“Do you still sell charcoal pills?” he asked. “I think the brand name is JJP.”
The pharmacist disappeared and returned with a little grey plastic bottle in his hand.
“Here you go sir,” he handed them over. “Work like magic.”
MIRIAM
Grown-ups can be so stupid sometimes. That’s what Miriam was thinking as Jonah tried to sidestep her “Are you going to marry my mother” question. If grown-ups weren’t trying to prise information out of kids then they were trying to withhold it instead. Or trick them. Miriam’s mother was a prime example. The lengths she’d gone to, to hide the fact that she and Jonah were way more than just friends was laughable. The first night that Jonah had stayed with them at 77 Gladstone Road, Miriam had woken with the larks and had gone to check to see if her mother was awake yet. She’d found her mother’s bed empty but roughed up, as if she
had
been sleeping in it, and then she’d heard snoring from the spare room, a man’s snoring, a sound she was unfamiliar with. She’d pushed the door ajar to have a peek and that’s when she’d seen Jonah and her mum lying in bed together, really close, fast asleep in each other’s arms. It was actually rather cute and, bizarrely, the sight of them had made Miriam feel happy.
Grown-ups think children don’t notice things, but they do. Miriam’s parents had never been particularly touchy-feely. Well, they were with
her
but not with each other. She couldn’t remember them kissing or cuddling or holding hands the way some of her friends’ parents did, so it hadn’t come as a complete surprise when they’d split up. Miriam hated the ‘D’ word, it felt like she’d been branded, the way she noticed sheep in fields that had letters inked on their curly white fur. She hoped the ‘D’ tag was a label that she could some day shake off.
Her life had been turned so upside down by the ‘D’, that when her father had introduced Miriam to her new step-mother and step-brother, it hadn’t actually felt that odd. They’d all seemed very happy together, a proper family unit just like the one Miriam had been part of before. She’d felt a pang of jealousy for her brother but had swallowed it. He was very sweet and utterly blameless. Because her father had found happiness again, she wanted her mother to be happy too. She’d seen that her mother was tired and lonely, always putting Miriam first and saying that she was “the light in her life” and assuring her that that was enough. Miriam had felt certain that she’d needed more. Jonah was nice. She really liked him. And whilst she’d been shocked to stumble upon them sleeping so intimately, it had pleased her too. She hoped he’d stick around. She’d never seen her mother smile so much or laugh so much or look quite so pretty and sparkly as she did whenever he was around.
The thing about the ‘D’ was that she had no control. No control over which parent she saw and when. No control over what she wanted to do because grown-ups made all the real decisions. And she had no control over her mother’s happiness. But as she’d pedalled uphill in Balboa Park she’d been toying with an idea. Perhaps she
could
have control over her mother’s happiness. Perhaps she was more powerful than she thought. The very concept had taken her mind off the pain in her thighs which felt as though they were circling through thick treacle as she conquered the steep slope. Whilst she’d watched Jonah shake the creases out of the green tartan picnic rug and smooth it flat under the branches of a tree, she dared herself to ask him the ‘M’ question. If she knew that he had every intention of sticking around then that would give her an element of control, both over her own life as well as over her mother’s.
She kept willing herself to ask as they’d sat down and the other two had begun to un-wrap their sandwiches, but the words had become lodged in her throat. Then she’d counted down from three to one in her head and told herself that she must, absolutely must, ask that question after she reached number one. If she didn’t, she convinced herself that something bad would happen. That fear alone was enough to make her blurt out the words. She saw that the question made Jonah very uncomfortable and, much as she liked him, which she really did, making such an impact on him made her feel in control. That’s why she didn’t leave the matter alone. Her first attempt had been more cleverly couched, the question hidden in a ramble about whether Jonah marrying her mother would make her and Martha sisters. The second time round there was no side-stepping the issue.
“So, are you going to marry my mother?”
Jonah’s eyes boggled, but he largely stayed calm, chewing his food with a thoughtful expression on his face. She wanted to ask him ‘a penny for them’, meaning she’d give him a penny for his thoughts if he dared to divulge them, only she didn’t want to distract him or interrupt his thought processes.
Darn
, as Martha would say. She wanted him to answer that question. It was very simple. Yes or no, with no murky grey area in-between.
“Do you think I should answer that question?” he asked.
One of her pet hates was a question being answered with a question. Well, two could play at that game.
“Do you think I think you should answer that question?”
Martha started giggling. Thankfully Jonah was too grown-up to keep playing this game, which could have continued ad infinitum with a never-ending series of ‘do you think I think you think I think you thinks’.
“I do think you think I should answer that question,” Jonah started. “And so I will try by saying that asking a woman for her hand in marriage is a very special thing and really, there’s only one person who should know about it first. Who do you think that is?”
Oh boy, another question.
“The person you’re going to ask to marry?” Martha suggested.
“Exactly,” said Jonah.
Clearly Miriam didn’t have the control or power that she hoped for. Reluctantly she realised that she had to move on. She opened the packaging to her turkey and coleslaw sandwich. It looked yummy. She took a mouthful. It
was
yummy. She hummed in appreciation. Miriam loved American food. Everything was so much tastier than at home.
“Dad,” asked Martha, “how did you ask Mummy to marry you?”
Jonah had just taken another mouthful of his salt beef sandwich and Miriam felt sorry for him. These pesky girls just wouldn’t stop asking questions.
-------------
Not only was Martha very bossy, she was very competitive too. Back at Lily Beach - that’s what Jonah’s house was called - Martha challenged Miriam to a game of Connect 4. They were pretty evenly matched but one game had turned into ‘best out of three’, which turned into ‘best of five’, which turned into ‘the first to twenty’. Martha was keeping a tally and somehow they were able to carry on a conversation as they played. So far, Martha was in the lead at eleven games to nine and her non-stop questions were probably some clever distraction tactic.
“You don’t look much like your mom,” she said. “Why is that?”
This wasn’t the first time Miriam had heard this. Friends at school often asked her the same thing. Whilst
she
could see a resemblance between herself and her mother, it was clear that others found it trickier.
“My Dad’s black,” Miriam explained. “So I guess that makes it harder for you to see the similarity. But my mother says that I’ve got her nose and lips. You can check it out later.”
Martha had the red discs, Miriam had the yellow. Martha made a bad move, allowing Miriam to complete a yellow row of four. Bingo!
“Ten, eleven,” said Miriam.
They emptied the discs out the frame and started again.
“Would you like to be my sister?” asked Martha.
“Yes,” said Miriam.
She answered very quickly. Too quickly perhaps, for this was a concept to which she’d not yet given proper consideration. This was weird considering she’d pretty much asked Jonah if he was going to be her step-Dad. But if he became her step-father then Martha would become her step-sister and, actually, that would be pretty cool. As far as step-sisters went, it could be much worse. For starters, Martha could have been a boy. Not that she had anything against boys and she loved Jasper, but it wasn’t like she could
play
with him. And she actually enjoyed playing with Martha. She was pretty sure that if Martha had been at her school then they would have picked each other to be friends. So the fact that they had been forced together was pretty neat. Miriam laughed as she found herself thinking the word ‘neat’. Clearly Martha’s influence was rubbing off on her. In England that word had a completely different meaning.
It was also great that they were both in the same position. They were both products of the big ‘D’ and that meant they shared a great understanding. It was hard having two homes and being passed from pillar to post. It was hard to hear your parents fight over you, to feel you were a pawn in their game of chess. It was hard if there wasn’t parity between your parents, if one was happy and the other wasn’t as a result of the ‘D’. It was hard when one of them had a boyfriend or girlfriend and the other one didn’t. Martha said her mother had
lots
of boyfriends since the ‘D’ and she didn’t like it. Claire was the first girlfriend her dad had introduced her to. She didn’t even know if there’d been others. So it was nice that Miriam had Martha and vice versa, because they understood each others’ pain in a way that others might not. They could be, and were, mutually supportive.
That didn’t stop the fact that Martha could be a pain in the arse and frequently was! She always wanted to watch reruns of
icarly
whereas Miriam was hooked on The Gameshow Network which showed ‘80s reruns in which the female contestants all had hilariously big curly hairstyles and wore enormous shoulder pads.
“Maybe we could go to the same school,” said Martha. “That would be cool, wouldn’t it?”
“I win,” said Miriam, spotting a possible line of four on the diagonal and slotting in a yellow disc. Martha grunted. She’d lost her lead. That was the thing which most irritated Miriam about her, her competitiveness. Martha always had to win and was a bad loser. Not that Miriam liked to lose either but, if she did, at least she did it graciously.
“I don’t want to play any more,” said Martha.
-----------------
Miriam’s father was fiercely competitive, just like Martha, and he was also a prime example of a grown-up trying to extract information from a kid. He thought he was being clever and that she didn’t see what he was up to, but one time, the first time she stayed with him after meeting Jonah, he fired question after question at her. What did she think of Jonah? Had Jonah stayed the night? What did you do together? Rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat, the questions had come at her as steady and rapid as gunfire. Miriam didn’t think it was any of her father’s business. Her mother never interrogated her, and her mother had got used to the idea not just of Daddy with another woman but Daddy with another child. And so she decided to wind up her father, as much as an eight year old child was able. She had a fair idea of his pressure points and she played to them, aggravating him with what was entirely the truth. She knew how much her father believed in the truth. What were the words he told her, the ones that witnesses were forced to swear on the bible in court?
I promise to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
And so she had. She told him she liked Jonah a
lot.
She told him that he let her win games. “Which you never do,” she added as an afterthought, to stick in the knife and turn it painfully. She told him that he stayed not one but
two
nights. And then her favourite part of the conversation had been when she told her father that her mother was going to be a TV superstar. He’d been really mean. He opened his mouth so wide in disbelief that she could have stuck a football between his teeth. And then he laughed sarcastically. That wasn’t nice. Miriam loved her mother even if her father didn’t. Weren’t grown-ups meant to behave better than children? And see, he’d been wrong. Mummy really
was
turning into a TV superstar.
Miriam’s father was coming to pick her up in just over a week’s time and already she knew that she didn’t want to go. She loved him. He was her
father
after all and she wanted to spend time with him. The thing was, though, these last three weeks had been some of the best in her life and she didn’t want them to end. She loved it here. Yes, Martha could be a pain but she was a nice pain. She enjoyed being with her. They swam, they played tennis, they
did
things, but not in a forced way, in a natural way. She loved Jonah’s home, the surroundings, the sea, their lifestyle. Dinner was her favourite time of day. They’d started the way they meant to continue that first night, after her mother had won one miraculous point off Jonah in the tennis match. He’d fired up the barbecue in the garden and, even though strictly speaking it was Jonah who was meant to be the sole chef as his punishment for losing the bet, everyone had played a part. Martha had helped her dad with the sausages and chicken legs. Miriam and her mother had been in charge of salads. They’d made a potato salad with caramelised onions, a green salad and a simple corn salad. Most nights they had a barbecue and ate together on the patio but, occasionally Claire cooked something different. So far Martha had gone crazy for her beef lasagne as well as her homemade fresh fish in breadcrumbs. “You’re a much better cook than my mom,” she praised.