ‘And I can’t believe she’s really thinking of changing the colour of our school uniform! I mean, is that wacky or what?’

  ‘Listen, Abby,’ I said, feeling irritated. ‘Shut up about my mum, OK?’

  She looked at me in surprise. I thought she might be going to say something snappish back, which I guess I deserved, but she didn’t. She just said, ‘OK,’ and gave me a sympathetic smile, as if feeling embarrassed by your mother was something she understood only too well.

  * * *

  Mum was in a bad mood with me in the car on the way home and not just because I kept playing with the buttons that make the electric windows go up and down. She was cross because I had bought Dad’s cheese plant back and only told her when the sale was over that the Reserved sticker attached to one of its leaves meant it was reserved for us. Mum had refused to let me bring it home and said it could stay in the corner of the school hall, where hopefully it would die from lack of water. I didn’t tell her that I’d asked our school caretaker if he would water it until Dad got the chance to fetch it back.

  As soon as we got home, Martha ran over to feed her goldfish and let out a scream. One of the fish – the one with the white spot on its side – was floating on the surface, obviously dead.

  ‘Look!’ Mum pointed at a fish who was taking a bite out of the dead one. ‘You should have called that one Hannibal!’ She banged on the side of the tank with her fist. ‘Hey, it’s Hannibal the cannibal!’ She began to laugh.

  ‘Mum, Martha’s really upset!’ I hissed.

  ‘Oh, baby!’ Mum crooned. ‘Don’t be upset. We’ll have a funeral. A proper fishy funeral. It’ll be fun! No flushing down the loo for this fish! Daniel, you fish out the fish. I’ll fetch a coffin.’ She whizzed off into the kitchen.

  ‘It’s R-Rupert,’ Martha sobbed, as I used the little fishing net we’d bought from the pet shop to scoop out the little orange body. ‘He was my f-favourite.’

  ‘Ta-da!’ Mum boomed, like she was a magician at a kiddies’ party instead of a mother in charge of a sobbing little girl who had just lost her favourite fish.

  I couldn’t believe she was behaving like this. It was as if she didn’t care how Martha felt at all.

  ‘One fishy coffin!’ She shook out Rupert from the net and rammed him into the matchbox she’d just emptied as I tried to comfort my sister. ‘We’ll give him a funeral to die for!’ Mum started laughing again. ‘A funeral to die for! Get it?’ She grabbed Martha’s hand and pulled her towards the door. ‘We’ll bury him at sea – just like they bury sailors!’

  ‘But Rupert’s not a sailor,’ Martha sniffed, trying to twist her hand free from Mum’s.

  ‘No, he’s a floater!’ Mum dropped Martha’s hand to do an impersonation of a dead fish with two sticky-out fins and staring eyes.

  I tried to keep a straight face, but it was difficult. Sick joke or not, as dead-fish impressions go Mum’s was pretty funny.


  Mum and I had a huge row the following day. Mum accused me of being a stick-in-the-mud and too big for my boots. I told her she was a rotten mother.

  The thing that started the row was me having a go at Mum – again – about how she’d gone swimming in the sea in her bra and knickers after we’d thrown Rupert off the end of the pier the day before. Mum told me I was a prude and that if she wanted to go swimming in the nude then she’d do that too. I couldn’t believe it when she said that. Normally she gets self-conscious even lying in a swimsuit on the beach, and she won’t wear a bikini because she says it shows too much of her fat tummy. Mum was acting differently to how she’d ever acted before and I didn’t know if it was because Dad wasn’t around or because she was a headmistress now or – and this was the thought that worried me the most – because she’d stopped taking her lithium tablets.

  Dad had said that when Mum stopped taking her medication before, she had become really ill. I tried to imagine what a person would be like if they were ill in a mental sort of way, but so far the only mentally ill people I’d seen were those patients in the hospital and the guy on TV who’d planted that bomb. (The bomb had been disarmed with two seconds to spare by the really cool young detective. Afterwards, the bomber had started raving about how he was the Chosen One and how he’d heard the voice of God telling him to blow everybody up.) Mum certainly wasn’t anything like anyone I’d seen in the hospital or that guy on TV.

  I decided to phone Dad that night while Mum was in the bathroom and Martha was in bed. If Mum was feeling stressed because Dad wasn’t here, then maybe if I told Dad that, he’d try and come home a bit sooner. And I guessed maybe it was time I told him that she’d stopped her lithium.

  It was my aunt who answered Dad’s phone. It would be nine o’clock in the morning there, I’d calculated. ‘Oh … hello Daniel. Your father can’t speak to you right now. He’s helping our mother choose the hymns for her funeral.’ She sounded tired.

  ‘Can you ask him to call me as soon as he’s done?’ I asked. ‘It’s really important.’

  Aunt Helen coughed, like she’d just got something stuck in her throat. ‘You did hear what I said, didn’t you? Malcolm is choosing the hymns for our mother’s funeral? I think he might be just a little upset and not up to a big phone conversation when he’s done, don’t you?’

  I realised I wasn’t being very tactful, but I just really needed to speak to Dad. ‘Yes, but I think Mum really … really needs him. I think maybe he should come home sooner …’

  There was a long silence at the other end. My aunt sounded angry when she finally spoke. ‘And I think this might be a time when Malcolm should put his own family first.’ She slammed the phone down and it was a few minutes later when I registered that she meant them and not us.

  I decided I’d wait and call Dad again tomorrow. In the meantime I would send him an email to say goodnight.

  That’s when I went to look for our laptop and couldn’t find it anywhere.

  Mum had finished in the bathroom and now she was crashing about in the spare room where there were still lots of boxes that we hadn’t unpacked.

  I went to ask her about the computer.

  She briefly looked up from a cardboard box she had just opened. ‘Never mind that. I can’t find the photos.’

  ‘What photos?’

  ‘The photos of Martha. My Martha. In the hospital.’

  ‘Do you want me to help you look?’

  We carried on searching together, and eventually she came across the box she was looking for. Shoved at the back of an old photo album were some baby photographs of Martha that I’d never seen before.

  ‘Your dad doesn’t like seeing these pictures,’ Mum told me. ‘He says it reminds him of a time he’d rather forget. But that’s not the real reason he won’t look at them.’

  ‘What is the real reason?’ I asked, curious.

  Mum didn’t reply. She was peering closely at a picture of herself holding Martha in her arms. I stared at the picture. It was a really bad photo of Mum. She was sitting up in bed in hospital, wearing a pink nightdress, and her dark hair was all over the place. It was her face that was the most disturbing though. She had this really fixed grin and her eyes were staring at the camera in a frenzied sort of way, wide open with too much of the whites showing. She looked like a bad actress playing the part of a mad-woman in a horror movie. No wonder Dad didn’t like seeing it. She was clutching a tiny baby in her arms tightly, as if she were afraid it was going to squirm away from her if she let go. The baby was wrapped in a blanket and the cover had been pulled over its head like a hood. It looked all tiny and wrinkly. I couldn’t take my eyes off the mother in the picture, though. I mean, I knew it was Mum, but somehow I couldn’t feel as if it was. I picked up the other photographs that had been taken at the same time and thankfully she looked pretty normal in those, apart from looking tired and not smiling at all. There was a photo of her and the woman called Kate both standing with their babies. The babies were wearing similar pink knitted bonnets and matching cardigans.

  ‘This is my baby!’ Mum said, pointing at the baby in her arms in the picture.

  I nodded. ‘That’s Martha, right?’

  ‘My baby had dark hair.’

  ‘You can’t see her hair,’ I pointed out.

  ‘I don’t have to see it to remember it!’ She turned to look at me. ‘I’m not saying they did it on purpose. But after it happened, nobody would admit it. They’re like that, those doctors. They all close ranks.’

  ‘After what happened?’ I frowned. ‘What are you talking about, Mum?’

  Mum suddenly seemed angry. ‘They thought I was too mad to know my own baby! That’s what they thought!’

  I took a step back from her. What was wrong with her? She wasn’t making any sense.

  ‘Mummy?’ Suddenly Martha was standing in the doorway, rubbing her eyes. We’d probably woken her up with all the noise we were making. She saw the photographs and came over to look. Pointing at the baby in Mum’s arms she asked, ‘Is that me?’

  ‘No,’ Mum said abruptly. ‘It’s not!’

  I stared at Mum. ‘But I thought you just said –’

  ‘Is it Daniel?’ Martha was reaching out to touch the photograph.

  ‘Go away,’ Mum rasped, slapping Martha’s hand.

  I felt scared then, though I wasn’t really sure why. I quickly led Martha back to her room and settled her into bed.

  ‘What’s wrong with Mummy?’ she asked, starting to cry.

  ‘Nothing. She’s just missing Daddy,’ I murmured, as I tried to think what Dad would do in this situation. ‘If you lie down now and close your eyes, I’ll stay with you until you go to sleep,’ I said, and I started to rub her back. She always likes it when Dad does that.

  Her tears stopped, and after a bit of fidgeting and complaining that my back massaging wasn’t as good as Daddy’s, she finally went back to sleep.

  CHAPTER 9

  First thing the next morning Dad phoned us. He was phoning from the hospital. Grandma had taken a turn for the worse and had been rushed there a few hours ago. Dad said she wasn’t going to have a blood transfusion this time because she was so sick that it wouldn’t do much to help.

  Mum had picked up the phone first and I stood by, listening as he told all of this to her. She kept saying, ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ over and over. She looked a bit dazed and, when she’d finished speaking to him, she put the phone down straight away instead of handing it over to me.

  ‘I wanted to speak to him,’ I said.

  ‘Later, Daniel. You can’t just now. It sounds as if your grandmother is fading fast.’

  It wasn’t that I didn’t care about what was happening to my grandmother, but I had other things I needed to ask Mum about since I obviously couldn’t ask Dad. ‘Mum … what you said last night –’ I began, but I had to stop as Martha came running into the room to remind us that if we didn’t hurry up we’d all be late for school.

  I wait
ed until we’d dropped Martha off before tackling Mum again. (I was letting her give me a lift to school too today because we were running so late.) ‘Mum, what did you mean last night – about what happened when Martha was a baby?’

  Mum turned to look at me. But instead of answering she seemed suddenly distracted by my school tie. Before I knew what was happening she reached out and gave it a tug. ‘Take that off this instant! How dare you wear that to school when I’ve told you the new colour is red!’

  ‘Mu-um!’ I straightened my tie indignantly. ‘Mum you’ve never told me that!’

  ‘I haven’t?’ Her eyes lit up and instead of apologising, she started to tell me her latest idea for our new school uniform as if she expected me to be as excited about it as she was. She said she was going to commission one of the designers who made the Duchess of Cambridge’s outfits. From the way Mum spoke you’d think she knew Kate and William – and the whole royal family – personally.

  ‘Mum, you can’t be serious –’

  ‘Red is a much better colour for a school than grey!’ she interrupted. ‘We’ll change everything grey to red! Pillar-box red or strawberry red? What do you think?’

  ‘Mum, stop it!’

  ‘Stop what?’

  ‘Stop acting like … like…’ But I couldn’t put into words what I was really trying to say so instead I settled for, ‘… like your ideas are more important than everybody else’s!’

  She laughed. ‘But they are more important! I’m the head, aren’t I?!’

  ‘But Mum, it’s not like the school belongs to you!’ I protested. ‘I mean, what about all the other teachers? What about what they think?’

  ‘Daniel,’ she laughed again. ‘You are so serious! So like your dad … always worrying!’ And she planted a big kiss on my cheek even though I’d have rather she just kept facing straight ahead, since she was driving us round a roundabout at the time.

  We were almost at the school, so I made her stop the car to let me out before anyone saw us together. I would have to wait until this evening to ask her what had happened when Martha was a baby.