Mimi and the Blue Slave

by Catherine Bateson

  ‘You’ll be fine, Mum.’

  She looked flustered and nervy and when she kissed me I could smell the Chanel perfume she always wore as a charm.

  ‘You smell terrific.’ I told her.

  ‘Don’t open the shop door to anyone. Anyone! If they say they’re a policeman, make sure you see their police ID. You can ask them to put it through the mail slot. Don’t answer the phone, Mimi. Oh, wait a minute. You’d better answer the phone, because I’ll ring at break-time. If there is a break. There’ll have to be a break, won’t there?’

  ‘We always have a break at school.’

  ‘Yes, there’ll be a break so we can all drink instant coffee. I should take a herbal tea bag.’

  ‘Mum! You’re going to be late.’

  ‘I just haven’t been out. Doug was the one who was best with people. Learning things.’

  Mum looked like a new girl at school, her eyes frightened and her mouth trembly.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘Mum. You’ll be great. Don’t worry. Enjoy yourself.’

  ‘I’m not doing this to enjoy myself. I’m doing it for the shop. For us.’

  I gave her a little push closer to the door. ‘Whatever.’

  ‘So I’ll ring three times, then I’ll hang up and ring again straightaway. That’s the call you answer, okay?’

  ‘What if it’s the aunties?’

  ‘You can talk to Marita but not Ann – just let the answering machine pick up. Ann will want to know why you’re home all by yourself and then she’ll be offended.’

  ‘Okay. What about Guy?’

  ‘Guy won’t ring. Anyway, he can leave a message. Everyone else can leave a message. Oh, and don’t have a bath.’

  ‘What? I always have a bath.’

  ‘Well, don’t tonight. You might slip and fall.’

  ‘I think you’re being silly, Mum.’

  ‘You can drown in a bath. You just hit your head on the side and that’s it. You’d slip under without a sound.’

  ‘I could do the same thing while you were working downstairs.’

  ‘No. I’d hear you. I’d know. Mother’s instinct.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense. But, okay, Mum, I won’t have a bath. Can I have a shower instead?’

  Mum thought about it. ‘Okay, if you’re careful. Heat the crumble in the microwave, not the oven, and don’t stand in front of the microwave door.’

  ‘Mum, you really will be late. You shouldn’t be late to your first class.’

  ‘No. Well, that’s it then. I’ve got everything. You will be careful, won’t you Mimi?’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ I told her patiently and gave her another push, closer to the car.

  This time she made it all the way over and opened the car door before turning back to me.

  ‘Go!’ I said tapping my wrist. ‘Bye!’

  ‘Bye-bye, Mimi,’ she called and then she got into the car, shut the door and turned on the engine. I waved at her madly until she’d pulled out of the driveway and was driving up the narrow street behind the shop. I pulled the gates shut, as she’d instructed, but didn’t padlock them.

  Cap’n gone, then, Ableth enquired. Bit of a fanfare!

  I’m the captain round here, I told him. Look sharp, sailor!

  You’re my queen, he said. So what will we do with the whole ship to ourselves?

  I thought of phoning someone, but I wasn’t going to phone Angel. I couldn’t phone Fergus because a) I didn’t have his number – though, of course, I could have looked it up easily enough, and b) we didn’t do that kind of thing.

  I thought of getting on MSN – but the computer was downstairs in the shop. I couldn’t use the computer, Mum had said quite fiercely, in case anyone saw the light and peered into the shop and noticed me there all by myself. The old computer upstairs wasn’t connected to the internet. It was one of those jobs on Dad’s to-do list. I wondered if any of them would get done now – and who would do them.

  I spent the next hour or so channel-surfing on the TV. There was nothing on that I really wanted to watch, but it was kind of fun flicking through all the channels.

  You call this fun? Ableth was looking surly.

  Relax, Ableth.

  I’m so relaxed, so brain-deadened by this banal twaddle, I’m in danger of falling off the planet.

  I was hungry anyway, so I turned the TV off and went downstairs to the kitchen. I peered into the shop on the way. It was shadowy and dark. The things looked different when it was all shut up. The dresser with claw feet squatted in the middle room like a strange animal. Streetlights gave the front room a ghostly glow and headlights from passing cars caused strange shadows to jump across the walls. I didn’t want to go in there.

  Even the kitchen didn’t feel normal. The light was on, but that just made the backyard seem darker. I was used to Dad’s shed light being on and the feel of him working out there.

  I should put the outside light on, for Mum, I told Ableth.

  It just made it more obvious that no one was home. Or no one of any importance.

  I told you so, Ableth said smugly. The sails creak, ghosts walk the planks and The Flying Dutchman crests the horizon. Lonely places, ships at night.

  Don’t be stupid, Ableth. I’m not scared. I’m just getting used to it. That’s all.

  I made an ice-cream sandwich with some ginger-nut biscuits. I sprinkled hot chocolate on the top of the ice-cream. It was delicious. Then I tried one with peanut butter. Not quite as good, but pretty nice if you added a dollop of honey. I heated the rhubarb crumble in the microwave and ate it slowly with an extra big serve of ice-cream.

  Then I waddled upstairs and started to run a bath. It was halfway full when the phone rang. I counted three rings and then the caller hung up. Sure enough, it started ringing again straightaway.

  ‘Hi Mum.’

  ‘Mimi. Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m fine. How’s the class?’

  ‘Good. It’s easy-peasy, Mimi, I understand everything. It’s quite exciting, actually. What have you been doing?’

  ‘Watching a bit of TV.’ I didn’t mention the bath because as soon as the phone had rung, I’d remembered I wasn’t supposed to have one. Was it worse to waste water or disobey Mum? I couldn’t decide.

  ‘You can curl up in my bed, if you like,’ Mum said. ‘That way you’ll know when I’m home, but you can go to sleep if you want to.’

  I didn’t want to sleep in Mum’s bed, but I said okay anyway.

  When we hung up I went to look at the bath. It was a shame to waste so much hot water. I poured in some of Mum’s bath stuff and ran some more water. There was no way I was going to hit my head on the side of the bath and drown. It was just stupid.

  I lay back in the water and read for a while. I was reading Swallows and Amazons. The children in the illustrations had old-fashioned curly hair. The girls wore little bows in it. I wondered if I wore a little bow in my hair whether I could start a new trend. Would I suddenly become a popular girl?

  ‘Mimi’s so cool,’ I imagined Angel saying. ‘I knew she was like that from the day she walked in here with that little retro bow. You know her mother’s made a packet selling antiques over the internet. She was going to move Mimi to another school, but Mimi insisted on staying here. She and Fergus are an item, you know. And we’re besties forever.’

  It worked well when I gave Angel a slightly American accent. Then I tried to think what Fergus would say.

  ‘The girl with the adorable bow? That’s Mimi. She’s such a babe. We’re going out, you know.’

  I couldn’t hear Fergus saying I was a babe. I tried again.

  ‘The gorgeous girl with the sweet bow? That’s Mimi. She’s a real doll. We’re going out, you know.’

  It still didn’t work.

&nbs
p; You don’t need bows and fiddle-faddle, Ableth said somewhere above me. You’re a queen, Mimi. Queen of my creaking seas.

  Ableth! I said crossly. I’m in the bath.

  Covered with bubbles, he pointed out, and anyway, I’m a slave. I’m permitted everywhere because I see nothing, hear nothing and say nothing.

  That’s hardly true, I told him. You break those rules all the time, Ableth! You’re actually a lousy slave and I should release you and make you find your own way home.

  I’m home in your heart, he said carelessly.

  But seriously, you don’t think one little bow?

  He was gone. The air felt empty. Typical! I looked down at the bubbles. There were quite a few on the floor as well. I’d been a bit too generous with Mum’s spa stuff. I wouldn’t need any soap! I let the dirt soak off me.

  Maybe not a bow, maybe something more radical. Maybe I should get Mum to let me cut my hair in some punky way, or get it tipped crazy pink or purple? Or maybe I should try dreadlocks. Would she let me have dreadlocks? Just a new pair of jeans would help, black with skinny legs. Angel was such a girly girl. I could be different.

  The bathwater went cold and the bath wouldn’t hold any more hot. I knew from experience it was too difficult to try to let out the old bathwater to run more. The plug never went back in properly. Also my skin was wrinkling up which Aunty Marita always said was a sign that you were dehydrating. Though how you could dehydrate in all that water was a mystery to me.

  I hauled myself out of the bath, without hitting my head. It took a while – and two bath towels – to clean up the mess of bubbles. Then I went into Mum’s bed and turned on the electric blanket. I felt kind of dehydrated, but I didn’t want to go down to the kitchen, so I drank some water even though I really felt like a hot chocolate.

  I turned on the TV and channel-surfed until I found something funny, rather than scary. It was amazing just how many cop shows were on the TV at night. You’d think that would be the worst time to show them. Wouldn’t everyone just get scared? The program wasn’t that funny – it was about old people and their problems, mostly with their teenage daughters. The teenagers were cool, though. They both wore skinny jeans and one had bleached-blonde hair.

  Mum would never let me bleach my hair. She might agree to skinny jeans, though, and I could always get a cool scarf to wrap around my hips the way the elder teenager in the show did. The daughters disappeared from the show and then it was just about the couple and how they were trying to save their marriage. It was so boring, I went to sleep and didn’t wake up until Mum came in.

  ‘Mimi! You’re roasting. Good heavens, you’ve got the electric blanket on high. No wonder you’re hot, baby. You had an okay time? You weren’t too lonely?’

  I tried to tell her I’d go back to my own bed, but I couldn’t keep my eyes or my mouth open long enough to do that, so I just gave up. I didn’t go straight back to sleep exactly. For a long time I could hear what she was doing – the clunk as she put a cup of tea on the bedside table, the chink as she put her earrings in the bowl on the chest of drawers, a drawer opening and closing, the shoes thumping into the wardrobe. Then a tap running. When she came into bed everything smelt like flowers; her perfume, me from the bath and then the final smell of her face cleanser and moisturiser.

  It’s like sleeping in a field of spring flowers I tried to say, but the words wouldn’t actually come out properly. It didn’t matter. I felt my mouth smile even though my eyes were shut tight. Mum was home and the ship was quiet again.

  When did Mum miss Dad? I wondered if she missed him all the time, or, like I did, at certain moments of each day. I missed him in the afternoons – although now that Fergus walked home with me from school that wasn’t as bad. I missed him as soon as I walked into the shop, though. At dinnertime, I missed his stories and hearing his and Mum’s voices joined together like a glad song of the day. At night I missed seeing the light of the shed on and knowing he was out there, polishing or mending or just sitting and thinking. I missed reading together and his goodnight kiss.

  I knew there were nights when Mum hadn’t slept. She would come downstairs, her face all scrunched up and tight except for the baggy shadows around her eyes. They were the nights I guessed that she’d sat up thinking about him. She didn’t talk about it, so neither did I. It seemed we’d run out of words.

  The old ladies tried. They were mostly widows themselves.

  ‘Men die earlier,’ Mrs Harper told me, cornering me in the middle room one day, between the china cabinet and the nest of corner tables. ‘It’s a sad fact. How’s your mother holding up? I remember when poor dear George passed. I was distraught for weeks. I lost ten pounds. Then I put it all back on. I just couldn’t cook for one.’

  ‘She seems fine,’ I said. ‘She’s doing a course.’

  ‘How wonderful. That’s what you have to do, get back in the swim of things.’

  Mrs Peters brought flowers. ‘More use now than straight after the funeral,’ she said. ‘I hated flowers for that first month. Couldn’t stand them. Then, there was a morning I woke up and thought, I miss the flowers. Where have they all gone?’

  Mum put her little bouquets of dainty roses or sweet-smelling violets on our kitchen table at night and moved them to the shop counter during the day.

  ‘Perhaps we should do more with the backyard,’ she said wistfully one morning, touching a rose petal as though it were a face she loved. ‘I’m sure we could plant a few rosebushes.’

  ‘A course!’ Mrs Herman said when I told her about Mum. ‘Well, good on her. After my Stan died, I couldn’t get out of bed for weeks. But we had been together since we were little more than kids. Five of our own we had, and seven grandchildren he saw before the Lord claimed him. Christmas will be hard. That’s when grief can thunder in like an unstoppable storm.’

  Christmas! I swallowed. I hadn’t thought of that. What would we do?

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ Mrs Herman took my chin firmly in her hand and lifted my face to hers so she could see me properly. ‘You’ll manage. We always manage. Me, I got out of bed, did the shopping as usual. You can’t disappoint the kids, can you? But it was hard. It will be hard.’

  ‘What do you guys do at Christmas time?’ I asked Fergus casually that afternoon.

  ‘Christmas! That’s ages away. Why do you want to know?’

  I shrugged and kicked a pebble into the gutter. ‘Just that this will be our first one without ... you know.’

  ‘Oh. Of course. Well, we have a big feast – everyone goes over to Mum’s brother’s place. It’s really good there. They’ve got a pool and a big enough backyard to play cricket in. There’s always an argument because Uncle Hugo doesn’t believe in organic fruit and veg the way Mum and Dad do. But it’s not a serious argument. At least Aunty Peggy buys free-range turkey.’

  I stared at Fergus. ‘So you all talk about food?’

  It was his turn to shrug. ‘A bit, maybe,’ he said. ‘So?’

  ‘I dunno. We don’t, I suppose. I mean we have Christmas food and everything and the aunties make stuff. If we go there. If we stay there if we go.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Last year we went there and then there was a massive argument and Dad stormed out and said he’d never go there again and Mum whooshed us up and left.’

  ‘That’s bad,’ Fergus said seriously. ‘At Christmas time, too.’

  ‘It was just one of those things. Dad and the aunties didn’t always get along. We came home and it was fine. We all had a good time.’

  ‘But the aunties, what did they do?’

  ‘Just the usual, I suppose.’ I didn’t want to remember Aunty Marita standing at the door sobbing or Aunty Ann’s thunderous face. Or the words she shouted at Mum. Don’t defend him, Lou. He’s nothing but a drunk.

  ‘Maybe you’ll go back to the aunties?
’ Fergus said.

  ‘Yes, probably.’

  Would Dad want us to do that? Surely he wouldn’t want Mum and me sitting around in the kitchen pulling Christmas crackers on our own. Or would he?

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’ Fergus pinched me softly on my arm. ‘It’s ages away, Mimi. Ages and ages!’

  Doing the course was making Mum feel better. After the second week she went out and bought a brand new digital camera.

  ‘Twelve megapixels,’ she said when we brought it home and unpacked it. ‘That’s what I need, Mimi. This is fabulous.’

  We spent the afternoon taking photos of each other and looking at them on the computer.

  ‘We’ll need to get the computer upstairs networked to the internet,’ Mum said later. ‘Edie – this woman in the course – she knows a technician. She’s given me his number. Your dad always meant to do it, but I seriously think it was a little outside his comfort zone.’

  I got home from school one day to find a computer installed on a new desk in a corner of Mum’s bedroom.

  ‘This is fantastic!’ Mum said later. ‘Look, Mimi – I’m online upstairs! What can we google? I’m going to do a course in web page building next. That’s what the shop needs.’ She turned to me and suddenly her face grew serious. ‘But what do you need, Mimi? I’ve been so selfish, haven’t I? What do you need?’

  ‘Black skinny jeans,’ I said, ‘and – maybe a dog?’

  ‘ Black skinny jeans? It’s nearly summer, sweetheart. I get the skinny jeans, but wouldn’t you like them in a pale blue denim for summer?’

  She didn’t mention the dog.

  ‘Pale blue, then, but pale colours make your bum look big.’

  Mum raised her eyebrows. ‘And?’

  ‘I don’t want my bum to look big.’

  ‘Trust me, your bum’s fine.’

  She still didn’t say anything about the dog.

  ‘A new top,’ I added. ‘Something white if I’m going to get pale blue jeans. With embroidery though. You know, a hippy kind of top. And a dog.’

  ‘Embroidery’s very in this year,’ Mum said.