The Seven Rules of Elvira Carr

by Frances Maynard

  “What’s a vegetarian, Daddy?” asked Roxanna, tracing the tattoo of her name on Josh’s arm. He’d had it done over Possessed.

  “Somebody who doesn’t enjoy a good steak, darling,” he growled, undoing a clip on the gas bottle.

  “Somebody not in their right mind, if you ask me.” Trevor pounced at the burgers with his spatula as if they were still alive.

  “I don’t enjoy a good steak.” Roxanna frowned. “I don’t like steak. I like fish cakes.”

  “Here we go,” said Trevor.

  “Do you like fish cakes, Ellie?” Roxanna asked, leaning close.

  “No,” I said. I stood stiffly, my arms hanging by my sides, my face hot. “I don’t eat meat or fish.”

  “Just grass,” put in Trevor. He stared at me. There was a mooing noise from Josh and they both laughed, although I didn’t think either had made a joke.

  Roxanna clung to Josh’s arm, “Will you take me, Daddy, please, please, please?”

  Josh scooped her high in the air, her blond ponytail brushing his face. “So, shall we go now, eh? Eh? Eh?”

  “Don’t be silly, Daddy. We’re at a party now. My party.”

  “Shall we find a nice cage to lock you up in?” He blew into her neck, making a Rude Noise, and she giggled and squealed. “With just a banana for your tea?”

  “Actually,” I corrected, “there aren’t any cages at Animal Arcadia, and the monkeys are only allowed one banana a week because…”

  “Hey, hey, shall we chain you up instead, you little monkey?”

  Roxanna shrieked with laughter. I wanted to put my fingers in my ears, but Sylvia had said it wasn’t polite.

  • • •

  “Isn’t this nice?” Sylvia beamed, as we all sat around the patio table. “One big happy family.” I sat between Katie and Shelbie, watching as Sylvia passed around bread and salads to see how much you were supposed to take. I wasn’t really part of Sylvia’s family or social group. I had a different surname and lived in a different house.

  “When does the salon open for business?” Katie heaped potato salad onto her plate.

  Shelbie pulled her hand out from under Josh’s. She tapped her nails together, long nails—not claws; I felt a flush of shame—with sunsets painted on them. “Got to get the paperwork sorted out first. Sign the mortgage agreement and…”

  “You can leave all that to me, Shell.” Josh tore off a hunk of bread.

  “Well, no.” Shelbie looked at him, a frown pulling her dark eyebrows together. “I’ve got to know what’s going on, babe. It’s me that will be running the business.”

  “Yeah”—Josh lowered his knife—“but I’ll be doing the finances. Taking the responsibility.”

  “Look how clever Josh was, saving all that cash on the sly for you and Roxanna,” said Sylvia. There was a pause. Sylvia passed around the lettuce, but nobody wanted any. I’d just clenched my toes to ask Katie’s husband, who was a quiet person, the Queen’s favorite conversational topic, Have you come far? when Trevor brought over the tray of meat.

  “I don’t want those black things. I want what Ellie’s having,” Roxanna said.

  “No,” said Shelbie. “Granny got you fish cakes specially.”

  “Ohh!” Roxanna drew out the sound into a moan.

  “I don’t want you eating any of that cranky stuff,” Josh said.

  “Now, Ellie”—Trevor pointed with his fish slice—“vegetarian sausage? Or, let me see, a little specialty of the house?” He winked at Josh. “Grassburger!” He held out a round object, heavily speckled with green.

  “Do you really eat grass?” asked Roxanna.

  “No, I don’t.” I shifted in my seat. “No, thank you.”

  “Well, now you do.” Josh grunted from beneath his hair.

  “Stop playing around Trev, and give the poor girl her burger,” Sylvia intervened. “It’s Welsh, Ellie. From Waitrose. The green bits are leeks. Don’t listen to him.”

  • • •

  I copied Katie’s clearing of the table and headed toward the kitchen with a half-empty bowl of tomatoes, but before I could get there, Shelbie stopped me.

  “It wasn’t right what you did to me,” she hissed, her black-rimmed eyes narrow.

  I looked at her quickly. In the fading light, I could see smudges of eyeliner under her eyes. Her breath smelled sour, like the champagne, my champagne, we’d toasted her salon with earlier. We were alone in the garden. My heart jumped around in my chest.

  “Sylvia might want us all to be one big happy family, but I don’t! If I hadn’t had Roxie and a career to think about, I’d have sorted you out—or gotten someone to do it for me!” Shelbie spat out the words, chin jutting. “Count yourself lucky Josh and I are making a second go of things.”

  I could see she was angry. Saying sorry helped people not to be. I knew this from school and from a note under Rule One (Being Polite and Respectful) even though Shelbie was neither. “I’m sorry,” I said, staring down at the tomatoes. It was hard to speak. And why was I lucky?

  “How dare you say I was a bad mother!”

  “I didn’t,” I mumbled. “I wanted to make Sylvia feel better.” I couldn’t take my gaze from the tomatoes. I tried to explain Rule Four (You learn by making Mistakes), but she jabbed her finger, with its sunset nail polish, in my face.

  “What do you know about anything in life? Tell me that.”

  I put down the bowl of tomatoes to obey her. “I know about orangutans and guinea pigs and David Attenborough and cookie packaging and Delia Smith…”

  “Yeah! The sad thing is you probably do know about all that rubbish. But that’s all you know. You don’t know anything about life. So don’t interfere with what you don’t understand. Do you hear?”

  I nodded vigorously. “I can hear you really well.” My fingers explored a tiny hole in my T-shirt. I tried to explain there were actually seven Rules, which were all helping me to be normal, but Shelbie interrupted.

  “Good,” she said. “Now, we’d better get back inside, or Sylvia will think I’ve been having a go at you.” She snatched up the bread basket.

  “But,” I said, “you have…”

  Shelbie had already marched ahead, staggering slightly in her high heels.

  23.

  We don’t always get what we deserve.

  —Mrs. Agnes Carr (Mother)

  “That’ll be over and done with now then,” Paul said when I told him about Shelbie. He swilled a gulp of Coca-Cola around in his mouth.

  “I hope so.” I chewed a toast crust, then changed the subject. “It’s my mother’s birthday next week. She’ll be seventy-three.”

  “That is old. My mum’s fifty-four. Your mum’s nearly as old as my grandparents!”

  I frowned, aligning my knife and fork neatly together on the plate. “They had me late in life. Mother said they’d given up hope, and then I came along and took them by surprise.” I didn’t think Mother liked surprises any more than I did, because of her being cross when Father had come back unexpectedly.

  “What are you going to get her?”

  I shrugged my shoulders, sighing. “All she does now is listen to her iPod and look out of the window.”

  “Cool,” said Paul, tilting the can upright to get the last drops. “What does she listen to?”

  “Operas,” I said.

  “Oh.” Paul stopped smiling. “All day?”

  “Yes. All the time except when they recharge it at night.”

  “You could get her a nighttime iPod then.” Paul put down the empty can and belched.

  I thought for a minute. “That’s a good idea.”

  “Yo…” Paul raised his hand to meet mine in a high-five gesture. “Sorted out! Hey, have you seen what they’ve done to the new wolf enclosure? The lookout post?”

  I put down my teacup wit
h a clatter. Mark was starting work here on Tuesdays. He was probably in Wolf Wilderness now. Would he come to the Adoption House? Wait for me after work? Did he still want to be my boyfriend? My stomach lurched, and some scrambled egg came up in my throat. He might have another girlfriend now. Him liking someone else made my stomach turn over again with a mixture of fear and what might be jealousy. Whenever I thought about Mark, I felt bad in one way or another.

  • • •

  I wrote out a script of what to say in the shop and bought Mother’s nighttime iPod on my own. I’d walked up and down outside the shop for a bit, first, before squeezing my hands tight and going in. I emailed Katie and asked her how to download Mother’s Operas. I bought Mother a card with a picture of a retriever that looked like Buster—the Caring Canine—on it, some strawberries, and a box of Extra Special Chocolate Biscuits from Asda. They didn’t sell Wessex Wafers.

  • • •

  Jean Christophe was in Mother’s room laying the Ravel table, while Bay View Lodge’s cook was in the kitchen making Onion Soup.

  “It’s a lovely idea,” Sylvia said to Mrs. Hulme. “You’re a proper fairy godmother.”

  I’d seen a proper Fairy Godmother once, in a Pantomime at Christmas. She’d had a wand and a sparkly dress, and although she’d been old, she hadn’t been the same shape as Mrs. Hulme.

  “Oh, I wish.” She made a waving movement with her hand, and they both laughed.

  Mrs. Hulme said they’d had a belly dancer in last week and, no, it hadn’t been for a gentleman resident, but for a frail lady who’d always wanted to go to Turkey.

  Sylvia said “Aah!” in the way people did when they heard other people’s bad news and asked Mrs. Hulme to put her name on Bay View Lodge’s waiting list now, even though she wasn’t old enough or sick enough, in spite of her high blood pressure, to go into a nursing home.

  We went into the lounge. “Happy Birthday, Agnes, love.” Sylvia held out a bunch of flowers from her garden—roses, and something with berries, and some feathery leaves. “Happy Birthday, Agnes, love.” Mother glanced at the blooms, then bent her head, eyes shut, and sniffed.

  “Lovely, aren’t they, Agnes? I picked them this morning. Now if it’s all right with Matron, Ooh-er,” Sylvia added incomprehensibly, “I’ll take them up to your room and put them in water.” She winked. “That way I get a peek at Jean Christophe and his table arrangement.”

  Mother pushed her card away. I put it with the others on the table. One was from Mr. Watson; one, with a picture of a cathedral on it, was from Jane in Dunstable. Courage, mon brave, it said inside. Another, three ginger kittens in a basket, was from the Staff and Residents at Bay View Lodge. Mother hated cats. She said they were ungrateful. Sylvia’s card had a picture of Venice on it. The last card, of a Scottish glen, said Best Wishes from Charlie and underneath, in brackets, Charles Hargreaves (Carr). Someone I’d never heard of, although our surnames were the same. A coincidence, since I didn’t have any cousins because of Mother and Father being only children.

  I unwrapped Mother’s present for her. She hadn’t always liked the presents I’d bought. She’d said an unusual cookie tin, in the shape of a steam engine, with Royal Scot cookies inside, was tacky, and when I’d bought her a pink bottle of Extra Special Fragrance from Asda because her Je Reviens was nearly finished, I’d found it, only a week later, not yet opened, in the recycling bin.

  I dangled the white headphones of the new iPod. Mother’s gaze wandered toward me, her eyes widening behind her slipping glasses. She touched the iPod’s smooth aluminum surface and then slowly reached into her cardigan pocket and felt for the other one.

  Sylvia popped back to say we were in for a real treat. I showed her the Scottish birthday card. “Do you know who Charles Carr is? Is he a distant relation of Father’s?”

  Sylvia put on her glasses and peered. She dropped the card, and then put it behind the others. “Not anyone I’ve ever met, pet.” She had to dash off because Mrs. Hulme came in to take Mother upstairs in the lift.

  I could hear classical music as I went upstairs. Jean Christophe, smiling, in white jacket and black bow tie, stood in Mother’s doorway. Behind him, two large black-and-white photos of musicians had replaced Mother’s shipwreck paintings. He bowed and ushered me inside.

  “How are you, Mademoiselle Elvira?” he asked.

  “I’m fine, thank you. How are you?” I replied.

  “I’m very well. Thank you for asking.”

  I felt a little rush of joy at the words being exactly the same as before.

  “Here we are, Agnes. Surprise!” Mrs. Hulme leaned over Mother. “Ravel has come to you!”

  “Happy birthday! How are you, Madame Carr?” Jean Christophe asked, pushing Mother’s wheelchair close to the table.

  Mother fixed him with her watery blue eyes, then turned her stare to the table’s white cloth and gleaming wineglasses. Sylvia’s flowers were in a silver vase in the middle. There were the shining cutlery and the starched serviettes (napkins, Mother would have said) that she used to comment on at the real Ravel. People had polished and ironed to get things right for her, and she’d had no hand in cooking, or instructing how to cook, the meal herself.

  It took her back to when she’d had servants to wait on her hand and foot. (Only what you deserve, darling, Father had whispered. We don’t always get what we deserve, though, do we, Gregory? she’d replied with a flash of her glasses. Although she’d had to wear thicker lenses as she’d gotten older, she’d still had good sight. This was because the scales have fallen from my eyes, she’d said. The absence of scales had enabled her to always notice what I was doing.)

  “Not that way,” she muttered now, sagging to one side of her wheelchair.

  Mrs. Hulme smiled from the doorway. “That’s a good sign. We haven’t heard you speak for weeks, Agnes.”

  A good sign of what? I didn’t want Mother to start shouting again. Or, I thought with a guilty stab, to recover enough to come back home and be in charge. Mrs. Hulme could just be making conversation. People spoke for the sake of it, I was finding, without there being much point in what they said. They wasted a lot of time.

  Jean Christophe handed Mother a piece of paper, neatly handwritten, but not quite like a proper menu, with the things we always ordered. “Might I recommend the cutlet, Madame? It is very tender-r-r.” Jean Christophe r’s were soft and purring, like a guinea pig’s contentment noise.

  Mother gazed at him, her mouth slack, but… “Ver-ry good, Madame.” He took the menu from her as if she’d spoken. In the real Ravel, Mother used to order for me because I’d get it wrong, and she’d said the French words.

  Jean Christophe had chosen a little white wine for us. Mother stared at the wine bottle, its green glass, and the white cloth behind it, reflecting in her spectacles. I reached out to scratch off the Tesco price label. I didn’t like pretending things, but this was for Mother’s birthday.

  The Onion Soup came with its little floating island of Cheese on Toast, although it was square, from a sliced loaf, rather than a baguette. Mother’s spoon trembled in her hand, but she ignored Jean Christophe’s offer of help. He returned with Kim, who stood very close to him. If it had been me, Sylvia would have said I was invading his personal space, another thing NeuroTypicals were sensitive about. Kim tried to move Mother’s soup bowl but she shouted, soup dribbling from her mouth. Kim told her to keep her hair on.

  “Oui, non de cette facon, Madame. You prefer-r to be independent, I think,” Jean Christophe said.

  Kim said that was a tactful way of putting it, in her sore-throat-sounding voice. She raised her eyebrows at Jean Christophe and winked at me as she left. I didn’t know why.

  Mother took twenty-three minutes to finish her soup. I timed her under the tablecloth. Jean Christophe sliced her cutlet—it looked more like a pork chop—and she ate it one morsel at a time. “Merci, Madame.” Jean C
hristophe smiled when he took her empty plate, as if she’d paid him a compliment. She picked up the tiny, dolls’ tea-set sized wineglass with shaking fingers, drained it in one gulp, and smacked her lips together. Then she sat, head drooping, glasses slipping to the end of her nose, the white headphones of her iPod just visible, as if she was examining the shiny surface of her dessert spoon. She only took fourteen minutes to eat her Little Fruit Tart, with its whole strawberry, but without the usual glistening slices of pineapple and kiwi fruit, because she ate it with her fingers.

  Afterward, Mother and I sat by her window, drinking coffee and eating Chocolate Truffles. Again I had to scratch off a price label.

  “All is clear-red away now.” Jean Christophe bowed. “Au revoir, Madame, au revoir, Mademoiselle. I hope to see you again next year.”

  “Good-bye,” I said then, clenching my toes. “It was marvelous.” That was what Mother had always said.

  24.

  Not seeing much of someone helps you stay together.

  —Karen Hutchinson, adoptions administrator, Animal Arcadia

  “I hardly see Matt in the summer,” Karen said, gulping down a coffee. “He’s always out on that bloody board. He is ever so brown, though,” she added, folding her arms behind her head, “and his hair’s got lovely blond streaks.”

  “Mmm.” I folded a donated towel.

  “In the winter, he spends hours practicing maneuvers on a skateboard. I still don’t see much of him. Perhaps that’s why we’re still together.” She laughed, and I stretched my mouth upward. It was almost a reflex action now. I’d overheard Mother say a similar thing about Father to Jane from Dunstable in one of their Sunday night conversations. It was only seeing so little of Father that kept their relationship civil. That and giving him the small spare bedroom. When I’d asked her why they no longer shared her room, she’d said that she needed more space, almost as if she was still growing, and I’d had to look closely at her to check. She’d also mentioned living her own life, but who else’s could she live?