The Scrapbook (2 page)

I was nine when my father disappeared, never to be heard of again. I attacked him twice more in the intervening five years, or so I'm told.

One of those times was at a picnic. Allegedly. I'm slightly dubious about this one as I don't remember a thing. Not even a smell. According to mum she'd spent ages persuading Lawrence to give me another chance and so we all went on a picnic, like a proper family. Jolly decent of him. He passed me a sandwich and I leaned in and bit his hand with my sharp little teeth. I growled. He had to have a tetanus shot.

Five stitches. He had to have five bloody stitches!

The other time I do remember but that doesn't make it true. He was stood at the front gate, waiting, while my mum hurled herself around the bathroom with hairbrush and mascara. His car filled the lane and was the colour of cherries a day before they've reached their peak. I wanted to pat the bonnet but didn't want to speak to him. I started to trot down the path, pretending to be a horse, and then broke into a canter and then a full-on gallop. Beds of forget-me-nots collided into one solid blur of colour as I raced down the path and prepared to jump the hurdle. Was I trying to skip past him and get to the car? Who knows? Either way, no matter how pure my intentions, I whinnied and butted him square in the stomach and he folded in half and clung to me to avoid falling over. His breath against my cheek thick and wet with pain.

After that he didn't even get out of the car when he came to collect my mum. He just hit the horn and kept the engine running. Sometimes his gaze would find mine as I peeped from the kitchen window, and he'd nod and raise a hand. I'd nod back and show those sharp little teeth in a grin and he'd lower his hand to his lap and look away. I knew then that he'd be massaging the scar I'd given him and the car's interior would echo with the battle cry that I'd shrieked into his stomach.

Has my mother ever forgiven me for his disappearance? Is there a chance she ever will? I know there are times when she blames me entirely for it.

Those times when she doesn't speak are the worst.

Every day since my return to the island, I see her strain towards the window, lumber from foot to foot until she gets too tired to stand, her varicose veins pushing through her tights like a nest of slow-worms, and I want to kneel behind her on the rug and see her as she used to be. My young, beautiful mother, in her gauzy dresses and her ridiculous heels. My magical mother, who could disappear without even needing a puff of smoke.

She refuses to move from this house. Even after Granny Ivy died and left behind plump pensions and insurance policies, she wouldn't even book a week's holiday to the mainland. You see, she believes he will come back for her. Just like old times. He'll appear in the lane in his magnificent motorcar and she'll lift up her skirts and run to him.

She knows that there are such things as telephone directories and he could track her down if he wanted to, but deep inside her, flailing for air beneath the hope and the gin, is the belief that if she made it too hard for him then he just wouldn't bother. She needs to stay right here, right where he can find her without any effort.

What he'd make of me being here as well I can only imagine. The poor sod, to finally return after an absence of seventeen years, certain that, by now, I must
surely
have gone. Only to find me once more narrowing my eyes at him over the threshold as I help mum up from her chair and out of her slippers.

I wouldn't be here at all if she hadn't needed me. I did actually leave Spur and was making a fairly decent stab at adulthood all by myself on the mainland when she called me back. Or rather Tommy did. He'd dropped by with some eggs and found her at the bottom of the stairs, twisted and spiky with broken bones. She'd been lying there for most of the afternoon, inching a tortured route across the hallway. Tommy thinks she'd been trying to reach the phone but I reckon it was more likely the bottle of gin on the dresser in the kitchen.

When he phoned from the hospital with his catalogue of injuries
– concussion, broken wrist and elbow. Cracked ribs as well. She can't manage by herself, love, you need to be with her
–
I asked for time off from the cafe and agreed to come home. Just for a while, just until she could be safely left alone. It didn't take long to pack a bag and put all the plants out in the back garden to fend for themselves. The rent was taken care of for the next month and thanks to Granny Ivy I had savings to fall back on. There was nothing else to stop me. And once I'd committed I suddenly yearned for that sense of snugness only living on the island had ever given me. Swaddled by sea on all sides, safe.

To be honest I wanted to see her again, spend some time with her. Maybe even ask some questions. I've become sentimental lately, preoccupied with the past. I want to pick through that collision of gristle and genes that links the generations, try to make some sense of it. And that means I'll need to know something about him. My father.

I've spent my life refusing all knowledge of him, as if I could somehow be tainted by the familiarity. I don't even have a clear memory of what he looked like anymore because there are no photographs of him. It's only lately that I've come to accept, though grudgingly, that he had just as much to do with forming the person I am as my mother did.

We're doing okay actually. Me and mum. Since my return she's discovered gratitude and a sense of humour, and so we laugh a lot. It's generally barbed laughter, and at the other's expense, but that's how we both are.

Or how we've become.

*

Today she's indulging one of her bad, sad moods and she got at the gin while I was out watching the morning ferry from the mainland come into harbour. We have a rule that generally works: I won't try to stop her drinking and she won't try to pour it down her throat before dinnertime. I cheat a little, I have to confess, because I keep all of the alcohol on the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard so she'd be hard pushed to reach it without my saying so, and I can't see her scaling the cabinets unaided. But this morning she outmanoeuvred me somehow. Maybe after lunch I'll slick the kitchen counters with olive oil or tie her to her chair while she's sleeping it off.

‘Oh, Fern, I still can't believe he just upped and left us,' she whispers to me as I try to wrestle the glass from her. She's as devastated as ever she was, and I'm a little in awe of a love so splintering that it can still hurt her this much. I give her a hug and then twist the glass out of her grasp. She lunges for it, arm flapping in its sling, and I drink down the contents quickly. Wince at the strength of the barely-mixed spirit.

‘Gone. And no more until dinner. Remember your promise, mum.'

As I turn to leave she kicks out with a bloated foot and catches me on the ankle. I almost laugh despite the sting of it. ‘Hey. That bloody hurt.'

‘It's all your fault. You ruined everything. You and your bloody grandmother. You never wanted me to be happy.'

She tries to heave herself out of her chair but alcohol and anguish conspire to turn her bones to rubber. I hover a wary couple of feet away and watch her struggle and my irritation bleeds into pity. Again. But I won't move any closer, not just yet. She hasn't exhausted the limit of her pain and anger.

‘You drove him away, with your nasty, spiteful temper. I thought we could be a family. Once I had you I thought it would all be different. And maybe it would have been if you'd only behaved like a proper daughter, given him a reason to want to come back.'

I cradle the glass to my chest and try to remember how fragile she is. Try to remember that this is not forever. Then I put the glass down.

‘You weren't exactly a great mother, if memory serves.'

She swipes at me again, carves a shaky path through the dust motes dawdling in the sunlight. I laugh with bitter pleasure and dance backwards. ‘Missed.'

Mum grunts and hunches on the edge of her chair, swaying. She looks as if she's about to topple right off it. ‘I did my best. But you were impossible. Couldn't be trusted to behave like a normal little girl. And as for your grandmother…'

I pick up the glass and turn to go. ‘Leave her alone. She practically raised me.'

Her voice rises. ‘You were nothing but her puppet. You know she was a witch. She used you to break us up. Turned you feral every time he came near you.'

Sweat studs her upper lip and her cheeks are purpled with distress.

‘What can I say to that, mum? Apart from … Oh no, it's come back. The feral beast has come back.'

I claw the air and contort my face, wiggle my tongue at her. After a second's prim silence she titters grudgingly and flaps her good hand at me. ‘Don't mock me, Fern.'

I lean over her and kiss her damp forehead. ‘As if I ever would.'

As I butter bread in the kitchen I can feel the delicate change of pressure in the house that means she's either asleep or groping towards it. I sit at the table and eat her share of sandwiches as well as mine, look around me at the room. Each mark and stain tags a memory. The cracked tiles by the cooker are twenty years old, but the look on Granny Ivy's face when she dropped her stew pot after I'd crept up on her makes me shiver even now. That burnt patch on the work surface is still livid, a perfect circle scorched into the wood by the bottom of a pan when mum tried to fry eggs and drink gin at the same time. This house is as familiar to me as the inside of my own skull.

The phone starts to ring as I'm washing up and I jump and drop my plate into the sink, creating a wave that splashes over the side and onto my jeans. I'll never get used to the presence of a telephone in this house. As I wipe my hands dry I try to remember exactly when mum got it. It can't have been that long before I left home. Now when the phone sounds she doesn't even bother to answer it. She'd surrendered her fantasies when she had it installed, had probably known then that taking an active step towards embracing her life would only highlight its inadequacies. It's far safer to be passive, to wait at the window and hope. Against her better judgement and the
rules she lived her life by, she let the phone intrude on this and then she sat and watched it day after day, scooping it up occasionally to check the dial tone, before finally accepting that though it may ring, it would never ring for her.

I prod mum awake in the late afternoon and refuse to let her have any more to drink until she's eaten some soup. The television distracts her from her sulk and she spoons up her meal while she watches the early news bulletin and tuts gloomily at the sorry state of the world beyond her front door. She pats the faded velvet of her armchair with each fresh piece of news, as if to congratulate herself on her good sense in having narrowed her existence to this handful of rooms.

‘Silly man,' she says to herself. ‘Wearing that tie with those trousers. Lawrence would never do that. He's never anything but smartly dressed.'

Then she flinches as she remembers and stares down into her soup, using her spoon to swirl the liquid around the bowl.

As I pull her out of her chair to walk the obligatory post-meal lap of the room, she reaches to stroke my hair.

‘Are you okay, love?' she asks. ‘You look sad.'

Her concern leaves me speechless. I'm not used to such sensitivity from her. Sarcasm deserts me momentarily so I rush out of the room with her stained napkin and run it under the taps, lean over the sink and watch it darken and shift beneath the push of the water. Something about my stance, or the gape of the plughole, makes me want to retch and I abandon the cloth and return to the living room with two big tumblers.

Mum's back in her chair and I suspect that she cut corners on her circuit. Probably did a quick shuffle on the spot and called it quits. The television has been switched off and she's sitting with her hands folded in her lap, watching the door. I pass her one of the glasses and watch as she takes a greedy gulp then scowls at me.

‘Very bloody funny. This is soda water.'

‘Oops, sorry.' I swap her glass for mine and smirk as she sips at it cautiously, then more deeply. ‘That better?'

‘Much better. Bit too much tonic for my liking but I won't complain.'

‘Well, amen to that small mercy.' I raise my glass to her and she smiles. She looks lovely for a second, but then she puckers her lips for another go at her drink.

‘You always were cheeky,' she observes. ‘From the moment you could speak, always so quick with the backchat and the sarcasm. I worried that you'd never get a man to warm to you, you were that prickly. And it looks like I was right.'

She studies me expectantly. I gaze at the wall and open my mouth as if to speak, then shut it again. I can feel her rising frustration and when she starts to huff I laugh and respond.

‘Okay, mum, what do you want to know? Did I ever manage to attract a man? But what if I'm not interested in men, did you ever think of that?'

She looks so confused I want to take it back. It's easy to forget how insular, how innocent, she can be. I rush to fill the silence before she asks me to clarify.

‘You want to know if there have been men? Yes, mum, of course there have. I remember a particularly nice one called Mark in my first term at university, and an absolute bastard who two-timed me in my final year. He lasted longer than he should have done, but he was fun in a way. And there've been lots since then, just please don't ask me to do a head count.'