by Fiona Gibson
Dad and I stride across the concrete slipway and into the dunes where he unclips the dogs’ leads. Surf tears off, reappearing as brief flashes of ear or tail. Turf, who can’t see the point of tearing anywhere, mooches beside us.
Charlie has brought assignments to mark. I left him with papers spread all over the floor in the spare room where we’ll sleep tonight. Maggie was clearing away after lunch, making a foil parcel of the remaining quiche.
Soon the dunes give way to slabs of rock, their crevices filled with water and languorous weed. Two boys are crouching at the edge of the biggest rock pool. ‘Cool,’ one murmurs. ‘It really moves sideways.’ The boy has skinny, goose-pimpled arms. He nudges the crab with a fishing net.
‘That’s what crabs do,’ Dad says, startling the boys. I want to tell them that my brother knows everything there is to know about crabs—that crabs are his life—but they’d think I’m some crazy lady who marches around making up stories.
‘Why?’ the skinny boy asks.
‘They just do,’ Dad says, shrugging.
‘But why?’
Dad marches on, unable to handle small children demanding information. I assumed that was why he started to spend more time in the allotment after Mum’s accident, where no one pinged questions: Where is she now? Can she see us, do you think? How can she see us, if she was put in a fire?
‘Stop it!’ Dad roared. The subject was closed.
We’re at the cliff ’s edge now, higher than swooping gulls and the waves that from here look like small splashes in a bathtub. The sky has darkened, swathed with watery ink. ‘Looks like a storm’s coming,’ I say.
‘I think it’ll blow over.’
‘No, Dad, the barometer’s right.’
‘Maybe.’ He pulls a tight smile. I want to ask him: why was she cremated? Who decided what happened? But I can’t; we don’t talk about Mum. We pretend that it—she—never happened.
I remember him greeting her brothers—two sallow middle-aged men whom I recalled vaguely from distant Christmases—when they arrived in the small tarmacked car park before the funeral. During the service Charlie lurked at the back, away from everyone. Dad sat with the brothers, who looked the same with their black suits and gaunt faces. Jen gripped my hand. Elona kept trying to hug me but I shook her off. There was faint music, which sounded like it came from a badly tuned radio, then a tinny buzzing noise—the mechanism that caused the wine-colored curtain to close around the coffin. I wanted to push through the people and grab that curtain and rip it to shreds.
After the service, everyone came to tea at our house. A ragged assortment of vaguely known aunties arranged plates of finger rolls and cold meats and whispered to each other as I passed. Dad mingled, talking seriously with his jaw set hard, as if discussing program proposals with TV executives. Across the room I saw Charlie coil his fingers around Uncle Dave’s sherry glass and tip the contents down his throat.
‘Why was she cremated?’ I asked Dad later when the guests had finally tumbled back into their cars. Charlie had locked his bedroom door and refused to open it, even when I’d banged and banged with my fist.
Dad looked up from his slumped position in the green velour armchair. ‘It’s what Eleanor wanted,’ he said, ‘and it’s what I want, when it’s my time to join her.’
I didn’t make any noise, even though sheets of wetness were pouring down my face. Dad’s eyes looked soft and watery, as if he really wanted to get up from the chair and hold me, the way I needed him to, but simply didn’t know how.
Next morning Charlie and I find the crab boys huddled over the rock pool with a magnifying glass. We left Dad and Maggie still sleeping and Surf gnawing the sofa’s loose cover in the living room. The house smelled of yesterday’s goulash.
Charlie is telling the boys that hermit crabs don’t have homes of their own; they hide in the discarded shells of other species. ‘It’s blocked the hole with its claws,’ the skinny boy says.
‘That’s hermit crab language,’ Charlie says, ‘for leave me alone.’ He’s wearing his wetsuit and carrying a faded blue surfboard. Everything felt wrong, the time Charlie tried to teach me to surf: my skewed feet, never at the right angles, my ungainly body that couldn’t even ride, belly down, on the board. He said, ‘You need to go with it,’ whatever that meant.
We leave the boys trying to trap the crab in their net. I strip off to my swimsuit and plunge into the water. It’s shockingly cold, but quite bearable by the third stroke. Dad’s ill humor washes away as I push through the waves.
A bunch of surfers usually gathers here, even in October, but today there’s only me, Charlie and the crab boys, who are paddling now. When my arms start to ache I wade back to the beach and get dressed, shrouded by towel. Charlie rises and falls on scooping waves, where no one can reach him.
Dad checks his watch and says, ‘I’m due to meet Harry at the Smugglers. We’re figuring out a training program for Surf.’
‘About time,’ Maggie says briskly, looking up from her cross-stitch sampler at the kitchen table. Surf disgraced himself this morning by lunging for a plateful of bacon that she’d placed on the hob. We breakfasted on stale Corn Flakes. Dad lights a Café Crème, clouding the kitchen, then heads upstairs for our bags. He places them at the front door where they wait like expectant dogs.
‘Well, I suppose we should be going,’ Charlie says brightly.
Maggie’s kiss is feathery, her shoulders fragile as I hug her. Sensing a walk—some kind of adventure—Surf springs out of his basket and up at me, scraping my hand with his paw.
‘Surf!’ Maggie cries. ‘Bad, bad dog.’
I stare down at my hand. Three ragged lines are oozing blood. It looks too vivid, like joke blood from a bottle. ‘Frankie, look what Surf ’s done,’ Maggie cries.
Dad is tapping the barometer with a fingernail, trying to make it do something. He was right; the threatening storm came to nothing. ‘Only a scratch,’ he murmurs. ‘Just give it a wash.’
Water floods over my hand, as cold as the sea. ‘It still says stormy,’ Dad murmurs. ‘You sure this thing’s working?’ He raps the barometer’s glass with a knuckle.
They trail out after us, Maggie trying to wrap a dank-smelling tea towel around my wound and Dad thrusting his hands into his pockets. I kiss his plump cheek and try for a hug, but he flinches and steps back into the doorway—which, as any crustacean expert will tell you, is hermit-crab-speak for ‘Leave me alone.’
‘Why do we bother, Charlie?’
‘It was your idea,’ he says, swirling the steamed-up passenger window with a finger.
‘I thought he’d be pleased to see us. I feel bad, you know, not coming more often, when he goes to the trouble of sending all those recipes….’
‘What recipes?’
‘His own, of course. The ones he handwrites on those little crinkly squares.’
‘Not still sending them, is he?’
I glance at Charlie. ‘At least a couple a month. Don’t you get any?’
He shakes his head and laughs softly. ‘He sent a few, when I’d just left home. That first house I lived in had a coal fire. Crinkly paper makes great firelighters, did you know that? Burns like you wouldn’t believe.’
‘Charlie, you didn’t.’
‘What d’you do with yours? Stick them lovingly in an album?’
‘I keep them in a box, in case I’m ever stuck for dinner-party ideas.’
‘What you need,’ Charlie sniggers, ‘is a lovely rich goulash, with piped…what do you call those piped potatoes?’
‘Fondante, I think.’
‘Avec les pommes de terre fondantes…’
We construct ludicrous menus until it’s dark and we’re pulling up outside Charlie’s house. He rents the lodge that guards the entrance to Hurleigh House, a bleak manor that has been reinvented as a hotel, country club and conference center, and now lies eerily vacant. ‘Take care of that hand now,’ he says, unloading his bag and surfboard.
‘I’m
sure it’ll be okay.’
He bends to kiss my cheek. Someone opens the lodge’s front door and steps out to greet him. My brother hurries toward her without looking back.
Instead of driving home, I turn down to the new marina. The boats look gray under streetlights but are really gleaming white like Hollywood teeth. I park and walk along the seafront to the end of the damp wooden jetty. The scratches on my hand have formed three raised wiggly lines as if they’ve been drawn with a glue pen. Midge had those sorts of pens. They spurted out glittery glue in fluorescent colors to be smudged onto curtains and T-shirts and finally confiscated by Diane. She stuffed them into the everything-drawer in the kitchen.
I stroll away from the seafront and through town until the roads widen and have names like Lilac Avenue and Camellia Grove. Pampas grass sprouts like startling haircuts from groomed lawns. There are bird tables, wishing wells, a figure of eight-shaped pond.
The bungalows’ windows beam rectangles of pale yellow light or bluish flickers from TVs. Here’s a burgundy three-piece suite, a glass-fronted cabinet filled with crystal glasses—every detail visible in the stark center light. Staring into other people’s houses is a bad habit of mine. Mum used to tug my arm sharply when she caught me spying. ‘Come on, Stella,’ she’d say, ‘it’s so rude to stare. Your head will stick like that.’ We’d march onward with me twisting my neck, trying to steal glances into other people’s lives. I wanted to see what it would be like to live with an ordinary dad.
Now the bungalows have made way for cramped Victorian terraces whose front doors open onto the street. Dock Lane smells of vinegar from the chip shop on the corner. I’m nearly at his road now, where there are no gardens or views: just a dismal pub, the Old Admiral, and a secondhand furniture store with faded lamp shades stacked messily in its window.
A doorbell with two names beneath it: ground floor flat, Brown. No lights on there, nothing to see. Top flat: Alex Carson, and the dim glow from a table lamp. ‘This doesn’t feel right,’ he had told me. ‘I’m sorry, Stella, I’ve got to move out.’ He had already found himself the flat and asked Mo-with-the-van to move his important stuff (he promised to collect the rest as soon as he’d got himself sorted—it’s been six months and I’m still waiting for him to feel sorted).
While he packed, I went to the back beach and plowed back and forth, thinking the harder I swam, the better I’d feel, but it didn’t work this time. I came home and stared at odd spaces where his things had been. My house looked burgled.
Jen was convinced he’d come back. ‘It’s just one of his fads,’ she said angrily. ‘I can’t believe he’s putting you through this.’ She was familiar with Alex’s short-lived passions for fishing, poetry, classical guitar. She wanted to come round; that’s what you do when a friend’s in crisis. But it didn’t feel like a crisis. I sat in the garden, in the plum-colored evening light, wondering how long it would take to get used to being without him.
He’ll look out in a minute, and notice me standing here. He’ll be so damned pleased to see me, he’ll hurry downstairs to let me in. Inside his flat there’ll be a table, a couple of worn chairs, a TV borrowed from Mo and unwashed coffee cups everywhere. The guitar, in which he lost interest after the top E-string broke, will be propped against a wall. The floor will be strewn with dirty clothes. Clearly, the person who lives here is falling apart without his girlfriend.
He’ll examine the scratches on my hand. Casually, I’ll mention seeing him at the antiques market with that girl. ‘She’s Mo’s little sister,’ he’ll say, or, ‘She’s just a girl I work with.’ He has rent to pay now. He’s had to get a job. This job requires him to work alongside stunning girls with outrageously long legs. ‘I made a mistake,’ Alex will tell me. ‘I still love you, Stella.’
I blink away the wetness from my eyes. The doorbell is so close, so touchable. I’ll decide whether to leave, or to stay the night. Even if I stay, it won’t mean a thing. I might just crave warm limbs wrapped around mine, the feeling of being wanted. I’ll shower in the morning—his shower dribbles pathetically, unlike the power shower I have at home—then watch him watching me get dressed. He’ll behave as if we never broke up.
I wait until the raven sky becomes streaked with orange—burnt-orange, the color of dawn and old-fashioned trouser suits—without me noticing it happening.
8
Bonkers Hound
Midge flings her light saber onto my sofa. ‘Where’s your bracelet?’ she asks.
‘What bracelet?’ I hand the girls a glass of lemonade each (I have started to buy lemonade, and iced biscuits called Party Hoops, instead of organic sesame rice cakes).
‘The one I gave you,’ Midge retorts, drumming the table impatiently. ‘The ruby one that took me ages to make. The special one.’
‘Oh, made of sweets. I put it somewhere safe. I’m sure it’ll turn up.’
She frowns at me as if to say: Yeah, like the bin, and fishes a Chewy Jewel packet from her schoolbag. The girls were lurking in my front garden, swiping each other with their schoolbags, when I came home from work.
‘What’s up with your hand?’ Jojo asks.
‘Just a scratch from my Dad’s dog.’
‘It looks horrible,’ she says, shuddering dramatically.
‘Is that where you were at the weekend—at your Dad’s?’ Midge cuts in. ‘We called for you five times, didn’t we, Jojo? We even climbed into your garden and checked your shed. You weren’t there.’
‘I do go out sometimes,’ I say, feeling cornered.
‘You can get blood poisoning from dog scratches,’ Jojo adds. ‘You could go blind or even die. Mum told me.’ She picks lilac icing from a biscuit and observes me with foreboding eyes. ‘Or maybe that’s dog poo,’ she adds.
‘I’m sure I’ll live, Jojo.’
‘Is this your special flute?’ she asks, prodding the open case on the table with her sugary finger.
‘No, just my everyday one. The one I use for teaching.’
‘Can I have a go?’
‘Sure, go ahead, when you’ve finished your biscuit.’
She gulps it down, wipes her mouth on her cuff and picks up the flute. I don’t mind her having a try—she won’t be able to play it—and at least it’ll take her mind off the state of my blood and imminent death. I start to explain where to place her fingers, and how to position her mouth, but she’s already standing up, filling her lungs. A sound—a wavering yet powerful note—fills the room.
She stops suddenly, her cheeks blazing, and falls back onto the sofa.
‘Jojo, you didn’t tell me you could play.’
‘I can’t. I haven’t ever.’ She sounds shocked. She dumps the flute on her lap and reaches to the table for a third Party Hoop.
‘Are you sure? Not just a little bit?’
‘Not a bit,’ Jojo says, puffing out crumbs.
No one picks up a flute for the first time and just plays. There are hollow sounds until a note struggles through, then more notes as the mouth and fingers find their way and the flute stops being a scary and cold metal thing. It’s all in the muscle control—the mouth—and, of course, the breathing. At first I didn’t understand what Mrs Bones meant. Eventually, though, I managed to breathe the way she described, with the diaphragm, filling myself up. I felt powerful, full of air, as if I could take off and soar.
Not even Toby Nichols played a true note straight off. Jojo brings the flute back to her mouth. I show her where the fingers go to play a B. ‘I want a go!’ Midge announces, swiping the light saber excitedly.
‘In a minute, Midge. Let your sister—’
Jojo plays a clear B. ‘That’s lovely,’ I say, ‘now try taking a bigger breath, and holding the note for longer….’
‘My turn,’ Midge insists.
Jojo places the flute gently on the table. ‘She’s putting me off,’ she declares, pulling out her pink scrunchie. Buff-colored hair bushes around her chubby face.
‘You could learn how to play properly,’
I tell her. ‘Read music and everything.’
‘My reading’s not good,’ Jojo murmurs.
‘Music’s different. I’m sure you could do it. I’ll help you.’
‘I haven’t got a flute.’
Of course she hasn’t, and Paul Street Primary doesn’t have instruments to lend out. Kids like Toby and Willow have parents who can afford to buy them. Laura Sweet has a top-notch Yamaha, bought last Christmas, which she’s on the verge of giving up.
‘You could borrow this one,’ I say, ‘just for a few days, to see if you like it.’
Jojo eyes the flute warily, as if it’s a crocodile that’s likely to snap at her fingers. ‘It’s not your special one,’ she says.
‘No, but it’s still very expensive and delicate. You’d have to keep it in its case and take care of it.’
‘What’s special about your other flute?’
‘The head joint—the top section—is solid silver.’ That’s not why it’s special, but I don’t tell her the rest.
Midge has forgotten that she wanted a turn with the flute and instead demands junk, for modeling. I have several empty Evian bottles, ready for recycling, and let her bind them together with Sellotape to make a missile. ‘I want to paint it,’ she announces. All I have is white emulsion left over from painting the living room (Alex despaired of my liking for white). I cover the table with newspaper and hand her a brush and the half-empty can. ‘Next time,’ she retorts, following the bottles’ ridges with the brush, ‘get better colors.’
Diane is home now. Killer Queen thumps through the wall. Midge stomps out, with Jojo following her, hugging the flute close to her chest. I watch them clamber over the garden wall. Jojo could break the flute, damage its delicate springs, use it to battle Midge with her light saber. They could move away, as abruptly as they arrived, and I’d never see it again.
Jojo flings their door open. ‘It’s really important to look after it,’ I call after her.
‘Like your ruby bracelet,’ Midge yells back.
Jojo was right. Something is festering inside my hand. I arrange myself in bed so it’s untouched by any other part of my body or the duvet. I still sleep on my side of the bed, not Alex’s side. It doesn’t feel right, sleeping where he slept, even though the bed’s all mine now—was always mine. The window is open a fraction but I’m still shivery-hot.