The Third Person
Stephanie Newell
Published: 2011
Tag(s): Dark funny "literary fiction"
The Third Person
By Stephanie Newell
Published by Philistine Press
Copyright 2011 Stephanie Newell
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
If you like what you read, please make a donation at www.philistinepress.com
I. August
Mon 1st August
Our mother says infants don’t have language, and this means they don’t have proper memories either, only fragments and broken impressions.
But I remember everything.
I remember touching his prickly beard when I was a baby, seeking out his lips with my fingertips. As I admired my reflection in the lenses of his glasses, a vast warm mouth would suddenly close over my hand and trap my fingers, making contented munching sounds.
His mouth always looked so lonely, tucked away in his beard.
****
Wed 3rd August
Even though she’s only nine and should be playing proper games with children her own age, my little sister spends most of her time nursing her collection of houseplants. What a ludicrous hobby! Whenever I spy on her through the crack in her bedroom door, I see her crouching on the floor, curly black hair scraped back in a crooked ponytail, taking cuttings, putting seedlings in pots, tending and feeding and watering her specimens, humming made-up tunes to herself.
It’s funny to watch her face when she doesn’t know she’s being observed, especially when she’s having a conversation with herself. She looks like a cartoon character: eyebrows up, eyes left, eyebrows down, mouth down, eyes forward, eyebrows up, mouth up. It goes on for ages.
Gardening is for OAPs and idiots.
I barge into her room while she squats by an untidy row of seed-trays and tell her that I have given her an amusing new nickname.
‘What is it?’ she asks, looking pleased.
‘You’re called Whore from now on,’ I tell her.
She protests, whining, saying that she doesn’t want that name.
‘You don’t even know what it means!’
She says it doesn’t sound very nice. After a pause, she asks, ‘what’s it called when someone makes words sound really difficult, like grownup words?’
I search for the right expression. ‘Adulterate.’
‘Well, Lizzie,’ she comments primly, ‘sometimes you adulterate words, and I don’t know what you mean.’
But when I tell her that her new name is short for ‘horticulturalist,’ a term that is used in honour of good gardeners, she looks pleased again. She paws at my arm and says thank you in the annoying little-girl voice she always used with Dad. I hate that voice. It’s turned on deliberately to melt grownups. And look what she has done. She has melted our dad clean away.
****
Fri 5th August
I’m the first person to see everything around here.
I always inspect the post, but leave it where it falls unless there’s a letter for me in my dad’s writing. He always writes Elizabeth rather than Lizzie. You can tell he’s in a good mood if he deliberately sticks the stamp upside-down in the corner. When a letter arrived from New Zealand today, however, I noticed he had put the stamp the right way around. I spent the whole morning trying to work out if he was in a good mood or a bad mood because New Zealand is upside-down compared to us: therefore perhaps a stamp placed the right way up in New Zealand is a clever joke about me being upside down over here? Or perhaps he was angry again.
I’ve thought about it for hours and I still can’t decide.
When our mother emerges from her bedroom, rubbing her eyes, she scoops up all the letters, sorts the white envelopes from the brown ones, and puts them on the desk in her study.
Wherever she goes in the house these days, a cloud of cigarette smoke lingers around her head. Sometimes we can hardly see her face. When she cries, we see big drops of rain falling out of the cloud. Since he disappeared, the cloud has grown fatter and heavier: it sucks out all her energy. She says she’s too tired to play Scrabble or Monopoly any more in the evenings. She used to be fun. Now all her love seems to dangle over our heads, just out of reach. It’s lucky that I’m taller and stronger than Helen. I can reach higher.
****
Tues 9th August
Helen nudges open my bedroom door with her elbows, keeping a finger buried in each ear.
‘What’s happening?’ she whines. ‘What’s that noise?’
I jump up.
‘Out!’ I spit, trying to focus on her so I can push her out of my room. ‘You’re not allowed in here.’
I’ve been working on my Gothic script this morning. It takes a lot of skill and concentration, and the violent thumping sounds downstairs have barely registered in my thoughts. I’ve copied out the full alphabet in capital letters fifteen times in rapid succession. That’s 390 letters in the space of 150 minutes. That’s an approximate rate of one letter every 23 seconds. When I finish this exercise, I’m going to copy out Hamlet’s soliloquies in my neatest Gothic script.
‘It’s giving me a headache. What is it?’
I would probably find my sister less irritating if she didn’t whinge in a high-pitched voice whenever she opens her mouth. I’m the one with the headache. The sight of her is bad enough, but whenever she speaks it grates against my bones and makes me clamp my teeth together.
Children of her age should not be seen, and they should also not be heard.
I need to complete one more sheet of capitals, and then I’ll move onto the small letters.
‘If you’re so worried, go downstairs and find out,’ I tell her.
‘I’m scared. What if it’s beagles? Come with me.’ She says beagles instead of burglars.
‘You’re unbelievably stupid! Burglars try to be quiet, imbecile. Go away!’
I know she’s hovering on the landing in-between our bedrooms because I can hear the floorboards creaking gently.
I can’t not hear the noise now that she’s alerted me to it. The silences are more disturbing than the thumps. They open up a network of spaces where my imagination plants images of strange men raiding cupboards and drawers downstairs before hammering their way up to get me.
I try to focus on the sixteenth sheet of paper, crisp and blank, specially prepared for this moment. Unlike the other sheets, which I tore out of my A4 pad, this last page is good quality cartridge paper. Each line has been pricked out with a pin at half-inch intervals so that each letter of the alphabet will occupy an invisible box the same size as its neighbour. My fresh sheet awaits the curl-spike-curl of the beautiful Gothic parade.
One of my Rules is to make whatever I write as beautiful as possible.
The banging noise begins again downstairs.
I stamp out of the room, grabbing one of Helen’s elbows on the way. ‘Come on!’
When we get to the top of the stairs we start to tiptoe, just in case there are burglars in the house. We lean on the banisters and tread on the edges of each dusty stair to stop the boards creaking.
Normally, the kitchen door is propped open with an earthenware Victorian flask that our mother borrowed from my bottle collection but, to our amazement, today the door is firmly closed.
We stand outside for a while and listen.
Buried in the core of the banging noise we hear a strangulated gasp, rising and falling. Here’s a sound I recognise at last. It reverberates through my memory, echoing all the way back to before I could speak.
Helen reaches out and tries to grab my hand, but I shake her off.
Tentatively, I twist the door handle and peep around the crack just in time to catch the first in a new se
ries of thumps.
Everything in the kitchen is covered with a film of white powder, including our mother. She stands at the table holding a rolling-pin vertically over her head. Down it comes like a caveman’s club, again and again. She’s beating the living daylights out of a large grey thing on the table, hitting it with all her strength. The mixing bowl leaps up and down on the table, beside the ashtray and a half-empty packet of Marlboro.
‘What’re you doing?’ Helen whines from the doorway.
Our mother looks up, but her face doesn’t seem to register who we are. Her glasses, cheeks and forehead are covered with wet white streaks and there’s sticky stuff in her hair. ‘Sorry?’
Pebbles of putty dot the room. Helen repeats her question, and her whine gets even louder.
‘Do you need any help?’ I call calmly, in a voice strong enough to be heard above my sister’s racket. I know how to handle these situations. If a person is angry or upset, you mustn’t make them feel threatened by asking confrontational or silly questions, or bursting into tears.
Our mother still looks a bit confused. She sits down and reaches for her cigarettes.
Helen and I push forward a few inches into the kitchen. The air is full of white powder.
‘Can we help with what you’re doing?’ I ask.
Our mother’s chest heaves so much she can’t inhale her cigarette. I reach out for Helen’s hand and squeeze it, not too tightly this time.
‘No thank you, girls,’ our mother says, working hard to control her voice.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask next.
She turns her head towards the dead thing on the table. ‘Pizza bases,’ she says, gazing at the dough, exhaling a cloud of smoke at it.
‘Oh!’ we both say, together.
‘Everything’s gone wrong.’ She pronounces each word slowly.
The flesh around her eyes and cheeks is puffy, and her nose is bright red. When our mother cries, her sobs are silent, stealing quickly and quietly out of her mouth. When she cries, her face puffs up and slowly changes colour. After an hour or two, you can hardly see her eyes any more. Only then does she start to wail. Then she doesn’t stop for days. Me and Helen always try to intercept her at the puffing-up stage.
Helen drops my hand and moves deeper into the kitchen. ‘It’s okay. I know how to do pizza. I saw a man do it on telly.’
I try to snatch her arm, but she escapes.
‘You’re not supposed to hit it with a rolling-pin. You’re supposed to push it around, like this.’ Helen waves her hands helpfully in a dough-kneading motion.
Our mother blows her nose on a flour-covered paper tissue. ‘I don’t think I can cope any more.’
I relax a little because even though she’s crying, I’ve heard her say this lots of times before. I sense that we are floating towards safe territory, away from days of wailing.
‘Maybe we should all think about a holiday,’ Helen says in her most grownup voice, moving towards our mother’s chair. She heard Wendy Craig say that on Butterflies.
‘Shall I make a cup of tea?’ I ask, trying to deflect my sister’s ridiculous suggestion.
I walk through the channel Helen’s opened up in the carpet of flour and veer away when it gets to our mother’s chair. I create a new channel leading up to the sideboard, and fill the kettle. But when I turn round to look, Helen has climbed onto our mother’s lap and wrapped her arms round her sticky neck. A rope of smoke twists around their bodies, binding them together.
****
Sun 14th August
I wake up with a buzzing sensation in my stomach. When I roll onto my back and look at the ceiling, the buzz pushes its way into my throat and hovers there impatiently before moving into my ears. I know it’s a bottle-hunting day.
I lie in bed and picture all those treasures peeping out of the mud, waiting to be found and brought home. Then it’s impossible to stay indoors a minute longer because I’m bursting with excitement. I grab my tools out of the shed and leave number eleven immediately.
The banks on our side of the creek are covered with tall, golden grasses, transformed into hay over the summer. Swallows dart over the water and small gulls plod through the mudflats, heads dipping sporadically. Along the sea-wall, the mudflats have split into thousands of mosaic pieces, cracked and chiselled by months of heat, waiting for the autumn rain. The breeze scoops up flakes of mud in big handfuls and scatters them away towards the bone factory.
I discovered the old rubbish dump shortly after Dad disappeared. I was sitting cross-legged on top of my table staring out of my bedroom window one morning, trying to remember the funny angle he held his fork when he spiked a breakfast sausage, when suddenly the wasteland started to sparkle in the watery sunshine on the other side of the creek. I thought it was fairy-dust, and ran out of the house towards it.
The old dump is half way up the flat road. I can see the back of the bone factory when I walk around inside the site, but nobody from the factory can see me because there aren’t any windows in the corrugated walls of the warehouse on that side, just a row of grey plastic pipes jutting out of the building, covered with green slime. Sometimes brown liquid trickles out of the pipes and splashes thickly into the pool of water at the back of the factory.
The whole place is surrounded by a fence, and the rotten planks are plastered with signs saying, ‘Danger Keep Out’ and ‘Trespassers will be Prosecuted.’
There’s an opening behind a hawthorn bush where I can still crawl through, although since I first discovered this place I’ve grown a lot bigger, and I’ve had to loosen some extra planks on either side of the original hole.
My mother’s size six wellies flap against my legs as I crawl in, dragging the fork through the gap behind me. Its teeth graze the verge. I need to carry a full-sized gardening fork because creek mud is heavy and sticky, and I need to dig down as far as possible. The more I go bottle-hunting, the more I manage to dig deeper into the mud. That’s where the best treasure is hidden, lurking in the darkness. The mud is so thick it bends the teeth of smaller forks.
My pockets bulge with crumpled carrier bags. They crackle when I move. Gulls circle above me in the sky.
Everything else is completely still.
Coming through this fence seals me off from the rest of the world.
All the old rubbish pits are full of muddy water. I walk carefully along the uneven mounds dividing the pits from each another, using the fork to keep my balance. I never take my eyes off the shallows.
Flecks of white foam from the factory pipes nudge the shoreline.
The mud’s slippery. Places that are firm one week can be soft the next, and my feet sometimes get stuck. Once I nearly had to leave a wellington boot behind, sticking out of the shallows, because the mud closed round my foot and gripped it so tightly I couldn’t escape. This place isn’t ‘dangerous,’ though. ‘Dangerous’ is people, not places.
Mud sticks to the fork when I dig, and I push the clods off with my foot.
The creek is tidal, so the mud’s always shifting, pushing things up to the surface to be found.
Most of the bottles are broken, but when I find an intact one I squat down and swish it about in the shallows before putting it inside one of the carrier bags. When I rinse a bottle, I always think I can see the story inside it leaking into the water. If I find a rare item, like a clay pipe or a bottle with a marble in the neck or a blue poison bottle, there’s a Rule that I’m not allowed to rinse it or inspect it until I get home. I put it straight in the bag, covered in mud, and try to imagine what it looks like all the way back to number eleven, how it’s been perfectly preserved since Victorian times.
The bottles are always heavy with mud from a century of burial.
I’m allowed to imagine lots of things when I’m here in this place. Today I picture my dad coming home with armfuls of exotic gifts from all the countries he’s visited this year. The presents are piled so high we can’t see his face, but I know he’s smiling. For me, he’s br
ought a telescope. When handing it over, he whispers that he’ll teach me how to use it. He’s also brought me a set of twelve calligraphy pens with platinum nibs of different widths, and some sticks of gold, silver and bronze sealing wax. He’s bought a diamond ring for our mother, to replace the one she sold to pay the legal fees. (For Helen he brings a pair of cheap plastic roller skates.) After a cup of tea in the kitchen, made by me, he asks politely if he can see my bottle collection. I take him upstairs and describe each exhibit on my special glass shelf, showing him the labels I’m in the process of writing in miniature Gothic script.
I always keep my bedroom spotlessly clean in case Dad comes back and wants to see it. I’ve designed three separate Exhibition Areas, one for my calligraphy, one for my bottles, and one for my sealing wax and seals. I also have an extensive personal library containing twenty-nine books arranged with my favourite one, The Mill on the Floss, first, followed by The Lord of the Flies and Hamlet. I had to wedge Hamlet on top of The Lord of the Flies because I like them both equally and they share second place. Third is Crime and Punishment. (I love the way Raskolnikov kills the old woman: he thinks it through so carefully before he does it.) Last on the shelf is the worst book ever written: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott with those creepy goody-goody sisters and that irritating sweet mother. I won’t throw it away. I keep it on the shelf as a reminder. Sometimes I read it just to make myself angry.
I walk around the site and try to decide on a spot for today’s excavation of bottles. A small mound beside a pool of water looks hopeful. I imagine a cluster of buried bottles lurking under the surface, and start to dig.
There are four Rules to bottle-hunting, and they must be strictly observed at all times:
When digging for bottles, you must insert the fork at a right-angle, and press firmly so that each tooth sinks smoothly into the mud.
If the fork hits a firm object, you must withdraw it instantly. Then you must move back half a footstep and reinsert the fork so that you are never to blame for breaking anything underneath the surface.
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