Astonishing Splashes of Colour

by Clare Morrall

She looks up at me with a slightly confused expression on her face. “Haven’t got a dad.”

  Just like me, except that I had someone who pretended to be my father. “Does he live somewhere else?”

  “No,” she says. “I haven’t got a dad. I told you.”

  “Has he died?” I say gently.

  She thinks for a while. “You can’t die if you never existed.”

  I’m beginning to think that she’s older than she looks.

  We’ve had fun together. We went shopping, and bought lots of clothes for her. She tried on so many things. We dressed her in jeans from Tammy Girl, a top with a heart on it from Miss Self-ridge and a warm coat from Marks & Spencer. And we found some trainers with a red light that flashes off and on as she walks. Not the sort of thing that Lesley would buy for Emily or Rosie.

  We went into Rackhams and bought a hold-all to put all the old clothes in. Then I did what I had wanted to do since I first saw her. I walked into the hairdresser’s and asked them to cut off her plaits.

  She came out to show me, swinging her hair round her face, grinning in a way I had not seen before. “Cool,” she said.

  “You look so much older.”

  “Do I look as if I’m thirteen?”

  “Easily. You must be at least fifteen.”

  But she wasn’t that old, because she slipped her hand into mine and it felt as if she belonged to me.

  “Do you want to go home now?” I said.

  “I told you,” she said. “I’m not going home. I’m running away.”

  “Let’s go and have some tea,” I said.

  In the last half-hour before Rackhams closed, we went up to the restaurant on the sixth floor to see what they had left. Megan had chocolate cake and a cream bun and fizzy orange. I had a scone and a cup of tea.

  I sat for a while and watched her eat. She looked like a different child in her new hairstyle, certainly older, but she was still very pale. She didn’t look very well. Her huge eyes were strangely dark and translucent, with purple shadows underneath.

  “Why were you at the doctor’s?” I said.

  She met my eyes for a few seconds, then looked down again without speaking. I saw that she hadn’t eaten very much. Most of the food was broken into crumbs and scattered over the plate. “Nothing much,” she said.

  “Who was ill?” I asked. “Mum, Henry or you?”

  “Don’t know,” she said.

  “Was it you?”

  Her eyes slid away from me. “I’ve got—asthma,” she said.

  I relaxed. Thousands of children have asthma. Emily has it, although not badly. “Do you have an inhaler?”

  She nodded.

  “Do you have it with you?” I knew she didn’t. I’d helped her take her clothes on and off when she tried on the new ones.

  “No,” she said. “I forgot it.”

  She looked older, but was acting as if she were younger. “How often do you use it?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Not much.”

  It couldn’t be too bad. She was breathing all right now, and she had been all afternoon. It’s nothing, I thought, just an inconvenience. But when I looked at her closely, I could see something not quite right—a fragile, vulnerable look. Her face seemed too clearly defined, as if the skin were shrinking and needed to be stretched very tightly over the bones.

  “Shall I take you home now?” I said.

  “No,” she said, and a warmth crept through me, a secret pleasure at the discovery that she really wanted to be with me. “What are we going to do now?” she said.

  I thought of Emily and Rosie and what we used to do together. We went for walks, read books, played hopscotch. Megan is older than both of them, more capable of acting independently. There must be far more things to do.

  “Have you ever been to the theatre?” I asked.

  She screwed up her nose. “I went with our school. It was a stupid play about people who fly and pirates.”

  So she’s already seen Peter Pan. “Didn’t you enjoy it?”

  She rolled her eyes and didn’t bother to reply. I was amazed. How could she, a lost child, be unable to identify with the lost boys?

  “Couldn’t hear it. The boys next to me were talking all the time. Sir took them out in the end, but then I couldn’t see properly because Sarah Middleton was in front of me and she’s so big and fat nobody could see round her. I kicked her a bit, but she wouldn’t move.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I tried to imagine Rosie and Emily kicking the people in front of them and calling them fat, but I knew they’d never do that. Lesley wouldn’t allow it.

  “Can’t we go to your house?”

  “My house?” Did she mean Dad’s house, with Paul and Martin and my father? Or my flat? Where a baby wouldn’t fit. I couldn’t take her there because—well, what about James? If I couldn’t see a baby in my space, I certainly couldn’t see an older child of indeterminate age. Even if she had no father.

  “No,” I said. “That’s not possible.”

  We were still in the restaurant on the top floor of Rackhams. You ought to be able to sit and look down on Birmingham, but you can’t because there are barriers outside the windows. You have no good way of knowing that you’re high up.

  An idea shot into my mind. I am high up, I thought. I could leap out of the window and fly. We could do anything, go anywhere. Maybe if I let go of the table, I would float upwards—to a distant Neverland.

  “When did you last go to the seaside?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  She frowned and looked confused. “It’s not my fault if I’ve never been.”

  I was appalled. “Never?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

  I leaned forward and grasped the table tightly in case I floated off. “Would you like to go to the seaside?”

  She shrugged. “How should I know?”

  “It’s wonderful. Playing in the sand with buckets and spades …” I thought of my father’s picture of the baby crawling off to the side. He was right about one thing. Babies are not for keeping.

  “You can make sandcastles—seaweed, shells—real sandwiches with sand—kites. You can watch boats—or swim.” I nearly tip over the teapot with my hand, but save it just in time.

  “I can’t swim.”

  “You don’t have to. You can paddle.”

  She looked uncertain.

  “We can go together. It’ll be your first time on the beach and we can do all the things you’ve missed.”

  “Now?” she said.

  “We could go down on the train tonight, find somewhere to stay in Exmouth. Have all day on the beach tomorrow.”

  She drank up the last of the fizzy orange. “OK,” she said.

  So here we are on the train. We bought some books at the station, although Megan didn’t show much enthusiasm—she was more interested in Just Seventeen and Mizz. I bought her one of each reluctantly, but I’m sure they’re too old for her. I’d like to encourage her to read something more challenging, and I’m just about to ask if she would like me to read to her when I notice she has fallen asleep, leaning against my arm. Very gently, I ease her round so that her head rests on my lap and her feet are up on the seat. She moves restlessly, muttering in her sleep, but then she calms down and becomes still.

  I listen anxiously to her breathing, worrying about the asthma, but I can’t hear anything unusual. I look at the side of her face on my lap and try to work out her age again. She looks very young in her sleep, almost a baby. I smooth the light wispy hair off her cheek, and notice again the thinness of her face, the sharp definition of her nose and cheekbones. I feel the warmth of her body on mine, the rise and fall of her chest as she breathes and I am filled with love for her.

  I’d like to sleep myself, but I’m afraid I won’t wake up at the right moment and we’d miss Exeter. I rummage carefully through my bag, hoping to find some leftover chocolate, a few Ro
los, a square of Dairy Milk. But there’s nothing to eat.

  I come across the letter that I picked up this morning in my flat—so long ago in another life, when I had no children or responsibilities. I take it out and examine it, trying to guess who wrote it. Someone has given up a sizeable portion of their time to think of me and record their thoughts. I stop guessing and open it. The letter is from my father.

  But my father doesn’t write letters. He telephones and shouts, or waits until the person turns up at the house. I’ve never seen him sit down and write a letter. I can’t even imagine it. Hardly anyone writes to him because they know they won’t get a reply. Even Dennis the agent comes up from London to ask him a question or to sign a form. It’s the only way he can get a reaction.

  My father has written me a letter. I think of all the letters in the attic from Janet, Louise, Philippa, etc. He never wrote to them, but he’s written to me.

  I’m not sure about this. What does he want to tell me? About Dinah, my mother? But I wish he would take time to think. To sort out real memory from pretend memory. I don’t know if he can do this, but I think he ought to try.

  Dear Kitty,

  Don’t tear this letter up and destroy it before you read it. (That’s good coming from someone who spent over thirty years tearing up letters from his children’s mother.) I want to explain, and it seems easier to write it down. (He wouldn’t even write a letter to school when I was ill. Paul had to forge his signature.) I have nothing to say about Margaret, and I still believe I did the right thing. She can appear or disappear for all I care.

  I imagine you want to know about Dinah. I can’t tell you much, because I didn’t have much to do with her, but I do remember that she was a very difficult child. She cried as a baby, screamed as a toddler and argued as soon as she could talk. There were endless rows as she grew older, especially with Margaret, who insisted on confronting her over every issue—mistakenly in my opinion. In the end, Dinah stopped talking to us altogether.

  Then one day, when she was fifteen, she went out and never came back. We thought she would eventually turn up when she was hungry, but she didn’t. We tried to find her. We went to the police, drove round to her friends’ houses, but they had no idea where she was. There had been a group of hippies in the area for a while, who disappeared at the same time, and we finally decided she had gone with them.

  That was it. We never found her and in the end we stopped looking.

  Margaret will no doubt claim that she was depressed by Dinah’s departure, and that’s why she abandoned us.

  What does my father know about depression? Anyway, I don’t want to know about Margaret, I want to know about Dinah. Megan stirs on my lap and I shift slightly, trying to stretch my legs without waking her. She murmurs incoherent words, then quiets again and breathes more deeply. In and out. In and out.

  Three years later, a man appeared on our doorstep with you, saying that Dinah was dead. She fell off a mountain in Austria. Messing around as usual, dancing without being careful, and she slipped and fell 800 feet. Once they realized she was dead, they left her there, where someone else would find her. Nobody seemed to have any idea of responsibility. I gather they just drove over the next border into another country. (So my mother died in an unfamiliar land, buried in an unmarked grave. The end of her past, the end of her future.)

  That’s all he said. He didn’t give me any choice about taking you. He might have been your father, but I wouldn’t recognize him again—he had a long beard and hair down his back. He was very vague—probably on drugs—but he kissed you and gave me a Tesco bag containing your possessions. There wasn’t much—a dirty blanket, a dummy and a threadbare pink fluffy duck.

  Dinah must have been pregnant when she left here. Fifteen. What a way to mess up her life and yours. But you were all right once you were cleaned up. The boys liked you. They were pleased to have a baby sister.

  I know your birth certificate says Margaret and I are your parents. I lied. I paid a lot of money to get that sorted—it took months after you came back, but you don’t want to know the details. I’m afraid your date of birth isn’t accurate. It was a rough guess.

  That’s it really. I know it’s not much. I might have the Tesco bag somewhere with all its filthy contents and I’ll look for it if you want me to.

  Sorry.

  Dad.

  I’m crying, the tears rolling down my cheeks and falling on to the letter. I imagine Dinah falling off into a ravine, her long hippy skirt billowing out round her like a failed parachute. I wonder if she thought she was flying at first, free from the natural laws of the universe. Were the last few seconds of her life deliriously happy, free, untamed? Was I in her thoughts in those last moments before landing? I don’t believe she was bad, just different. I remember warmth, a comfortable lap, singing, the pretty tasselled dress.

  Perhaps my memories aren’t of Dinah. Perhaps I was handed from person to person, although Dinah must have felt some responsibility for me. Otherwise they wouldn’t have brought me back after she died. I want her to be the mother in my mind.

  I look down at Megan, asleep on my lap, and I stroke her arm. Mothers can’t reject their children, however hard they try. I think about the kiss given me by the bearded man. Was he my father? I am grateful for his kiss.

  I want James. I want him so much. I need to tell him about this, to explain to him that Dinah wasn’t bad.

  But I’m sitting in a train in the dark, going in the opposite direction, away from James, going to the seaside with an unpredictable child whose age changes every time I look at her.

  We don’t arrive in Exeter until eleven o’clock, far too late to go to Exmouth. We come out of the station bleary-eyed, and I don’t know what to do. Megan stands miserably next to me, sucking her thumb. She looks even paler than before and very miserable.

  “Come on,” I say. “We need to find somewhere to stay.”

  We walk up a hill without speaking. Judging by the road signs, we’re near the university, so there must be places to stay nearby. Margaret came here once, I say to myself. My grandmother. We have a connection. We walk past a row of houses, until, with a rush of relief, I see several bed and breakfast signs. I keep walking until I can see a light still on downstairs.

  I ring the doorbell twice before anything happens. An elderly lady with ragged grey hair peers round the door.

  “Hello,” I say. “I’m sorry to be so late, but do you have a room for me and my daughter?”

  The door opens a bit wider as she studies us. She’s wearing a pink nylon overall over a knee-length orange flowery dress and enormous hedgehog slippers, and she’s holding a kettle. “It’s a bit late,” she said.

  “Yes,” I say, nodding vigorously. I struggle to find an explanation as the silence grows longer. “We meant to get here earlier, but the car broke down and we had to take the train.”

  She looks vaguely puzzled. “Was I expecting you?”

  “No, no. We’re on our way to Exmouth.”

  Her eyes fall on Megan and her lined, scrubbed face becomes more tender. “Well,” she says, “you can catch an early train tomorrow. The station’s only five minutes away.”

  “Yes, I know. It would be so helpful if we could stay here.”

  “You’ll have to make your own beds.” She opens the door wider and we go in.

  I am woken by a sudden sharp sound. My eyes fly open, and there are a few seconds of confusion while I struggle with the unfamiliarity of the darkness. Then I remember. We’re in Exeter, in the bed and breakfast. I’m in a creaky double bed which has a headboard made from yellow and black tiger-striped acrylic fur. Megan is in a little camp bed at the foot of mine. As my eyes become gradually accustomed to the dark, I can pick out the forest of plastic plants in one corner of the room and a pile of fluffy toys in another. The orange and blue teddy bear that was on my bed went straight into the corner to join the others, but Megan kept her orange fluffy cat and went to sleep with it in her arms.

&nb
sp; The same sharp sound that woke me comes again. A flickering light briefly illuminates the room, and there’s a strong smell of matches. I sit up.

  “Megan?” I whisper. “What are you doing?”

  Complete silence.

  I wonder if I’m dreaming, but I’m sure I recognize the smell. I lean over and fumble for the switch on the bedside lamp. It clicks on and I spend a few more seconds adjusting, focusing my eyes on the lamp, which I’d hardly noticed when we came to bed. It is made out of brass and shaped like a swan, its long neck arching upwards to the head.

  Then I lean over and look at Megan. She is lying with her back to me, the quilt pulled up tightly round her neck.

  “Megan,” I whisper.

  There’s no reply and her breathing sounds calm and even. I lean over to pull the duvet back, but it won’t come. She’s resisting me.

  “Megan,” I whisper more urgently. “What are you doing?”

  I relax my hold on the duvet, then try to yank it off, but she’s still pulling hard in the opposite direction. I give up, get out of bed and walk round to her other side. I am still in my underwear because we didn’t think about nighties when we decided to go to the beach.

  I grab the duvet from the bottom and pull it off very quickly. Megan is hunched up tightly, hiding something with her hands.

  “Come on, Megan,” I say. “Give me the matches.”

  She screws up her eyes and doesn’t move.

  “It’s all right,” I say more gently. “I won’t be cross.” I stroke her arms, hoping she’ll relax. She refuses to acknowledge me.

  “Give me what you have in your hands,” I say, willing her to obey me, but still nothing happens.

  I start to get annoyed by this ridiculous situation. It’s the middle of the night. I want some sleep and I don’t want to wake up in a burning bedroom. “I’m going to ask you one more time. Give it to me.” As soon as I’ve said this, I realize it’s a mistake. She doesn’t respond to the authority in my voice and I have no way to make her obey.

  I reach out and start to pull her hands apart. She doesn’t say anything, but she resists me with all her strength. I have to pull really hard, prising every finger apart and holding them back until I can grab the box of matches. Just as I free them she bends her head down to my hand and I snatch the matches away before she bites me.