by Fiona Gibson
Hannah glanced up and winced, as if she’d been offered some particularly challenging delicacy like sheep’s brain, or a trotter. Her hair, which she’d tinted aubergine with a wash-in color, hung messily around her luminous face. “I’m not hungry,” she said flatly.
“Go on,” Rachel insisted. “It looks a bit sludgy but it tastes okay.”
“No thanks.”
Rachel shrugged and placed the offending cake on the table. “You okay, birthday girl?” Jane asked, crouching down beside Hannah. Tufts of rust-colored wool were flaking off the rug’s edges. They needed a new rug, a new table, chairs and curtains—new everything, really. Their furniture looked way past its use-by date. It had all been acquired, rather than chosen.
“I’m fine,” Hannah murmured, removing the silver lid from the “Bark” polish. It was dark brown—not unlike the Betty Crocker icing.
“Are you upset or something?” Jane murmured, wanting to snap: cheer up, would you? It’s your birthday. Your best friends are here. What more do you want?
“It’s just—” Hannah kept her eyelids lowered “—that cake.”
“Okay. I messed up.” So shoot me, Jane added silently. She headed for the kitchen, intending to dispense drinks and leave the girls to play CDs and watch videos. Hannah didn’t want her getting in the way. Some mums did that—didn’t know when to step back. It happened all the time at Nippers, the day care where Jane worked: women hovering at the windows, steaming the glass, unaware that their looming faces were heightening separation anxiety. She’d see them huddled in their cars, talking fretfully on their cells. Sometimes you had to know when to let go.
The music stopped abruptly. Jane pricked her ears, unable to resist tuning in. “So,” Rachel was saying, “what did your dad get you?”
“The usual,” Hannah replied. “Thirty quid stuck in a birthday card.”
“Lucky thing!” Amy exclaimed. “You know what mine gave me, last time he bloody remembered, which was, like, two years ago?”
“What?” Hannah asked.
“A Winnie-the-Pooh jigsaw.”
The girls’ high-pitched laughter ricocheted around the house. Jane opened the fridge and took out Hannah’s favorite elderflower cordial. They were like wild puppies in there, screeching with laughter as more unsuitable presents—and the general cluelessness and crapness of parents—were howled over. Jane hadn’t heard Hannah laugh like that—laugh properly—for weeks. At least she could still do it, and her laughing mechanism hadn’t entirely seized up. Jane unscrewed the cap from the cordial and picked up the ringing phone.
“Jane? Hi, it’s me.”
“Hi, Max.” She gripped the receiver between shoulder and ear while sploshing the liqueur into glasses.
“Just wondered if the birthday girl’s enjoying her day.”
Jane smiled. “Think so. Have a listen.” She held out the phone in the direction of the kitchen door.
“Has she got some friends round?”
“Just Rachel and Amy. She didn’t invite any others—said she didn’t want a big fuss.”
“God,” Max chuckled. “She sounds about sixty.”
“I know. She didn’t even want to go to the cinema or anything.”
The girls’ laughter was replaced by sweeping strings and the film’s opening credits. “So…is she okay?” Max asked hesitantly.
“She’s…you know. Business as usual.” Jane didn’t need to use words like uncommunicative or listless with Max. He just knew. She’d seen it smeared all over his face—that fake jollity—when he’d brought Hannah home from their trip to the London Aquarium. She hadn’t shown any interest in the tiny seahorses or the rays with their sandpaper skin and limpid eyes in the touch-tank. “I’m so stupid,” Max had hissed, “thinking she’d enjoy somewhere like that at fourteen.” Max knew he was losing her. Both of them were.
“She didn’t think much of the house yesterday,” he added.
“I know. She came back saying you’d lost your mind. Said it’s even worse than our house. I explained that you’re doing it up, that it’ll be palatial and she’ll love it so much she’ll want to move in with you—” She glimpsed Hannah heading upstairs.
“Oh, please,” Max cried in mock horror.
“I’m sure she was exaggerating….”
“Come round sometime, see for yourself. It is pretty bad, but it’s got…”
“Potential,” Jane said, laughing. Her anger had faded a long time ago. That thing—Max’s drunken night with that woman—was buried so deeply in the past, it could have happened to someone else.
“Actually,” Max added, “I was going to ask a favor. Not a favor, exactly—I’d pay you of course. There’s this window in the living room…The glass is cracked, and I was thinking some stained glass would—”
“You mean you’ve bought this place that Hannah reckons was a squat—she said someone’s painted ‘Fuck Pigs’ on the living room wall—”
“I tried to paint over that.”
“But the place needs rewiring and God knows what, and you’re thinking of blowing your money on stained glass windows?”
“Window,” Max corrected her. “Just one. Something simple, bright colors…”
A smile sneaked across Jane’s face. “Okay, I’ll have a look.”
“Tomorrow?”
“I finish work at four. Hannah’s got drama workshop after school—she’ll probably head over to Amy’s afterward. I’ll come straight from the day care.”
“Great,” Max said. Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “Give her a shout, would you? Tell her her old dad wants to wish her happy birthday.”
Jane carried the cordless phone into the hall and peered up the gloomy staircase. “Hannah?” she called.
Silence.
“Hannah! Dad’s on the phone.”
“I’m on the loo,” came the harassed reply.
“Sorry,” Jane told him, “Madame’s busy with her toilette. I’ll ask her to ring you later tonight.”
“Jane,” Max said. “You don’t think it’s something to do with the house, do you? Has it upset her, d’you think, me leaving the old place?”
“Why would it? She hasn’t lived there for ten years….”
“I know, but maybe it was important that she could go back whenever she wanted. I’m sure that’s when it all started. When I told her I was buying this place.”
Birthday cake stuck to the roof of Jane’s mouth. “We can’t do anything about that now.”
Max fell silent. Jane could hear his soft breath. For a moment she wished he wasn’t alone in an echoey house with its foul graffiti, but right here, jabbing a finger into a tub of icing…which had acquired an unappetizing crust. “I thought she’d like it,” he murmured.
“It’s probably nothing to do with the house,” Jane said firmly. “Isn’t this what happens, Max?”
“What d’you mean?”
“The moodiness. Treating me and you like we’re…inconvenient. It’s just a phase. Our girl’s growing up.”
“I guess you’re right.”
What if I am? Jane thought. When she’s really grown up, and there’s no growing up left to do—what then? I won’t need you anymore, and you won’t need me. I’ll really lose you then, for good.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?” she said softly, finishing the call and fixing on her best party smile.
2
Hannah sat on the loo with her jeans bunched around her ankles, wondering when her mother would head out to her “studio,” as she insisted on calling that embarrassing shack at the bottom of the garden. She’d had one of its wooden sides replaced with glass, which she never got around to cleaning. The place was crammed with offcuts of lead, sheets of glass jutting from their pigeonholes and a hulking workbench, which was covered in doodles and scarred by Jane’s cutting tools.
Hannah hadn’t always felt so repelled by the studio. As a child, she’d loved being allowed to play in there. Other mums—like Amy’s mum—would ha
ve had a hairy fit if they’d seen its potential dangers and mess. The drawers beneath the bench were crammed with paper, pens, glass cutters with oily blades and sample squares of glass in every conceivable color. Hannah had been drawn to the deep blues, greens and turquoises—the colors of oceans and eyes.
Photos of Jane’s finished pieces were taped haphazardly on to the inside walls. Scraps of things had been pinned up in clusters: fragments of fabric from Hannah’s old dungarees, gleaming wrappers from Quality Street chocolates. By the time Hannah had turned seven or eight, Jane had let her use cutting tools under strict supervision. They’d filled the studio with their chatter, their breath showing as pale puffs on sharp winter’s nights…unless the kiln was on, when they’d turn pink and glisten with sweat. Hannah had made a small panel all by herself—a yellow star on a turquoise background—that they’d hung from a rusting hook at the bathroom window.
Hannah shifted position on the seat and peered at it. Weak sunlight eked through the star, forming a golden cast on the cracked washbasin. These days she avoided the studio. It was so chaotic in there that even the warmth of the kiln on a winter’s afternoon couldn’t draw her in. God knows how her mother managed to produce anything that people would pay good money for. No wonder her little stained glass sideline had never taken off.
Hannah could hear Amy laughing raucously downstairs. She’d left her friends watching the film. It wasn’t her thing: too schmaltzy, totally predictable, for people with mashed potato for brains. She could hear Jane chatting with them—with her friends. Hannah’s friends thought she was the bloody bee’s knees. Mind you, they’d like anyone’s mum who let them lie about her house for hours and scarf down whatever they liked from the cupboards or fridge. “Jane’s all right,” Amy reminded Hannah with irritating frequency. “If you were stuck with my mum and her bloody whale music, and her pointing out condoms at the counter in Boots, saying, ‘These are condoms, Amy,’ as if I might’ve mistaken them for tissues or packets of mints…”
Things could be worse, Hannah reflected grudgingly. She could have parents who hated each other’s guts, who tore round to each other’s flats to kick over their trash bins, like Amy’s mum had before she’d discovered whale music. At least Jane and Max still liked each other. Hannah couldn’t understand why they didn’t cut all this nicey-nicey stuff and get back together, be done with it. It wasn’t as if either of them had met anyone decent in the meanwhile. Jane’s love life was beyond tragic. The last man she’d brought home had looked petrified, as if Hannah might actually bite.
Hannah couldn’t understand why her parents had split up in the first place. “We were just too young,” was all Jane had told her. Too young for what? Hannah had wondered, figuring that they must have been around nineteen when they’d met, and wasn’t that about as grown up as it was possible to be? Sure, Jane had been young to get pregnant—no way would Hannah end up in a mess like that—but they were hardly kids, for God’s sake. By the time Hannah was nineteen she intended to be at art college and living in a gorgeous loft apartment. She’d have an American fridge with an ice maker and none of that depressing, old-fashioned furniture that Jane seemed so keen to hang on to.
She could hear the three of them: Amy, Rachel and her mum all having a great time without her. They probably hadn’t even noticed she was missing. Too busy guzzling that cake, most likely. Most mothers—normal mothers—would have pitched the damn thing. Not Jane. She’d tried to rectify it with ready-made icing and those horrible sweets made from extract of bloody papaya or solidified mango puree and presented it as if it was perfectly respectable. Hannah hoped she wouldn’t be expected to consume so much as a crumb of it. She’d rather ingest poison.
Why couldn’t Jane admit she’d messed up? She couldn’t face reality, that was the problem. Life was sunny and happy—just the two of them, trapped in a scruffy old house with an ancient telly that took an age to warm up, and a remote that you had to jiggle right in front of the screen, which surely defeated its purpose. “I don’t want to be ruled by gadgets,” Jane had declared when Hannah had suggested they haul themselves into the 21st century and buy a DVD player.
“It’s not a gadget,” Hannah had protested. “It’s just a thing—”
“I don’t want things.”
Hannah had tried to explain that normal people had DVD players and TVs with functioning remote controls, but Jane had swished off to fire some painted glass segments—naturally, the kiln didn’t count as a gadget. It had taken Hannah six months of nagging to persuade her that she couldn’t run a business without a computer.
Worse than any of that, her dad had left the old house without giving her any warning whatsoever and bought that horrible crumbly place that smelled like someone had died in it. New tenants had moved into the old place already; Max had mentioned that they had a little girl. Hannah wondered if she’d notice that loose floorboard in the back bedroom. Would she lift it up, find those tiny things and wonder who’d hidden them there? They’d be hers then, this strange girl’s. Finders, keepers.
“Hannah!” Amy yelled upstairs. “Are you staying up there all night?”
“Coming,” Hannah called wearily. She heard the back door creak open. Jane would be in the studio for hours now, out of their hair. Hannah stood up, hiked up her jeans and retied the skinny paisley scarf she wore as a belt. She flushed the loo, even though there was nothing untoward in it, and marched downstairs to join the spectacular throng of her 15th birthday party.
“Hey, Han,” Amy said, looking up, “what took you so long?”
“I had a tummy ache.”
“Oh, poor you. You’ve missed half the film.”
“Never mind.” Hannah squeezed into the space between her friends on the sofa. She thought about the worry dolls—five tiny figures bound in brightly colored wool—trapped under the floor at the old house. They weren’t really dolls at all; they didn’t even have faces. Yet they’d worked. All through her childhood, once they’d settled into Albemarle Street, she’d realized that she still had her mum and her dad and no real worries at all.
Now everything was different.
3
The little boy extracted his face from his mother’s corduroy skirt. “He’s never been anywhere like this before,” the woman told Jane, as if day care centers were quite terrifying with their ladybird-shaped floor cushions and wicker baskets overflowing with toys. The woman glanced anxiously at a group of children who were engrossed in a vigorous game in which toy dinosaurs were being made to charge headlong into each other. There was a sharp thwack, a collision of prehistoric skulls.
“Joshua,” Jane said gently, “would you and Mummy like to see our sandpit?”
The boy nodded uncertainly, yet remained unwilling to detach himself from his mother’s clothing. He was gripping her tights now, tugging the nylon until it formed a semi-sheer tent. She waggled her leg in a feeble attempt to detach him. Jane had greeted hundreds of new children at Nippers. She excelled at coaxing them away from their mothers’ hosiery, their fathers’ neatly pressed trousers.
Sally had offered Jane shifts at Nippers when she and Hannah had moved to Albemarle Street. Although it was ideal—a mere five-minute walk from home—Jane had assumed it would just be a stopgap. Having a child of her own had felt so right, yet dealing with other people’s kids and their perpetual emissions seemed quite alarming. Here she was, ten years on, now deputy manager and “a part of this place,” as Sally was fond of putting it. It was well-meant but sometimes made Jane feel like an electrical appliance or a radiator.
Jane led Joshua, who was still clinging fiercely to his mother’s limb, up the short flight of steps into the main play space. The woman’s lips were pressed together in an anxious line. “This is our messy play area,” Jane explained. “Do you like painting, Joshua?”
“Yuh,” he muttered.
His mother scanned the chaotic array of paintings and collages tacked to the walls. “Josh has some allergies,” she murmured, “and there
’s a piece of old blanket he really can’t manage without, I hope you don’t think it’s silly—”
“That wouldn’t be a problem,” Jane said, accustomed to complex dietary intolerances and children who refused to be parted from some strip of damp satin that had once edged a baby blanket.
In the dining area children were guzzling milk from plastic cups. “Isn’t this a lovely place, darling?” the woman asked.
Joshua gazed up at Jane. “Like nursery lady,” he whispered.
Jane smiled, thinking, if only fifteen-year-olds were as easy to win round. She remembered Hannah the previous night, sounding outraged at being disturbed whilst on the loo. Yet for years, Jane had been unable to go to the bathroom without Hannah scuttling after her. Anytime she’d had the audacity to lock the door, Hannah had shoved madly scrawled notes through the gap beneath it—Let me in!!! Wot are yoo doing?—until Jane had abandoned any concept of privacy and allowed Hannah to play with her Tonka digger at her feet.
“If you ask Sally in the office,” Jane told Joshua’s mother, “she’ll arrange a start date. The extension’s nearly finished so we should have a place in a few weeks.”
The boy’s hot, damp fingers had curled around Jane’s. He tugged hard on her hand, yanking her toward the face-painting table as he ordered, “Come on.”
“So you’re off to Max’s new place?” Sally asked.
“Yes—going to see what the hell he’s got himself into. According to Hannah, the place is a heap. It was infested with mice when he moved in.”
“Really?” Sally was fearless when confronted by uninvited wildlife. She fed the savage-looking stray cats that prowled around her garden off Hackney Road, and had been known to lurk at her window at 2:00 a.m., hoping to photograph visiting foxes.