Alarm Girl

by Hannah Vincent

  ‘Very nice, thank you, Douglas.’

  ‘Some of the other wives bought them,’ her husband

  ‘It looks expensive,’ she said.

  After Karen left, he said he should be making tracks too. Valerie sat at the dining table without clearing the breakfast things. She wondered if the other wives really had bought silk scarf souvenirs. It wasn’t the kind of thing she would wear. It wasn’t the kind of thing any of the other wives would wear. It was just something else coming into the house for her to find a place for. She folded the scarf. She would put it in Karen’s drawer when she went upstairs. The thought of all the things in all the drawers of the house oppressed her.

  Margie Lawrence was probably having a lie-in this morning, after yesterday’s travel. She would be exhausted after the weekend. She would have got on with the other wives, even the ones she had never met before, and the husbands too. She would have tried out her schoolgirl French in the shops and restaurants and at the hotel she would have laid out all her purchases on the hotel bed for Dave Lawrence to admire before going down to dinner with the others. Dave would have offered to pay for everyone’s meal and called the trip a ‘team effort’. The others would have raised their glasses in a toast to the company. Doug and Valerie would have raised their glasses too, if she had been there, but, as she had told Doug often enough recently, they weren’t that kind of couple.

  DAD TOLD NAN AND GRANDAD about the idea of us staying with him in Africa. Nan and Grandad went quiet. It’s a big life out here, Doug, Dad was saying, but Grandad didn’t say anything back. Everyone crowded around Dad’s laptop and we looked at the website of the girls’ school Dad told me about. There was a different school for Robin that had a swimming pool with diving boards. Dad had it all planned out. He said he would pay for Nan and Grandad to come and visit us whenever they wanted. Nan asked me and Robin what we thought. Robin said he wanted to go to school in South Africa. He didn’t mind if me and him went to different schools. He said our school in England was rubbish because it didn’t even have a swimming pool, let alone diving boards. I said What about Beautiful, would she be here too? Dad said we didn’t have to decide right now.

  Robin didn’t believe me that I nearly drowned. I wanted to tell him that maybe Dad did it on purpose but I knew he wouldn’t believe that either. He would get annoyed and call me a nutter. We were on the tyre and I told him I lost your scarf at the beach. He said it was a good thing because I looked like a moron fiddling with it the whole time. I said That scarf was the only thing of Mum’s I had but he said we had loads of your stuff. Not here, I said, her scarf was the only thing I brought with me. There’s nothing about Mum in Africa, it’s all in England. He stopped talking then and I could tell he was thinking about you. He said Let’s go and get Zami, it’s better when there’s three. I said What if Dad marries Beautiful and wants her to be our new mum? Robin said We would just have to suck it up like Beth had to when her mum and dad split up. Beth’s mum didn’t die though.

  Zami was mending a hole in the fence where the jackals got in but he came with us on the tyre. When I told him about nearly drowning he said there was a river nearby where boys jump off a ledge into the water and one got eaten by a crocodile. I imagined the boy jumping straight into the crocodile’s open mouth, even though I know it wouldn’t happen like that. If I was drawing a picture of it happening I would draw it like that because it would make a better picture than the crocodile twisting the boy around and around and holding him under water until he drowned, which is what really happens. The true version would be more difficult to draw.

  No one was talking, we were just taking turns swinging backwards and forwards over the giant hole that’s going to be a swimming pool, thinking about what it would feel like to drown and thinking about me and Robin going to different schools instead of the same one.

  You better make sure the school Dad gets for you has a good art teacher, Robin said, which showed he was thinking about the same things as me. Then he said maybe the nicest thing he’s ever said to me in his whole life. He said I was a better drawrer than Beth and a better drawrer than him (it’s true) even though they’re both older than me.

  Even though he won’t let me speak to him at school because he says it’s embarrassing, I like it when I catch sight of him in the corridor. Our new schools would be two different schools instead of the same one. Robin’s would be the one with diving boards.

  The next morning the big living room window was right open so the whole world felt like it was coming into the house. Dad and Robin were doing exercises in their bare chests. Grandad had sweat patches on his shirt even though it wasn’t him doing the exercises. He was looking through the telescope. Nan was sitting on the sofa with her handbag, like she was going somewhere. I said Where are you going but she said Nowhere, I’m just taking in the view.

  I ate my cereal in my room. Robin came and found me when I was drawing family against CatladyUK and waiting for Picasso to guess my suitcase. I drew a label like the ones me and Robin have got on our suitcases with our names on as a clue for you. We were up to thirty-two non-stop right guesses.

  Robin told me to be nice to Beautiful. I said You don’t like her either. True, he said, but I’m doing it for Dad. He started doing press-ups in the middle of my room. I don’t want him to marry her, I said. Robin put his headphones on but I carried on talking. Maybe Mum wasn’t ill, I said, and Robin had to turn his music off to hear me. I said it again – Maybe Mum wasn’t ill. He said What are you talking about, you numpty? If Dad was in love with Beautiful and wanted to marry her, I said, maybe it was murder. That made him angry and he stopped doing his press-ups and snatched the iPad off me. He said why were girls so mental and wasn’t it about time I stopped thinking about you the whole time. Nan heard us rowing and made him give me my iPad back even though she says I’m addicted to it. She made Robin go and have a shower and wash his mouth out with the soap.

  I couldn’t believe he would say that. I’m never going to stop thinking about you. I am like a tree and you are the sky all around. There is nothing apart from you and me and maybe a family of lions that comes to lie in the shade of me when the sun gets too hot.

  In my room I thought about when it was my birthday when I was going to be nine. I wish I had never opened any of my presents because they were the last ones that you ever wrapped up. I had a daydream that you bought all my presents and wrapped them up but then you found Beautiful’s lipstick on Dad’s shirt and you tried to attack him with some scissors but he got them off you and stabbed you instead and the police never found out. It was a daydream but it felt like it could be true. What made it feel real was how Nan and Grandad act when they’re with Dad. You were their daughter so they wouldn’t like to be near someone that murdered you. They have to be nice to him but you can see they’re pretending.

  I wanted to tell them what I knew but when I found them I couldn’t say the words. I asked if we were going out instead. Nan was still sitting on the sofa with her handbag. She said her and Grandad were going with the flow. I couldn’t stand to be sitting with them and everyone not saying what they were thinking so I went to find Zami.

  He was wearing an old T-shirt with holes in it instead of the new football one Dad gave him which made me think he doesn’t support Manchester City or he is a boy who doesn’t like football. Or maybe he is saving it for best. I said to him Why don’t you wear your new football top? He just sort of smiled without saying anything.

  Zami says a child never stops loving its mother because a child chooses its mum out of all the mums in the world so why would we stop loving that special one? Before I was born I must have chosen you so that’s why I will always love you and think about you even when you’re dead.

  IT WOULD BE INDIGO’S birthday soon – they had talked about getting her a bike or a dog, maybe. Wrapping her coat more tightly around her, Karen took Ian’s arm and drew herself into his warmth. Her leaning her weight against him caused them to veer momentarily off the
path. She looked back over her shoulder to see how far behind Robin was trailing. He was sulking because they had insisted he come on a walk with them instead of allowing him to stay at home on the computer. Every now and then there was a flash of orange plastic bag among the trees where his sister moved about gathering sticks and bark for a school project.

  There had been moments in the past when Karen had doubted her capacity for this kind of a life; when she’d doubted that what constituted ‘normal’ standards of happiness could be hers. Medication helped. The ringing in her ears had stopped and she had a feeling of having reached a kind of plateau. From this height she felt safe. She was able to look out on everything that might have caused her anguish before.

  It was possible to be happy. It was possible to walk in the woods with one’s sulky pre-teen son and one’s daughter hopping about collecting debris in a plastic bag.

  ‘So what if we destroy the planet?’ she said, realising too late that Ian hadn’t had the benefit of the thoughts leading up to her statement.

  ‘Er, what? Where did that come from?’ He was laughing.

  Thinking about Indigo’s birthday and planning a family get-together now that she was feeling better, she had been thinking about her parents and how different they were from Ian’s. They could seem so narrow in their outlook compared with his, who always seemed more cosmopolitan. Ian’s parents were separated and living with new partners. They owned second homes and travelled widely. Her own parents lived more modestly. They could appear small-minded and unadventurous but they lived their lives without harming anyone. They were insignificant, in the best possible sense.

  ‘As long as we don’t mess things up too badly it hardly matters how we live, does it?’ she said. ‘Sooner or later something else will come along; someone else will take over. Like when the dinosaurs died out – it will be something else’s turn.’

  She really was feeling more robust.

  ‘This is Robin’s area,’ Ian said. ‘Robin? Robbo?’

  He called to their son, who couldn’t hear them above the music on his iPod.

  ‘He reckons ants and cockroaches would be the only things to survive a nuclear future,’ he said, revealing that Robin had talked to him about his theories too. Karen had shown him public information films on YouTube containing advice about how to make a nuclear shelter for the family out of tables and mattresses. As if hiding under a table could protect anyone against a searing nuclear blast.

  She took Ian’s hand and swung it, jovial, then brought it to her lips and kissed it.

  ‘What was that for?’ he asked, but she couldn’t say. It would be too much like tempting fate to tell him that suddenly everything seemed possible. Instead, she proposed they get Indy a dog for her birthday.

  ‘How about a bike?’ Ian said. ‘Fewer turds to pick up.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘Imagine it – all four of us cycling through the woods – how wholesome would that be?’

  ‘You won’t get Robin on a bike.’

  ‘True.’

  Back home she showed Indigo how to crumble flour, butter and sugar and the basement kitchen, warmed by the heat of the oven, grew fragrant with cinnamon and cloves. Fairy-lights glowed around the misted window that ran with condensation. After dinner she sat at the table reading the Sunday paper while the others were upstairs, elsewhere. Occasionally, she and Ian still talked about travelling or about moving to the country and getting a place with a bigger garden, but at times like these she felt they had found their true home.

  At last, she went to find him.

  ‘Ten more minutes, Robin,’ she said, standing in her son’s bedroom doorway while he twitched in front of a gunsight on a computer screen.

  Indigo was already in bed. ‘I can’t sleep.’ It was her daughter’s way of asking her to stroke her head.

  ‘What, even after that big long walk?’ Karen said, sitting on the bed. She combed her fingers through Indy’s hair and scanned the grubby lilac-painted walls of the room, decorated with years’ worth of her own artwork going right back to dried pasta collages made at nursery. Drawings of mermaids and princesses crowded posters of Disney’s versions cut out from comics. She would be nine on her birthday but she was growing up fast. The previous week she had asked for a Facebook account. Maybe instead of a bike or a dog they should give her a room makeover. Karen’s gaze fell on the dressing-up trunk and, testing herself, she tried to recall its contents: as well as a Cinderella dress and a Snow White outfit and a selection of wands, there were handbags and scarves of her mother’s that had been in Karen’s own dressing-up box when she was a girl. Indigo didn’t dress up any more. Soon it would be time to store the collection in the loft space above the landing, along with Robin’s Lego, ready for the next generation. The idea of her children’s children, and this image of the future skidding and unwinding like cotton off a reel, made her giddy. In the past, this vertiginous sensation could feel unmanageable, as if she stood on the brink of an abyss, teetering, the ground underneath her feet threatening to crumble and fall away. Now, though, as her fingers traced the contours of her daughter’s skull, she felt calm. It wasn’t a false stupor that she had experienced before, where no feeling seemed able to penetrate her surface; it was a true calm. Her foothold felt secure. She had found her place – in the universe, in her life, in this small town, in this cramped little house, sitting on her daughter’s bed. Indigo’s breathing slowed in sleep. She stood up and the bed creaked. She heard a murmured, ‘Night, Mum,’ as she tiptoed out.

  In their bedroom, Ian watched her take off her makeup. ‘I’m mad to cycle on the spot in a sweaty gym next to strangers when I could be thrashing through glorious English woodland with my family,’ he said. ‘Let’s go to Bike World and buy a whole set.’

  She laid her silver bangle on the chest, opened a drawer to fetch a clean nightdress.

  ‘What do you think the collective noun for bikes is?’ he asked. ‘A “zeal”, maybe?’

  ‘An idiocy of bikes,’ she replied.

  Her nightie held the coolness of the pine drawer. Among her underclothes, the foil packet of white tablets. Not for the first time recently she wondered if she might discard it. She glanced at the wicker basket in the corner of the room. ‘Shall I put my cap in?’

  ‘Cor, wouldn’t say no.’

  Foreplay.

  Afterwards, she padded to the bathroom and then back to bed, shivering with cold. She threw away the foil packet. She felt safe and strong. As if hiding under a table could protect anyone against a searing nuclear blast.

  MY SHEETS AND PYJAMAS were wet every morning but I left my pissy things on the bed. At home if it happens, I wait until Robin’s gone then put everything in the washing machine. When I get home from school Nan’s washed and dried it and the bed’s all made again so it looks like nothing’s happened.

  At Dad’s I left the wet sheets on the bed. I didn’t even mind the smell. I liked it. Nan asked if I wanted her to ask Dad if we could put a few things in the wash. I said No thanks and she didn’t know what to say then. She was standing in my room while I was sitting on the floor with my iPad. The wall felt cold against my back. Indigo, she said, I think we should get your sheets and things washed. She said she hadn’t seen a washing machine anywhere but she could take them to Dad if I didn’t want to.

  The wall was nice and cool and I was pretending to be a marble statue of me. I stayed still with my face really serious. Nan said Are you alright Indy but I didn’t answer and I didn’t move. She said my name in a sharp voice so I snapped back into life again. You’re spending too much time on that thing, she said, meaning my iPad, you’re getting addicted.

  She started taking the sheets and everything off. Come along, let’s get this lot sorted, she said, but then she sat on the edge of the bed and I could tell I was going to get a talk. There’s a lot on offer in the new South Africa, she said, A lot of opportunities for people like your dad and not just people like him, either. Everyone. You’ve got to thin
k what you want, though.

  The washing machine was disguised as a cupboard – that’s why Nan couldn’t find it. She told Dad that I sometimes had a bit of trouble at night. I didn’t care that he knew. It’s stress-related, Nan said. Luckily Robin didn’t hear because he had his headphones on. After we found the washing machine I wanted to play the drawing game on my iPad but Nan made me put it away and go outside.

  Even though everyone says there’s so much to do, there’s not much and there’s nowhere to go. It was too hot outside. Dad was on the phone to some customers who were coming on a golfing holiday and everyone else was lying around like they had melted. Even Tonyhog just wanted to lie in the shade with the chickens. I spied on Zami who was with Lindisizwe and the skinny stick man outside the gate. It looked as if they were having an argument but I couldn’t tell because they were talking in a foreign language. The stick man was waving around a bit like as if he was drunk. When Zami saw me he gave me a sad look. Then again his look is always sad.

  I went in Dad’s room and tried on some of the necklaces hanging on the wardrobe door and I took some money I found on the table, even though I knew it was stealing. When I look at the paintings in his house I can’t remember what they were like when I first saw them. I thought they were just blobs of paint then, but now all I can see is the people. I stared and stared at the one in his bedroom, trying to make it blobs again.

  THE BABY WAS TEN DAYS OLD and she still didn’t have a name. For Karen it summed up the chaos they were in.

  ‘She’ll have a name soon enough,’ Ian said. ‘Robin wants to call her Fluff.’