by Fiona Gibson
Outside Diane dries her feet on a vivid pink towel and saws at her toenails with an emery board. I finish my coffee and lift my flute, about to play:
Mamma-mia-mamma-mia…
‘For Christ’s sake,’ I mutter. ‘This happened on Wednesday night. I’m trying to teach Sophie—this lovely girl, who’s progressing so well—then this music starts up….’
Robert peers through the window, clearly fascinated as Diane hauls up a foot onto the opposite thigh and starts painting her toenails. She has positioned herself to take maximum advantage of a thin slice of sunlight. I had to finish Sophie’s lesson upstairs,’ I rant on, ‘which was quieter, but felt…wrong. I don’t want pupils in my bedroom.’
‘No, of course you don’t.’ Robert colors slightly. Diane’s music has stopped. There are no cars straining up Briar Hill; no murmurings from lawn mowers or TVs. I join Robert at the window. Diane has produced a razor now, and is briskly skimming her legs.
I stare down at Robert’s hand. He has placed it across mine, making a lattice of fingers. I’m aware of my internal organs: heart, lungs and the diaphragm, rising and falling in the correct manner. Robert smells of honey. His hand is warm over mine. My other hand grips the special flute, the one no one else ever plays.
‘We should go out sometime,’ he says.
‘Yes, I’d like to.’
He lifts my hand, and for a moment looks as though he might do something alarming—maybe kiss it—but instead lets it drop like a sweet wrapper. ‘Stella,’ he says, ‘you’re a wonderful friend.’
Charlie sounds his usual Saturday lunchtime self: barely woken, perhaps not alone. ‘We should visit Dad,’ I say.
‘Mmm, sometime.’ He yawns into the phone.
‘I mean for his birthday. It’s only two weeks away. Shall we club together for a present?’
‘Oh, God,’ he says, and I’m not sure whether he’s horrified by the prospect of shopping for Dad, or the schlep to Cornwall.
There’s someone else, a girl’s voice in the background. ‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘you’ve got company.’
‘It’s just me,’ he protests.
‘Still seeing that girl—Phoebe, is it—with the beach hut?’
‘Maybe,’ Charlie says, and I can hear his smile.
‘So… Dad’s present. We could look round the antiques market….’
‘I’ll trust you to pick something,’ he says—then, to make amends, ‘Let’s meet up tomorrow for a swim,’ which we often do Sundays anyway. Charlie’s the only person I know who loves to swim as much as I do.
‘We could buy him a grandfather clock,’ I add.
‘Fine.’
‘Or a stuffed moose.’
‘Whatever you say.’
‘Want to come in on this present, or what?’
He laughs and says, ‘Yes, Mum.’
Later, as Diane drags her deck chair inside, I’m still thinking: Don’t call me that.
Next morning I’m woken at 8:20 a.m. by Midge rapping at my front door. ‘Coming to play?’ she asks pleasantly.
‘Play?’ I repeat.
‘Yeah. I’ve got no one to play with.’
‘But it’s Sunday, I’m still in my—’
‘Pajamas. Yeah, I can see that.’ She waltzes past me in her mud-caked boots and starts swinging on my living-room door. She manages this by gripping the handles on each side of the door and pulling her knees up to her chest. Then she thuds to the floor and skips across the room to plink-plonk on my piano. ‘I’ll get dressed,’ I say wearily.
‘Be quick,’ she commands. ‘Yes, boss.’
Jojo is lounging on the top bunk in the girls’ shared bedroom. The room has been halved by a wobbly line of masking tape stuck to the stained porridge-colored carpet. ‘Look,’ Midge says, dragging a scuffed metal tray from beneath the lower bunk. The tray is piled high with necklaces and bracelets made from sweets threaded onto fuzzy green string. ‘They’re for wearing,’ Midge says, ‘but she just eats them. She’s a pig.’
‘Shut up!’ Jojo snaps.
‘You two behaving up there?’ Diane shouts from the foot of the stairs. Her habit of playing Queen at full volume doesn’t seem to have impaired her hearing.
‘This is my best one,’ Midge continues, plucking a bracelet of ruby-colored jewels that have been dulled by a fine coating of hair and fluff. ‘I could get a lot of money for this. But you can have it.’
‘No, you keep it. It’s part of your collection.’
‘It’s for you,’ she insists. ‘You never give me anything,’ Jojo complains. She has arranged herself so her head and shoulders are hanging down from the bunk. Her thin brown hair falls around her face like a funnel.
‘You want tea, Stella?’ Diane calls up.
‘Yes please.’ The girls trip downstairs after me. Diane is unpacking glasses and ornaments from a tea chest. Every cupboard is crammed haphazardly. She’s behaving as if she’s been forced to take part in a house-swap program and can’t figure out where to put anything.
‘Make Stella a cup of tea,’ Midge prompts her.
Diane pulls the newspaper wrapping from a pottery mug tree and says, ‘The girls say you teach at their school.’
‘Yes, just part-time—I’m a music teacher. Peripatetic.’
‘My dad gets peripatetic drunk,’ Midge mutters.
Diane throws her a sharp look and rests a cut-glass vase on top of the hamster cage that fills the windowsill. Abandoning her unpacking project, Diane pushes past Jojo, who’s lounging in the doorway with a packet of Monster Munch, and leads me into the living room. There are so many places to sit—on the fuchsia sofa, or one of three mismatched armchairs—that I can’t decide where to park myself.
‘Sit with me,’ Midge demands, perching on a chair arm. I push aside an assortment of weaponry to make space for myself.
‘Are these your daggers?’ I ask.
‘No—that’s a scabbard, these are daggers, and this is a cutlass like what pirates use. Do you like war?’
‘I usually try to avoid it.’
Diane hands me a mug of biscuit-colored liquid and says, ‘Girls, scram.’
Midge slides off the chair arm and marches out of the room. Jojo pretends to leave, but lurks behind the living-room door, crunching Monster Munch.
‘They’re giving Jojo extra help,’ Diane murmurs, leaning forward, ‘like there’s something wrong with her.’
‘Who?’ I ask.
‘Them.’ She means teachers. Parents often forget we’re ordinary people who shop in Roots and Fruits and go to the toilet. It’s as if we shouldn’t exist outside the classroom, but quietly fold ourselves up at the end of the school day and slide into cupboards.
‘What’s she having trouble with?’ I ask.
‘Reading, writing. Basic stuff. Keeps bringing home extra worksheets.’
‘It’ll be learning support. Her form teacher, Miss Barnes, is just trying—’
‘She’s been singled out,’ Diane blusters. ‘Midge is rubbish at maths, and no one’s forcing special-anything on her.’
‘Lots of kids have learning support. You could make an appointment with Miss Barnes, or with Mrs Summer, the head teacher….’
Diane’s plump hand lands on my knee. ‘It’s been rough on them, leaving their dad. We had this dog—the girls loved him to bits—and had to leave him behind because pets aren’t allowed here.’
‘That’s such a shame.’
‘I had no choice, Stella. I’d had it up to here.’ Her arm shoots up in a salute.
With your husband, I think, or the dog? ‘You don’t have kids,’ she continues, ‘so you won’t understand. But I’m a mum, right? A bloody good mum. And I bent over backwards for him. You know what happens when you do that?’
‘What?’
‘You get taken for granted. You’re just a big old lump of ugly furniture.’
‘Diane, of course you’re not a big—’
‘In the early days, before kids, he’d whisk me away.’
‘Where to?’
‘Restaurants, nightclubs, went to a club on a riverboat once…’
‘And what happened?’
Her face sags. ‘He stopped whisking. Stopped noticing me, basically. Unless he was out of his brain—paralytic—and then, ugh…’ She lies back on the sofa, pushes away an invisible body.
‘We all feel like that sometimes.’
‘Not you,’ she declares. ‘Look at you—single, successful… God, you’re lucky.’
‘I don’t feel lucky.’
‘You’ve got your head screwed on, Stella. That’s why the girls like you so much.’
‘Do they?’ I ask.
‘They think you’re the bloody bee’s knees,’ she says with a rich, rounded laugh, showing clusters of pewter-colored fillings.
Midge watches me step over the wall as if I might be incapable of finding my own way home. ‘Stella,’ she calls after me, ‘why do you live all by yourself?’
I pause on my doorstep. ‘I just like it.’
‘Don’t you get lonely?’
‘I don’t really think about it.’
‘D’you want a boyfriend? Husband?’
‘Not at the moment,’ I say, aware of hotness creeping up my neck.
‘There are men’s shaving things in that cupboard in your bathroom….’
‘You’ve been looking in my cupboards?’
‘Just a little look,’ she says, flicking pink gravel with the toe of her trainer. ‘Whose is it?’
‘My old boyfriend’s,’ I mutter as Jojo wanders out to aid her sister in the interview process.
‘Maybe he’s going to come back,’ Midge adds. ‘That’s why he didn’t take his man’s razor.’
‘I don’t think so.’ I grip my door handle.
‘He might. What if he still likes you and—’
I unlock the door, relieved to escape interrogation, and shut it firmly behind me.
The crunch of feet on gravel, a light tapping sound. A small head appears briefly through the door’s frosted glass panel. ‘You forgot this!’ Midge shouts through the letterbox. She feeds through a small, inky-looking hand that is clutching the bracelet. It drops to the floor.
‘Thanks,’ I tell the letterbox. ‘You can be our friend,’ she yells, her mouth jammed against the slot.
I feel cornered in my own home. The letterbox snaps shut. Midge’s Chewy Jewel bracelet clings to my skin as I slide it on.
The first section of the antiques market is housed in a dank-smelling warehouse filled with dark, looming furniture. I wander past grandfather clocks with speckled faces and rusting hands. An agitated man is trying to decide whether to buy a glass-fronted bookcase while his child—a whirlwind of fuzzy black hair and fluorescent dummy—attempts to open the grandfather clocks’ doors and manhandle their inner workings. Children and fragile objects don’t mix. I have already had to ask Midge to use my doorbell instead of banging her fist on the glass panel.
‘Now, Sebastian,’ the man says, tugging the child away from delicate timepieces and out to the open-air market. Stall-holders are sipping steaming drinks from polystyrene cups. Tables are laden with chipped enamel kitchenware and wooden tools, their edges worn as smooth as driftwood. One table is filled with nautical equipment: mysterious dials encased in mahogany and brass. There are binoculars, which I chose for Dad’s last birthday. I’d thought he’d enjoy watching soaring cormorants. But he just peered through them briefly, out of his grimy living-room window—then, unnervingly, directly at me—and placed them at the top of his bookshelf where they appear to have remained ever since. He said, ‘Very thoughtful of you, Stella, but you shouldn’t have.’
The nautical stallholder lights a strong-smelling cigarette and gives me a lazy smile. ‘Know what this is?’ he asks. He offers me a circular brass object with a dial and ornate markings that read Dry, Fair, Change, Rain, Stormy.
‘It’s a barometer,’ I say.
He takes quick puffs of his cigarette and asks, ‘D’you know how it works?’ Across the market a lean figure peruses the old tools stall. ‘It depends,’ the nautical man says, ‘whether we’re talking the mercurial barometer, which contains a column of mercury—self-explanatory really—or the aneroid barometer, which…’
The man looks like Alex, but is skinnier and has shorter hair. I haven’t seen him since he walked, or rather strolled out—kissing my cheek, and climbing into his friend Mo’s yellow van as if it were just an ordinary day. As if they were going fishing or to a gig.
The nautical man holds the barometer too close to my face. ‘The metal cells,’ he continues, ‘respond to atmospheric pressure, moving closer together…’ The person turns, and it is Alex. Something jolts inside me. He’s had his hair trimmed to chin-length, gone lean and angular. I try to swallow, but my throat feels scratchy and dry. The stall man’s cigarette makes a sizzling noise as he drops it into his cup.
Alex has moved to the bookstall to flick through wooden boxes of paperbacks. ‘You’ll be amazed,’ the stall man says, ‘by this barometer’s sensitivity.’
I watch as Alex drifts toward racks of old postcards. A girl is walking beside him. She has a pale, dainty face and glossy black hair that snakes down her back. Is she with him? No, far too young. Early twenties, maybe. She’s wearing a chunky sweater—it looks like a man’s sweater—with a short tweedy skirt. Her legs are outrageously long. Alex and the girl wander to a caravan—the Snackmobile—that sells teas, coffees and hot dogs in an oniony haze.
‘Falling pressure,’ the stall man rabbits on, ‘indicates a period of unsettled weather.’
‘I’ll take it.’
‘Present or for yourself?’
‘It’s for my dad’s birthday.’
‘A very lucky man. I’m sure he’ll enjoy it.’
I glance back at the Snackmobile where Alex and the girl are laughing. Clearly, they are strangers who have experienced hunger and thirst simultaneously and are sharing a joke in the queue. I remember that Alex isn’t a joke-sharing person.
He and the girl with outrageous legs take napkin-wrapped bundles from the Snackmobile man. Then they stroll out of the market, nibbling the ends of their hot dogs, their arms linked.
6
Mrs Bones
Charlie peers at the barometer. ‘It’s different,’ he says.
‘I thought you’d like it.’
‘I do like it. I’m just saying what he’s going to say.’ I rewrap it, and we change for swimming in the beach hut. It’s rented by Phoebe, Charlie’s current love interest, and is painted searing-blue inside and out. Her flip-flops, garnished with diamanté flowers, lie close to my feet.
We wade out between boats until the sea is uncluttered and perfectly clear. Charlie is far too tanned and healthy-looking for someone who spends ridiculous hours holed up at the university’s biology faculty, where he lectures. He has inherited Dad’s skin that holds onto its brownness. Mine is paler—virtually transparent, like Mum’s.
He’s ahead of me now, his sleek shoulders rising like seals. ‘Heard Dad’s news?’ he shouts. It’s unusual for my brother to talk while he’s swimming. Despite possessing a brain jammed with crustacean-related facts, he is incapable of doing more than one thing at once.
‘What news?’ I yell back.
‘An offer. Friday Zoo, some regular slot.’
‘You’re kidding.’ Friday Zoo is a mishmash of a show fronted by three wacky presenters who pretend it’s all spontaneous, but you know it’s all scripted. I rarely see Friday Zoo because I teach Katy Salmon when it’s on.
Charlie grabs the bow of an anchored fishing boat, which lurches uneasily. ‘I’m surprised you hadn’t heard.’
‘Is he going to do it?’ I ask, kicking through the seaweed that tickles my ankles.
‘Think so. It’s the first real offer he’s had for years.’
‘How will Dad fit into that kind of show? I hope it’s not just a piss-take….’
Charlie laughs, pushes away from the
boat and heads back to shore. ‘We should be pleased for him,’ he calls back. ‘Might cheer the old bugger up.’
‘I am pleased for him. I just worry—’ I stop short. I should be more like Charlie, and stop fretting.
We towel ourselves in Phoebe’s hut, and drink the beers I’ve brought. The hut is sparsely furnished with the small table, a worn rattan mat and two folding chairs. ‘Are things going well with her?’ I ask. I could be referring to a frail elderly relative or a pet.
‘Yes, thank you,’ Charlie says, mock-serious. ‘How about you?’
‘What about me?’
‘Men,’ he says, feigning drama.
I’m about to tell him about seeing Alex with the black-haired girl, but he has already wandered out of the hut and back on to the beach. I don’t know why I bother to quiz him about girlfriends. He reveals little, snapping himself shut like a clam; a trick learned, I suspect, from Dad.
Late afternoon sun has forced its way through the clouds. A gaggle of kids splosh in the shallows. ‘You going back in?’ I call after Charlie.
‘Race you,’ he says, kicking up sand as he runs.
I come home from the beach to find Robert’s white Fiat parked crookedly outside my house. He climbs out and says, ‘Hi there, Stella. Is this a good time?’
For what? I wonder. ‘Of course it is. Come on in.’
He follows me up the path. ‘Can’t stay long. Just realized I’d forgotten to pay you for my last lesson.’
‘You didn’t have a lesson. We just talked.’
‘I feel bad about taking your time.’ His gray eyes look anxious. Fine hair flops uncertainly around his face.
‘For God’s sake, stop apologizing.’
‘Sorry,’ he says, and we laugh, like we’ve been given permission to breathe again.
I make him coffee, which he barely touches before he has to leave. Verity needs him to look after the boys during her leg-waxing appointment. As he drives away, I notice he’s left money on the shelf in the hall.
Fifteen pounds for holding my hand. I feel cheap, yet ridiculously overpriced.