With a guilty backwards glance, I crossed the concrete patio, where I was allowed to play, and planted my feet in the lawn, where I was not. Walking in the dirt was forbidden; it would make my pretty clothes messy, and furthermore it impaired the aeration of the earth, which was always dug over but never quite planted. It was into the mud that I stamped with my next step.
My mother’s boot crunched deliciously into the raw ground. I bent forwards to gaze at the colours, the rubber-black wellington against the loam-black soil, then stuck my other foot in as well. Evidence of my crime would be as plain as day when my mother came out later; I lifted one boot and studied the perfect zigzag print I had left, neat and telling as a signed confession.
At that moment I did not care. My mother had said something once when the rent man was due. ‘For a sheep as a lamb,’ she had said, and I barely understood. ‘Might as well hang.’ I stalked through the crackling mud like a scarecrow in a duffel coat, right across as far as the cherry tree and the end fence, blown half down by last summer’s windstorm.
It was standing there that I got the most peculiar feeling. And it was there, by the cherry tree’s listing base, that I caught a glimpse of metal in the earth. I hunkered down to see, as the half-tame robin that lived in the garden fluttered down from the side hedge. With chilly fingers, I picked at the ground until I had uncovered a small round doorknob.
I knelt in the cold, biting at my lip. With forensic care, I picked up a twig and begin to scrape at it the edges of it until it lay on its own in a flat bed of loam. There was a large dent in the side, a whole edge was squashed in. Somehow I did not care to actually touch it with my bare hands. I glanced up to see a pair of collared doves land heavily on the lawn. Gradually, a small noise began to nag at my consciousness: a tiny feather-shuffling; the shushing of folded wings. I became aware of how cold I was.
When I lifted my head, the hedge, the tree and fence, the ground, everywhere was heavy with silent, watching birds, glaring like an impromptu law court, gazing with their heads cocked sideways. I moved my crouching body slightly and their heads all followed the movement sternly. My legs were cramping. I glanced back down the garden. All the birds looked too. I heard the front gate close. My grandmother had come home.
She came through the gloom and made as if to march in at the back door, but stopped suddenly in her tracks, scowling at the songbird-littered garden. I cringed behind the cherry tree to hide. All the birds jumped, blinking oil-black eyes, and a low twittering began on the lawn, a mutter of threatened betrayal. My grandmother stood, with her arms folded and a thin look in her eyes. A thousand sharp faces fazed up at me, refusing to take flight. Defeated, I stood up, rubbing at the ache in the backs of my legs.
My grandmother nodded to me, held out her hand. Sulky, caught in misbehaviour, I scrubbed earth back over the doorknob, clapped some of the dirt from my palms, and hurried over to the concrete patio to receive my telling off. As I approached the back door, all the birds flew away at once, filling the air with a sound like applause.
32
Child
THE SUN IS up in the space above the pit, cold and bright as a looking glass. The air holes are perfect points of whiteness, and beyond them is the anxious chitter of the songbirds. The wrong child is wrapped around herself, honest and patient as a potato. The frost never penetrates the webbing of her root-walled nest, for the cherry tree is her guardian; it will not allow it. Her fingers twitch a little as she sleeps. She is dreaming, and the worms and small creeping things dare not wake her.
The garden birds are afraid. The morning has come, and the grandmother, who is made out of garden herself, is a dictator of songbirds, and a harsh one. They fidget their shoulders, stick out their wings and flap them; they glance diagonally at one another, and glance quickly away again. They wonder which of them it should be.
The firecrest is the smallest of them all, with a flash of gold across its head that moves the other birds to jealousy. Envy is as good a motivation as any. The starlings shuffle their feathers, exchange meaningful looks. The collared doves catch the gesture, and begin to edge away.
The firecrest blinks in horror. The magpie has become shifty. Yes, the grandmother is a hard ruler. The birds have become their own secret police, willing to betray each other in order to save themselves; save their own nestlings; save their own particular species. The grandmother pits wren against crow, robin against mistle thrush. In this way she rules over them; the songbirds must decide which among their number must sacrifice their wings, for if they do not then the grandmother will choose herself, and she will pick more than one. A bird without wings is a shameful thing, even in death, for the soul may not fly away. The firecrest is looking at its claws, beginning to jitter.
But then there is the noise of human feet, and the garden birds all leap heavenwards, except the poor firecrest. But it is not the grandmother after all; it is Marie, sad as can be with a coat buttoned over her nightdress. The hem of it peeps white underneath. The firecrest zigzags to the cherry tree with its tiny breast pounding.
And suddenly, the wrong child’s dream becomes a dream of what she is now. She dreams of herself, hibernating beneath the ground, beneath the door that is her roof, beneath the affairs of other creatures. She dreams that her dress is soft with moss and that her fingernails are shining and grey, like the claws of moles. She dreams of her own black hair, glossy as oil and thick as a blanket, and of her own sleeping face, which is beautiful. Then everything settles; the wrong child dreams that she awakes. Her eyes open, very gently.
Above the wrong child’s head, her twin, the one who has a name, is squatting on the soil beside the door handle on the roof. If she had made just one more step forwards, she might have stood right on top, felt the hollow tread of the empty space beneath her boot. The wrong child feels her there; her eyes glisten and she smiles.
But the garden birds are watching too, like spies. They cannot believe their luck, for if they tell the grandmother interesting things, then she sometimes overlooks their debts. The firecrest is overjoyed at a chance to snitch, and flurries away like a feather in a storm, off to tell tales.
And before the wrong child can unbend her limbs to sit, the grandmother is in the garden. The cherry tree does its best to conceal Marie, this innocent intruder that has made its childling smile. It is no good; her presence is as plain as day with all those treacherous beaks pointing out her hiding place. The grandmother glowers, squints against the daylight; then she marches forward.
In a trice, the moment has gone. The wrong child’s twin is gone again; the grandmother is gone with her, along with a duck, which she poached from the park with her own two hands. The birds all breathe. The cherry tree sighs, and so does the wrong child in her burrow. She closes her eyes again, prepares herself for sleeping. Her dreams follow Marie into the house. They peep around the edges of doors, and creep up and down the staircase.
33
Rent Man
THE RENT MAN broke into a sweat as he edged his car through the front gate, breathing in and pulling his belly as if it might help him squeeze between the fence posts. And though he held his breath and gritted his jaws, still he grazed the wing against the bramble bushes on the swing into the driveway. He rolled his eyes at the rear-view mirror and he swore. Tiny jewels of perspiration stood among the stubbles on his neck as the rent man blotted his forehead on his sleeve.
After he had yanked the handbrake up tight, the rent man inspected his teeth, checking for fragments of breakfast. They were square and slightly translucent, like tea stained porcelain. Then, he lifted up the collar of his shirt and dug his nose inside it, sniffing carefully.
He did not detect any odour, so the rent man gave himself a fishy smile and opened the car door, heaving his body from the seat and slamming the door. The rent man rather liked the slam of his car door. It was a satisfying noise, a solid chunky noise. A masculine noise. He smiled, adjusted
his trousers and cleared his throat.
The rent man was here for his due. He paused, stooped to tie his shoelaces. The rent man’s shoes were plastic and extremely shiny. Bending made him feel tied in half by his waistband; he was puffing a little as he straightened up. She had not yet brought in the milk. He stooped again, picked up the bottles, wrapped his hands around their necks. He would take them to her. It would be chivalrous. She would look at him, and would be forced to smile.
The rent man’s shoes slid up the path until they took him to the front door. The gloss was blistering off it in fragments, and the fingerplate was tarnish black. There was a doorbell too, and the rent man knew full well that it worked. He hung his fingers above it for a few moments, considering, and then he decided not to push it. He tried the handle instead, but it was locked. The rent man took this sad news well; for another second, he lingered on the doorbell, but discovered that he could make out the sound of voices from around the back.
The rent man did not generally care to knock. He preferred instead to try at latches, peep and peer, to see what he could see. He nodded once at the door, as one would at an insolent waiter, and thrust his hands into his pockets. On his way round, the rent man took in the hanging guttering and the cracks in window glass; the rot and damp and the stinging nettles on the ground. He made a mental note; proper upkeep was a condition of the tenancy. Things has slid in that department since her old man had done his runner. Not that the rent man had been sad to see him go. No indeed.
He was right; there were certainly voices coming from the back patio, in fact it sounded as though people were arguing. He paused to eavesdrop but found that he could not distinguish the words. It was some other language, some foreign guttural gibberish. The rent man’s morning lit up. Perhaps she was subletting! Perhaps she was harbouring immigrants! The rent man removed his hands from his pockets, smoothed down his eyebrows, prepared a charming grin, and stepped around the corner.
There were no immigrants in the back garden, however. There was just the grandmother, who had begun to laugh, and a poor magpie that was shuddering as though he were perched in the eye of a snowstorm. They both turned to stare, as the rent man unwrapped his smile and showed it to them. There were no other people there but her. The mad old crone must have been talking to herself. Her eyes met the rent man’s; they hardened. At the same moment the mother came out of the back door.
She was dressed oddly, in a cardigan with some of the buttons replaced by safety pins, and a tartan kilt that did not go with it at all. Her hair was held back with plastic combs, and it was escaping here and there in stiff, wiry sprigs, and she was wringing her fingers hard enough to do herself an injury. Nonetheless, the flash of skin exposed at bosom and leg was womanly enough.
She caught his eye and almost screamed. Then, she quivered forwards like a gerbil, trilling out Hellos. The rent man stepped towards her. If he had owned a hat, he would have raised it at this point. But he dared not wear a hat, for he feared that the lack of circulation might accelerate his bald patch.
But the grandmother stalked forwards too, gripped the rent man’s wrist and shook it with a ‘How do you do?’ Then, she turned behind to the mother. ‘Run and fetch the envelope, dear, don’t stand around catching flies.’ The mother gulped, with an expression that looked a little like gratitude. The rent man beamed and retrieved his wrist, cursing his luck.
Since the grandmother had turned up, she always had the money come rent day. The rent man folded his arms and groped in his brain for small talk; but the grandmother had turned her back already. She was doing something with the rosebushes. The rent man glowered at her rod-stiff back. House calls had been rather more interesting before that wrinkled nag moved in and began to interfere.
After her old man had set off for pastures new, the mother had experienced a period of relative insolvency. There are other ways to pay one’s rent than in note and coin. The rent man was by nature a generous kind of chap, and had been disposed to suggest a few of these, rather than see her thrown on the street.
Ah, for the old days. The rent man raised himself up on the balls of his feet, and then lowered himself again. His shoe was biting a raw spot on his poor tender foot, where the skin was vulnerable and never exposed to the sun. His mind began to wander; he wondered if he could get away with a sleep in his car this afternoon. After a time it dawned on him that one of the windows had been painted bright pink. The rent man had been about to comment upon this when the mother returned, with an envelope runched in her fist. The rent man bowed very gallantly, took it from the mother’s sweating hand, adjusted his trousers once more, and left.
34
Marie
ON APRIL NIGHTS, the garden could not make up its mind whether it was winter or springtime. Leaf buds hung in the cherry tree and bushes, and the honeysuckle on the back fence was pushing out hopeful little spirals of growth.
At night these brave gestures seemed like some regretful tableau of a lost springtime, long gone. At night the garden was like the two christening gowns that I found hanging in my mother’s wardrobe.
They were identical, beautiful; they hissed some secret history that smelled of mothballs and lavender. Once guessed at, that knowledge would surely vanish, like those gowns did when I found them. Perhaps, as my mother had told me, perhaps I had only made them up. I must have been a fanciful child.
And yet, here I was in the garden again, a trespasser in that gentle sadness. Here I was again. I found myself out here, more and more, standing on the concrete patio or the doorstep, with my fingers in my mouth, as though I had walked there sleeping and then woken up.
I discovered myself shivering at the front door; I turned to go back, but the Yale had clicked. I would have to go right round to the back door. We never locked the back because the door was so sticky. The key would not turn properly. I had nothing upon my feet but socks.
I crept along out house’s itchy hide and peered into the parlour. Most of the view was obscured by the heavy red curtains, thick as liver; here and there were constellations of prick marks that let the light through. Thomas made these; sometimes he clambered right up the fabric, goaded to snapping by those flirtatious mice. Once, he brought the whole lot down, pole and hooks and all. My grandmother had been furious, had banished him into the garden until my mother smuggled him back in, swathed in a cunning disguise of tea towels.
A single slice of light betrayed the scene within. It was not much to speak of; just my mother, sweating before an overzealous fire, bundled in housecoat and cardigan. She was knitting a dishcloth. A fat moth threw itself tirelessly against the lampshade that hung from the ceiling.
I could almost hear it, the catastrophic smack of wings against the wire and cardboard, impact after impact. There was no saving the moths. What they craved more than anything was the glory of light, the blindness and death of it. My mother paid it no mind, huddled inside her knitting like a spider in a cobweb. She looked tired.
I worried about my mother. I would try and look after her, in my way; I would leave her cups of tea in strategic places, so she would find them and think she had poured them herself. I would make cheese sandwiches that she would happen across; I hoped that if she found a ready-made supper, she would not take the trouble to cook. It often worked, except sometimes when she would use them to make cheese sandwich soup instead.
My mother was a haunted thing; she started and jumped at empty corners, fidgeted and muttered and worried. Sometimes she would gaze at me in a panic, or else make as if to tell me something important. Sometimes, she would even sneak out a word or two, then catch herself and stop her mouth up with her fist, and run to lock herself in the loo. I tried to love her; I did my best.
She began to do things in twos; she would present me with two bowls of cornflakes, one for each hand, or kiss my forehead and then aim another beside my head, kissing into empty air. Then, she would have to steady herself to avoid fall
ing right over.
A stealthy noise behind me made me start. I told myself that it was only Thomas, nonetheless, I inched a little closer to the bright window. For a second I saw myself as another person would: thin and small as a little child, with two slender pigtails and a crocheted cardigan. I pulled its brown hood over my head, and dug my hands inside the sleeves. There were bats in the garden at dusk; sometimes they got tangled in your hair. They did not mean to.
My mother began to wag her head as though she had soap in her eyes and they were stinging. Then she plugged both her ears with her fingers, and began to sing, a Lalala song, an I’m not listening and I can’t hear you song. And in front of my mother I could almost see a shape, vague as Vaseline, dissolving into air. It was a large animal, lying on its side. It might even have been a person. It vanished.
After a minute she opened her eyes, and nodded at the vacant space as though she had won an argument. ‘Told you so,’ said my mother with a smirk, and she shoved her needles through her knitting with a violence that hurt me, with an air that disintegrated slowly from triumph into misery.
She leaned over to the clutch of carrier bags that lived at the base of her armchair and pulled out a dishcloth, pristine grey, never used, and began to unravel it so she could use the string for knitting. My mother unwound it from cloth to nothing again, winding the kinked thread around the waist of her hand.
I sighed, and began to make my way along the wall, feeling the nettles bite at my calves and the gravel beneath my feet. I could feel the growing blackness of my socks, the dirt and wetness spreading through them. I could not bear to hurry though, for any step but the gentlest hurt my feet. And it was dark at the side of the house, with no windows and a fraying moon above my head. I felt like a traveller making a journey alone, and with no way to tell me when I arrived, or even when I was close.
The Knife Drawer Page 13