by Isla Dewar
James yawned. ‘I’m tired. I have to go to bed.’ He leaned over and kissed the top of George’s head. ‘Love you.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ she said.
‘But I do.’
‘I brought you up. I thought you’d have better taste.’
‘Nah. I love you.’
George tutted.
It was a game James and his sisters played. They told her they loved her so they could watch her lips tighten when she told them not to be daft. They’d clearly discussed this and none of them could understand it. It was like they’d agreed to tell her of their love every time they saw her, hoping one day she’d believe them. But in time telling George they loved her had become a game, a contest. They now vied over the don’t-be-daft count. So far James was winning. She’d given him six in one conversation. She’d also given him a fierce look and told him he was being cheeky. ‘I’m not being cheeky,’ he’d said. ‘I love you.’ George had thrown a biscuit at him. Oh, how he and his sisters had laughed about that.
George always enjoyed having family around. Hearing them moving about in the house pleased her. But she knew the worry would return. It always did. When they were away from her they lived their lives. They came and went and she let them get on with it. When they slept under her roof she fretted about them. If any of them was out late she lay rigid in bed, eyes on the ceiling, waiting, listening for them to return. Then she relaxed. It was always there – the fear they would not come back to her.
She sat alone at her kitchen table, eyeing the whisky bottle. Better not, she decided. A second glass would keep her awake and being awake would lead to worrying or revisiting past moments that made her wince. Upstairs, James was running a bath. He always did bathe a lot. In his teenage years he’d light candles and take a radio into the bathroom with him so he could listen to music as he soaked. It still pleased her that her boy had pursued his pleasure so openly. Remembering him, the baby, the boy and the young man she’d known, she realised he’d always gone his own way. Never one to follow the crowd.
He’d been eight, George recalled, when she’d lost him in the supermarket. The panic, the wildly beating heart, the sweat and fluster as she steamed up and down the aisles thrusting her trolley in front of her as she searched for him. She was panting when she found him pressed against a display of tinned tuna, arms spread, preventing shoppers from picking a tin up. ‘Don’t buy this tuna,’ he was shouting, ‘dolphins get killed by the fishing nets. Save the dolphins.’ He was succeeding. People were buying salmon instead. George had been embarrassed. She’d apologised to her fellow shoppers and trolley trundlers. ‘He’s passionate about animals,’ she said. She’d lured James away with promises of ice cream. He’d followed her, walking backwards, keeping an eye on the rogue tuna tins. She’d scolded him for going missing. ‘I was worried something had happened to you.’ But he’d amazed her. She doubted she’d have stood up for dolphins as he had. ‘You’re brave,’ she said. ‘I am so proud of you.’ She’d stroked his hair, kissed the top of his head. Pride made her tearful.
She put the whisky away, rinsed the glasses and climbed the stairs. Time for bed. Tomorrow was going to be busy. It was her day to take eighty-five-year-old Grace, who lived across the way, to the supermarket, the library and the hairdresser. She was going to be fully occupied hanging about as Grace selected her food, her books and her hairstyle.
In the end it all went smoothly. Grace always bought chicken, fish and a large selection of puddings, along with several bottles of red wine. In the library she chose several thrillers and a love story. When she was discussing hairstyles with Sylvia, her hairdresser, George went for a stroll.
It was a clear day, sun and a slight breeze. George had a coffee in a small café then bought cheese from a deli. After that she decided to have a look round a charity shop. You never knew what you’d find there. She had an illustrated copy of Cider with Rosie, two dark red mugs, a DVD of Dances with Wolves and a grey knitted throw she didn’t know what to do with. Today might bring more treasures.
The shop was empty. George looked at the books and then shifted some jackets on a rail. The crockery today was boring, but a small print of a tulip in a glass jar caught her eye. As she went over to examine it, an assistant leaned over the counter and asked if she could help. George said she was just having a look round. The assistant said, ‘Help yourself.’
There was something about her assertive tone that made George stop and look at her. She was oddly familiar. George stared and tried to place her. ‘Have we met?’
‘Yes,’ the assistant told her.
George smiled. ‘I am sorry. You seem so familiar but I can’t place you.’
The assistant was tall, certainly taller than George. She was immaculately dressed. Everything she wore – neat grey skirt, white shirt, black cardigan – looked freshly ironed. Her make-up expertly applied. Eyebrows perfectly plucked. Her hair was a shiny neat bob, not a trace of grey. George envied that. The assistant’s smile was frosty. It was putting George off the tulip print. In fact, the woman was so hostile George decided to leave.
Unexplained loathing was very disturbing, George thought, as she made her way back along the street. Who was that woman? So familiar and so hard to place. And then it came to her. She stopped. Oh my God, Dorothy Pringle. The nemesis of her childhood gang. The prissy girl whose downfall she and Anna had sought. Bloody hell, bloody Dorothy Pringle.
She returned to the shop to check. Didn’t go in. Instead she looked at the woman through the glass pane on the door. The woman glared back. The hatred was so raw, so primal, so savage, so hot that had George held her hands before that rigid face she could have warmed them. Oh yes, it was Dorothy Pringle.
13
A Day Like Any Other Day
It was too exciting for a phone call and certainly too exciting to leave till she saw Anna in a couple of days’ time. As soon as she dropped Grace with her shopping, her library books and her new hairdo, George drove to Anna’s.
‘You’ll never guess who I saw,’ she said as she puffed into the living room.
‘Who?’ Anna was intrigued.
‘Dorothy Pringle.’ George almost shouted it. She revelled in this wonderful moment of having extraordinary news to share.
Anna looked blank. ‘Who?’
‘You know, Dorothy Pringle.’ This was said with more emphasis and even louder now. ‘Dorothy Pringle. The Two Yellows plotted her downfall.’
‘Oh my God. The prissy swot.’
‘Yes.’
‘She had a pencil case to die for and always did her homework and got to hand out the milk. I thought she was dead.’
‘She lives. Works in a charity shop in Leith. You should have seen the look she gave me. Pure hatred.’
‘We were horrible to her. You once threw a custard pie at her.’
‘It wasn’t a real custard pie. It was a mixture of flour, water and shaving foam. And anyway, I missed.’
‘It was still horrible. Whatever possessed us?’
‘We were kids,’ said George. ‘We didn’t know any better. We should apologise.’
‘You think?’ Anna wasn’t sure. ‘Perhaps we should secretly atone. Do something good to her.’
‘Yes. We plotted her downfall in secret. It was all subterfuge apart from the custard pie that wasn’t a custard pie. That was because she sneaked on me. Told Mrs Watkins in Maths that I’d copied Susan Brown’s homework. I had to write “I must always do my own homework and never deliberately copy the work of another and pass it off as mine” five hundred times. That pie was justified.’
‘Absolutely,’ said Anna. She added, ‘Happy days.’ She went to the kitchen to make coffee.
George wasn’t so sure about happy days. She hadn’t enjoyed school. But then she hadn’t been enthralled with anything as much as Anna had been with English literature.
Anna boiled a kettle and laid out a couple of mugs. She had loved school. It had been a time of poetry and hope and music. She spoone
d coffee into each mug and hummed songs from her youth. Walking to school, bag of books heavy on her back, white ankle socks slipping down inside her brown Clark’s sandals and ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ humming in her head. Oh, how she’d loved that song. Though to this day she’d no idea what it meant.
‘I loved Phil Spector’s wall of sound,’ she told George as she came back with the coffee. ‘I remember walking across the living room at home and hearing it. Couldn’t turn up the radio loud enough. Lying on the floor eating salt and vinegar crisps listening to “Da Doo Ron Ron” was heaven. When were you happiest?’
‘Walking Willy to nursery. He’d hold my hand and we’d talk about manhole covers and if bears lived over the wall of Mr Mackie’s garden. I knew I’d never have another child. I vowed to enjoy him. He was a little human being I savoured.’
‘I know,’ said Anna. She gave George a mug and patted her shoulder.
‘I suppose I should think more about death,’ said George. ‘It’s going to happen for sure. It’s what’s next. I’ve done everything else. Lost my virginity.’
‘That’s going back a while,’ Anna said.
‘Given birth. Had the menopause. I wonder what it will be like? What will the day I die be like?’
‘A day like any other day,’ said Anna. ‘Only you might not be around for your tea.’
George could see this might be true. ‘Well, now we know Dorothy Pringle is among the living we have to do something good to her.’
Anna looked out of the window. It was getting dark, a velvety gloaming. A time of day she loved. She heard a neighbour arriving home, slamming a car door. Didn’t know who it was. But it wasn’t Marla. This wasn’t one of her working days.
She said, ‘Marla from across the way. We could get her to go to the charity shop, play her a song and give her balloons and a cupcake.’
George was enthused. ‘Excellent plan. Her being Dorothy, Marla could sing her selections from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.’
They clinked coffee mugs in agreement.
*
In the early morning hours, Anna woke. First light shifted through the room. Her mind was clear. It wasn’t that she was suddenly free of guilt and remorse; just that she knew what to do about her sins. She decided to do something good every day from now on, to make herself less ashamed of her naughty past. She would start by apologising to her mother. Not that her mother would know about it. She’d been dead for thirty years. But her demise hadn’t dented Anna’s shame.
It had started in this very flat where Anna lived now. Her mother had been visiting and had been in top insulting form. Anna was a disappointment, a girl that could have been a secretary to a proper businessman wasting her life to write poems. She never cleaned, couldn’t cook and her clothes were an embarrassment. ‘You’re not like Lorna,’ Mrs MacLean said. Lorna had lived across the road from the MacLeans years ago. ‘I met her mother last week. Lorna married a doctor. She has two beautiful children and a dishwasher. Her husband drives a Jaguar.’ Anna hated Lorna. ‘You,’ her mother decreed, ‘are a slut.’
Anna wondered where the slut accusation came from. It had been going on since she was sixteen. At first it had hurt enough to make her cry. She’d sobbed into her pillow, heaving and shuddering, working at breathing. As time passed it mattered less and less, but she always puzzled over it. She wasn’t a slut.
The day after her mother’s onslaught Anna had baked brownies. She laced them with hash. It had been a small cube that Michael, her then lover, had forgotten to take with him when he left her to go to Australia. They’d been together for over a year. Staying sometimes at his place, sometimes at hers. It had been an easy affair that she’d enjoyed. His leaving had been hard to get over, especially as he hadn’t asked her to go with him. She wondered if he’d left the hash deliberately, thinking it might ease the pain, the loneliness. It hadn’t. The pea incident had put her off drugs for ever. As a hoarder, she didn’t know what to do with the hash. She’d wrapped it in cling film and shoved it to the back of her cutlery drawer.
Feeling marvellously naughty, she took the hash brownies in a blue plastic tub round to the house where she’d been brought up and where her parents still lived. Her father was away on a golfing weekend with old friends. He was often away. In fact, he was rarely home.
‘Baked you brownies,’ Anna said, putting them on a plate.
Her mother filled the kettle and looked at them. ‘Didn’t know you baked. They’re a bit lumpy.’
‘Yes,’ Anna admitted. The brownies weren’t visually appealing. ‘That’s the way of them. It’s the nuts.’
Tea made and poured into neat pink cups, gold rimmed, Mrs MacLean sat at the kitchen table and took one. Ate it. ‘Not bad. Bit of a strange aftertaste.’ She took another. This was strange. She only ever ate one scone, or one biscuit, or one of anything really. She stopped after three and didn’t notice Anna’s abstinence. She smiled and looked dreamy. ‘I always only wanted a puppy,’ she said. ‘But your father wanted children. So I got you.’
Anna said, ‘Sorry.’ She felt the gleeful mischief melt away. Oh no, drugs were going to make her mother even more painfully honest than she already was.
‘Not your fault. Just me. I never liked children. Perhaps I should apologise.’
‘No need.’
Her mother took another brownie. ‘Oddly enough, these are making me feel cheerful and strangely relaxed. Perhaps it’s that you took the trouble to make them.’
‘I enjoyed it.’
‘You were always so dreamy. Always reading or staring. You’d drift off into your own little world. What were you thinking about?’
‘I daydreamed. I invented a world where I . . .’ Mattered, she was about to say.
Her mother didn’t notice the unfinished sentence. She’d drifted off and was looking at the floor. ‘I never really liked this floor.’
Anna didn’t know what to do. She drank her tea and waited.
After a while her mother said, ‘I never liked being married. The whole thing took me by surprise. I was innocent. I didn’t know. Nobody mentioned anything about men. You seem fine, though. Who told you?’
‘George.’
Mrs MacLean laughed. She laughed and laughed. ‘George, of course. I love George. A nurse and not a poet. George is lovely.’ She laughed again, then settled to gaze at the sugar bowl. She seemed happy. ‘Sugar bowl,’ she said.
After an hour Anna decided to go home. She said, ‘Goodbye.’ Her mother had flickered her fingers at her and given her a lavish smile.
She threw back her duvet and got out of bed. It was not her fault. She wasn’t a slut. Of course she wasn’t. Her mother had hated sex, that was all. Once Anna had insisted she and George went to an art exhibition that was the talk of the Edinburgh Festival. There had been a statue of a naked man standing proud. ‘Displaying his bits,’ her mother would have said.
Anna had known nothing about men and her open-mouthed, red-faced shock when staring up at the statue had drawn more interest from other gallery-goers than the actual work of art. George had gently led Anna away and taken her to a coffee bar in Princes Street, bought her a Coke and settled her in a quiet corner where she’d told her the facts of life. Anna, amazed, had said, ‘Well, I’ll remember all this. But I’m never going to do it. Not ever.’
She pulled on a jumper over the T-shirt she wore in bed and went to the kitchen. At the table she opened her notebook. Her poeming book, she called it. The pages were full of half-finished verses, lines, thoughts and words she loved. It had crossed her mind that her father had from time to time wooed her mother with alcohol and promises.
She wrote: Is it true that I was born/Of wine and powdered rhino horn.
She stopped. Tapped her head with her pen. Sighed. She couldn’t think of anything more.
Her poor mother had hated sex and had suspected her daughter loved it. Too right, Ma, Anna thought. Sorry about that. And sorry about the brownies. Tomorrow she’d buy flowers and place them on Mrs MacL
ean’s grave. She hadn’t been there in years.
*
She started early. At the supermarket she bought a large bunch of mixed flowers, mostly blues and purples. They were wrapped in cellophane with a gold ribbon round the stalks. She took the bus to Leith and before walking through the Links to the cemetery to lay her bouquet at her mother’s grave, she walked to the charity shop where Dorothy Pringle worked. She wanted to get a look at the old enemy and enjoy imagining what Dorothy would make of getting a cupcake and a balloon and, perhaps, a song. She might wonder who had sent this treat. George and Anna would, however, savour their anonymity and know they had at least tried to atone for their childish insensitivity.
Clutching the flowers in one hand and holding herself upright with her stick in the other, Anna looked into the shop. There was Dorothy being unmistakeably Dorothy. She was neat as a pin, hair shiny, shoes polished, expression disapproving. She spotted Anna and came to the door to return the stare. She crossed her arms and glared. Finally she opened the door and stepped out.
‘Ah, Anna MacLean, the poet,’ she said. ‘How interesting to see you. Flowers, I see.’ She reached out and took them. ‘Thank you. I appreciate the gesture, but really, I don’t think they in any way make up for the misery you and George caused me.’
14
The Looking-After Rules
‘I just went home. Had tomato soup,’ said Anna.
‘You didn’t say that the flowers were for your mother?’
‘No. She just grabbed them and stomped off. I was too stunned to speak.’
‘So you didn’t go to your mother’s grave?’
‘No, I didn’t want to turn up empty-handed.’
‘She wouldn’t have noticed, on account of being dead.’
‘Yes, in body. In mind, my mind, she is still around. Still criticising. I thought if I arrived to see her without bringing a gift, she’d rise up out of her grave and give me a stiff, unforgiving and scary lecture on how only a slut turns up anywhere without an offering.’