The canary’s puffed up into a ball in his cage. Outside, Lorrie’s raking leaves. Toby keeps mussing up the pile, just to do her head in. I wave and he waves back. Lorrie ducks behind the shed.
‘Lorrie doesn’t pop over so much any more.’ Ma peers over my shoulder. ‘Have you had a falling-out?’
‘Not exactly,’ I say.
It’s not as simple as falling out. Me and Lorrie don’t have to fall out. We never really fell in. It’s pointless telling Ma. She ain’t listening. She’s dangling the rabbit in front of me and putting on her cutesy voice like a cartoon before the matinee.
‘Hello missy, I want a cuddle with my favourite girl.’
She’s making that lip-smacking sound like if rabbits could talk, they’d be pondering the joys of carrots all day long.
‘Don’t worry,’ Ma says, in her own voice again. ‘I’ll smooth everything over with Lorrie. I’ll go have a chat with her mother. I’ve got a fresh batch of kitchenware anyway. I have these lovely little pots for storing egg mayonnaise.’ She pushes the rabbit towards me.
‘Go on, take him. You know you want to.’
I know she won’t go until she gets what she wants. She’ll crawl in the attic and drag out Da’s letters from the war. ‘He was always so hungry,’ she’ll say. ‘I didn’t think the pantry could ever have enough to fill him when he came home.’ She’ll tell me about swapping her wedding dress for two rabbits. That became four, that became ten. Peace of mind she could hold in her arms for a while. I don’t want to hear about his ribs ever again.
Whenever she tells me about Da, she’s got this habit of stroking her wrist, like she’s feeling the bones. ‘He was so small, I could reach all the way around him and grip my own elbows.’ I can’t stand to see her showing me, her arms out in front of her. Holding on to nothing.
I stroke Mr Churchill and she shuts up. The fur’s silky and cool. He’s got this dip in his skull where my finger fits just right. It’s so warm there and soft. Damn rabbit. And Ma, war and friends. I’m too shattered to think about it all.
‘Don’t worry about anything,’ she’s saying. ‘I’ll make everything right.’
The rabbit’s dangling in front of me. I breathe in the straw on its huge fluffy feet, and the furry scent that reminds me of sleep. I hold him so close I can feel his tiny heart beat through my fingers. His nose twitching on my lips. Ma whispers ‘That’s my girl’, and slips her arm around me, holding me up as I droop and shuffle back to bed.
Lorrie
Bunny arrived with pie and a smile. The cottage was in chaos. The cabinets lay in splinters by the door. The freshly plastered walls left a rosy dust on our clothes. Grumps saw Bunny, mumbled, ‘fucking hell’, and ducked out the back door. He returned to the distillery with a sandwich and the sense of having avoided something painful. For forty years, his wife dealt with the pleasantries to neighbours. In company, he did the listening, she did the talking. It worked. When she passed away, she left him all listening and never quite knowing what to say.
Bunny fussed with Sylvie’s hair and curled a strand behind her ear.
‘Don’t slouch,’ she hissed, turning to beam at my mother opening the door. ‘Hello, I thought it was time I came over to officially introduce myself,’ she said. ‘Sylvie, get your hair out of your mouth. Girls!’
She offered a handshake at the sort of angle Victorian ladies may present a hand to be kissed, balancing a pie in the other.
‘Come in,’ Mum said. ‘Sorry about the mess.’
If the words on headstones were the phrases people spoke the most in their lives I’m sorry about the mess would be carved on hers. I’m sorry I’m here would be on Sylvie’s. I wasn’t sure what mine would be yet.
An Evaluation of my Mother
Nose: The clothes she wears have the slightest aroma of the dust she sweeps around the kitchen, spilled sugar, beeswax and coffee. Her breath has a hint of hops and ice cream, remnants of the small treats she dangles to get herself through the day. ‘As soon as I finish cleaning the kitchen, painting this wall, hanging the laundry out… I’m going to sit still for fifteen minutes.’ She is one of those women who must always have something in her hands. It’s the only way she can stop them clearing something away.
Palate: The bread she bakes that only rises fifty per cent of the time, strands of cotton she sucks and threads through a needle to sew on all our buttons. Her little finger tastes of whisky. She dips it into a shot glass at the distillery on bottling days, refusing to drink during daylight. It always reminds her of being a child, she says, the marmalade her mother made for everyone at Christmas, a splash of whisky in a jar bright as fire.
Finish: Freckled in summer, the weather brings out chestnut stripes in her hair. Left to her own devices, she’d never wear shoes. She wants her feet and legs bare. Whenever she hears a car or footsteps outside, she dashes to the mirror before anyone comes in. Bunny knocks and she slips on her shoes and runs her hands over her hair, doing her best to appear formal and neat and how she thinks a woman is supposed to be.
Overall: Mother with a dash of girl thrown in that no amount of herringbone skirts, sensible trousers or cable-knit jumpers can disguise.
Bunny wiped the chair with a handkerchief and sat. The kettle boiled while the pair chatted about the weather, the Quaker family who lived in Bunny’s house before my mother left home (‘beautiful people, faces plain as white bread’) and me being a lovely girl. I didn’t want to be lovely. I wanted them to leave.
‘Congratulations on your engagement,’ Mum said. ‘It must have been difficult, being on your own.’
Bunny swatted away sympathy faster than flies from a pie.
‘It could have been worse. I wasn’t alone. I have Sylvie.’
She gave Sylvie a look I hadn’t seen on her before. It gave the impression the girl was something other than a nuisance who kept too much junk in her pockets (feathers she found, interestingly shaped stones, the small skull of a bird picked clean by the gulls).
‘I didn’t think we could have children,’ Bunny said. ‘Sylvie was our miracle.’
‘Miracle’ was Bunny’s favourite word. Miracle Tile Cleaner, Miracle Scissors that claim to cut a coin in half, the Miracle Apple Peeler. The Miracle Boots that saved her husband’s life.
I’d heard the story before, but she told it again. It was amazing Sylvie was born. John Tyler was almost killed in the war. Gunfire pelted his squad. They ran for cover, only finding the bullet that hit him later. He found it lodged in his boots, knotted by the laces and hung over his shoulder.
‘If it wasn’t for the steel plate in the soles he’d have died years before Sylvie was born. She wouldn’t be here at all,’ Bunny said. Three years later he’d died anyway, searching the loft for mousetraps, he coughed until something in his head popped. As far as miracles go, I thought it was shoddy.
Bunny dusted sugar off her cup and turned her attention to the kitchen.
‘Will you have that pie after supper?’ She nodded at the baking on the table.
‘Would you like a slice now?’ My mother’s knife hovered.
‘Heavens, no, by the time I’ve made something I’m sick of the sight of it! That’s the one thing no one admits about cooking. It only tastes good when someone else did it.’
‘Well, it was kind of you to bring it anyway. As you can see, we have our work cut out for us.’
They looked at the spaces where the cabinets had been. The carpenter’s horse was braced for their replacements. The pie was blackberry with frosty sugared pastry.
‘How long ago do you think I baked this?’ Bunny asked.
‘This morning?’
‘Yesterday, yet it’s still so fresh. Did you know there’s more bacteria in your kitchen than in a dog’s mouth? It’s up to you to fight germs and provide your family with the best. You can be confident storing food in plastic, even with leftovers. The pots come in any size you could imagine…’
Bunny’s crusade again
st stale crusts and limp lettuce began. She pulled out a brochure.
‘Why don’t you go play with your friend, Lorrie?’ My mother’s eyes said: It’s too late for me, go, save yourself. I winced at her use of the word ‘friend’, it was a leash around my neck, tying me to Sylvie. I’d rather have been somewhere else.
The dust drifted on the stairs, the air full of fibres. Another shoal of silverfish had been evicted last week. I opened my door and sneezed.
‘This is it, my bedroom. They haven’t decorated yet.’
I sniffed and sneezed again.
‘I keep wondering if there are more dead things under the floor.’
Sylvie stroked the roses on the wall, a patch of colour on the flowers so much brighter than the others. I’d taken down the pictures my mother pinned up as a child. They were all circus scenes: elephants, ballerinas dancing on horses, and women with lions. I kept only the photo I found under the floor. It was my mother at sixteen, piggybacking a young man with coal-black hair. His hands circled her ankles, holding her firm. Her arms looped around his neck, casual as a sweater. They were grinning. They were grinning so much that once the photo was taken they’d probably have fallen into a heap laughing. I wanted to ask about it, but somehow I never quite got around to it. My mother always had so much to clean and unpack there was never room to drag out the life she’d lived before I was born.
Sylvie stroked a tea chest labelled ‘Bits and Bobs’. I sneezed again.
‘You’ve got allergies? Germs?’ she said. ‘You know what your problem is? You don’t have enough Tupperware. Did you know there are more germs in your bed than a cat’s arse?’
She grinned a wicked little grin, a glimpse of a whole other side to her she’d never showed me before. If she was always like that, I thought, we’d get on. It was gone in a flash.
‘What shall we do? I’ve got roller skates…’
I glanced towards the clouds darkening fast as a bruise.
‘It’s going to rain. I’ve got board games somewhere.’
I sliced some sticky tape off a box and tossed Snakes and Ladders onto the bed. ‘Do you like the guy your mother’s marrying?’ I asked.
‘Seth? I suppose so. He’s alright,’ Sylvie said.
This was a glowing review, ‘they’re alright’ was the most glowing review I’d heard anyone on the island give anyone. Compliments were spat out as reluctantly as saying the weather looked fine; acknowledging anything was OK was tempting fate. As soon as anyone said something was great, it could only get worse. Seth deserved the praise, Sylvie said, because he let her put her rag doll in a wheelbarrow when she was little. He didn’t care when she knocked over a display of buckets and crashed into a customer buying a snow shovel. She could wheel that barrow up and down all she wanted. It didn’t bother him at all. It added laughter to the store. He could stand more.
‘I love the way he is with Ma,’ Sylvie said. ‘She sort of turns into someone else when he comes in, someone softer. When she’s complaining about me being shy at dinner, or sucking my knuckles, he just rolls his eyes. Let the girl be. The stiller the water, the deeper the river, he says. Better to say little than a whole load of nothing.’
‘He says that to Bunny?!’
Sylvie laughed.
‘Aye, all the time. He does this funny wee wink when she’s giving me grief, like he’s on my side, and he can see Ma’s annoying and love her at the same time. It’s more bearable living with her when he’s around, but…’ Sylvie slid a counter up a ladder. ‘I’m worried that…’
Bunny’s voice sing-songed upstairs.
‘Come on, Sylvie, we should make a move. I’ve got a kitchen gadget demonstration at the Women’s Institute. I want you to come and peel tatties the wrong way while I show them mashed potato will never be the same again.’
Bunny and Sylvie left. I sat with my mother opening and closing the storage pot she had bought. There was nowhere to store it. It was too small to hold anything that could fill anyone up.
‘I’m not sure what to put in it,’ my mother said.
It would happen the same way as the dentists. Every so often, that time came again when we had to put on a scarf, sail to the mainland and return with numb jaws and a tooth in our pocket. Just as inevitably, every so often Bunny would arrive with a container full of gingerbread and a brochure, leaving my mother with a sweet taste in her mouth and no change in her purse. ‘She got me again,’ she’d say. ‘I don’t know how she does it! I never use a thing I buy off her.’
The women were courteous without ever truly liking each other. They swapped recipes and magazines, Bunny grumbling about flour crusted to the pages whenever a cookbook was returned, my mother noting Bunny had snipped out the contest to win a fridge out of Woman’s Own. We weren’t country people. In the city, it was easy to like and dislike our neighbours. We liked the man who scraped dandelions out of the footpath, and disliked the woman who never picked up after her Jack Russell, and took in parcels for both. Everyone could be smiled at and waved away to their own lives with a ‘lovely morning’ or a ‘nice weather for ducks’. It wasn’t so simple on the island. My mother had to get used to jam-making competitions, being ambushed by pies and everyone knowing everyone’s business. I had to live with the realisation Sylvie and I would be friends. It was impossible not to be.
I’d probably have drifted away from Robin Macleod anyway, because of spit. Robin had just seen a film where some boys became blood brothers, and since neither of us were about to cut our hands, she said we could do it with spit. I looked at her palm covered with a puddle of bubbles, waiting to be pressed against mine. I lowered my head over her hand and found my mouth dry. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I suggested we make a friendship bracelet instead.
‘You’re the same as everyone else,’ she said. ‘A girly girl. Scared to do anything in case you get dirty.’
Robin flipped me the Vs and stormed off. I settled on Sylvie. Compared to her I always looked brave. She made me look like I could do anything.
5th November 1957
I can hear everything changing. The furniture shuffling all over the place. The sofa and the armchair pushing their backs to the wall. Another sofa squeezes into the lounge and our footsteps rustle, the floor covered in paper. Ma’s sewing room’s getting a lick of blue paint to make it fit for a boy. It won’t be long until Seth moves in with his son, Zach. Ma can’t stop moving. All day and night she scurries around, hiding anything too girly like kryptonite that will kill a lad on sight.
The button box must go. The lacy pillows and all. The ornaments. Even those china milkmaids she loves rearranging on the dresser cower in the loft, folded in paper like lasses having a kip.
Ma stomps the bronze boots on my dresser. Thud! It doesn’t feel right letting them kick about downstairs when another fella’s shoes are on the mat. She’s taken Our Lady off the shelf too, and plonks it down with the Bible we keep by the bog.
‘It’s not that Seth hates church,’ she says. ‘He has nothing against Our Lady. He just doesn’t want to feel her staring at him all day. Religion’s like cabbage, he says, he knows a bit of it’s good for him, but he doesn’t want it for every meal.’
Ma laughs, all love and nerves and fearty, scared to death of letting folks into our life. It’s been just me and her for so long we dunno how to be with anyone else. ‘You know, things are going to be different around here,’ she keeps saying.
The place is reeking of the smoked fish in the soup she’s got bubbling downstairs. She’s wearing camellia perfume. And she’s achieved those feathery flicks in her hair. I know Seth’s gonna arrive any minute because she looks like a catalogue woman.
‘I’m not sure it’s sensible to get married,’ she says, ‘but…’
I know what the but is… she gets lonely. The kind of lonely no amount of face masks or beating me at dominoes can cure.
‘Do you think it’s a mistake?’ she says. ‘He’s a sweet man.’
‘I just want you to be happy,’ I say. ‘It’ll be alright.’
I dunno if it will be, but it’s what she wants to hear. It’s not that much of a shock she’s engaged. I reckon nothing’s been the same since the Sausage Wizard arrived and she did a meat-grinding demonstration outside the hardware store. I sorta knew this day would happen. It’s been coming for years. And it still feels dead sudden now it’s finally here.
Ma strokes my hair. Quietly, and knowing the quiet is as frail as china with cracks. Seth’s already here. Knock knock knocking. He’s lunging through the door with a massive stack of records slipping and sliding out of his arms. His toolbox is already on the floor in the living room. By the time they get married we’ll have enough shelves for Nat King Cole.
‘Bunny? Can I shift this table?’ he calls.
‘I’m coming!’
Ma skips towards his voice like a lassie who hasn’t skipped for a year.
‘Don’t move anything without me! I know where everything should go!’
She pauses at the door wanting to say more, but she can’t. The place is too full. Full of fish stink, and screwdrivers, and wrenches and screws, and her own voice telling her man to be careful where he leaves his tools. It’s jam-packed with the life she wants to live. I reckon I know what she wants to say anyway. Everything will be different soon. When the lads come, we’ve got to be careful about certain things. There are eyes and ears everywhere.
Lorrie
Bunny married on a Saturday in spring. The parachute strung across the garden to provide an awning billowed. The stocks she’d planted crawled with bees. Every woman who owned a kitchen gadget or man who’d bought a hammer within a five-mile radius attended in their squeakiest shoes. ‘There’s no need for a fuss at my age,’ Bunny would say, setting about her plans with military precision. The plans went on for months, with more guests being added to the list every day. Seth kept inviting his customers to ‘pop in’ to the reception: ‘No need to bother with church first, if it’s not your sort of thing. Just come for a bite to eat and to raise a glass.’ It was a hell of a month for business. Seth’s customers left with screws and promises of cake almost as good as a discount. Bunny smacked his arm in the post office. ‘There you go, inviting the world and his dog! Where will we put everyone? You’d better set to work on my lawn, mister. You’ve invited more than will fit in the house!’
Something Like Breathing Page 4
