by Carys Bray
He walks from the changeover stop on Lord Street to Dad’s flat. The cafés have crept outside into the heat; the pavement is crowded by chairs and umbrellaed tables. He passes ice-cream shops, bucket-and-spade shops, rock shops and fancy-dress shops; places that almost make him feel as if he lives beside the right sort of seaside, the kind with yellow sand and blue sea, rather than a stretch of salt marsh bordered by dunes.
Dad has chosen to grow old and reclusive in a modern retirement development. It’s nice enough; within walking distance of a golf course, the shops, a park and the Marine Lake. At least it would be, if Dad ever went anywhere. There’s a communal garden and a lift, which Dad doesn’t need because there’s nothing wrong with his legs. They have bingo and coffee mornings, games nights and a visiting library. But Dad doesn’t join in.
Darren walks down the block brick path, presses the intercom and waits next to one of the tubs of pansies someone has placed on either side of the entrance. ‘It’s me,’ he says, and the door jerks open.
He climbs the stairs to Dad’s flat. The front door is already unfastened and Dad is waiting for him in the hall, beside the cuckoo clocks and the big photograph of Mum. It’s fuzzy and over-exposed. They didn’t have a digital camera at the time and it’s how Darren remembers her now, soft around the edges and slightly luminous.
Dad follows his gaze. ‘She never made a fuss, did she?’
Faint praise. Darren searches for the words that will agree with Dad and simultaneously expand his observation into a meaningful tribute.
‘She was a good woman,’ he says, and Dad nods. It’ll have to do.
Once, when Darren was still a teenager, his mum was diagnosed with lung cancer. They awaited the results of the tests that would stage it. 2B was the best they could hope for. 2B or not 2B, Mum said – a Shakespeare joke, fleetingly funny; and then the answer was 3B, median life expectancy fifteen months, and all jokes stopped.
Another picture in Dad’s hall, smaller, darker, captures the three of them, together. There’s Darren, twenty years old by then, wearing a black polo neck jumper and white jeans, one arm around his dying mother, smiling for the camera and for his future self, who is bound to examine and re-examine this particular photograph. There he is, assuming death is a simple thing that it happens in stages: The Preparation, The (obligatory) Fight and The (inevitable) Capitulation; followed by The Arrangements, The Mourning and The Mending.
‘Beer?’ Dad asks.
‘Go on then.’
Dad’s got all the windows open but it’s still muggy. Even the glass doors that lead on to the balcony are gaping. Darren can hear applause from a game show on the telly and the low buzz of a flotilla of bluebottles as they fling themselves from one end of the flat to the other. As Dad shuffles into the kitchen Darren watches the crook of his retreating back. The kitchen smells faintly of piss. Dad says – no, insists that he doesn’t pour it down the sink once he’s measured and recorded its volume in his B&B (Bowel and Bladder) book, but he’s got to be lying. That, or there’s a problem with the drains. Either way, Dad can’t seem to smell it and so there’s a weird performance every time Darren arrives which involves him sniffing around like a cartoon hound while Dad follows in his wake, saying, ‘It’s you. There’s something wrong with your nose. That’s what it is.’
‘Have you got some bleach? I’ll pour a bit down the drain and see if it makes a difference.’
Dad points at the cupboard under the sink. ‘You don’t have to come. You’re busy and I don’t want to be any bother.’
‘You’re no bother.’ Darren finds the bleach, positions the bottle over the plughole and pours.
‘But Clover –’
‘Clover’s fine. She’ll have been at the allotment, watering. There’ll be a bag of veg for you in the kitchen. I’ll bring it or she can cycle round with it. She’s been dead cheerful. Humming to herself, smiling at nothing. Must be the holidays.’ Darren puts the bleach back in the cupboard and pauses as he tots up Clover’s round-the-clock cheerfulness to the daydreamy way she has been holding old photographs and books. ‘You don’t think she’s . . . she’s too young to be soft on a lad, isn’t she?’
‘Sounds about right to me.’
‘Oh God.’
‘No need to worry, it’ll all be in her imagination.’
‘What?’
‘Have you ever seen a twelve-year-old lad? Ha-ha!’ Dad’s laugh turns into a cough and he digs in his pocket for a hanky, which he uses to wipe his eyes. ‘It’ll be someone off the telly. A singer, probably. You’d better find out who it is and buy her a poster so she can practise kissing it.’
‘Ugh.’
‘That’s what they do, isn’t it, girls?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Me neither. Not really.’ Dad lifts a few cans out of a cupboard. John Smith’s and Courage Best Bitter. ‘Help yourself.’
‘Have you got something cold?’
‘No.’
‘This then. Ta.’
Dad opens one of the leaves of the fold-away table and gestures. Sit. They sip their beers. A bluebottle bursts in from the hall and scopes out the kitchen, hovering briefly over a neat stack of unfastened Amazon boxes on the table, ready for recycling.
‘Been anywhere nice recently?’ Darren asks.
‘No.’
‘Been anywhere at all?’
‘No.’
‘That’s a shame.’
‘No need. Everything’s delivered.’ Dad nods at the flattened boxes on the table and lifts his beer. ‘Good shift?’
‘Fine. Hot.’
‘When’re you next off?’
‘Tomorrow. But I’m helping Colin with a job.’
‘Colin.’ Dad tuts. ‘How’s his friend?’
‘Mark’s okay.’
‘Brave lad. I looked up the charity. You volunteer and then you have to go wherever they send you, did you know that?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Least he only went to Africa. Could have been Afghanistan or Syria.’
‘I know. Colin was dead worried.’
‘Colin’s a scally.’
‘He’s all right.’
‘Waste of a day off, helping him.’
‘He’s lonely. Missing Mark. And it’s a bit of extra cash. Comes in handy. The allotment cost fifty quid this year.’
‘Worth it, though.’
‘Probably. Just.’
‘Carrots any good?’
‘Pathetic.’
‘Put them in tubs. I’ve told you.’
‘I know. I’ll listen one of these days.’
Dad fills his mouth with beer, holds it between his cheeks for a moment then swallows. Gulp. ‘You can start now, if you like.’
‘Go on,’ Darren says, wary of the forced jollity in Dad’s voice and his not-so-subtle request for permission to speak.
‘Sid’s dead.’
‘Sid?’
‘From upstairs. Sid with the incontinent pug.’
‘Ah, Sid. God, he was old.’
‘Ninety-three.’
Darren tries to look sympathetic, but he can’t muster any sadness for Sid. In fact, he feels slightly pissed off with him for having lived so long. Greedy, really, when you think about it.
‘Sid got me thinking. I used to have conversations with your mum, before she got ill. When I die, I’d like you to do such and such a thing – that’s what I’d say to her. And she’d say the same to me. We talked as if I’d see to her arrangements and she’d see to mine. I suppose you have to, really, because you don’t know who’ll go first. You don’t think about it, do you? You don’t think, One of us will get left behind and die alone, without the other. But I will – die alone, I mean. Without her.’
‘God, Dad.’ Darren’s chair scrapes the kitchen floor as he stands. It’s an abrupt, intrusive sound and he’s glad of it. He can’t remember the last time Dad said so many words at once. He picks his can off the table and carries it with him to the sink.
‘
You’ll have to sort things for me. I’ve written it down. It’s all in the envelope in the drawer next to the bed.’
‘You’ve told me be—’
‘Make sure you put me with her.’
‘I’ve said I will, haven’t I?
‘I’ve got about four years left, in all probability.’
Darren holds his breath and silently counts to three.
‘You might go first, of course.’
He snorts; he won’t argue about who’s going to die first. ‘You’re a barrel of laughs today.’
‘What do you want, when you go?’
‘Give over. I’m not talking about this with you.’
‘Well, you haven’t got anyone else to talk to, have you? And don’t pull that face. You’ve got to think about the future.’
‘You sound like one of those adverts where you get a free pen and alarm clock if you sign up for life insurance.’
‘Sit down, I’ll get a stiff neck looking up at you. There’s some biscuits in the tin.’
One of the clocks strikes the half hour and Darren steps into the hall to catch it. Dad kept three of the clocks when he moved here: the plainest, oldest clock, which looks like a nesting box, and two others, both shaped like alpine houses, their cuckoos hiding behind a first-floor window. The bird in the smallest alpine house sings on the half hour and, on the hour, the clock plays one of twelve different tunes. The larger house, the fanciest of the three clocks, has a garden and when the cuckoo sings a pair of goats on the lawn raise their heads while a man in lederhosen chops wood with a tiny axe. The rest of Dad’s collection is in Darren’s dining room, in boxes.
Darren thinks the oldest clock chimed first, but he can’t be certain. He waits and then the bird bursts out of the first-floor window of the smallest house, cuckoo. Dad joins him and Darren points at the biggest clock – this one, next. Dad nods and they stand together, Mum’s photograph on the wall beside them as Darren remembers clock parts arriving in the post: hands and chains and gong coils; gears, pendulums, weights, and sometimes, best of all, a new cuckoo, its extended tail giving it the appearance of a tiny, bird-nosed aeroplane. All those Saturday afternoons at the kitchen table, Mum coordinating their efforts – ‘I’m sure Darren would like to help, love. Cover the table in newspaper for your dad, there’s a good lad.’ The quiet concentration, the cups of tea, the plate of biscuits Mum would place on the table beside them; pink wafers and digestives, in a pattern.
The first-floor window opens and the largest clock strikes the half hour, cuckoo. The familiar sound settles things. It’s almost as if Mum’s ghost is occupying the space between them, cushioning their corners.
‘We had a good time doing them clocks, didn’t we?’ Dad says.
‘We did.’
‘You could always unpack some of them and have a go with Clover.’
‘I could.’
He is thinking about leaving when Dad proffers the B&B book. He glances at the day’s recordings.
P.U.
6.00: 270ml yellow
10.23: 185ml pale
1.14: 225ml pale
4.07: 190 ml pale
B.O.
10.23: firm, 5 inches
1.14: pellets, several – firm
‘Looks fine,’ he says. ‘Everything seems to be in working order.’
‘The bladder should be able to hold up to 430ml.’
‘Well, there’s no point in holding it in, is there? Seems all right to me. Go and see the doctor if you’re worried.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Good. And you’re keeping busy, even though you’re not going out?’
‘I am.’
‘With . . . ?’
‘YouTube,’ Dad says, eyebrows raised, indicating that he was barely able to resist adding, of course.
‘Anything in particular?’
‘Documentaries.’
‘About?’
‘Mars.’
‘Right.’
‘The red planet.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Do you know how many documentaries there are about Mars on YouTube?’
Darren shakes his head. ‘Do you?’
‘No.’
‘Oh. I thought you were going to tell –’
‘Lots.’
‘Right.’
‘A hundred thousand people have applied to go there. And there isn’t even any oxygen.’
‘Idiots.’
‘Do you know how cold it gets at night?’
‘No.’
‘Minus one hundred.’
‘Pretty cold, then.’
‘I should say so. There’s a fifteen-mile-high volcano.’
‘High, that.’
‘You’re not kidding.’ Dad taps his fingers on the table. ‘I’d go, you know.’
‘To Mars?’
‘I would.’
‘Give over.’
‘Nothing for me here.’
Darren won’t argue. There’s no point. It’s a provocation – I’d go to Mars, and you won’t even get yourself a girlfriend – that’s what Dad’s really saying.
He leaves with a bag of the outsize beefsteak tomatoes Dad grows on the balcony. He hasn’t asked how Dad gets them so big or what he uses for fertiliser because he really doesn’t want to know.
He strides back through town to South Garden, where he buys fish and chips for two in honour of the programme Clover likes, the one that starts tonight. It’s always better to watch food programmes with something nice to eat, so you don’t get hungry, and although South Garden isn’t the nearest takeaway, the portion sizes are immense and their chips are the best in town.
He’s approaching The Grove and the incline of the railway bridge, the fish and chips sweating in the plain white carrier bag, when he thinks about pudding. The thought sends him striding up the hill alongside the blue railings and the trees; past the dip in which the house sits, past Jewson’s and down the hill to Jo Kelly’s News, where he buys a box of Mr Kipling’s French Fancies. Clover’s baking programme has contestants and judges. When the judges are tasting the contestants’ creations, he’ll produce the French Fancies, on a plate.
‘Lovely icing, Darren,’ he’ll say, in a high, posh voice, just like the female judge. ‘Very delicate. And in three colours. Well done.’
Clover will laugh and it will be another moment he can call on, should he need it. They’ll sit together, the two of them, in the dip beside the railway bridge, surrounded by their stuff; everything she might want – everything he can think of, at least – all the ingredients for a good life, so many possibilities, so many reasons to be happy.
Concept (idea): An exhibit. ‘Becky Brookfield – the Untold Story’.
Purpose: Education, information, discussion, illustration (add other ‘ion’ words so there is lots of purpose).
Objects: The objects will come from the second bedroom and they will also be borrowed from around the house. Clover Quinn will catalogue the objects.
Story: Clover Quinn will tell the story and write any text.
Designer: Clover Quinn.
Curator: Clover Quinn.
Keeper: Darren Quinn.
Other information: This will be a temporary exhibit. Afterwards the objects will be stored somewhere safe.
3
Clover bought the notebook during the end-of-term trip to the Maritime Museum, a few weeks ago. The day began badly. As the train sloped into the station Mr Judge told people to pick partners and she was filled with a panicky, musical chairs feeling.
This school year, friendship has evolved from something easy to a complicated performance that requires a lot of pretending. It has become vitally important to like and dislike the right things; to have committed certain acts or to at least understand the acts that other people claim to have committed. Take fingering, for example, which sounds like it could be to do with playing the ukulele, but is something else entirely – something Abbie Higham claims to have had done to her.
Abbie Higham has the kudos that comes from having been kissed. She won’t name names, but she is happy to be pressed for details and proffer advice.
‘When you kiss, you have to open your mouth or you’ll suffocate.’
‘If you wear red lipstick it means you’re a slag.’
‘You shouldn’t go swimming in the sea when you have your period. Sharks, duh!’
Clover glanced left and right, pulling her best not-bothered face; she wouldn’t look desperate by dashing about from person to person. It wasn’t a case of not being liked, just of not being liked enough, of not being anyone’s first choice, of not having a bosom friend, something she can’t ever say out loud, obviously – bosom! – but has been mulling over ever since she and Grandad read Anne of Green Gables in their book club last summer.
In the end Mr Judge took pity on her. ‘You can sit with me, Clover,’ he offered.
They crowded on to the train. Mr Judge secured four seats, two sets of two, facing each other, and placed his bag beside him. Clover sat opposite, in the aisle seat, and watched as further down the carriage Abbie, Jess and Emily attempted to stop Dagmar from occupying an empty seat by piling their bags on it.
‘Clover!’ Abbie called. ‘We’re saving this for you.’
Dagmar waited in the aisle, one eye obscured by the slope of her dark fringe.
‘Clover! Get here! I’m not sitting next to Dracula.’
‘She vants to bite us.’
They needed Clover’s help to complete their meanness, but she didn’t move. In the end Mr Judge stood, twisted and, clutching the headrest of his seat, called, ‘For goodness’ sake, Dagmar, just sit down.’
Dagmar looked helplessly at the piled bags.
‘Clover, move up to the window. Dagmar, come here. There’s a seat right here.’ He sat down hard. ‘Honestly, girls.’
Dagmar sat, head bowed, hands clasped, and not for the first time Clover wondered what to say to her. It was easy to assume that she didn’t care. She never blushed. Her expression remained impassive and she held herself small, as if she was used to pretending invisibility. But she must care, Clover thought, she must.
Dagmar felt the looking and glanced up, face cross, forehead crinkled. If she had spoken, she might have said, I didn’t ask for your help and Don’t you dare feel sorry for me.