by Carys Bray
Edna’s neighbourliness didn’t stop there. The generous retiree gave the new parents’ kitchen a thorough going over with a mop and bucket. Well done, Edna! We’ll be sending Edna our Resident of the Week bouquet, courtesy of Sweeneys Florist.
Mother and baby are thought to be doing well in hospital. If you know the family, call our news hotline.
The article is accompanied by a photograph of Mrs Mackerel holding a mixing bowl and spoon, as if she is just rustling up a baby. It is captioned ‘Edna Mackerel, pictured in her own kitchen’ and it’s the most promising object she has found to date. It was printed just days after she arrived in the world. At the exact moment when paper boys and paper girls were slipping the newspaper through people’s letter boxes, she, Clover Quinn, was in hospital, with her mother. Dad was probably too busy to do an interview. And too surprised! But it would have been nice if he had agreed and the newspaper had sent a photographer to the hospital to take a picture of the three of them, together.
There are only two photographs of her with her mother. Dad took them with an old-fashioned camera. She slips off her gloves and hurries downstairs to retrieve the album from the kitchen drawer.
The first photograph was taken at the hospital. Her mother is sitting up in bed, legs hidden by a white blanket. She is wearing a black baggy T-shirt, with something written across the chest that’s difficult to read because she is cradling a tiny baby in a rock-a-bye pose. The baby’s face is scrunched and she is wearing a yellow woollen hat.
Her mother looks tired. But that’s to be expected. And a bit startled. No wonder! Her hair is loose and it reaches her waist. The camera has missed her smile. Dad says this happened all the time with old cameras because you couldn’t check the photograph until you picked up your order from the shop; you didn’t know what you’d got until it was too late.
The second photograph was taken at home, in the kitchen. Her mother is wearing another big T-shirt and a pair of baggy trackie bottoms. Her hair is still loose and her mouth is open, as if she is saying something or – Clover thinks – about to smile. You can’t see the baby’s face because she is holding it against her, one hand resting on the bump of its nappy-covered bottom, the other supporting its back. The baby is wearing a pink baby-grow. It looks bald. It’s not possible to say whether the baby is asleep or awake, but Clover feels that she was definitely awake and that the hold was more of a hug than a carry.
That’s it. One and two. There’s nothing else of them together. Unless there’s something here, in among all the stuff. An overlooked photograph or another newspaper cutting; both, even. Perhaps she’ll get really lucky and discover something amazing – a long-forgotten interview accompanied by a family picture: SPECIAL DELIVERY FOR DARREN AND BECKY! That would be epic.
The other pictures in the album are of Clover by herself and, occasionally, with Dad. She flicks through, amazed at her smallness. Dad says the doctors decided that she was about five weeks early; that’s probably why she had to wear an eyepatch when she was a toddler. She was lucky, he says, some early babies have respiratory problems and developmental delays. And, he teases, she was clearly determined, in arriving early – in arriving at all – to surprise as many people as possible.
She slips the gloves back on. The two photographs of her with her mother don’t seem to belong in the little album any more. They belong with the newspaper article. She slides them out of the plastic pockets and places them on the floor. She will make a display. Draw a special heading – ‘SURPRISE’ in bubble writing. But not yet. She’ll need to arrange things properly. And she might find more stuff to add, things from her own room, like the tiny clothes Dad bought on the day she was born – there he was, buying baby-grows, and he’d never even held a baby until that afternoon.
She examines the photographs side by side, scanning the just-missed-smile and about-to-smile face of her mother for a reflection of herself – an echo or an impression, an answer to the question what will I be? She is incomplete, a part-written recipe. How can she imagine what she will be if she only knows half of her ingredients?
Exhibit: ‘Becky Brookfield – the Untold Story’
Catalogue
Object: School report – one of several.
Description: Becky Brookfield’s school report, summer 1989.
Item Number: 9.
Provenance: Becky Brookfield (my mother) is described by her teacher, Mrs Sylvester, as a solitary child who sometimes needs encouragement. Mrs Sylvester’s pen pressed hard into the paper and her writing is very spiky. Becky Brookfield was often absent. I expect I would be absent a lot too, if Mrs Sylvester was my teacher.
Display: In its brown envelope which doesn’t have a stamp (Becky Brookfield must have carried it home from school with her).
Curator: Clover Quinn.
Keeper: Darren Quinn.
8
It’s been a while since he visited Broadhursts. He used to come here with Mum when he was a boy, and he came a few times with Clover to collect the free World Book Day books and to spend the tokens Edna used to give at Christmas and birthdays. He’d forgotten how nice it is. The walls are wrapped in bookcases and glass-fronted cabinets, and the air is warm with the grassy smell of paper and leather. A book-packing station with a string dispenser and sheets of brown paper sits below an antique sign: Pleasant Books for the Children. The place feels old and trusty and a little bit magical.
He glances around, hoping he won’t have to ask, but he doesn’t know the author’s name. Perhaps he should have ordered the book online, but he practically passes the shop on his way home from Lord Street; he’d be daft not to do it while it’s on his mind. He tilts his head and inspects the spines of the books in the nearest case. It’s such a small shop; he won’t get away with browsing for long before someone –
‘Can I help you?’
‘There’s this book I’m looking for. It’s about women.’
‘Hmm,’ the girl says. And as she purses her lips thoughtfully, he notices a book just behind her, front-facing: Vagina. Oh God. What if she thinks he wants that book? – it’s practically bellowing, I’m a book about women!
‘Something about how to do it. How to be a woman, I mean,’ he adds, quickly.
‘Ah, I know.’ The girl lifts a green paperback from a shelf just behind him. ‘This’ll be the one,’ she says, holding it up for his inspection.
There’s a picture of a woman on the cover. She has long black hair with a white streak, like Morticia. Her expression is one of mild amusement, but her raised eyebrow says, Mess with me at your peril.
‘Is it a present?’
‘No.’
‘Oh, that’s great.’
‘I mean –’
‘Good for you!’
‘– well, I’m a man –’
‘You’ll love it.’
I’m a man? Good one, Captain Obvious.
‘Especially the bit where she tells you to find a chair to stand on.’
‘Right.’
‘I am a feminist!’ the girl cries, toasting him with an imaginary glass. ‘Would you like it wrapped?’
‘Oh, I –’
‘There’s no charge.’
And before he can respond she is folding brown paper around Morticia’s face and the quote on the book’s cover – ‘The book EVERY woman should read’ – disappears under creases and a criss-cross of string.
He hurries home in the early evening sunshine, clasping the wrapped book. In its pages lies the promise of certainty. He feels better already, comforted by the anchoring assurance of another solid object.
*
The runner beans have grown dark and wild, overwhelming the bamboo frame he built. Several of the thickened knotty pods have dried in the sun. He tears them away from the plants and opens them up. The seeds inside are speckled purple and black, smooth and shiny like pebbles. He empties them into the palm of one hand and slips them into a ziplock bag. He will plant them next spring and they will begin their lives in
the kitchen, on the windowsill and the worktop, where it’s warm and light. One day he’ll get a greenhouse. One day.
The mozzies are out. He can hear them whining past his ears. Bastards. He windmills his arms and jumps on the spot, sending the seeds spinning around the bag. There weren’t mosquitoes like this when he came here as a boy. Of course, it was a different world – God, he sounds ancient, like Dad, but it was – when you missed something on the telly or forgot to set the video recorder, that was that; if you finished your book you had to wait until the shops or the library opened, you couldn’t download another one or pop to a twenty-four-hour supermarket. On light evenings, when he was small, and he’d finished watching Inspector Gadget or Bananaman, he happily helped Dad with the growing; it wasn’t as if there was much else to do. And he enjoyed it. Just the two of them, Bob Quinn & Son, growing things in the back garden, tending them until they were big enough to be lifted into the boot of the car and transported to the allotment.
When Dad stepped into the back garden, he turned into someone different: Grandmaster of the Greenhouse, conjurer of life in yogurt pots, seed trays and margarine tubs. Years before Darren was born, when Dad lived in the house alone, he had laid a stepping-stone path down the middle of the lawn. It pointed like a suggestion to the bottom of the garden where the greenhouse lived. The greenhouse had an aluminium frame. It was shaped like the kind of house you draw when you’re a kid, with a pitched roof, a little door bang in the middle of its front, and fruit trees on either side. When the door opened, warm air steamed out, thick with the peppery smell of generations of tomato plants. In addition to the growing things, the shelves that lined its perimeter were filled with treasures: balls of string, wooden clothes pegs, a tub of slug pellets, twine, leather gloves, pot brushes, insect catchers, a folding pruning saw and a pocket knife. Bags of compost and fertiliser slouched on the floor alongside watering cans and bubble-wrap rolls. There were cobwebs and all manner of pupa – some fat and occupied, others derelict, dried-up husks. And spiders: hairy beasts with legs like pipe-cleaners that waited out the winter under the shelves and inside the empty pots.
In the early spring he and Dad lined up the pots and trays. They filled them with compost and labelled them with plant sticks, a task Darren was allowed to perform as soon as he was able to shrink his bloated, quivering letters small enough. Dad kept the seeds in a long box, separated by alphabetised index cards: bean (broad), bean (green), beetroot, broccoli, cabbage, carrot, celery, chives, cucumber, and so on. He’d written notes on the cards, in capitals:
START INDOORS
SOW AFTER DANGER OF FROST HAS PASSED.
PLANT 2 INCHES APART.
SOAK SEEDS 24 HOURS BEFORE SOWING.
One year, when he can’t have been more than five, Darren sneaked into the greenhouse before Dad got home from his job at the Philips factory, with the intention of doing him a great kindness. He filled the biggest watering can using the outside tap – once, twice, three times – and he watered everything. There was nothing much to see at that stage: they had only recently buried the seeds under the compost. Perhaps he had hoped to hurry them up; he can’t remember his precise thoughts, but he remembers heaving the can with both hands, swamping the yogurt pots of peas (garden), submerging the trays of lettuce (round) and sopping the tubs of beans (green). Not content with soaking all the growing things that were concealed under compost, he refilled the can and saturated the onion sets. Then he sluffed the seed potatoes. And finally, he opened the long, indexed seed box and filled that with water, too.
When Dad got home they had tea and then they went outside together as usual, Darren carrying the battery-operated radio, tuned to John Dunn’s Radio 2 drivetime show. Dad opened the greenhouse door and froze. He didn’t shout. He waited for a few moments before turning and heading back down the stepping-stone path and into the kitchen.
Darren followed.
‘Carol, come and look at this.’
‘What is it, love?’ Mum asked.
Dad inclined his head and she stepped into the garden in her slippers. Again, Darren followed, radio at the ready.
They stopped at the greenhouse door. It looked like there’d been a storm. Water dripped from the shelves: plop, plop, plop.
Mum put her hand on Dad’s shoulder. ‘Oh, love. I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I really am.’
Dad nodded, accepting her condolences.
‘He’ll have done it to be helpful. You were trying to help, weren’t you, Darren? He didn’t understand what he was doing, did you?’
Darren realised they weren’t going to thank him. And that he might be in trouble. So he hurried back into the house, put the radio on the side where it belonged and crept up to bed.
‘It wasn’t the best idea you’ve ever had,’ Dad observed, the following morning.
Over the subsequent evenings they restored order. Dad tied lines of string to the greenhouse ceiling and pegged the index cards out to dry. It looked like bunting and while it was up, whenever they walked down the garden, it felt they were on their way to a party. Some of the seeds from the box were salvageable because the envelopes were waxy, pretty much waterproof. Where the soil and seeds had been washed out of pots and trays, they replanted. They put the onions in the earth earlier than planned in case of mould. The potatoes were fine. It was all right in the end. Dad never shouted at him. Not when he doused the greenhouse. Not ever. Perhaps his patience was a product of his age.
His mum and dad were older than other parents, something that dawned on Darren during his first sports day, when he experienced an unexpected flare of panic at the announcement of a dads’ race. He looked at Dad, who had taken the afternoon off work specially, and realised that, compared to the other men, he was slow, deliberate. Darren didn’t mind this. In fact, he felt a great wave of tenderness for him, an overwhelming feeling that it would be the worst possible thing in the world for him to feel obliged to enter the race and come last or, worse still, fall and hurt himself in front of everyone. So while his mates dragged their half-laughing, half-posturing dads to the starting line, Darren studied the band of elastic on the front of his plimsolls.
There was a tremendous thudding on the grass as the dads ran. They were like animals, a herd of strapping chaps. Darren felt the stomp of their feet in his chest and he cheered and laughed with everyone else, but afterwards, during the walk home, he held Dad’s hand extra tight. I might have cheered for them, his hand was saying, but don’t worry, I like you the best.
Darren grabs the watering can from under the carpet and jogs down the path to the tap. The peas are struggling. Clover’s daytime watering isn’t doing the trick. Still, it’s better than nothing and at least she’s not being eaten alive. He drops the can and whacks a mozzie on his forearm. Splat – ha!
Once the watering is done, he banks a line of emerging potatoes and weeds between the older plants. It’d be good if he could drag Dad down here. He saw a little wooden sign not long ago, when he was in Lidl, doing the shopping. What was it? – TO PLANT A GARDEN IS TO BELIEVE IN TOMORROW. Dad won’t get involved in any material plans for tomorrow. All he wants is to stay at home and shop from his armchair. He orders everything: groceries, clothes, the latest technology – he’s got wireless headphones, chargers that don’t need to be plugged in, all sorts of shit. He’d rather watch telly and look stuff up on YouTube than go outside and do something. He’s on to Shakespeare now, Clover says. There are thirty-seven plays – Darren checked, to see how long it will last: clear through until September. And what’s the point? What’ll Dad have to show for it in the end? He should do one of those adult courses at the college if he wants to learn stuff. Otherwise, what’s the difference between him and other people who never leave their houses, the ones who sit in bed all day eating, only to shit it out the next morning?
Some people are all right by themselves – Darren is absolutely fine. Dad says he is fine too, but Darren can’t help wondering whether his mother would have managed better on her
own. She had friends. A whole group of them. They worked at Kwik Save together, before he was born. When he was small they came round for coffee and chats and card games. He liked their paraphernalia: scarves and bags, hats and coats, gloves and cardigans. He liked the way they filled the room with their soft things, and soft noises, the sympathetic hmms they made, the similar sounds that meant a variety of things: no, yes, really? Never! They fussed and petted him. Sometimes he’d get to climb on a comfy knee and listen to his favourite Ladybird books: The Enormous Turnip and The Little Red Hen. When he’d had enough of their attentions he would sit on the rug with his colouring book while they smoked and laughed and called, ‘Last card!’ In between rubbers they talked about men he didn’t know: Alan, Steve, Ian, Paul. Later, after he started school, it troubled him to know that Mum’s friends were meeting without him. He knew when they’d been, because the house smelled of their bodies: of talc, extra cigarette smoke and instant coffee.
One day after they’d been – he was a little older, definitely school-aged, so perhaps it was during the holidays – Mum got a picture out of the dresser drawer.
‘I expect you’ve been wondering who Paul is.’
He hadn’t. But she seemed about to say something interesting, so he listened.
‘Before I met your dad, I was married to Paul. He died. And I was very sad. But then I met your dad and had you. And now I’m very happy.’
She showed him a picture of a wedding. It was her, his mum, in a floaty white dress, head wrapped in a piece of material that looked like a net curtain, getting married to someone who wasn’t his dad.
‘Why did he die?’
‘Something went wrong in his brain. It bled, inside.’
He looked at the photo of the man who wasn’t Dad, the man with the brown suit, the thick moustache and the bleeding brain, and he was glad that the man was dead.