Mud Pie

by Emma Lee Bole

  Chapter Five

  Nan’s House

  I was growing to hate the tent. I loathed that skimpy flapping cloth between me and the pitch-black night. It seemed to amplify every fox’s bark, sheep’s stumble and rat’s rustle, to say nothing of the raucous shouts that jerked me frantically out of sleep, only to hear the Killick brothers hallooing their way home after a lock-in. My bed felt colder and harder than ever; and everything I owned now smelt of cowpat.

  I knocked on Arthur’s door to ask about renting a room, but his tiny, dignified wife Doreen clearly did not want a lodger, especially me. Maybe she distrusted Arthur even though he must be well over sixty.

  Perhaps that was also why Rhoda was so hostile. When I suggested camping in the cellar, she dismissed the idea so vehemently that I got the impression it wasn’t the barrels she was worried about, it was Brendan. God knows why. He looked too much like a barrel himself for me to imagine him straying.

  I decided Rhoda was paranoid. Despite her resentment of me, she would scarcely let me out of her sight. Whether I was grilling (seldom) or just chopping and stirring (usually), she would sigh impatiently at my shoulder like an examiner who couldn’t wait to fail me. It got worse with every meal.

  So, neither listening nor talking to Rhoda more than absolutely necessary, I chopped and stirred in grim silence. The part-time girl, Fay, was as dumb and scared as a rabbit. I rang Charlotte from the bar and felt her voice grow fainter, the connection thinning as it stretched, like Blutack.

  I was an urban ghost in exile, wisping around inside the Woolpack’s thick stone walls which were clammy to the touch. The lounge was morgue-cold when no fire burned in the hearth. And it was always gloomy. A dribble of enfeebled daylight seeped past the china drayhorses champing on the windowsills, beneath a grove of pallid spider plants. At least the kitchen was bright, despite the draughts and a leak where the lean-to had been tacked on.

  Unfortunately, the pub was the only place I could get a wash, a toilet, anything warm to eat or anywhere comfortable to sit; so I was there pretty well all day, trying not to tread mud all over Rhoda’s precious carpet, and doing my best to be invisible.

  Despite my ghostiness, I didn’t succeed. The longer I tiptoed around, the nervier and snappier Rhoda got. I was wondering if I should just bugger off to Scotland, when Frank clumped into the bar one empty afternoon and thudded a large white garden urn down on a table.

  “Got a place for you to live, Lannie,” he announced.

  I looked at the urn. “Bit small, isn’t it?”

  “That’s for Rhoda. Present for you, Rhoda. For your azalea.”

  Rhoda gazed at it expressionlessly. Then, to my horror, I saw her eyes fill up with tears.

  “If I ever see it,” she said. “Thank you, Frank. But you shouldn’t.”

  “Don’t be daft, Rhoda. You said you wanted one.” He put a brotherly arm around her shoulder. Rhoda shook it off, and blew her nose.

  “Get it off that table before it marks,” she ordered, and disappeared rapidly upstairs. I tried to lift the urn: it was immovable. Frank hoicked it up again and took it out the back.

  “Brendan around?” he asked on his return.

  “He’s in the cellar. Frank, what’s up with Rhoda?”

  He looked vague. “This and that. So do you want to see this place?”

  “Where is it? Is it a flat or what?”

  “House,” said Frank. He called down the cellar steps. “Brendan? Think you’re needed.”

  I was shocked. “A whole house? I can’t afford that! Whose is it?”

  “Mine,” said Frank. “Previously my Nan’s. She left it to me, four years ago. It’s over at Brocklow, walkable. Little terrace, two-bed.”

  “You’re moving into Sue’s flat at last, then, are you?” asked Brendan, emerging from the cellar. “About time too. She making an honest man of you?”

  “She’s doing her best,” said Frank.

  “By heck, she’s got her work cut out,” said Brendan.

  I said, “Frank, I can’t afford to rent a house.”

  “It’s not much.” He named a figure that was way too low.

  “You could let it out for three times that!”

  “He couldn’t,” said Brendan. “You haven’t seen it.”

  “Take you now,” said Frank. “Um, Rhoda’s a bit. You know? She’s gone upstairs.”

  “Oh! Right. Thanks.” Brendan, looking alarmed, bustled upstairs after her.

  I followed Frank out to his van. This time, the back held a neat stack of old bricks in a canvas sling. The van smelt of earth and concrete.

  “The house won’t be what you’re used to,” warned Frank.

  “I’m used to not much,” I said, and braced myself for the inevitable questions about my past; but Frank asked none. He drove carefully and wordlessly, gliding to a slow crawl at each bend, until he had to brake for an old man on a bike at the Brocklow crossroads and all the bricks slithered gratingly out of the sling across the floor. Frank sighed resignedly, accepting his lot.

  Nan’s house was a two-up, two-down terrace in the middle of a short row facing directly onto the pavement in Brocklow’s second street. It only had the two. Behind the row of houses, the hillside lurched straight up at the sulky clouds, brackened and criss-crossed with broken drystone walls.

  “Weaver’s cottage?”

  Frank shook his head. “Not big enough. Mine-workers, more like. Or quarry-men.”

  “Still worth a bit.”

  “It will be, when I do it up. Not had much time yet.”

  In four years? I wanted to ask. But when Frank opened the door it was obvious that it hadn’t been done up for forty years, never mind four.

  He was right: it wasn’t what I was used to, but it wasn’t so far off either. The familiar smell of damp neglect nearly made me heave. It swept me right back to my childhood, to the times my mother locked us in the small back bedroom with the stinking mattress and the monstrous rotting wardrobe while she went out on the razzle. Just me and Karl: Mikey was caged in his cot, while Nicole, at thirteen, was out on a razzle of her own.

  I’d forgotten it till now, how the grey stench of mould and mildew clawed at our throats. The wardrobe terrified Karl. She’d shut him in it once too often. He screamed and wet himself, and it took me hours of songs and games each time to calm him down.

  I had to pause on the doorstep to compose myself. Frank was looking at me expectantly, so I made myself walk in.

  Inside, it was better. Everything was different, apart from the smell. The hall was brown. The bathroom was a chilly extension out the back. The kitchen had red, original lino, a White Rose gas cooker circa 1965, and a wooden draining board by a stained enamel sink. Leaning against the rusty fridge were half a motorbike and a terracotta chimney-pot. I wanted to ask about the motorbike, but didn’t. After all, Frank hadn’t asked.

  I peered through the kitchen window. No garden: just a small flag-stoned yard, and behind it, the hunched back of the hillside turned on me.

  “What’s the hill called?”

  “Brocklow, same as the village. There’s no central heating. Back boiler for hot water, gas fire in the front room.”

  We went into the front room. I’d seen a display a bit like it in the Museum of Science and Industry: a working-class parlour of the sixties. Note the brown and orange nylon slipcovers on the chairs.

  And the brass. Nan had liked brass. There was more brass around her green tiled fireplace than in the whole Woolpack: tarnished candlesticks, fire-irons, spoons and a trumpet, and two dimpling rows of horse-brasses reflecting the unlikely golden trees in the lakeside scene over the fireplace.

  Nan’s hearth was guarded by a pair of smug china dogs with coats like porridge. Nan had traditional bad taste. And though I didn’t believe in ghosts, I could just see Nan in there, feet in sensible shoes planted well apart on the blocky crimson carpet, fixing me with a stern eye through her thick glasses.

  “Was she a bit of a formidable
lady, your Nan?” I asked.

  “Could be. Eighty-six when she racked her clogs.”

  I didn’t ask if he felt her watchful presence. It didn’t seem surprising that I could: after all, I was dead too. Nan wore loose fawn slacks and a turquoise cardigan. She had rigid, tubular curls and twitched her head to one side sharply, like a bird.

  “You’d better see upstairs,” said Frank.

  The main bedroom was small and cold, but it held a newish bed, unlinened, and so extraordinarily inviting to my weary eyes and sore hips that I could have flopped straight down on it there and then if I hadn’t cared about Frank taking it the wrong way. Instead I distracted myself by inspecting the sole picture on the wall: a photo of a mountain of mud with staring eyes.

  “Who’s Swamp Thing?”

  “That’s Fran Cotton.” Frank wiped the dust from the frame with a stubby, reverent finger. “Sue’s not keen on him. Won’t have him in the flat. I can move him if you like.”

  “No, that’s all right,” I said, since Swamp Thing’s wild eyes were staring not at me, but at something over my shoulder. Nan, maybe. Except that Nan wasn’t up here.

  Neither was she in the smaller bedroom, which held no bed but was instead crammed full of window-frames, fireplaces, tiles, cardboard boxes, motorcycle helmets, a television, a cricket bat, piles of greyed sports kit and a large pair of wellies which I ear-marked for my own use. Without comment we went back down to the kitchen, where Frank said, “The TV doesn’t work. I’ll take the motorbike up there too, out the way.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Don’t move it! It’ll be heavy.” But he was insistent. While I listened to him clumping the wheel-less motorbike upstairs, I fingered the knobs on the old oven. It was similar to the one in my mother’s flat, on which I learned to cook.

  We’d got a name for ourselves by then. We were on police records, social service files, court lists. Much of that was due to my father, an intermittent and violent visitor who disappeared for good when I was nine, to my relief: but by then, the baton had been taken up by my big sister Nicole (shoplifting, causing an affray) and my little brother Karl (criminal damage, biting, nicking crayons) but was chiefly carried on by my mother. Drunk and disorderly, most of the time. Polish vodka, Chilean wine, Spanish brandy, whatever. She wasn’t choosy, my mother, in any respect.

  So I taught myself to cook. Specifically, I baked. The oven became the heart of my home. Cakes, buns and biscuits, with careful timing, to coincide with the social worker’s appointments. She’d arrive to find me and my mother in the kitchen, sprayed with flour and greased with Stork, toddler Mikey at our feet with a packet of chocolate buttons to keep him quiet.

  The social worker looked, she sniffed, she approved. How could she not approve, with that burnt-gold scent in the air, the evidence before her, the careful cherry on each bun? How could a home that smelt of baking be slovenly or neglectful?

  “Mother coping,” I imagined her writing back in the office. “Family not 100% clean but well-fed and cheerful.” My mother was especially cheerful since I had found for her the vodka I had hidden behind the fridge and would have to hide again that evening, if any remained in the bottle; but for now, her flushed cheeks and rumpled hair could be attributed to the excitement of the oven, her smiles to the comfort of her happy home. I shoved the mixing bowl beneath her unresisting hands, and offered the social worker a bun.

  When Frank came back downstairs, I asked him what his Nan had liked to cook.

  He frowned reflectively. “Sandwiches mostly, the last few years. Eggs. Not a cook, my Nan.”

  It didn’t matter. I would cook, and Nan would watch. It would be nice to have the company.

  In the shadow of the stove, reality shook its shaven head and growled at me. What was I doing in this fossilised house with this strange man, it demanded, why was I loitering in the inadequate folds between small, grumpy hills, while men in blacked-out cars prowled in my pursuit? Why wasn’t I on a train two hundred miles away?

  I didn’t know the answer. I should be in Scotland, Cumbria, Cornwall; anywhere but here. Frank was watching me intently. A shiver trickled down my back.

  “I’ll take it,” I said.