The Scrapbook (3 page)

She still looks confused. ‘But, Fern, weren't any of them special? Don't you want to get married?'

I roll my eyes at her but she's got her nose buried in her glass and doesn't see.

‘I'm not like you, mum. You mated for life, but that sort of ‘always and forever, till the end of time' stuff doesn't sit well on some people. It can make them twitchy. It can make them leave.'

Her response is immediate and reflexive, her loyalty as touching as it is misplaced.

‘Don't speak about your father like that.'

She takes another gulp at her gin to soothe herself. I cast around to change the subject and am about to speak when she continues. ‘You know, there's nothing wrong with true love, Fern. It shouldn't scare you. Do you have someone special right now?'

She brightens immediately at my hesitation. ‘Ooh, you have as well. Tell me about him. What's his name? How long have you been seeing him? What does he do?'

I can't help but grin at her excitement. ‘His name's Rick and we've been together a while. But I'm not taking it too seriously.' I look away from her, to the clock above the mantle. The evening ferry will be docking soon.

‘Why not?' she asks. ‘Rick's a lovely name. I'm sure he's lovely. Maybe he's the one? The one that'll get you to settle down.'

I shift against the lumpy cushions and hiss breath through my teeth. ‘For god's sake, I'm not
like you, mum. I'm not.'

I don't know who's getting more uptight here. She frowns but looks almost smug as she wriggles in her chair and finishes her drink. ‘It's in your genes, love. There's nothing you can do about it.'

She hands me her glass for a refill. ‘So. Tell me everything about him. Why don't you invite him to stay here with us one weekend? I think I'd like to meet this Rick.'

I stand and tilt my head towards the window, my body tense as if I'm listening to or seeing something denied to her. And she immediately swivels and strains, and forgets.

‘What? What is it? Is it a car? Is it stopping?'

Cruel, I know, but it works every time.

A Torn Scrap Of
Dark Blue Handkerchief

When I first saw you, I had the sun in my eyes. You shone around the edges, a fireball of a man. In the moments it took me to focus on your centre, I'd absorbed you completely. My pores plugged by your smile. You made me shy.

You watched me dance, wild and uncoordinated and my hair vivid with sweat, and you fell in love with me instantly, knelt at my feet and pressed your handkerchief to my scratched knees as gently as you would later press your lips there.

I remade myself in tune to your blinks, your frowns, your glances away from me and then back. I read your needs as they soared across your face, and I carved myself anew again and again, hacking at the rough clay of my personality and re-sculpting, re-forming, without you even needing to speak.

I became like one of those tiny ballerinas who unfold from the raised lid of a jewellery box and perform for as long as needed. Do you ever wonder what happens to them once the lid is closed? Do they continue to swoop and swirl? Limbs gliding through the cramped space below the polished wood. Eyes wide and searching for the cracks that will bring the light. Buried alive.

You believed that we were special, set apart from other lovers, and I took it upon myself to ensure that we never had that moment. That moment when two people in love suddenly see
each other, without the twin deceits of passion and hope obscuring the view, and they falter and move on but are never quite the same.

Think of a pressed flower between the pages of a book; it's still recognisable, it looks like what it is, but it's lost the freshness, the essence that once it had. You still keep it, it still triggers the fond memories that led to its capture and crush, but it's no longer the perfect thing it was.

It's the same with love. I never thought to ask what our future would be. Never thought to establish whether you would take me away from this island and introduce me to the world I'd been waiting my whole life to meet. I thought that would be obvious.

You thought your intention, to keep what we had away from the complications of your life, keep me pure, was just as obvious, and so we never talked about any of it until it was too late.

My breakfast splashed around the toilet bowl. My womb no longer a hollow den.

Do you remember those nights when you stretched out on your stomach on the grass beneath the oak and I tapped out tunes up and down your spine? You guessed wrong every time. Every time. Do you remember that?

2

I was ten the first time my mum went away ‘for a break' and came back with a grimace so vague and so permanently fixed that it didn't slip even when she was asleep. I still see shades of it now, just occasionally, when she's overtired or overwrought. Violet creases chase each other around her mouth as her face corrugates and sinks. I hate it. I turn away and start to hum silly little childish tunes.

Every night, I'd lie in the bed we shared and curl up as far from her as I could get, terrified of that bland sadness and the emptiness behind it. Knowing that if I turned around and peered through the darkness, I'd see the glisten of moonlight reflected in her staring eyes. I started having nightmares.

Men with wolves' heads and red wellington boots pursued me through deserted streets. My mum's face high among the stars called for me to fly up to her, only I couldn't get my feet to leave the ground. A runaway car with no driver tipped me off the edge of the world, hurtling me through layers of nothingness.

I began to wet the bed, waking the next day chilled and ashamed. Mum would yawn and roll into the damp sheets, hands pressed hard against her flickering, wayward eyelids.

What time is it, Fern? It can't be morning already. Wake me in an hour.

Granny Ivy agreed to let me have the tiny spare bedroom, the one Grandfather Edgar had died in. I whimpered and weighed the options and concluded that the dead would haunt me less than the living. I washed the sheets through three times to get rid of any ghostly traces and then moved out of the room that had been my mum's since she was a child, and into my first proper bedroom.

And the bed-wetting stopped.

I saved my pocket money and took a bus into town to buy yellow paint from Woolworth's. How impressed my mum would be when she heard I'd caught a bus all by myself. But the paint was too thin, the walls too vast, and the old green bled through the delicate primrose like nicotine-stained handprints. I cut pictures of kittens and cute dormice from school friend's magazines to cover the ugly blotches, and delighted in the shiny jostle of colour.

I missed the scratch and sigh of the old oak tree waving its branches at me, the whisper of its leaves, but I loved my new pink curtains, made from one of mum's cast-off dresses. They did nothing to block the light but they quivered in the breeze as if they were dancing with the window frames.

I wanted mum to notice my absence. Maybe even miss the warmth and wriggle of my body next to hers in the night, but she never commented on it. At bedtime, when Granny Ivy looked pointedly from the mantelpiece clock to me and put her sewing aside, I'd haul myself to my feet, trail schoolwork and sighs, and fuss over my night time routine. Satchel left packed and ready by the back door, teeth cleaned, clothes neatly folded, and then a return to the front room for goodnight kisses. Waiting for some words of acknowledgement to accompany the scouring-pad scrape of mum's chapped lips against my forehead.

Haven't you grown up, Fern, such a big girl in your very own bedroom!

Always waiting.

Sometimes, when I couldn't sleep, I'd slide out of bed and tiptoe down the hall. As quiet as a cloud past Granny Ivy's closed bedroom door, and then into mum's room. She'd be lying in the scribble of shadows the oak tree conjured in the moonlight and threw across the bed. She never remembered to shut her curtains anymore. Her window wide open, even on the coldest nights. Sometimes she'd shiver uncontrollably in her sleep. I'd struggle with the old wood, try to shut the night out, and sometimes slip into bed beside her to warm her up. I never fell asleep but would wait until she unfolded with the heat I wrapped her in and then I'd tuck her up, covers pulled to her chin, and tiptoe back to my room.

Those were the times I prefer to remember. Not the other times, the too many times when I stood in the doorway and watched silently as she faced the ceiling and cried without appearing to know she was crying. Tears in jagged trails across her cheekbones. Or when she gasped and sat up in response to the tiny noise of my entrance, stared at me with her arms half raised, palms glowing a welcome through the dim air, blinked slowly and then collapsed back against the pillows and turned her head away.

Thoughts of those times pull my scalp tight and prickly across my skull and make me wish that this were over now, that I were returned to my previous life, away from this island and this house, to a place where I am wanted, just for being me.

After a while mum's twitch faded, and she blinked more. How long did it take? Weeks? Months? Anyway, I kept my mouth shut and hoped that wouldn't mean I'd have to move back in with her. My legs crossed at the very thought, my bladder throbbed with anxiety. But Granny Ivy seemed happy with the current sleeping arrangements.

There's no point chopping and changing. You'd only need to shift again the next time.

The next time? I hadn't realised mum's little holidays would be a regular thing.

Over the next couple of years I got to recognise the signs that precipitated one of her trips away. The high, thin sound she made after hours spent rubbing the front window clean of any trace of grime, only to mist it immediately with her breath. The way she cradled her keepsake box, refused to put it aside even at the meal table, stroking its crooked clasp until sores eventually silvered her hands with bracelets of scars. The precision with which she measured her steps from bedroom to bathroom, or from bedroom to kitchen, muttering the even numbers, humming the odd.

When I knew it was that time again, holiday time, I'd help her pack her weekend bag in preparation, pick out pretty dresses and high-heeled shoes that would later mysteriously disappear and be replaced with trousers and blouses, pairs of thick socks. She never sent a postcard or brought a souvenir back, and I never stopped hoping that she would.

I know now where she disappeared to and maybe a part of me even then had a sense of how broken she was. Every time we waved her off the air smelt brittle and acrid, as if a storm were about to spill its fury over my head. The adults conversed mechanically and smiled with their mouths and I covered my nose, staring up at the sky and waiting for the first judder of lightning to pierce the blue. Nudged into good manners, I'd skip after the taxi as it rolled slowly down the lane, waving at Tommy as he sat behind the wheel, smoking and tooting his horn, while mum sorted frantically through the contents of her handbag and didn't look up.

Granny Ivy would stand by the gate and wait for me to walk limply back to her. She'd put an arm around me, quickly, all the while focused on something in the distance. She'd squeeze me painfully and then let me go, almost pushing me away, then she'd sniff and fumble for a handkerchief.

Just the two of us again, Fern. But we won't make a fuss about it. Shall I fry us some potatoes for supper?

Those lonely evenings sat across from each other, heaping cushions onto the empty chair to give the illusion of solidity, of substance. At a glance, unfocused, there could be three of us in the room. Granny Ivy lit candles and whispered over her sewing, fingering her silk bag of jewels. I'd believed they were boiled sweets when I was younger and had cracked a tooth on a sticky sliver of jasper. Granny Ivy whispered and tied the tiniest knots into a piece of silver thread, dribbled wax along its length, and when I went to bed at night I slid my hand under my pillow and cupped the chunks of tourmaline that had been left there.

Mum doesn't like to talk about those times and I know that it must have crucified her to be separated from home, and her vigil. I only realised years later that she had to leave Spur altogether and travel to the hospital on Sorel, the next island over. After the car had taken her away but before the machine's crackle and spark pulsed tranquillity through her brain, flushing her clean of despair
,
she must have been frantic. Frantic to remain where she was, where my father could find her. And maybe even frantic to stay with us, no matter how little she showed it.

And so it would go on. The absence, the empty room at the end of the hall. The return of the half-mother, her face a wincing mask and her soul once more straitjacketed into submission.

*

The rain has stopped now and the garden is rinsed with citric tones. I settle mum into one of the deck chairs with a blanket and a tiny gin and tonic (our compromise – fresh air in exchange for a pre-dinner drink), and start to collect the dead leaves. As soon as I've raked a decent enough pile of them the wind tugs them loose and scatters them around my feet. Mum points and laughs and I grin over at her. This is as good a way as any to while away the day.

‘Will you find him for me?' she asks suddenly. ‘Lawrence?'