by Clare Boyd
‘Does it still work?’ I smiled, tugging at the pulley-system that connected with Mira and Barry’s garden next door.
For the first time, Rosie’s attention was on me. She looked up. ‘I don’t know.’
Rosie had discovered it on the first day we had moved in; left behind by the little girl who had lived here before us. At first, Rosie had secretly continued the previous owner’s game, sending little posies of sweet peas to Mira in the bucket, which Mira had sent back filled with homemade biscuits in tinfoil and little notes attached. When we found out, I had agreed she could use it occasionally, with permission from a grown-up.
‘Why didn’t you let me use it?’
‘I did!’
‘Hardly ever!’ she protested.
‘I was worried it would bother them.’
‘Why?’ Rosie said, bending to her work again.
The rope was damp and mildewed. As I pulled it, the blue bucket bounced and bopped along the rope towards the shared hedge. Just as the bucket reached the top of the hedge, I pulled the other rope, reversing the movement and returning it safely home.
‘Because people like their privacy, that’s why.’
‘But she lets Beth go through her garden to my camp.’
‘Hmmm,’ I said disapprovingly.
‘She doesn’t mind, it’s the truth, Mum.’
Knowing it was a sticking point, I changed the subject. ‘Come on, Rosie. Enough of that now. Time to go in.’
‘But I need to do this before tomorrow.’
‘No, you don’t. Now come on.’
Rosie continued wrapping and tying. ‘You don’t understand, Mum. It’s really important.’
‘If you don’t come now, Rosie, I’ll ban your games this week.’
‘Don’t care.’
I braced myself for a fight. ‘I won’t tell you again.’
‘Just two minutes.’
I stood there like a fool, wondering how to persuade her to come back inside, short of dragging her by the hair.
And then she raised her head, dazzling me with her head-torch, brandishing an intricate autumn wreath of oak leaves, which was dramatically backlit by the torch beam. I took it from her and rotated it round in my hands, admiring her work, charmed by its originality, distracted from the goal of getting her to do her maths homework, which suddenly didn’t seem so important. ‘Rosie, that is really beautiful,’ I said, returning it to her.
‘It’s for Charlotte.’
‘She’ll love it.’
Hand-in-hand, we ambled back across the garden, the wreath crackling as it brushed against her knee.
I gave her hand an extra tight squeeze. I felt a pang of fear, as though my grip on her was tenuous, as though she had never really been mine to hold on to. They say that you only have temporary custody of your children, that they are not yours to own. How true this felt in that moment. She was her own little person with her own journey to make. How much influence I had over her narrative was anyone’s guess.
‘Can I do my maths after supper?’
‘Okay. Just this once,’ I said, knowing I’d been duped.
‘Thanks, Mummy.’
‘How d’you get away with it, eh?’ I grinned, pinging off her head-torch and switching it off.
‘Because you love me so much?’ she asked cheekily.
‘That’s exactly why,’ I agreed, laughing, and kissing the top of her head.
When Rosie and I were getting along, I felt at peace in the world. It was all I had ever wanted for us: to enjoy the journey as mother and daughter, to feel I was guiding her towards a happy future. And as we went back inside, I hoped the sense of calm would last.
Chapter Two
Mira sank into the hot steaming water. It was a little too hot. She liked it that way. Her skin prickled with pleasure as she slowly submerged her body up to her neck. The bubbles crackled in her ear. The water near-scalded her skin.
Her bath should have been the most peaceful time of her day, but there were antics next door. The raised voices were turning to screams. She put her book down on the towel and reached for her phone and earphones, forced to listen to the words instead of reading them, to block the noise out. The audio book had been Barry’s suggestion.
He was probably sick of her complaining about next door, but Mira couldn’t bear the screaming. A child in distress was the worst, most abhorrent, heinous sound for her. As if it wasn’t bad enough to hear it at work, she thought, pressing her flannel into her eyes.
It was the only part of her job that she couldn’t stomach. The tears in the playground, the fights, the yelps of joy, she didn’t mind. It was the gut-wrenching screams that she found impossible; when a child was really hurting, inside rather than out. She believed she could tell the difference. If she had it her way, she would make it her business to keep every single one of those children at Woodland Primary happy, all the time.
Maybe it was because she didn’t have her own children. If she had her own, she supposed she would worry only about her own. Although, that’s what frustrated her most about the parents she had to deal with at school. It was all about what their own precious little Johnnys or Marys needed. There was very little concern about the bigger picture, for their community. Like the parents who parked on the zigzags every single morning, who didn’t seem to care that a child might get run over because they obstructed the crossing, just as long as they were not late for work or for their yoga class. The culprits were usually the ‘Down From London’s or DFLs, as Mira and Barry called them. They made Mira cross. Really cross.
‘Hello love? Are you decent?’ Barry said, knocking, rat-a-tat-tat. He would always wait ten or so minutes before he came in for a chat, to give her time to read at least a few pages of her book. The earplugs were in her ears and the narrator was speaking but she realised she hadn’t listened to a word of it.
Nudging the door open with one shoulder, Barry came in with a tray, which carried a tall glass of Prosecco that twinkled at her invitingly. Next to the glass, Barry had prepared a bowl of broken up bits of Curly Wurly chocolate bar. Her favourite.
‘Here you go. Thought you’d need it after today,’ he said, placing it on the chair by her head.
‘Thanks, my dear. What a lucky wife I am.’ She stretched her neck and puckered her lips to give him a wet, bubbly kiss.
He settled down in the wicker chair in the alcove by the small window. Beyond the flowered blind was the Bradleys’ house, almost close enough to reach out and touch.
‘So, how was it today?’ Barry asked. His spectacles magnified his brown eyes and his grey hair was combed neatly to one side. Like a schoolboy, Mira thought.
‘Seemed to go well. They asked loads of questions, and they smiled quite a bit, which I thought was a good sign. Patricia was in a tiz-woz though.’
‘Well, it’s her head on the line if you don’t get “outstanding” again.’
‘Whatever happened to “good”? Good doesn’t seem to be good enough anymore.’
‘It’s all those mums like whatshername next door who come into this area with their big cars and expect all sorts of nonsense.’
‘Gemma and Peter send their kids private.’
‘Still. It’s mums like her that cause all the trouble.’
As if on cue, a muffled yowl emanated from the Bradleys’ marble-tiled family bathroom. Mira knew it had marble tiles because one of the tradesmen had shown her round the house before the Bradleys had moved in. She had lied to the plumber, introducing herself as Gemma’s sister, which was laughable considering how different they looked. Mira was built big, with a round, tough body topped off by her short, blunt grey hair and ruddy tan. It was baffling to Mira that Gemma, with her wispy hair and skinny bottom, could be Head Honcho of Blah-Blah Department at some fancy bank. Amazingly, the plumber hadn’t questioned their contrasting appearances. If she’d come in wearing a balaclava and carrying a swag bag, he probably wouldn’t have cared. No respect for his client, plainly. She had guesse
d that Gemma had treated him badly, barked orders at him and forgot to make him tea. That was five years ago now, Mira mused, staggered by how quickly time flew.
‘Funny how she never liked the blue bucket.’
‘Seemed innocent enough.’
‘Maybe they don’t like you,’ Mira said, blowing a mountain of bubbles at Barry.
‘Thanks a bundle,’ he laughed, wiping his glasses.
Submerging further into the water again, she asked, ‘How was your day?’
‘I did the roses at Lower Barn and Mrs Cranbourne hovered over me all day. Sometimes I wonder why she doesn’t do them herself. Although, she is a love. Quite chatty.’
‘Oh yeah? Pretty is she, too?’
‘She’s about hundred and five!’
Mira cleared the bubbles to see how her breasts were bobbing on the surface. Maybe this was why she liked baths so much. It was the only time when her body defied gravity and looked perky.
‘I feel about a hundred and five sometimes,’ she said.
‘Well, you look about twenty-five,’ Barry said, reaching out to wiggle her big toe. Mira wondered whether marriage-goggles, like beer-goggles, were a thing. Barry didn’t seem to see her with any real clarity. In his eyes, she had stayed exactly the same since the day they married twenty years ago. She wasn’t complaining. With her fiftieth birthday coming up next year, she was grateful for his marriage-goggles.
‘Tell me about Mrs Cranbourne,’ Mira said, adjusting the folded towel behind her head.
She liked his stories about his clients. It was vicarious curtain-twitching. Not that he was a natural raconteur. He would drone on and on sometimes, adding too much detail. She would dip in and out, piqued by certain facts: like Mr Ingham’s habit of clipping his toenails into his wife’s flowerpots when the sun was shining, and young Danny Clark’s progress on the motorbike dirt-track that he was building for his five-year-old in his back garden, or Mrs Bloom’s naked swimming.
A high-pitched, sustained wail rang out from the Bradleys’ bathroom next door. ‘You’ve hurt me, Mummy!’
On and on she screamed.
Barry, usually impervious to the noises of next door, stopped speaking for a second and glanced at Mira nervously.
To Mira, the screaming sounded like fingernails down a blackboard. She put her hands over her ears. She could still hear her, as though it were her own scream. Her own scream. And then a splash and a race through the waves at Climping beach. Ten years old again. Exhilarated, terrified, chasing through the seaweed, squishy and slimy under her feet. A flash of sunlight bleached her memory.
Or was it the streetlight. Barry had flicked open the blind to peer out.
The split screen of Barry, here and now, and the other half, her past.
Mira spoke over her past, as it romped through one half of her mind.
‘Should we be worried?’ Mira said, releasing her hands.
The screaming continued, even louder now, as though the window had been opened. Mira’s head throbbed. A pebble hard into her back. Her knees buckling into the brown stinking mush. Another pebble into her head. Her mother’s laughter. Or was it her sister’s?
‘We’ve been through this, Mira love. It’s just family life, that’s all.’ Barry let go of the blind.
‘The poor little pet, she’s in real distress. Do you think I should go round there?’
‘Barbara’s kids used to scream like that when they had their hair brushed. Don’t you remember on that holiday in Cornwall?’
‘But they were only little ’uns and Rosie next door must be at least eleven now, no?’
‘Maybe so, but when Barbara...’
There was another rattling cry. And then a string of unintelligible admonishments from, she could only assume, Gemma Bradley. It was certainly a female adult shouting back. The tone of her voice was certainly nasty.
‘Maybe we should sell up and move,’ Mira said, meaning it this time.
‘You can’t escape families. They’re everywhere.’ He pushed his glasses up and rubbed his face under them. It made him look like he had no eyes.
‘I’m sure some are quieter.’
Mum would turn in her grave if we sold this house, Mira thought, pre-empting Barry.
‘Mum would turn in her grave if we sold this house,’ Barry said.
‘If we downsized, we’d have a few spare pennies. We could do that cruise around the fjords,’ she said, believing she could really do it. Downsizing and holidays abroad had, in the past, seemed like an exhausting prospect, but maybe she could do it if she changed gear a little.
‘Maybe when I retire,’ Barry said.
‘Yes,’ she sighed, knowing they would never sell up and cruise in Norway. Barry’s mother didn’t haunt the house, but she certainly haunted Barry. The meddling old bag, Mira thought. However hard Mira had tried to live up to her expectations, Mrs Entwistle had never forgiven her for marrying her one and only son.
‘And as for Barbara. Gee whizz, she would have a...’ he began.
Mira wanted his talking to drown out Rosie’s screaming, but it didn’t. The noise entered Mira’s bones. She slipped down into the bath until her head was covered. The water pressing on her eardrums, deadening the sound of Barry’s monologue. She was surprised she could hear his words so clearly. Then she heard the bathroom door opening or shutting. She jumped, sitting up straight, feeling the cold air flare goose-bumps across her arms. Barry had left her. She patted her hair. It was bone dry, as was the skin on her cheeks. She could have sworn she had been under the water. The water was suddenly cold and she leapt out of the bath towards her warmed towel on the heated rail, knocking over the champagne glass.
Still dripping, unnerved, she padded downstairs, leaving wet footprints in the pink carpet.
She could hear Barry in the kitchen, clearing things away.
In Barry’s study, or ‘music room’ as he called it, she stepped over his dusty guitar and his exercise bike and knelt on the floor in front of the chest of drawers. Quietly, so as not to alert Barry, she pulled open the drawer to find the large photograph album. The pink material covering the bindings was watermarked like ribbon. It was smooth under her fingertips.
The tissue paper separating the stiff pages rustled as she turned them. A few of the tiny plastic stickers that her sister had painstakingly fixed to the corners of the square instant snaps had come away from the paper. The photos dangled limply like her memories. She flicked through them, knowing exactly which photograph she wanted to look at.
Climping Beach, 1976, Me, Mira and Mum was written underneath it in her sister’s spidery fountain pen writing. For some reason, when she looked at this faded photograph, her mouth felt dry and her heart beat faster.
It had been a happy day, hadn’t it? Their smiles were in their eyes. Their skin brushed by sunlight. She could almost see her chest heaving after a swim in the sparkling sea that lapped at their feet. A flawless summer’s day. The colour of her mother’s jumper looked yellow in the photograph, but it had been orange back then, back in 1976. Bright orange and scratchy on Mira’s face. The smell of the damp, hot wool on a summer’s day came rushing back to her. Her mother was always cold. And that dress. Mira’s only dress. She put her face closer to the photograph and squinted at the little dots over the white cotton, which she remembered as tiny, brown flowers. One of the thin straps would always fall off her shoulder, as it had in the photograph. She had forgotten about that dress.
The screaming was getting louder, like a siren in her ears, it never stopped. She ripped her towel from her body and buried her head in it.
Barry was behind her. She must have cried out.
‘No, no, shush-shush, not this again, Mira, shush-shush,’ Barry said, kneeling beside her.
Mira felt her nakedness keenly as though she was in front of a stranger. Perhaps she was the stranger. For twenty-five years, they had learned each other’s rhythms and habits and moods, intimately, but there were times when Mira felt like a fraud. He saw h
er one way; she knew different. He had pigeonholed her as a good person, someone worth loving; she knew different.
Barry untangled the towel from her head, wrapped it around her, and held her.
For a moment, she was comforted, slumped into him, allowing his gentle rocking to soothe her. But he continued talking. ‘Rosie’s not yours to worry about. She’s safe,’ he said. ‘You’re safe, with me, here.’
His words irritated her, made her itch under his touch. She wriggled free of him and wiped her wet cheeks with the towel.
‘This isn’t about me, Barry. I have to go over there to check she’s all right. Just to check.’
Barry scratched at the curly grey hairs sticking out of his shirt and sighed.
‘Okay, love, if it’ll make you feel any better,’ Barry said, letting her go.
Chapter Three
Rosie and Noah had pushed me to the edge. They had fought over the soap in the bath; they had smeared toothpaste on their clean pyjamas; they had upended three toy boxes, twice; they had performed acrobats on their beds, messing up the sheets. I had barked orders at them in a low-level bad temper until they were both in bed, ten minutes or so before Peter was due home at nine o’clock.
After tidying the kitchen and preparing supper number two, I trudged upstairs to make sure that the children’s lights were still out. Noah was splayed out, eyes half closed. I picked up his teddy and placed it in the crook of his arm and he smiled sleepily at me. In Rosie’s room, I saw the glow of her torch under the duvet. The sense of failure was monumental. Every ounce of patience evaporated in an instant.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
‘Nothing.’
I whipped back her covers and she quickly snapped the cover closed on her pink, plastic diary.
‘It’s nine-thirty!’ I cried.
‘I couldn’t sleep.’