‘I’ve got printer issues again. Rocky’s an IT wizard!’ Julie winks at me. ‘Rocky, this is the boss’s daughter, Ellie.’
The newcomer holds out a hand, and I take it. It’s surprisingly clean. ‘I am sorry for the trouble you find yourself in.’
His English is very formal, with an accent I can’t place. I nod, and he lets go of my hand.
‘My name is Piotr, but they call me—’
‘Rocky. Yeah, I heard.’ I return his smile.
‘My name, it means Rock. P-I-O-T-R. But there is a problem with the spelling in Scotland.’
‘Piotr.’ I try out the spelling in my head, visualise it. It suits him. ‘Ignore them. They have to give everyone a nickname. They call my brother Ganges.’
‘Ganges?’
‘River.’
‘Oh.’ Piotr nods as if he doesn’t really get the connection.
Julie crosses her black silky legs with a sound like a whisper. ‘They call me Legs!’ she giggles.
Piotr goes a bit red. ‘Perhaps I will come back later, to sort you out.’
Julie collapses into giggles and, embarrassingly, I can feel my face start to twitch. I jump in with some comment, tell him to ignore her.
‘We can schedule a meeting about it, sweetheart’ – she glances at me – ‘later.’
Piotr has a wary glint in his eye. He is the sort of guy who will body-swerve a hen party in the pub at all costs, and I warm to him immediately. He says his goodbyes and slinks out of the door. Yes, he’s slinky – that describes him. Not in a sly way, but more graceful, like a cat. He’s at ease with his body. I shouldn’t be noticing, given the circumstances, but I spot Julie raising her gaze from where his arse has just been.
‘Cute, eh? Eastern European. Offshore Dave can’t stand him “coming over here, stealing our jobs”’ – she puts on a very good Dave voice – ‘but fuck it, if I wasn’t married, I would. He likes the older women, too.’
I can see Piotr nodding to Dave as he crosses the yard. Dave spits on the ground behind him. Older woman? Julie is staring at me again, with a strange expression on her face. It reminds me of the way Sharon Duthie looks when she’s digging for information.
‘Rocky got on great with your mum.’
I clunk my mug down on the desk. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Nothing. Your mum was lovely to everyone. I expect because he’s an outsider, they kind of bonded.’ Her eyes are all innocence behind spiky lashes.
My chin goes up. ‘IS. My mother IS lovely to everyone. I’d better go, in case the police call.’
Julie puts on the sad face again. How am I going to get used to this? How am I ever going to get used to people talking about my mother in the past tense?
At the end of the day, my father stands beside the sink, hands in the air like a surgeon. He nods pointedly to the tap and I do all the things my mother would have done, lifting out the overflowing basin of dirty plates, letting the hot water hammer onto the stainless steel. My mother hates him washing his hands in the kitchen sink. In fairground circles, you never wash in the same place that you eat, but it is my father’s house, and he likes to remind her of that.
When Mum moved in with Dad, it was the first time she’d ever lived in a house. Her people, the Smiths, were an old fairground family from Nottingham. You got a job as soon as you were able to count. At the age of seven, little Imelda Smith was taking money for the rides: the swing boats first and then the dodgems. She was a shark with cash, and she was fly enough to squirrel away some ‘rainy day dosh’ for emergencies. At sixteen, my father came into her life. Already dealing scrap, he was in the market for a vintage steam engine the Smiths had for sale. I don’t think he was in the market for a wife, but suddenly Lawler Rook and Imelda Smith were an item, and she was heading north of the border with him.
There’s a standing joke around the yard that my dad is the cleanest scrappie on earth. He wears a fresh boiler suit every day, while under the sink there are tins and tins of Swarfega, stockpiled from the cash and carry. Maintaining his cleanliness has become a two-person ritual. My mother spends her life running hot baths and buying the right kind of nail brushes. The dull churn of the washing machine was the soundtrack of my childhood.
He’s a difficult man to love. I put it down to the bushy white beard which covers half his face, leaving you with a pale triangle of expression, a thin strip of mouth. His eyes, a startling china blue, are those of a poker player. If babies can read faces before they can make out words, I was screwed from a tender age.
It’s become a part of my landscape, the beard, like the pear tree in the front garden, or the car cemetery in the woods. It has its advantages. The other kids thought my dad was the real Santa, and around Christmas time, I would suddenly become the most popular girl at school. It was the best bargaining tool ever. For at least six weeks, I called the shots. I was the Queen of Shore Road Primary, keeping a naughty list of all the kids that pissed me off, like Katie Coutts. I spun a lot of tales. We kept reindeer behind Finella’s waterfall and the sleigh was hidden at the back of the yard. That’s why we had electronic gates.
My power was only borrowed, unfortunately, and by Hogmanay I was back to being the scrappie’s daughter, any gains melting away like frost. My father is a cold, difficult man.
The scalding gush of the water on my fingers gives me an unpleasant jolt. I drop in the plug, watch the sink fill. Dad slips off his watch and his wedding ring and plunges his hands into the sink; applies the nail brush, scrubbing until the skin turns pink. I find myself holding a fresh towel like I’ve suddenly slipped back to the fifties. The gold band catches my eye. It rolled a little when my father took it off and has come to rest on its side. I can just make out the engraved initials: ‘I. S. & L. R.’
My father takes the towel from me to dry his hands, picking up the ring and forcing it over his still-damp knuckle. The look on his face saddens me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my father cry, not even when Grandma Rook died, although, according to Shelby, she was an old trout and it was time for her to go. My insides start to wobble. I’m not sure how to handle this. I’m quite a tactile person. I do lots of hugging when I’m abroad. I hug hello; I hug goodbye. I rub shoulders; I kiss. I send warm and lovely messages to friends I’ve only just made, but here, at home, I’m stuck to the kitchen floor like it’s made of treacle.
Dad looks scared. I catch hold of his hand, pink as a freshly butchered pork chop. We both stare at the wedding ring as if it will magically connect us, both knowing that the only person who can do that is lost. I reach out. His bicep is tough and wiry beneath the soft plaid of his shirt. My eyes are wet, and I’m hot with embarrassment, betraying myself in front of my father. We don’t do this. We do oil and diesel. We crush cars. Crushed hearts are a different matter.
My father pets my head. The wedding ring catches in my hair, and I wince a little.
‘Good lass,’ he says. ‘Good lass.’ He straps on the watch. ‘I’ve a few calls to make. We’ll eat around seven. Just cook whatever you can find. Good girl.’
8
Eight Days After
There are things I should be doing. Unpacking my rucksack, for instance. Hanging up my shorts and sweeping the sand from my bedroom floor. As a teenager, I couldn’t wait to get away from here. I didn’t just want to fly the nest, I wanted to shoot that nest right out of the tree. I’d had enough of being a Rook. Scraping into university was like winning the lottery. It didn’t matter that it was Newcastle, less than a five-hour drive from home; it would be a world away from the grime and the endless walking on eggshells. My mother was delighted. ‘It will be the making of you, Ellie Rook,’ she’d said. I remember calling her on my first night in halls, sitting in my cell-like room, not knowing a soul.
‘Are you lonely?’ she wanted to know. ‘Are you? I am. I feel so alone.’
She was the one who burst into tears. I was lost for words. How could she be lonely in the family home, with Dad and River and Off
shore Dave and Julie and all the rest? I was too naïve to understand. Then, after uni, there was the gap year that kept on going. I graduated from bar work to teaching English, and my visits home became fewer, as I became more settled in my new life. Home had become a dot on the map, someone else’s responsibility. Now, the full impact of the situation hits me in the gut, winding me. I feel hollow and scared. Without my mother, this is no longer home.
So I mooch around, letting myself notice all the things I hate about this house. The old-fashioned kitchen that dominates family life hasn’t changed much since Grandma Rook’s day. The sink unit, the worktops, the appliances are all at random heights, because my mother never complained enough about the inconvenience. The washing machine and the fridge are obsolete brands, because my father picked them up cheap. He keeps a box of vintage parts, in the hope that, one day, something will wear out, and he’ll be able to take it to pieces and spread the bits all over the kitchen. I realise now that the only clean, shiny thing in the whole place has always been my mother.
The kitchen table with its mismatched chairs is also a museum piece. It seats the family and all the waifs and strays that come to work in the yard. The men track dirt through the kitchen and strip engine parts on the table, and my mother runs around with newspapers and Mr Muscle, but nobody cares. She is peripheral, like the skirting boards or the wallpaper. Scrap is the beating heart of this home.
I really can’t be bothered emptying my rucksack. Sighing, I polish my sunglasses, flick through my passport. I place both items carefully in my knicker drawer. Dirt coloured my childhood; everything was stained by our lifestyle. My underwear is now dazzling white, and I want to keep it that way. I slam the drawer shut.
Flopping down on my bed, I check my phone. I haven’t posted anything on Facebook since my father made the awful call that summoned me home. I scroll through all the concerned messages until I reach my final selfie: me drinking sugarcane juice from a coconut shell, on a rare trip to the ocean. I look like a typical backpacker: hair piled up in a bird’s nest, grey eyes clear and confident, like I know where I’m going and I don’t need a map. Nothing marks the fragility of life like social media.
A name catches my eye. Liam Duthie. We’re friends on Facebook, even though I’ve never had the appetite to reconnect with him in real life. Not since he married Katie Coutts. His comment reads, ‘So sorry to hear this, Ellie. I’m back home again for a while. Hope to catch up soon.’
After Paintgate, I became sort-of friends with Katie Coutts. Probably because she was scared of me. We attended each other’s birthday parties, but only if mine were held in a public place. Her mother labelled the yard as ‘too dangerous’, and I was never sure if she was referring to the machinery or us Rooks.
I remember once being invited to Katie’s for tea. I didn’t really want to go, but my mother said rubbish and buttoned me into a clean white shirt. You need to mix more, she said. Don’t be stuck out here like me, with nowhere to go.
Sharon Duthie said Katie’s father was one of the ‘high heid yins’ on the council. I didn’t know what that meant, but I couldn’t get over how clean he was. He smelled of perfume, not diesel, and he had a round, soft face and even softer hands. My dad had clean hands, but they were a result of much scrubbing. Mr Coutts was naturally clean. When I saw him in the playground, I had to stop myself from sniffing him. The day I was invited for tea, he was waiting for us at the school gate, the only dad in a suit, which was neat and grey. We walked to his car. It was low and black and shiny, and the inside was like marshmallow. I was too shy to speak. I just listened to Mr Coutts questioning Katie about her day and imagined my dad doing that. In my head I practised my replies, even though in real life it would never happen. School was an alien landscape to my father.
The radio pumped piano music round the interior. A scented fir tree danced below the mirror, but the smell of it clashed with Mr Coutts’s cologne, and by the time we reached their house I was feeling a bit queasy. I told my dad later about the fir tree, and he said it was criminal. Nothing wrong with the natural smell of a car.
Katie’s mother had been smiley and quiet. She’d given us spaghetti bolognese, but I’d never eaten spaghetti before (Mum never cooked pasta, because Dad hated it) and I’d spilled a bit. As the red sauce seeped into my school shirt like blood, Katie’s mother leaped into life and scooped me into the kitchen. She had a library of books on household matters and I had to sit on the counter while she dabbed at me with soda water, vinegar and eventually white spirit. I can remember it so clearly.
‘Is it white wine for red stains, Bill? Maybe that’s just for red wine, eh, Ellie? Do you know what? Let’s just stick it in the wash. The tumble dryer will have it all dry by the time you go home, and your mum won’t be any the wiser.’
And then she sees my socks (I’d cast off my school shoes in the hallway, as instructed).
‘Oh dear. Let’s slip those off too – they’re a bit black, aren’t they? Have you been tiptoeing through the coal yard?’ Laughing, she’s unbuttoning my shirt, pulling it off over my head. White cotton fills my mouth, cuts off my protests. I’m sitting there in my grubby vest, sweating with shame, arms crossed so tightly over non-existent breasts that I make a sort-of cleavage. I pray that Mr Coutts will not come in. Mrs Coutts has moved away, stuffing the clothes into the machine, and through the archway I can see my congealing, half-eaten bowl of pasta. Katie is staring at me with disgust. I want to slap her, to tell her this isn’t my fault. This is your clean-freak mother. Your marshmallow house.
I’m given a pink top belonging to Katie. It smells funny. We race through the jelly and ice cream, and within the hour I’m dressed again in sparkling white socks and shirt. I smell of alien laundry products. I no longer feel like me, and Katie is refusing to share her toys. I just want to go home, and the pang of longing to be back with my family is so intense I think I might throw up in Mr Coutts’s fancy car as it purrs me away.
When I walk into the kitchen, my mother is sitting at the table, reading a book. She must have heard the car door slam as I was deposited in the yard, but maybe she didn’t want to speak to Mr Coutts. My mother looks up and sniffs, already scenting outside interference.
‘How come you smell of bleach?’
‘I had bolognese,’ I say wearily.
‘Ah.’ She goes back to her reading. ‘No good can come of foreign food.’
The memory still makes me chuckle a little, although the aftermath was horrible. At school, Katie Coutts told everyone about my grubby vest and socks, and I was tormented endlessly for living on a scrap heap.
As I read Liam’s message again, I try to imagine him married to Katie Coutts. My old life is peopled with storybook characters: close the book and they remain the same. But real life isn’t like that. Popping across the road to say hello to Liam is bound to open the book at a different chapter. Still, the thought of escaping from the house for a little while is appealing.
I jump off the bed and shove my feet into flip-flops. Woolly socks and sensible shoes are a must if I am going to stay here much longer. The thought is a bottomless well. Slipping the phone into the back pocket of my jeans, I snatch a passing glance in the mirror. My tan is just about managing to hide the worst of the shadows under my eyes. I pat down my mane of hair. Not for Liam’s benefit. It just doesn’t pay to look too foreign around here. I think of Offshore Dave spitting in Piotr’s direction and make a face at my reflection. The girl in the mirror stares back at me with troubled eyes.
I’m about to let myself out the front door when I hear a noise like something being knocked over. The hall is perfectly still; I check all around. My mother is very particular about the hall. The ceiling is painted every year and the rose-patterned carpet is protected by a vinyl runner. Against the staircase, there’s an old-fashioned teak telephone table which belonged to Grandma Rook. The Yellow Pages date from 2005. Mum usually has a crystal vase of something fresh posed there: daffodils, maybe, or even just the cuttings fr
om fragrant shrubs. Now the vase is empty.
The noise again. It’s coming from the sitting room, as if someone is blundering around in there. An intruder? My heart starts to race, and I press my ear to the white-glossed door. A distinct fluttering sound is coming from within. My hand hovers over the handle, but it takes an angry squawk to make me throw open the door.
Jesus! The crow and I stare at each other for a long moment. I suspect that under those blue-black feathers there’s a heart knocking out a rhythm in sync with mine. The bird must have fallen down the chimney – they do that sometimes, when they’re quarrelling over roof space. There’s soot everywhere, the pristine room stained with the crow’s blackness. My mother’s favourite owl ornament is lying in pieces on the hearthrug.
The crow tilts its head, all the better to eyeball me with its boot-button eyes. It has something in its beak, but when I take a step forward, it rushes for the window ledge and drops whatever it is. Reluctantly, I pick it up. It’s a single green button.
‘Get out.’ I rush to open the window, gulping in a lungful of fresh air. ‘She isn’t here. She isn’t coming back. Fuck off with your messages.’
I stand back and the crow eyes me for a second. I shoo it up onto the windowsill, and from there it takes its time, fluttering down into the garden as if it does this every day. But this isn’t every day.
My mother isn’t ever coming back.
9
Sharon Duthie is listening intently to my crow story. I rant about the broken ornament and the trail of soot. It’s everywhere – on the carpet, the curtains, the walls. She’s made coffee, although I’m now in the mood for something stronger.
‘You’ll need Net White for those curtains. I have a sachet you can have. Just stick it in your wash and Bob’s your uncle. Your ma aye fed the birds. Every day. I suppose that was its way of reminding you. Want a KitKat with that, hen?’
The Unmaking of Ellie Rook Page 4