Polly Samson

by Polly Samson

  “It’s where a Pisces should live,” Christopher sighs, his hand still resting on Anna’s arm.

  Hal says: “You’re Pisces as well, aren’t you mum?” but she doesn’t even nod, though he’s sure she’s heard him. Instead she pulls away, says: “I suppose it was Meg’s idea? Moving out here?”

  Why does she have to bring Meg into it? Hal wishes she wouldn’t. Normally Anna calls Meg “Smeg”, though Hal doesn’t have the faintest idea why. He just knows it would be very rude if she started calling her Smeg right now, here.

  “Yeah, Meg wanted to move here,” his dad says it quietly, like it’s a confession. Or an apology.

  “Right,” says Anna. “So where…?”

  “It was the silence. I think it got to her,” Christopher interrupts her before she asks. “That, and I’ve stopped drinking.”

  “Right,” Anna flushes again, stepping back into the room. “So, it’s goodbye Johnny Walker.”

  “Yeah, him as well,” says Christopher propping his backside against the windowsill, his arms folded, facing where she stands with nowhere to run to in the middle of the room.

  “Good.” She says finally, and Hal wonders what he can say to stop everything feeling so awkward.

  “Can I see my room now, dad?”

  Sometimes Hal wished he had his own bedroom in London. At home, his bed was in the corner of his mum’s room because it’s only a one-bedroom flat, and he’s supposed to sleep in a dark space between the wall and the bookcase that Anna’s pulled across the room to divide his space from hers. Because of bad dreams, he usually slept in Anna’s bed with her: she never seemed to mind too much. He preferred her side of the room because of the window. The good thing about his part is that she lets him draw on the wall, but the bad thing is that he’s already used up most of the bits he can reach. Some of his drawings make him cringe they’re so babyish. Silly smiling figures with legs growing straight out of potato heads, instead of having bodies which is how he can draw people now. It’s good that she lets him draw on the wall though: normal pictures can be taken down and thrown in the bin, even if you use lots of sellotape and Blu-Tack.

  “So what do you think?” Christopher stands at the door and waves his arm into the small room, like a salesman. “Do you like your bedroom?” Hal catches sight of Bob the Builder smiling at him from a poster and thinks: How long is it since I’ve seen you, dad?

  “I like the curtains,” he says. “Did you get them just for me?”

  “Yeah, I thought they were kind of like Action Man’s curtains,” says Christopher.

  Hal notices that they don’t quite reach the bottom of the window, but who cares? They’re made of green and grey camouflage material. And the bed!

  “Oh, dad, cool! It’s Action Man’s duvet.” Hal bounces on his knees because of the sloping ceiling.

  Christopher says to Anna: “I got the stuff from Army Surplus and had Tamsin from the café run it all up for him.”

  Anna nods, smiling. “You’ve done well, Chris,” she says.

  “Do you want your mum to sleep in here with you?” asks his dad. “I think the bed’s just about big enough.”

  “Where else?” Anna’s smiling, her head on one side, her face shining in the late light from the West. Hal’s sure he’s never seen her look so beautiful. With her long golden hair and pink lips she’d pass for a mermaid any day.

  “Sofa?” suggests Christopher, and Hal glances at his dad and catches him wink.

  They’re both laughing now, and although he doesn’t know what the joke is, Hal joins in when Anna punches Christopher lightly on the arm.

  “You don’t change do you? Shouldn’t you take the sofa? I’m your guest.”

  Anna looks so happy that Hal decides to try to make his parents laugh at every opportunity. He pulls silly dinosaur faces while they eat cheese on toast and sliced red apples. “Has he gone mental, or what?” says his dad.

  Hal takes off most of his clothes, and dances in his pants in front of the telly when they curl on the sofa with mugs of tea to watch Top of the Pops. Blur are Number One and they’re much better than Oasis. He’s glad that his parents agree with each other about things.

  In the bathroom, his mum and dad sit cross-legged on the floor while Hal splashes around, pretending he can swim. The bath is old and it’s like sitting on grit and his dad’s soap doesn’t smell so nice: it’s yellow streaked with grey like a piece of old marble. It’s a shame they keep talking, though, because Hal can hear the sea when they’re quiet. It feels special hearing the sea swell and sloosh against the sand at the same time as you’re sliding to and fro, your own waves slip-slapping against your skin.

  “Lovely colour you’ve done,” says Anna, looking around the room, nodding like she’s in a shop, like she’s about to buy something she can’t quite afford. “I like it.”

  The bathroom is freshly painted in a pale green, misty like seedless grapes. Hal looks for signs of the grape colour on his dad, but he’s clean. Usually Christopher has speckles caught in his hair, sometimes on the backs of his hands, like sugar strands on a cake.

  Hal catches Anna gesture at the bath. “He’s very proud of you, you know,” she confides in an audible whisper, then adds at normal volume: “He told his new teacher all about you when he went for his try-out at proper school, didn’t you Hal?”

  Yes, Hal had felt rather boastful at the time. “My dad’s a painter,” he told Miss Sanders.

  “Of walls,” Anna said. “Not pictures.”

  “And he did the laundry. It was a really big job.” Hal wanted Miss Sanders to be really impressed. Just as Hal himself had been when he watched his dad paint around the laundry machines in swift, unwavering lines, as if the grey paint simply unwound from his brush like tape.

  Christopher and Anna are deep in conversation, so it’s hopeless trying to listen to the sea. He interrupts them asking for more hot water. His dad is telling his mum that he’s going back to school. “It’s time I got some exams,” he says. “And Janine says she’ll lend me her computer if I do a course at the Tech.”

  “Can I do the hot tap again?”

  Anna says: “What about Hal?” She doesn’t look very pleased all of a sudden and Hal wonders if it’s just because she hates his Auntie J so much. As his dad mumbles on about computer courses and grants, Hal thinks about Janine, about the last time he was allowed to see her.

  He’d been with his dad and Meg and Auntie J at the stock cars and his mum had been horrible to Auntie J when she brought him back in a taxi. She’d snatched him through the half open door with such sudden strength that his feet flew in behind the rest of him and Auntie J said: “Not so rough!”

  Hal had to catch his breath, it was as though he had been stupid and she was saving him from the wheels of a car. She smelled cross, like raw onions. “It’s late, so…!” And so angry, she spat few words as he shrank inside his coat. She grabbed the carrier bag of clothes from his Auntie J, who didn’t smile at Anna: come to think of it they’d given that up months before. Auntie J’s face was all pointed and foxy above her fur collar and he had tried to wave to her, making the movement as tiny and close to his coat as he could.Back inside, Anna pushed him to the bathroom. He saw her hands shake as she undid the toggles of his coat. The monstrous pipes chugged, while Hal stood, silencing himself, a soft, naked, thing in the steaming, windowless cube of bathroom. Anna was kneeling, holding him so tight that he could feel her heart banging against his ear. She made him get into the bath too hot, he danced from foot to foot, the water stinging prickles up to his knees.

  “I can’t sit down,” he yelped.

  “You’ll be able to in a moment,” she told him, grim-faced, as though he’d done something bad, as though he deserved it.

  He flinched more later, when he heard her confess how she had felt undressing him. “Full of hate,” she said. “Like I was skinning an animal.” He understood then that the bath had to be hot to wash Meg away. He heard her crying while she spoke to whoever it
was she always spoke to.

  “I can’t help it,” he could hear her blowing her nose. “I can’t stand it if he smells of her.”

  And he remembered how she shuddered when she chased the suds down the plughole with the rubber spray.

  In the grape-coloured bathroom, Hal curls up on the floor with a towel. Christopher says: “You’re too big to be a little egg now you know!”

  “I’m not,” Hal tries to burrow, to get snug, but his dad’s towel is thin and grey and the carpet smells disgusting, like Brussels sprouts, or something worse.

  “You’d have to be a socking great ostrich, not a baby bird,” says his dad. It doesn’t matter, Hal wants to get up off the floor anyway.

  “He’s still my little egg at home,” says Anna returning from the kettle. “We have big big towels, don’t we Hal?”

  It’s true. Hal likes warm, dark spaces. At home he crouches into a ball on the bathroom floor and Anna tucks the towel around him. He curls into a small, delighted, eggling, while she pretends to walk in and find him there. “Who left this little egg on the floor? I wonder what’s inside?” She has to crack the little egg all over for ages before he emerges from the secret, dark, space. He hatches into the light of the bathroom.

  “Why, it’s a sweet little bird!”

  “What’s a goo goo? Can I have one?” Hal is woken, as Christopher predicted, by the sound of the cockerel. “It’s not cock-a-doodle-doo at all,” he says. “Listen. It’s cook a goo goo.”

  Anna gives him her tender, pale-lipped, morning smile from the pillow beside him and for an instant he can’t work out why she’s there, her hair all fuzzy over her usual old pink sleeping shirt. He must have dreamt about snuggling up to her in his dad’s bed, after the noise and thinking it was the cockerel and even though it was pitch black, managing not to bang into anything on his way through the sitting room, and the sound of the sea, and their breathing getting louder, guiding him to them. Anna’s skin was buttery, warm: she wasn’t wearing the pink shirt in the dream. She had groaned and rolled towards him and then he fell asleep, enclosed by her bare arms and her lemony scent.

  Anna sits up and rubs the sleepy-dust from the corners of her eyes. Hal catches a faint whiff of warm lemons when she lifts her arm. Weirdly, he can still recall the early morning smell of his parents together, at Checkpoint Road it must have been, from when he used to crawl between them before it was light. Lemons like now and warm and sort of eggy, but not unpleasant. He had never got into his dad’s bed with Meg. He always just sat on the covers, though Meg said he could get in with them if he wanted, when it was winter, and she and his dad watched cartoons in bed all morning, turned up loud because of the traffic.

  Hal stretches and looks around him. Mostly he looks at Anna, as she untangles her hair with her fingers, and he tries to sift memories, to separate dreams. He would ask her if she’s been here all night, but he catches sight of three brand-new shrimp nets on bamboo poles leaning against the wall and excitement bubbles up inside him. “Let’s go,” he says. “Get dad out of bed and let’s go to the beach.”

  It wasn’t really the best beach for swimming, his dad said, because of all the rocks and it feels like hours before they catch any shrimps. Hal’s neck began to ache from staring down into his net.

  “Let’s pretend we’re shipwrecked,” says Anna. His dad had been talking for ages to a couple of men with motorbikes up the top, where they had bought the Disney buckets and some cans of coke from a kiosk that also sold ice-cream.

  “We’ll have some later,” said his mum when he asked, and she told him they’d have to earn their lollies by catching enough shrimps for supper. She’d been boasting all morning about how good she used to be at it, not that she’d been near the sea, oh since who knows when. Her feet were bare, and she had rolled her jeans to above her knees and she was wearing her red bra as a top because she’d only packed Hal’s swimming things, not her own.

  “We’re going down now Chris,” she said to his dad who was leaning against the wall, watching one of the men roll a cigarette. She muttered: “You’d think he’d introduce us.” Hal shouted over to his dad, asked him if he’d get him an ice-cream.

  “Yeah, in a minute,” he said and then he nodded towards Hal and said to the men: “That’s my kid, come for the weekend from London. That’s Hal.”

  Hal felt he and Anna were very alone, on a desert island probably, in spite of all the other people on the sandy part of the beach. They flinched in their bare feet over sharp black rocks headed for the wider pools that the tide had left behind. They settled by the shallowest and dipped their nets into lukewarm water full of seaweed and promise, but pulled up nets full of nothing more exciting than sand and bladderwrack that smelled of sewage. Further up the beach two seagulls squabbled noisily over a crust left over from someone’s picnic. They pulled it between them like a tug of war, until a girl, about Hal’s age, in a bright orange swimsuit ran at them, flinging sand.

  Hal is still watching the girl as Christopher catches up with them, flicking the end of a roll-up at the water, just as Anna caught the first shrimp.

  “Dad, you forgot the ice-cream,” says Hal, but he doesn’t have time to be disappointed because of Anna’s excitement.

  “Look, look,” she says, “Oh Hal, it’s quite big.”

  “Yeah,” says Christopher peering into her net, “practically a lobster.”

  “I’ll get you a lolly in a minute Hal,” promises Anna. “Now help me get the prawn into the bucket.”

  “Shrimp,” says Hal, studying the miniscule sliver of grey, jumping against the gauzy green net like a cartoon flea.

  Christopher prizes a limpet off the rocks by bashing it with a stone so that it oozes orange goo. He throws it into their pool. “There, now you’ll get somewhere,” he says, dusting his hands together, casual but expert. There are five or six much bigger shrimps in Anna’s net. Christopher wanders off with a heavy stone to hammer more limpets and Anna announces that she can’t bear to touch the shrimps after all.

  “They feel too acrobatic, too alive,” and Hal has to tweezer hers as well as his own off the nets with his useful little boy’s fingers and hop them into the buckets. For a while he and Anna forget all about his dad.

  As far as Hal is concerned, there is only him and his mum, foraging for their food on the island: it’s a matter of life or death. For a moment he doesn’t even notice when his dad reappears at his side.

  “I think there’ll be some monster ones in this pool,” he says throwing in a handful of smashed up limpets, steering Hal to a deeper pool, much further out, which is shadowed by a large, overhanging rock.

  “And, look, there’s room for a little bum on this comfy ledge. Come and fish with me,” he says plaintively. Hal looks round, Anna is still picking seaweed from her net.

  His dad pats the rock beside him, adding, in a scratchy voice, a bit like a baddy in a film: “Come with me, Hal. We can talk of many things: of shoes - and ships - and sealing wax…”

  “What? What do you mean?” Hal doesn’t know why his dad has suddenly started talking rubbish.

  “- of cabbages - and kings…”

  “I don’t like it when you do that voice.”

  “And why the sea is boiling hot…” Christopher continues all the same. “And whether pigs have wings.”

  Christopher raises his eyebrows so they almost touch in the middle, while Hal stabs the sand with the end of his net, feeling hot and prickly and stupid. Why was it that he could never understand what grown-ups were talking about?

  “It’s from Alice in Wonderland,” his mum is at his side, she explains. “Me and your dad had to learn it at school. The walrus and the carpenter get all the little oysters to go for a walk with them and then when they’re far from their beds they gobble them up with bread and butter.”

  “Dad, I remember when you had oysters once,” says Hal so suddenly, it felt to him as though someone else had spoken through his lips. “You hit the oyster with your hammer
and a bit of shell went right in your eye.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” says Christopher looking along the bamboo of his net, down into the pool. “What an amazing memory you have!”

  “Yes, and you went to hospital for an operation.” Hal could remember his dad’s eye, the red on it, like a marble rolling around in a horrible wet pouch where he had pulled down the skin for Anna to look.

  “You’re getting confused,” says Anna, wandering back to the bucket with an empty net.

  “No, I didn’t go to hospital,” says Christopher.

  “Yes, you did,” insists Hal. “Mum and I came to see you and you were in a bed with a blue fuzzy blanket and the floor was white and I slipped over and then we left you there.”

  “I think you might be muddling things up a bit,” says Christopher, turning to watch Anna walking away.

  “I’m not,” insists Hal. “You swore and mum was crying.”

  Christopher turns back to face him.

  “Really Hal, it did hurt like hell, but I just rinsed my eye with Optrex. Honest.” He jumps down from the rock, although Hal had been about to join him there on the ledge.

  “Talking of boiling hot sea, I think these poor little things might be fish soup if we don’t change their water soon.”

  Hal has to help him. They tip all three hauls into one of the nets, the shrimps buck and jump like rain hammering a puddle, while Christopher replaces the water in the bottom of the buckets by scooping them into the sea. Hal is pleased to see his mum coming back from the top. He knew he was right about the hospital. Everyone knew Hal had a brilliant memory and he would never forget his dad there, with his black pirate’s eye patch and his hair all messy; how lonely and sad he had looked when they left him.

  “Hi, lovely!” Anna treads like a cat over the sharp rocks bearing lollies. “That’s enough talk about hospitals.”