by Jo Cotterill
‘Come and sit down,’ says Abby, ‘and meet Calypso. Calypso, this is Lina.’
Lina says hi to me and then sits down at the table. ‘What are we doing?’
Over the next twenty minutes, I paint my photo frame. Two more boys join us – Tyler, and someone whose name I don’t catch. They do a lot of play-fighting and tip over two of the paint pots, which annoys Krystal. ‘Now I’ll have to wash this!’ she exclaims, staring at her skirt, which has a big red splodge on it. ‘And it won’t be dry by tomorrow! You idiots!’ They apologise, and Abby promises to help Krystal remove the paint once it’s dried.
I choose yellow for my frame, and paint the whole thing the same colour, filling in any imperfections in the wood with extra dabs of paint. There’s glitter too, and I sprinkle gold over the yellow as evenly as I can.
‘That looks lovely,’ says Abby. ‘Like sunshine or happiness.’
I freeze. Happiness – my mother’s painting, the one that was in the exhibition at the National Gallery. The picture that’s all yellow with glitter sprinkles on it. I feel cold all over. I didn’t even realise that’s what I was doing.
‘I love painting, don’t you?’ asks Lisiella cheerfully.
I realise she’s talking to me. ‘Er,’ I say. ‘It’s all right. I prefer reading.’
Lisiella looks sceptical. ‘Reading?’ she echoes. ‘You like it?’
‘Yes. Why, don’t you?’
She shakes her head. ‘What’s it for?’
I am nonplussed. No one has ever asked me this question before. What is reading for?
Abby is looking at me. I wonder if she knows how to answer, but she doesn’t say anything. Instead she gives me an encouraging smile.
I say to Lisiella, ‘Reading is for everything. You can go places you can’t in real life. You can be people you’re not. You can do things you wouldn’t be allowed to do.’
Lisiella stares very hard at her picture frame. ‘I don’t need reading for any of that stuff,’ she says. ‘I go round to my friend’s house and play on her DS.’
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘I’ve never done that.’
‘You’ve never played on a DS?’ says Lisiella. She sounds disbelieving.
‘No.’
‘What about an Xbox?’
‘No.’
‘A Wii?’
I feel a bit nervous. I’m not really sure what one of those is. It sounds like a made-up name. Is she testing me? Will she laugh if I say the wrong thing? ‘I haven’t played any video-game … things,’ I say.
Now everyone else around the table is looking at me, amazed.
‘You’re joking,’ says Reece.
‘You must have played something,’ says Krystal. ‘Everyone’s played something.’
‘I’ve played games on computer,’ I say desperately. I have, but only the ones at school that are educational.
The others shake their heads.
‘They’re rubbish,’ declares Reece. ‘You should play Grand Theft Auto.’
Attention immediately switches. Krystal demands to know when she can come round to his house and have a go, and Lisiella shouts that no one should be playing it because it’s too violent and anyway he’s too young. Lina says she’s heard that video games make people violent and Reece snorts and says he’s never killed anyone so she’s talking rubbish.
I look down at my hands, seeing dabs of yellow paint on my fingers, and feel hot and cold. Am I really so different from everyone else, even here? Christopher has a tablet thing that he plays games on, but Mae and I are always too busy writing our stories or reading books. Have I missed out on something absolutely vital to my life?
Raj clears his throat. ‘I think that’s enough of that,’ he says. ‘Time to chat.’
The others, still arguing over video games, get up and bring their chairs into a space on the other side of the room, forming a circle. I do the same, unsure.
‘Don’t be alarmed,’ Abby tells me. ‘We always have a bit of circle time. It helps to share our worries and our problems with people who understand.’ She sees my face. ‘You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to.’
I breathe out in relief.
Lina goes first. ‘I took Mum back to see the consultant yesterday. He wants to try her on these new drugs, which might help with her muscle spasms. They’ve got worse since the last relapse. She keeps knocking stuff over, and dropping things because she can’t grip them properly. I keep having to clear up after her.’ She heaves a big sigh. ‘But hopefully the new drugs will help, as long as she keeps taking them. She’s going through another phase of not wanting to take anything because she says the pills make her depressed.’
I am listening very quietly and intently. It sounds like Lina’s mum is really sick. My dad doesn’t have anything like that. Muscle spasms? Are they like cramp?
‘Lina’s mum has multiple sclerosis,’ Abby says to me, and I jump, startled.
‘Oh,’ I say. I don’t know what that is.
‘Do you need more help?’ Raj asks Lina. ‘Should I speak to Antonia?’
Lina has the same social worker as me! I don’t quite know why I’m surprised. I suppose they have lots of children to look after.
Lina shrugs. ‘Like what? She’s always so busy.’
Raj says, ‘She does her best.’
‘Yeah, I know. Too much work, that’s what my mum says. They’ve all got too much work. That’s why she’s never in the office.’ Lina pulls a face. ‘Got to make the best of it, don’t we?’
Krystal tells us that her mum managed to go to a job interview by herself, which doesn’t sound all that amazing to me until I realise that her mum is blind. And then Tyler tells us about his little brother passing his swimming certificate and how he’s really proud of him. Tyler’s dad has something called post-traumatic stress disorder after being in the army and his mum has depression. It sounds like there’s a lot of arguing in their house, and Tyler has three younger brothers that he looks after, getting them dressed and ready for school in the morning and everything. He’s the same age as me and worried about what will happen when he goes to secondary school, because he’ll have to catch a bus that leaves earlier than his brothers have to leave for their school.
Lisiella complains that her dad won’t let her have a mobile phone. Reece says nothing.
‘Calypso, did you want to tell us a bit about yourself?’ Abby asks me kindly.
But I can’t. How can I? What problems do I have compared with the others? And how can I possibly tell them that my dad has been keeping lemons on bookshelves? How would people who play Xboxes and don’t read books react to that extreme weirdness?
I shrink back in my chair and shake my head. The others look a bit disappointed, except Reece, who has pulled his phone out of his pocket again.
Abby and Raj get out some games, and I play Snap with Lisiella, Krystal and Lina until it’s time to go home.
‘See you next week,’ Abby and Raj say as I head out to find Dad’s car.
I smile and wave at them. It’s been a weird evening. Everyone there looks after their parents, and sometimes their brothers and sisters. It’s the wrong way round, really. The parents should be doing the looking-after. It’s like the children have to be the grown-ups.
Is that what I’ve been doing for Dad? Has our family life been the wrong way round ever since Mum died?
I go to my library that evening and sit on the floor, staring at the books from my mother’s childhood. I pull out an old copy of Anne of Green Gables and see her name in careful joined-up handwriting on the first page: Coral Costello, aged 9 ¼. I run my finger over it. I’m sure she must have loved Anne too – her wildness, her spirit, her imagination. Did she dream of one day sharing this story with me? How did she feel when she knew – when she was told – that she would never see me grow up? I rest my hand over her writing and close my eyes.
The air stills. This room is my sanctuary. I sit and breathe in the invisible stories all around me, the characters trapp
ed between the pages of the books only until someone reads the words, and then they’re set free. Books can take you places and show you people you’d never meet in real life. I breathe in the faint scent of oil paint too – and suddenly I can see Mum in my mind’s eye, clear as day, her red hair shining in the sunlight (it’s sunny again!) and a big smile on her face. A great sense of warmth rushes through me. She’s here; I haven’t forgotten her, and I won’t, ever.
It’s time to rescue the books from the library of lemons.
I go downstairs and tell Dad, ‘We need to get those books from behind the shed.’
He is sitting at his desk, staring at nothing. His eyes close. ‘I’m tired, Calypso.’
‘So am I. But we need to get the books.’
‘It’s dark.’
‘Now, Dad. It’s important.’
He heaves the biggest sigh ever, deflating, like all the breath is leaving his body.
I wait, impatiently. ‘Come on.’
Eventually he says, ‘All right.’
It takes him ages to put on his boots by the back door. My boots are too small and pinch my toes, but I hardly notice because I am shifting from one foot to the other, feeling irritation grow by the second. Why is he so slow?
We take a torch into the garden. The shed is at the end, with a small gap between the back of it and the hedge. Dad shines the torch into the gap. I swallow. There are nine or ten cardboard boxes of books, stacked on top of each other. How did he even fit them into this gap?
‘We must bring them inside,’ I say.
Dad opens his mouth and then closes it again. He hands me the torch and reaches for the nearest box. It takes a lot of pulling and wriggling to get it to move, and then one side falls away completely, spilling paperbacks onto the grass. I see Pride and Prejudice, The Handmaid’s Tale, Enduring Love – Mum’s books.
‘Pick them up!’ I say, reaching desperately to grab as many as I can. We fill our arms and carry them back to the kitchen where I stack them on the table.
They are in a pitiful state. Some are black and mouldy round the edges; others have come apart at the binding. All are damp.
I am filled with fire. We must save them. It is my mission. ‘We have to get them all in. Not just Mum’s – all of them.’
Dad balks at this. ‘We can’t get them all tonight, Calypso. It’s dark and cold, and we have nowhere to put them.’
‘Yes we do,’ I say obstinately. ‘We have your library.’
After all, the shelves are no longer occupied by lemons.
Dad is cold and damp himself by the time he’s brought all the books inside. It takes him nearly two hours. Every now and then he mutters in a complaining way, but then he glances at me and stops.
Some of the books are beyond saving. The enormous atlas disintegrates in my hands, the seams dissolved and the paper blotched and unreadable. But others have survived better. I spread them all out over the shelves and the floor of the library, pages open to the air to dry. There are so many that by the time we have finished there is no space to place even one foot inside the room. We stand and stare from the doorway at the metres and metres of words. My back aches and I should have been in bed hours ago, but I feel satisfaction at the sight. I can almost see Mum nodding and smiling at me.
Behind me, Dad gives a big sigh. I can’t tell if it’s a sigh of happiness or a sigh of sadness. Does he miss his lemons? I daren’t ask.
‘Thank you,’ I say instead.
That night, I dream about books. I am in a forest, where books are literally growing on trees, and I am hungry. It’s dark, and chilly, and my stomach growls, and so I reach up to a branch and pluck down a book. It is a blue hardback. I take a bite, and the book melts between my teeth into something like a marshmallow sandwich. I pluck a red paperback from another branch, and it is crisp and crunchy like an apple. I eat and eat and eat until the branches are bare and my stomach is full. And then I sit down on the grass and groan, because now I feel sick.
And my father appears in between the trees, saying, ‘Calypso, you know perfectly well that you need a pencil and a trained ferret to find your way through the woods. Have I taught you nothing?’
Then he turns into a lemon and rolls away through the trees, and I can hear my mother singing, which is strange, because I don’t think she sang much when I was little, but in the dream I’m sure it’s her. And the singing makes me breathe out all the books I’ve eaten in a long sigh. All these words come spilling and tumbling out of my mouth and lie about me on the forest floor. And I lie down too, my hair and fingers and feet tangling in words and letters and sentences, and the sunlight comes dancing through the trees, and I feel happy.
‘So are all the books there?’ asks Mae when I tell her about our rescue mission. ‘In the library?’
‘Yes. They need to dry out. Some of them might be all right – not as good as they were, but good enough to read and put back on the shelves. I think the others will have to be thrown away.’
She nods with a grimace. We are round at her house after school. Mae’s expanding one of the intricate patterns on her wall and I am colouring in some pictures in a colouring book. Dad is at a counselling session.
‘I’m glad some of them will be okay,’ she says. ‘What about your mum’s books? Have you saved all of them?’
‘No.’ I look down at my picture. ‘I mean, yes, I’ve brought them all in. But the pages of To Kill a Mockingbird are all stuck together and I think even when it’s dried out it’ll be no good.’
‘You could buy a new copy,’ Mae says.
‘It wouldn’t be hers,’ I say. There is a pause, and a fierceness sweeps through me. ‘How could he do it, Mae? I mean, getting rid of your own books is one thing, but how could he do that to hers? She’s dead! They were her things. They were meant for me. Did he know how spiteful it would be to chuck them in the garden? Did he want to hurt me? Or is he so completely loopy that he didn’t even think about it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mae says in a hesitant voice. ‘I guess when things aren’t … normal, then …’ She trails off.
‘Am I normal?’ I say bluntly.
She looks startled, a red felt-tip poised in mid-air. ‘Well, you seem normal to me.’
‘Have you got a dictionary?’
She sticks out an arm and pulls a thick book off a nearby shelf. It takes us a while to find the right page.
‘Normal,’ she says. ‘Conforming to the standard or common type. Usual, regular, natural.’
‘So then something that is common is normal,’ I say. ‘So if most people have blue eyes, then brown eyes are not normal.’
‘Brown eyes are common too,’ objects Mae. ‘It doesn’t say you can only have one type of normal.’
‘Good point. So if lots of kids live with just one parent, that’s common enough to be normal, right?’
‘I guess so.’
‘And lots of people die from cancer, don’t they? So that makes that normal too.’
Mae frowns. ‘Dying from a disease when you’re not old shouldn’t be normal.’
‘But shouldn’t isn’t the same as is,’ I say, shaking my head. ‘Wanting things to be different doesn’t make them that.’ I feel compelled to go on. ‘But lots of people don’t die from cancer either, which is also normal. So … how can two opposite things both be normal?’
Mae bites her lip thoughtfully. ‘It sort of makes you wonder how anyone works out what normal is.’
‘And if no one is really sure …’ I say. ‘If people are just making up their own idea of normal, then …’
‘Then anything is normal. And everything,’ concludes Mae.
There is silence in the room. Mae and I stare at each other.
There are fireworks in my brain. Ever since Mum died, I’ve felt not normal. Like I didn’t fit in. I preferred reading books to making friends. I lived with a dad who didn’t seem to notice I was there half the time, and who didn’t like hugging, and who insisted on inner strength. I didn’t mind
, exactly – but I didn’t feel normal.
But what if normal isn’t really a thing?
What if I’m normal in a world where everything and nothing is normal? The thought is incredible.
And then Mae adds, looking down at the page, ‘It says “psychology” too. In terms of “normal”. Er. Approximately average in any psychological trait, such as intelligence, personality or emotional adjustment. Also, free from any mental disorder, sane.’ She closes the book.
‘But,’ I say, carrying through my previous thought, ‘what does that even mean, if anything can be normal?’ I look at her. ‘Do you think maybe throwing out my mum’s books seemed normal to my dad?’
‘I suppose it must have. Because he needed the shelves. For his … um … lemons.’
The way she says it makes me want to laugh. It’s the silliest thing ever!
Mae casts a glance at me, and I see that the corner of her mouth has twitched up a bit. She says, ‘At least it wasn’t, I dunno, fingers or something.’
‘Fingers?’
‘You know, like a serial killer. Or dead babies.’
My mouth drops open in horror. ‘Mae! That’s just … eww! How can you think up such horrible things?’
Her eyes are mischievous. ‘What? I’m just saying, it could be worse. I mean – lemons. Not exactly the stuff of nightmares.’
I can’t help a grin. ‘That’s what you think. I dream about them now. They freak me out. Dad actually turned into a lemon in last night’s dream, and rolled away through a forest.’
She laughs. ‘What I mean is, even if your dad’s a bit mad, it’s not like he’s dangerous or something, is it? Keeping lemons on shelves is freaky, but it’s not run-for-the-hills, is it?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘How’s his counselling going?’
I shrug. ‘All right, I think. Sometimes he seems upset when he comes home. I think they make him talk about my mum.’
‘Oh.’ Mae goes quiet for a moment. Then she says, ‘I guess he must miss her a lot.’
‘I guess so …’ I say slowly, feeling puzzled. ‘He’s never said he does. He always says you should use inner strength to cope with sad feelings.’