The Queen of Bloody Everything

by Joanna Nadin

  I am too busy marvelling at the name Harry – Ha-rreeee – seeing how it feels on my tongue, to realize she is addressing me.

  ‘Are you talking to yourself?’

  ‘No,’ I lie. ‘And anyway fat is a feminist issue.’ I repeat the words you spelled out for me from the torn piece of paper Toni had pinned to the bathroom door.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Harry asks.

  I shrug. ‘I don’t know. It was in my mummy’s magazine.’

  She smiles then, and, encouraged, I kick a tidal wave across the bathwater and sink the boy’s boat.

  ‘Oi,’ he says. But he’s smiling widely now, too, and sends an arc of water soaring over us.

  ‘To-om!’ Harry complains, and kicks both feet furiously.

  ‘Tom,’ I say to myself, feeling the shape of the word, hard and round like a pebble, as I do the same.

  Soon all three of us have turned the peace of the Fenjal lagoon into a raging sea that slip-slops out and soaks into the hard earth beneath, our legs tangled and toes pushing into who knows what.

  ‘Harriet?’ comes a voice.

  I look up to see a woman stalking across the lawn. She is a stretched, hardened version of the girl sitting next to me, wearing an immaculate white kaftan and straw hat, and carrying two plastic beakers, one blue, one pink.

  She stops short of the paddling pool, staring first at me, then at the shipwreck we have created, then back at me again, unsure, I assume, which disaster to deal with first. She picks me.

  ‘And who might you be?’

  Where your voice is low and rounded, like the smoke ring from a cigarette, hers is precise, sharp, like glass. But fragile, as if it, too, is ready to snap.

  ‘Dido,’ says Harry.

  ‘Die-doe?’ She repeats the name as if it’s a dirty word, or a lie.

  ‘Dido Sylvia Jones,’ I say quickly, as if the rest will balance it out; make it a real name after all. ‘The Sylvia is after a woman who wrote poems and put her head in an oven.’

  ‘Really.’ Her face is taut and unimpressed. ‘And where exactly did you spring from, then, Dido?’

  Harry looks blankly back and I realize I never told them, because no one asked. Maybe they think I am a fairy child fallen to earth. Or an orphan. It is on the tip of my tongue to say the last one, to see if she’ll adopt me, so I can live forever in the big house with the paddling pool and beakers of orange squash. But Tom pipes up, ‘She’s moved to the house over the back, haven’t you?’

  Astonished at his soothsaying, I am only able to nod.

  ‘Really,’ the woman repeats. ‘And where is your mother?’

  I look at Tom to see if he knows that too, but it seems his psychic ability has dried up for the day.

  ‘Lying down,’ I say. ‘She said she’s buggered from the move.’

  I feel the minute change of air pressure as clearly as if it were the clang of a bell. And I realize in that instant the potency of words, their inherent magic to disarm and disturb, and realize too that this one – buggered, I assume – has damaged only me, marked me out. And I vow to try to mind my language. Once I know what is and isn’t permitted.

  It is Tom who breaks the tension as he lets out a snigger.

  ‘That’s enough, Thomas,’ his mother snaps, her voice rising. ‘And close your mouth, Harriet, you’ll swallow a fly.’

  The pair do as they are told, clamping their lips between their teeth to stifle the thrill, and are handed their beakers as reward. I look hopefully at the kitchen, but there is no squash for swearers.

  The woman turns to me again. ‘Does she know you’re here?’

  ‘Sort of,’ I say.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘She said to explore, but only as far as Timbuctoo.’

  The woman raises an eyebrow in disbelief and I wonder if Timbuctoo is a bad swear too.

  ‘It’s true,’ I insist. ‘She doesn’t mind, as long as I don’t talk to strange men or try to bring home dogs.’

  ‘What about your father?’

  ‘I don’t have one.’ It is my turn to be matter-of-fact. This is the most questions anyone has ever asked me in a row and I am quite pleased with myself for getting most of them right, even with the ‘bugger’ thing.

  ‘Everyone has a dad,’ says Harry.

  ‘Well, I don’t,’ I declare. ‘I thought it was Denzil, but Edie said don’t be daft because he’s black.’

  ‘Good lord.’ The woman touches the palm of her hand to her hair, which is held up with an invisible force, folding in on itself at the back. Neat, coiled, like her. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Six years and seven days,’ I say, still truthfully.

  ‘You’ll be in Harry’s class, then,’ says Tom. ‘She’s seven in September.’

  ‘Well, only if she’s at the same school,’ his mother corrects. Then turns to me, concern edging her voice now. ‘Where do you go to school?’

  ‘I don’t,’ I reply. ‘Toni teaches me at home, and sometimes Chinese Clive who isn’t from China at all, he’s from Jamaica, but he loves pork balls with sweet and sour. But that was in London. Edie says now we’re in the wretched provinces I can go to an actual school, so I’m starting at St Mary’s in three weeks and two days.’

  ‘We’ve got Mrs Maxwell this year,’ Harry says. ‘She’s fat and old and Karen Kerr said she once hit Brian Banner with a board rubber just for coughing too loud.’

  ‘She didn’t,’ Tom retorts.

  ‘Did too. You’re just cross because you haven’t got Miss Wicks any more.’ She turns to me conspiratorially. ‘He loves Miss Wicks.’

  She draws out the vowel to a long ‘urrr’ and with it I feel a strange sting, the first, it will transpire, of many. Confused, I quickly offer up the only school story I know. ‘Edie says in her old school in Cambridge, which was all girls and you had to wear hats, one girl nearly got expelled for kissing the music teacher.’

  I do not tell them the one girl was Edie – you – but the woman’s lips thin anyway.

  ‘And just who is this Edie person?’

  It is my turn to look incredulous. ‘My mum, of course. She’s really called Edith but she hates that and our surname because of the pay-tri— pay-tri something. She says for her thirtieth birthday which is in four years eight months and . . . seventeen days she’s going to change it.’

  ‘What to?’ Harry asks.

  ‘She said Moon or maybe Nefertiti. But Toni – she loves women – told her to stop being mental.’

  ‘That’s enough.’ The woman ponders this latest atrocity. ‘Well, this isn’t Timbuctoo,’ she says finally. ‘This is the Lodge. And it’s high time you two came in before you get sunstroke.’

  Tom stands up, obediently, and for the first time I see him in all his naked glory.

  And so does she.

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Thomas, sit down,’ she says. ‘Or put some clothes on.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I say. ‘I’ve seen loads.’ And I have – Maudsley Mick’s, Chinese Clive’s, and all the others who think I’m still asleep when they creep out for a pee in the middle of the night. ‘It’s only a penis,’ you said then, and I repeat it now.

  But the words fail to have the calming effect I was aiming for.

  ‘Inside, both of you,’ she says, then turns to me. ‘And you’d better run along, too.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I say.

  ‘Why ever not?’

  I point at the tree. ‘The branch is too high on this side.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake.’

  I am expecting to be led solemnly round to the front of the house, all the while hoping for a reprieve, a stay of execution, to be invited into the fairy-tale castle, even if it is by the ice queen. Incredibly, inconceivably, I am offered the next best thing: a gleaming talisman in the shape of an old iron key, a key that wasn’t in a drawer or a magic lamp but in the gate itself, on this side of the wall. She turns it and it sounds a delicious clunk like a full stop.

  ‘Bye, D
ido,’ Tom says.

  ‘Ciao,’ I say. ‘It means hello and goodbye.’

  ‘Chow,’ mimics Harry.

  ‘Oh, do come along,’ her mother pleads. And this time both children obey, their glimmering bodies galloping ahead of her across scorched lawn.

  You forgot to lock it, I think. But I do not say it. Instead I slip my feet into my flip-flops, pick up my pants and vest from the lawn and slide the key quietly, carefully out of its lock. And, as I feel its weight, its power, its importance, I realize that I have found exactly what I’ve been looking for after all. I’ve found my Narnia, my Neverland. And in it are no fauns or crocodiles or talking beavers, but a would-be Wendy and a not-at-all-Lost Boy, and a world of what I will later find out is called normal.

  But for now, to me, is pure enchantment.

  And with the key to this Wonderland clasped tightly in my hot, damp hand, I dance up the path to tell you all about it.

  Hansel and Gretel

  August 1976

  There’s a Polaroid in my purse – it used to be stuck to our fridge with a Busby magnet, do you remember? A blurry snapshot of a boy and a girl – Tom and me – in ersatz German costume squinting at the camera, hand in sweaty hand, faces red from the polyester heat. Do you remember that day?

  That was the day you met him.

  It was almost September, a Saturday tagged onto a summer that was turning Indian in its persistence. The garden matched our carpets in swirls of brown and burnt umbers, and any fruit that had managed to claim enough water to swell beyond a pip had long since dried to raisins or been reduced to a wasp-blown corpse. I’d grown an inch in height – tall enough to reach the cupboard in the bathroom where the tablets were kept. Yet time refused to obey similar rules, elongating hours into what felt like days, or standing still entirely.

  Because they were gone.

  Every day, since our paddling pool meeting, I’d slipped through the gate in the wall; every day I’d found the garden deserted, the house locked, the curtains drawn. I worried they’d all died in the drought. Or moved away, horrified at the arrival of a girl with a strange name who said ‘bugger’ and thought nothing of a penis. It wasn’t until the eighth afternoon, when I came across a fat grey woman who was in the kitchen feeding a thin grey cat, that I found out they’d gone on holiday.

  ‘Cornwall,’ she says, her cheeks wobbling like pink blancmange. ‘Three weeks, same every year. Didn’t they tell you?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘You’re in the old Henderson house, aren’t you?’

  ‘Henderson-Jones actually,’ I say. ‘We’re just Jones because of – ’ I try to remember if this is about men or racists or poor people – ‘something bad,’ I offer.

  The cat woman frowns, her forehead creasing easily like a thin sheet.

  ‘You’re related?’

  I nod. ‘Only no one told us she was dead for ages so we didn’t even go to the bloody funeral.’

  The woman’s cheeks deepen to a ruddy scarlet. ‘Right, well, shoo now, I’m locking up.’

  So I shoo, and come running home with my news.

  ‘They’re not dead!’ I announce. ‘They’re just in Cornwall.’

  ‘Good as, then,’ you sigh from the sagging velvet of the chaise longue. You spend a lot of time on this piece of furniture, claiming it for yourself, nesting on your back in the cushions with a novel and a jar of nuts.

  ‘Three weeks, she said, so that’s . . . thirteen days to go.’

  ‘Who’s she?’ You open one eye, look hard at me. ‘The cat’s mother?’

  ‘No, the cat feeder. She had a moustache.’

  Other mothers, older mothers, would have pointed out it’s rude to stare, rude to even see these things. But you just snort out a ‘Ha!’ and close your eye again.

  ‘Why are we just Jones?’ I ask then. ‘I couldn’t remember.’

  The smile that had lingered on your lips at the thought of the cat lady slips quickly and you stand and push past me into the kitchen. ‘Who’s asking?’

  ‘The cat feeder,’ I reply, following you. ‘And me.’

  ‘Because . . .’ you begin. Then change your mind. ‘God, Dido, will you just stop with the Spanish bloody Inquisition?’ You pull a pink cocktail cigarette from the packet, your seventh of the day so far, and light it leaning over the gas cooker. I hold my breath as I wait for your hair to catch fire. It doesn’t, and I am almost disappointed.

  ‘Go, go and read a book or something,’ you say, flapping your left hand.

  And the conversation is over.

  I stamp up to my room, lie down on my bed – a narrow, rigid thing that, unlike yours, and to my continual chagrin, holds no princess-and-pea potential, though at least, you tell me, no one died in it – and, huffing audibly, calculatedly, take a foxed and faded copy of The Velveteen Rabbit from my bedside table and turn to page one.

  I am a precocious reader, taught by Toni who labelled the squat with zeal and a Dymo printer for the benefit of both me and a brown-toothed Frenchman. Toilet, table, tangerine, we learned. Bathroom, bastard mice, bong. There, though, the books had dull covers and duller contents, and, worse, were borrowed from the library so that by the time I was half a chapter in, we had to return them to Mr Higgins with his sallow skin and sour-milk smell.

  Here, there are books galore and all of them mine: Woolf and Wilde, Waugh and Wharton, alphabetized and coded by size and colour. I have built myself a reading fort, watched over by a stuffed raven in a glass dome, a creature I found in the attic and you deigned to keep, despite your tangible disgust. You have your own treasures, anyway – a wardrobe of shot silk and black taffeta and furs that promises adventures but, when I climb inside, offers up only mothballs and worm-chewed wood that cracks underneath me, an accident that sends you into fits of laughter, hurting my pride, if not my bare behind. And so as you retreat, revel in costume changes, I strike out into my own make-believe, a world populated by rabbits that come alive, by boys that can fly, by mothers who make picnics, plait hair, and wait patiently for their husbands to come home.

  Later you climb into bed with me, whisper a smoky ‘Sorry’ into my neck, and then haul me up so we can dress as ‘ladies’, sticking feathers in our hair in the flyblown mirror; dabbing our necks, our wrists and, to my fascination, the hard bone between my nipples, with a deep-amber liquid from a label-faded bottle; painting our lips with a coral stick as thick as clay. The day after that, still in our finery, we go to town and buy scratchy school shirts and checked dresses and, to my delight, red T-bar sandals. And the day after that we get rocket lollies in Glover’s and eat them in the market square watching the fruit and veg men whirling closed paper bags of hard potatoes and fat Cape apples, copying the egg man calling out his price for a dozen. But really, this is white noise, set-dressing. Because what I am really doing all this time is counting down the days until Harry and Tom come home.

  I awake on the twenty-eighth of September – D-Day – to a hammering sound outside my window. On the other side of the curtain is our garden, then their garden. And in their garden is a man in shorts with a moustache, only a proper one this time, and he’s up in the tree doing something with wood.

  ‘Edie!’ I yell. ‘Trespass!’

  ‘Jesus, fuck,’ comes your voice from the other side of the landing. ‘What time is it?’ There’s a pause. Then, ‘Not even ten, yet.’

  ‘But there’s a man,’ I insist. ‘In the garden.’

  ‘What?’

  The threat – or maybe prospect – of a man, even a trespassing one, lures you out of bed, and you appear at my side naked but for a string of beads and a pair of black knickers. Then sigh heavily. ‘He’s not in our garden,’ you say. ‘He’s over the back.’

  ‘What if he’s a burglar?’ I suggest.

  ‘Hardly,’ you say. ‘He’s got loafers on.’

  We watch him for a minute, see him swap the hammer for a saw, see him flex it professionally, like the magician from the Palladium about to slice a lady in
half.

  ‘What the . . . He’d better not be bloody chopping down that tree.’ You bang viciously on the window.

  He glances over, sees us, and waves. Then cups one hand to his ear as if he has misheard.

  You open the window to point out his folly. ‘You’d better not be chopping that down, I said.’

  ‘I . . . er, Mrs Jones?’ He points at you, confused.

  ‘What?’ You look down. ‘Oh. Fine. Hang on.’

  You stalk back to your room, then return pulling on Maudsley Mick’s Grateful Dead T-shirt. ‘I said you’d better not be chopping that down,’ you yell. ‘And it’s not Mrs anything.’ You pause. ‘It’s Edie.’

  ‘Call me David,’ he yells back. ‘Hang on. Do you want to come down? Be easier to talk then.’

  ‘Fine,’ you hiss, and, leaving the window wide open to the world, you march downstairs in your cigarette-burned top and knickers with me in my apple-print nylon nightie hurrying behind.

  Call-Me-David is also called Mr Trevelyan, which gives me another fat fact to keep safe in my pocket: ‘Tom Trevelyan,’ I say to myself while you discuss the wood and the weather and when we got here and why. ‘Harriet Trevelyan.’

  ‘It’s her birthday party today,’ a sentence finishes, and my ears prick up. ‘That’s what this is for. Should have done it weeks ago but we were waiting for the Wendy house to arrive. This is the platform, see.’ He pats the wood that is already stretching across two branches as if it is a horse or a hound. ‘Then the house will sit on top. Won’t be done before the party, though.’

  ‘What a shame,’ you say, with no hint of irony, which, for you, is astounding.

  ‘Apparently so,’ he says, his voice tinged with regret, and inevitability. ‘It’ll be me shut in there later. In the doghouse.’

  You laugh loudly, affectedly, so that he smiles.

  ‘You should come,’ he says. ‘Both of you.’ He looks down at me, finally. ‘You must be Dido,’ he says.

  I nod eagerly, thrilled that they have told him my name, bestowing me with importance.

  ‘It’s fancy dress,’ he warns. ‘I said we shouldn’t bother, just let everyone wear swimming costumes, but it’s all planned, see, on the invites.’