Читать книгу Pandora’s Box - Giselle Green - Страница 7

Pandora’s box arrives on a grey Saturday in March, wet on its cardboard bottom where the postwoman has laid it down in a puddle outside our front door. My first thought is: I told my mother not to send it. I know what’s in it and I don’t want it.

I’m not even going to open it.

The box has ‘This will cheer you up’ scrawled in my mother’s handwriting along the top. But I know that it won’t. My mother, Pandora—who is emigrating to Sydney with her new ‘boyfriend’—has already told me exactly what she is sending:

‘Just some of your childhood things I’ve been holding on to. All your stuff, you know. Your school certificates and your medals and some old letters I kept. Photos of you and Liliana doing your dancing. God, what promise you two girls once showed!’ she had sniffed, remembering. She didn’t have to spell it out to me that we’d never lived up to that promise. ‘But there’s nothing I can really take with me all that way.’

Of course she can’t and, fair enough, I thought, I am forty-two after all. I can’t expect Mum to hang on to all my childhood paraphernalia forever.

I just wish she’d chucked it out herself instead of sending it on to me. There is something disquieting about having this stuff turn up at my door this morning; something I can’t put my finger on. I look at the box. It’s 7.45 a.m. and the children aren’t even up yet. The hallway is still dark when I pad through to the kitchen with the box, hoping for a tiny bit more light. The fact that she’s sent this to me…it’s as if I’ve been left holding the past in some way. My stomach catches tight at the thought. I feel as if I’ve just filled it with a bowlful of cold porridge.

What I want to do is just chuck the whole lot out without even looking at it—after all, why waste the time? Time is precious. Time is something I never have enough of, these days. The lino on the kitchen floor is freezing my feet and the scissors aren’t in the drawer where they’re supposed to be. My little kitchen faces north but when the sun shines I can see the blue sky in the distance over the tops of the houses and trees. When the sun shines all the pansies and daffodils struggling through in the garden don’t look so battered and lifeless. It isn’t shining today.

It’s all very well for Pandora, I think suddenly. She gets to jet off to sunnier climes with a new life and a new man. ‘I couldn’t believe it when Bernie asked me to join him out there.’ The memory of her voice fills my head again. ‘You know I’ve always wanted to emigrate but the time never seemed right till now. Bernie said he couldn’t possibly set up his new PR venture without me. Just think, at my age!’ The cold feeling in my stomach resolves itself into an uncomfortable patch of envy.

I’ve got the wintertime blues, that is all.

The cardboard box—underneath all the masking tape—looks vaguely familiar. Surely it’s got to be the same one that my mother has kept, tucked away in the back of her wardrobe for the last, oh, century or so?

It must be at least that long because that’s how old I feel. I set about one corner of the box with my little vegetable knife. It must have been at least a hundred years ago that I was young enough to have won certificates at school and drawn pictures that anybody judged worth keeping and…had Mum said medals?

I hadn’t won any medals. I pull a face as the brown tape sticks onto my hands, winding itself around my fingers as if it wants to tie me up. Liliana had won all the medals. All those championship rosettes for the under-fourteens’ ballroom dancing events. Yuck. I had hated those events. I was the taller one so I always had to be the ‘boy’. I didn’t remember anything much about them except that I hated them.

‘You will come out and visit us, won’t you? Just as soon as we’re settled.’ Pandora’s voice over the phone had been breathless, just the slightest edge of anxiety to it had warned me: just say yes, say you’ll come. Don’t bring up Shelley and the fact that she can’t fly so you won’t ever come, even assuming you could get the money together in order to do so…

We are trapped, basically: Shelley and me and her brother Daniel. I pull vengefully at one long piece of sticky tape that has been wound interminably around the top of the box.

My mother can’t—or won’t—see that.

Hell, she doesn’t even really accept the fact that Shelley is dying.

‘Hope springs eternal’, as she likes to tell me gaily every time she calls. Well, she is Pandora, so maybe in her world it does. I just wish I could tap into that eternal spring when I get faced with things like Shelley refusing to go to school because it is ‘a waste of the precious little time she has left’. And maybe Shelley is right. What does school matter, for her? She won’t need the exams. She won’t ever be going to university. She won’t live long enough to ever get herself a job.

It is an unfathomable thought, but it is the stark reality, a truth that winds itself like a steel cord around my heart every time I think about it, threatening to cut me in two.

I cut the masking tape away from my fingers with the knife and flick open the door under the sink to throw it in the bin. Damn it. Why did things have to work out this way? Nothing matters any more. Things only ever matter when you’ve got hope, and today I don’t have any.

My daughter might seem fine, but I know she isn’t. Recently her consultant has been keeping an even tighter check on Shelley. Our one-monthly check-ups have become fortnightly. Lately he even offered to make them weekly, even though there has been no real change in her condition for a long while. But there has to be a reason why he is tightening up on her care, doesn’t there? They warned me last year, after her friend Miriam died with the same condition, ‘Shelley doesn’t have long.’ But how long is ‘not long’? How long is a piece of string?

And how long do I really want to waste this morning, going through all this old junk? I stare at the space behind the little pedal bin. There is just about enough room in there for me to store this old box away without ever having to give it another thought. What do I care about old certificates and photos, anyway?

‘Mum? What was that, Mum? What did the postie bring?’

Shelley can be deadly silent on that wheelchair of hers. She must have oiled the wheels because I didn’t hear her come in at all. She looks wan in the pale morning light, I think, even younger than her fourteen years without all her usual Goth war-paint on.

‘Um, just some paperwork your gran sent through. I’ll have to plough through it sometime. Nothing for you to concern yourself with.’

‘And you’re putting it in the bin?’ She leans forward in her wheelchair to see what I’ve been up to.

‘No. Behind the bin.’

‘You don’t usually put stuff there,’ she notes. She knows I’m angry. She can tell, just like I can always tell what she is feeling. We spend too much time in each other’s company for it to be otherwise.

‘Are you upset because Granny Panny’s left the country?’ Shelley enquires sagely. ‘She was never really much use to you anyway, even when she was here.’

‘Well, what use would you expect her to be? She’s got her own life to live, hasn’t she?’

Shelley sits back, slender shoulders slumped. She is wearing the same pink pyjamas she wore last summer. She hasn’t grown much in the year when most of the girls in her class have shot up to about six foot, it seems. The rest of them have all begun to blossom out.

But something in Shelley’s face has definitely changed. There is a different look in her eye that I don’t remember being there before, a certain angle to her jaw that has made her face more defined, another year older, more worn by life.

And she shouldn’t be worn by life, why should she? She’s never had any fun, never been anywhere, never done anything. She doesn’t know yet what it is like to love or to be loved. How can she be so worn by life when she has never really lived?

‘This will cheer you up’ indeed! I shove the pedal bin in front of Pandora’s box with my foot and close the cupboard door. I’ll give the whole lot to Liliana when I see her. She’s into nostalgic memories and memorabilia. It isn’t of any use to me, that’s for sure.

As far as I’m concerned, the past is dead and buried, and all my hopes were buried years ago, right along with it.