by Simon Mason
Before their baths, they managed to sit together for a few minutes in Martha’s room.
‘Do you like living here, Martha?’
‘I think it’s for the best, Tug. What about you?’
‘It’s a bit tiring.’ He was thoughtful. ‘And they don’t really understand me yet,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m hungry all the time.’
Martha sighed. ‘But it’s very neat and tidy. And since the court order Dad hasn’t come round.’
‘It’s a bit too clean. And I don’t like Grandma. But,’ he added brightly, ‘I haven’t broken anything yet.’
They had baths, and separate reading, and then it was time to turn out their lights.
Grandma stood in Martha’s doorway. ‘Now, at last,’ she said, ‘we have a chance to make a new beginning. Good night, Martha.’
‘Good night, Grandma.’
For a moment, as she lay there, she thought about Dad. She was sorry for him: she didn’t want him to go to jail. But she was glad he wasn’t coming round any more. She didn’t want to see him, or think about him either.
Very carefully, she made herself stop thinking about him. Instead, she thought of herself lying in her new bed, in her new room, in the dark. As she had said to Tug, everything was neat and tidy, even the shadows, though there weren’t many of those because she had closed the curtains tightly so she wouldn’t be able to see the moon. It was a safe darkness, smooth and still, and she allowed herself to lie there in the quiet and the darkness and the stillness, not thinking about anything else.
This is it, she said to herself, this feeling now. A new beginning. At last.
She woke suddenly, and lay there listening hard. She had a feeling that something had made a noise.
Everything was quiet. She looked at her bedside clock. The luminous face said 02.30. She sat up to listen better and the whole house was as still and peaceful as before. There was only the faint noise of rain against the window.
Perhaps it was thunder, she thought. But as she lay back down, she heard it again, a sharp, scrappy noise somewhere close.
‘Tug?’ she said.
She put on the lamp and got out of bed. She tiptoed to the door and opened it. The landing was dark and empty. Then the noise came again, from behind her, and she realized it was coming from the window. Going across the room, she drew back the curtains and moonlight flooded in through the rain-streaked pane. Dimly, she could see something moving in the garden below, a long dark shape swaying from side to side. It swung through the air towards her and thumped against the window, and she saw that it was a ladder.
Oh no, she thought. Please no.
Dad’s face appeared at the window, very wet and white. ‘Martha!’ he said, slapping the glass with his hand. ‘Martha! Shh! Quietly! Open the window.’ He laughed. ‘Quick, Martha, before I fall onto the wheelie bin!’
She opened the window and the rain came in and wet her face.
‘What are you doing? You can’t stay here or they’ll catch you and put you in prison. There isn’t a wheelie bin,’ she added.
‘Never mind that. Come with me now. Climb onto my shoulders, and put Tug under my arm and let’s be off.’ He was giggling.
‘You’re drunk,’ she said.
‘We’ll be runaways!’ he shouted. ‘Shh!’ he added. ‘Quietly does it.’
She stared at him. It was too much. She felt herself begin to tremble. ‘Stop it, Dad. Please stop. You’re being silly.’
‘What’s wrong with being silly if we love each other? I love you more than … damn, I can’t think of anything.’ He began to laugh again. ‘There’s too much rain to think.’ He took both hands off the ladder and reached them out towards her. ‘Everything’s my fault,’ he said. ‘Even the rain. I just wanted to see you. I miss you so much. Don’t you miss me?’
Martha stepped backwards into her room. She was trembling so badly now she could hardly stand. Something was happening to her. She couldn’t control herself any more. She felt a great shuddering inside her, and a choking pain and her eyes were suddenly blind with tears.
‘Leave me alone!’ she screamed at the top of her voice.
Dad looked startled. ‘Shh!’ he said. ‘Bit noisy.’
She ran forward and slammed the window shut. ‘I don’t want to see you any more!’ she yelled.
Dad had stopped laughing. He pressed his face against the wet window pane, looking very surprised. ‘Martha?’ he mouthed.
She took a deep, deep breath, and shouted at him so furiously she hurt her throat: ‘Can’t you see? I’m only a little girl!’
Finally he was quiet.
Through the wet window he stared at her in horror.
Then there were footsteps in the hall, and Grandma and Grandpa burst into the room, closely followed by Tug. From outside came a tilting, scraping, sliding noise. Then a thump and a muffled cry. Martha ran forward and looked down into the garden, just in time to see Dad, covered in mud, limping and slithering across the wet grass, round the side of the house and out of her life.
35
The seasons changed. Summer ended, autumn began. In the park the trees shed their leaves, the yellow and blue boats were taken off the lake and put into storage, and the tennis courts were locked up. At the end of October the café closed. The days grew short. Down by the canal where the fun fair used to come, work began on two new apartment blocks, and by the end of the year the walls were built up to the eaves. Christmas came and went, and then, very slowly, the dreary, colourless days of January and February, with their chilly mornings and gloomy afternoons, when Martha caught a cold and Tug had a verruca, and Grandpa developed bronchitis and had to stay in bed for nearly a week. In March the corner shop where they bought their lollies was replaced by a coffee shop, and road works went up all along the main road and kept the traffic at a crawl until the end of April.
During these months everything was strange and new for Martha and Tug. As the seasons changed, they changed too. Martha stopped going to Cookery Club and Costumes Club; she took more interest in her school work and excelled, particularly in Science and Maths. She started playing hockey and did well enough to get into the school team, though the games teacher was apt to comment that she looked a little thin. She kept her long hair braided, and her friends at school told her she looked like Heidi or some other girl heroine in a foreign story. They all knew what had happened at home, and were sorry for her, and kind to her, though Martha never spoke about Dad to them. At the beginning of December she turned twelve, and Grandma and Grandpa took her for high tea at the Dorchester hotel in town. She was becoming a quiet, serious girl.
Tug, on the other hand, was neither quiet nor serious. He was growing fast. He wasn’t neat and square any more, but dirty-faced and wiry, with big clumsy feet. He didn’t like school. His behaviour in class had never been good; now he got into trouble regularly. His teachers reported that he was ‘difficult and stubborn’. Once in the winter term, and twice in the spring term, Grandma and Grandpa were summoned to discuss his naughtiness with the head teacher. He had his sixth birthday in February, but Grandma and Grandpa didn’t take him anywhere.
After that chaotic night at the end of August, Dad never came back. Grandma told the children that he had gone away to ‘get better’. One autumn afternoon Martha and Tug secretly went to their old house to check, and saw another family living there, and knew then that Grandma was telling the truth. Martha asked Grandma where Dad had gone, but she said she didn’t know. The number of Dad’s phone had been cancelled, so they couldn’t phone him, and Martha and Tug had new phones with new numbers, so he couldn’t phone them. They received no messages or letters either, or even postcards. He had gone.
It was a relief. Almost immediately Martha began to feel better. She stopped getting the dizzy feeling. For a while she still got upset whenever she thought about Dad, but she made a conscious effort not to think about him, and as the months went by it got easier.
Curiously, though, Martha sometimes felt as if she wasn’t properly busy. There were many things she was not allowed to do. Grandma didn’t let her help with cooking (‘It’s a safety issue,’) or look after Tug (‘I shall monitor Christopher myself, thank you,’) or sew in the house (‘Grandpa and I can afford to buy you new clothes, should you need them.’). From the beginning Grandma made her views about children plain. She told them frequently – angrily – that Dad had given them far too much freedom.
‘Children need rules,’ she said. ‘I warn you now, I will not make the same mistakes your father made.’
She could be strict, sometimes cold. Although she encouraged ‘discussion’, she was not easy to talk to.
However, Martha soon discovered something Grandma would always talk to her about: Mum.
Living with Dad, Martha had got used to never talking about her. But in Grandma’s house, there was no way of avoiding it. There were photographs of Mum everywhere – on the walls of the living room, on the sideboard in the dining room, along the bookcase in Grandpa’s study, in the hallway, up the stairs, even in the downstairs toilet. Many of them showed Mum when she was a girl, with pale skin and red hair and a pointed nose.
‘You’re so alike,’ Grandma said to Martha. ‘I don’t just mean the colouring, or the features. You have the look too.’
‘What look, Grandma?’
Grandma smiled. ‘Very determined.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh yes. You’re a very determined girl, just as she was. I can tell.’
Grandma liked to talk to her about Mum when she was a girl, her ballet lessons, her struggles with homework, and, above all, her acting in school shows.
‘She was always superb in whatever part she played. And she was always acting, whether or not she was on stage, putting on funny voices, dressing up, making up little songs.’
When Grandma talked about Mum like this she became a different person, warmer and kinder, easily distracted. At first it was strange. But Martha got used to it. She got used to the pictures too. Sometimes she went round the house, just looking at them. They made her feel sad, because Mum had died, but somehow they made her happy as well, as she imagined the sort of girl that Mum had been and thought about the stories Grandma told her.
It was not the same for Tug. He didn’t talk to Grandma about Mum. He didn’t talk to Grandma at all, if he could help it. But Grandma talked to him, mainly about the house rules and why he shouldn’t have broken them.
‘She’s always telling me off,’ he complained to Martha. ‘Just because there’s a bit of mud got onto the carpet, or the door bangs. If I ask her where the biscuit tin is she says I’m rude. I’m not rude, I’m hungry. And I didn’t mean to drop my milk on that rug. And what’s the point of Grandpa? He doesn’t help.’
In fact, Grandma told Grandpa off too, for not saying the right thing, or for failing to be ‘sufficiently firm’ with the children, or for losing his glasses, which was often. Twice he had left them in Tug’s room and it was hardly Tug’s fault that both times he had trodden on them. But mainly it was Tug Grandma told off. She told him off for not speaking when he was spoken to, and for speaking when he shouldn’t have been, and for not eating his salad, and for bringing earth into his room, and for cleverly inserting his third-best JCB into the pipe that fed the water feature in the garden. At the appropriate times she told him off for his poor school reports. When he started to wet the bed again, she was cross with him about that too. And when at last, inevitably, he broke one of the Swarovski crystal figurines, she was very cross indeed.
‘I hate flamingos,’ Tug said. And this was true, because three weeks later, he broke another one.
Martha always defended Tug, though it didn’t make much difference, and sometimes it seemed to make things worse.
As the months went by, Tug grew steadily unhappier.
‘I’m going to run away.’
‘No, you’re not, Tug.’
‘Yes, I am, Martha.’
‘Where will you go?’
‘I’ll go back to Dad.’
‘We don’t know where Dad is.’
Unlike Martha, Tug talked about Dad a lot. He wanted to know where he was, and what he was doing, and why he never came to see them any more.
‘Do you think he has a new family, Martha?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘With a new Tug? And a new Martha?’
‘I don’t know, Tug.’
‘But when will we find out?’
‘I think, Tug, it might be better if we try to forget Dad, at least for a while. It only makes us sad.’
‘Can you forget him?’
‘I’m trying to. It’s easier than you’d think. And it’ll make you feel better.’
Tug said he would try too. ‘But I still hate the flamingos,’ he said. ‘And Grandmas,’ he added.
Every couple of months Martha and Tug had an interview with Alison from the Social Services. In these interviews they were asked lots of questions about living with Grandma and Grandpa, and – as Alison pointed out to Tug – their answers always showed that they were well looked-after, well-fed and safe.
36
If Grandma’s weekly routines could seem dreary and tiring, at least Martha and Tug were still allowed to go to Marcus’s every Wednesday.
One Saturday afternoon in September, shortly after they first moved in with Grandma and Grandpa, Marcus came to the house unannounced.
Grandma opened the door and found him on the doorstep wearing a tight-fitting catsuit made of gold lamé, and eye-liner.
‘Good afternoon,’ he said politely. ‘You must be Martha’s elegant grandmother. My name is Marcus Brown. May I speak to Martha?’
His good manners confused Grandma, who invited him in, even though Martha was out. She noticed that Marcus was carrying a bag. It was a plastic handbag printed with a leopard-skin design in pink.
‘May I leave something with you, to give to her?’
Grandma said he may, and Marcus took out of the bag a long bright green piece of stretchy fabric.
‘This is a mankini.’
‘I beg your pardon.’
‘An article of clothing for men. Quite sexual. It fits like this.’
Grandma watched, horrified, as he strapped it on over his catsuit.
‘What do you think?’ he asked Grandma. ‘I think it’s slightly vulgar.’
‘I quite agree,’ she said coldly.
‘It’s the green,’ Marcus said. ‘Exactly the wrong colour. And this fabric is all wrong too. I would like Martha to make me one in artificial fur.’
Grandma was bewildered. ‘Artificial fur?’ she repeated.
‘Yes. Are you keen on artificial fur?’
‘I am not.’
‘You can get some quite nice stuff in electric blue. I’ve seen it.’
Grandma refused to take the mankini from Marcus and showed him out. That evening she talked to Martha about it, and put her view with characteristic plainness.
‘I do not like the idea of you having anything to do with clothing to be worn by this boy. It is very far from proper. I must insist you cease to be involved.’
Martha was dismayed. ‘But, Grandma,
Wednesday nights are so much fun. Tug likes them too.’
‘Obviously he will also have to stop going.’
‘And Marcus needs our help.’
‘Your only involvement is with the clothing, I think. I’m sure he will find someone else. I’m sorry, Martha. It’s best to make a clean break and not see him any more.’
From Grandma’s tone of voice it was clear that the ‘discussion’ was over, and she rose to go.
Martha thought fast. ‘Grandma?’
‘What is it?’
‘If I can’t make the costumes, I would like to act.’
As soon as she said it, she had the feeling that she had always meant to say it one day. ‘Pardon?’
‘I would like to act in Marcus’s films. He’s often asked me, and I’ve always said no. But I’ve changed my mind. Now I really want to.’
Grandma sat down again. She frowned. ‘What films are these?’
‘My Fair Lady. Casablanca.’
Grandma was surprised. ‘They are good films, it’s true,’ she said.
‘I want to do what Mum did,’ Martha said.
The change came over Grandma. She smiled to herself. ‘Once, in fact, your mother acted in the school production of My Fair Lady. I remember it very well. There is a photo of her in Grandpa’s study, I must show you.’
‘She was such a very good actress, wasn’t she, Grandma?’
Grandma nodded again. ‘Though,’ she added sternly, ‘I’m not at all sure the acting world was good for her in the end.’
Martha said, ‘This is just at a friend’s house, so you needn’t worry. I won’t have anything to do with costumes any more, I promise. I’ll just act.’