by Rebecca Ley
‘They’re hungry,’ I snort, shovelling. She stops and lowers her spoon. I look at her fingers, I check them. But it’s only been a few months of work. ‘I mean.’
Ruby smiles, and it’s a relief. ‘You’re right.’ She looks me up and down, she looks at her fingers, too, poised above the bowl. ‘Children are better at it than adults.’
I shrug, licking my fingers. ‘They don’t know any different.’
‘Charles had chocolate sometimes. He used to bring it back from work.’
We didn’t ask her, but she told us. Charles died on a boat. They were looking for things. They were on an expedition. Charles got a fever but we don’t know why. There was no way for Charles to get back to land in time. We also know, and have told her, this isn’t something to worry about. There is nothing on land that could have helped him.
Ruby changes the subject as quickly as she brings it up, to give us the impression his name is of little consequence to her. She’s older than us, but not by much. Enough for her hands to be more crooked than ours. Ten years, that’s all it might take.
‘You girls should come along to the church on Friday.’ She gestures to me and Mathilde, because we’re the new girls. ‘There’s music.’ She’s watching my oatmeal disappear. ‘I help organise the thing, nice place to take the kids.’ We nod, politely. I think of last weekend where we holed up at home. We tried to light a fire in the old fireplace and burnt the rug. We hung our clothes by it to dry. We blew on the wood to keep it lit. We huddled by it and told each other stories about the future.
Ruby raises her eyebrows, ‘There’s heating.’
‘There is?’ I clatter my spoon into my bowl. ‘We’re there.’
Ruby takes my hand and I try not to touch her crooked knuckles. I don’t want to feel them, because I know I’ll think about them. They curl around my fingers, and I realise it is joy that makes her do this. ‘There’s booze too.’ She whispers, close to me. ‘If you ask the priest right, for communion.’ She makes a glugging motion with her hands and mouth. It isn’t that hard to find drink, but it is expensive. It helps with the cold.
Ruby has red painted nails as red as her name. I ask her where she gets her cosmetics. I find it such a jarring thing to bother with. Especially with her fingers, but also for the fact that there’s nowhere to go. What a thing to spend money on. She said she made a trip, a few years ago, to the nearest town. She found some leftover things there. The nail varnish has hardened in its bottle now, and she tells us she has to hold it over the fireplace to warm it up before she can paint with it.
‘It’s called “Affair in Red Square”. Do you remember how nail varnish had names like that?’
I laugh. ‘I remember,’ I say, ‘God, how stupid. How perfectly stupid. You could be a nail varnish: “Ruby with her red nails”, that’s what they call her.’ I think it sounds like freedom.
I know we will both spend the afternoon thinking of the warmth, and the bodies, and how like London that might be. How we have nothing to wear that we might have worn then. Nothing but overalls and blue jeans that gather around the bum and the knees, that we have to wear with men’s belts we find in seconds shops, belts once worn by people who looked smart in them. The kind of belt my grandfather bought when he moved to Kenya and subsumed himself into Britishness: the belt that landed him in the paper with his immaculate suit and turban under the list of ‘best-dressed’. The belt that my grandmother fretted about him wearing at my mother’s wedding, when he should have been in traditional dress. The kind of belt that once acted as a symbol and a set of signs; that once designated a kind of culture and a language. The kind of belt that once started arguments, and once made someone happy.
Now the belt means nothing.
I think about Ruby’s red nails, and the shiny lacquer of Affair in Red Square, not even chipped. I look at them, and remember the process of pushing cuticles back, removing the skin, shaping them, holding your extremities as decoration. I wonder about her house and how she lives. Even with the children, she must have acetone about the house. She must, because she must remove the polish, neatly, and reapply it. I am so struck by this thought of a bottle of acetone sitting in her bathroom cupboard that I see it in front of me, as if it were there: the lilac colour of the bottle, and its smell. It’s positioning in the cupboard in the corner, its winkingly glossy, clear liquid, label turned away, bottle turned towards me.
It makes me think of Gloria and that last party we went to. I can’t remember if her nails were painted (even though Mathilde asked me afterwards, several times, as though it might have made a difference). But I do remember what she said, half-sitting on the window ledge, her legs tucked over one another, casually. Wearing her jeans, one hand jutted out from her body, dangling a cigarette, the paper burning through to nothing without her having taken a drag.
This is such a bore! she said, and she laughed, gladly. But she did also look out of the window and stop laughing. And said, turned away from me, We’re all such bores, even now.
Thinking about Ruby’s nails and knowing about that bottle of acetone makes me just as excited as I was at that party, when we had everything. Strange, that it excites me now, when at that party all those women could have had painted nails, and I wouldn’t have noticed.
That was the beginning, I think, another beginning: that party. That last day. When Gloria, who may or may not have had painted nails, but definitely had 100% pure acetone, went to the bathroom and drank said bottle of acetone. She drank it like it was a martini and might have bequeathed her a light head but that was all; might have had an olive in it, but that was all.
It was bloody murder in the bathroom when I found her, and too late by then, but we decided she might have said she thought she’d been drinking a cocktail, and that was all.
Of all the much easier ways to do it in the world we lived, even then, it was a strange choice, a choice I thought about often, of all the choices you could make. Maybe there weren’t many, but there were some, and that was one. Even with the open window, she’d made that choice.
But it wasn’t so strange that we didn’t understand, not so strange that we couldn’t explain it when we found her. Not so strange we didn’t look at women’s painted nails after that and wonder about their acetone. Or toilet bleach, or furniture polish. Or whatever else women still had in their houses and thought about.
‘What about our son?’ Mathilde says. ‘Can we bring him?’
Ruby looks at us, surprised. She is clearing away our bowls, as we are ready to start our last shift.
‘You have a child?’ she asks, amazed.
‘Yes we do,’ I say, ‘Is that okay?’
Ruby looks from one of us to the other, hoping for more explanation. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘It’s just, you’ve been here for weeks now and you hadn’t mentioned.’ A smile overwhelms her face. ‘What a relief for you, with the child policy in London. What a relief that must have been.’
They’ve heard about it then. Despite that tenuous border and all that rain separating them from Mrs P, they know about the policy.
She looks searchingly from one of us to the other, as though to ascertain who she should be relieved for. ‘Do you mind me asking?’
‘He’s both of ours,’ Mathilde says, then looks at me.
‘We raise him together,’ I say.
‘Oh,’ Ruby says, and raises her eyebrows and smiles. She might assume that together means that we are romantically together, and neither of us counters her assumption. It matters little, either way, especially when I think we are together in nearly every sense. There is only the three of us. I think of us crawling up under our blanket on our one bed, trying to stoke the fire with our feet.
‘And you didn’t want any more?’ She looks between us, as though wondering who she should feel sorry for, as she had felt sorry for the both of us, thinking us childless, only moments ago.
‘Oh, no,’ I say, my face straight, ‘One was enough to almost kill us.’
I break a smile and Ruby exhales. She laughs, but it is out of pity.
I remember Hugo’s birth vividly, we both do; the pain on our faces and the horrible energy of it. It was just the two of us; and then, suddenly, three. We gawped at the responsibility of another life when we hadn’t always taken our own seriously. We had to immediately care for him more than we’d ever cared for ourselves. We knew he was going to see the world through our eyes so we had to work out what that meant.
Almost six years have passed since then.
We arrive home, together today, and collect him from our landlady in the flat above us.
‘Was he good?’ Mathilde says. ‘Were you good?’ she asks him.
Hugo looks up at her. ‘Yes, Maman,’ he says, surprised.
‘He was fascinated by the jars in my cupboard, so I gave him one.’ Mrs Donald says. She gestures to the jar he clutches in his hands. I bend down and squeeze it out of his, to look at it. His face breaks and he starts to cry.
‘Come on, Hugo,’ Mathilde says, soothingly. I take little notice, and hand the jar to her. It has a label on it, Strawberry Jam. ‘Oh, Mrs Donald, no, we can’t accept this.’
‘He’ll like it,’ she says, bending down and rubbing his back to try and stop his crying.
He stops abruptly when she touches him, and looks at Mathilde, arms outstretched. ‘It’s time to go home now, isn’t it, Maman?’
She nods at him. ‘We can have it after dinner.’ She places the jar back in his hands and he laughs gleefully.
‘How did the food get in the jar?’ He says, holding it up to his face. He shakes it. ‘Did it come from here?’
‘Thursday, then?’ Mrs Donald says, straightening up and trying to regain her detached air of indifference towards him that always manages to slip. ‘Little boys shouldn’t cry,’ she says to Hugo, as though warning him. He reaches out for my hand and we start to walk down to our flat.
‘Thursday,’ I call out, in agreement.
As we get to the door I say to him, ‘Boys can cry as much as girls.’
‘I don’t want to be a girl,’ he says.
‘And you’re not,’ I say. ‘But you can cry.’ I look at Mathilde, waiting for her to agree.
‘We can all cry as much as we like,’ she says, gleefully, opening the front door. She picks Hugo up and brings his face to hers, as we walk into the kitchen. ‘Let’s wail and wail until Mrs Donald tells us off.’ He starts to laugh, and wriggles his legs.
‘What’s for supper?’ I say.
As soon as Mathilde puts him down, he runs up to me and showers me with kisses. I hold out my arms for him and swoop him up. ‘I’m a boy, aren’t I, Mummy?’
‘In a sense, Hugo,’ I say.
‘Do you cry, Mummy?’
‘Only when it matters.’
‘When I grow up I don’t think I’ll cry.’
‘Big words,’ I say, and pat his belly, ‘Big words.’
After we’ve eaten some potatoes and cabbage, all three of us bundle into bed. We submerge under the blanket, and Mathilde takes out her worn copy of Peter Pan. We found it in an old shop months ago, and the sight of it warmed us, in a way. It made us feel close to Gloria and Gwendolyn again, as though we were laughing with them as we turned the pages.
We told Hugo it was a book for older children and so he flicked through it to make a point. We relented, recently, and have started reading it to him as part of our nightly routine. But there’s so much about it he doesn’t understand. We have to explain Nana the dog to him, and mermaids, and fairies, but not thimbles or sewing. He understands why Wendy must sew Peter’s shadow onto his feet. And he understands imagination, and how time passes in strange ways in Neverland.
Mathilde does the reading. She tests him, to see if he can remember. ‘Who’s Wendy?’ She says, and he’ll reply as best he can.
‘She’s the lady, she’s the Lost Boys’ mother,’ he says.
‘And where do they live?’
‘Neverland.’
I see her look at him, deciding on the kind of child he is. And I think she likes to say the names again; Wendy Darling, and Peter Pan, and Hook.
She encourages his questioning, even when it becomes relentless. ‘Why aren’t there pictures in grown-up books? Don’t grown-ups like pictures?’ he says, as we bundle down and Mathilde reads him the first sentence.
‘They do,’ she says, pleased with him. ‘But when you get older you like to focus on the words more.’
‘Are words better than pictures?’
She smiles. ‘Neither is better. But words make pictures. I say a word and you see a picture in your head, don’t you? So you don’t need to have someone draw it and tell you what the picture in their head is like.’
He muses on this for a second, before saying, ‘But I can’t imagine Neverland on my own. It’s not like here.’
‘That’s true,’ she says, ‘but you can try.’
‘It’s okay, Maman, I’ll find it for us. Second star to the right and straight on ‘til morning.’ He pauses, he looks at her and I start stroking his head. ‘You can keep reading now,’ he says, as though it’s obvious. We always start from the beginning as soon as we reach the end, and he enjoys the repetition of it, as though he finds something new in it each time.
‘Back to Mrs Darling,’ Mathilde says, turning to the first page, and reading:
‘She was a lovely lady, with a romantic mind and such a sweet mocking mouth. Her romantic mind was like the tiny boxes, one within the other, that come from the puzzling East, however many you discover there is always one more; and her sweet mocking mouth had one kiss on it that Wendy could never get, though there it was, perfectly conspicuous in the right-hand corner.’
Out of the three of us, he falls asleep first, sandwiched in the middle. Mathilde and I look at each other over the top of him in the dark. She keeps reading at first:
‘Mr Darling got all of her, except the innermost box and the innermost kiss. He never knew about the box, and in time he gave up trying for the kiss.’
I look at her, and down at Hugo, now sound asleep. ‘He’ll understand it better in a way,’ I say, ‘when he’s older.’ I look up at her again but she breaks my gaze.
‘We need another book,’ Mathilde says, ‘We can’t read Peter Pan until he’s twenty-one.’
‘We could try find Treasure Island.’
‘Funny,’ Mathilde says. ‘I’m serious.’
‘So am I,’ I whisper as Hugo lets out a heavy breath. ‘Another book would keep us going for years.’
‘I’m going to ask Ruby,’ she says. ‘She must have books.’
I look at Hugo’s small ear, turned towards me, perfectly formed in miniature. We didn’t have to do anything for that structure to form, intact, impeccably rendered. I don’t want to think about what happens when we finish Peter Pan, or any other book. I want him to stay like this.
‘I’m not sure she cares about books,’ I say.
‘She might know about a school, though.’
I prop myself up on my elbow. ‘People at schools ask questions.’
‘We can’t keep him here. We don’t have enough to teach him with.’
‘But that was the plan.’
‘He’s clever,’ she says, a tone of desperation in her voice. ‘He needs to go to a school.’
I look at him. He is grasping Mrs Donald’s jam jar in his sleep. ‘Do you think he knows there was jam in that once?’
‘Mrs Donald would have told him. She might have explained what it was.’
‘I remember raspberry seeds. That got stuck in your teeth.’
‘I don’t remember,’ she says.
‘You do, it was sweet.’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘He pretended to, after dinner. Did you see? He pretended to remember. He ate air out of the jar with a spoon.’
‘She must have told him, but he can’t imagine. He doesn’t know.’
‘No. You can’t imagine a thing like that.’ I look at he
r, I whisper.
‘So maybe it’s better not to try and make him. It will only hurt him. He shouldn’t try and imagine. He shouldn’t have to. We shouldn’t have to.’ She looks at me, pointedly, ‘It will only break your heart.’
She tilts her head towards me, pleading. I have no way to tell her we’re too far gone for that.
5
On Sundays we go to the market in town. Hugo can barely contain his excitement as people plonk things they don’t want on makeshift tables. The bulk of stalls are made up of Mrs Campbell’s rejects, which means everyone has built up a substantial collection of blankets and warm gear; odd clothing with bad stitching and holes (easily mended) and awkward squares of fabric (good enough for anything).
This is the third time we’ve come, and I marvel, as I look across at this drizzly sight of vendors, that Hugo is excited about these items. It’s the experience of looking at things he’s never seen before, holding them in his hands, and asking me about them that matters. Even if they’re only forgotten toys with no batteries, wool jumpers that have shrunk and collapsed, old door handles and wires that have no earthly value. Not now.
The last time we came, he surprised me by picking up an old calculator, one which would never work because there would never be the batteries to power it. I held it up to the sky to check if it was solar powered, but realised that was futile too.
‘I don’t think it works,’ I said, and he looked so disappointed I bought it for him anyway, and he carried it along pressing the numbers until his fingers grew sore and he had to wiggle them about in front of him. I laughed at him, watching these hours of fascination, until he eventually looked up at me and said, ‘What’s it for?’
My stomach fell with guilt, that I hadn’t explained it to him. That I assumed he knew. I felt terrible that a thing he didn’t even understand brought him such joy.
‘Don’t cry, Mummy,’ he said, and I laughed it off. But he put the calculator down after that.
I look for things too, but it’s a different sort of looking. His is discovery, enchantment and a world of endless possibility. Mine is the pointless hope of recovery. I look for books, but there are never many. I look for anything that might have a musical note on it. I look for parts of a piano – parts, because who wouldn’t have ripped it in pieces if they found one, to use for firewood. I look for old newspapers to check, afraid, for any sign of us, or them. I look for anything that is recognisable, anything that’s familiar. I look for anything that I could hold up to him and say: look, this is what we left behind. Mathilde doesn’t come with us, and I know it is because it is easier for her not to pretend there might be something worth giving to Hugo, there might be something worth finding. When he brings home another pointless object, the letter Q from an old keyboard, I am the one who tries to explain to him what qwerty is, and she is the one who looks into her lap and continues sewing. She resists telling me to be quiet, but I turn quiet eventually, anyway.