by Ruth Thomas
P. Crieff
It took me a moment to understand the term ‘in circs’. I thought for a moment of circuses: of Mrs Crieff in a Big Top, wearing spandex tights and a fitted scarlet jacket and holding a lion tamer’s whip. And then I thought of Circle Time. Then I realised, of course, that Mrs Crieff was simply talking about circumstances – those difficult events, those situations it is sometimes hard even to write down in full, let alone to discuss. I read the sentence again, the way I used to read the Golden Rules on my way across the playground.
I have had a meeting with Mrs Ellis and will not, in circs, pursue events of last Thur.
I thought of Mrs Crieff with her fake lawn and her Desiderata and her Jack Russell. I thought of Mr Ellis with his series of books about the universe. Then I tore the comp. slip up in half, and then into quarters, then in eighths, then sixteenths, and then I put the bits of paper in the bin.
*
The weather continued sunny that July, as the weathermen said, when they appeared after the News at Ten bulletins with their new, improved clouds and their isobars and their warm fronts. They never had to pick the clouds up off the studio floor any more – they only had to move them with the click of a button – and I missed them a little, those old clouds, just as I missed our Today the weather is sign in the Portakabin. The sun shone, anyway, without help from the weathermen or me or Mrs Baxter or maybe even from God, and the swifts continued to flit through the warm air that rose up the slopes towards Pumzika. I spent a lot of July and August sitting in the back garden, the rabbit hopping around near me in the grass. The lawn was green and warm and scented, and the sky was blue and white. Beryl had quite a stretch of grass to run across, and a view of the Pentland Hills. It was a good view for a rabbit – a better view, anyway, than the inside of Magic Bob’s top hat. I sat with a cup of tea at my elbow and a sketch book on my lap, and I drew some pictures of the hills – pencil sketches, mainly, and others with pastel and charcoal. And I felt like someone recuperating: like some pallid but rallying child who has been sent to a sanatorium in the Alps after a long illness. My hair began to fade after a while, from pink back to mousey brown, but the rest of my life started to become more colourful. For a start, I began seeing the fresh-fish man from Newcastle. Although he was a boy, really, not a man. He was only a year older than me. But he already knew that selling fish wasn’t what he wanted to do with his life. Things happened after I met him, anyway. Things changed; and all those people I’d known at St Luke’s – even the people I’d liked, like Mrs Baxter and Mrs Regan and the lollipop man – were people from my past already; were people I would not be seeing again. Even Mrs Ellis, my Miss Gazall, was someone who would alter now; who would come to her own conclusions and continue the way she thought best. Probably she would move on. Everybody had to, eventually.
‘I’ll only be keeping the rabbit for a few weeks,’ I’d lied to my parents at first – although Beryl ended up staying at Pumzika a lot longer, of course; a lot longer than I hung around. Even so, she was still, in some childish way, my rabbit. My pet. She was the last vestige of something, I think; a kind of ghost, a spectre from some earlier life. The strange thing is, she made the house feel homely. Like home, just as I was about to leave it. And the last thing I did, an hour or so before I packed up my things and got in a taxi and waved goodbye to my father and to my mother (Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye!), was paint her picture.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks –
to Sarah Hosking and the Hosking Houses Trust for a 2010 residency in Clifford Chambers; to Janice Galloway for her timely encouragement and to my editor Hannah Griffiths and project editor Kate Murray-Browne for their sensitivity and patience. I should also like to thank Deborah Rogers for her enthusiasm, Jennie Renton and Lucy Scriven for their advice, and my parents and sister, who have always supported me.
The Royal Literary Fund have been extremely kind providers of a writing fellowship and I am very grateful to them, as I am to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and its students for giving me a job and music to listen to; and my friends for keeping me happy.
Finally, I could never have written this book (or taken so long over it!) without the patient understanding of my family. Thanks again.
About the Author
Ruth Thomas is the author of two novels and three collections of short stories. Her first collection was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys and the Saltire Society First Book Awards, and her second received a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Super Girl, her first collection with Faber, was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and her novel Things to Make and Mend received a Good Housekeeping Book Award. She is currently a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and lives in Edinburgh with her husband and children.
By the Same Author
Things To Make and Mend
Super Girl
Sea Monster Tattoo
The Dance Settee
First published in 2013
by Faber and Faber Ltd
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London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2013
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© Ruth Thomas, 2013
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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ISBN 978–0–571–29961–4