Her children were too young to detect her sense of failure. While they were little they had no barometer with which to measure her. They were a sanctuary. Even so, it was a struggle to disguise her feelings from them.
‘Want to play the egg game?’ she suggested.
‘What is it?’
‘The egg game – you know. We used to play it when you were little.’
Indigo couldn’t remember.
‘We wrap ourselves up in duvets,’ she said, ‘and we wait until we hatch.’
Together, they pulled bedding off Indigo’s bed and fetched the duvet from Karen and Ian’s bed and made a soft, pulpy mountain in the middle of the room. Disney characters on Indy’s duvet smiled contortedly in the hillock’s humps and folds. They burrowed underneath, clumping the quilty mass all around them.
‘Now we’re in our egg,’ Karen said, inhaling the musky, biscuity smell of their surroundings.
They sat quietly for a few moments before Indigo asked, ‘What happens when we hatch?’
Her voice was low next to Karen’s ear and it filled her with such love and longing, she wanted to stay like this forever.
‘We have to wait quite a long time,’ she whispered.
They remained still and she listened to her child breathing. After a while she wondered if she had fallen asleep. She didn’t dare move for fear of disturbing her. She shifted her weight slightly.
‘What happens after we hatch?’ came the question once more. Karen felt a flush of panic.
‘What happens?’ Indy persisted.
‘We find out what kind of creatures we are,’ Karen said, and there was sudden movement as her daughter announced she was hatching into a princess. The duvets were thrown off and daylight from the bedroom window broke up the softness into dazzling shards.
Karen helped to lift the lid of the trunk where dressing-up clothes were kept and watched Indigo hunt for the costume she always chose. She pulled out a silk scarf whose bronze lettering spelled out the word P.A.R.I.S. Karen’s father had brought it back from a business trip when she was a girl. She knotted it around her throat.
‘Passports, please, ladies and gentlemen!’ she cried with the false cheer of an air stewardess.
Hearing herself, she could almost believe her own enthusiasm. She felt like the real thing.
‘All aboard flight one two three,’ she said, and Indy stared at her with the look of hers that her teachers commented on. Pre-school nursery workers had mentioned it too, even when she was little. It seemed to unnerve people, as it unnerved Karen now.
‘All aboard flight one two three,’ she repeated, wilting under her child’s gaze.
NAN SAID THE BLESSED chickens woke her and Grandad up early with their cockadoodledoing. I said to her did she wish it could have been one of those chickens that was sacrificed but she said Best not to talk about that poor chicken. She said it would be nice for me and Dad to do something together just us two. Dad was going to take me to a famous beach and restaurant. Robin was jealous. I said he could come too but when we got in the car it was only me and Dad.
On the journey, Dad asked me if I was happy at school and how I was doing and if I had a boyfriend and what about maths, did I think I could do with extra help? I said school was fine and I’m okay at maths and all the boys are idiots. What about living with Nan and Grandad, he said, is that working out alright? I miss Mum, I said, and he said That’s natural, you’re bound to miss her. I told him I missed him too. Why do you have to live in Africa and we live in England, I said, and he just said what he always says, about setting up a new life for all of us. He told me about a school I could go to where it’s just girls and you get to wear a dress and a straw hat for the uniform. He said How do you feel about staying in South Africa? I said Forever? He said If you like. What about Robin, I said, and he said Robin would stay too, of course, but he would go to a different school because the one he was telling me about was just for girls. I wanted to tell him about Zami’s sister and how they wanted to be a family together but I knew I wasn’t allowed so I just told him I didn’t want to go to a new school and I didn’t want him and Beautiful to be girlfriend and boyfriend. I twisted the corner of my scarf into a point so sharp it hurt when I poked it under my thumbnail. Dad said Robin was right and a big girl like me shouldn’t be carrying around a thing like that. It’s not a thing, I said, it’s Mum’s scarf.
The beach was really famous. It wasn’t one of the ones where you get Great Whites. On some beaches they blow a loud horn if one comes and everyone has to get out of the water as quick as they can. There was a photoshoot going on, with big lights and models waving bits of cloth around. Their clothes got wet because they were in the waves. Dad was really embarrassing – he went up to one of the make-up people and asked about what they were doing and he asked her if she thought someone as pretty as me could end up as a model. Of course she said yes but only because he asked her, she didn’t mean it. Dad said I could do anything I wanted in life. I said I don’t think I’m pretty and Dad said Yes you are. He bet me five pounds in English money, not South African, that I would have a boyfriend soon. I said The boys at my school are stupid but Dad told me I was going to start being interested in things like that, it’s only natural. Dads can find that kind of thing tough, he said. It’s when you need your mum around most of all – to talk about things like boys. We were walking along the beach and I couldn’t keep up. The sand kept swallowing my feet and I couldn’t hear properly because of the wind. I thought he was going to say he was going to marry Beautiful and she could be our new mum so I told him I didn’t need one. We learn about periods and stuff like that at school, I said, and I’ve got Beth, too. Dad said Beth doesn’t necessarily get her facts right.
Some people won’t go on holiday to Africa because they think they’ll get eaten by lions or Great Whites. They are the kind of people who don’t do anything with their lives, Dad said. I said Everyone does something with their life. Dad said lots of people don’t make the most of their time living on this planet. Life is short, he said, and time goes really quickly. Time seemed to be going really slowly though, I thought. It felt like we had been on holiday for ages. Beth might not recognise me by the time we go home.
The worst thing is that you never said anything. When Zami’s mum died she said goodbye to him and she told his sister to look after him and have a better life.
We sat on the beach on our towels. Dad had the blue one and I had the red one. I wished we had an umbrella but it was too windy for one. Dad said me and Robin could be in some of the photos on his website. He needs pictures of people having fun. We had a joke that Robin would have to hold his tummy in. It’s because Dad cares that he wants Robin to lose weight, compared with Nan who lets him eat chips. Dad said Nan and Grandad have a different attitude. He was going on about making the most of everything because you don’t know how long you’ve got and I said Do you think Nan and Grandad make the most of their life? Dad said it was up to them how they live but I could tell he didn’t mean it. He said he wished you and him could have come out to South Africa, not just him on his own. I said I wished that too – then he would have you as his girlfriend, not Beautiful. I said to Dad that instead of getting fainter in my mind, you get stronger. Even though it’s hard to remember what you were like when you were alive, I can feel you all around like the sky. Dad said Let’s go for a swim, Last one in’s a sissy.
The waves were big and people were on surfboards. Dad dived straight in. The water smashed into me and I dived in after him. I got my head under straight away. Dad said How’s your swimming these days? Be careful not to get out of your depth. The waves were massive. He was shouting and smiling and I was shouting back. Hold on to me, he said, I won’t let you go, but his body was too slippery and I was afraid I couldn’t touch the bottom. All I could see was turquoise and green sparkles, like the sequins on the mermaid picture on the wall in the old house that I did when I was little. They were getting in my eyes and blinding me. I was tr
ying to tell Dad to go shallower but the waves were too loud and there were little rainbows in my eyes when I looked into the sun. I was trying to hold on with my arms and legs and he was laughing but it felt like he was trying to drown me because I wasn’t making the most of everything and because I was mean to Beautiful. Then there was a crash and everything was bright nothingness, then dead. A thump against my chest like an elephant charging. No sound. My ears full of nothing, my mouth sewn up like I didn’t have one, my eyes open blind. Deadness. Then a loud rushing noise, like a screeching of brakes and my legs dragged forward, scraping along rough tarmac, burning on the bedroom carpet with Robin pulling me along with my head all wrapped up in my bed sheet, me suffocating and laughing at the same time. I didn’t know where I was and then with a whoosh I was upside down.
I was coughing and choking but the water was only shallow. Dad was far away waving and calling, asking if I was alright. I scrabbled back to the shore and Dad came wading back. His hairy chest was all dragged downwards so it looked like animal fur, with his shark-tooth necklace all tangled up in it. The sea is very powerful, he said. It should never be underestimated. It felt like a live thing that was trying to kill me, though, and I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t him.
After that I didn’t want to go in any more. Dad tried to persuade me but he had to go by himself while I watched. The salt was stinging my cheek so I lay down under the blue towel. I tried to get the mermaid sparkles in my eyes again so I could remember the picture. I don’t know what happened to it. Dad must have packed it in a box when we went to Nan and Grandad’s or maybe he threw it away. It was a good picture. I did it when I was about four or something. Thinking about it made me feel sleepy. The wind was lifting my hair off my face and it reminded me of how you used to stroke my head. If I couldn’t get to sleep you would sit on my bed and stroke my hair, remember? On the beach under Dad’s towel the wind was still strong but I could barely feel your fingers. I needed it to be stronger for me to remember how it felt and to remember what you looked like sitting on my bed at night.
When we got dressed I found out I had lost my scarf. Dad was asking me why I was hopping up and down but I couldn’t help it. My body wouldn’t stop moving – even though I tried to make it, it wouldn’t obey me. We walked back where we had come from with me half running half falling over in the sand. He asked the make-up lady if she had seen it but it was nowhere. Someone must have picked it up, he said. They could even be wearing it, lucky them, think of it like that. Someone got lucky today, man, like getting a present for nothing. I thought I saw it miles down the beach, crumpled up on the sand, but it was just a rock.
We went to a restaurant even though I wasn’t hungry. It was so near the sea the waves smashed against the windows. Dad said it was special glass that could never break. He wanted us to sit at the table at the front but it was booked up so he made the waiter let us sit there by giving him some secret extra money. The waiter put Dad’s money in his pocket and we were allowed to sit at the table by the window. My legs were shaky, though, and I felt weak. Every time a wave crashed it made me jump. Dad said Had enough of the sea for one day, puppy and I said Yes.
The waiter lit a candle on our table even though it was daytime. I didn’t want anything to eat. I wanted to go home – not to Dad’s house or Nan’s house – I wanted to go home where you and me and Robin and Dad used to live, even though it didn’t have a proper garden but me and Robin had a sandpit. I liked it there. Dad was ordering with the waiter but in my head I was trying to put all the scraps of you together – the sound of your voice when you called out that dinner was ready and the smell of mashed potato that you used to cook that is different from Nan’s or from mashed potato in a restaurant. The look of your hands in the sink when you were washing up without your rings on and the look of your face when your hair was wrapped up in a towel after you had a bath. The smell of your clothes when you used to lean over to kiss me night-night. All of them were pieces of you like a drawing that got torn up because it went wrong. I was trying to collect all the little bits back together and remember what the picture was like. Everyone says you were ill for a long time before you died but I never saw you ill. When I was little, if I was sick you would bring me the washing-up bowl and put a flannel on my head and call me Go-Go.
Thinking about you calling me Go-Go and about someone else wearing your scarf and about me and Robin not looking after each other at different schools and about Dad trying to drown me so I could meet you in Heaven if there is one made me start crying a bit noisily. Dad didn’t know what to do. He said to the waiter that we had changed our minds, we weren’t eating after all. I wanted to rush out and knock all the tables over but I couldn’t move my legs. I was stuck and I was shaking. People were staring and Dad was saying stuff to me but I couldn’t really hear him, like when I was under the sea with him trying to drown me with no one looking. Everyone was looking now. A woman with blonde hair who was wearing massive earrings got a blanket from one of the waiters and put it around me. She said I was in shock. Dad told me to take deep breaths and when I did I could smell the earring woman’s perfume and I wondered if she could be CatladyUK or Eleanor O or Picasso and if she was I wanted to stay with her forever.
VALERIE SAT IN BED reading. Her skin cleansed and moisturised, according to her nightly ritual, and the day over, she couldn’t concentrate on the book in her hands. Doug would be home soon. Partly she welcomed his return after a weekend’s separation, but partly she dreaded the possibility of an awkward atmosphere like the one that marked his departure. Some couples thrived on awkwardness. Some women she knew seemed to have some permanent misdemeanour of their husbands’ to report. They were always punishing their menfolk for something or other.
Doug wouldn’t stand for punishment but he was no stranger to her withdrawal from him. Sometimes he wouldn’t know what he had done wrong. Sometimes he hadn’t done anything wrong. He put these retreats of hers down to what he called her ‘dark days’. Well, he had dark days too.
No sooner had she conjured him in her mind than she heard the slowing of a car’s engine and the crunch of tyres on gravel, as if she had summoned him with the power of thought. She tested herself, as if taking her own temperature almost, to see if she was willing to provide an attentive audience for his traveller’s tales, but, in the time it took him to fetch his bags out of the boot of the car and walk from the car to the front door, she decided he wasn’t deserving of such a performance. She switched off the bedside lamp, the sound of it masked by the simultaneous click of the front door, and when he came into their bedroom she lay still in the dark, facing the wall.
The next morning she was awake early. She made them both a cup of tea, bringing it back to bed as was their custom. Light filtered into the room through the flowered curtains. She arranged her nightgown under the bedcovers and waited for him to sit up and put on his glasses.
‘It’ll get cold,’ she said, after some minutes passed without him stirring. Then, ‘How was the trip?’
In a mirror image of the way in which she had presented herself to him the previous night, he remained with his back curved away from her. She could tell he was awake. Karen’s alarm clock sounded in the room next door and after a few moments their daughter’s footsteps padded across the landing to the bathroom.
‘It was a success,’ he told her, in answer to her question, but not until much later, when all three of them were seated at the breakfast table.
‘Did the others enjoy it?’ she asked.
By others she meant Margie Lawrence and the rest of the wives.
‘Yes, everyone did. You were missed.’
She shrugged. ‘I’m not one for travelling.’
‘It was only France, Val.’
‘Yeah, it’s only France, Mum.’ Karen said. ‘When I went to Dieppe with the school it only took a few hours.’
‘Let’s not go into all that again,’ she said, sensing them ganging up on her as usual. ‘Are you ready?’
; Doug got up from the table and went out into the hallway where his salesman’s briefcase and Weekender luggage sat neatly under the coat hooks.
‘I got something for both of you,’ he said, coming back into the room with two plastic bags with Duty Free written on. Inside Karen’s bag was a clear plastic cylinder containing a doll in French regional costume. The doll wore a full skirt and white blouse with puffed sleeves and a red cape. Her black pinafore apron was decorated with tiny flowers and lace. The nylon fibres of her brown hair shone and her mouth was a dainty rosebud. Her eyes, though, were clumsy dashes of the same black paint that covered her pink plastic feet to represent shoes. The doll looked as if she had been blinded in some violent attack. Or perhaps she had been like it from birth. Catching herself wondering if the disfigurement was an inherited condition, Valerie thought she must be going mad. This Margie Lawrence business had tipped her over the edge.
‘Thanks, Dad.’ Karen kissed her father. ‘I’ll call her something French. What’s a French name?’
‘Françoise,’ Doug suggested, and he caught Valerie’s eye as he said it.
Karen asked if she was going to open her present too. She reached inside the plastic bag. Her husband had evidently been so taken with Margie Lawrence and her charms, or indeed so occupied with ‘Françoise’, that he hadn’t thought about his wife or daughter until he was passing through Duty Free on the way home. In the bag was a flat cellophane package. She unwrapped it and held up the silk square it contained. It was brown and gold, with the word P.A.R.I.S spelled out in bronze letters over and over.
Alarm Girl Page 9
