The Scrapbook (7 page)

She's got herself tangled up in brambles, thorny ropes cling around her ankles. She teeters and almost falls.

‘Wait, mum, let me …' I bend to free her and swear as my fingers get scratched. Her legs are already laddered with blood. She stands patiently, staring over my head, humming something I can't quite catch.

‘There you go. Take a big step now, and watch that clump by here.'

But she turns and walks away, wading further through the brambles. Every time it seems as if she's in danger of getting snarled up again she pushes through, hard, with her knees. I can hear small ripping sounds and hope very much that they are coming from her skirt and not her skin.

‘Mum, for Christ's sake what are you doing? I'm not coming to get you if you fall over.'

She looks back at me and her face is soft with delight. The kind flush of the setting sun lends her a youthful beauty. She glances down, shuffles her feet to disturb the vegetation, and then stands still and swivels round, with a graceful roll of her hips that's almost a shimmy. The brambles swivel with her, lassoing her ankles. She doesn't notice.

‘This is where I first met your father. Right here, in this spot. He was driving past and saw me dancing under this tree. He said he had to stop and speak to me, see if I was as lovely up close as I looked from a distance. And I was, back then.'

She starts to hum again and this time I can almost make out the tune. I wince at the sight of her torn legs and then shrug and lean back against a gravestone. There's antiseptic lotion in the house. ‘I know you were, mum. I've seen the photos.'

I don't think she's heard me. She stands with her back straight and her head up as though waiting for someone. I follow her gaze to the gate and half expect to see the ghost of a man walk through it and towards us. Towards her. Gathering pace as he gets nearer, intent on nothing but her, on discovering her. I squint into the sun's afterglow and can almost see the urgent flicker of two shadows rushing to meet each other.

‘When did he tell you that he was married?' I suddenly ask.

She jumps and frowns.

I ask it again, with real need. I want to know, had she been as cynical as him from the very start, as thoughtlessly determined to pursue her own pleasures, regardless of the consequences to herself, to his other family, or to me.

She sighs and wades back to me, for the first time noticing the state her legs are in. She lets out a yelp of horror at the dried smears of blood across her shins. I've punctured her mood and my punishment is that tight, closed look on her face. That resentful pout to her lips. But I'm determined not to drive her home, to her precious bottles, until she's answered my question. She needs to give me something. I need to know.

I tell her as much as I heave her out of the undergrowth and back onto the path. She pulls and hunches away, but then gives in and leans against me. Tired now, and eager to leave.

I ask again. We stop beside the car and she shivers, but I don't unlock it. ‘Well? When did he tell you?'

She rubs her elbow as if it pains her and tugs at the door handle. Puts her free arm on the roof and rests her head on it. Her face is turned from me but I know that she's furious. ‘Stop bullying me, Fern.'

I clench my hand around the keys until they dig into my palm. I don't look away. ‘When did he tell you?'

She turns her head then and stares at me. There's a nerve flickering below her eye.

‘Not for a while. I didn't even think … It was your bloody grandmother who guessed and told me to ask him. You can imagine how delighted she was. But we both decided to keep things as they were. He wouldn't leave his wife and I wouldn't leave him, so there didn't seem to be much choice but to keep things as they were.'

I poke the key roughly into the lock and turn it. Open the car door and hold it for her so that she can climb into the front seat. ‘There's always choice, mum.'

She huddles into her coat as I start the engine and angle the hot air fan in her direction.

‘How nice it must be to be you, Fern. How nice to lead such a pale life.'

I swing the car onto the road, past the heaped stone wall of the churchyard, and shudder when I see how centuries of sunlight striking the stones have bleached them of hue. They balance like infant's skulls, one on top of the other.

A Bird's Claw

Feathers speckled grey and white and beige across the grass. Feathers stained gaudy scarlet at their tips. And a frail, snapped leg, just the one, amongst the feast remains.

As you stooped to look I picked up the leg and lunged it, claw wagging on its broken stem, towards your face. It was just a joke, I was never going to touch you with it, but you made a disgusted noise and pushed my hand away, kept yours outstretched to create distance. You told me I was childish.

I wiped my palm on my dress and ran to catch you up but you refused to hold my hand, refused to even look at me. I tried to hug your arm and match my strides to yours, half-skipping to stay close, but our hips kept clashing and throwing me off rhythm. We lurched like that for a while, in silence.

You were angry with me. I thrilled with the newness of it. You were angry with me and I had the power to defuse or inflame this moment. How much damage would we do? How much would it hurt? More than saying goodbye? I let go of your arm and made a brittle, laughing comment about the difference in our ages. I think I called you an old man. You stopped and we faced each other, showed our teeth. We'd never done this before, didn't know how, but suddenly I wanted to, and so badly.

You started to speak and I mimicked your tone, repeated your words in a high, sing-song whine that pressed a nerve behind your eyes so that they grew wide and hard. You half turned away and I grabbed your arm and pulled you roughly back. I began to shout.

Do you remember what I said? Do you still think about it? I can't recall anything but the exhilarating surge of spite and the need to take a word-axe to your roots and topple you. I hadn't realised I could be so cruel, hadn't realised how many layers of hurt had calcified beneath the crust of my smile. I stood and shouted.

Your lips drooped apart and I saw beyond the trembling pink your crooked bottom teeth. I couldn't breathe for tears.

You hugged me as I cried. You hushed my remorse. You told me that it didn't matter, that nothing had changed, that everything was going to be okay. And then you gave me your hand as we walked. It started to rain and you laughed and draped your jacket over me as we ran to the car.

After you'd gone I sat in my room and shivered as I tried to summon memory of what I might have said. I sat in the dark and whispered words I might have used.
Bastard. Dirty old man. Cheap kicks. Other woman. Whore.

I couldn't remember a single thing. My mind had tipped itself upside down and emptied out all trace of our argument. There was nothing left but a sour taste along my gums. I brushed my teeth and rinsed my mouth, rubbed my tongue with soap until bubbles frothed iridescently around my gag, and by the next morning the sourness had gone.

4

I was fourteen when Granny Ivy's spirit shook itself loose from its nest below my rib cage during a nasty fever and flung itself onto the bedroom wall. Her final breath made solid and given physical shape.

Once the bout of coughing had subsided, I propped myself onto my elbow and watched as the thing I'd created scuttled and clung to the shadows. Rustling up to the ceiling and whispering, whispering words that I couldn't make out.

It was like a child's crayon drawing of a crow, all scrawled edges and funny lumps, but it looked at me with her eyes. I flung myself against my pillows and reached as high as I could, tearing at the air, scrabbling for it.

Come back to me.

When I think of that night I want to scoop up my fourteen-year-old self and hold her close; keep her safe from a world which my adult self knows doesn't allow for such whimsy. Yes, I was delirious, but I was also sure, am still sure, that my granny's soul was there, on my ceiling. And I couldn't bear to lose her twice.

My pillows reared up and pummelled me and I threw myself forward, onto my knees. The blankets twisted themselves around my wrists, pulling me down into the mattress. I rolled onto my back, legs pedalling the air, and spilled over the side of the bed, jarring my shoulder against the wardrobe. Its door swung slowly open and the mirror fastened to its dark-wood carcass distorted my face so that I loomed above myself like a stranger. I screamed for my mum.

She careered through the door a few seconds later, glass pitching in hand and ice cubes pirouetting across the room.

What? What's happened?

I could only thrash and gasp. She stared around her, above her, and then at me. Exasperation at the spillage of her precious drink sharpened her eyes and her voice.

For Christ's sake
,
what's wrong?

She slapped impatiently at the light switch.

The pillows now smooth and plump against the headboard. The blankets layered in neat squares. The creature had retreated.

I climbed back into bed, hot and tearful, trying to speak, and then another coughing fit overcame me. I was desperate for one of mum's ice cubes.

With rare maternal understanding she scooped one up from the rug and blew on it to dislodge the fluff, then ran it across my temples until I was quiet again. She was so gentle.

It's okay now. You're running a fever. Seeing things that aren't there. It's okay now.

She stayed with me while she finished her drink, patting my hand between sips, and then she went back downstairs for a refill, but she left the light on.

It took another couple of days for the fever to subside and another week before I could trust my legs enough to bear my weight. I lay and stared at the ceiling and read
The Shining
between naps. I thought about the thing I'd seen.

I wondered what it had been trying to say. I worried that it had been something important. I worried that it missed me.

My bedside light scorched holes through the night for months afterwards, scalding the shadows so that they leapt and tumbled across my walls. My reflection hesitated just beyond the lamp's glow, flickered just out of reach, but I was too scared to look in case I didn't recognise myself.

I'd carried Granny Ivy's soul around inside me for over a year, had swallowed it with her dying breath and kept it locked up next to my own. I'd imagined them bumping gently together when I walked, like twins in a womb. Through colds and stomach upsets I'd held on, and now one bad fever had rattled it loose and sent it crashing into the wall.

So I started to skip meals, saving room inside me in case it came back. Especially now that I knew how big it was.

I began to barter my way through the days. If I got from the chemistry lab to the art room in exactly seventy steps, it would return to me. If I held my breath on the school bus, from the park to the bicycle shop, it would return. If I could stay awake all night. If I could …

I developed a phobia about spiders and then was unable to sit still in class. The sudden swoop of a bird in the yard had me calling out, running for the exit with my arms outstretched. Opening my mouth wide, stretching my lips apart with my fingers until they cracked and tore. Searching out the ink-scrawl shifting across the sky's slate and willing it to return to me.

The skewed logic of those months, the logic that comes screaming out of loss and hope, makes sense to me even now. Am I really a more fulfilled person, less lonely, without the rituals I'd once framed my world with? Like mum with her gin, and Granny Ivy with her magic, I needed them. But I should have been more discreet.

Those few friends who hadn't yet been put off by mum's habit of flinging up her skirts and dancing drunkenly around the house with her knickers on show began to slink away from me, as if strangeness could be contagious. Playground whispers soon became a hum that reached even the ears of the teachers and I was sent to the school nurse. She stripped me of my uniform and turned me this way and that with hands so cold they made my skin wince and pucker. She spoke over my head to her colleague as if I were deaf, or absent.

You've heard about her mother? The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

I didn't understand the reference but the image made me think of mum, cheeks Gala flushed, dancing under the oak.

Once nothing was found to be physically wrong with me
it was decided that I was experiencing some kind of emotional disturbance and mum was called in to speak to the form mistress. That was the last thing either of us wanted. She ignored the first three summonses, chose instead to shut herself into the living room on the day in question, curtains closed and radio on. She was usually drunk, and sometimes asleep, when I returned from school with another note. I'd slip it into her fist and then go to put the kettle on, returning with a mug of strong, bitter coffee. The note would have disappeared by then, magicked away as if it had never been, and she wouldn't look at me as she raised herself into a sitting position and tucked her trembling hands out of sight.

I knew how scared she was, for both of us, but I never said anything. Some cold, stubborn part of me was curious to see what would happen if all this were allowed to carry on for much longer. My present was pursuing her past and I'd soon be catching it up. Racing it to the place where pretty dresses weren't allowed. A part of me even wanted to go to that place, and make
her
wait at home for the postcard that never arrived. See how she liked it.