by Fiona Gibson
‘You could kick him out of your group,’ Jen says. She’s not only head teacher at Paul Street, she’s also been my friend since we were eleven. Where we’re sitting now, at the far end of the jetty, is where we used to leap off into the sea.
‘It’s not serious enough to kick him out. You know how talented he is.’
Jen rolls her eyes. ‘He’s foul, Stella. Had to call in his parents last week. He’s been bullying Alexander Holt—a year-two kid, for God’s sake, four years younger than Toby. Pushed him downstairs, said he’d do worse if he tells. That’s the kind of monster we’re talking about.’
‘Let’s just give it a few more weeks,’ I say, draining my glass. ‘He doesn’t deserve it. There are lots of other kids who are keen to get started.’
I stroll back along the jetty and jump down onto the sand. Seaweed is draped over beached boats like wet hair. A girl and a boy are grabbing handfuls to fling at each other. Jen lands on the beach behind me. ‘Still no word from Robert?’ she asks as we pick our way between the boats.
‘Nothing. I’ve left a message—he hasn’t even called back.’
The girl scampers past, waving seaweed—the thick, slimy kind, like crimp-edged pasta. Water sprays off, hitting my shirt. ‘Sorry, Miss Moon,’ the girl shouts.
‘That’s okay, Laura.’
‘Doesn’t he hang around after lessons,’ Jen continues, ‘saying what a good friend you are?’
‘I think he just wants someone to talk to.’
‘I can’t believe he stood you up,’ she announces, kicking a stranded buoy out of her path. ‘What do you see in him?’
‘He’s a friend, Jen. He’s kind, sensitive…’
‘Gorgeous?’ she cuts in.
‘Well, yes.’ I don’t tell her he’s the first man I’ve noticed—really noticed—since Alex. Something about him tugs at my heart: the way he tries to be the best dad he can be, the way he flounders over his scales. I want to help him, hold him.
‘Can he play?’ Jen asks.
I shake my head, laughing. ‘He struggles, never seems to improve. At first I thought he only carried on with lessons to get a breather from the kids. But since Verity left—’
‘He just wants to see you.’
I shrug, batting off her suggestion.
‘Has he ever pounced on you?’
The thought of Robert pouncing, panther-style, makes me splutter. ‘Of course not. He wouldn’t dare, even if he wanted to.’
‘Why don’t you?’
‘What?’ I ask, feigning innocence.
‘Kiss Robert. Peel off his clothes…’ We smother our laughter, conscious of Laura who’s within earshot, stirring stagnant water in a beached rowing boat with a stick.
‘I’m out of practice,’ I hiss. ‘Wouldn’t know where to start.’
‘With the shirt,’ Jen suggests. ‘Not the socks.’
‘If it happens, I’ll phone you. You can talk me through it.’
‘You think I remember?’ she sniggers. ‘I don’t undress Simon. He’d assume I’d been reading some dumb sex manual….’
Alex used to undress me, piece by piece. ‘You have the perfect body,’ he said, the first time I stood naked before him. I wanted to laugh and point out the lack of what women’s magazines refer to as curves. As a teenager I worried that I’d need an operation to become a proper woman.
‘Still miss Alex?’ Jen asks, reading my thoughts.
I could lie and tell her Of course not. He drove me mad with his crazes, his butterfly mind. I’m over him now, glad that he left. Life’s so much better without him.
The words are out before I can stop them. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I really do.’
3
Chewy Jewels
Stella, can’t believe I’ve done this…so embarrassed…something came up—it went right out of my mind…
Robert’s voice limps from the answer phone, sounding tinny and hopeless. Hope you didn’t go to any trouble, ends the message.
I rifle the kitchen for acceptable edibles and find a jar of marinated peppers that I bought in the fancy deli during a shopping day with Jen. She was trying to assemble a hamper for her son Elliot to minimize the risk of starvation when he left for university. A ‘starter hamper,’ she called it. Jen was flapping in shops crammed with flavored oils and pungent cheeses. She couldn’t remember what he liked and disliked, and kept snatching non-starter-ish foods like pickled walnuts and anchovy relish.
I drape the peppers over a lump of French bread and eat on the sofa, over a dinner plate to catch the crumbs. On TV is a program called Dirty Business about restaurants infested with rodents and bugs. ‘What you’re ordering here,’ says a gaunt man in glasses, ‘is our little friend salmonellosis….’ It sounds harmless—cute, even. Like something my brother Charlie might have discussed in his Ph.D. thesis: Agnostic Behavior and Population Dynamics of Euphausiid Crustaceans. I flip channels to a gardening show where a shiny-faced woman is helping to erect a hideous water feature. Distressed-looking cherubs cluster around a central plinth.
Before he moved out—before he announced that he didn’t ‘feel right,’ whatever that meant—Alex decided that a water feature would act as a focal point in our back garden. I’d assumed that flowers were meant to be the focal point; wasn’t that why people had gardens? He plonked a catalog called Aqua Designs on my music stand, obscuring Mozart’s Flute Concerto in G. I stared at a monstrous structure entitled Village Pump in Textured Resin. ‘It looks like a concrete penis,’ I said.
‘Not that one,’ Alex retorted, flipping to the correct page. ‘See, it’s a figure of eight.’ He jabbed at a bleak-looking structure that looked like two dog bowls connected by a feeding trough.
‘What’s it for?’
‘It’s for aerating and energizing water. We can use it to irrigate the garden, and bring oxygen to—’
‘We don’t need to irrigate,’ I pointed out. ‘This is Devon, not Africa.’
He complained that I lacked imagination, wouldn’t try anything new or different. Why else would I have left Devon to study in London, then scuttled back to my hometown? I said, ‘If I hadn’t, you’d never have met me.’
Alex snatched the water feature brochure and prodded the Mozart piece. ‘You’re more interested in some bloke who died in 1870,’ he muttered.
‘1791,’ I teased him.
After three years together—and, I assumed, thoroughly cheesed off with the air-filled void where my imagination should have been—Alex forced me to try something new and different, because he left me.
He still sneaks into my head when I least expect him. I don’t want him there, don’t want him back. ‘I don’t want him,’ I tell the gardening woman and her dribbling fountain.
‘Next week,’ she chirps, ‘we’ll transform a dismal backyard into a Mediterranean-style courtyard with a few bits and pieces you’ll have lying around your home.’ What does she mean, exactly? An old clotheshorse, filing cabinet or deceased tumble drier?
I still wonder if things might have turned out differently with Alex and me if I’d agreed to a figure-of-eight water feature.
Midge, the younger girl from next door, is yelping from the front garden wall—my garden wall. I keep my gaze firmly fixed on the TV. ‘I’m desperate,’ she chirps, clutching her groin. By the time I reach the front door, the older one, Jojo, is thumping rhythmically on the glass panel.
‘Hi, girls,’ I say, half opening the door, ‘isn’t your mum—’
‘We need the toilet,’ Jojo announces.
‘Can’t you use the one in your house?’
Midge leaps down from the wall, performing a desperate-for-bathroom wiggle. ‘She’s still at work,’ she says.
‘You mean you’re locked out?’
‘She didn’t lock us out. She’s just not in.’ She says this as if I have the comprehension of a cat flea.
‘Okay, come in. Loo’s upstairs, first door on the—’
‘We know,’ Midge retorts. ‘Our house is the
same as yours.’
‘But not as fancy,’ Jojo adds, following her sister as she thunders upstairs.
From the bathroom comes the juddering sound of the bath’s Jacuzzi setting. The multifunctioning bath was here when I bought the house—before Alex moved in—and has never done anything more useful than make a low rumble like an underground train. There’s muffled giggling, the whir of loo roll being unraveled. ‘Everything okay?’ I call up nervously.
‘Yeah,’ they yell in unison. I hope they’re not prying in the bathroom cabinet. This is my house, these are my things. I’m used to well-behaved pupils being here, not sniggering neighbors.
I pull out the music for tonight’s lessons: Sophie at five, Jade at six-thirty. I have taken on more private pupils since Alex left, nearly doubling my workload. My diary is packed with names and times, as if it belongs to someone with billions of friends and a dizzying social life.
Midge clatters into the living room and smears wet hands on to the front of her skirt. She has springy pale gold hair and an old-fashioned face that belongs on a biscuit tin or a Pears Soap wrapper. ‘I like your house,’ she says through a mouth crammed with sweets. ‘It’s very tidy. But it smells funny.’
‘Does it? What of?’
‘Don’t know. Kind of new, like a shop.’
Clean, she means. Alex despaired of my need for tidy surroundings. When he caught me pairing up his shoes in the hall, he said, ‘You’re acting like my mother.’ I tried to stop tidying his things after that because the last thing I wanted to be was his mother.
‘One person doesn’t make much mess,’ I tell Midge.
‘You live in this massive house all by yourself?’
‘It’s not that big,’ I say, laughing. ‘Just the same size as yours.’
Jojo stomps in, casting off her red school sweatshirt to reveal a grubby polo shirt and a necklace of pink plastic fairies joined by their outstretched arms. She perches on the arm of the sofa, her pale gray eyes flicking suspiciously around my living room. Midge examines the bookshelf with her head cocked to one side, trying to read spines. Make yourselves at home, I think.
‘I like your hair,’ Midge announces. ‘How d’you get it like that?’
‘Like what?’
‘Kind of ginger.’
‘It’s more…brownish really. It’s a color you put on, called henna.’
‘You dye it,’ Jojo announces. ‘I said she did, didn’t I, Midge? So does our mum. Last time she used the wrong sort of dye and it rained and ran down her face.’ She rests her upper body on the table, causing it to wobble dangerously, and flicks through the stack of sheet music. ‘What’s this?’ she asks.
‘It’s sheet music. You know I’m a teacher, don’t you? Well, I teach flute….’
‘Is this it?’ She lifts the slender black case from the table and picks at the catch.
‘Yes, that’s it. Please leave it alone, Jojo.’
The case opens. ‘Can I have a go?’ she asks, prodding a key with her index finger.
‘Not with that one. That’s my special—’
‘Just a tiny go,’ she insists.
‘Mum says it’s nice to share,’ Midge adds, smirking.
‘Will your mum be home soon?’ I ask, glancing at my watch.
‘Could be ages,’ Midge declares. ‘I think she’s going to the supermarket then she’ll maybe see her friend Gail that she works with.’
I take the flute case from Jojo, shut it firmly and place it on top of the bookshelf. Sophie is due for her lesson in fifteen minutes. ‘Aren’t you a bit young to be left waiting outside on your own?’ I ask.
‘No,’ Midge retorts. ‘I’m seven-and-a-quarter, she’s ten, and I’m starving.’
‘She ate all my sweets,’ Jojo adds accusingly.
All I can offer are tangerines, apples, grapes—‘We don’t like fruit,’ Midge informs me—and rice cakes, which the girls nibble at reluctantly while producing an impressive flurry of crumbs on their laps and the floor. ‘Look at this,’ Jojo says, extending a finger. A splinter peeps out from a small area of angry pink.
‘That looks really painful. We should get it out.’
‘How?’
‘Hang on a minute.’ I run up to the bathroom and fish tweezers from my makeup bag. A sweet packet—Chewy Jewels, they’re called—lies crumpled in the washbasin. The toilet roll has been hastily wound back onto its tube.
I find Jojo trying to gouge out the splinter with grubby fingernails. ‘Let me try,’ I say, tweezing its end but feeling awkward; surely a mother should take charge of splinter removal?
‘Ow!’ she shrieks. ‘You’re pushing it in. I’ll get blood poisoning.’
‘Sit still,’ I mutter. Her breathing is noisy, chesty. I suspect that she’s the kind of child who is always starting or finishing a cold. She rubs her damp nose against her non-splintered hand.
Midge peers intently over my shoulder, as if she’s been allowed into an operating theater to watch a complex operation. ‘Eugh,’ she mutters. The splinter slides out, leaving a tiny hole.
‘Midge! Jojo!’ yells Diane from the street.
‘Mum’s home,’ Jojo says glumly.
‘Christ, you two,’ Diane snaps, pushing past me as I let her in, ‘what are you playing at, bothering Cilla?’
‘Stella,’ Midge corrects her.
‘She pulled a thing out my finger with tweezers,’ Jojo announces. ‘It really hurt.’
Diane frowns and squints at me. Her burgundy lipstick has meandered over her lip line. Beneath her denim jacket is a purple T-shirt depicting Freddie Mercury with a bare chest and multi-chained necklace. ‘I’m sorry,’ she mutters, although I’m not sure what for, as she ushers the girls over the low brick wall that divides our meager front gardens. Jojo is telling her mother, ‘She gave us these horrible biscuits that smelled of sick.’
I close the door, brush up rice-cake crumbs from the sofa and floor, and pluck more Chewy Jewel wrappers from between the cushions. The aroma of gummy sweets hangs in the air. Sophie’s mother’s car pulls up, and my pupil trips out, her blond hair secured in immaculate plaits. ‘Be good now, play your best,’ her mother says, planting a kiss on the child’s pale forehead.
‘Hello, Miss Moon, how are you?’ the child asks, like a mini grown-up. She fits her flute together and places her scale book carefully on the stand.
Music pounds through from next door. ‘Let’s start by running through your arpeggios,’ I say over twanging guitars.
Sophie starts to play, but her notes crumple beneath the sheer weight of Killer Queen. She tugs anxiously on a plait. ‘What’s that music?’ she whispers.
‘Just my new neighbors.’
‘Who are they?’
‘Two girls and their mum. You might know Jojo and Midge Price from school.’
She shakes her head quickly. ‘Where’s their dad?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do they always play music this—’
There’s an abrupt zipping noise—a needle being swiped across vinyl—then Diane’s voice cuts through the wall as she roars, ‘Don’t you go round there again, bothering that woman—do you hear me? She could be anyone.’
4
How to Be Famous
Children didn’t bang on our door when I was a child. The unspoken rule stated quite firmly that Stella and Charlie Moon weren’t allowed to have friends around to play. ‘Your dad doesn’t like being disturbed,’ Mum told us, even when he was engaged in nothing more taxing than dead-heading geraniums in the back garden.
‘It’s not fair,’ I protested.
‘That’s just the way he is, Stella. If you want to meet your friends, you’ll have to play outside.’
‘What if it’s raining?’
‘You play at Lynette’s, don’t you?’
‘I want to play here.’
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘Because it’s my home,’ I yelled, flouncing up to my room where the special flute nestled in its open cas
e on my bed, triggering instant guilt.
I could tell, from the way that her cheeks flushed when he spoke sharply to her, that Mum was scared of Dad. Although small in stature, and prone to grunts and mumbles rather than shouting, Dad was scary. By the age of eleven I was a fervent nail biter, despite Mum’s star charts (‘Five days without biting and I’ll buy you a Sindy, sweetheart…. A whole month and you’ll have Sindy’s bathroom!’). I couldn’t break it to her that I’d outgrown Sindy, and developed a liking for the acrid anti-bite lotions that she lovingly painted on.
Dad’s show was now broadcast twice a week, and repeated on Sundays. Fame, I’d realized, made someone not necessarily richer or happier than non-famous people, but appear bigger and more powerful than they really are. When fans clustered around Dad in the street, or stopped to talk to him over our front garden wall, they’d say, ‘You’re not nearly as tall as you look on TV,’ as if they’d been expecting the towering persona who burst into their homes with his Stuffed Grapefruits and Savory Rice Rings every Tuesday and Thursday teatime. They didn’t realize that the Frankie they knew, or thought they knew—TV Frankie—didn’t really exist.
‘Want to watch the show being filmed?’ Dad asked one morning during the Easter holidays.
‘Why? When?’ came my confused babble. Mum, Charlie and I were rarely invited to the studios. These flurries of attention—what Charlie and I referred to as ‘Dad Making an Effort’—usually followed a late-night row between our parents. The previous night I’d lain in bed, waiting for them to finish.
‘Is it any wonder,’ Mum had called out hopelessly, ‘when you don’t care about us?’ After these rows, Dad would behave as if he’d suddenly remembered he had a family, and should involve himself with us.
‘I’ve organized tickets for Thursday,’ Dad explained, as if this had required a supreme effort on his part.
‘Thank you, darling,’ Mum said.
‘Lynette’s mum’s taking us swimming on—’ I began.
‘Fine—you’d rather go swimming than see my show.’
‘No, Dad, we just had a plan…’