Eggshell Days

by Rebecca Gregson

  “Bloody Mary, mother of J!”

  The phone sprang into life in his hand.

  “Hello? Oh, did I say today? No, not busy, just, er, no, no. Give me half an hour. I’ll be there. Forgive me.”

  Saved. He put the phone back in his pocket, let his head fall into his hands for a brief moment, then pushed his chair back and stood up. There was a convincing argument to let sleeping dogs lie. Or at least take the day off.

  * * *

  Maya treasured her “I’m me” moments. Sometimes she went through a phase of them happening every day, and then they would stop and she wouldn’t get one for months. It was nothing to do with mood or place. It was all and everything to do with her own secret self, and that was the only way she could explain it.

  The first time she’d tried to verbalize the experience was nearly five years ago, in a Peckham park on her sixth birthday. Puddles of spilt orange fizz had formed in the dips of the waterproof tablecloth, crisp crumbs and half-eaten sausage rolls stuck to the abandoned crumpled paper plates. Her friends had gone home, the late May sunshine had turned to a milky haze and her loathed Little Mermaid swimming costume had finally broken its Lycra promise.

  “I’m me,” she’d suddenly told Emmy as she decorated their grubby toes with tiny padded stickers.

  “Yep, you are.”

  “No one else is me, are they? Just me. Only me.”

  “’Fraid so,” Emmy replied. As a child, she’d often frightened herself with the recurrent and profound realization that no one else can share the world with you. It loomed, like a storm cloud approaching, or the swell of nausea. You knew it was going to get worse before it got better.

  “Think of that,” Maya carried on. “Just me. No one else knows what it’s like to be me. Not even you.”

  “Just shake it away,” Emmy said. “It’ll go in a minute.”

  “Why?” Maya asked. “I like it.”

  Emmy hadn’t been organized enough to remember to take anything as sensible as a camera, of course, but as a result of the “I’m me” moment, she could still see the day as clearly as any carefully captioned snapshot. It was the point at which she realized her daughter possessed the inherent security she herself lacked. It might also have been the first time she saw Maya as a crutch, a stronger, better version of herself, but that was now so ingrained a view that she couldn’t recall ever seeing it otherwise.

  Sometimes Sita and Niall warned her about her tendency to lean on Maya. “She’s only a child,” they’d say. “You don’t need to be quite so truthful with her.” But she knew Maya better than they did, and she knew, too, that her daughter didn’t get the whole truth. She only got the half of it.

  Maya was having an “I’m me” moment that very minute, kneeling in the music room at Bodinnick, laying out on newspaper the materials to construct a medieval dwelling as part of Jonathan’s brilliant idea for their first rainy Saturday. So far, she had a bucket of mud, some clay, and a pile of carefully selected willow twigs for timber supports. She knew what she was going to build. A single-cell wattle-and-daub cottage, like the one in the book Jonathan had got from the library.

  As she concentrated on the engrossing task of sorting twigs into uprights and roof beams, it happened. A feeling of suspended animation washed over her. Stuff receded. There was only her. This is me, Maya Hart, ten years old, watching myself getting ready to build a model house. She sang a few tuneless notes just to hear her own voice in her head. She looked at her hands still moving around on the newspaper. I am ten but I am ageless. I am me, but there is someone else in me, too, someone I know but don’t know. I am a spirit in a body. My brain isn’t big enough for my thoughts.

  She tried, as she always did, to see around the corner of the moment, but so far she had never got there in time. One day she felt sure she would. She looked up and then pop! Back to normal.

  “Jonathan?” she asked.

  “Mm?”

  “Do you ever get ‘I’m me’ moments?”

  “I get ‘I wish I wasn’t me’ moments,” he said, trying for the third time to fit the printer cable into the back of the PC.

  “You don’t, do you?” Maya was shocked. It had never occurred to her that anyone might prefer to be someone else.

  9

  “Make the most of your joie de vivre,” Julian had told Emmy at Toby’s funeral. Well, if ever there was a time to celebrate new beginnings, this was it. As luck would have it, it was the first of May.

  “I need a maypole,” she announced to the other three at breakfast, once the children had left for school, “or something. We should go to Padstow.”

  “Why?” asked Sita.

  “Because it’s May Day and that’s where everyone in Cornwall goes on May Day.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well, for a start, I listen to the local radio and not Classic bloody FM,” Emmy teased lightly, “but Toby took us once and I’ve never forgotten it. There was a monster horse chasing nubile wenches up and down the streets and people dancing and singing all over the place. We had to step over a drunk in the street.”

  “Sounds delightful,” said Jonathan grumpily.

  The sun was bouncing off the kitchen’s freshly painted saffron-yellow walls, there were primroses on the table, wisteria dripping off the front of the house and unexpected geraniums breaking out all over the flowerbeds. Spring had sprung with such convincing life at Bodinnick that Emmy felt she could even forget Kat was coming back tomorrow. Almost, anyway.

  “Feeling pagan, are you?” Niall asked, noticing with a little shiver of lust that she had let the hair under her arms grow.

  “Yes,” she muttered so Sita and Jonathan couldn’t hear, “I am, actually, and if I were you I’d make the most of it.”

  Sometimes, she congratulated herself from the back of Niall’s bike as they rushed up the A30, she had the best ideas. She put her arms round his waist, pressed her face into his shoulder and silently kissed his leather jacket. He wouldn’t feel it so it wouldn’t do any harm.

  They were streaking up the outside of a mile-long tailback, passing camper vans with foreign numberplates, shiny Land-Rovers advertising London garages, surfy VW Beetles and anonymous station wagons packed to the gunnels with children and luggage, all of them bound for Padstow. Somewhere in the middle of it all were Sita, Jonathan and Lila in their ubiquitous SUV, but that was their lookout, Emmy decided, almost gagging on the rush of air that filled her open mouth as Niall put his foot down and took the lot.

  The north-coast fishing village they were heading for really was the only place to go if you were in Cornwall on May Day. Even though tourists all over the world could pull details of this wild ancient custom off the Internet, it didn’t stop thousands of them from believing, once they got there, that they were being offered a rare private glimpse of a primitive tribe at play, being let into a secret which had lost its roots in the mists of time—a clever trick which had as much vociferous local opposition as global support.

  Plans to meet Sita and Jonathan in the car park proved to be a joke. There were too many car parks, too many people and too long a queue, so Emmy sent them a text message and they headed off.

  Down in the primevally decorated town, it was impossible not to feel a little bit primeval oneself. Emmy walked the crowded narrow streets next to Niall like a ripe bud ready to burst into life. Even the stem of bluebells pinned to her red sleeveless vest made her feel like a bucolic maiden ready for the plucking.

  Their shoulders were brushing again, as they had at the wedding, before Kat, and she could feel the swing of her breasts against the cotton of her top, imagining he could somehow feel them too.

  The whole place looked like an Arcadian dream. Doorways and windows had been transformed overnight to arcane portals. Sycamore trees in the surrounding woodlands had been stripped of their best branches and young green leaves now fluttered competitively in the sea breeze with the brilliant nylon flags that zigzagged overhead.

  Everywhere Emm
y looked in the jubilant throng milling around the harbor, she saw a representation of youth. Plump rosy virgins (highly unlikely, she knew, but she was in the mood to suspend reality) flirted with their muscled admirers, who stood libidinously against the low granite walls. She couldn’t help looking at the ways the boys advanced on their prizes, putting one arm against a shop front, a foot on a curb, pulling a ring from a lager can and spraying the opposition, standing just that little bit closer to each other. At the same time, the girls were easy prey, with open arms and happy faces.

  “Everyone looks so hot-blooded,” she said, lifting her voice above the clamor and the sporadic bursts of song.

  “You don’t look so cold yourself,” Niall told her, his hand pushing her bottom through the horde. Keep it there, keep it there, she thought.

  They shuffled along, following the stream of people round and round the cobbled streets, not knowing or caring where they were going, but trusting it would be somewhere good. Soon, they found themselves outside a formidable building which had clearly never tolerated any nonsense. Before they could draw breath, the swing doors of the Institute opened with a single thump on the drum. The crowd stilled. You could almost have heard a pin drop. Three more deafening beats, then out the monster came.

  The town’s entire population let out a roar as the May beast lashed and swirled its way into the crowd, the band weaving around it, teasing it with its pagan rhythm. Emmy and Niall’s fingers crept toward each other and locked tight.

  They called it a hobby horse, or ’obby ’oss if you were in the know, but the animal was nothing like the nursery toy the tourists expected. It didn’t matter how meek the man underneath the wood and canvas frame was, it was a wild black whirling dervish of a stallion with its fierce hungry face that emerged to the baying of the mob.

  “It’s Nat Harvey’s first time this year,” Emmy heard someone say behind her.

  “Bloody ’ell. Tamar better watch out th’n,” another voice replied.

  As the thump of the band approached, Emmy felt the rhythm hit her deep inside, melting her, making her tingle and want to run and dance. Fear and desire fell upon her and she had a crystal-clear sense of the world offering itself to her. Something opened up in her shut-down soul.

  “Kiss me,” she sang, swinging round to face Niall. “I need you to kiss me.”

  In that instant, they became different people, or maybe the same people operating in a different reality. He grabbed her by her bare shoulders, stopping dead in the middle of the pavement, sending people scattering and hopping out of their way. He pushed his lips—they were cold with the beer he had just swigged—against hers, and their mouths opened and joined. The rest of the world closed down for a moment, and when it started up again, the creature’s mask—a stallion’s head with snapping teeth and red eyes—was so close it could have taken a bite out of them. The revelers around it whooped and sang and clapped and cheered.

  “Unite and unite and let us all unite

  For summer is acome unto day

  And whither we are going we will all unite

  In the merry morning of May”

  The song rose high and clear, and as the music reached an almost deafening climax, a rounded woman in her fifties, dressed in the day’s traditional white shirt and white jeans, grabbed Emmy’s hand and pulled her toward the ’oss.

  “Like this,” the woman told her, and took her into the dance. Her movements were large, practiced and confident.

  Niall watched. He wanted Emmy for himself but the older woman’s magnetism drew him in, and soon it was her he couldn’t take his eyes off.

  The horse noticed her, too. It flung its tail into the air and then brought it down in a controlled display of strength, sweeping the floor and the tips of the woman’s shoes. It ran into the crowd, sent the girls squealing and Emmy flying back to Niall, then retreated to pay more attention to its prize. It reared and came, circled and swooped and then backed off before doing the whole dance again. The woman’s hips rose and fell at each approach, her arms outstretched to embrace the challenge.

  Suddenly, the hoop was up and over her head and she was under the skirt. Emmy imagined herself under there, her world turning black, the drums and the accordions becoming a muffled pulse. She imagined being the only woman in the world who could smell the horse’s hot torso, the mix of tar and sweat and horsehair, the damp cloth of a T-shirt.

  When the ’oss finally released the woman with a vertical toss of the heavy hoop, his sooty finger daubed her reddened cheek and she waltzed out laughing, branded with what some referred to as “the mark of life.”

  “Blimey!” Emmy laughed.

  She looked at Niall, and Niall looked at her. They kept looking for a long time, long enough for there to be no doubt left whatsoever, and then he put his finger to her cheek and traced a line down her jaw.

  “Oh, there you are,” Sita said, almost on top of them. “We’ve only just been able to park the car. Have we missed anything?”

  * * *

  That evening, when the house was very quiet, Jay hid himself away in Emmy’s sewing room, perfecting his blanket stitch. He felt proud of his banner idea. He was going to hang it across the Welsh dresser tomorrow, so that when they all sat down to eat, they would know what they were supposed to be celebrating. If Kat was coming home for a party, a party they’d better have.

  He was a bit annoyed with his parents for behaving as if they needed reminding to be honest. “No one said it would be easy,” his mum kept saying when little things went wrong. “Don’t expect it to happen just like that.” But it sounded very much to him as though she was talking to herself.

  What about that “period of adjustment” they had kept telling him about in London? Don’t expect it to be plain sailing, Jay, they had said. Don’t expect this, don’t expect that. There will be times when you miss your friends, and hate us for taking you away from them. But give it a chance. We’re doing this for you as much as for us.

  Well, he didn’t miss his friends because he had new ones, better ones, ones who made him feel he counted. And he didn’t hate his parents for taking him away from London. He might hate them for taking him back, though, and that was his fear. That was why this banner had to be so big, so that they’d get the message.

  Licking the end of the cotton as he’d seen his mother do, he took three attempts to get it through the eye of the needle. The floorboards creaked once, then twice, on the landing outside the door and he held his breath, but the footsteps moved on. Then he settled down to find the rhythm of the stitch he’d been taught in Year Two when he had made a miniature Christmas stocking out of red felt and cotton wool, and all the boys had teased him for being a girl.

  When he got to the end of the seam, he bit the cotton off the needle and flattened out the joined sheet to admire his work.

  At his feet was a selection of recently developed photographs, taken since their arrival at Bodinnick. Shiny faces grinning from kitchen tables, step ladders, and garden ponds.

  He’d noticed when he was sorting them out that people always did the same thing when confronted with a camera. Emmy made the error of poking her tongue out in every single one, as if she didn’t know how to smile to order. Niall had a tendency to put his arm round Maya, or lift her up, or do something to her. Always Maya, never Asha or him, or even Lila; always, always Maya. His mum tilted her head toward the person next to her and opened her eyes wider than she usually did, giving her a fake startled look. The only one his dad was in was the self-timer they’d done on the first night. He was holding up a load of paper and Maya’s fingers were poking up like rabbit ears behind his unsuspecting head. Jay didn’t like the way she’d done that—he thought it made his dad look stupid—so he Sellotaped it to one of the top seams where no one would see it.

  In his favorite photograph, he was center stage, standing on one foot, the other in the air, his arms outstretched, overbalancing, obscuring both his sister and Maya. He wouldn’t have done that a month ago.
A month ago, he would have lurked at the edges. He spent thirty seconds admiring himself, pleased with what he saw, and then fixed it in a prominent position in the center of the banner.

  Next to him was a carrier bag full of discarded tester pots which had been sitting on the landing for weeks. When he tipped them out, ready to paint the words, he realized that the paper seal hadn’t been broken on some of them. Perhaps Scott’s mum was right. Perhaps his parents did have more money than sense.

  On his knees, paintbrush in his hand, he began. In capital letters of varying heights, purples and thickness, he painted “ONE Whole MONTH” along the length of the sheet. The cloth puckered under the upward movement of the brush, and in places the emulsion seeped through onto the threadbare carpet.

  As he waited for it to dry, he worked out that if each match pot had cost two pounds, the household had spent at least twenty pounds on choosing paint colors. And that was just for Maya’s bedroom. That wasn’t simple living, was it? Who were they trying to kid?

  * * *

  Outside her sewing room, Emmy slowed. There was the threshold to Niall’s space—the space that would soon be shared with Kat again.

  His bathroom door was wide open, a green towel was in a damp heap on the floor and puddles led to the bedroom. Beyond that, a radio burbled. Niall would be listening to it, wet and unclothed, preparing himself for the great return.

  The thump of the May Day music was still beating inside her, making her want to burst in, throw herself on his bed, fling out her arms and give in. She wanted to dance with the ’oss just once, for old and new times’ sake, but she knew she had to carry on putting one foot in front of the other until she reached her own room. It was almost too much effort.

  Suddenly, she wanted something even more than the ’oss. She wanted closure on the last few weeks. She wanted to know where she stood, what would happen when Kat went back the next time, if their increased intimacy had changed things. All the issues that had been carried away with the beast this morning were back. The May Day music was fading to a feeble squeak.