The Illustrated Child

by Polly Crosby

  ‘I know, but she’s back.’

  ‘Parents don’t just come back.’

  I felt bad for her. Her dad may never come back, but it didn’t mean my mum couldn’t.

  ‘Yes they do. Sometimes.’

  ‘You’re lying. I don’t believe you ever had a mum.’

  ‘Just because you’ve never seen her, doesn’t mean she doesn’t exist,’ I said. ‘I’ve never seen your mum, but I know you have one.’

  Stacey didn’t answer.

  ‘Where was it, then?’ I said, relenting, ‘this ghost you saw?’

  She pointed to the compost heap next to the cart shed. Something dusky pink sat on top. I got up for a closer look.

  It was the roses I had given to Mum yesterday. I picked them up and stroked one of the velvety petals, watching a tiny beetle as it crept along a stem. Why would she throw them away when they were still so fresh?

  ‘We could make a potion,’ Stacey said just behind me, making me jump. She reached round and grabbed the flowers from my hands. ‘Petal potion,’ she said, ‘like the old gods used to make.’

  ‘What old gods?’

  ‘I dunno. Flower gods? Get some water from the moat, would you?’

  As if under her spell, I turned and walked to the moat. I rooted around in the grass for a vessel to put it in, kicking at a few broken flower pots before finding an old jar that was almost whole. It must have been left over from one of Dad’s outside painting sessions: the inside was a pale green-blue as if he had been painting the sky. I rinsed it in the moat, and scooped the water into it. When I held it up to the light I could see a whole world swirling within: little dancing insects spiralling through the water, drifting flakes of green algae, and a peculiar little thing with feelers, its body encased in tiny stones, sinking down, down, and settling at the bottom.

  Stacey was roaming the garden, looking for a potion-making spot. She ducked under the willow and I followed her, placing the jar right at the centre of the dusty brown circle.

  ‘After this, let’s race snails,’ she said, her mind already cantering forwards to the rest of the day.

  ‘OK,’ I said begrudgingly, watching her tear at the petals of my mother’s roses and drop them into the jar. She scooped a handful of potion out and, pulling roughly at my arm, sprinkled it over us both.

  The shock of the cold water raised goosebumps on my arm. We both lay back, gazing up at the willow, its green fringe splayed out all around us in a perfect circle. We could do anything in here, I thought, and no one would know.

  ‘Come on,’ Stacey said, pulling herself up, her arms covered in fragments of pink petal. She took my nail varnish from her pocket. She would make a good pickpocket: I hadn’t seen her take it.

  ‘We could paint this on the snails,’ she said, holding it up, ‘we can number them so we know which one wins.’

  Kicking over the potion, she ducked and ran out from under the willow. I held back, watching as Mum’s rose petals and countless living beings cascaded out of their world and flooded across the bare earth.

  I found her at the water butt. She was staring down into the slimy depths. I looked doubtfully at the shells bobbing on the surface.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be cruel, painting nail varnish on them?’

  ‘They’re only snails. They don’t have brains or anything.’

  I looked at my precious bottle of nail polish, then at Stacey with her terrible haircut. Her eyebrows were raised and her mouth was pursed. She looked like she was holding her breath in anticipation.

  ‘OK,’ I said grudgingly.

  ‘Cool. Snail varnish!’ She dropped onto the grass by the brick wall and wedged her fingers round one of the bricks.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said, kneeling down beside her. Ignoring me, she levered a brick out, bending low so she could see into the small hollow she’d opened up.

  ‘Whoever wins gets this,’ she said, pulling out a small round badge and handing it to me. On its rusty face was a little squirrel dressed in a colourful suit. The words ‘The Tufty Club’ were written round the edge in black.

  ‘How did you know it was there?’

  She shrugged again, replacing the brick with practised flair. I wondered what other secrets she knew about Braër.

  ‘What’s the Tufty Club?’

  ‘Dunno. But it’s the only prize we’ve got, unless you want to bet this nail varnish.’

  I grabbed the little bottle from her and held onto it tightly.

  ‘Thought not. Tufty it is.’

  We scooped up a handful of snails each, me placing mine on the grass quickly and wiping my hands on my T-shirt, Stacey seeming to relish the feel of the slime between her fingers.

  We decided to paint a picture on them instead of a number. My snails had stars on them. Stacey’s had faces that looked more like fried eggs.

  The first pair of snails went in opposite directions, but the second pair began to race. Slowly they crept over the grass, picking up tiny crumbs of dirt on the way. Stacey’s snail climbed a long blade of grass which buckled forward, propelling it into the lead. She knelt as close as she could, her head bent in silent support of her snail. But the shock of its tumble from the grass had sent it into its shell, and no amount of prodding would coax it out. My snail gambolled forward, joyfully crossing the dandelion finish line.

  Smash. Stacey’s fist came down on its shell.

  Crunch. Her shoe thudded on top of her own snail. Getting to her feet, glistening snail shell hanging from her knees, she stood over the snails, her face snarling, then she turned with a whirl and ran from the garden.

  ‘Stacey!’ I called, jumping up to run after her, but she had gone. Seeing the two mashed snails in the grass I sank down to scoop them up, the smell of nail varnish in my nostrils, tears dripping onto them as I watched their slow, silent death throes.

  Eleven

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Ah, there you are, Roe. Grab the other end, would you?’

  I took hold of the end of the plank of wood and lifted, holding on fast, feeling my arm muscles shudder at its weight. There was a piece of snail shell on my sleeve still, I could see it hanging by a thread. I went to pick it off, hefting the wood into my other hand, but my knees wobbled under the weight of it and I left the shell dangling where it was.

  ‘Hold tight, Romilly, please don’t drop it.’

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said distractedly, trying to manoeuvre the plank towards the ground and simultaneously pick up a hammer and nails.

  ‘How can you tell if someone’s real and not a ghost?’

  Dad lowered the plank to the ground, and gently spat a couple of nails onto the grass while he thought. My arms felt like they might fall off. I lowered my own end to the ground too, and began to pick out the splinters in my palms, brushing the piece of shell away as I did so.

  Dad had spent a lot of the summer erecting a shed in the garden. Small yet grand, it had a crenulated roof and faux marble pillars at the entrance. Above the door was a little cut-out of a wooden circus tent, its flaps folded back. If you looked really closely, you could just see an elephant inside balancing on a big red-and-yellow ball. The shed was to be his painting studio. During its construction, he was often to be seen standing back and contemplating it, or else pacing out the space inside, sketching the layout of armchair and drawing board.

  Now, he sucked on a fragment of leftover nail in his mouth as he contemplated my question.

  ‘Is it if you can’t touch them, is that how you know?’ I asked hopefully, poking him gently in the belly to demonstrate he was real.

  I thought about what Stacey had said about my mum. I trusted Stacey’s judgement, but Mum couldn’t possibly be a ghost. And yet there was something otherworldly about her, a sort of glassy sadness that made it hard to love her.

  There had been a moment – after she saved Monty from the snare – where everything felt exactly right: we were like a proper family all of a sudden, sharing in silly stories and la
ughing with each other, just like you see on the TV. When she came upstairs that evening to kiss me goodnight, she hugged me so tightly, it was as if she couldn’t quite believe I was real. Each hug she gave me felt better than the last, like she was learning from scratch how to do it.

  But then last night, as she leant in to kiss me goodnight, her ruby red nails pinned the pillow on either side of me, and a long-forgotten memory flitted across my vision: a red-nailed hand swooping sharply towards my cheek, so fast that I had no time to duck out of the way. As her lips kissed my cheek, I flinched, the memory of the pain so sharp it was as if she had hit me for real.

  Mum paused, frowning. ‘What’s wrong?’ she said.

  But how could I put into words the memory, if memory it was? I think she saw the fright in my eyes, because she drew away, saying goodnight in a flat voice, before climbing back down the stairs.

  I had wanted to jump out of bed and follow her, throwing myself into her arms for a hug the way I did with Dad, but there was something about Mum that stopped me doing anything too spontaneous, as if she might be frightened by the sudden movement and run away, never to be seen again.

  Dad was still considering my question. He had picked up the hammer again and was turning it in his hands. ‘But if you went round prodding people to check they were real,’ he said, ‘you’d end up in prison.’

  I loved this about Dad. He always gave my questions some real thought. He was looking at me while I thought about all this, his brow creased.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘relationships need give and take, Romilly. Even mother-daughter relationships. Perhaps you need to make the first move with your mum – show her you care. Why don’t you thank her for all the nice things she’s done for you? That would be a good start.’

  I racked my brains for things I could thank her for. There wasn’t a huge amount to choose from. And then I remembered my little picture of Mary Mother-of-God. I had never had the chance to thank her for it when she sent it. I would do that.

  ‘She’s as real as the rest of us, your mum,’ Dad said. ‘I know she might not be what you were expecting, but she’s your mother, and that counts for a lot.’

  I shoved my hands in my pockets, feeling guilty.

  ‘I don’t know if there is a way to tell if someone is definitely real or not, Roe. The most real people are sometimes not really real at all, and the most mysterious and other worldly people are sometimes more real than you or I.’

  ‘I am real, aren’t I?’ I asked quietly, pulling my hands out of my pockets and looking at them, and wondering if it were possible to touch one’s own skin to prove your realness.

  ‘You’re as real as I am.’ He bent down and dug his finger into the recently excavated mud that surrounded his shed. Straightening up, he lifted his hand and swabbed the mud down my forehead and over my nose and mouth, coming to a stop on my chin. I could smell the mud’s cold tang, and feel its grit on my teeth. I stood still, focusing on a small crumb of wet earth on the end of my nose until my eyes crossed.

  ‘You’re as real as that earth on your skin. And it’s made from millions of leaves and insects, millions of years old. Nothing is more real.’ He smiled at me. ‘Close your eyes. Can you feel it still, even if you can’t see it? Can you smell it?’

  I did as I was told, my world shrinking down to the slick of cold wetness on my face. I nodded, feeling not like a human any more, but a relic, ancient and petrified. I didn’t know if I felt real at all anymore.

  In the house, Mum was sitting on the velvet sofa, rolling up a ball of wool that Monty had chased across the rug. A pale sunbeam slanted across her face, making a slice of her shimmer. I watched her for a moment, trying to pluck up the courage to talk to her.

  ‘Mum?’

  She looked up and smiled.

  ‘Thank you for the picture of Mary Mother-of-God,’ I said, kneeling down on the rug by her feet.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The lady with the golden hat? You sent it to me just before the hurricane broke my arm. When I was nine.’

  She set the wool on her lap. ‘You did get in a lot of scrapes before I came along, didn’t you?’ she said. ‘I don’t remember sending you a picture.’

  ‘You did. You said that she would look after me until you could. And she has.’ I wanted to convey how comforting the little picture had been, but Mum was frowning.

  ‘I think I’d remember doing something like that. And why would I send you a picture of the Virgin Mary? I’m not religious. You must have got it from somewhere else.’

  ‘I didn’t. You sent it. And you sent me the denim dress, the first one.’

  ‘I admit, I did send that – I remember the nurses helping me order it – but not the picture.’ She was looking at me warily. She put a hand to my forehead, and I jumped at the touch. ‘Are you sure you’re feeling all right?’ she said.

  I shook my head, pushing her hand away, searching around for a way to explain. ‘You wrote me a letter,’ I said. ‘I can go and find it…’ I started to rise.

  ‘Don’t be so silly, child. I remember the autumn you hurt your arm. I wasn’t in a good place. I could never have written a letter back then, let alone send things, I wasn’t well enough to get my own breakfast.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘Is this a trick?’

  ‘No!’ I felt like I was in sinking mud, slowly being swallowed up: this conversation had layers that I couldn’t understand. ‘Mud!’ I blurted out, clinging on to Dad’s explanation.

  ‘What?’ Mum said, the word coming out in a huff of air.

  ‘Dad says I’m as real as mud.’ I sank back down onto the floor, and picked up a strand of wool, curling it into a ball to help her. ‘We were talking about how you can tell if someone is real, and Dad said I’m as real as mud.’

  Mum looked as if her patience was wearing thin. She took a breath, her eyebrows rising. ‘Well, mud is very real.’

  ‘He said I was as real as him, and he’s very real. But mud isn’t very real, is it? It doesn’t breathe.’ I was getting confused now, forgetting his explanation that had made perfect sense moments ago. I wrapped a dead daddy-long-legs up into the ball of wool, a little surprise for next time Mum did some knitting. I imagined with pleasure a jumper embellished with delicate lace-wings, a few long spiny legs here and there for good measure.

  ‘You mean mud isn’t very human,’ Mum said, plucking the ball of wool from my hands and picking out the bits of daddy-long-legs she could see before giving it back. ‘It’s definitely real. And it does sort of breathe.’

  ‘Can someone be human and not real?’ I picked up a dead fly and tucked it inside the wool.

  ‘Romilly, will you please stop putting dead insects into my wool. It’s disgusting.’ She grabbed the ball again and shook the fly out onto the floor. The ball of wool slipped from her hands and unrolled across the rug. ‘Now look what you’ve made me do,’ she said, exasperated.

  The dead fly came to a stop near Monty, and I leant over and flicked it for him. Mum put a hand to my forehead again. Bits of dried mud flaked away and floated down in front of my eyes.

  ‘You’re a bit warm, do you think you might stay inside now? There’s a chill in the garden.’

  ‘But I want to go and find Stac…’ She looked up, eyebrows raised. ‘I want to go and play outside,’ I finished lamely. Mum didn’t approve of Stacey, which was unfair since she hadn’t even met her yet. Mum didn’t approve of much, it turned out, except manners and early bedtimes. I looked out of the window and sighed. I wanted to go and see if Stacey was all right after the snails outburst.

  ‘Please?’ I said. ‘Please can I go back outside? Just for a little while?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Romilly, not today. You might catch a chill: your chest’s sounding a little gritty.’ She had picked up the ball of wool again.

  I tried to focus on my breathing, but it sounded perfectly normal to me. ‘But I need to check something,’ I said, picking at the desiccated pieces of insect on the rug and wondering when they
would turn into mud.

  ‘For goodness’ sake. No means no!’

  ‘Dad’ll let me,’ I said, starting to get up.

  She looked at me with ill-concealed anger. ‘I’m here now, and I say you’re to stay inside. Sit. Down.’

  Deep in my chest, a white-hot rage opened up, goading me. ‘Why did you leave us?’ I asked.

  She held my gaze for a moment before looking out of the window at the moat, her hands stroking the wool. ‘You need to ask your father that,’ she said, and at her answer, the rage and the injustice and the unfairness of it all bubbled up inside me, and I couldn’t hold the words in any more.

  I looked down at the rug and whispered, ‘You’re just a ghost.’ I let the words pour out into the red and black threads, forcing my anger into their pattern, shooting it out like lasers from my eyes.

  Mum dropped the ball of wool. ‘What did you say, young lady?’ Her voice was icy.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said quickly. A little bit of warmth trickled into my pants.

  She picked up the wool again, spooling it angrily in her hands, not taking her eyes off me. ‘How dare you,’ she said. ‘I come here to look after you. I’ve been nothing but nice to you – despite everything that happened – and yet you’re so insolent. So rude.’

  With each word she spoke, it was as if she was picking away at our relationship, attacking it in the same way that she attacked the knots in the wool, pulling and stabbing. I was mesmerised by her hands, by the sharp, red nails plunging into the soft wool.

  And suddenly those sharp talons were coming towards me, gripping my arm, squeezing into my bare flesh until I thought my skin would break apart.

  My pants suddenly felt very warm as a wet torrent of urine was released.

  Smack! A sharp pain cascaded across the backs of my legs, and without warning I was lying on the floor.

  ‘Look what you’ve done – soaked the rug.’ A hand grabbed at my wrist, sharp nails digging into the bones of my arm that had so recently healed, and I was being dragged back onto my feet and pulled along. Glimpses of Braër’s hall rushed past me as I half-ran behind Mum, and then we were in the kitchen and I was being pushed into the pantry, and the door was shutting, and I was alone.