The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q (29 page)

It was a letter from a literary agent. Now, I know nothing of the world of literary agents but I do love novels and I read articles about my favourite authors and even I had heard of this agent, a really big time guy.

It was a letter of rejection. Not even a personal one. Her name had been added in handwriting to a form letter that even I could tell was a duplicate, sent out to hundreds, if not thousands, of hopeful aspiring novelists.

‘Dear Author,

Thank you very much for sending us the manuscript of
The Six O’Clock Bee
. Though we enjoyed reading it very much we are sorry to inform you that …’

And then I knew. Mum was writing a novel. Or had written one. Or both. That’s what she did when she got up early in the morning to work. The realisation came to me in a flash of both great admiration and deep compassion. Oh, the poor thing. The poor, poor thing.

Mum was a good writer, but not
that
good. No one knew this as well as I did. I was her first reader, after all. Oh, she was successful in her own way, and many of her love stories for women’s magazines got published. But a whole novel? She couldn’t do it. No way. Not that I hadn’t encouraged her:

‘You should write the next Harry Potter!’ I’d told her a couple of times, but she’d laughed me off. Not my genre, she’d said; but that’s the kind of thing that made fortunes, and not love stories.

‘Or, at least, something like Bridget Jones,’ I conceded. ‘That made a couple of millions too. Something light and funny.’ We’d both laughed our heads off at Bridget Jones. Now, if Mum could duplicate
that
… But she hadn’t wanted to talk about it. She shook her head and refused to say a single word more on the subject. Secretive, evasive, private: in every subject that was in any way important to Mum, she kept her silence. It was so aggravating.

Now, my heart sank for her. In fact, I teared up in compassion. Poor Mum! Poor scatty, mediocre Mum, born to lose. No wonder she’d cracked this morning, if only for a short while. I wished she
had
screamed instead of doing whatever mysterious thing she did with incense and candlelight. Maybe a good scream would get this thing out of her system, once and for all.

I decided not to make the bed after all; because then she’d know I knew and would be embarrassed.

All those rejections, all that effort; it was enough to make anyone depressed.

As I turned to go I saw her filing cabinet. One of the doors was open. I glanced at the shelves: a row of upright arch lever files, all in different, bright colours, as if to brighten her day, whereas I knew for a fact that their contents did just the opposite.

Poor Mum. Poor, poor Mum. I wished I could help; I wished I was rich and could pour my benevolence down on her. How happy she’d be, how grateful! I had savings, it was true; I had worked since I was sixteen; squirreled away a bit of my wages whenever I could, a little nest-egg for my gap year in Asia. Apart from that, I could just afford a small rent for Mum and my own food, and what remained was enough for Gran’s new dress and hairdo, but not enough to pay all Mum’s bills.

My glance fell on the back of a bright red file. Written on the spine were the letters ‘REJ.’

I’d seen this one before and always thought ‘REJ.’ was simply a sloppily spelled ‘REG.’, short for ‘Registration’ or ‘Register’ or something official like that. But with my newfound intelligence I instinctively knew: ‘REJ.’ was for ‘Rejections’. I reached out, removed the file, and opened it. I was right.

It was more than an inch thick; chock full of rejection letters.

I leafed through them, and looked at the first. It was from ten years back. Mum had been at this for over ten years, and this was the only result: a humiliating, devastating file of rejections. A quick check told me that they were for three different novels.
Three!
Whatever else you could say about Mum, lack of perseverance wasn’t one of her flaws. I sighed and replaced the file.

Lowering my glance to the floor of the cabinet I saw Mum’s other shame, in a pretty Ikea storage basket: a collection of unopened letters: demands for payment she could not pay. I shouldn’t have done it, but I did: I pulled it out.

And then I frowned. On the top of the pile was an envelope that shouldn’t be there. A personal letter, covered in stamps, unopened. I couldn’t resist; I picked it up and inspected it, turning it over in my hands. It was a long white envelope with a smattering of Guyanese stamps, and a Royal Mail sticker on it saying ‘Signed For’. It was addressed to Mum and the handwriting – I recognised it now, that flourish, from the letters I’d received as a child – was Gran’s. Yes – written on the back, as a return address, was Gran’s name and address in Guyana. There were some words written beneath the return address:

‘Rika: you said in your letter that I am not to write you. But you MUST read this. Please!’

S
o Gran had written
to Mum and she had never opened it, never read the letter. In spite of that urgent appeal to do so! Typical! I tried to figure out the date, the stamp was smudged, but the ‘Signed For’ notice had the date: 1984! The year of my birth! Eighteen years ago, and Mum had never read it!

And yet, why was it on top of the other letters? Surely that meant she had been looking at it recently? What was going on? Oh, the will power it took me to resist opening that letter, reading it! Here, I knew, would be the answer to all my questions, the solving of the mystery. But I lacked just that last little bit of brazenness. And the will power it must have taken
her,
to keep it for eighteen years, never reading it, yet holding on to it! Why? Why hadn’t she thrown it away, if she couldn’t bear to read it? Why? What did it say? Reluctantly, I laid the letter back in the box, shoved the box back into the cabinet. But one day, I swore to myself, Mum would read that letter. She had to. I would force her to.

O
ur old friend
the stamp dealer rang to say that his contact had made a final offer of £15,000. Gran could take it or leave it. ‘For all we know,’ he said, ‘the stamp is a fake. It hasn’t been validated, has it?’

Once again, Gran told him to haul his tail.

But when a Mr Peterson from Stanley Gibbons – the authority on stamps, apparently – called, she took the phone into her room and closed the door. When she came out again fifteen minutes later she was subdued but serious.

‘That man,’ she told us, ‘say the experts saying it might not be a real genuine British Guiana One Cent. He saying, the only way to prove it is to let them examine it. If is a fake is worth nothing. But if is authentic, original from 1856, it going to be famous. But first I got to let them analyse it. Otherwise them experts going to always doubt.’

Her brow puckered at the dilemma: obviously, Gran wanted her stamp to be granted full recognition by the philatelic world. On the other hand, in order to do that she’d have to let them get their hot little hands on it. She couldn’t have it both ways, and she couldn’t boss them into recognising the stamp.

‘Rika,’ she said, after a moment of rare reflection, ‘I think I going to do it. Otherwise people going say I is a liar. Yes, I going to let them prove is real.’

T
elevision began to bore Gran
. She turned to Internet surfing instead. Mum took the huge step of installing Broadband – which I’d always nagged for anyway – and Gran now sat from mornings to evenings with her Neville-donated laptop, checking out God knows what websites. Gran joined online discussion forums, dropping in to leave an anonymous caustic opinion, and dropping out again. She chased up old schoolmates. She wrote articles for Wikipedia – articles on obscure points of Guyana’s history, such as the Enmore Massacre, which nobody was going to read anyway. She made sure I read them, though; she was horrified by my lack of background knowledge on Guyana.

‘You is a woman without roots,’ she told me; ‘if you don’t know where you come from how you going know where you going?’ I could have told her I come from
England;
I didn’t need some irrelevant dump of an ex-colony sitting on the edge of nowhere as my roots. I kept that opinion to myself.

What worried me the most was Gran’s new emailing tic. For not only did she look up old friends, she followed the footsteps of long-lost Quints, digging them out of their cubby-holes all over the globe, from New Zealand to Ireland, from Finland to Chile. That’s how wide our family had spread. Gran drew an enormous family tree which she blue-tacked to her wall, and as soon as she knew the names of third, fourth and fifth generation Quints, she filled them in. And, if she could get hold of their address, and if they were old enough to read and write, she emailed them to introduce herself.

It worried me. For, as Mum had told me, I knew what she was looking for: a suitable heir for the Quint.

Which was betrayal of us, her next of kin, her own flesh and blood. I seethed in jealousy, but to speak up would be to worsen matters. In agony, I watched the family tree grow.

A
lready
, flesh and blood was getting far too close for comfort. Soon after Gran’s flirtation with fame the calls from Neville and Norbert increased to daily. I never knew the content of those long conversations, for Gran retreated to her room with the phone, shutting the door on Mum and me. All I know is that around that time came the talk of putting in a stair-lift and a bathtub device that would lift Gran into the tub. Those suggestions never came to anything.

But then, one day, the delivery van arrived once more.

Gran had mentioned a couple of times that she wanted a new wheelchair, a motorised one, with which she could go out on her own. This was it; a present from Neville: a luxury scooter, with all the bells and whistles.

Already, Gran had been venturing ever further afield with her wheelchair. She had taken to going off, all on her own, to the Post Office and the Bank, to the grocery and the newsagent on Streatham High Road, and, especially, the charity shops where she hunted for bargains, sniffing the armpits of cardigans and blouses for tell-tale traces of perspiration, but seldom buying anything. And in all those places everyone rushed around the counters to serve her; she never had to stand up, although she could. I know because the first two times I accompanied her, not believing her capable of buying a stamp or a mango for herself. Once again, she proved me wrong.

Now, with her new scooter, she went everywhere. Armed with a map of London, she disappeared into the concrete wilderness. When this first happened Mum panicked and together we scoured the streets, looking for her. When we returned home there she was, laughing at us. Locked out of the house.

With this new freedom came a new sense of entitlement. It was her right, Gran said, to own a dog.

‘A dog!’ Mum cried.

‘Not a big one. Jus’ one a them lil’ tiny t’ings. I saw a lady in the park today; she had one, just like a toy. I thought it was a puppy but no, it was a real grown up dog. I want one like that.’

‘But I don’t want a dog! I already have a cat. What about Samba? I thought you liked Samba?’

‘Samba is for inside the house, my little dog is to take for walks. I done choose a name for it, Elephant.’

‘Why out of the blue do you want a
dog?’

‘It’s not out of the blue. I always wanted a dog, ever since I was a little girl. A dog of my own. My parents didn’t let me. They said dogs is for boys not girls. Them Quints always had a dog, sometimes two. Turtle. Parrot. Kanga. Rabbit. And remember, Rika? Rabbit? Rabbit was your dog.’

‘Not really. Rabbit was the family dog. I wanted the new puppy to be mine alone, but you gave him to the twins. Remember Devil?’

‘Ah, Devil, Devil. Yeh, I remember Devil. And I remember Devil get tame. But that was after you left. You never get to see the new Devil.’

I had to laugh. Girls wanting dogs and not getting them seemed to run in our family. I remembered the fights Mum and I used to have, the tears, the tantrums. But Mum had been adamant. Just as she was now.

‘No dog, and no Elephant!’ said Mum emphatically. ‘And I’m late for work.’

‘Mum!’ I called, as she rushed to the door.

‘What?’

‘Your shirt’s on inside out.’

She looked down.

‘Oh. Oh, thanks, Inky. Where’s my head today’

‘Where it always is. Up in the clouds.’

She made a face, left the room. Her footsteps pounded on the stairs as she dashed up to change.

What would Mum do without me?

‘You’re a good daughter,’ Gran said. ‘Take good care of you mother, like that boy in the poem.’

‘What poem?’

‘James Morrison Weatherby George Dupree – the little boy who took care of his mother,
A. A. Milne. You mother didn’t read those poems to you?’

I shook my head. Mum hadn’t read anything to me when I was little; she’d made up stories on the spot. She didn’t like reading aloud, she told me later, but it didn’t matter as I’d loved those made-up stories. Stories of a faraway land she called Back-of-Beyond-Land, the land she’d grown up in. Back then, she’d made it sound like paradise. As a child I’d longed to go there, see for myself the sakiwinki monkeys and hear the six-o’clock bee and the kiskadee. She told stories of crazy, funny people who walked the streets and children who climbed mango trees and caught fish and frogs in alleyways; it was a happy place, the country of her childhood. But that happy place was a figment of her imagination, because later, once I’d grown up, she told me the truth. Real stories. Stories of murder and betrayal and poverty, political mayhem and economic downfall. She convinced me the place was a shambles, not worth even a thought. The paradise she’d created for me as a child came all from her imagination. She’d created a homeland flowing with milk and honey, and the child-me had taken it for real. That was the power of her writing. Back then.

I’d told her to write more stories and get them published, but she always shook her head.

‘Children’s stories don’t come to me any more,’ she’d explained, as if stories landed on her head from outer space.