I used to make cakes with my daughter once a week on a Saturday afternoon. When she was a little girl. To have with tea in front of the telly. Any leftover ones to be eaten on Sunday.
Little packet mixes for children; you’d put a blob of icing on the top of each cake and a sticker on that. Disney, mostly. Mickey Mouse and the like.
And here I am now. With Rosie. Ready to make cakes with her. She stands by the kitchen table, seeming awkward and embarrassed.
I get the mixing bowl out from a cabinet. Butter, sugar, eggs, flour. A sharp knife from a drawer. A wooden spoon. All put on the table. She looks at them.
I have a tray for twelve little cakes underneath the sink. I take that out and rinse and wipe it over with a tea towel and put it on the table too.
Reach for a half-empty packet of cake cases in another cupboard. I’ve no idea how long they’ve been there gathering dust. Years. I switch the oven on and turn the dial to 180.
“There,” I say, looking at what’s on the table. “Now, what have I forgotten?” I’m half-teasing, half-checking to see if she knows.
She seems to redden slightly as she looks at the table. “Um.” That’s all she says. Then, “Um,” again.
“I don’t use scales,” I say before she can answer. “I know the amounts to put in.”
She says nothing, but watches as I cut off some of the butter and put it into the bowl, followed by rough-and-ready amounts of flour and sugar. I pick up the wooden spoon and offer it to her, then pull it back, teasing, as she slowly, reluctantly reaches for it.
“We’ve both forgotten something,” I say cheerfully as I put the spoon on the table in front of her. She watches as I open and reach into a drawer for my folded-up Michelangelo’s David apron. She looks down at it and up at me as it falls open. I see her smile to herself as she dips her head back down again.
I am tempted to lean over and flip the apron over her head before going the back of her and tying the cords around her waist. But I hesitate, feeling that this gesture might be seen as too intimate, creepy, even. So I simply hand it to her.
We stand there as she puts it over her head and ties it around herself. I am waiting for her to start mixing. She has her head down, looking at the bowl.
She puts the spoon in the bowl and stirs the flour and sugar slowly around the lump of butter. It is soft enough to mix, but even so, she won’t mix it like that.
I reach my hand across towards hers, and she drops the wooden spoon in the bowl. I take it and start mixing the ingredients together properly, squashing and spreading the butter vigorously. She watches me.
“Have you made … cupcakes before?” I ask, hesitating halfway through the sentence as I realise how foolish the question is. Surely every child has made cupcakes at some time in their life. But she’s oddly ill at ease.
“Not for ages,” she replies, not meeting my gaze. I think she hasn’t. Not ever.
“Did you make them with your mum when you were small?” I press on as I continue stirring the cake mixture.
A long pause. I do not think she is going to answer. But as I look down into the bowl, she speaks. “She died when I was little.”
I nod. Unsure what to say next. I think and go on: “Were you brought up by your dad … or a granny and grandad?”
She shakes her head and stands still, and for one awful moment, I think she is going to turn and run. There is a sense of panic. I push the bowl towards her quickly with a gesture as if to say, Go on, you do it. Something to distract her.
She takes the bowl and copies what I was doing, spreading and stirring and folding the mixture up and over and into itself.
I stand there not sure what to do, whether to wait for her to go on or to busy myself, pottering about, maybe getting icing sugar and sprinkles from the cupboard and water in a teacup to start mixing the toppings. Just to act normal.
Slowly, without looking up, she speaks. “It was just me and my mum … and uncles … and she … I was taken away when I was eleven … I saw her twice after … and then she died …” A pause and one more final, meaningless sentence. “I didn’t see her again after that.”
I watch her as she keeps stirring the mixture.
My heart aches.
And swells big enough to give her all the love that I can.
I nod and sigh, but do not ask her anything more nor add any comments of my own. It would, I think, be natural to push on now that we have bonded over my daughter and her mother. But it would be wrong to do so. I do not want to force our relationship. I would prefer it to grow naturally. So that it will go on. And endure. Last a lifetime.
Instead, I busy around. Then, when she has mixed all the ingredients together well, I grease and put the tray in front of her. I hand her a large spoon, inviting her to drop a spoonful of mix into each of the twelve spaces. She does so, making some spoonfuls larger than others and dropping some of the mix on the tablecloth. “Oops,” we both say at the same time and laugh together. It is a nice moment.
When the tray is ready to put in the oven, she reaches out to the teacup I have by my side, full of the icing to put on top of each little cake. Without thinking, I put my hand out and rest it on hers, as if to say stop, not yet … we do that after the cakes have been baked! She does not pull her hand back this time, nor seem to mind that I have my hand on hers. She laughs and says, “Oops,” again. And I tell her we will do the toppings later, once the cakes are out and have cooled. We can have them after our lunch instead of pudding.
She smiles at me. I smile back, taking my hand away as naturally as I can.
Pals.
Becoming good pals now.
As we finish our lunch – more Tesco Luxury Range Lasagne and salad – I bring the cupcakes across to the table.
Push the teacup full of icing towards Rosie. Hand her a spoon.
“Go on,” I say. “You do it … then we can eat some of them.” She takes the spoon and dips it inside the teacup, scooping out a blob of icing.
I watch her and decide this is the time to tell her about my wife. A version of it, anyway. To fill in a gap, so to speak. Rosie must be wondering about my wife since I gave her the make-up box. And as I have talked about my daughter and she has talked about her mother, this is the natural time to do it. If I am honest, I am surprised she has not asked.
“Blob it,” I say. “Just a bit on each … that’s got to go between twelve.”
She looks at me and smiles. The look of concentration on her little face – the determination to get it right – makes me want to laugh. But I do not. We are not yet at the stage where we can tease and have fun with each other. It will come soon enough.
“If you put a teaspoonful in the middle, you can then turn the spoon over and spread the icing across to the edges.”
She slows and turns the spoon over on the cake and gets in a muddle, the icing oozing over the spoon onto the tablecloth. She laughs to herself, happy in the moment. Wipes it off the cloth with her fingers.
She looks at me. Her sweet face.
I smile back.
These happy times. And so many more to come.
She licks the icing off her fingers with her tongue. It distracts me, this. Her tongue, long and pink, slightly repelling me, but fascinating me too, the way it runs over her fingers one at a time.
“I’m a widower,” I say, my voice wavering slightly. An expression of sadness.
She glances up at me, her tongue wrapped halfway round her index finger.
She nods as if to say, yes, I know, I guessed that. As though it does not really matter all that much. To her, anyway. If anything at all.
I am shocked a little. Maybe disappointed is a better word. That a death is just yeah, whatever to her. Perhaps I should be angry.
She was interested in my daughter. I suppose, being much the same age, what happened to my daughter – at least what I said happened to my daughter – is of more relevance. An older woman dying is, I suspect, of little concern. Old people die. It’s the way of
things. Someone of forty-seven is ancient to Rosie.
“She … passed away … after my daughter.” I have talked previously about my wife, many times, and to different people, and use certain phrases that put it over well. Never recovered. Took her own life. I have been grieving ever since. And other descriptions that gloss over the truth of the matter. The heart of things. The reality of it.
But Rosie has already moved on, dipping the teaspoon back into the cup.
Taking out more icing.
Dropping it on the cake, turning the spoon, spreading it about.
And the matter of my wife and her death and what happened is dismissed. Just like that. I had expected questions and had my prepared answers. I know what to say. I do not doubt that Rosie, had she listened, would have been moved and would have felt protective of me.
Never mind. She has accepted the deaths of my wife and daughter as perfectly natural and nothing out of the ordinary. And she is happy here and all is well. And I am happy. All is well with me, too.
Neither my daughter nor my wife cast a shadow.
Over us.
Nor anything else for that matter.
We are sitting at the kitchen table. Rosie and I.
The lunchtime things have long since been put away. Fluffy is asleep in his bed.
And we are ready to have some fun.
I keep scrapbooks. Of cuttings from newspapers and magazines over the years. Anything relating, one way or the other, to yours truly. And other things. Mementoes. Souvenirs. Stuff you can stick to a page. My little collections would probably seem odd to someone who sat there and flicked through the books at random. They might think I was a strange man.
It’s something I started doing as a young boy. I was an only child and lonely, especially in the school holidays. I was not allowed to bring friends home. My father’s work. Not that I really had any friends. I don’t know why. I guess nobody liked me enough to want to come round. I have always been a solitary person, even when I had my own family.
I have continued scrapbooking all my life. It’s a habit. A hobby. Perhaps more. Most of them are stacked up in the loft. The childhood ones are gone, of course. My father burned them when I left home. I went to university and never returned. More recent ones are stored in roll-out drawers beneath my bed. I take them out from time to time and look at them, thinking things over.
Rosie sits opposite me at the kitchen table. She holds scissors in one hand. A glue brush in the other. A pot of white sloppy glue is by her side.
She has a clean, fresh scrapbook I have given to her. And a stack of magazines that I have bought and read and kept over the years. There are articles in them that I like to revisit from time to time.
I have a half-filled scrapbook in my bedroom, but I do not want Rosie to see what is in it, so I have a new one in front of me. I have a pile of old local East Anglian Daily Times and Evening Stars, too, and will see what’s in them. Some bits have been cut out, but there are plenty of pages left.
“You’ve never had a scrapbook?” I say in a light and friendly manner. Conversational. Not interrogative.
She shrugs as if to say no or I don’t remember; a negative either way.
“You can do all sorts with a scrapbook,” I add cheerfully. “You can keep clippings of any stories you’re in yourself. Or cut out pictures of scenes. Or follow a story through press cuttings. Or do what I do, and mix pictures together.” I don’t actually do that, but it’s an idea I have for getting friendlier. I’ve used it before. Twice. With some success.
I pull one or two magazines towards me, flicking through the pages. One’s a farming magazine. There was an article in there that caught my eye when I saw it in WHSmith. About composting. The other a lifestyle one, which I bought back from the dentist’s, as there was an advert in it that interested me. Some liquid for rotting tree stumps. Rosie watches me, slightly puzzled. She is young, naïve even, in some ways.
I take my scissors and cut around a photo in the farming magazine and glue it in the middle of the first page of my opened scrapbook. Rosie leans forward, looks at it, and laughs. I think maybe she knows where I am going with this.
I then flick through the lifestyle magazine, an upmarket one full of photos of weddings and other events in grand houses and barns and stately homes across the county. And smug, self-satisfied people full of their own importance. The Wills and Cordelias who think they are much better than the likes of me. I find a photo similar to the one I had in mind, give or take, and cut a twenty-pence-piece-sized part out of the middle of it as carefully as I can. I stick the part on the front page of the scrapbook.
Rosie laughs, derisive laughter, and suddenly snorts and brings her hand to her mouth. She continues to laugh. An almost jeering sound.
At the sight of a fat bride’s face inside a veil stuck onto the body of a Holstein Friesian cow.
And I know, at this moment, with that one silly act, that I have got through to her. And that things will move quickly from here.
We are going to do our scrapbooks for most of the afternoon, up to teatime and Fluffy’s walk. Maybe into the evening, too.
I cut out photos of cities and faraway beaches. The Eiffel Tower. A beach in Antigua. The Empire State Building. Rosie goes for photos of babies and small children.
We do this all quite happily, mostly in silence. I am a quiet and solitary person. I think Rosie is, too. We fit together well.
I notice that she has cut out a photo of a small baby and stuck it in the middle of the first page, and drawn sketches of a baby from different angles all around it. Then, on the next page, a photo of a slightly older child, a toddler, in the middle with her own sketches to the top, sides and bottom.
I stop what I am doing and watch her. She does not seem to mind the attention. She hums to herself as she flicks through magazines until she finds a photo of another child, a slightly older one now, a boy. She cuts that out and sticks it in the middle of the next page and starts sketching again.
I speak with my head down as if focusing on my own scrapbook.
“Do you have a brother?” I say quietly. I think she said she was an only child, but I am not sure. Sometimes my memory plays tricks with me. I have had tests to prove this. It is not my fault.
“No, just me,” she replies, quite matter-of-factly, whilst carrying on with what she is doing. I expect her to add, I told you, but she does not.
“Me too,” I answer, pleased to confirm the connection.
A moment’s silence.
“Were you lonely?” I ask. “I was. I spent hours on my own during the school holidays. I used to cycle to different libraries.”
“Not really.” She sighs as if she does not want to talk about it. Would rather carry on sketching. She does not add to it.
I do not say anything else. I do not want to push her into a corner. She will open up to me, as and when she is ready.
“I like drawing,” she says suddenly, unexpectedly, a minute or two later.
“You’re good at it,” I reply and add, “Do you always draw babies and children?” I am about to laugh, but see her serious face and decide not to. I wonder if she has been pregnant and maybe lost the baby. She seems so young to me, but it’s possible.
“Not always. I like drawing things that change but stay the same.”
I am not sure what she means by that. But I am reluctant to ask her, to question her too much. She senses my confusion.
“So I would draw a kitten.” She sketches the outline of a kitten’s face on the pad by her side on the table. She then draws the eyes. “And I would draw it as a cat … see, the eyes are bigger, but still look the same.”
I look at her. Uh, okay? is what I think, but I do not say it.
“So, this … and this … and this.” She points to the sketches of the baby and of the toddler and of the small child. “Are the same boy. My drawings, not the photos. You can see how his face changes … but stays the same. His eyes. His nose. His ears. Well, they get bigger.” She
laughs.
I have no idea what she is talking about. I am not sure she does, either. But she is happy and enthusiastic; I like her chatting away. Even if it is nonsense. It will lead to other conversations.
“What I’d really like is a notepad with about eighty pages. I can draw a face on each page, starting from a baby. You can then flick the pages and see them getting older …”
“But staying the same,” I tease.
She does not pick up on it. “When I was little, my dad showed me two photos of his mother … my grandma … as a young woman and an old woman before she died. I did not think they were the same person. But he pointed out how the eyes were the same in both photos.”
“I see,” I say although I don’t. Not really.
She flicks through another magazine, presumably looking for a photo of an older boy to cut out. One who is similar to the photos of the boys she has already stuck in the scrapbook, although none of these are the same boy. Except her sketches are. Or whatever. None of it makes sense to me. But then I am not artistic.
I am watching her when I hear the sound of the helicopter again. It is further away than last time. And the noise is not as loud. But I can still hear it clearly. And I wonder what it wants. Why it is there. And whether it is going to come closer.
Be seen this time. Circling overhead. Whoever is in it is looking down across the landscape through binoculars. Searching for something or someone. There is a prison over at Hollesley Bay, for men and young offenders. They are always escaping, and the public are warned not to approach them. But I do not think any of them would get out this far.
I look at Rosie to see if she has heard the helicopter. I expect to see her head cocked at an angle, listening, a puzzled look on her face. But her head is down, and she is sketching again. I wait, listening. The helicopter comes closer. Lower, maybe. A louder noise either way.
“Do you hear it?” I ask.
“Hear what?”
“The helicopter.”
She stops. Angles her head. As I expected. Listens carefully. “No.” Then she adds, “You must have better hearing than me.”
The Girl Downstairs Page 10