Crazy Paving

by Louise Doughty

  By the time she arrived at her mother’s house, she was tired and hungry. Her mother would have a ready-made pie in the oven. When she heard Annette’s knock, she would turn on a ring on the electric cooker, on top of which would be sitting a saucepan of peas. They would have an early night.

  The door opened. There was her mother, again. The same, again. Annette leant forward and pressed her cold damp cheek against her mother’s, which was warm and papery.

  ‘I’ve got a pie in the oven,’ her mother said. ‘Minced beef and onion. I thought we’d have an early night.’

  Later, Annette vomited the pie neatly into her mother’s clean white toilet. There was a heavy smell of disinfectant and the water in the bowl was slightly blue. Annette pulled the flush, then added some more bleach from a green plastic bottle that sat on the floor, and flushed again.

  As she came out of the toilet, her mother passed her on the landing. ‘Night night dear,’ she said.

  ‘Night,’ Annette replied.

  Her mother knew about the vomiting – she could not help but know. Their house had been built in the sixties and the walls were thin as greaseproof paper. Ever since it had begun, when Annette was thirteen, the sound of her puking and choking must have filled their small semi, sometimes for nights in a row, then sometimes not at all for several months. She imagined her mother lying in bed and listening. She imagined her ironing downstairs, and listening. She imagined her turning the telly up.

  Her father had known about it, known consciously, in a way that her mother had not. Annette was sure of that. She saw the way he looked at her sometimes, half questioning, half annoyed. The start of the vomiting coincided with the early years of her adolescence, the years when her father had begun to follow her around. He stood in her bedroom doorway while she did her homework, most evenings, and asked her if she wanted any help. He would not allow her to go shopping on a Saturday afternoon unless he gave her a lift to the high street, even though it was only a ten minute walk. He would not allow her out of the house at all unless her coat was buttoned and she could prove she had gloves in her pocket.

  When she was twelve, she demanded to be allowed her first trip to the cinema. She wanted to go with her friend Bridget. Bridget’s mum would pick her up, drop them off and bring her safely back.

  Later on that evening, she overheard her parents arguing in the kitchen.

  Bridget’s mother had hair which was the most beautiful colour Annette could imagine for hair, a thick glossy mass of orange. ‘She puts mud on it,’ Bridget had confessed, in tones which suggested she wanted to die of shame. As Bridget’s mother drove them to the cinema she shrieked with laughter and said, ‘Your parents, Annette! Dearie me, you poor love! I thought they were going to ask to see my licence!’ As she parked the car outside the cinema she said, ‘What on earth are they going to do in a couple of years’ time when it’s boys you want to go out and see?’ She was shaking her head.

  ‘I’m sorry about my mum,’ Bridget muttered as they waved her off from the cinema steps. ‘She’s so embarrassing.’

  ‘I like her,’ said Annette.

  They were early. There was no one at the ticket desk although the sweet counter was open. ‘I’ll get some,’ said Bridget, ‘but we’re not allowed to start eating them until we’re inside.’

  By the time the ticket desk woman had ambled back, a small queue had formed. The people behind them were mostly children of their age, some a little older, a couple of adults. It was as they were turning away with their tickets that Annette saw – standing by the cinema entrance a few feet away – her father.

  Their eyes met. He made no attempt to greet her. He did not smile. She wondered momentarily if he could have a double, but no, this man was wearing her father’s heavy coat. As they wandered slowly away from the ticket desk, he stepped forward to take his place in the queue.

  ‘Here,’ said Bridget. ‘I want a drink as well. Do you?’

  Annette shook her head. ‘Let’s go in.’

  ‘In a minute.’

  She felt her father walking behind them as they followed the usherette’s torchbeam down the aisle. As they edged along a row of seats, she sensed him edging along the row behind them.

  The cinema was two thirds empty. The bright rectangle of the screen threw out flickers of pink and grey. Bridget sat down and slumped back with her knees up against the seat in front of her. Annette removed her anorak, folded it neatly and put it down on the seat beside her. Then she sat down too. Bridget pulled their sweets from her jacket pocket. As she opened the packet wine gums popped out, sprang into the air and dived down into the darkness beneath their knees. ‘Oh bugger,’ giggled Bridget. Behind them, Annette heard a cough.

  The film began; an adventure. Annette forgot about her father. Once every few minutes, Bridget’s clammy hand would sneak over and drop a wine gum into hers. They both chewed noisily. When a spider dropped down the heroine’s neck, Bridget leant over and said, ‘Yuck . . .’

  It was approximately half-way through the film. Annette had slid down in her seat and put her knees up, like Bridget. She had lifted her long hair clear so that she could lean her head back on the top of her seat. She went to sit up. And found that she could not. The man sitting in the seat behind her had leant forward and had rested his forearms across the top of her seat, on top of her hair.

  Perhaps she had made a mistake. If somebody was leaning on her hair accidentally, then when she tried to move again, they would get off. Experimentally, she lifted her head. It was only possible to move an inch or two. The man was leaning firmly on her hair and he had no intention of moving, although he must realise that she was trying to lift her head. She sat back down. Bridget passed over a wine gum and Annette put it in her mouth, chewing automatically. It seemed flavourless.

  The man did not move. Her neck became more and more stiff. She was desperate to shift her position. She hardly saw the rest of the film. Instead, she concentrated on her physical discomfort.

  Towards the end she suddenly sneezed, and found that she could move. She sat up and glanced behind her. The man had gone.

  When she got home, she found her parents in the sitting room. They were both reading newspapers. Her mother looked up. ‘You got home alright, then?’

  ‘Yes. Bridget’s mum brought me.’

  ‘Good.’

  Her father looked up as well. He stared at her. She left the room.

  For the first week after he died, Annette hardly noticed he was gone. He had had a heart attack at work. She was fifteen. His boss had come round to the house in the middle of the afternoon, just after Annette had arrived home from school. She had opened the door in her grey pleated skirt. The boss stood there, clutching a plastic bag to his chest with one hand. The other hand hung down by his side, clenching and unclenching. He looked at her and said, ‘Is your mum in?’ She nodded, not moving. From somewhere inside the house her mother called out, ‘What is it?’

  The boss looked at Annette as if it was she who had asked the question. Then he said solemnly, ‘It’s your dad.’

  Within hours, the house was invaded. It stayed that way for days. Then there came the unequivocal glamour of the funeral. Annette’s Aunt Alice took her out and bought her a new dress, soft navy blue wool with a tea-coloured lace edging around the cuffs and collar. It was from a boutique in East Grinstead called Young Lady, which was full of middle-aged assistants with gravity-defying hairdos who followed Annette around the shop twisting their hands together and saying, ‘Oh that looks lovely on.’ Annette had never had anything so old fashioned. She was enchanted. She was less enchanted when, the following day, she found her mother in the sitting room with the dress clasped on her lap. She was unpicking the lace with the end of a fruit knife. Annette sat down on the sofa and watched her in silence. Eventually, the lace lay curled next to her mother’s feet, like crumbled biscuit. Her mother held the dress up, proudly. ‘There, now you’re decent.’

  At the graveside they stood close together. A
nnette in her new dress with the tiny pin-prick holes around the cuffs and collar, her mother in an old brown coat, her face red from weeping. Their next door neighbours, Mr and Mrs Dobson, stood either side of them and held umbrellas over their heads. Mrs Dobson was on one side, with her arm around Annette’s mother. Mr Dobson was on the other, next to Annette. Once in a while, he squeezed her shoulder protectively. She liked the feel of the Dobsons either side of them. It was like having bodyguards. She stared at the coffin and thought, Mum and me, we are the stars. For days now, people had been coming round to the house and telling her how wonderfully well she was coping; complete strangers, some of them.

  The following week, all the people disappeared. Her father had been buried. The house was silent. It became apparent that he was gone.

  The only person who hung around was Mr Dobson. He was an electrician, self-employed. He started fixing things for them. ‘Might as well,’ he would murmur from underneath the sink, his voice echoing. Annette understood that this was because her father was no longer around, although she couldn’t remember him ever having fixed anything even when he was. A week after the funeral Mr Dobson came with a bunch of carnations for Annette’s mother and a book for Annette. ‘Just to cheer you up a bit,’ he said, a little bashfully, looking at Annette’s mother. After he had gone, she swayed softly from side to side in the kitchen, and said to Annette, ‘He’s such a thoughtful man, and that wife of his leads him a merry dance. She doesn’t deserve him. What’s in your book?’

  ‘Poetry.’

  Upstairs, later, Annette opened it: Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. Inside Mr Dobson had written, To a brave and lovely girlie, and signed it, Keith.

  Her mother did not find out about Keith for eighteen months. By then, he had left his wife and moved into a flat in a new development on the edge of Uckfield. Mrs Dobson had come round and wept in their kitchen. ‘I don’t know why . . .’ she had sobbed. ‘He won’t talk to me even . . .’

  Later Annette’s mother said, ‘That put me in a rather difficult position you know.’ Then she added with a secretive little smile, ‘Not that you’d understand.’

  The first time Annette removed her clothes for Keith, she was standing in the bedroom of his new flat. Except for the bed and a wardrobe, it was completely bare. The walls were covered with woodchip wallpaper, painted beige. She stood in front of him. He sat on the bed and stared. She was wearing the knickers that her mother regularly bought for her, cream-coloured ones which came right up to her waist. Keith was staring at the knickers. Oh God, she thought. How awful. I must look about twelve years old. I’ve got to chuck these out and get some new ones. How embarrassing. Keith took her wrists and drew her towards him. He gazed up at her. Then he buried his face in the palms of her hands.

  Eventually, Annette plucked up the courage to tell her mother she was moving out. She was going to live with Mr Dobson. He wanted them to get married. Her mother looked up at her, disbelievingly, from where she sat on a wooden kitchen chair. It was a Sunday. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said.

  Annette went upstairs and began to sort through her things. Later, her mother came and stood in the doorway and began to shout. ‘That man is married! He’s the same age as your poor father! They were almost best friends! He may have left her but he’s still married! What about your A levels? Think of his poor wife!’

  The shouting continued for several months, whenever Annette or her mother met, which was not often and usually accidental. Once, they bumped into each other in Gateways. Her mother had shrieked, from one end of the aisle to the other, ‘Your father is turning in his grave!’

  It was Sunday afternoon. Soon, Annette would leave to catch her train back to London. She and her mother sat in the kitchen. They had eaten lunch. They were drinking tea. Alternately, one of them would lift their cup to their lips, as if they were figures on a rain or sunshine weathervane. In the back garden, cloud and sun were also alternating. Shadows moved about.

  There was a pile of brochures and leaflets on the kitchen counter. Annette saw them as she rose from the table and went to refill the pot. She picked one up while the kettle boiled and began to flick through it.

  ‘You can put crazy paving wherever you like these days you know,’ her mother said. She was sitting with her back to Annette. She didn’t turn around. ‘Not just paths. In the front, down the back, up the walls. Except if you put it up the walls it’s called something else.’

  Annette read: It is important that crazy paving is laid level. Pegs should be placed every nine feet, alternately on each side of the path. Stones should be placed adjacent to the pegs . . . Opposite the instructions was a glossy colour picture of a man in early middle age wearing jeans and a lumberjack shirt, grinningly handsome. He was standing in a front garden and holding a broken concrete slab. Behind him was his house. Standing in the window of his house, was his wife. His wife was holding their baby. She was also grinning. They were both looking towards the camera and the wife had her hand raised, as if she wanted to comment on proceedings in some way. The joints between stones must be between one quarter and one half of an inch and should be filled with mortar. ‘I had no idea it was so complicated . . .’ Annette murmured.

  ‘You have to do it right,’ said her mother. ‘You can’t just do it anyhow.’

  Annette looked out of the window. You know what your problem is . . . Helly had said. Perhaps Annette did not know what sort of woman she was, but she knew what sort of woman she was not. She was not the woman in the crazy paving picture. She was not her mother. She was not Mrs Dobson – or William’s wife. Perhaps, she thought, as I get older and older, all the other women I might be will get eliminated, one by one. Perhaps, eventually, there will be one final option. Then I shall know. ‘Funny thing is,’ her mother was saying, ‘the man said if there’s any pattern, then it isn’t crazy paving. Which strikes me as a bit illogical, if you think about it.’ Annette was thinking of all the different types of women she might or might not be. She thought about her childhood and words ran round her head. In particular, one word – abuse.

  She read the papers. She knew the meaning of the word. She knew about two-year-olds being felt up by their uncles, adolescent girls made pregnant by their fathers, children of all ages beaten, buggered. Throughout her childhood, all her awakened years, her father had never once touched her improperly.

  It was simply that, throughout those years, she had felt that at any moment without warning, he might.

  Chapter 7

  The weather was not kind. Alun said they were unlucky. April was often fine this far south, he said. That’s what it said in the brochure. Joan knew that they were not unlucky, they were average. They were mean, that’s what they were. If they had come a month later they would have had sunny afternoons, all the shops open, warmth. Instead, they got the special offer with twenty per cent off, a brisk breeze and plenty of cloud.

  Torrievieja was perched on the coast a few kilometres south of Alicante. Their apartment block was outside the village, a custard-coloured edifice built around a central courtyard with a restaurant and kidney-shaped swimming pool. It was built to house a couple of thousand, by the size of it, but the only guests at that time were their tour group and three teenage girls in the room below Alun and Joan who played pop music in the middle of the night and did their make-up on the balcony.

  Most of the other travellers in the group were women. On the bus from Alicante, Joan had allowed herself a glance round and a moment of perverse satisfaction that she was one of the few people on the bus whose husband had not yet dropped dead.

  Once they were settled in they kept themselves to themselves. Joan tried to feel pleased. She had prepared herself for mucking in, exchanging life stories, the spirit of the blitz. She had come ready to tolerate people she did not really like. Instead, the group seemed to keep in its pre-arranged order, mixed and single sex couples and the odd lone female. Joan and Alun were among the youngest. The exception was a group of four women who were shari
ng an apartment on the same floor. They knocked on Joan and Alun’s door the first morning and said they were going on an adventure down to the beach and did they want to come?

  ‘Oh,’ said Joan. ‘It is rather windy . . .’

  After they had gone, Alun said, ‘What did they want?’

  ‘They wanted to know if we wanted to take a walk with them to look at the beach. They said nothing ventured nothing gained.’

  Alun grunted and said, ‘Teapot.’

  The restaurant was wood-panelled and served cheese and ham sandwiches at lunchtime and steak and chips in the evening. It was staffed by two young waiters in white shirts and black waistcoats. They had brown eyes and heavily loaded accents which they practised on the teenagers. ‘Hallo,’ they would say, as the girls slid themselves up onto the tall thin bar stools. ‘Would you like somet’ing to eat or drink or shall we talk about t’ings?’

  They ignored Alun and Joan, sitting at a table in an alcove. Alun was relatively patient to start off with, tapping the table with the end of a teaspoon and waiting for one of them to amble over. Eventually, he went up to the bar and gave their order in a voice that boomed around the little restaurant and out into the courtyard.

  ‘I,’ (pointing at himself) ‘would like steak and chips. My wife,’ (pointing back at Joan) ‘would like egg and chips. We would like them pronto. Quickly.’

  The waiters looked at each other and pulled faces. Then they shrugged and lifted their hands.

  Alun sighed, picked up the plastic-covered menu and pointed at the pictures of what they wanted. ‘I . . .’ he began again, pointing at himself.

  The young women watched, giggling.

  Eventually, one of the waiters said, ‘Aah, Señor,’ as if Alun had explained the meaning of the universe, ‘I understand. Cheeps!’

  At that, there was great rejoicing. The other waiter threw his hands up into the air and beamed with joy. ‘Yes! Cheeps!’ They both ran around behind the bar calling, ‘Cheeps! Cheeps!’ Then one of them lifted the hatch behind him and shouted into the kitchen, ‘Luis! The Eenglish! He want cheeps!’