by Fiona Gibson
She nods.
I watch Barney through the open café door; he’s three but still a baby really. His shorts are padded with nappy, his dummy attached to his Fat Controller T-shirt by a red plastic clip.
“I’ve already stuck a notice in the newsagent’s window, trying to sell his cot, stage-one car seat, all that baby guff,” she says flatly.
“What does Peter think?”
“He can’t understand why I’m so worried. Says that one more won’t make any difference.”
I place my hand over hers and squeeze it.
“And we’ve used up all our favorite names,” she adds.
“We’ve got some baby name books in the shop. I’ll start racking my brain.”
“I don’t want it, Ro,” she says quietly.
The smell of frying fills the café like thick breath. Sarah doesn’t come to deep-fried bacon cafés. There’s no need—she doesn’t have children.
“Ro, are you okay?” Suzie asks. “You look kind of peaky.”
I want to tell her, but Tod and Barney have buffeted back into the café and want one of those ice-cream lollies that shock your teeth with a hard toffee center. I open the plastic carton and waft Mum’s fish tarts in their faces.
“Ew,” says Barney.
“Put the lid back on,” instructs Tod.
As we leave, the waitress hurries over to wipe toffee lolly remains from the table.
“You sure everything’s all right?” Suzie says. “You don’t look very well.” Barney’s arms are wrapped around her knees, causing her to shuffle, as if trapped in a sack.
“It’s just the fish tarts,” I tell her, opening the carton and flinging Mum’s offerings to the ducks.
My birthday falls on a Monday, the day after Perry’s sixtieth. I am thirty-six, and therefore no longer in my early thirties. To celebrate this monumental event, I am spewing up peach-colored fluid in the vague direction of our green glass Habitat bowl, a wedding present from Anna intended to contain elegant salads, and not my stomach lining. Marcus is holding the bowl under my chin. Forget Valentine’s Day, and flowers delivered to a loved one’s workplace. True love, I figure, while wiping my jaw with a damp tea towel, is demonstrated by a willingness to catch someone’s sick. Boxed Brainwaves should mention this.
As Tod and Marcus consumed only maize snacks shaped like maggots, they are both bristling with health. “What’s wrong?” Tod demands.
“Mum’s got food poisoning,” Marcus mutters.
“Will she die?” he asks brightly.
“Of course not,” I snap, spitting into the bowl. Tod once informed me that, if Marcus and I were both to drop dead, he would choose to live with Suzie because they have pizza and cola bottle sweets. He looked quite excited at the prospect of being orphaned, as long as it involved daily consumption of Four Seasons with Cheesy Crust and unlimited refined sugar. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had a pre-packed suitcase stashed under his bed.
I give my face a proper wash and brush my teeth, gums and tongue.
“You going to be okay?” Marcus asks, checking his watch.
“I’ll be fine,” I tell him. Now I just feel weak and mildly dizzy, as if most of my blood has been siphoned off.
In the shop, Julia administers peppermint tea and deals with customers, so all I have to do is alternate between my chair at the till, where I gaze at the computer, and the toilet. Tod is sprawled on the floor in the shop’s darkest corner with his felt tips and paper. As he rejected the Summer Kids’ Club in Lexley, and even arts and craft sessions at school, he has been spending my working days in the shop. “But the Summer Club sounds great,” I insisted, forcing him to study the leaflet. Its itinerary included nature walks, fancy dress contests and a wide range of sporting activities.
“I’m not going,” he insisted. His “What I Did During the Holidays” diary will read only: “I sat in the bookshop.” Today he is designing an underground maze, its passages snaking deep into the earth, perilously close to its fiery red core. He demands that I try it out, see if I can negotiate the pathways without being horribly burned.
“Please go home, Ro,” Julia says at lunchtime. “I can manage fine on my own today.”
“Thanks,” I say. “You could watch that dinosaur video, Tod.” I suspect that Julia doesn’t want me fouling the shop with my breath, which is still laced with Mum’s fishy fillings.
A birthday present arrives in the afternoon post, and I let Tod rip it open. It’s a snug-fitting, pale gray tracksuit from Natalie. I must have over-egged my enthusiasm for running. Mum and Perry’s present is a wicker basket shaped like a swan, with a cracked neck, and nothing inside it. Marcus’s parents have sent a card, with a note saying that they weren’t sure what to get me but have a velvet ottoman which is surplus to requirements, and they’ll bring it next time they visit.
There is a card from Anna, a black-and-white picture of a woman wearing a beaded fifties-style gown, holding a cocktail. The woman is grinning and she has her party lips on. The caption reads: Muriel was devastated when her children left home. Tod’s card, to which he has stuck tinfoil hearts, reads: You Are a Fantustic Mum. Marcus hasn’t given me anything yet.
Despite my bad stomach, I start lugging as many of our possessions as possible upstairs, in preparation for floor sanding. Sandy is starting work tomorrow. Sandy the sander will exfoliate our floors. I stack chairs, bookcases and the TV around our bed, figuring that Marcus can deal with the table and filing cabinets. This isn’t what a person with rotting tarts in her gut should be doing. I should be lying down, with someone stroking my head.
I’m still upstairs, heaving furniture about, when Marcus arrives, early for once, and shouts, “Ro? Stay up there. Don’t come down till I’m ready.”
“When what’s ready?” Tod yells from his bath. He scrambles out, and runs naked and dripping to greet Marcus, but is sent back upstairs, out of the way. Marcus doesn’t want Tod hopping around him, barking questions.
Finally, Marcus shouts, “Ready.”
As most of our belongings are now crammed into our bedroom, there are few places where he could have hidden my presents. In the kitchen I delve into the cupboard where we keep the fish gravel sieve. I check under the sink, and behind all doors and curtains.
“Cold,” reports Marcus.
Tod has pulled on a belt-less dressing gown and is teetering on the edge of the bath to access the top of the old-fashioned cistern. I hope that Marcus hasn’t hidden my exquisite underwear in such an unhygienic location.
“Garden?” I ask.
“Warmer,” he says, smirking.
Although it’s not quite dark, a yellowish light, maybe a candle, glows from the tree-house window. A fire hazard, Carl would say. Joe is sitting there, swinging his legs over the edge of the platform. Tod waves and Joe waves back. I study the strip of soil Marcus refers to as a herbaceous border, and note that the plug plants have yet to burst into life.
“Keep looking,” Marcus says.
Round the back of the house I’m getting warmer, warmer, hotter now—boiling hot. A balloon on a string drifts limply from the shed door handle. In the collapsible wheelbarrow are two parcels. One is a thickly knitted sweater, the kind Anna warned me that previously stylish women start wearing once they move beyond the M25. There’s a chrome shelf to span the bath and hold flannels and soap, the sort of bathroom accessory that would get in the way should you be seized by a desire to hold your very own foam party.
“There’s something else,” Marcus adds, and his mischievous look tells me, This is your special thing. You’re going to love this.
Tod has found it, propped against the oil tank, and hands it to me, quivering with anticipation. The parcel is long and thin with a flat end. It’s very crowded, with three us squashed into the shed. I rip off the paper.
“Well?” Marcus says.
“What the hell is it?”
“It’s a hoe, Ro.”
“That rhymes,” sniggers Tod, pulling his dr
essing gown tight across his stomach.
“I know what it is, Marcus.”
He steps backward, out of the shed. “It’s a joke, darling. Of course it’s not for you. I just thought we’d better have our own garden tools. We can’t keep borrowing Carl’s.”
“A hoe,” I repeat.
“The other things are your real presents.” He strides back to the house, with Tod scampering ahead.
I stand at the open shed door.
Marcus looks back, checks my face. “What?” he says.
Tod has clattered into the house. It’s just me and Marcus out here, and I’m still clutching the hoe. “I have something for you, too,” I say.
“What did I do,” he says, laughing, “to deserve a present?”
“I’m pregnant, Marcus.”
He tries to smile. His jaw trembles with the effort. To stop it shaking, he presses a hand over his mouth. “Are you sure?” he asks through his fingers. “How did that happen?”
“There was one night—”
“You can’t be. We’re so careful…”
“Well, I just am.” He hadn’t been careful Marcus then; he hadn’t even been properly awake, or he would have taken steps to ensure that this would never have happened.
The hoe falls from my hand as he throws his arms around me, and clangs heavily on to the side of the oil tank. He’s holding me, but it feels like hugging a fridge.
“Marcus,” I whisper, “I know we didn’t plan this, but I can’t tell you how happy I am.” My face is wet, and the tears feel sticky between my face and his. Then I realize that they’re not just my tears.
“I’m going to have it,” I tell him, thinking, no matter what you say.
“Of course you are, darling, of course you are.”
Ridiculously, I am more worried about how the mysterious fillings of Mum’s party fancies, rather than Sarah, might affect our unborn child.
chapter 20
Sarah
Sandy arrives with his throbbing machine with which he will blast a hundred years’ worth of gunk from our floorboards. We have already slung out Gordon and Betty’s autumnal carpets. They looked even worse, hanging out of a skip, than they did in our house. A century’s worth of split milky tea had clogged up their pile, and I had started to wear slippers to avoid skin-on-carpet contact. When she passed our house, Tina the hairdresser gave Harry a sharp tug on the arm and snapped, “For God’s sake, don’t touch that.”
By day four of sanding procedures, the three of us are living and sleeping in our bedroom, surrounded by most of our furniture. I am unused to seeing my family so close up. Marcus is spending as much time as possible in London, and escaping to the Poacher’s with Carl most other evenings. I am too worn down by the screeching of Sandy’s machine to muster up any anger.
Tod views the ordeal as great fun. Children are remarkable in their ability to embrace chaos and filth. “It’s like camping,” he says, writhing delightedly between Marcus and me in bed.
“Don’t have enough space,” Marcus mumbles into his pillow. “I feel like I’m going to fall out.”
“No one has enough space,” I remind him. But he’s right. We will fall out in the most awful, gut-wrenching way, when he’s not at work or the Poacher’s and Tod isn’t around. When will that be?
Suzie told me that, when the new baby arrives, she doesn’t know how she’ll find time to go to the toilet. Marcus hasn’t mentioned our baby since Hoe Day. I’m already sneaking quick looks through that baby name book. I suspect that he has managed to convince himself that he dreamed up our brief conversation, and that everything’s normal.
And it’s not like camping. At least when you’re installed under canvas or nylon, you have actually chosen to bundle your family into one ridiculously small space. Yes, we chose to invite Sandy into our home, but how could we have known what to expect? I had anticipated some noise, slightly louder than the whir of a hair dryer. I hadn’t expected relentless screeching, or that I would be wearing the same socks for days on end, and find thick yellow dust in my knicker drawer. We weren’t warned that Sandy would strew Gorby Cottage with toolboxes spewing wood filler and treacherous power tools, and that huge portions of our home would be sealed off by clear plastic sheeting.
Sandy left hours ago but the air still tastes of wood because, in fact, it is wood. Marcus and Tod are asleep now, but I’m lying here, wondering how so much dust might affect a six-year-old’s lungs. He is a passive dust-breather. By the time he wakes up, he’ll have inhaled the equivalent of a six-foot plank.
And what about school? Autumn term starts next week. School doesn’t care that you’re dirty and can’t find your purse, or that your offspring’s good shoes are lost, probably crushed under a bookcase. Tod will start a new term, on September the tenth, whether or not Sandy has finished his business in Gorby Cottage.
“It’s an awful upheaval, isn’t it, having your floors sanded?” Lucille sympathized. “But I suppose it’ll look great when you’ve laid new carpets.” She had brought me a tincture called agnus castus to soothe my hormonal mood swings. The small print on the label read: Not to be taken by pregnant or lactating women. “Promise you’ll start taking it?” she asked.
“I’ll start tomorrow,” I told her.
Joe’s garden didn’t die. When we came back from Majorca there were so many wildflowers, forming great swaths of color, like when you sprinkle dry powder paint onto wet paper.
Now Joe points out the poppies that burst in splashy oranges through the grass or, rather, he is showing Tod, and I just happen to be with Tod. We are only here because Sandy’s machine is still roaring, and ninety percent of our home is inaccessible.
“It’s a wilderness,” Tod declares.
“That’s what I wanted,” Joe says, crouching beside him. “I wanted to see what would happen if I let it go its own way, and didn’t interfere at all.”
I sit on the grass behind Tod and wrap my arms around his shoulders. “Our garden doesn’t feel like this,” I say. “We bought these plug plants and they’ve done nothing, and I can’t keep up with the bindweed.”
“What I did,” Joe says, “is throw wildflower seeds from the tree house, and the flowers have grown where the seeds landed.”
“I don’t think Marcus would go for that.”
He catches my eye, and I start laughing.
“What is it?” Tod asks, swinging round to face me.
“Nothing, honey, I’m just imagining Dad’s face, if I threw seeds all over the place.”
In fact I’m warming to Joe’s low-maintenance approach. Everything is alive and growing; his garden didn’t even get sick. “Carl messed up,” Lucille told me. “Must have got the dilution quantities wrong.” He had crept out with the knapsack spray, checked that Joe’s truck wasn’t parked in the drive, and that the house was in darkness. Then he sprayed the whole garden, working as quickly as possible. That must have been around two a.m.
Carl was exhausted after a terrible day spent photographing a wedding at Summerlea House. No one would cooperate. The bridesmaid had grass stains on her frock. The bride and groom didn’t want traditional shots, they demanded reportage, but what did that mean? Carl has been in wedding photography for seventeen years. This wasn’t his style at all.
Joe brings me tea in a glass mug. Tod is scaling the rope ladder to the tree house, shouting, “Mum, come up and see.” The tree house has a pitched roof, you can see that from the road, and an ancient window I assume Joe found in a skip. When I look in skips, there are only mounds of wet plaster-board and cracked toilets. Inside the tree house, propped against a wall, is a white canvas marked with loose, penciled lines. A tarnished lantern hangs from a hook.
Joe climbs in. This tree house is too small for three of us—more cramped, even, than our shed. I can smell myself, stale wood from the sanding. I need a bath, or at least industrial strength deodorant, and Sandy out of my life.
“What do you do in here?” I ask.
“I look out
. It’s a great view, don’t you think?”
Tod jabs the canvas and asks, “Are you an artist?”
“I paint, but being a joiner is my real job. Do you know what a joiner is?”
“You make things in wood,” Tod says. “Could you make me a tree house?”
“Do you have a strong enough tree, one that’s broad enough to take the weight?”
“No,” Tod huffs, picking at flaking green paint on the door.
“And I’m not sure people would like it,” Joe continues. “Someone came round, a man from the council, said he’d had a call from a neighbor concerned about it being…just being here.”
“What happened?” I ask.
“He looked at it from the road and agreed that it was just a shed in a tree, and you don’t need permission for sheds. He also asked if I could build him a house in his sycamore because it would keep his kids out of his hair.”
Tod climbs down the ladder so there’s just Joe and me in the tree house. I sit on the platform and watch Tod letting himself tumble backward into cushions of grass. “I built this,” Joe tells me, “so I could see the garden from above, like a bird would. If you paint it from here, and take the grass right to the edges, so your picture’s all grass, it doesn’t look like a garden at all, just colors.”
I’m about to tell him that I draw and paint, at least I used to, but worry that he’ll ask to see my work and not know what to say if he doesn’t like it. I don’t want to spoil anything, even though there’s nothing, really, to spoil.
He’s just a neighbor. We’re sitting very close, on the platform. Tod is lifting stones close to Joe’s house, looking for bugs.
“Do woodlice bite?” he shouts up.
“No, I don’t think so,” I say. Joe’s hip is touching mine. I should move away from him, climb down and help Tod to identify insects. Joe lights a cigarette and offers me the open packet. “No, thanks. I gave up years ago.”
“So you’re never tempted,” he says.
“God, yes, all the time, with the sanding, and the way things are.” Ridiculously, my eyes fill with tears. Some mothers blub at anything. I am not one of those women.
