‘That’s not what I meant,’ I snap.
‘So what are you so worried I’ll find out anyway? Are you keeping secrets?’
For some reason I think of the hidden photo in my bedside table of Mum with James.
‘No. Course not.’
I’d been thinking perhaps I could ask her some questions about him, but somehow now doesn’t seem quite the right time. She’ll only bite my head off, take it all the wrong way.
She raises an eyebrow. ‘Then why do I get the feeling there are things you’re not telling me?’
‘Because you have a suspicious mind,’ I offer.
She sighs. ‘Can’t you be honest with me, Pearl? I’m your mum.’
‘I am being honest.’
She sighs and fishes a packet of cigarettes out of her pocket. ‘OK, if you say so.’
‘I do.’
‘Well I never,’ she says as she opens the window. ‘Come and look at this.’
‘What?’
‘There’s a rather glorious boy digging up next-door’s garden. Come and see.’
I walk over to the window and catch a glimpse of Finn disappearing into Dulcie’s house.
‘Oh, you’ve missed him now,’ Mum says. ‘He’s gone indoors. Shame. He was ever so good-looking.’
‘No he isn’t,’ I say, trying hard not to think about how blue his eyes are, and the way his hair falls down over them.
‘And how would you know?’ She turns to me, interested.
‘I’ve met him already.’
Mum’s face lights up. ‘Oh, have you indeed? When?’
‘A couple of times.’
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘Did you speak to him?’
I feel myself blush as I remember the utter horror of the first time I met him, and then the second time when he realized I’d left The Rat on her own. What must he think of me?
‘Yes.’
Mum notices the blush, I know she does, and misinterprets it.
‘And?’ she says, grinning.
‘And what?’
She sighs. ‘You are hard work sometimes, Pearl.’
I shrug. ‘And nothing.’
‘But what’s he like?’
‘He’s just – I don’t know. He was just in the garden. We didn’t say much.’
She tuts impatiently. ‘Oh, Pearl. Honestly.’
‘Well, what do you want me to do?’ I say. ‘Make stuff up? Fine. His deep-set dark eyes met mine across a herbaceous border. He took me in his strong, muscular arms and I looked up at his chiselled, masculine jawline and—’
‘Have you been reading Mills and Boon novels?’
‘Molly’s gran in Ireland reads them. Molly used to sneak them back in her suitcase.’
Mum smiles. ‘Darling Molly. How is she?’
‘Fine. Still on holiday. With Ravi.’
‘Ah.’
She goes quiet for a while.
‘Are you lonely?’ she says at last.
I smile. ‘No!’ I laugh. ‘Course not.’
It turns out lying isn’t so hard after all.
An asteroid is going to hit the earth. It’s all here in the paper Dad left lying on the kitchen table before he took The Rat off to the park. NASA scientists identify asteroid threat . . . Armageddon . . . Could hit Earth in 2040. I can see it in my head, this huge, lethal, unstoppable lump of rock with our name on it, hurtling silently through space towards us.
I stare at the piece of burnt toast on my plate and decide I’m definitely not hungry after all. I go upstairs to get dressed; but then I decide that maybe, as it’s Saturday and I don’t have to look after The Rat, I’ll go back to bed. It’s not like I’ve got anything else to do. Molly’s still on holiday and no one else bothers trying to get hold of me any more.
I stop for a second, remembering how we all used to hang out together on Saturdays, Molly and me and the others. It seems so long ago, unreal almost, as though it didn’t really happen to me at all. I’ve got used to being on my own, and it turns out it’s really easy to avoid people without a phone. And I haven’t opened my laptop in months.
I’m just climbing back into bed when I hear some kind of small commotion going on in the street. I peer out of the window to see what’s happening. A black taxi has stopped a couple of doors down from us and there’s an argument going on between a woman I can’t see, because a tree is in the way, and the taxi driver. There’s also a yapping dog somewhere. Its bark bounces off the walls.
I head back to my bed and close my eyes. But a few moments later there’s a very long ring on the doorbell. I think about ignoring it, but almost immediately there are another two impatient rings. I pull on an old jumper of Mum’s over my pyjamas, go downstairs and open the door.
On the doorstep is a small glamorous woman, old but not really old: about sixty I’d guess, though she’s wearing a lot of make-up and I’m rubbish at ages. She has cropped blonde hair with designer sunglasses perched on top and she’s wearing an expensive-looking cream jacket. Behind is the taxi driver I saw from the window, laden down with matching violet-coloured leather luggage.
‘This “gentleman” is trying to make me pay extra!’ she says in a posh Scottish voice, jerking a manicured thumb at the taxi driver. ‘For Hector.’ She looks at me outraged, evidently expecting a response. I stare back at her, bewildered. She’s clearly mad. I look to the taxi driver for some kind of explanation, but he’s red and sweating both from carrying the cases and from being very angry.
‘NO dogs in my taxi. Except for guide dogs obviously,’ he adds apologetically to me, as if to prove he’s not a monster.
‘Well then, you should have said something when we got in,’ says the woman, sounding like the Queen.
‘Um,’ I start to say, not quite knowing where to start. Who is she? Why is she here? Why are they both talking as if I know what’s going on? I’m also a bit confused by the fact that she seems to own an invisible dog.
‘How was I supposed to know you had a bleedin’ dog? You smuggled him on in that!’ He points accusingly at the large bag tucked under the madwoman’s arm and, as I look at it, I realize there are two large black eyes gleaming out of it suspiciously, which at least answers one question.
‘Smuggled him on indeed.’ She glares at him. ‘I’ve never heard such nonsense.’
‘Excuse me,’ I begin again, ‘I think you’ve made a mistake—’
‘It’s not hygienic I’m afraid, love,’ the driver explains to me. ‘And I’m allergic.’ As if to prove the point, he sneezes loudly, sending the bags and cases tumbling to the ground.
‘No, I mean—’
‘Not hygienic?’ For a moment I think the madwoman is actually going to hit him. She covers the gap in the bag where Hector (presumably) is peering out, as if to protect him from the distress of hearing the slur. The bag begins to emit a low grumpy bark, which gets louder as the madwoman gets angrier. ‘How dare you? You are a silly, ignorant little man—’
‘Now wait a minute.’ The taxi driver pulls out a handkerchief and blows his nose loudly, then glares at the woman. ‘I’m not putting up with that, not even from an old lady.’
She turns a similar colour to her luggage and draws herself up as tall as she can, which is about chest height to the taxi driver.
‘Just who exactly are you calling an old lady?’
‘EXCUSE ME! WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?’ I shout. They both turn their full attention to me for the first time and I remember I’m still in pyjama bottoms and one of Mum’s old jumpers. The woman looks me up and down and clicks her tongue.
‘Dear, dear,’ she says. ‘There’s no need to shout, Pearl.’
I stare at her. She knows my name.
‘Who are you?’ I say it slowly because, as I’m speaking, I realize there is something familiar about her, something I know, but can’t quite remember . . .
The taxi driver looks from her to me, bemused. ‘I thought you said your granddaughter lived here?’ He
looks at me and taps the side of his head. ‘Sorry, love, I think she’s got a screw loose.’
‘Granny?’ I stare at her in disbelief. But yes, I know it’s her now, even though I haven’t seen her since I was four.
She looks at me as if I’m the one who’s behaving oddly.
‘Of course. Who else would I be? Now enough of this nonsense. Shall we go in?’
‘No,’ I say. She looks at me.
‘Pardon?’
‘You can’t. It’s Mum’s house. She wouldn’t want you here. You’re not welcome.’
She smiles at me as if I’m still the four-year-old I was last time she saw me. ‘Don’t be silly, Pearl.’
‘I mean it,’ I say. ‘Dad’s not going to be too happy if he comes back and finds you’ve just turned up out of the blue.’
She looks at me, her plucked and pencilled eyebrows arched with surprise. ‘Pearl, dear,’ she says. ‘Who do you think asked me to come? Did he not tell you?’
He wouldn’t have gone behind my back. Surely. But of course. The conversation we never got round to having. The phone call I interrupted. That’s why he was being so shifty. I shake my head slowly.
‘I wasn’t supposed to be arriving till next weekend,’ she says, ‘but I managed to change my plans at the last minute and I thought I’d surprise you both.’
‘Looks like you’ve done that all right,’ says the taxi driver.
‘You needn’t look like that, my girl,’ Granny says as if the taxi driver no longer exists. ‘I’ve come to help. To sort you all out.’
She empties Hector, who turns out to be a pug, from her bag. He sniffs at a dandelion growing from the cracks in the garden path with his black, snub nose. Then he cocks his leg against the porch wall and trots into the hall, his little claws tip-tapping on the tiles. Soot, who had been sitting on the bottom stair, licking a paw, puffs her tail up like one of those old-fashioned dusters on a stick and scoots towards the back door.
‘I’m not your girl,’ I say to her. ‘And I don’t need sorting out.’
She smiles as if I’m a small child who’s said something very funny without realizing.
‘You really are so like your mother, God rest her soul. Poor dear Stella.’ She stops for a moment, puts her hand on my shoulder and looks genuinely sad. But it doesn’t last long. ‘As for you,’ she says, turning to the taxi driver, ‘you can help me in with these bags if you please.’
‘I don’t think so, love.’ The taxi driver sneezes again.
‘You will if you want paying,’ she says and grumbling he collects up the bags again and heaves them into the hall.
‘London,’ she says scathingly as she sweeps past me into the house, leaving a trail of relentlessly floral perfume in her wake. ‘There’s obscene graffiti on your front wall you know. And it’s not even spelt correctly.’ I wonder vaguely what she expects me to do about it. Remove it? Or go out with a spray can and correct it?
Within ten minutes it’s like Granny’s been here forever. She’s bustling about the kitchen, making tea, feeding Hector dog biscuits produced from one of her many cases, wondering aloud when Dad and The Rat will be back, complaining about the state of the house. Damp in the hallway. Woodworm in the floorboards. Kitchen hasn’t been renovated since the dawn of time. Garden like the jungles of Borneo. I look out through the patio windows. It’s wilder than ever out there. Mature, the estate agent had said. A challenge for the keen gardener.
He’d looked at Dad hopefully and Dad had said, We’d better hope the baby has green fingers then, hadn’t we?
‘Well, we like it,’ I lie.
‘The whole place is a bomb site, Pearl. What on earth possessed them to move into this place with a baby due any minute?’
‘Actually, the baby wasn’t due for months.’ So if you want to blame anyone blame her, I don’t add.
‘Still.’ Granny inspects the range, which is now covered in a thick layer of dust. ‘Gracious. My grandmother had one of these.’
‘We were supposed to move in months ago. Things kept going wrong. Down the chain. I don’t know . . . Mortgages. Surveys. Some boring thing or other. Anyway, Mum said all it needed was a lick of paint and elbow grease.’ As it happens, when Mum said this, I told her she was probably clinically insane and should seek medical attention, but I have to defend her against Granny since she’s not here to do it for herself.
‘Yes, well, she always did have a good imagination,’ Granny says disapprovingly. Then she sighs. ‘I really am sorry about it, Pearl. About your mum.’
‘No you’re not,’ I say. ‘I know how things were with you and her. You hated her. So you needn’t pretend to be upset.’
She shakes her head. ‘That’s not true, dear. Really it isn’t. We had our differences, but I didn’t hate your mother.’
‘You never even wanted her and Dad to get married. You thought she was a horrible single mother.’
Granny puts two cups of tea on the table. ‘I worried, like all mothers do,’ she says, giving the chair next to me a thorough clean with The Rat’s wet wipes which Dad’s left lying on the side. ‘I just wanted Alex to be happy. And maybe at first I did have reservations. But I could see that he was happy, with Stella. And with you. Happier than I’d ever seen him.’ She sits down at last and clicks sweetener into her tea. ‘He loved her. And he adored you. I’ve never seen anyone dote on a baby like he doted on you. Whether I liked Stella or she liked me didn’t come into it.’
Well, she would say that now, wouldn’t she? I don’t speak. Just stare at my tea. Hector comes sniffing round my feet. He seems very at home already. I wonder if we’ll ever see Soot again. If I could run off into the garden and hide, I’d do it too.
‘Anyway,’ Granny says briskly, ‘now isn’t the time to be going into all that. Let me have a good look at you, darling.’
Darling?
‘The last time I saw you, you were about so high and a chubby little thing. I used to call you “my precious Pearl”. Do you remember?’
My precious Pearl?
‘No,’ she says, hoisting Hector up on to her lap, and I realize that she is older than she seems, under the make-up. She looks tired. ‘I don’t suppose you do. Dear me.’ She sits there, gazing at me, lost in thought, until I feel so self-conscious I have to get up from the table and pretend I’m searching for something on the other side of the room.
‘You do look awfully thin, dear,’ she says at last, snapping out of it. ‘I’m going to have to feed you up a bit. What shall I cook us for dinner? Shepherd’s pie used to be your favourite.’
I’m just turning round to protest when I hear the sound of the key in the front door, followed by the familiar sound of Dad wrestling the stupid pram in. You still have to get it at exactly the right angle or it won’t fit, even since Dad moved the chest of drawers in the hallway.
‘There they are!’ Granny’s face lights up. She’s so excited she even empties Hector off her knee, and he stands, squat and belligerent, at her feet, looking up at her. Dad comes into the kitchen and Hector starts up his gruff barking again. When Dad sees Granny, he stops, shocked. Then he looks anxiously over at me.
‘I thought you weren’t coming till next week?’ he says to Granny.
‘Well, that’s a nice welcome,’ she says. ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’
‘I am, Mum, of course I am.’ He walks over and gives her a hug, and he looks so relieved and she looks so happy I want to be sick.
‘What’s she doing here?’ I demand, although I know, of course I know. I’m not stupid.
‘I wanted to tell you, love, but I never got the chance. Granny’s come to look after Rose for a while,’ Dad says. ‘Just till we can get something else sorted. So you don’t have to any more.’
‘I was quite capable of looking after her,’ I say, though the truth is I’m so relieved that I won’t have to look after The Rat any more that part of me is actually quite pleased to see Granny, in spite of everything. Before Dad arrived, I’d been planning
a big If she stays, I go showdown. But now I think, what’s the point? Someone’s got to look after The Rat. And it’s not going to be me. It’s not like I have to have anything to do with Granny. Most of the time I’m in the house I stay in my room anyway, out of the way of Dad and The Rat. I won’t even have to talk to Granny if I don’t want to.
‘But you didn’t want to look after her in the first place,’ Dad says, bemused. ‘And it was always going to be a temporary thing. Anyway, you’ll be back at school in a few weeks.’
All this time Granny hasn’t taken her eyes off Dad.
‘You look older, Alex,’ she says. I wonder when she last saw him. I remember he used to go up and see her every now and then for a weekend, but not since I was a kid. Mum would stomp around in a bad mood the whole time he was away. I asked her once why I couldn’t go with him and she bit my head off so I never asked again.
‘Well, I am older,’ he says. ‘It’s been a while.’
But I know what she means. Dad looks older than he should. Granny’s staring at him as if she’s trying to get him into focus; trying to see her son in the grey, tired man in front of her.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘It has.’ Hector whines at her feet and she picks him up and strokes him and forces herself to smile. ‘Where is she then? My little granddaughter?’ Her voice goes all treacly. ‘What have you done with the little angel?’
‘She’s in the pram,’ Dad says, smiling. ‘Sleeping. Come and have a look.’
She clip-clops off down the hall after him in her heels, and I can hear her cooing. I stand in the doorway of the kitchen and watch them. Granny carefully lifts The Rat out of the pram. The Rat has almost disappeared inside a sleepsuit – her clothes are still far too big for her – and Granny cradles her in the crook of her arm so she can see her sleeping face.
‘Hello, Rose,’ she whispers.
Dad’s watching them, looking happier than I’ve seen him in a long time. He doesn’t care what Mum would think. He doesn’t care what I think.
The Year of the Rat Page 10