by Jo Cotterill
I lick my lips. The word ‘family’ doesn’t seem quite right to me. ‘There’s only me and my dad.’
Antonia nods. ‘You haven’t got any uncles or aunts or grandparents?’
‘Yes, some grandparents,’ I say, ‘but they live in Australia. I haven’t seen them for years.’
The other lady, Sarah, puts her head on one side. Her eyes are very blue. ‘I hear you like books, Calypso,’ she says.
I am surprised. ‘Yes.’
‘Have you read Matilda?’ she asks. ‘It’s my favourite book.’
I am even more surprised that a grown-up’s favourite book is one written for children. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I really liked it too. But George’s Marvellous Medicine is funnier.’
She laughs. ‘Yes. And The Twits.’
I smile. ‘That’s good too.’
‘What are you reading at the moment?’
‘Holes,’ I tell her. ‘I borrowed it from Mae. It’s really good. We swap books. She lent me The Diary of a Young Girl too.’
All the other people in the room go, ‘Ohh.’
‘A fantastic book,’ says Sarah, nodding. ‘What did you think of it?’
‘I liked it,’ I say. ‘I thought it was very sad. But it didn’t make me cry, not like Mae. She cries at everything.’
Sarah glances briefly at Miss Spotlin, who says, ‘Mae is Calypso’s best friend.’
‘Ah,’ says Sarah. ‘Good.’
Antonia pushes her glasses a bit further up her nose. ‘Calypso,’ she says, ‘we wonder if you could tell us what happened yesterday?’
‘What did you say?’ asks Mae a bit later. We are sitting in the canteen, just the two of us. Everyone else has gone to class, but because I missed lunch break, I’m allowed to sit here with Mae for half an hour and eat the food they saved for me.
I shrug. ‘Just what happened. I think. It’s a bit fuzzy in my head, you know?’
Mae nods. ‘What are they going to do?’
‘Talk to my dad.’ My stomach feels funny about this. ‘They said they were going straight to my house to see him. They spoke to him on the phone before they came here.’ In my pocket, I finger a little square of card. Antonia’s business card, with her phone number on it. ‘Ring if you need me,’ she said kindly. How will I know if I need her? And what can she do anyway?
I’m not sure I want to go home. I wonder if I could just go and stay with Mae for a bit longer. But what would Dad do without me?
‘Do they think …’ Mae hesitates. ‘Do they think there’s something wrong with him?’
‘I don’t know.’
She leaves it at that.
When I get home, Dad isn’t in his library. He’s in the sitting room, which is strange, because we hardly ever use that room. It’s at the front of the house, on the right as you go in through the front door, with a big bay window that matches the one on the other side of the front door – the library window. There’s a tree outside this window too. Even when it’s bare in winter it shadows the house. Our house has a lot of shadows, it seems.
Mae’s mum has come in with me. She offered, and I didn’t have the courage to refuse. There’s a sofa with a green William Morris pattern on it, and a matching armchair, with some big green and white squashy cushions. The curtains are pale green and the walls are cream with a patterned wallpaper. A clock they call a ‘carriage clock’ ticks quietly on the mantelpiece, and two landscape paintings of the Lake District hang either side. The room is dusty, and even though there’s a television, we hardly ever watch it. It’s on right now, though, showing some children’s drama programme about werewolves. The volume is turned down very low, so the voices sound like they’re whispering in the silence.
Mum liked this room. She used to sit in here in the evenings after I’d gone to bed, sketching or reading. Reading the books that used to be behind the shutters in the library.
Sometimes Dad would sit and read in here too, both of them focused intently on their own work. The only sounds would be their regular breathing and the turning of a page. I can remember being told to go and play somewhere else, because my bricks and toy cars and dolls were ‘too noisy’. And then Mum would look at me, and her face would soften, and she would come with me and we’d play trains in the kitchen or do painting in the garden.
She was always better at make-believe than Dad. She would have been so excited about Mae’s Wendy house. She’d have painted murals on the walls and sat inside with us and made up silly poems and giggled. It feels like when she died most of the fun and the craziness went out of our lives. Or the nice kind of craziness did anyway. Now it appears Dad has a crazy all his own.
Dad is standing by the sofa, one hand resting on the back of it, as though he needs its support. He looks very tired.
‘Calypso,’ he says.
‘Hi, Dad.’ My tongue feels heavy in my mouth.
He looks at Mae’s mum.
‘I won’t stay,’ she says. ‘Calypso wanted me to come in with her.’
‘It’s all right,’ he tells her. Then he says to me, ‘I thought we might watch some television.’
‘Oh. All right.’
He sits down in the armchair, and after a moment’s pause I put my bag down on the floor and take off my coat.
‘I suppose …’ I say to Mae’s mum.
She smiles at me in a reassuring way. ‘You’ll be fine. And you’ve got my number, so ring if you need anything.’
Then she goes.
I sit down on the sofa. Dad turns up the volume and we both stare at the TV. Two characters are having an argument about who can be trusted. Then there’s a family scene, where the father interferes with what the kids want to do.
Dad says, ‘Why doesn’t he want them to go outside?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I haven’t seen it before.’
We watch a bit more. Some of the characters turn into wolves. I can almost feel Dad’s eyebrows climbing up his forehead.
‘Well,’ he says as the episode ends, ‘that was … educational.’ Then he mutes the volume and says, ‘Calypso, we need to talk.’
I say nothing. I find it hard to look at him.
‘Some people from social services came to see me today. I gather they went to see you too.’
‘Yes, at school.’
‘What did you think?’
I am puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Did you think they were helpful?’
‘Uh … I guess.’ I feel as though this isn’t a good answer. The TV screen flickers with a trailer for some other programme. ‘They were nice,’ I add lamely.
He nods. ‘They want me to go for counselling.’
‘Counselling?’
‘They think … I need to talk to someone. About your mother.’ He swallows.
I can’t say anything. Is that why he’s in this room – her room? To think about her? Is he sorry he threw out her books?
He goes on, ‘I think maybe they’re right. I have been – internalising. For protection, you know?’
I don’t really. ‘Er …’
‘Maybe it’s about time I talked to someone.’
My throat tightens with tears. Why couldn’t he talk to me? How did everything get this bad?
‘There’ll be another meeting soon,’ he says. ‘All of us in a room together, to talk through the plan.’
‘I know. They told me.’
He leans towards me, resting his elbows on his knees. ‘Calypso, I’m very sorry. About the books – well, about everything. I’ve been … selfish. I haven’t been looking after you very well.’
My hands are tightly clasped in my lap. I should be grateful that he’s talking like this. His words should be reassuring, but I feel frightened. Dad doesn’t say these kinds of things. And he doesn’t use this tone of voice – the tone that says he’s vulnerable, that he’s unsure of himself. What’s more, we’re here, in the sitting room, in Mum’s room, and that feels wrong too.
I feel like I’m standing on the edg
e of a cliff, and I can’t stop myself falling off.
I wish I hadn’t discovered the lemons.
Mae sees beneath my calm exterior. ‘Are you okay?’ she asks.
‘I’m fine.’
‘No, you’re not.’
‘Well, if you knew I wasn’t, why did you ask?’ I snap.
She gives a little sigh. ‘We’re kindred spirits, Calypso, I know you. You can tell me everything that’s in your heart.’
I brush at my eyes. We are in class, creating bar charts. I have drawn my chart already and only need to colour it in.
‘Things are changing,’ I say. ‘I don’t like change.’
‘Bad changing?’ asks Mae, concentrating on her own chart.
‘I don’t know! Maybe.’
‘Everything changes,’ says Mae. ‘Mum says it’s not good for things to stay the same for too long.’
‘Why not?’
She hesitates. ‘I don’t know exactly. But it’s good that things have come out, isn’t it?’
‘Is it? I don’t know what to expect now. Will Dad be different? Am I supposed to be different?’
Mae smiles at me. ‘Don’t be different. I wouldn’t like it!’
Her words are comforting, but then I remember something Antonia mentioned. ‘They want me to go to a young carers’ group.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a group for kids who look after their parents.’
Mae frowns slightly. ‘Look after them how?’
‘Well – I’m not sure. Doing the cooking. Washing up. Making sure their parents eat or get dressed, stuff like that.’
She stares at me properly. ‘Do you have to do that for your dad?’
I hesitate. ‘I mostly make my own supper,’ I admit in a low voice. ‘Dad doesn’t remember to eat because he’s so busy working.’ Doubt grips me. Has he actually been working? Has it all been a pretence? ‘And I put the laundry on, and hang up the clothes. And I make him cups of tea. But I don’t have to get him dressed or anything. I mean, he’s not ill. Not – not in a normal way, anyway.’
She seems unsure of what to say next. ‘You never said. Isn’t it hard, doing all that? I don’t even know how to cook.’
‘Neither do I, really,’ I say. ‘I mostly heat things up in the oven or the microwave. Though I can do things with eggs – scrambled, boiled, you know. And you can use up lots of things in an omelette.’
‘Wow.’ Mae picks up a blue pencil and starts colouring in her bar chart. ‘So you’ll go to meet other kids who do those things too. That might be interesting.’
‘Mmm,’ I say. I’m a bit nervous of meeting new people. But how can I tell them I don’t want to go?
‘What about the books?’ Mae asks.
I know which ones she means. Mum’s books from the library, the ones Dad removed from the shelves and replaced with lemons. They’re behind the shed, he’d said.
I haven’t dared look yet. I can’t. Something about the thought of them there hurts me too much. It’s crazy, because the longer they stay out there, the more damaged they’ll be. But they’ve been out there for months already, haven’t they? The state some of those lemons were in … it would have taken over six months for them to get like that. Maybe a year.
I’m not sure I’m strong enough to face up to that just yet.
I shrug. ‘I’ll do something about them soon.’
Mae bites her lip but says nothing.
Dad is doing more things around the house. I come home one day to find he’s hoovered the bedrooms. I can’t remember the last time he did that. And there’s food in the fridge. It’s not food that’s very good for you – there are a lot of ready meals – but at least I don’t have to wonder what I’m going to eat every day.
He seems a bit lost, though. He drifts from room to room, moving things from one place to another and then back again. Now that he’s finished his book, he doesn’t know what to do with himself. He switched on his computer the other day and I saw there were three new emails from a publisher, offering him some work on new manuscripts. But he just sighed when he saw them and switched the computer off without replying.
When I get home from school, we go to the kitchen together, where he makes me a mug of tea and asks me how school was.
‘Fine,’ I say, and then we sit in an awkward silence for a while.
‘So,’ I say, ‘what have you done today?’
He draws a breath, as though it’s an effort. ‘I cleaned the bathroom,’ he says. ‘But we’d run out of bleach, so I went to the shop. I wasn’t sure what scent to get. I hope you like lavender.’
I shrug. ‘It’s all right.’
He says, ‘Well, it was that or … lemon.’
I bite my lip, staring at my mug of tea and deliberately burning my palms on it.
‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I didn’t mean to say that word. Er … then I came home, and I tried to make some soup. I found a nice recipe for potato and leek. But I forgot that our blender doesn’t work.’
This is all wrong. He doesn’t sound like himself.
‘Were you warm enough?’ he asks me. ‘Because it’s been cold out today, and I thought maybe you’d forgotten your gloves.’
Since when did my father talk about the weather? Who is this person? I don’t know how to talk to him.
I get up abruptly, slopping my tea slightly. ‘I’ve got homework to do,’ I say. ‘I’d better get on with it.’
‘Oh.’ His face falls in disappointment for a moment, before he forces a smile. ‘All right. Chicken and chips for dinner?’
‘Fine.’
I go to my room and stare at the walls. Will I get home one day to discover my house has turned into a regular three-bed, with a proper garden and a dog? Because the person downstairs is a complete stranger, so it wouldn’t surprise me if everything else changed as well.
If things change, will I change too?
If my father is no longer the same person, who am I?
The young carers’ group is held in the local family centre and the heating is on full blast. I am pleased. It’s the second week of November, the evenings are getting colder and I hate being cold. I hesitate in the doorway. Dad dropped me off, but I didn’t want him to come in. He keeps offering to do things with me, but I know it’s because he’s making an effort and that makes me not really believe he wants to, so I feel cross – and that makes me say no when he offers. I know it’s unreasonable of me, but I can’t help it.
There are two adults in the room – a man and a woman – and three kids. There’s a table set out with painting things on it, and in that moment I decide to turn and run. I don’t want to paint. Mum painted.
But it’s too late. The woman has seen me. ‘Hello!’ she says cheerfully, and heads over. ‘Are you Calypso?’
I nod.
She smiles. She’s younger than I expected, and she has long brown hair tied back in a plait. ‘I’m Abby. Come and join us.’
I smile back, and she walks me into the room.
‘This is Raj.’
The man grins at me. He looks a bit older than Abby, but not by much.
‘Hi, Calypso. This probably feels kind of freaky to you at the moment. Don’t worry. Just go with the flow, okay?’
I nod, wondering what on earth that means. Go with what flow? What will we be doing?
‘Not everyone is here yet,’ Abby tells me. ‘We should have another three any minute.’ She introduces me to the three kids who are already there. Lisiella and Krystal are girls, a bit younger than me I think. They look like they’ve known each other for a long time, since one of them is doing the other’s hair. They smile at me in between excited discussions about a pop band I’ve never heard of. The third is a boy, Reece, leaning against the window, thumbs flying over his mobile phone. He doesn’t even look up.
‘Everyone who comes to the group is a carer,’ Abby tells me. ‘When they’re at home, they have to do adult things, like cooking and cleaning and making sure their mum or dad take
s medication. Here they can switch all that off and be kids for an hour.’
‘Oh,’ I say, like I understand, but I’m not sure I do. Do I have to switch part of myself off? How do I do that?
Raj glances at the clock on the wall. ‘We could get started,’ he says, and Abby nods.
‘Might as well. The others will come when they can.’
I feel a bit surprised. They don’t seem cross that the other three kids are late. At school it would matter.
We sit down at the big table, and Abby explains what we’re going to do. ‘We’ve got some wooden photo frames,’ she says, holding one up. ‘And lots of different colours of paint. So you can do whatever design you like – either for yourself, or as a present for someone else. Maybe think about if one of your friends or relatives has a birthday coming up.’
Lisiella and Krystal make excited squeaking noises and immediately reach for brushes and paints. Reece is still looking at his phone.
‘Put that away now, mate,’ Raj tells him gently.
For a moment I think that Reece is going to ignore him, since he doesn’t show any sign that he’s heard. But then he puts his phone in his pocket and stares at the table.
‘I’m no good at painting,’ he says gruffly.
‘Everyone can paint,’ Abby says. ‘You can paint the whole frame blue if you like. It doesn’t have to have patterns on it.’ She smiles at me. ‘Got an idea of what you want to do?’
‘Er …’ I say. I’m not sure that ‘walk out of the door’ is one of the options.
A girl with the longest plait I’ve ever seen comes running in. ‘Sorry! Mum dropped all her tablets on the floor and I had to find them before the cat ate them.’
Lisiella and Krystal giggle, and the girl glares at them.
‘It’s not funny! The last time the cat ate one of her tablets, she had to have her stomach pumped at the vet and it cost ninety quid!’
Lisiella and Krystal immediately sober up.
‘Ooh,’ says Lisiella. ‘That’s criminal.’
‘That’s why my dad says we can’t have any pets,’ says Krystal. ‘They cost way too much.’