She held Ian’s gaze, willing him to sense the energy in the room.
‘Robin wants you to go up,’ he said once more, and a great gust buffeted the house. Something fell from the roof and clattered to the ground outside the back door. Ian sighed and turned away from her.
She climbed the narrow staircase and found her children motionless in their beds.
‘I don’t like this house,’ Robin said.
His limbs were in outline under old-fashioned sheets and blankets. The room smelt of mildew and a dream-catcher hung limply from the lampshade, its tendrils thick with dust. She and Ian had visited so many other places – stunning places, full of colour and noise and heat; how had they had ended up in a damp holiday cottage where dreams become clogged in deposits made up of strangers’ skin cells?
The wind shrieked and she was afraid the flimsy walls might crack and topple, afraid she herself would crack and topple. She imagined plaster and bricks tumbling around them, burying her and the children. The weight of the debris compressing her head from all sides would be a relief, balancing out the heaviness inside her mind.
Or perhaps the ferocious wind would catch the cottage and fling it into the sky. A powerful funnel would whisk all four of them into a vortex, swallowing them whole. Or else it might explode, the owners of the cottage having planted a bomb timed to go off at precisely this moment, combusting outwards, windows smashing, bright splinters of glass piercing her from all sides, slicing her skin and spiking her eyes, gashing the palms of her hands, stabbing her. The bedroom came back into focus. Her skull tightened; imagined wounds throbbed. The eiderdown on Robin’s bed was one of the old-fashioned kind, its shiny, silken material cool under her fingertips. Its barely-thereness was intolerable. She knew what she must do. What she must do was go downstairs and drop a glass on the stone floor of the kitchen, lacerate herself. It would release her, if just for a while.
She stood up quickly from the bed, heard what must be her voice say goodnight.
‘Why do we have to live here?’ Robin asked.
‘We don’t live here,’ she replied, speaking slowly, as if to a foreigner, or as if she was the foreigner.
‘Are we going back to our old house?’
‘Of course.’ She made her way to the door. ‘This is a holiday, isn’t it? We’re just staying here for a little bit.’
‘Why?’ Indy’s voice came from the other bed.
‘Why?’ She hesitated. Glass shards waited for her. ‘To see what it’s like.’
She switched off the light. Her children were two humps in the dimness of the strange room.
‘To see if we like it?’ Indy asked.
‘Yes.’
There was another shape in the room too, indistinct in the gloom but vivid in its malignancy.
‘I don’t like it,’ Robin said.
Her mood was infectious. She was infecting them all with it. She mustn’t wait for the house to explode or a storm destroy it or a tornado carry them all off into blissful oblivion; better for her to leave now, or when it grew dark. She could walk across the headland to the edge of the cliff, throw herself on the rocks.
‘Dad says if the weather’s better tomorrow we can go to a beach where there’s lots of sand,’ she said. The words were so thick in her mouth she had trouble moving her tongue around them.
‘I don’t like sand,’ Indigo said.
‘We’ll be going home soon,’ she said, trying hard to make her voice sound like it should.
She went back downstairs.
‘How were they?’ Ian asked, coming into the kitchen.
‘Okay.’
‘Christ knows, I’m trying,’ he said.
She stared at a glass she held in her hand, willing it to fall from her fingers.
‘I get nothing from you,’ he said.
Her fingers remained tensed. She couldn’t seem to loosen them. The glass remained whole. She couldn’t even summon up the will to break something.
‘You know what,’ he shouted before he managed to control his voice, ‘if you don’t feel like talking or being part of this family, just let me know.’
He reached for the cardboard sign he’d made for Indy’s shop. It hung on the back of one of the dining chairs and had the word Closed written on one side, Open on the other. He yanked it off the chair and looped it around her neck with Closed facing outwards. ‘Closed for business, right? Let me know when you’re open.’
His earnestness was gone, and his handsomeness, too. His voice was loud and his short hair made him look like a thug. He left the room and she remained, feeling like a dunce, in the corner. She had to keep still, because of the brute that was coming for her. If she kept still, the bully might not see her.
‘It’s not new,’ she said.
‘What’s not new?’
He was in front of her but they were no longer in the kitchen. She didn’t know what had happened to the glass that was in her hand. She didn’t know what had happened to the kitchen.
‘The feeling inside comes further out,’ she said.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘You’re just annoying me now.’
She wanted to tell him about a time before she knew him, but the words were too frightening and would summon the beast, which was what she was trying to avoid.
‘I just want to be a normal family,’ he said, breathing hard.
She had no idea how long they had been sitting on the sofa. She looked past him, checking the room for clues. The fire had burned low in the grate. His wine glass was empty. She could hear him trying to regulate the amount of air he was taking into his lungs.
‘Let’s give up,’ he said. ‘Let’s go back.’
She let out a little moan.
‘What’s keeping us here? We don’t have to stay. Karen!’
He gripped her tightly by the wrists and shook her. She allowed herself to be shaken. She wanted him to shake her, in the hope that he might be able to shake her out of herself.
WE WENT ON A FERRY to the island where Nelson Mandela was a prisoner. In the car on the way Nan and Grandad and Dad were all talking about his funeral. Grandad said people might start rioting and Nan said they didn’t riot when he was alive because he suffered enough. She said even though she didn’t like Nelson Mandela’s tactics when he was a terrorist it was dreadful to be locked up for so long. Dad didn’t agree that he was a terrorist and Nan said We’ll agree to disagree then, shall we, Ian? That shut him up. If she calls him by his name like that he goes quiet.
Robin couldn’t believe we were going to the actual prison where we could stand inside Nelson Mandela’s real prison cell. Lots of other people were going too and it was in the middle of the sea. Everyone felt sick on the ferry because of the waves and the engine smoke. Grandad tied my scarf around my face like a cowboy which was good because all I could smell was their house and no one could see my face, only my two eyes. Robin puked in a bag.
When we got to the prison a man gave us a talk. He told us before it was a prison the island was for lepers, and I noticed Nan kept rubbing her hands with handwash after that.
The man giving us the talk used to be an actual prisoner. Everyone was interested apart from me. I wanted to go on the iPad but Dad said it would be inappropriate. Inappropriate is a word that teachers say. They could say something is bad or wrong but instead they always say it’s inappropriate. It’s annoying. Nan asked the man was it true about Nelson Mandela knitting to stop himself getting bored and the man said yes it was true and he was the father of our nation. I wished I had some knitting to do.
Everyone apart from me was sick again on the ferry back. I was the odd man out. Nan said I was like an ox. When we got back Dad asked us for some business advice. He showed us the website he is designing for his company. Nan said I was too big to sit on Dad’s lap but I stayed where I was. Dad’s website has photos of his house and the beehive cottage and loads of countryside and animal pictures and one of Dad playing golf. It says Taylor
ed Travel – Travel With You In Mind on the homepage and there is some writing about how South Africa is a safe and exciting place for family holidays. Nan asked if it really was safe and Dad said It’s perfectly safe, Valerie. He called her by her name and she said to him You know Doug and I are more than happy to hang on to the kids, Ian, calling him by his name too. Dad said It’s perfectly safe. Then Nan said But there are no memories for them in South Africa and Dad said Maybe that’s a good thing.
We were all staring at a page on Dad’s website that said This Blog Is Still Being Built Please Come Back Later and Dad said we could do with a fresh start. Then I said to Nan Have you met Dad’s new girlfriend? Of course Nan said no. Her name’s Beautiful, I said, and Nan thought I meant she had a beautiful name so I had to tell her that her actual name was Beautiful. She got confused but in the end she said That’s an unusual name and I said Yes because what if you were called that and you were really ugly? Dad said he could introduce Beautiful to Nan and Grandad and Nan said that was entirely up to him. He tipped me off his lap after that and I could tell he wished I didn’t mention Beautiful to Nan.
Later when I was in my room Nan came in and asked me loads of questions. She said it was only natural Dad would want someone special in his life. Everyone needs someone, she said. I was feeling a bit sick. I don’t feel like me, I said, and Nan thought it was because of the ferry but that wasn’t right because when everyone else was being sick Grandad said I was like a sailor with sea-legs.
I was afraid it was malaria not seasickness and Nan could read my mind because she asked if I had taken my medicine. When I told her that Dad took my pills away because they would make me go weird Nan said what would I prefer, going weird or dying of malaria? She said I was too precious to take a chance so I should carry on taking the medicine. I said What about Robin and Nan said he was precious too. She said she would speak with Dad and she would make sure everyone kept taking their medicine.
SHE WENT TO SEE her doctor. She wasn’t well. The doctor gave her a prescription and she collected it from the pharmacy while Indigo stood patiently by her side, as patiently as she waited now, for her mother to fetch down paper and crayons from a shelf that was too high for her. The vulnerability in the slope of her shoulders as she stood waiting, her gaze fixed on the shelves in front of her, and the round of her buttocks in red corduroy trousers that were a size too small and hoisted too high, slayed Karen. She had to look away. There was a tightness in the room, like the increasing pressure of a migraine attack. Holding on to the edge of the kitchen counter while the whole room slanted away, she moved to the sink, steadying herself on furniture like Robin and Indy had when they were learning to walk.
She held a glass under the tap. The rush of water was deafening. She placed the glass carefully on the table, barely disturbing the surface tension of the water. Its transparency was a relief – its nothingness and its purity – but, as she stared, the glass and the rim of the water’s surface became an aggravation, its surfaces and boundaries defining too much the end of something and a beginning of something else. She yearned for an absence of lines or shapes or elements or objects. A blankness, like the white of a page for drawing, like the white of a smooth oval tablet.
Tired of waiting, the little girl came over and took her mother’s hand. Karen felt the transfer of droplets from the glass of water between their fingertips.
‘Wait a minute,’ she said, and she gulped from the glass, tipping back her head to swallow the tablet.
Together they moved to where the drawing things were and Karen fetched them down. Soon her daughter was bent over paper, the ends of her hair skimming the page.
The phone rang and the earlier tightness crept into the room once more. Karen listened to herself have a conversation with her husband. There was a thickness in her throat, as if she might vomit or weep. Their talk soon dwindled into nothing, matching the sensation she had of herself. If only she had something of the vigour of her child, who clutched two crayons in one hand, dragging a red trail and a blue trail across the page and on to the table top.
‘I can’t talk,’ she told Ian. ‘I’ve got nothing worth saying.’
Indy lay down her crayons. She picked up the piece of paper and turned it around for her mother to see, holding the page in front of her own face. ‘Guess.’
Karen stared at the swirl of red and blue, two loops either side of a triangle and a circle, two long spidery lines. It was a figure of some sort. Even though the images were basic, mostly she was able to guess them accurately. She couldn’t tell if her rate of success pleased her daughter or if she would prefer her to get it wrong sometimes. She cleared her throat before speaking.
‘Lady?’
‘A Mummy with wings,’ Indy said, and, replacing the page on the table top, she took up two crayons in one fist again and began hailing down a shower of red and blue bullets. Karen reached out a hand to stroke her head but Indy shook her off so instead she combed through the collection of pens and crayons, finding comfort in the simple task of putting on lids and testing colours. Making a pile of ones to throw away gave her a sense of purpose, although she knew even as she separated them that she would be incapable of disposing of them and would end up putting them back with the others.
At the doctor’s surgery she had listed her symptoms and the doctor had tapped out a rhythm on his computer keyboard. Now, sitting at the kitchen table, the thud of her daughter’s crayon on the paper seemed to echo the doctor’s beat, as if both daughter and doctor were trying to tell her something. She closed her eyes against the stark white of the page, against the white of smooth oval tablets in their packet, one dissolving in her bloodstream now. She tried to decipher the communication, concentrating on the punctures of sound emitted by each stab of the blue and red: two colours clenched in the fat little fist.
‘Why have you got your eyes closed?’
There was no pause in the thudding rhythm for the question but, when Karen didn’t answer, the noise stopped.
‘Why are your eyes shut? Are you making a wish?’
Karen nodded, trying to relax her mouth, trying to un-frown her brow. Then, the tap-tap-tapping of the doctor’s computer keyboard started up again, his typing re-patterned in the stab of red and blue, blue and red, pressed tight together, thumping over and over on the page, making a blizzard of tiny marks.
‘A wish, yes.’
She opened her eyes. The room billowed and pulsed. The walls throbbed, as if she and Indigo were inside the beating heart or bowels of a beast. She gripped the table edge.
‘Did it come true?’
Karen opened her mouth to answer but her tongue was stuck, as if she hadn’t uttered a word for a hundred years.
‘Did it come true?’ came the question again.
‘I don’t know yet,’ she said.
ON CHRISTMAS EVE I stayed in my room all morning. Everyone was annoying me. Nan was being annoying, Dad was being annoying and of course Robin was annoying. In my room all the folded-up things in my case were annoying so I scribbled and scrabbled them up and threw them all about so there were clothes on the bed, on the floor, everywhere.
In the yard the sun was beating down even though it was Christmas. There was no sign of Zami or Tonyhog and there was no sound, just the buzzing that Robin says is insects taking over the world. The chickens were hiding from the heat under Dad’s car. I opened my shutters and held on to the bars at my window, seeing what it would feel like to be Nelson Mandela in prison.
I was thinking about you and Dad and whether you were really in love. The way Dad and Nan are is a clue. Say Dad didn’t love you and he wanted you and me and Robin all to die so he could be with Beautiful, a good way of doing it would be to kill you and make me and Robin catch malaria. There would be no evidence.
Eleanor O drew a desert island and I guessed it. She guessed my kitchen and CatladyUK got computer. When I got Picasso’s birthday cake there was a message. It said ‘What colour is Indigo?’ Robin would say don’t
answer because it could be a paedophile but I knew it was you because you guessed my birthday cake in two seconds when I drew a Little Mermaid one like the one I had when I was eight.
Dad said Wow, what a mess! when he saw all my stuff on the floor. Why don’t you come and have some lunch, puppy doll? I didn’t go and I didn’t go and at last Nan came to find me. She said We’re going to a posh hotel for tea, I think your Dad’s trying to impress us. I tried to think what his plan was and if he could sneak poison into the food. I knew I was being stupid and that kind of thing only happens in stories but it didn’t stop me thinking it.
Dad said it would be nice to wear a dress or a skirt to the hotel. I wore shorts instead. Everyone was waiting for Beautiful. Nan was giving me looks and checking I had sun cream on even though I knew all that because I had been here longer than her. She always fusses over me but not Robin. She says it’s because I’m a girl and girls are a worry but that’s sexist.
I was with Tony when Beautiful came. He lets me scratch his back now, and I can pull him quite roughly by the tusks like Zami does. His eyes are brown, like mine and yours, and just like a human’s. Robin doesn’t believe it but he understands everything we say, even more than a dog. When he heard Beautiful’s car he ran around to the front of the house to say hello. I hid behind the Jeep where the chickens go. She didn’t even look at Tony. She walked straight past him. She was wearing an orange dress with a thin belt. She had flat orange shoes to match, and white bracelets on both wrists. The white showed up against her skin. Dad came out of the house and kissed her. I got in the Jeep and picked more stuffing out of the torn seats. Soon there will be none left and the seat will be just metal. It will be too uncomfortable for Dad’s clients to sit on.
Alarm Girl Page 7
