by Clare Boyd
I didn’t know how to consolidate the two parts of me. The desire to make time for a pretty nursery clashed with my career ambitions. But hadn’t I been managing the balance of home life and work life relatively well so far? Tiredness and stress were facts of everybody’s life these days, weren’t they? Maybe I could ask to work from home one day a week. Delegate some of the trips abroad? Rosie would be taking her eleven-plus next year. She would grow out of her tantrums, surely, and she would be taking herself off to school on a bus or train, or she might even board.
I stopped. I was getting ahead of myself. Once Richard found out about the baby, he might change his mind. Either way, it would be months before I was officially offered the role. Some upstart from another firm might interview so well they wouldn’t be able to resist them. There was time to think about it, to work out the logistics, to talk to Peter about it. The train carriage shot through a tunnel and I shut down my ruminations, cutting them off like the tunnel had cut my view beyond the window.
* * *
I climbed the hill home without the usual dread. The paper-light dress had an invisible glow of love and contrition.
I checked the time. A quarter to eight, much later than usual due to the quarterly budget meeting. Harriet, the nanny, would be telling the children to brush their teeth and get into bed ready for story-time with Mummy.
‘Helloooo-ooh!’ I called up the stairs.
Noah came rushing at me, full of chatter.
Rosie was at the top of the stairs with a toothbrush in her mouth and her hip cocked to the side. ‘Hi Mum,’ she mumbled.
‘Don’t drop toothpaste on the carpet, Rosie!’ I cried, immediately wanting to push the words back into my mouth and replace them with, ‘Hello, darling! How was your day?’
‘Hi,’ Harriet said, sauntering out of Noah’s room, folding one of his school jumpers. Her wide hips were swaying, and her full, permanently dry lips were humming. She was a rare combination of efficiency and calm. The children never ruffled her, or certainly never in front of me. Her voice remained at a level pitch, always. I envied her for it. Her bright red hair was a wonder to Noah, and he would twirl it in his fingers when she cuddled him. I hated watching it. He never did that to me. There were times when I wished she would get pregnant with her good-for-nothing boyfriend, and leave us to find someone they weren’t so attached to. But then, of course, I feared it more than wanted it.
‘How’ve they been?’
Before she answered, she followed me down the stairs and sat down next to a basket of clean clothes, folding as she spoke.
‘All good. We had a run around on the rec for an hour after school and we saw Charlotte there,’ Harriet said, wrinkling her nose.
‘Rosie’s going to her birthday party this weekend.’
‘She’s very rude.’
I looked at my watch, replying distractedly. ‘Hmmm, yes, her mum spoils her I think... You can pop off a little early if you like?’
Usually I would ask Harriet to detail everything both Rosie and Noah had said, done and eaten. But tonight, I was impatient with her to leave so that I could give Rosie her present.
Harriet dutifully disappeared after saying goodbye to Rosie and Noah.
And I carried the dress up the stairs.
First, I said goodnight to Noah. Then I peered around Rosie’s door. She was reading quietly in bed, just as she had been asked to do. I had the urge to drag Mira Entwistle from her horrible green kitchen and show her how contented Rosie could be. Maybe I should fling the window wide open so that Mira could eavesdrop on Rosie’s giggles when she sees her new party dress.
‘I’ve got something for you,’ I said, coming in. Her face lit up.
I sat on her bed and handed her the bag. ‘It’s for Charlotte’s party.’
‘Oh!’ she cried, squeezing her cheeks together in excitement, staring at the bag.
‘Go on, open it.’
Laying the tissue paper package on the bed, she knelt down to open it.
I watched every tiny twitch on her face as she unfolded the sundress. She looked at it and didn’t say a word. Was she simply speechless and overwhelmed?
‘It’s lovely,’ she said, and folded it back into the tissue paper.
‘Don’t you want to try it on?’
‘I’ll try it on tomorrow,’ she said.
My heart wanted to break.
‘Don’t you like it, sweetheart?’
‘It’s lovely, Mummy, I love it,’ she said, reaching her arms around me for a polite hug. ‘Thank you so much.’ She then moved her hand over my pregnant belly. ‘When is it going to kick, Mummy?’
‘Not for another couple of months probably.’
Sometimes, it was easier to think about the baby in the abstract, as an unformed embryo, but when I imagined its legs and arms kicking, a flutter of panic danced through my chest. This baby was going to be real. It was going to need much more than a few designer Babygros and a pretty cot. We would be a family of five. Peter and I would be outnumbered. Why, again, had we thought we could handle another one?
‘Did I kick a lot?’
‘You kicked so much I am still black and blue inside,’ I laughed.
She giggled. She loved hearing about being inside me, and about her birth. Her wonder reminded me of the miracle and privilege of being pregnant. We would handle the next one, just as we handled the other two. We would be okay. Third babies always slotted into the established family unit just fine. It was going to be fine.
‘There are some other bits and bobs in the bag,’ I said, hopefully.
She looked into the bag gingerly. When she brought out the silver slip-ons, bag and perfume, she seemed genuinely enthralled.
‘Look!’ she cried, hanging the bag over her pyjamas and slipping into her shoes. She paraded around in them pretending to be a fashion model. How I wished I had bought the blue dress. The yellow dress seemed babyish to me now that I saw Rosie in front of me, at ten years old, so tall, and only a few years away from puberty. I’d got it wrong. I had got her wrong.
I read the words of her bedtime book without engaging with them. I couldn’t shift the disappointment.
‘I’m sorry you don’t like the dress,’ I said when I kissed her goodnight.
‘I love it, Mummy, I really, really do!’ she said.
I wanted to believe her. ‘You’ll wear it to Charlotte’s party then?’
There was a pause as she snuggled down with her bear.
‘It’s a bowling party Mummy,’ she said, almost in a whisper.
The baby seemed to flip inside my belly, sending waves of sickness through me. A bowling party? Why the hell hadn’t I known?
‘Oh. No. Sorry,’ I said, unable to offer more. I was mortified.
‘It’s okay, Mummy,’ she said and she stroked my hand.
A ten-year-old, trying to reassure her mother. It was pitiful. And there, Mira seemed to be in the room with us again, watching me fail, and sneering at me for being utterly useless.
Chapter Eight
TOP SECRET
Dear Mummy,
I am so sad. I am the saddest girl in the whole wide world. I made you so sad and now I am so sad. I wish I liked the dress. It is very posh.
INVISIBLE INK ALERT: It was HORRIBLE, BABYISH, SILLY, STUPID, UGLY DRESS. I HATE IT. YUCK. If I wore that dress Charlotte would laugh at me, especially at a bowling party. How embarrassing. I would totally die.
The silver shoes and handbag are SICK (that means AWESOME). I don’t like them... I LOVE THEM. I’ll wear them with my skinny jeans and my black super sparkly bomber jacket that Auntie Jacks gave me for my birthday. You HATE, HATE, HATE that jacket. You have different taste to me. I think that’s okay, but you don’t. I hope you let me wear it. I will DIE if you don’t. Maybe I’ll scream so that Mrs E from next door comes over again. JUST JOKING.
INVISIBLE INK ALERT: Or am I joking?!!!!!!!!
I was listening to you and daddy talk about her after she left. You said she w
as a Nosey Parker. Two in the swear box mummy! She used to be very kind to send me those YUM SCRUM biscuits in the blue bucket. I loved the blue bucket. Maybe I’ll start it up again. But I don’t really want her to come over again. I’m a bit embarrassed that she heard me screaming. I wish I could stop myself. I wish I could delete the bad thoughts from my brain. Noah calls me pea-brain, but I have a massive brain filled with hundreds and thousands and a million-gazillion hundred worries. How do I make them stop?
Answers on a postcard! Daddy always says that. Silly daddy.
Night, night!
Five more sleeps until Charlotte’s party.
Love,
Rosie
P.S. Please don’t make me wear the dress to Charlotte’s party. I am worried you will because it probably cost a gazillion pounds.
Chapter Nine
The clouds had gathered over the sun and the dark green wallpaper sucked up what little light there was left. Mira clicked on the lamp. The yellow glow seemed only to add to the murky atmosphere.
Deidre cackled as she flicked through the old photographs. From the moment Mira had allowed Deidre to rip into the Tesco bags, she realised it had been a mistake to ask her to help sort them through. Mira had wanted the moral support. It had seemed logical to enlist her sister, who was the only other person alive who had been there throughout her childhood. Perversely, this turned out to be exactly why she was the worst person for the job. Deidre had never helped her with anything.
Her laughter throbbed in Mira’s head like the onset of a migraine. It rose, morphing into high-pitched screeching.
‘Where’s that screaming coming from?’ Deidre said absent-mindedly, rustling around for another photograph.
Realising that her sister’s laughing and the screeching were separate, Mira dropped the photograph she was holding and shot up from the dining room table.
The searing noise was definitely coming from a child’s lungs.
‘Next door. We hear it all the time.’
‘Sounds like you as a child,’ Deidre snorted.
Mira wanted to take her sister’s pearls and hang her up by the light-fitting with them. If her sister had been privy to the endless nights of Rosie’s distressing cries from next door, she would not be flippant. Neither had Deidre been part of the agonising debates that she and Barry had been having about Rosie’s well-being, how they had talked in circles, discussing the various reasons to be concerned, analysing what they knew of the Bradleys, elaborating on and guessing about what they didn’t know. Although their discussions would always end the same. Barry would persuade Mira that she did not have enough evidence to go to PC Yorke. ‘Listen, she’s not screaming tonight,’ he had said each time, and Mira would stop moving in her bath and strain to hear noises from next door, only to hear nothing, which she should have been happy about.
‘I’m just going to check something,’ Mira said, abandoning her sister and the photographs.
Two at a time up the stairs, straight to her bedroom window, which had views out of the front of the house. She stood behind the curtain and had a diagonal view out, over the hedge, and down to the Bradleys’ front driveway.
The electric gates were closing. Gemma was violently pulling Rosie by the arm across the gravel from their car to the front door. Noah jogged after them wailing.
‘You’re hurting me, Mummy!’ Rosie yelled before their front door was slammed.
Mira’s pulse raced as she slowly, thoughtfully descended back downstairs. Her mind was filled with abhorrent imaginings.
The dining room was stuffy, but she couldn’t open a window for fear of hearing more next door.
There was hardly enough room to squeeze past her sister at the table to sit down. Barry’s mum had left them the mahogany table with the house and it was too big for the room. Mira fantasised about slicing it up with a chainsaw.
‘Gosh, what a mess,’ Deidre said, dropping her zany red reading glasses from her head to her nose. She was fatter than ever. Her double-chin slanted down to her cleavage, the flesh bulging either side of the throttling string of pearls. She wore a purple nylon shirt that she would probably have liked to be silk. Mira had never owned anything silk and had no desire to.
‘I’m going to sort them out and put them in here,’ Mira said, sliding her hand over the smooth leather of the album.
Deidre ripped open the second bag. Her breathing had grown heavier, almost like snuffling.
‘Oh my God, look at Dad’s hair!’ she guffawed.
Mira wanted to tell Deidre to leave them alone, or to snatch the bag out of her sister’s fat hands.
Their father’s hair was long to his shoulders, lank and greasy, just like his arms that hung from the sleeves of his towelling T-shirt.
‘That was the fashion back then,’ Mira said defensively.
When they were little, they would sit next to each other like this to eat tea, and their mother used to push them into the table too tightly. Mira had that same sense of breathlessness now.
She presented another photograph to Deidre, like a policewoman presenting the face of a suspect to a witness. ‘Which one was this? He’s in loads of photos. He must’ve been around more than the others.’
‘Oh, shit a brick,’ Deidre said. ‘I’d forgotten about him.’
‘He was one of Mum’s boyfriends, wasn’t he?’
‘He was the one who came round a lot after Dad left. What was his name? He was Irish. Not Declan. Donagh? He was all right, I seem to remember.’
‘Out of a very bad lot.’ Mira remembered a steady flow of different men, but their faces were as memorable to her as those she saw in the supermarket every week.
‘Hmmm,’ Deidre said.
‘So, if Dad left when I was eight, that means it was probably 1975,’ Mira said, writing the date and name clearly on the back.
‘You’re not going to put him in the family album are you?’
‘No, of course not,’ Mira snapped, knowing that her sister was probably joking, but unable to laugh with her. ‘I just wanted to be sure he wasn’t some long-lost uncle or something, that’s all.’
Deidre stopped, picked up a photograph that had slid from the second bag and gasped. ‘Oh my God. There’s me and...’
Deidre stopped.
Mira turned cold. She didn’t know if she could look. Her sight blurred.
The white reflection across the glossy print floated in front of Mira’s eyes, while the colours in the photograph itself were lost: the red of his jacket, the blue of Deidre’s jeans, the brown of Mira’s dress.
She snatched the photograph from Deidre and flipped it over quickly without looking at the front. But the images of the three of them seeped through, into her fingertips, rolling up into her head, like a ball with a message inside, cracked open to reveal backlit cut-outs of her sister in the crook of a boy’s arm. Shadow faces. Banter. Nasty. Bad feelings. ‘Come on, Mira. Come in for the shot.’ Craig’s voice. Mira staring at the white-painted blades of grass near her face, the shoes of the girl who held the camera crushing them. She looked up to her sister. Blinded by the sun. Her arm yanked by Craig, his hand tight on her upper arm. ‘Come in for a cuddle,’ hot in her ear. She had tugged at the back of her dress to hide her knickers. The brown flowers had faded after so many washes.
Whining. ‘Mira hates photos.’ Deidre’s hip cocked to one side. Her new pencil skirt.
‘What’s wrong, scared you’ll be shown up?’
Mira, being dragged in front of the camera, clutched at his side. Cheap aftershave, days old. Deidre’s evil eyes, and her cackle.
‘Say cheeeese!’ the faceless photographer had called out.
The unnecessary flash, red-eye, and Craig’s hand was under Mira’s dress, squeezing her buttock. The shock. Like a bucket of cold water over her head. Her muscles froze, dumb-founded.
The hand was gone. Craig and Deidre, the perfect boyfriend and girlfriend, were kissing with tongues. His filthy hand was now under her sister’s denim jacket.
A sly wink at Mira over Deidre’s shoulder.
‘Are you still with us, Mira?’ Deidre warbled.
‘What?’ Mira blinked, clearing her vision. The words at the nib of her pen were incomplete. She finished the information: 1981. Mira, 14, Deidre, 16, Craig Baxter.
Another photograph was in her sister’s hand.
‘Did you ever take that dress off?’ Deidre continued, glued to the next picture.
‘Mum wouldn’t buy me a new one.’ The bitterness contorted her face.
Mira remembered the small messy stitches in the straps where she had extended them at the back, and how the bodice had flattened her growing breasts.
‘You had a paper round, didn’t you?’
As Deidre well knew, their mother had used Mira’s paper round money for cigarettes and whiskey. Mira didn’t bother reminding her, feeling unable to stomach Deidre’s challenge. The inevitability of her loyalty to their dead mother was tiresome. Unless Deidre really had forgotten in the way that Mira herself had forgotten so much.
‘Another cup of tea?’ Mira said, and moved out of the room, leaving Deidre talking to the photographs.
Mira had become weary of looking back. Please, no more faces she could not name. No more afterthoughts of a past she could not recall. Why, again, had she wanted to open those bags?
As she stood by the kettle, the screaming next door was ringing in the background like a distant alarm, waxing and waning on the wind. She didn’t know how long she could bear to listen to it.
Chapter Ten
‘Can you show me how to get more jewels, Rosie?’ Noah asked.
‘Sure.’
The jolly bleep of the game filled the car as I drove them home from the bowling alley. I was grateful for five minutes of peace.
But then the chit-chat over the gaming turned nasty.
‘No, not like that.’
‘Give it to me, it’s mine.’
