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Chapter Eight

Our kitchen smelled even damper than usual: soapsuds and wet wool. Mrs Owen knelt like a woman at prayer, a mat of newspaper spread beneath the open oven door to catch the orange-brown drips as she tackled two months’ worth of baked-on grease. Her formidable hindquarters moved rhythmically up and down as she rubbed. I was at the sink, scouring the metal racks. My hands were raw pink from the hot water, my fingertips grooved with wrinkles like raisins. My father was out at work: I never saw him on Saturday mornings.

‘Water!’ came a muffled roar from inside the oven. I scrambled to obey. My other task was to keep the plastic washing-up bowl full of fresh water so Mrs Owen could rinse her cloth. ‘I think your father imagines it’s the fairies do this.’ Her head was still inside the oven. ‘This bit’s a tough ol’ bugger. Is that water clean?’ I squatted beside her, the water slopping over the sides of the bowl. The strong, sharp smell of oven-cleaner made my eyes water. Mrs Owen shuffled backwards on her knees and her stiff grey curls emerged from the oven. She looked like a human Brillo pad.

‘You ought to be out with your friends, petal,’ she grumbled, plunging her cloth vigorously into my bowl. More water slopped out on to the newspaper. ‘Bleedin’ Jesus, now look at my dress.’ She laughed, a big child cheerfully splashing in puddles. ‘One more go.’ Her wire-wool head disappeared again.

I settled back on my haunches and sat cross-legged on the floor, balancing the bowl on my lap, always the handmaiden to Mrs Owen’s domestic priestess. My dad didn’t think it was the fairies who cleaned and dusted and washed the sheets; he thought it was me.

The radio was on in the front room, and I could hear crackles of laughter and applause. We always turned it on when Mrs Owen came round because the clock in the kitchen didn’t work, and I had to keep listening out for the pips at the beginning of the lunch-time news, because then it was time for Mrs Owen to wash her hands, shake her soggy dress and vanish as utterly as an elf before my father came home.

With a final grunt, she emerged, holding aloft her greasy cloth. I proffered the bowl. She plunged and wrung. I put the bowl down and we both plucked at our sopping chests.

‘I don’t know what your dad cooks in there but it’s always filthy.’

Mrs Owen didn’t believe my father could cook, so she supplemented our diet with homemade casseroles and slightly leaden Victoria sponges. She blamed my lack of height on poor nutrition, which was not true. My mother was petite. There was a photograph of her on honeymoon in Cromer. My dad, arm round her shoulders to protect her from the cold Norfolk winds, towered above her, though he was not especially tall.

Mrs Owen crumpled the newspaper and tossed it into the bin. She peeled off her rubber gloves, and fumbled in her pocket for cigarettes. She wouldn’t smoke one: she just liked to remind herself they were there. ‘You’ve made a good job of those,’ she said, eyeing the racks. They gleamed. ‘Stick ’em back in the oven, and we’ll have a nice cup of coffee.’

A drink and a chat were Mrs Owen’s only reward for her labours, and I never had the heart to refuse. I filled the kettle.

‘Not too strong, petal,’ Mrs Owen warned. ‘Gives me palpitations.’ She settled herself at the table. I knew she would have liked that cigarette, but my father didn’t smoke, and the scent of tobacco mixed with the cleaning smells would get us both into trouble.

The kitchen in our house was small, and hadn’t been altered since my father and mother had moved in after I was born in 1962. There was just room for the red Formica-topped table and two red plastic chairs. The cream paint on the units was chipped, and the plywood cupboards on the walls had sliding doors that had warped and sometimes got stuck half open. I hadn’t been able to close the one from which I’d taken the coffee jar, and I saw Mrs Owen staring thoughtfully at it. ‘Time your dad redecorated,’ she said, as I put the coffee in front of her.

I imagined the smouldering Gary Bennett, on a ladder slapping paint on the ceiling while I watched his overalls tightening over his muscular bum every time he lifted his arm. I knew it wouldn’t happen. My dad wouldn’t pay someone else to decorate; he’d be up the ladder himself. Or, more likely, he wouldn’t do it at all.

‘He always says he’s too busy,’ I said, hoping this would prompt Mrs Owen to talk about Gary, who had recently done her kitchen. But she wasn’t so easily led.

‘And them cupboards ought to go,’ she said. ‘Don’t cost much to buy a whole new kitchen from MFI. Wouldn’t take a practical man like him long.’

Poppy’s mother had ordered a German-made kitchen that had cost more than a thousand pounds. It had little violet and green sprigs of flowers on the doors, and a lovely marbled worktop. But Poppy’s kitchen was three times the size of ours, and there was a swimming-pool in their garden. Her dad drove a big grey Daimler, and her mum had a sky-blue estate as a runaround.

‘You are quiet,’ said Mrs Owen. ‘What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Tired. Didn’t sleep too good.’

‘Your father should never have sent you to that school.’ Mrs Owen’s brow corrugated like her curls. ‘It’s wicked how hard they work you. And you always with your nose in a book. I don’t know, mine were never like you.’ Mrs Owen’s two daughters had both married sensible milkmen. They’d met them together at a dance in the church hall, and had moved into neighbouring streets to raise fat, milky babies. Their idea of serious reading was the knitting pattern in Woman’s Weekly. ‘What I say is, what’s the point of teaching girls about science?’

My fingers traced an ammonite’s spiral on the tabletop. I was keeping an ear open for the pips.

Mrs Owen took the hint and lumbered to her feet, her coffee only half finished.

‘Better be off. Keith’ll be on his way.’ She always pretended she was going because her husband would be home soon, rather than my father. ‘My goodness, it’s gone black over Bill’s mother’s.’ She peered out of the kitchen window at the gathering rainclouds. ‘Switch the light on, Katie, let the dog see the rabbit.’

She was always coming out with these weird phrases, invocations to appease the everyday gods of women’s things and weather. I peeled myself from the plastic chair and got up to find a clean tea-towel while she rinsed the mugs.

‘Your dad’ll be soaked. Give him my best, won’t you?’ She knew full well I never told him she’d been there.

As she put the mugs away, I had a sudden urge to give her a hug, yearning for the feeling of her big soggy bosom against my cheek. But that wasn’t something I ever did. She ruffled the top of my head when she went past me on her way to the door, and like a cat I pushed up against her hand. That was the closest we came to physical affection. When I heard the front door close behind her, I sat down again at the table and thought about my mother.

My last memory of my mother isn’t even a memory. It’s more a feeling of being warm and enclosed, the details so sharp yet at the same time insubstantial that I may have made the whole thing up. It’s Christmas, or near it, I think–there are lots of glittery things around, and I can see firelight on shining spheres. A rack of clothes is drying in front of the fire, wet mittens, socks and my little blue coat, giving off a damp woollen smell. I’ve been playing out in the snow, but now it’s dark and time for bed, and I’ve eaten a bowlful of something sloppy and sweet and comforting that’s a bright orange-yellow. I’m wearing my pyjamas, and I’m sleepy, curled up on the wing backed sofa, and my mother is reading to me, a story about Wynken, Blynken and Nod, three fishermen who are being rocked to sleep in the arms of a crescent moon sailing through the sky like a boat. Or was it a wooden

shoe? I am drifting too, wrapped in the wet, warm smell of the steaming clothes.

Whether that was the last time I had seen my mother I wasn’t sure, but it was what I remembered as the last. Before the New Year she was gone. Every December after that my father brought out the packets of tinsel, the lantern-shaped Christmas-tree lights that always seemed to fuse and that he patiently fixed, year after year. But it was never the same. The unearthly boat in which Wynken, Blynken and Nod sailed the skies had taken away my mother too.

My father never talked about how she had left, or why.

‘She’s gone away,’ he said vaguely, if I cried for her when I was small. ‘Sssh now. Be good, or she might hear you and never come back.’

But she never did come back, however good I tried to be.

Nobody ever explained. What I knew, I overheard. One day, in the school holidays–I must have been eight or nine by then, but I still hid under the dining-table, playing house by myself–Mrs Owen was babysitting, while my dad was out at work. She had invited two of her friends round. They sat in the back room, with the french windows open to waft out the smell of their cigarettes. They didn’t know I was there.

Mrs Pegg must have spotted the photo of my mother on the mantelpiece. ‘Imagine that,’ she said, exhaling a whispery stream of smoke, ‘going off and leaving your kiddie.’

I sat Beau Bunny against the table leg, and lifted the edge of the cloth to hear better.

‘No grandparents?’ asked Mrs Joad.

‘All dead,’ confirmed Mrs Owen.

‘Poor lamb,’ said Mrs Joad.

‘Poor little petal,’ Mrs Owen agreed. That was what told me they were talking about me. She always called me her little petal.

‘Don’t she even write? Send birthday cards?’

‘She went off just like that. Wouldn’t think a mother could, would you? Cut off completely.’

‘Heartless.’

‘Cut his balls off, I’d say.’ Mrs Pegg sniggered. ‘You’d think a man’d go after her.’

I heard a rustle as Mrs Owen leaned forward on the settee. There was the smack of her lips on the cigarette. She lowered her voice. ‘She was in the family way when she went.’

‘Not his?’

‘Someone else’s, is my bet. She was seeing another man.’ She whispered something that sounded like ‘sojer’.

I wanted to hear more but must somehow have given myself away. The tablecloth whipped to one side. Three faces peered in at me, breathing tobacco breath, wondering how much I’d understood.

‘Poor man,’ I heard Mrs Joad say, as she pulled on her plastic mac on the doorstep. ‘Left to bring up a kiddie by hisself. Manages well, though, dunnee?’

Something inaudible from Mrs Owen–probably ‘Thanks to me.’ Her back was towards me so I sidled into the hallway.

‘Of course,’ Mrs Pegg said, bending her poisonous yellow curls towards Mrs Owen’s grey ones, ‘there’s always two sides, in’t there? Perhaps he druv her away.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Mrs Owen. ‘He’s a lovely man. Polite always. Ever so nice.’

Her loyalty was misplaced. Not long after that, my father decided he didn’t like Mrs Owen being in our house all the time. He told me she was nosy, and maybe he told her too, because she seemed rather pink about the eyes when she took me up the hill at the end of the holidays and said that this term I was big enough to walk by myself to and from school. A lesser woman would have taken umbrage, but it says a lot for her that she kept nipping up the road with casseroles.

‘I saw this recipe in my magazine,’ she’d say to my father, ‘and Keith won’t eat fancy food so I thought of you.’

The casseroles were delicious, but if my father came home from work angry, they went into the bin. Once, she gave me a Christmas present, a hairbrush set in blue marbled plastic that I thought was lovely, but my father marched down to her house on Christmas morning and made her take it back.

On my eleventh birthday, I was brave enough to raise the subject of my missing mother. ‘Do you think Mum’ll send a card, now I’m almost a teenager?’

‘No,’ my father said curtly, and I knew never to mention it again.

Suddenly he was there in the kitchen doorway, watching me. His short curly hair was dark and shiny with rain, and it made him look younger than he usually seemed, though his face was tired and there were lines beside his eyes. The shoulders of his jacket were covered with raindrops that sparkled under the kitchen light. He wore overalls to work but always put a sports jacket over the top to travel there and back.

I felt myself go red, and tensed, knowing I had been watched and not knowing for how long.

‘Sorry, Dad. I haven’t done anything about lunch.’

‘Don’t fuss.’ He waved me to sit down again. ‘I’ll make us a sandwich. There’ll be some of that ham.’

That was all right, then. It was a good day.

I sat back at the table as he opened the refrigerator door to get out the ham and tomatoes. There were silvery sprinkles in his black hair. It struck me that I didn’t even know what age my dad was. Maybe thirty-four or -five? Quite old when you thought about it. But I didn’t think about it. He was just my dad.

I wondered how it would have been if my mother had stayed. Would he have been less angry, more fun? I tried to imagine a Saturday when I would help my mother clean the oven and make us a cake for tea. She and I might go shopping in the afternoon, while my father watched Grandstand. But then, maybe, I wouldn’t get to do the things he and I did together now at weekends, like looking for ammonites, or going to the climbing wall in Bristol where he showed me how the quarrymen would go up the rockface. Three points of contact, Katie, that’s what keeps you steady …

‘Look in the hall,’ said my father, his back to me, slicing a loaf. His movements were always careful and exact, like the wiring diagrams he drew, or his plumbing schemes. He used to work as an electrician in the quarries, but he got nervous exhaustion and had to resign and go self-employed. He could do plumbing as well as electrics. He was clever at anything practical.

I went out into our hallway. The light through the lozenge in the front door fell on a pile of books on the table. Dad had stopped off at the library on his way back. He knew the kind of thing I liked. There was a John Wyndham, The Chrysalids, and a book called The Story of Britain, an old hardback in a polythene jacket to protect it, though it didn’t look as if too many people had taken this one out. ‘From the geological shaping of the land to the development of civilization,’ the cover said.

It had glossy black-and-white pictures. As I flipped through, there was something that looked like a fossilized tulip–a sea lily, according to the caption. I saw a trilobite like a huge stone woodlouse, and a whole page of ammonite marble, dozens of spirals in a sheet of polished black rock. There was a chapter devoted to the first humans in Britain. Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Neanderthal man, Homo sapiens. I muttered the names to myself like a rosary, tracing the row of skulls on the page.

‘What are you doing?’ called my father.

‘Looking at the book. The one with the ammonites.’

‘Not the book, nitwit. The bag.’

There was a brown-paper bag next to the books, so small I had overlooked it, folded in a neat square over something wrapped in cotton wool. I unwrapped it. ‘Brilliant,’ I said, walking back into the kitchen. ‘How did you find that?’

It was an ammonite, the size of an old penny. It had been split in half, so that one side was still rough brown stone, but the flat top surface had been polished to a gloss, tan and gold and grey, revealing the ammonite’s secret spiral chambers.

‘The book or the ammonite?’ He was smiling broadly. A very good day, then.

‘Both.’

‘I saw the ammonite in a shop window as I was walking down Walcot Street,’ said my father. ‘And the book was thanks to your favourite librarian.’ He put a plate with a doorstop sandwich in front of me. ‘Mayonnaise, no mustard, as the lady likes it.’

‘Which one’s that?’ I wasn’t sure I had a favourite librarian.

‘The young one.’

‘There aren’t any young ones.’

My father picked up his own doorstop–heavy on the mustard, it would be–and sat down opposite me. ‘Hair in a bun. Miss Legge.’

‘Is that her name? She’s ancient.’

‘Rubbish. She’s a lot younger than me. I asked her if she had anything on ammonites. We looked in the index, and bingo.’

I took a bite of my sandwich. ‘It looks great,’ I said, through a mouthful of ham and salad. I opened the book and showed him the ammonite marble. He raised his eyebrows.

‘I like yours better, eh? It’s in colour. What are you up to this afternoon?’

‘Poppy’s having a pool party. Could you drive me up there? It starts at three.’

‘It’s raining,’ said my dad.

‘So we’ll get wet. That’s what happens when you swim.’

I sat in my room, in front of the dressing-table, fingers rubbing the cool polished surface of the ammonite. I imagined the shrieks and the splashes, feet skidding on rain-slippery tiles by the side of the swimming-pool. I saw myself sitting ignored on the edge, kicking my toes in the water, pretending I was having a good time, watching a scum of wet leaves and dead insects rocking on the surface. I didn’t want to go to Poppy’s party after all.

I felt like the girl in my Edward Dulac poster on the wall next to my bed, a waif-like creature kneeling in a huge dark pinewood, hiding her face in her hands. Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night.

‘Katie?’ My father’s voice came up the stairs. ‘Time to go.’

I heard his feet on the stairs. The door opened.

‘Come on, you’ll be late.’

I could see him in the dressing-table mirror. There he was, by the door, hovering awkwardly behind the hideous pink lump in the foreground that was me.

‘What’s the matter?’

My eyes filled with tears again. I put my face into my hands like the girl in the poster. He came over and I felt his arm round my shoulders. ‘Come on, sweetheart, nothing’s that bad, surely.’

‘I look like a freak.’

He peeled my hands away from my eyes. I could see him in the mirror, kneeling beside me, his concerned freckled face next to my shiny red one. ‘You look nothing of the sort. You look lovely.’

‘No, I don’t. I look like an ugly blancmange.’ I was wearing a pink blouse he had bought me from the market. It wasn’t my colour.

‘Mmm.’ He looked carefully at my reflection in the mirror. ‘I admit it clashes with your nose. Put something else on, then.’

‘Everything else is dirty,’ I moaned, ‘or horrible. I haven’t got the right kind of clothes. Trish and Poppy …’

Trish and Poppy had pocket money. They went into town to buy clothes at Miss Selfridge and Top Shop. They were going to be in bikinis this afternoon, and all I had was my black school swimming-costume with its high front and crossover straps.

My father’s lips made a hard straight line in his face. ‘Trish Klein looks like a little … madam, sometimes. You don’t want to grow up too soon, Katie.’

‘But they’re growing up and leaving me behind.’

My father looked at me in the mirror. He took in my long dark brown hair, straight like my mother’s, not curly like his, my blotchy reddened skin, my narrow shoulders hunched in misery. The blouse was awful, the colour of internal organs. It reminded me somehow of a dog’s tongue. It was made of cheap nylon, and my father always bought things a size too big so I could grow into them. He sighed. ‘Perhaps I should ask Mrs Owen to buy more of your clothes.’

‘No-oo!’ I wailed. I was wearing one of the sensible A-line skirts she’d bought me; it skimmed my knees, neither short nor fashionably long. I plucked fretfully at the blouse, just above where my breasts had recently started to sprout, two hard little apples in their first A-cup bra, almost lost under shapeless shiny pink.

‘They’ll just laugh at me.’

My father closed his eyes as if praying for a miracle. He didn’t say anything for a moment, but I felt his arm tighten across my shoulders.

‘Look,’ he said eventually. ‘Look in the mirror.’

I looked. No magic transformation. Pink face, pink swollen eyes, pink dog-tongue blouse.

‘You’re pretty,’ he said. ‘I know your old dad’s bound to think that, but you are. You’ve got lovely hair.’ He twisted his fingers clumsily in the shining strands. ‘Go and splash your face with cold water. And if you don’t want to go to the party, I’ll take you to the climbing wall again. Or the cinema. I’d be proud to be seen with you.’

I didn’t go to the party. We went to see Rocky at the Odeon instead. Afterwards, walking back up Milsom Street to where we’d left the car, I tried not to look in the shop windows.

We were passing Jolly’s, the big department store, when my father spoke: ‘I think you’re old enough to shop for your own clothes now. I’ll give you an allowance.’

My eyes slid away to the shop window. There was a mannequin in kick-flares and a top that knotted under the breasts, leaving the midriff bare.

‘But not,’ my father added quickly, ‘anything too extreme.’

‘The clothes or the allowance?’

‘Both. I’m not made of money.’ He was smiling at me, but I could tell he felt out of his depth.

I felt a huge bubble of happiness push its way up from my stomach, so forcefully I thought I’d have to belch with joy. Milsom Street looked wonderful, its pavements still shiny from rain, the summer evening sky washed blue and yellow above the rooftops. The air was fresh and smelt of wet leaves. I wondered if Poppy and Trish had noticed I wasn’t at the party. I hoped they’d missed me. But I didn’t care.

‘Hey,’ said my father. ‘There’s your nice librarian over there.’