Читать книгу It’s Not Me, It’s You - Mhairi McFarlane, Mhairi McFarlane - Страница 17

Ralph was behind his closed bedroom door, rapping ‘Dis dat prime SHIT!’ to himself and bumping into furniture, so Delia decided he sounded quite caffeine-wired and was probably OK for a cup of tea.

She would’ve asked him to help her to track down Peshwari Naan, only Paul had always gently mocked her for thinking Ralph was an I.T. supremo. ‘He plays loads of games, Dee, he’s not an expert. That’s like expecting someone who has the telly on all day to write you The Sopranos, or fix the reception.’

As she turned to head back downstairs, she saw that their mum had washed his royal-blue-and-yellow-striped chip shop tabard and left it neatly folded outside his door.

Delia had tried to have motivational talks about seeking alternative employment with Ralph, but they always fell on deaf ears.

‘Do you enjoy work?’ was one tack she used. ‘No, that’s why they call it work,’ Ralph gurgle-shriek laughed.

‘Wouldn’t you like to use your brain more?’ Delia said, and Ralph shrugged. ‘Do you like your work?’

He had her there.

Delia wasn’t fired up by writing press releases about school litter-picking drives or changes to the traffic light signalling in Gosforth. Her job paid for her life when she wasn’t at work, that was all.

Ralph said he was doing the same, it was just that his occupation involved adding the green dye to vats of grey marrowfat peas, or dunking wire baskets of raw potato slices into bubbling fat.

From time to time, Delia appealed to her parents to help her cause. Their view was that Ralph wasn’t in any trouble, and seemed happy: he’d move out eventually. They weren’t ambitious for their kids, and Delia usually liked that.

On occasion though, she mildly resented it. A boot up the bum wasn’t always a bad thing, but hassling Ralph felt like prodding a gentle creature through the bars of its cage, and it’d never bite you back.

She plodded downstairs and headed towards the sticky-sealed UPVC back door, cup of tea in one hand – tea was the currency at her parents’; like Buddhists bringing gifts, you must always bear tea – and crossed the garden to her dad’s shed. It was more of a small summerhouse, and full of the forest floor smell of wood shavings.

Her dad was at his workbench with a piece of oak that had been smoothed and planed into a crest, presumably one day to be part of a bed or a wardrobe.

‘Thanks, love,’ he said, putting his goggles on his head and accepting a mug of milk-no-sugar with sandy hands.

‘Mum’s not home yet. I thought I might make spag bol for tea?’

‘Sounds nice. Are you OK?’ her dad said.

‘A bit sad,’ Delia said. ‘I’ll get better.’

‘You’re always so cheerful, usually,’ her dad said. He blew on his tea and paused. ‘Did he not want to get married?’

‘He said he’d get married,’ Delia said, then stopped. She’d only said she and Paul had been arguing and needed some space. (She’d told Ralph the truth, but Ralph wouldn’t pass it on, nor would they ask him.)

She was conscious that if she said Paul had been unfaithful, she might never restore his reputation in their eyes. It was one thing eventually deciding to forgive your cheating partner, but adjusting wasn’t so easily accomplished by your parents. Better to keep them in the partial dark until you’d decided. Once again, the scorned woman’s sour rewards seemed to be denied to her. ‘I don’t think he was very happy with me. Or as happy as I thought. I’m not sure.’

Her father nodded; perhaps he’d deciphered this code. ‘You make everyone else happy though.’

Delia nodded, smiled, and gulped down the threat of a sob.

‘You can stay here as long as you like,’ her dad concluded, fixing her with watery blue eyes, the pouchier version of Ralph’s. ‘No rush.’

‘Thanks, Dad. Good to know,’ Delia said, and she meant it.

Back in the galley kitchen, she chopped onions and garlic, fried mince, and slopped a tin of chopped tomatoes into the pan, rinsing the residue out with water and adding that too – a student ‘make it go further’ trick that had stuck. It occurred to her how reassuring cooking could be, even though she wasn’t hungry.

It was ironic: without her usually very healthy appetite, Delia could feel herself tightening and shrinking inside her clothes. As if she might end up disappearing entirely into a deflated dress, like the Wicked Witch melting at the end of The Wizard of Oz.

If she was still getting married, Delia would have been delighted: the corsets on some of the vintage gowns she’d admired looked worryingly constrictive. As it was, it didn’t matter. She could be any size she liked – Paul had still slept with Celine.

Once the Bolognese sauce had coalesced into something orange-brown instead of red-brown, she turned the gas down, put a lid on it and went up to her bedroom.

Delia hesitated, once she’d closed the door. She could hear Ralph’s singing and her dad’s saw. Her mum was at the allotment. She opened the wardrobe. There at the bottom, under the old clothes and mothballed coats, were flat, clear plastic storage boxes with handles.

She slid them out, hauling them onto the bed, and opened the top one. Delia was oddly anxious, excited, and self-conscious. It was so long since she’d looked at any of this.

Delia had started The Fox when she was a teenager. It was an idea borne of daydreaming at school, when life had been getting on top of her. She was teased for her red hair. She wasn’t an exceptional student, she wasn’t an athlete, or cool, or popular.

She was lonely. So she fantasised another life for herself. One where she was all the things she wanted to be in the real world – special, fantastic, heroic, brave, exciting, useful. As a child, she was fascinated by a fox that visited the family garden, and bombarded her parents with questions. Why did it only come out at night? Did all the foxes know each other? Where were they hiding during the day? Delia had decided her invented answers were preferable to their explanations.

When the idea to draw a comic book occurred in her teens, she knew straight away it had to involve that fox.

As a superhero, The Fox lived in a subterranean lair, travelled on a super-fast bicycle and had an actual talking fox sidekick, called Reginald. Her network of bushy-tailed spies told The Fox what was going on in the city, and she used this information to uncover wrongdoing and fight crime.

When she’d told Paul about it once, he said: ‘LSD is a helluva drug.’

Delia had always been creative and never quite known how to channel it: in writing and drawing The Fox, she found herself fulfilled in a way she’d never been before. She bought herself fine-nibbed pens and A3 drawing pads with her pocket money and escaped into the frames of the story, spending hours cross-legged on her bed, sketching away. Everyone in her family had their magical outlet from mundanity, and now Delia did too.

She felt too foolish to show any of her friends, but luckily having a brother as offbeat as Ralph meant she had a non-judgemental audience. When she’d first shyly showed him The Fox’s escapades, she half-expected even him to laugh at her. Instead, he was fascinated – and with Ralph, you always knew you were getting a genuine reaction.

‘Can I see more?’ Ralph would ask. ‘What happens next?’

What happens next? might’ve been the most thrilling thing anyone had ever said to Delia. Someone cared what might happen in a fictional universe she’d made up, simply to entertain herself, as if it had a life of its own. As if The Fox existed.

Somehow, though The Fox had started as a Delia alter ego, it became instructive to her. If there was something happening and Delia didn’t know how to deal with it, she punted it over to The Fox, presented the challenge in a universe where she could make the courageous choice.

She carried on writing and drawing it at university, when she studied Graphic Design, but shelved it when she graduated, lacking the self-belief to launch a career. ‘What I learned on my course is that everyone else is more talented than me,’ she told Emma, who thought her work was incredible and called her a raving idiot. Delia complained she had all kinds of technical deficiencies compared to her peers. Emma vehemently disagreed. ‘You have something very special that sets you apart from most people: you have charm,’ Emma had said.

Instead of trying and failing, Delia never tried. She told herself that failure was inevitable and she’d only look silly in the process. It was fear, cloaked in rationalisations and self-deprecation. So Delia fell into the kind of jobs that educated young women with a nice phone manner in the twenty-first century fall into, because that’s what she told herself she was good for.

This evening, a dozen years since university, Delia felt faintly daft returning to the escapism of her youth. However, as she turned the pages, she found herself grinning despite herself. It was sparky and joyful in a way you so often weren’t, in adulthood.

What did Ralph say? ‘You’re in charge.’ She was surprised at how inspiring those three words felt. Perhaps Ralph was much better at motivating her, than vice versa.

She was lost in re-reading The Fox’s adventures until her mum, who’d somehow returned home without Delia noticing, called up the stairs to ask if she should put the spaghetti on.

After dinner, Delia picked up a pen and tentatively began a fresh page of The Fox. It came to her immediately, like mouthing the lyrics to an old song you’d not heard in years, and yet instinctively knowing the next line.