The Home Corner

by Ruth Thomas

  The oddest thing about Mrs Crieff’s house was that her front lawn was made from fake grass. I’d clocked this before I’d even known she lived there, and had wondered who on earth would have a fake lawn in their garden instead of the real thing. It was only evident up close: from the distance of my bedroom window you couldn’t tell. My mother and I had had a laugh about it from time to time on our way home from the shops. Who could be so divorced from nature, we’d wondered, that they could bear to confront that every time they opened their curtains in the morning? And then we’d discovered that, well, Mrs Crieff could.

  ‘I suppose it never needs mowing,’ my mother had conceded politely. ‘Maybe that’s why she had it put down. I suppose she’s a busy woman.’

  And we’d both just stood and gazed at it for a moment, lost for anything further to say. The lawn was made from the same material that you saw sometimes beneath cuts of meat in butchers’ shops or on indoor football pitches. It was a searing, impossible green. A blackbird had settled on it as we watched, bounced its beak against it and flown off again, puzzled. I’d seen that happen a few times since then: Mrs Crieff’s conning of the blackbirds. The plastic had begun to fade a little now, though. It had turned a kind of greenish-blue, like algae on a pond; and hurrying past, it was hard not to gawp. Mrs Crieff also had quite a few garden ornaments. Positioned near the front door there was a stone-effect mushroom about the size of a toddler, several white plastic flower urns and a half-size concrete fox. Sticking up from the flower beds were two moles – the top halves of them, anyway – wearing spectacles and hats. And stationed at an angle near the gate there was a small, white, wheel-less wheelbarrow, within which sat a grey fibreglass rabbit. I was oddly drawn to it, this rabbit: I suppose I almost wondered if it would ever, one day, become real and hop away. As I scuttled past that afternoon I noticed that a new sign had been hung around Mrs Crieff’s front gate. It said I Live Here, and beneath these words there was a picture of an Alsatian dog. Which was something else that made me wonder about Mrs Crieff and her choices.

  *

  My mother was in the front garden when I got home. She was standing there pruning the roses. And as soon as I saw her I wanted to run into her arms. My mother was the only sane person I knew in the whole world. The only kind person. The still centre. But I didn’t, of course, run into her arms. It was a Monday afternoon in June, blue and overcast but otherwise undramatic, and I had not been brought up to be theatrical, I’d been raised discreet and stoical. I couldn’t help thinking, though, that I must have disappointed her, not having a nice boyfriend and a rented flat and a proper set of things to do.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ she called to me down the path.

  ‘Hi.’

  We had big yellow roses in our garden – the kind you see sometimes in municipal flower beds – but we also had the smaller, scented, more disease-prone types with names like Madame Eglantine and Queen of Denmark. Also some great big ones the colour of a pink winter sky. My father had planted all the roses when we’d first moved to the house. I think they were meant as a kind of peace offering to my mother, who’d never (she’d once told me) particularly wanted to move to Pumzika. She’d always wanted to live in a flat in the centre of town, with wide, painted doors, and a balcony and a big kitchen and a room of her own.

  ‘Good day?’ she asked as I opened the gate and plodded up the path towards her. ‘How was Mrs Baxter? And Mrs Crieff?’

  ‘Oh, their normal selves,’ I replied, pulling a tiny leaf off one of the rose-stems and squashing it between my fingers. I didn’t really want to talk about my day at St Luke’s, I just wanted to let it recede into the past, just like the children did, when their mothers asked them what they’d been doing that day. ‘Things,’ they would say. Or, ‘Nothing.’

  ‘So, what did you to today?’ my mother asked, as if she could read my mind.

  ‘Nothing much to report, really,’ I breathed out, deciding not to mention my meeting with Mrs Crieff. ‘Apart from one girl having a massive nose bleed at lunchtime. It started at lunchtime and it just went on and on.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘It stopped in the end, though. We began to think we might have to take her to A&E or something because it just wouldn’t stop, but then it did, just as we were about to phone her mum. Oh, and Joe fell off the boat.’

  ‘Joe fell off a boat?’

  ‘In the playground. Not a real boat.’

  My mother frowned. ‘Was he OK?’

  ‘Yeah, he was fine. His head swelled up for a while, which was quite worrying. The top of his nose went all sort of puffy, and I wondered if –’

  – my mother was looking at me a little anxiously –

  ‘– if he might have to go to A&E too, but it was probably some protective sort of response; the swelling . . . It calmed down in the end. And he was fine.’

  My mother waited. She seemed to think I might have something else to say. But I didn’t.

  ‘Well, good,’ she said, in her sensible voice – the voice that was a shield which had always protected me and my father from anything too bad, which had always prevented our lives from straying too far into chaos. Or admitting that they might be about to.

  ‘. . . hmm, and what else happened?’ I mused, hearing the familiar, slightly sour note appearing in my own voice – I had developed a tendency towards sourness that summer – ‘Oh yes: the lollipop man told me another one of his jokes.’

  I watched my mother clip one of the big yellow roses near its base – one of her Queens of Denmark – and place the stem into a wooden trug.

  ‘He tells me jokes quite a lot,’ I added, ‘when I meet him at the crossing.’

  Quietly, my mother bent and pulled a chickweed out of the ground. She was wearing her cut-down red Wellingtons and her spotty gardening gloves. She looked as if she was thinking about all the ways I had disappointed her.

  ‘Do you want to hear it?’ I asked.

  ‘Go on then.’

  ‘So, a bear walks into a bar, and the barman goes, “What would you like?”’

  ‘Hmm,’ said my mother.

  ‘And the bear doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then he goes, “I’ll have a glass of orange juice, please.”’

  My mother looked up.

  ‘And the barman goes, “Why the long pause?”’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘“Why the long paws?”’

  My mother didn’t speak for a moment. She stood up straight and looked almost a little tearful. Then she said, ‘Yes, but surely you got that in the wrong order?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The pause. Or you should have paused or something. Or not mentioned the glass of orange juice. And should lollipop men be telling jokes about bars?’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘That’s why it’s funny. He’s funny, the lollipop man. He’s a laugh. He doesn’t take life too seriously.’

  My mother’s frown increased slightly.

  ‘That’s the way he told it to me, anyway,’ I said. ‘And I thought . . .’ – but I could feel something sliding away now, something failing to amuse my mother, or even me – ‘I thought’, I said, ‘that it was somehow funnier like that. The way he told me.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘He told me another one, too, the other day. A doctor, doctor one.’

  ‘Right,’ my mother said, flatly.

  ‘Doctor, doctor,’ I ploughed on, ‘I keep thinking I’m invisible.’

  My mother looked at me, waiting for the punchline.

  ‘Next, please!’ I said.

  I thought it was funny, too, that joke. It was the funniest joke I’d heard for a while.

  My mother placed her secateurs on top of the yellow roses in the trug, then lifted it up. “Trug” – isn’t that a peculiar word? I’d said to her one afternoon, a few days earlier. But at least a trug was useful, I supposed, now. At least it wasn’t Mrs Crieff’s wheel-less wheelbarrow.

  ‘Shall we go in then?’ she said.

  And we procee
ded down the sidepath, through the back door and into the kitchen. ‘Oh, by the way,’ my mother added, putting the trug down beneath the table, ‘I made some more cakes today for your jumble sale.’

  And she went to the sink to fill the kettle.

  I leaned against the side of the fridge.

  ‘The jamboree, you mean?’ I said. ‘Really?’

  ‘I just thought they could maybe do with another batch from someone. I mean, I shouldn’t think many of the mums have got time to bake, have they, in the middle of everything else?’ she continued, over the noise of rushing water. ‘And it’s a pretty funny week to be having a jumble sale at all.’

  ‘Jamboree,’ I said.

  ‘Whatever it’s called.’

  I didn’t reply. I looked at the wall opposite and noticed that the Family Organiser had already been turned to July’s page. There was a recipe for Smoked Seafood Dip and some advice on stemming the flow of blood from a wound.

  ‘Mrs Baxter makes Melting Moments,’ I said. ‘Apparently she’s famous for them.’

  ‘Is she?’

  ‘You don’t have to make cakes for the jamboree, Mum. I mean, there’s no obligation.’

  ‘I know there’s no obligation, darling, I just feel like it. I like making cakes,’ she said, sounding slightly hurt. ‘And it’s for a good cause.’

  ‘I’m not sure a load of gym equipment is much of a good cause,’ I replied, not in the mood suddenly to be conciliatory, or even nice: sometimes, when I got home, something happened to me and I started behaving like a bad-tempered nine-year-old. ‘I mean,’ I said, ‘since when is a gym horse a good cause, exactly?’

  ‘Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick,’ my mother retorted. Which was true, of course. A gym horse was definitely better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. It wasn’t even one of her expressions though, it was one of my dad’s. We are all living a lie, I thought, and I sighed and looked across at my old framed picture on the wall.

  Happy Days Are Coming.

  ‘So what sort of cakes have you made, then?’ I asked.

  ‘Another batch of gingerbread men. Look – there they are on the cooling rack. They’re bigger this time because I found another cutter. I’d forgotten all about it and then I found it at the back of the drawer. It’s that one we bought in Bakewell years ago.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, and I looked across at the table top. There were twelve new gingerbread men lying there, twelve apostolic gingerbread men. Tonight one of you will betray me . . . One of them had a face that reminded me of Ed McRae’s. Spacey and cruel, one eyebrow raised. ‘Mum, I’ve got a question,’ I said.

  ‘What’s that, love?’

  ‘You know some children have imaginary friends? You know, invisible friends that they play with?’

  ‘Yes?’ She sounded a little wary.

  ‘Well, did I ever have any? When I was little?’

  My mother’s face suddenly brightened, as if she was pleased to be asked a question about my childhood – an altogether happier part of our lives together.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ she said.

  ‘No reason, really. Just, there’s this wee girl at school who keeps telling me about this imaginary friend she’s got. Her name’s Mindy Moo. The friend, that is. She’s this cool kind of . . . girl. And today, when Emily was playing in the Home Corner, she . . .’

  ‘Mindy Moo,’ my mother interrupted. ‘Well, that’s quite a name!’ And she stopped talking and gazed off, into space. ‘Well, I suppose you did have Shonky,’ she said, after a moment.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Yes. For a while there was this character you had called Shonky.’

  ‘Shonky?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t know what she was, really. I don’t know if she was a person or an animal or what. But I suppose she was an imaginary friend. She was definitely female, anyway. She was a she.’

  I didn’t know what to say. I had no recollection of Shonky at all.

  ‘Yes, she used to loom quite large in your life for a while,’ my mother continued, a look of fondness in her eyes. ‘She was always following you around. Sort of . . . trailing around behind you. And then she just . . . disappeared. You stopped talking about her. I suddenly thought ‘Luisa doesn’t talk about Shonky any more, and she was . . . gone.’

  ‘How funny,’ I said.

  ‘Yes: “Shonky’s here,” you used to say, sometimes in the funniest places! Sometimes when we were in the supermarket or somewhere, or when we were getting changed for your swimming lessons . . .’

  She paused.

  ‘She went on holiday with us one summer. Don’t you remember? She came camping with us when we went to Wales. Slept in the tent with us.’

  My mother put the lid on the kettle and plugged it in at the wall. And I stood and watched her and tried to remember.

  ‘It’s funny,’ I said after a moment, ‘because Shonky’s an actual word, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, yes. But you didn’t know that, did you? You just made it up. You were three. And you used to like making up words.’

  ‘Shonky,’ I said. But all that came into my head, for some reason, was a little picture of Mrs Crieff and her plastic lawn.

  ‘We used to like having her around,’ my mother said. And she suddenly looked rather sad.

  I walked over to the table, sat down, and tried to recall the space my imaginary friend had once occupied in my life. I suspected that I would have believed in her more than I’d ever believed in, say, God. She would definitely have been more fun than God. God never went swimming with you, for a start, or camping, despite what some people might say. ‘Shonky,’ I said again. But it was impossible to summon her up, or who she had been.

  ‘It’s difficult to know sometimes, isn’t it,’ I began, ‘when something’s made up and when it’s real. Or even when . . .’

  But my mother had surfaced from her reverie.

  ‘No, I don’t think so, particularly,’ she said. ‘Anyway, shall we sort out tea? Maybe you could spin the lettuce for me.’

  Because she had that ability: to snap out of fond recall. It was a skill she had. A kind of pragmatism.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. And I looked up, and out through the window, as if she might be standing out there, my old friend Shonky. She wasn’t, of course. There was just the camper van belonging to our neighbours Audrey and Donald Faulkner. Sirrocco Breeze. It was slowly reversing past the side wall of our house. It crunched noisily into a new gear and trundled off down the road.

  I found the lettuce in the salad drawer. Then I went to the sink, dropped some leaves into the salad spinner, ran water over them and whirred them around. When you turned the handle fast, the salad spinner made a noise that sounded like the trains on the London Underground. That accelerating, whirring noise that got commuters from A to B.

  ‘So I think I’ll have a bath after tea,’ I said, letting go of the handle and watching the salad spinner continue on its own, like a zoetrope. ‘I’m going to try and sort my hair out.’ It was the first time I’d mentioned the disaster of my hair, since I’d dyed it. ‘I thought it was one of those wash-in, wash-out ones,’ I explained, as if this might, in some way, make my decision seem more normal.

  ‘Did you?’ my mother said, airily, from the other side of the room. And she glanced quickly across at my hair, where it was coming loose from a kirby grip.

  *

  I was in bed extremely early. It was still light outside, and would be till nearly eleven. I sat up against my cloud-print pillows and listened to a blackbird making its warning call from the branches of our cherry tree. I read an old copy of Cosmopolitan, dated November 1992, when my life had been something else. But they were always the same anyway, those magazines. They always said the same things. There was a picture on the cover of a startlingly perfect young woman, probably about my age but different in most other respects. Her hair was a successful kind of tawny colour and her teeth, revealed in a joyful smile, were dazzlingly white. She looked as if she had s
ome important job writing advertising copy or working for a TV station. She would definitely have a boyfriend and at least three close girlfriends she had lunch dates with. I turned the page. Things happen after a Badedas bath, it said, over the picture of a young woman draped alluringly in a bath sheet. When I was small I’d used to wonder what was meant by that Badedas slogan: by ‘things happening’. I’d thought it might be something like Christmas presents or a sudden, exciting fall of snow. The magazine smelled of old perfume, which depressed me but also gave me, at the same time, a curious sense of hope. And it occurred to me that perfume might be designed to do exactly that: it might intentionally have a kind of double edge. Then I read an article I’d read at least five times before, about losing two pounds a week through keeping a calorie-counting diary and only eating, as far as I could see, nuts and yogurt and fish. I read another article called ‘Make Time for You!’, which was all about disguising your imperfections with the deft use of concealer, spritzing your face with lavender water and practising yoga for inner peace. Then, just before nine, I turned off the light. I think I must have fallen asleep pretty quickly. And at some point that night, I had a dream about Stella Muir. She didn’t look like Stella, she was just this vague, floating presence – the kind that turns up in dreams – all spirit and no substance. But I knew it was her, and in the dream she was called Shonky.