Authors: Chris Curran
He was always such a forceful character, but he didn’t get angry with me that day, even when I shouted that Mum would prefer it if I stayed away.
I reminded him that the last time I’d come home she had accused me of stealing one of her rings, and I remembered how indignantly I said this, very prim in the knowledge of my innocence. And conveniently ignoring the fact I
had
pinched twenty quid from his wallet, and a handful of Valium from her dressing table.
‘It’s been hardest on Alice, you know,’ he said. ‘With your mother ill so much in the last couple of years and me away a lot of the time. No kind of life for a youngster.’
I think I got up and walked away – shakily, no doubt – at that point, and said none of it was my fault.
‘But Alice has always idolised you. So if you came back home, I know it would help her.’
I told him, more or less, to get lost. I couldn’t help myself, let alone anyone else. But something changed that day, and a month or so later I did go back, determined to start afresh.
Alice was still talking. ‘He couldn’t do anything simply, could he? Everyone else had burgers and sausages, but he had to go in for whole trout and stuff like that.’
‘Stuff we wouldn’t eat, yeah. Still,
I
made sure we had the basics.’
It didn’t last long: only one summer, but in its own way it was magical. The three of us became like a real family. We steered clear of talking about Mum, about anything that mattered, and maybe that was why it worked.
Alice touched my knee. ‘Do you remember those steaks he cooked? When I had my friends from school over? ’
He had tried out some kind of fancy sauce – very hot. ‘And that poor boy was the only one who would eat it,’ I said, ‘and he turned puce after a few mouthfuls?’
‘He was my first boyfriend. I was so embarrassed. But Dad was too obtuse to realise.’ She looked at me with her little sister smile, the one I’d almost forgotten. ‘But you took Adrian inside and made him sit down with a glass of water. He never said anything, but I know he was really grateful to you. So was I.’
Our eyes met, hers almost violet in the gathering dark, and when she spoke again there was a quiver in her voice. ‘Those were good times.’
All I could do was nod. I almost said I wished those days could have lasted longer, but soon after that I got pregnant and, looking at Tom now, I certainly couldn’t wish that away.
She followed my gaze and, after a moment, said, ‘Tom’s got exams next week, so I think maybe we should let him concentrate on them. He needs to do well if he’s to have a good choice for GCSE.’
Another of those rushes of feeling that I knew I mustn’t show. I swallowed and fought to speak gently. ‘Don’t you want me to see him?’
‘Well, you’ll have all day tomorrow, and then I thought maybe he could spend the whole of next Sunday at your place. It’s Mark’s birthday on Saturday so they’re going bowling, but I’ll bring him over on Sunday morning then make myself scarce. Let you have some time: just the two of you.’
That night, sleeping, or rather, not sleeping, in my old room, I knew why I had refused to come back to live here, even for a while, when I got out. Although Alice had transformed the house, it still held too many memories. A few, like the barbecues, were good, but it was the others that clamoured at me. The ones with Mum. I adored Dad, even when we argued, and I loved Lorna, but it was Mum whose approval I craved, maybe because I never got it.
Of course, I’d been a difficult child, but Dad made excuses for me. He had found me in a Romanian orphanage at the age of eleven months and I’d always pictured myself clutching a dirty blanket and staring glassy-eyed through the bars of a cot. I was lucky; Dad was the managing director of a large multi-national, so he must have used his clout to get me out quickly.
Apparently the doctors had told Mum she would be unlikely to have a child of her own, but how Dad could have imagined she might be satisfied with a raging bundle of suspect foreign genes was beyond me. And four years later the miracle happened and she brought a replica of her own blonde beauty into the world. One of my first memories was of Mum in the hospital bed, tiny Alice in her arms. Dad carried me and I carried a bunch of flowers as big as myself. Mum was sitting propped up, her hair untidy for once, looking down at the baby, and ignoring our noisy arrival.
I’d practised saying, ‘Well done, Mummy,’ but I was dumbfounded by the glazed happiness in the eyes she raised to us; a happiness quickly replaced by the look I was used to.
‘Hello, Clare, darling. Do mind baby with those flowers. Put them over there will you, Robert?’ I had scribed my name laboriously on the card, and I tried to pull it from the bouquet as he took it from me, desperate for Mummy to admire my writing. ‘Oh look what she’s doing Robert. Put her down. She’s big enough to stand
on her own two feet anyway. Clare, be good, or you won’t see Alice.’
I wanted to stamp and scream until she looked at the card, but Daddy had made it clear only good girls were allowed in hospitals, so I stood in surly silence. ‘Now we don’t want any sulks do we?’ Mummy was firm, her eyes blue crystals. ‘You’re not jealous of Alice are you?’’
I had no idea how to reply to this, but a shake of the head seemed to satisfy her, and I was allowed to come close enough to peer at the little, crumpled face, to feel the warmth radiating from the shawl, and to smell for the first time that unique baby smell.
I don’t think I
was
ever jealous of Alice herself, and I soon realised that, in any case, Daddy still loved me best. I even remembered explaining to Alice, as we sat in the garden one sunny afternoon, that Daddy was mine and Mummy was hers. We had been allowed to have sandwiches under the tree and Alice, a chubby five or six-year-old, a daisy chain we’d made together twined in her white-blonde hair, chewed slowly as she listened. Her eyes, bright blue in the sunlight, grew larger as I spoke, but she nodded, already understanding exactly what I meant.
The irony was that Alice probably killed our mother as surely as I killed Dad. Mum suffered what I now realised was severe post-natal depression and was never well again and, although she managed to survive for another fourteen years, she was in and out of hospital all the time. She killed herself when I was nineteen.
Thinking back, I wondered how reliable my memory of that first hospital visit really was. It seemed very detailed and vivid for the recollections of a five-year-old and I wondered if it was really a composite of all the others during my childhood. There were so many times when I woke in the morning, or came home from school, to find Mum gone. Dad always said it was just a precaution, but it would sometimes be weeks before we were allowed to visit her and even longer until she came home.
It was shortly after Alice’s birth that our parents told me about my adoption. They had chosen me because my own mother was dead and Mummy and Daddy thought they couldn’t have babies. It was meant, I suppose, to reassure me, but I recall being terrified that if I was naughty – and I often was – they might one day decide that now they had Alice they no longer needed me. It didn’t help that my mass of dark hair and olive skin marked me out as such an obvious cuckoo in the nest.
Tom woke me with a cup of tea in the morning, saying Alice had gone to the supermarket. I was amazed to see it was close to 11 o’clock: I had slept after all. Tom sat on the end of my bed as I drank the tea.
‘So,’ I said. ‘You’ve got exams coming up?’
‘Yeah, worse luck.’
‘Alice suggested you spend all of next Sunday with me in Hastings. There’s a lot to do: amusement arcades, the Smugglers’ Caves, Sea Life Centre, whatever you fancy.’ He didn’t answer. ‘Only if you want of course.’
He shifted from foot to foot. ‘That’d be cool, yeah. It’s a whole week away though.’
I grabbed my dressing gown from the end of the bed and pulled it on to give myself time to think, but I’d promised myself I’d be honest with him. ‘I know and I’d love to see you before that, but your exams are important, so why not concentrate on them and look forward to the weekend?’
‘I could come over on the train after school one day.’
‘I’d love that, but I’m working Monday and Tuesday, and on Wednesday I’m hoping to go and see Emily.’ I didn’t say that I couldn’t interfere with Alice’s decisions, but I could see he wasn’t happy and he left the room without a word. That familiar ache throbbed inside. I hated to see his disappointment.
I took my time getting dressed, but he wasn’t hiding away as I’d expected. Instead, I found him tucking into a bowl of cereal in the kitchen. He was studying some papers and I took a chance and spoke as if I hadn’t noticed his anger. ‘Revising on a Sunday? You are good.’
‘No, it’s more stuff about Granddad and some ideas Mark and I had about things you can try to find out.’ I poured myself some Rice Krispies still standing up and looking out of the window. I wasn’t hungry, but it was something to do, to hide how disturbed I was. He was obviously obsessing about this.
I tried to keep my voice casual. ‘Tom, don’t let this stuff get in the way of school work, will you? When I ran away from home I thought education didn’t matter and it wasn’t until I married your dad that I realised I how ignorant I was. I was lucky. I could do some studying part-time then, and later on in prison too, but I still missed out and I don’t want you to do that.’
He smiled, still leafing through the pages. ‘It’s cool, Mum, don’t worry. I like school.’ He pulled out a piece of paper. ‘This bit says Granddad made up a report, told lies. It was in the news.’
‘There was a lot of stuff in the papers that wasn’t true, you know, always is.’ I sat opposite him at the table and pulled a sheet towards me.
‘That’s important, Mum. We need to find out about him, Dr Penrose, the whistle-blower. It says here he’s dead, but there must be people around who knew him.’
‘You’re right but, Tom, I’m serious, please don’t let it get in the way of your exams.’ I heard Alice’s car pull into the driveway. ‘And let’s talk about it when we’re on our own, shall we? We don’t want to upset Alice.’
He piled his papers into a cardboard folder. ‘Right. I’ll hide this.’
As he ran upstairs I felt a twinge. It wasn’t right to encourage him to keep secrets from Alice, but she seemed so happy that – how had she phrased it – he’d
begun to accept things as they are
. So maybe it was best to keep quiet about it for now.
‘I think getting away from your flat and meeting a few people, has done you good,’ Alice said, as she drove me back. ‘You certainly look better than you did when you arrived last night.’
She needed to go back right away, because we’d left Tom getting ready for bed, so I gave her a quick kiss and jumped out of the car.
The house was very quiet and dark and I had to switch on the light in the main hall before I could open my own door.
But even as I stepped inside I knew something was wrong.
The little hallway was unbelievably hot. Of course, I’d made sure all the windows were locked before I left, and it had been warm today, but as well as the temperature, there was an insistent sound – a kind of whispering – that went on and on.
I stood looking at the living room door, afraid to touch it, feeling something ice cold shifting inside me even though my hands were damp from the steamy heat.
What if the place was on fire? I knew I shouldn’t open the door, but I was already turning the handle, my mouth shut tight to stop myself taking a breath.
A gust of smoke came out at me. The whole room was filled with it. A thick, hot fog.
But, even as I slammed the door again, my mind whirred, trying to make sense, and the sound became recognisable. The shower. I’d left the shower on and this was steam, not smoke.
I dropped my bag and went in. The bathroom door was half open and the steam had filled the living room. Everything was dripping. I turned off the shower, unlocked and threw open the bathroom window, then all four windows in the living room.
I had used the shower on Saturday, but surely I wouldn’t have left it turned on?
As wafts of night air spread through the flat I shivered, the moisture chilling on my skin. I closed and locked all the windows tight, checked each one twice, then double-locked the front door. After that I dragged off my damp clothes, pulled on some old pyjamas, and crawled under the duvet.
I am in a dark place, very hot and very scared. There’s noise and heat all around me. I want to run away, but I can’t move. Then I realise the noise is the roar of flames and I’m surrounded by fire. Outside, in the darkness, a woman stands looking at me. I try to scream at her to help me: I need to get to my boys. But my voice won’t come. The woman is my mum and she just stands there even though she must see how desperate I am. When I look again I see it isn’t Mum, but Lorna and she has turned and is walking away.
When I woke, the place still smelled damp, but I didn’t dare leave any windows open, and before I left for work I checked the shower and all the taps, made sure the cooker, the kettle, and the iron were turned off, and tried all the windows again.
The shop was surprisingly busy for a Monday, Stella had loads of orders to catch up on and I helped her when I wasn’t serving. Just before five o’clock I went into the back room. She glanced at her watch as she twisted yellow ribbons around a posy of tiny rose buds. ‘Oh lord is that the time? You should be locking up and getting home.’
‘Can I do anything before I go?’
‘I’d love a cup of tea, if you’ve got time.’
I heard the shop bell ring as I carried her tea down and called out, ‘Just one minute please.’
‘It’s OK, we’re not customers.’ I recognised Kieran’s voice at once and felt the flush rise from my chest to my neck and up into my cheeks. But when I saw he wasn’t alone, the flush drained away as my knees threatened to give. I could still hear Kieran’s voice, but all I could see was his companion, looking at me with a sheepish grin.
‘Hi there, Clare,’ said Kieran. ‘I found this young man hanging about in our garden. Says he’s come to see his mum.’