Читать книгу Homemaking for the Down-At-Heart - Finuala Dowling - Страница 8

Pia slept with one arm and one leg clear of the pink bedclothes. Her bed was awash with crayons, books and discarded clothes. Like a drunk who can’t remember how he got into this scrape, Teddy sat propped on a pillow wearing a pair of floral panties on his head.

Pia’s limbs were long now; she was almost the size of a small woman. Her flesh was unblemished, ignorant of trauma or wear. And all about the room, high and low, pair upon pair of eyes – glass, acrylic, felt and painted – watched over her cushioned progress. Trolls in dinner jackets stood alert beside their tented book homes; plush ducks and lions drove pulled-out drawers. Ken the lone male Barbie sat on a miniature dining-room chair, his broken leg – the one Curtis had replaced with a carved wooden prosthesis – stretched out manfully before him.

Pia dreamt that she was at Mugg & Bean with her mother, but the restaurant offered nothing that Margot wanted. Somehow this felt like Pia’s fault.

She woke up. Mornings always surprised her. She had woken up nearly five thousand times in her life, yet still she sat up with a straight back and blinked at the foreignness of it all. Apparently, someone had phoned in to Margot After Midnight recently to say that the world was going to end soon. Oh no, it wasn’t. She didn’t even have breasts yet, so how could the world end? Thirteen – she’d been a teenager for a month! But weren’t you supposed to be different at thirteen? You were supposed to stop playing. She looked at her trolls in the great metropolis laid out on her bedroom floor. Yesterday’s game had been good, and she could think of lots of things they could do next. She also needed to investigate a possible murder in Duignam Road and put the clues in see-through plastic bags. She would borrow Curtis’s magnifying glass. Hadn’t he said he would help her clean the shed and make it into a little house with cups and things today? Sunday rolled out before her like a red carpet. She would block out school until the last minute. If she could reach supper time without letting school in, then it would be a good day.

Sunday supper time. Leroy came every second Sunday for a visit, usually in the late afternoon or evening because he slept late. Her tummy fluttered. She went to find her mother.

Margot woke to the gentle boring of her daughter’s eyes. “Hello, darling,” she said from her pillow.

“My dad’s coming today,” said Pia.

Margot opened the bedclothes and Pia climbed inside. Margot put her arms around her daughter. “It’ll be okay,” she said, still trying to hold on to the sleeve of sleep. “He may be in a good mood.”

“But what if he wants to take me somewhere?”

“You might have fun. He might take you riding.”

“But I’ll miss you. And what if he takes me to those skanky friends of his and makes me watch TV with their snotty brats?”

“Then we’ll say you’ve got a test tomorrow.”

“I can’t wait to grow up. When I’m older I’m going to tell him what I think.”

“You could tell him now.”

“But he might shout at me.”

“He wouldn’t dare.”

“I wish Curtis were my dad.”

The two loves of Margot’s life converged into one great love. “Curtis would be really, really pleased if he heard that.”

“But I feel sorry for my dad.”

Margot wanted to say that she did too, when she didn’t feel like hitting him across his face. But then she remembered – be lovely. Live inside a flowery eulogy.

“Leroy’s an incredibly talented man,” she said.

“Where the hell did that come from?” asked Pia, pulling her head back from her mother’s chest.