Sweet Home

by Carys Bray

  ‘Look, love.’ Boris cleared his throat. ‘I’ve been thinking … I’m not very good at this sort of thing. So I thought I’d borrow someone else’s words. Let me not to the marriage of true minds,’ he began.

  As he delivered the poem, Carol tight-roped between laughter and a spiky emotion that poked her throat. Once she got over the urge to laugh, she recognised that his recitation was the most romantic thing she’d ever heard. She felt as if she was in a scene from one of the novels she used to read, even though they never featured plump, middle-aged, single-breasted women. When he finished, she didn’t say anything. They stood together in the darkness, listening to the sea break in the distance, and then he kissed her. As she kissed him back, he slid the cardigan down her arms. She was a little surprised when he slipped a finger into the side of her dress, and under the edge of her bra. She stood very still as he explored the knotty verge of scar tissue.

  ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.’

  Standing in the garden, Carol wishes Boris could see her bra, stranded in the hedge. It would make him laugh. She cases the area once more, in search of a solution and notices the washing-line prop.

  The girls watch Mrs Evans fishing for her bra.

  ‘She’ll never do it,’ Sophie says. ‘Is there someone who can help? Does she live by herself?’

  ‘Her husband’s dead.’ Louisa shrugs. ‘He died ages ago. It was like, seven years ago or something, at least.’

  ‘Was he fat, too?’ Sophie asks. She tucks a spray of marigold curls behind each ear in order to better observe the old woman’s struggle.

  ‘Not really. But he had a big, fat moustache. Like a hairy caterpillar.’

  ‘Gross. Imagine being kissed by someone with a moustache.’

  Louisa thinks about being kissed by Matt Jones; the thought is definitely grosser than Mr Evans’s furry moustache.

  ‘I can’t imagine her kissing anyone, can you?’ says Sophie.

  Louisa considers Mrs Evans for a moment. ‘Not really.’

  ‘Maybe she had a sexless marriage.’ Sophie laughs. ‘Perhaps she’s never done it.’

  ‘She must have. She’s got two sons. They come and visit her sometimes.’

  ‘Ew. Can you imagine?’ Sophie uncrouches and strikes a pose in front of the window. ‘Oh, Mr Evans, don’t rumple my apron! I’m trying to wash the table cloths! Stop it, you’ll ladder my pop socks!’

  ‘Get down! She’ll see you,’ Louisa hisses.

  ‘No, Mr Evans, you may not remove my slippers. I’m frigid—’

  ‘Don’t be tight.’

  ‘Oh, come on. Look at her! Mr Evans, you’re creasing my pleats!’

  Louisa is suddenly unsure about Sophie. ‘I bet she wasn’t frigid when she was younger. People just say stuff like that for the sake of it.’

  ‘Get you! Sticking up for that—’

  ‘Stop it.’ Louisa’s words unfasten their tentative friendship, leaving it in two pieces like a split end.

  Sophie moves away from the window. ‘I’m going to the loo,’ she huffs.

  But Louisa stays on the end of the bed, peeping out through the gap in the curtains. She watches Mrs Evans retrieve the bra and quickly bury it in the waiting washing basket. Then she crawls back into bed and snuggles into a spool of duvet. She closes her eyes and imagines kissing a boy warmly, expertly. The imaginary boy brushes her jaw gently with the tips of his fingers, just like sexy men do in films. And Louisa smiles as she hides under the covers.

  Love: terms and conditions

  The photograph in my parents’ hall is a lie, a counterfeit memory they forged when I was small. Despite their efforts, I can see the truth of my childhood in its pixels. Every time we visit, I am compelled to examine it. Last time we visited, it was Boxing Day. As we waited on the doorstep, I cautioned the children to be on their best behaviour. I reminded them of the rules, explained the consequences of contraventions, and justified the effort required to achieve acceptance.

  ‘Be polite. Eat all of your dinner, and don’t ask too many questions.’

  ‘Yes, Mum,’ they chorused.

  My mother opened the door. ‘My favourite grandchildren!’ she exclaimed, presenting her cheek to them.

  ‘We’re your only grandchildren, silly,’ Martha giggled.

  ‘I really don’t like kisses, Nanna,’ Adam said, as he always does.

  ‘It’s true,’ I vouched, hoping that she would let him off. ‘He won’t kiss me, either.’

  ‘No Christmas presents if you don’t kiss me,’ my mother said.

  ‘Okay then, Nanna.’ Adam shrugged and smiled at her. ‘Mum and Dad got me an iPod and that’s all I really wanted. Merry Christmas.’ He squeezed past her sentinelling form, into the house.

  ‘Do I have to kiss you?’ Jonathan asked.

  ‘Yes,’ my mother said.

  ‘One, two, three …’ He gave her a lightning-quick peck. ‘You’re like the gatekeeper in a fairy tale, Nanna,’ said Martha. ‘People have to pay you to get in, with kisses. You should say, “You cannot pass unless you kiss the ugly, wicked witch.” And then your kisses could turn everyone into stone and—’

  My mother stood to one side and Martha raced down the corridor without offering payment. In an attempt to make up for the children, Chris bestowed a generous, smacking kiss as he stepped inside.

  ‘If they saw you more often …’ I apologised, as I proffered my lips.

  ‘It’s such a long way to drive,’ my mother said as she closed the front door, consigning the distances she and my father drive during their transatlantic holidays to an entirely separate category of travel.

  I followed her down the hall until I reached the photograph. I stopped to look at myself, aged five, standing in the back garden on a wintry day. I’d pestered and pestered to be allowed outside to play in the fine scatter of snow and eventually my mother gave in. She packed me into my red snowsuit, fastening the zip so high that it caught my throat. Then she escorted me outside and positioned me on the patio. My eyes were awash with unshed tears as my father called, ‘Say cheese.’ Afterwards, when I wanted to play, they said it was too cold and made me come straight back indoors. They have forgotten this. It is something, along with a horror of compulsory kisses and the nettley prickle of elderly relatives’ tissue-paper cheeks, that has been unremembered. They refer to the photograph as ‘that lovely picture of you having fun in the snow’.

  As I looked at my five-year-old self, forced into a scarecrow stance by my marshmallowing outfit, I wished, not for the first time, that I could stretch an arm into the picture, unzip the snowsuit, kiss the nipped throat better, and say, ‘Off you go, sweetheart. Go and have a big, messy roll in the snow.’

  Martha interrupted my thoughts. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked as she trundled down the corridor.

  ‘Just looking at this old picture of me.’

  ‘What were you like when you were a little girl, Mummy?’

  I thought about it for a moment. ‘I was good.’

  She reached her arms around the top of my leg and hugged me, hard. ‘You are the beautifullest lady in the planet and the land,’ she consoled. ‘And Nanna says to tell you that the lunch is getting ruined.’

  There were five different vegetables at lunch.

  ‘I don’t like green beans, thank you, Nanna,’ Jonathan said.

  ‘They’re good for you,’ my mother responded.

  ‘I know, but they squeak in my mouth and they make me shiver.’ His eyebrows rummaged for a suitable expression while he laughed nervously, ‘He-he.’

  ‘You’ll get what you’re given, sonny-Jim,’ she said as she ladled green beans onto his plate. ‘There aren’t any fussy eaters in this house.’

  ‘We’re not fussy, Nanna,’ Martha piped up. ‘We eat spaghetti Bolognese, carbonara, fricassee, macaroni cheese and chicken fajitas. Do you like all of—’

  ‘Eat your lunch,’ my father interrupted her.

  Jo
nathan desperately tried to make eye contact with me, seeking permission to leave his beans. I pretended that I hadn’t noticed, but Chris leaned across the table. ‘Don’t worry about the beans, Jonno,’ he said. ‘I hated them when I was younger, too. Love them now though, yum.’ He speared a mound of Jonathan’s beans with his fork and held them up in a toast to my mother.

  Outside, tiny grains of snow began to speckle the patio. I stared out of the dining-room window as they scattered like crumbs, and my father began to talk to Adam about university.

  ‘Oh, that’s years away,’ Chris interjected.

  ‘I don’t want to go to university,’ Adam said.

  ‘Your mum went to university. Grandad will be very disappointed in you if you don’t go,’ my father wheedled.

  ‘You are Grandad,’ Martha pointed out. ‘Do you mean that you will be disappointed, Grandad?’

  ‘Yes, of course that’s what Grandad means,’ my father huffed.

  ‘Well, I don’t want to go, anyway,’ Adam said. ‘And Mum says I don’t have to. I’m probably going to be a referee. I’d like to be a professional footballer, but it’s not likely cos I haven’t been signed yet. Look! It’s starting to snow.’

  ‘Can we go outside, after lunch?’ Jonathan asked.

  ‘Yes! And build a snowman.’ Martha smacked her hands together.

  ‘There’s not enough snow for that.’ Chris laughed.

  ‘It’s freezing out there. You’ll catch your death,’ my mother said as she scowled a full-stop frown at Martha.

  ‘We’ll wrap up warm,’ Jonathan assured her. ‘Don’t worry about us, Nanna. We’re tough!’

  ‘You’ll make a terrible mess.’ My mother shook her head irrevocably.

  ‘We’ll be very careful,’ Adam promised.

  ‘I said, no.’

  ‘No you didn’t, Nanna. She didn’t say no, did she, Grandad?’

  ‘Yes she did,’ my father insisted. ‘Don’t argue with your Nanna, Martha.’

  There was Christmas pudding with cream for afters, but the children wouldn’t try it. The boys refused politely and thanked my mother for making it. ‘I think raisins look like spiders, Nanna,’ Martha explained. ‘Little, dead spider’s bodies with the legs pulled—’

  ‘Don’t be silly!’ my mother said. ‘This is Nanna’s Christmas pudding. Who’s going to give it a try? One of my favourite grandsons? My favourite granddaughter? No? You’re not at all like your mummy, she always ate everything. Whoever tries it can have a big kiss.’

  The children had ice cream and sprinkles, and they remembered to ask if they could leave the table when they finished.

  ‘Wait,’ my mother said, pointing at Martha’s bowl. ‘You haven’t eaten all your sprinkles.’ She picked the bowl up and scraped the stray sprinkles and a residue of melted ice cream onto a spoon. ‘Open wide,’ she instructed Martha, whose surprised mouth automatically gaped. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘There are starving children in Africa.’

  I spun around in my chair to give Adam a look, but I wasn’t quick enough. ‘Name two,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ my mother asked.

  ‘Did you mean “pardon”, Nanna?’ Martha wondered.

  ‘Name two of the starving children,’ said Adam. ‘Mum says it for a joke sometimes. That thing about starving children is silly. Over-eating isn’t going to help children in Africa. We all say, “Send the food to Africa, then,” and things like that. For a joke.’

  After lunch the children opened packets of socks and underpants, and finally a large bar of chocolate each.

  ‘Thank you for the socks,’ Martha said. ‘I’ve got hundreds now.’

  Jonathan opened his bar of chocolate and took a large bite out of it.

  ‘You’re not going to eat it all in one go?’ My father asked, mesmerised by Jonathan’s munching chops.

  In the car on the way home I thanked the children for being good.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ they answered: cheeky, greedy and precocious respectively, according to my parents’ whispered exchange as we said our goodbyes.

  ‘We’re always good,’ Martha said, and I heard the boys murmuring agreement as I fiddled with the radio.

  ‘I ate everything except for the green beans.’

  ‘And I told Grandad all about the referee course.’

  Chris chuckled quietly as the children listed their virtues. They have grown up in a family where love doesn’t track a base rate of obedience. There are no Terms and Conditions to our affection, which has left them utterly unprepared for the measured, auditing love of their grandparents. ‘They’ve got no idea, have they?’ Chris whispered, laughing softly. It’s all right for him, his parents are dead.

  Later that night, when the children were finally asleep, it snowed fat, butterfly flakes. They flittered into our garden like a plague of – cabbage whites. I’d never seen snow like it.

  ‘Let’s go outside and build a snowman,’ I said to Chris.

  ‘Been there, done that.’

  ‘Come on, I’ve always wanted to.’

  He smiled at me and carried on watching television.

  I built the snowman in the front garden. Snow tumbled over me, settling on my head and shoulders. The air was thick with it, muffling everything into silence. Neighbours saw me as they drew their curtains before going to bed. They stared. I waved, bashfully at first, and then with an enthusiasm born of freezing wet extremities and shivery sniggers. It was snowing so heavily that tracks left by my enormous snowball were packed with fresh snow every time I returned to the start of my circuit. When the ball was as high as my waist I couldn’t push it any more. I left it next to the garden wall and began again. The snow lifted in a cotton-wool carpet, Swiss-rolling like turf. I picked up the second, smaller ball and placed it on top of the first. Then I whirled a third snowball to add to the others. The snowman was as tall as me. I knelt down and pushed the surrounding snow into the hollows of his body until he rose up out of the ground, as if he had legs. He didn’t balance, he stood. I dressed him in a red, sequinned cowboy hat from the pound shop – Martha’s Christmas present to me – and a green woolly scarf. I gave him a carrot nose, black grape eyes and I wedged a banana skin into a smiling mouth with the help of cocktail sticks. My first snowman.

  The snow was still falling, planting icy kisses on my nose and cheeks when I lay down next to the hedge on a drift knoll and made a snow angel. Chris knocked on the window and made shivering gestures. I waved. I hadn’t realised that I had always wanted to lie in the snow, that a small part of me had been patiently waiting to be filled with cold, damp happiness.

  I stumbled into the house, cold-clumsy and giggling. ‘Let’s wake the children up,’ I said as Chris tutted at the trail of snow that stalked me. ‘It’ll make up for earlier, and this is the real stuff. Imagine being woken up in the middle of the night and your mum telling you that you can go out and roll in the snow.’

  ‘I don’t think … there’s no need …’ his words faded as I raced up the stairs, snowing on him as he quietly followed.

  I burst into each of their rooms. ‘Wake up! Who wants to come outside and play in the snow? You’ve never seen snow like it! It may never snow like this again!’

  ‘Oh go away, Mummy,’ Martha groaned.

  Adam and Jonathan dragged themselves out of bed, deigning to look out of the window.

  ‘Look what I made. He looks just like The Snowman.’

  ‘No he doesn’t,’ said Adam.

  ‘Why don’t you come outside for a bit while it’s still snowing?’

  ‘You’ll let us go out in the morning, won’t you?’ Jonathan yawned.

  ‘Yes, but don’t you want to come right now? Look at the snowman. Do you think he might come to life?’

  The snowman stood in the front garden expectantly, smiling his banana-skin grin at us, a lone figure in the unfamiliar, white landscape. The boys stared at me for a moment, rolled their eyes at each other and stumbled back to bed.

  I went downstairs and
switched the lounge light off. I opened the curtains and looked at my snowman. He was a model of contentment; amenable and compliant, entirely comprehensible, his perpetual happiness secured by a pair of well-positioned cocktail sticks. My parents would have loved him.

  In the morning, I watched through the lounge window as the children undid my snowman. At first it was a matter of improvement and rearrangement, but it quickly turned into something else; he was dismembered, razed, annihilated. And then they began again. The three heaps of his carcass were remodelled, enhanced and cast into fresh creations.

  ‘Didn’t you like my snowman?’ I asked as they tumbled back into the house, frozen pink and snow-sparkled.

  ‘It was okay,’ Adam admitted. ‘But it was a bit boring. My alien’s better.’

  ‘So is my snow bear,’ said Jonathan.

  ‘Yours was nice, Mummy. But I wanted to make my own.’ Martha flopped onto the sofa next to me and wrinkled her face into tight pleats of pretend sleep. ‘I’m Sleeping Beauty.’ She spoke out of the side of her mouth so as not to spoil the appearance of sleep. ‘Sleeping Beauty falls in love with a handsome person. And she’s a mermaid. She has three days to make him kiss her. She doesn’t even tell her dad about it. Do you like my snow dog? Is he your favourite? Yesterday Grandma said I was her favourite granddaughter. Do you love me the most? Am I your favourite?’

  ‘Your snow dog is lovely.’ I said. ‘And I love you all the same.’

  Adam laughed. ‘Ha! We all know who your favourite is,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t have favourites, Adam.’

  Martha started to snore, softly at first, then with intensifying piggyness. Jonathan watched Adam, waiting for him to reveal the name of the favourite child, hoping it was him, suspecting that it wasn’t. His eyes darted between Adam and me. I felt like a contestant on a talent show with the camera trained on my face, preparing to examine the truth of my reaction.