by Ann Kelley
There’s a pink-brown stone Buddha too, which I always loved to hold as it felt cold even on the hottest day, as if it contained something otherworldly. It has a smiling face, as if this god has a sense of humour. You don’t get that impression about Jesus or God.
‘Where shall we put them, Mum?’
‘Have them in your room if you want.’
I put them on the stairs so I can carry them up next time I climb to my attic room. There are little piles of towels and sheets, clothes and books there already, waiting to be carried to their homes, like travellers in family groups at a bus station.
Grandpop travelled all over the world when he was in the Royal Navy and brought back lots of exotic souvenirs. We unpack a Japanese tea set they used to keep safe in a glass cabinet, thin porcelain coloured red and gold with little figures and landscapes.
‘We’ll use these,’ Mum says.
‘But aren’t they terribly precious and worth lots of money?’
‘No, it’s only Japanese export stuff. We should enjoy them. What’s the point of having pretty things gathering dust?’
Mum’s good about stuff like that. She never makes a fuss if I break something. They’re Only Things and Accidents Happen. I pick up a cup and look through it at the sun shining. It’s a lovely thing.
‘No dishwasher for these, Gussie, you’ll have to wash them by hand.’
‘No probs, Mum.’ I am learning how to speak Strine – Australian – for when and if my new friend Brett comes to see me. No Worries. Crikey.
Mum sleeps in the main bedroom, the master bedroom, or I suppose it should be called the mistress bedroom, on the floor below me. There’s a big bay window and the same view that I have, but slightly lower of course. The terrace faces south, there’s plenty of sunshine all day long, and there’s a little slab of concrete along the front path that gets the last of the sun. We sit there together on cushions and she drinks her whisky and I have a freshly squeezed orange juice or elderflower juice and we talk.
I think we talk more easily because we are not looking at each other. It’s as if we are in a car, sitting next to each other, but looking ahead, and it’s easier to say important things if you are not looking into each other’s eyes. We have our eyes closed, because the sun is still so bright, and it’s as if we are in a dream. I feel close to Mum when we talk like that.
‘Don’t you still love Daddy just a little bit?’ I sometimes ask.
‘No I bloody don’t. He slept with other women. Why should I love him?’
‘Okay, okay. I only asked.’
‘I still feel very hurt, Gussie. Bastard! He betrayed me – us. He betrayed us.’
‘Yeah, but if he wanted you to forgive him and he wanted to be with us, here, now, what would you say?’
‘Fuck off, probably.’ She sniffs. ‘Anyway, we’re okay on our own, aren’t we?’
‘I suppose.’
CHAPTER TWO
MUM HAS GONE out for the evening with Dr Dobbs – Alistair.
I’m playing Scrabble with Mrs Lorn. She is letting me win without much of a fight. Also I keep getting good letters – the high scoring C, Q and X so far. I put down all my letters straight away – QUIXOTIC, how about that! That’s got to be the best score I’ve ever had. Probably the best score anyone has ever had in the entire history of Scrabble – 72, as it was on a double word score, plus 50 for putting down all my letters at once. She’s getting all the rubbish, lots of vowels. She calls me ‘my girl’ with an extra ‘r’ in girl. Mrs Lorn has this habit of whistling when she’s thinking – hymns, mostly. Sometimes she breaks into song. I do like Scrabble. I wish I wasn’t winning so easily though. She’s so old, she has probably given up the idea of winning.
‘How old are you, Mrs Lorn?’
‘As old as my feet but younger than my teeth and hair.’
She cackles like an old witch. ‘Anyway, my girl, don’t you know it’s bad manners to ask a lady her age?’
‘Why is it? Mum says she’s fifty-two but her tits are only thirty-nine.’
Mrs Lorn screams with shocked laughter.
I like old people, apart from when they hug me or do that thing with my lips, you know, pinch them together so your mouth is an O and they make you say ‘Sausages’. Though no one’s done that to me for years. It’s a torture aimed solely at small children who can’t defend themselves. Like when they pull off your nose and show it to you and put it back again before you realise it’s only their thumb and your nose is still where it always was, in the middle of your face. You’ve got to be very young to believe that. When you get to five it’s too late, except for Father Christmas and fairies.
When I was three I can remember sitting at the window on Christmas Eve and I saw Father Christmas’s sleigh pulled by reindeer in the sky. I really believed I saw it.
It must be wonderful to grow old like Mrs Lorn and know so much and have experienced a lot of life. It must make you wise if you can remember all those things you have heard and seen and read.
There’s a old man who has three retriever dogs on leads accompanying him as he braves the roads at Carbis Bay in his electric wheelchair. He looks very heroic, as if he’s in a horse-drawn chariot or on a dog sledge. I haven’t seen him for a while, not since we left the cottage. We used to wave to him from the car but he didn’t wave back. Probably he isn’t able to. I wonder what he knows, and what he used to be before he became lopsided? And another very old man, always dressed immaculately in tweed suit and pork pie hat, straw hat in summer (Mr Dapper we call him), walks with the help of a stick all the way from Carbis Bay to St Ives and back each morning along the main road. He looks sad. Lonely. He’s a guest at an old people’s home.
Why do they put old people’s homes in out of the way places? If I were old I would want to be in the middle of things, not on the outside ready to be shoved out of life when the time came. I suppose that’s what I felt like when I was in the wilderness out at the cottage on the cliff. Apart from society. An outcast, cast away. Here in St Ives there’s human life all around me.
Mum and Alistair have come back and he’s off again, giving Mrs Lorn a lift home. She was delighted.
Mum looks flushed and smells of cigarettes and whisky and other people’s beer. Her hair looks good. Her skirt’s a bit short though. She must like him a lot.
Alistair’s not half as handsome as Daddy. Daddy looks like a cross between Keanu Reeves and Bob Geldof, but not as scruffy as Bob Geldof. Alistair looks like a Dobbin horse, with his big ears and long face and nose. But he has kind eyes and a nice smile and always wears interesting ties. It must be difficult being a man and having to wear boring suits to work. I suppose a tie is one item you can decorate yourself with.
Like the bower bird. I think they attract females by making their nests, or bowers, look interesting.
‘Bed, Gussie, Bed. Off You Go, Late. Late. Late.’
‘Where did you go, Mum? Did you have a good time?’
‘Sloop Inn. Fun, it was fun.’
‘Did you meet anyone?’
‘Alistair knows everyone.’
‘Might he know Dad’s relations, do you think?’
‘Gussie. It’s not the sort of thing you ask a man the first time he takes you out. You ask him. I’m going to bed, and You Should Too. Tired. You Look Tired.’
‘Okay, okay, I’m going.’
I take my time getting upstairs, stop halfway to stroke Flo, who is on guard on the landing. She is such a school prefect, always keeping the other two cats in order, on their toes. I would be too, in their shoes. On their toes, in their shoes… interesting, these foot metaphors or whatever. Standing up for your beliefs. Filling his shoes. Knocking the socks off… Language is interesting.
I’d like to go to a school where they teach Latin, so I could study the roots of words. The local school is good apparently, but doesn’t have Latin. I’ll have to teach myself if I really want to learn. There was a Winnie the Pooh in Latin at our last house. Winnie ille Pu.
Locus inondatus – floody place.
Domus mea – my house.
What about this one! Fovea insidiosa ad heffalumpus catandos idonea (Pooh trap for heffalumps).
I wrote those down so I could remember them. They were on the maps at both ends of the book. I like maps. There are lovely maps on the end pages of the Swallows and Amazons books too.
Mum said she entered her O-level German oral exam only knowing two phrases. One of them was – Ich erkannte ihn an seinem Bart – I recognised him by his beard. And the other phrase was – Ich muss nach Hause gehen – I must go home now. She managed to incorporate both into her conversation, and charmed the examiner with her knowledge of art – there was a Pieter Brueghel print to talk about. She spoke in English for most of the time and still passed.
I don’t believe everything she tells me. She’s a dreadful exaggerator.
Mum potters about downstairs, filling the dishwasher and putting the washing in the drier. Then she comes up too, carrying her hot water bottle. She feels the cold almost as much as me.
It’s comforting having her in the room below, moving about, snoring in her sleep.
Our gulls are settled on the roof, hunkered down for the night, their heads tucked under their wings. There’s no moon tonight and it’s very cloudy. The wind is coming from the back of the house, the west, so I can open the front window without it rattling.
Tomorrow I’ll go to the library and look for poetry books. There were loads at our last place.
I wonder if I’ll ever meet Mr Writer – that’s my name for the man who owns Peregrine Cottage. Maybe he’s a murderer doing time. Or a famous poet on a world tour. He could be a bank manager, or a drug dealer, or a gunrunner. So many possibilities. Does anyone ever want to grow up to be a gunrunner or a car park attendant or a dinner lady?
I always wanted to be a cowboy until I realised, because I was a girl I could never ever be a cowboy. I was devastated that God had done this to me. It wasn’t fair.
It didn’t stop me dressing as a boy for quite a while afterwards though. I felt I had to gradually dissolve my boyhood and think myself slowly into being a girl. It wasn’t easy.
I find it hard to go to sleep sometimes. I feel it’s a waste of time, sleeping, when I could be reading or living. But then, dreaming is a sort of living, I suppose. I often have an exciting time in my dreams, more so than in my ordinary life. Sometimes in the middle of a dream one of the cats wakes me (chasing and killing something usually) and I get frustrated by the interruption. I usually forget an interrupted dream. Why is it so difficult to remember dreams? I feel cheated if I can’t remember what happened.
Last night there were two birds. One was a little white owl sitting quietly on top of the book shelf in my room. The other was a miniature rail, buff and apricot coloured with black sharp beak, black legs and wide spread long black toes. It became scarlet and emerald, and stepped carefully across my books, as if they were water lily leaves. I think there is a bird called a Jesus bird – because it looks like it’s walking on water. It might have been one of those.
My own room: I do like it. All my babyhood is on the top shelf of the large book case: faded and worn Teddy, who has never had another name; Panda, from a trip Daddy made to Germany; Nightie Dog, that used to be Mum’s and has a zip in its tummy for pyjamas; several knitted toys, including Noddy, that Grandma made for me. He’s very old and his colours have faded but his bell still rings on the end of his night cap. And Rena Wooflie, my favourite, a soft stuffed girl dog with checked dress and apron. Mum bought her for me in Mombasa the very first time we went to Africa, because I had lost my cuddly comfort blanket on the journey.
I love Rena Wooflie and she has to come with me to hospital. It’s for her sake, not mine. She gets lonely, as she doesn’t talk the same language as Panda or Teddy or Nightie Dog. Rena Wooflie and I speak Swahili together.
jambo – hello
abari? – how are you?
msuri – good
paka – cat
malaika – angel
kuku – fowl
simba – lion
nyuki – bee
kidege – a little bird
kufa tutakufa wote – as for dying, we shall all die.
That’s all I know really but I do still have a phrase book so I could in theory learn some more.
That first winter in Africa there was a family with a little boy about my age – three – and he was desperate for my Rena Wooflie. No matter that he had hundreds of teddies and soft toys, he wanted my one and only. My mum bought another one and gave it to him. Its head wasn’t at quite the same angle as my Rena Wooflie’s and he started to moan and grizzle, and he threw it and yelled, and his mother picked it up and yanked its head around and said – Is that better? And I could tell she was pretending it was her little boy’s head she was twisting, not the toy’s.
I would never abuse my Rena Wooflie.
On top of my wardrobe, looking down at me is Horsey.He was my baby walker, a horse on wheels. Mum tried to throw him away once because the metal neck pole had pushed through the straw and fur and his head was in danger of coming off. She placed Horsey by the dustbins the day before dustbin day, and then it started to rain so she brought him in again. That was years ago. He’s still here, mended of course with a new patch of different coloured fake fur. He’s part of the family now.
Noah’s Ark completes childhood on the high shelf. It was Mum’s when she was little. There are pairs of little wooden hand-painted lions and elephants, sheep and cows, hippos and zebra, and I’ve added other tiny animals found over the years – a lead crocodile, a glass cat, a wooden cat, and my favourite, a giraffe made of bone.
CHAPTER THREE
MORNINGS IN MID September smell fresher than August, and there’s lots of swirling white mist over the water, hiding the dunes and estuary. But the air is still and somehow you know it’s going to be sunny later. The heavy band of mist is chrome and silver; the clouds are the colour of lavender leaves and steamed up mirrors. The sea is hammered pewter and the low waves are mercury creeping up the beach. Where the sun breaks through, it explodes on the water in a firework burst of sparkling stars. On the other side of the bay, battleship clouds float above the dunes and hills of Gwithian and Godrevy.
September is like a wonderful monochrome photograph or the opening credits of an obscure French movie. Like the ones Daddy used to take me to.
Yesterday evening we went to Porthmeor Beach to see the really high tide. Waves clapped like thunder on the walls of the studios and apartments on the beach and rolled up and over in a constant tumult. We hung over the wall with lots of other people and watched boys and girls run along the top of the sand racing the waves and getting soaked. Most of the tourists had gone home to get ready for dinner.
It was as if the holidaymakers had been swept away and the sand wiped clean of summer. The Island (which isn’t really an island but that’s what it’s called) turned from green to orange in the setting sun. It has a little chapel on the top and reminds me of the Paula Rega painting – The Dance. Maybe it isn’t a painting. She did huge pastel drawings. Mum has loads of books on painters and we’ve unpacked some already.
Our new house in St Ives is not new new, it’s Victorian – a terraced house on three floors. I love having the attic room – I know it’s crazy for me to want to climb all these stairs, but it’s worth it for the view: right over the grey and orange roofs down to the harbour and across the bay to the lighthouse and beyond.
I have a white painted cast iron bed and a new quilt, pink and blue cotton stripes and roses. I chose it from a catalogue. It’s very girlie. Not my usual style at all.
The ceiling slopes to the roof and I have a real watercolour painting on the wall, which shows almost the same scene I see from the window but from a slightly different angle. The walls and ceiling are white and I ha
ve white cotton curtains. When the light changes, as it does all the time, the room turns blue or pink or pale green or mauve. A small roof window sheds a square of light on my bed.
On my chest of drawers there’s a photograph of Grandpop and Grandma made by Daddy. There’s also a photograph of Daddy and Mum getting married that Mum won’t have in her room, so I’ve got it. I think it’s because she doesn’t want to be reminded of how happy they were together. And there’s a photograph of our three cats lying on a sofa together – a rare event.
We are just far enough away from the main streets not to hear the holidaymakers, though we do hear the fishing trip boatman calling out over his loud speaker. ‘Seal Island. Boat leaving in ten minutes for Seal Island.’
We are close enough to get to the shops and beaches very easily. Getting back up again is another story. But I can see people coming up the hill from my window. People! It’s wonderful to be near people again. I had begun to talk to myself at Peregrine Cottage, or anyway, to the cats. There were no people to talk to out on the cliff.
I don’t count Mum of course. She’s not terribly good at talking to me, except to tell me what not to do – Don’t Overdo it, Don’t go for Walks along the Cliff, Don’t Wear that Hat – that sort of thing. I was quite ill before we left, and she was really worried about me. I think she’s happier too, now we are in the town.
I miss the badgers coming to the kitchen door for peanuts at night, and the sight of gannets folding back their wings and plunging like arrows into the sea just off the point. I miss the crickets climbing up the wooden walls, and the slowworms, which would appear mysteriously on the sitting room floor or on the doormat.
