When we get back to the flat, I feel as light as a feather in an anti-gravity chamber, because as we drove away from the ocean Cat said she’d like to throw us a party. She said she wanted to invite us all around to her flat, since we invited her to ours. There would be lasagne again and she was very good at making home-made chips from sweet potatoes. And her Knickerbocker Glories were famous.
“With who?” I asked.
“With myself,” replied Cat, laughing.
And that was good enough for me.
Truth is, I don’t want the evening to end, so I ask Cat to come into our flat and say hello to Dad because he’s always happy to see her. In fact, I say she has to tell Dad about the party invite herself. I’m still chatting to Cat when I turn the key in our front door, and then I hurry down the hallway, calling that Cat is with me.
When I reach the living room, I stop. Pearl is sitting on the sofa with Dad, and Billy is between them. Dad beckons me on and says it’s great to hear I’ve enjoyed myself. He thanks Cat for letting me come with her on the job.
“My pleasure,” says Cat, giving me a tiny punch to the arm. “You were mighty, Becket.”
There is an awkward moment when Pearl shifts on the sofa and says nothing. She smoothes down her frilly skirt and tucks her feet underneath.
As Cat turns to leave, I remind her that she was going to ask Dad something. “Oh yes,” says Cat, a nervous smile dancing around on her lips. “I’m throwing a tiny party.” A strand of hair falls over her eyes and she pushes it back behind her ear. She’s wearing earrings shaped like tiny scissors. “It was kind of you to invite me to yours and I thought I’d say thank you. It’ll be nothing fancy, mind.”
Dad looks at Pearl for approval but her face stays totally straight, not a smile, a frown, nothing. “Er…I’m not sure,” replies Dad, turning back to Cat. “Could I let you know?” The temperature in the flat has dropped a few degrees and I pull my coat closer to my body and shiver. Maybe Dad hasn’t put the radiators on.
Billy, sensing something is wrong, pipes up, “Can Pearl come to your party?”
“Thank you, Billy,” replies Pearl and she makes a huge fuss of him. It’s not how she treated him at the party though. Now she’s all over him like a bluebottle on poop. “I never seem to get invites to all these parties you two throw for each other,” says Pearl. “Perhaps I’m not as popular as I thought I was.”
Cat, her cheeks two red apples, says of course Pearl can come, and she’d better get back to her flat and sort out her hairdressing kit because all the combs and scissors need cleaning. “Thank you again, Becket,” Cat says, pushing a crumpled five-pound note into my palm. “We must do it again sometime.”
“It’s a wonder she’s a hairdresser,” mutters Pearl as Cat walks into the hallway with Dad. “Her hair is atrocious – she looks like she’s been in a wind tunnel.”
I think of our evening together. Cat’s hair didn’t matter because she was too busy doing everyone else’s, and when she wound down the car window so I could see the ocean, she wasn’t bothered about how it might mess up her hair.
When Dad returns I don’t feel as confident about Pearl being here as I thought I would when I sent that text. This was supposed to be a lovely surprise but it feels like Pearl’s angry, only she doesn’t say so. Instead she plays with a strand of beads that look like boiled sweets around her neck, saying, “Well, isn’t this lovely? Since we’re all getting along so well, perhaps you’d like to come to my exhibition of nudes, Stephen?”
“Oh,” says Dad. “’Kay. I guess I could come and see it.”
Pearl dips her head and rests it on Dad’s shoulder and tells him it’s going to be a lot of fun. She follows this with a tiny kiss on the cheek, like a chicken pecking corn. Dad brightens and he says maybe it would be good and he’s never been to a proper art exhibition before.
“You were too busy with fish,” says Pearl. “But since you texted me and begged me to come back, I’m prepared to give it a whirl if you are.” Dad looks confused, his eyebrows rising up his forehead like two caterpillars in a glass lift. “So, from tomorrow we can start again. Put the past behind us. Never mention Cat or Camille again.”
Dad pauses, looks at Billy, who nods. He looks at me and I don’t know whether I’m nodding or shaking my head. After a moment Dad agrees with Pearl, before adding that since it is dinner time, maybe we could get a pizza in. He orders ham and pineapple and when it arrives we all eat it sitting in front of the TV like we used to.
Pearl dabs the side of her mouth with a paper napkin. There is a smear of red lipstick on white. “You know you can’t do without me, Stephen. Not really. Look at you, living here in this horrible grimy flat with horrible fake flowers.” The lilies are not that horrible and I want to say so, but I don’t. All of a sudden I feel a wave of sadness that maybe I won’t want to talk about Mum to Pearl like I’ve just done with Cat. “And you’ve got that awful woman with the screechy voice from the flat next door.”
“Cat.” I do correct Pearl this time, chewing on the crust of my pizza. “And she’s not awful.” I couldn’t ignore her saying that, not after the evening I’ve had with Cat. Not when Cat listened to me talk about Mum.
“Like I said,” says Pearl without catching my eye, “the awful woman with the screechy voice from the flat next door. You’ll need to get away from her as soon as possible.” She glares at Dad, daring him to disagree with her. He doesn’t, even though he knows Cat doesn’t have a screechy voice. She is softly spoken and I don’t think I’ve ever heard her say anything horrible. I think of how Cat was today, cutting everyone’s hair and telling jokes, making them laugh. And I think about how she was with me, making me feel better. Pearl continues, “I could paint my nudes anywhere. Perhaps we could go to the city and soak up the art scene there and you could get a desk job instead of that awful fish delivery job. Yes, Sugar Plum?” She pouts as prettily as she can.
A desk job isn’t Dad. He loves fish. He can recite an A-Z of fish from Adriatic salmon to Zambezi parrotfish.
Pearl smiles and grabs the last piece of pizza from the box, just as Billy reaches for it. I wait for her to offer it to him, but instead she takes a huge bite right in front of him and then throws the rest of it back down in the box, saying she’s full and didn’t want it anyway. Next, she eases her body away from Billy and rises from the sofa. “So, four o’clock tomorrow at Saint Bartholomew’s church hall. I’m usually at Tower Point on Mondays but not tomorrow.”
“Okay,” says Dad softly. “We can talk things through afterwards. I think we need to talk about all this properly. Things need to change.”
Pearl doesn’t respond. Instead her green eyes flicker like the inside of an emerald. If it was possible to bore through someone with your eyes, Pearl would have just drilled a hole through Dad, the wall behind, the street, the town, the world.
“I’ll show you,” says Pearl finally, “that you’re no good without me.” She smiles dreamily. “There would be many men who would feel privileged to go out with me.” It’s on the tip of my tongue to say Naked Man, for starters. “And think of Billy. He needs a mother and I suppose I’m the only person left to fill that position.” Pearl tuts and shakes her head. “If only the birth hadn’t killed his own mother things would have been so very different.”
Dad’s eyes explode like millions of tiny fireworks.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” says Pearl quickly. “I didn’t mean it like that. Ignore me. I’m sorry, Billy, it slipped out. I’m silly. Please forgive me. You weren’t involved in your mother’s death at all. I was just thinking aloud.”
On the outside Billy’s smile appears to be flaring brightly, but inside I can see it flicker and begin to die.
“Sorry,” repeats Pearl, her eyes not meeting mine – which is just as well because my eyes are very angry with her. The rest of me is too.
“I’ll get Billy and Becket to stay with Cat in the salon after school tomorrow,” Dad sighs. “That way I can come.”
“I don’t t
hink we should keep worrying about your neighbour.” Pearl looks up again and gives Dad a smile. Dad doesn’t smile back. “And anyway, Becket doesn’t need a babysitter. I think he’s grown up enough to watch Billy for a couple of hours after school. Aren’t you, love?”
I nod quickly, wishing Pearl would just go away now. As if she can read my mind, Pearl stands up and waits until Dad finds her pink coat and helps her put it on. “Four. Don’t be late.” Then she leads Dad into the hallway.
Once their footsteps fade, Billy, legs banging against the sofa, looks at the half-chewed piece of pizza. “It wasn’t my fault that Mummy died, was it, Becket?” he says quietly. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault, right?” Billy stares at me, the water level in his eyes rising. “I didn’t kill Mummy, I didn’t. No one will put me in prison for it, will they?”
“Ignore Pearl,” I hiss, reaching out to him. I give Billy a hug and when I pull away I say, “You heard her. She said she was sorry and she didn’t mean it that way. I think she just got things confused. You know Mum had eclampsia and that it had nothing to do with you.”
“But if I hadn’t been in her tummy then she’d be okay.”
“It’s not like that,” I tell him.
“You’re telling fibs,” Billy cries. “I can see it in your eyeballs.”
The awful thing is…Mum would be alive if she hadn’t been having a baby, because eclampsia only happens when you’re pregnant. I could kick myself for even letting Billy ask me the question. Billy flicks the remote control and stares at a cartoon on the TV. I want to say: look at me. But he doesn’t. Every so often he laughs, clear and sparkly like a little silver bell, but it doesn’t fool me.
From the hallway I can hear Pearl repeatedly telling Dad that she doesn’t like Cat and why did he bother texting to tell her to come back if he’s still interested in someone else. Dad says he didn’t text her at all and hasn’t a clue what she’s talking about. That’s when I jump up like a flea attempting the high jump. I skitter across the living room and fling open the hallway door, thinking I’ll pretend I wanted to say goodbye. Any excuse to stop the pair of them discussing the text that I sent from Dad’s phone. But when the door swings open, I see something.
Something I don’t think I should have seen.
Something that makes my stomach flip like a pancake.
Something that makes me question everything.
My knees buckle a bit. Pearl notices me from the corner of her eye and says firmly, “Be there,” before opening the front door. As she’s leaving, she gives Dad a peck on the cheek. The lipstick mark is shaped like a broken heart.
“It wasn’t what it looked like,” says Dad quickly after he shuts the door.
“What did it look like?”
“I don’t know, but whatever it looked like it wasn’t that.” Dad leans against the wall in the hallway, his bald head crowned by the roses on the wallpaper.
I don’t say anything else, I just go into the bathroom, glad it’s all over. I vow I’ll never go out with someone who makes me raise my voice, or get cross. I lock the toilet door and stand for the longest time staring in the mirror. Is this what it looks like to be mixed up, confused, sad, scared? Is this what it’s like to start growing up? If it is, I want to go back and be little again. If love is about hurting each other, I don’t want any part of it. I wish I’d never sent that stupid text now. I wish I didn’t know that grown-ups argue and say and do things they don’t mean. I wish the world wasn’t so confusing. I wish I’d never been born. I swallow, feeling guilty for thinking that. I tell myself over and over that I’m glad I was born and I’m glad Billy was too.
At bedtime I’m walking towards our room and I can hear Billy talking to someone. I peep in through the open door and then duck back again and rest my head against the wall, listening.
“I think my mummy would be alive if it wasn’t for me, Brian,” says Billy.
“Why do you say that, Billy?” says Billy, making his voice deep and clearly pretending he’s a snail. Although if it was me pretending to be a snail, I think I’d talk a lot slower than Billy is.
“Pearl said if only my birth hadn’t killed Mummy things would be different, Brian. Pearl wouldn’t say so if it wasn’t true,” replies Billy in his own voice again. “I think that’s why Pearl and Daddy argue. They are very cross and Daddy is very cross because Pearl says Mummy died because of me. But I was very little and I don’t remember it. I must be very bad, Brian.”
“Hmm… I don’t think you are. Could Pearl be wrong?” Billy replies in his Brian tone.
“Awww. I don’t know, Brian. She’s a grown-up and they know everything.”
“We snails know a lot too, Billy.” Billy’s voice changes again.
“I know, Brian.” I hear a pause and I want to punch through the wall like a superhero and save Billy but I can’t. “But I want a mummy and it’s very hard when it’s me who keeps losing them. Maybe if I wasn’t around, Becket could have a mummy for himself.”
On Monday, Dad is up and down from the breakfast table like his bum is doing a Mexican wave. He says he won’t be at the exhibition long. He makes tea, he sits down and then he gets up and walks over to the window. He stares at the grey clouds and says it’s freezing out there. He comes back and sits down. We’re to go to Cat straight after school and then he’ll be back and pick us up from Crops and Bobbers. Dad sips his tea and adds more milk. He says everything will change when he gets back. It will be the beginning of a whole new chapter.
I bring a spoonful of chocolate cereal to my lips. I’m still feeling uneasy about what I saw in the hallway. Last night I tried to figure it all out but it hurt my head so much that I fell into an uneasy dreamless sleep, until Billy woke me at five forty-three. Only this time he didn’t come into my bed. I heard him get up and sit in Mum’s armchair, and I heard him mumbling something, but then I fell back asleep so I have no idea what it was.
This morning Billy doesn’t speak to either Dad or me at all. He’s got tiny little purple half-moons under his eyes and when Dad asks if he’s tired Billy just shrugs and says he slept all the way through the night.
On the way to school I challenge Billy. “What’s wrong?” I ask. “Is it what Pearl said? You know she’s not right. It was a stupid thing to say.”
“Nothing is wrong,” Billy replies and for the first time ever on our walk to school he doesn’t bend down and poke through the mud in someone’s garden. He doesn’t tell me that he’s seen a ladybird or a millipede, or a spider with six legs (because he accidentally stood on two of them). When we reach the playground, Billy says goodbye. I don’t answer because the bell rings just then and I have to join my line. Out of the corner of my eye I see Billy and his class trot away to their classroom like tiny ducklings wearing backpacks. He turns back and waves at me so I wave in return. Then Billy is gone.
At lunchtime it is obvious Dad had a lot on his mind this morning because he has forgotten to put fish paste in my sandwiches. All I’ve got is plain white bread.
“Nice simple sandwiches you’ve got there,” scoffs Nevaeh, from the table next door. I lean over and say I’m sorry about what I said about butterflies. Nevaeh says she knew I would be.
“How?”
“Because you’re still wearing the bracelet.” She points at my wrist. “If you really thought it was stupid then you’d have taken it off, but you haven’t. I was just waiting until you said sorry and now you have.”
Knuckles butts in and says the bracelet worked for him. He won the garden competition and got to plant an apple tree for his dad. I shrug and say it still hasn’t done anything for me and maybe nothing is ever going to happen.
Nevaeh leans across and passes me a cheesy biscuit and says she’s sure it will because she can feel it in her bones. I want to say that I hope she can’t feel anything in her bones because I’ve read about bones in my medical manual and if they start hurting it’s not a great sign, but now we’re back to being friends I just take the biscuit instead.
The one person I’m definitely not friends with though walks past and shoots me a smug smile. I can’t figure out why. When I ask Nevaeh what Mimi’s problem is, Nevaeh shakes her head. “Perfection is her problem.” You could knock me down with an ostrich feather. How is being perfect a problem? “Okay, you’re looking at me as if I’m stupid,” says Nevaeh, “but listen. Mimi might live in a perfect house, with perfect parents, and her mum might look like a model, but they expect her to be perfect at everything. Didn’t you see how annoyed she was at not doing well in her science test? She was fuming at you for getting everything right.”
“I can’t help being good at science,” I bluster.
“And you won the garden competition.”
“I can’t help being good at…” I scratch my head.
Nevaeh explains that Mimi is probably a bit envious because she was used to getting the gold stars for everything until I came along. “Did you know we used to be best mates and I’d go around to her house all the time?” I shake my head. Nevaeh continues, “But her mum didn’t like us messing up their perfect house. And her mum made her do all these after-school clubs. We kind of drifted apart after that. I don’t think she’s got any real friends any more.”
“She could have us,” says Knuckles, chewing the last of his tuna sandwich. He shrugs.
I bite my lip. Mimi hasn’t been all that nice to me since I started at Bleeding Heart. Knuckles, seeing my face, says there’s no point in being annoyed with Mimi any more because it won’t get us anywhere and let’s face it, none of us are perfect anyway. So, the girl who thinks she has to be perfect is about to get three imperfect friends, whether she likes it or not, Knuckles suggests. After a moment’s thought, I tell Nevaeh she should make Mimi one of her special bracelets and Nevaeh smiles and says she might just do that, because Mimi probably needs something good to happen to her too.
“Maybe we could be the good thing,” Nevaeh muses.
“Like the garden was my amazing thing,” says Knuckles, opening his lunch box. He takes out a carton of apple juice and pierces it with a straw. Nevaeh asks him why he thinks the garden made the bracelet snap, because he never really said. “Well, you know it’s for my dad.” Knuckles takes a slurp of apple juice and sets down the carton on the table. A tiny drip dangles on the end of the straw. “I miss him so much and I wanted to do something that would make me feel a bit closer to him, despite everything that happened to us. Dad loved gardening and once told me apples were a symbol of love and happiness and I wanted to try to remember Dad with love and happiness even though it was hard so I thought of planting an apple tree. Seeing the dumper truck on the table made me think about how Dad and me used to play together.” Knuckles pauses. “And then all that was gone.”
The Boy Who Sailed the Ocean in an Armchair Page 15