Butterfly Fish (42 page)

Earlier, she'd torn the name band from her wrist. She looked up at the whiteboard mounted on the wall, transfixed by the names and hospital numbers scrawled in barely legible orange handwriting, waiting for something to be revealed to her. She felt scared, lonely and miserable. Part of the baby's blueprint had found its way into her throat, scrunching into a ball. Her eyes swam. She spotted a nurse flying towards her, face pinched. “You left your baby on the bed! You can't do that. What if she rolled over and fell to the floor? Oh dear, you must be very tired.” The nurse remarked, searching her face worriedly. Queenie looked through the nurse, her mouth curving up in a half smile, half grimace.

Two days later Ella came to pick her up, dressed in a blue dungarees and tortoiseshell glasses. She hopped out of her long suffering Peugeot and half-embraced Queenie, stroking Joy, who was cooing in her mother's arms. The blistering wind whipped Ella's bright red quiff, back and forth like an exotic bird.

“Get in!” she ordered, gently kissing Joy on the forehead. “Before we catch our deaths!” She yanked the back passenger door open. Queenie piled in, comforted by the smell of baked goods. A squashed,
empty Danish packet lay on the floor by her feet. Ella flicked the engine on. She'd parked in the small, disabled section. She stole a quick glance around, checking the parking attendant hadn't spotted her.

“She's gorgeous Queenie! Can't tell who she looks like yet though.” This she threw over her shoulder, turning the radio on before reversing out of the parking lot.

Queenie adjusted the blanket around Joy as The Rolling Stone's
All Night Long
blared from the radio. The car sputtered over the roundabout and into a narrow road. At the lights, a man holding his daughter's hand bent his head, talking with a patient expression. It triggered the memory of being pushed on a swing by her father all those years ago; the scorching heat, the rhythm of the swing, how she'd nearly slid off a few times, almost falling into her shadow.

She remembered her father in his creased linen outfit, lying to her about being able to control the weather. She remembered how happy she felt because her father was Houdini, could create new weather and told her his brass head set in motion things that couldn't be revealed in the day. He was a magician who'd disappeared. You woke up one day and he was gone, leaving belongings distorting in the dark. The void left had been so big, she and her mother took turns hurtling their bodies in, filling the spare rooms in the house with all their bad landings.

Joy stretched her tiny hand, reaching for her mother's breast. Her expression was delicate; Queenie felt the weight of responsibility. What would she learn from a mother who'd already made so many mistakes?

What can I offer you but the disappointment that's found a home in me?

How can I ever look you in the eye and tell you the truth?
She said silently.

The streets shrank and passed in the rear-view mirror. A purple kite above a field became a pigeon chasing its beak. A dog barking leaped into a Ferris wheel of blue sky. An old swing worked its way
into the traffic, knocking against bumpers. The girl from the swing wrote something illegible on windscreens, knowing that the man who could make weather will come for her. Queenie saw her baby on the spinning rooftops of terraced houses, crawling down towards cold slip roads. She called out but the baby didn't turn around. She shuddered in her seat as car horns sounded, one hand under her sleepy-eyed child, the other clinging to an old, frayed swing rope. A wave of nausea hit her. Ella steered the car into a busy roundabout, flanked by a shopping centre and a cinema. Cars zipping by were God's toys on one of his playgrounds.

Ella changed the radio station, drummed her fingers on the dashboard before hitting the gas. “You should tell him you know. Why isn't he here?” She nudged her glasses up her nose. A gesture Queenie knew meant she was ready to argue with you.

“Where is it written that he has to know? Lots of women manage on their own.” Queenie rubbed Joy's head; the car ride seemed to have settled her. She was sleeping peacefully, oblivious to the world and all its cruelties.

“Yes, I know but it's not ideal is it?” Ella asked. “And you shouldn't be one of them. You haven't worked in the shop for months. That's fine but as far as I know, you don't have a lot of savings. How are you going to live? He should be able to give you some financial support at least, no matter his circumstances. This wasn't an immaculate conception!”

“No, this was a mistake!” Queenie said, suddenly weary of it all.

“What? How can you say that?” Ella spat, a red flush crawling up her neck. “You know I can't have children. I'd give anything to have your-to be in your position. Please don't talk like that around her; babies are sensitive creatures. They can sense things.”

“Spare me please,” Queenie said tersely. “I'm not one of your charity cases. You have no clue so please shut up!”

The car became quiet, the atmosphere tense. The engine ran on fuel and the argument they'd just had. Ella's knuckles whitened at the wheel. The flush on her face was a half formed silent island. She
flew across another set of lights, throwing a furious glance Queenie's way. God's playground and cruelties were connected. Queenie knew this for a fact. The memory of it had been clawing at her for months.

They zipped down the flyover, their silence a patchy sky spilling into the side mirrors. Queenie saw her silhouette in blind spots, clinging to tires, dragged across the streets.

She didn't know what it meant or what anything meant anymore. She sank back in the seat, rocking her baby. The smell of her own smoke slowly filled her lungs.

Queenie 1980s: Dice Eyes

Queenie sat listening in the tight hallway, trembling against a cold radiator. It was freezing but she hadn't been able to afford to heat the flat properly for weeks.

All they had was the portable electric heater whirring in the living room, melting the lids of pens and burning a small, brown cave into Joy's bib. Dice eyes in the ceiling spun. They'd followed her from sleep, grainy and constantly adjusting to the surfaces in the flat, watching the sluggishness that had taken over her limbs since the hospital. She'd tried to get rid of them, running cold water on her eyes at full blast till they stung and the tap began to hiss from the pressure, ready to uproot into her head and flood the very thing she'd been trying to submerge.

She slid down as the knocks became heavier, more insistent. Cold sweat trickled on her back. The door rattled. His large frame loomed in the bubbled glass. The silver post slot flapped. His mouth there floated in some separate ether.

“Queenie! I just want to talk. I'm worried about you,” he said, the last bits of patience dwindling in his voice. He waited a few moments, then kicked the door repeatedly.

“Open this fucking door! Open it or I swear I'll break it down, you hear me?” He growled, “I'll tear this
rahtid
place apart. Let me see her. You can't stop me from seeing her!”

Queenie slid further down until she felt like nothing. Shame washed over her. She ran a nervous hand over her matted hair.
Oh God, he'll kill me
, she thought.
He'll finish me if he knows
.
He can't know
.

Her heartbeat tripled. Unopened mail beneath her feet grew bold, becoming flattened white tongues curling up, straining to talk.

In the kitchen, the table was stacked with empty cans of food, parts of a memory spilled from each one, cutting themselves on sharp edges.

“I'm having tea with the Queen!” she yelled, “She's expecting me at The Ritz.”

He'd moved out of sight. Somehow increasing the pressure he was applying to her head. He was travelling through the bubbled glass door, watered by the angles of light she'd lost along the way. She looked into the living room. Joy crawled past the bright throw on the floor, towards the plugs. He began to kick the door again, till a small gap appeared. It rattled in the frame some more. She felt the hinges weakening beneath her sweaty fingertips. Joy began to scream, a twisted-faced angry scream that went on and on.

Queenie had found her father on a harsh blustery day. She stumbled upon him. Years later, she'd rake over each aspect, agonizingly unpicking the series of sequences. Each moment was a red brick, one shakily stacked on top of the other. Had an element been missing, the bricks would have toppled and Queenie may never have found him at all. It was a Sunday. She'd been wandering through Petticoat Lane Market, amidst the packed throngs in the centre, which splintered off into various side roads where more stalls awaited, selling everything from leather coats, knock off Singer sewing machines, board games and wigs on white mannequin heads sporting cling film mouths. The din was loud and seductive. Every couple of strides a different smell accosted you; prawns sizzling in huge black woks, hot dogs and burgers smothered in chunks of fried onions and
ketchup, fried rice sprinkled with cashew nuts. Clothes for every size and shape fluttered and swayed on breakable hangers. A wind chime rang over the door of a record shop.

At exactly 2.15pm, Queenie's right shoe caught in a groove on the road. She went flying, grazing her elbow. The contents of her handbag spilled. Had the dog's head from the costume stall not landed at the feet of one of the flock of orange-robed monks ahead, had her lipstick not rolled to the feet of that same monk, had the man on the motorbike not appeared from nowhere, revving his engine and rudely cutting across the monks, causing their cluster to fracture and that particular monk to accidentally crack her lipstick beneath his sole, Queenie would never have stood abruptly and awkwardly to try to save it. She would never have knocked into the stall selling maps and atlases. She would never have noticed the heavy black boots under the stall with bits of cement and paint on them.

He sat before a building site. Construction workers trailed in and out. Sawdust and white residue covered their winter skin. Her heart began to race and her mouth ran dry. Thoughts sped up and jumbled in her head. All these years later and she'd never forgotten his face. It was him, she was sure of it. He was older of course; his handsome features more lived in, weathered. Tight curls beneath his yellow hard hat were greying at the temples. She rubbed her leg. A tingling sensation made her arms tremble. How ordinary he seemed! Smoke from the hissing wok at the next stall shrouded him, as if he would change guise by the time it curled away. How plain he looked holding a steaming cup of coffee. How ironic to find him loitering behind maps and atlases, the sly curls of smoke ready to make him disappear into an atlas. Blue plastic sheeting covering the stall flapped in his face. As though part of it would morph into a carrier pigeon reporting to the wandering God blowing silences into the city.

“Are you alright?” he asked, his voice still heavily accented.

He set the mug of hot black liquid down on the pavement.

Queenie nodded, watching the slow look of horror on his face, a flicker of recognition as his dark brown eyes darted sideways quickly. She knew she was moving forward but couldn't feel her legs. “Papa that is you? Peter? Peter Lowon? It's me, Queenie.” She grabbed his arm despite herself. Thoughts in her head were bent arrows flying into other openings. Their angles of flight had caught him off guard. His left hand shook in her grasp, some small creature made of nerves and instinct. He snatched it away. “Nnno, that cannot be. I'm sorry, I don't have a daughter.” He shook his head, turning away, unable to meet her gaze.

“It's me, Felicia's daughter! Your daughter, you remember. I know you remember! All these years and not one word. You remember Felicia, your wife?”

He stopped in his tracks. That look of horror appeared again. Queenie was the spitting image of her mother. “Where have you been?” she asked, her voice cracking and rising simultaneously, as if it didn't know whether to do one or the other. She halved into two, overwhelmed, she didn't feel the Singer sewing needle sinking into her tongue, stitching a blueprint of invisible threads. His shoulders stiffened. The wind puffed his orange jacket. His expression of shame contorted. Men on the site behind them leaned in and out of impossible angles, Lego people in the dangerous house. The hot liquid he set down had spilled, leaving a small trail of coffee for the motorcycle man to rev his engine through. The sounds of hammers and drills rang from the site.

Queenie looked up at the rusted bars of scaffolding she was suddenly balancing on with a drill going into her head, the churnings of her organs catching bits of air from holes in her body. Instruments of rubble winged their way into the vast, grey sky. The wandering God began to try the hard hats of men who'd disintegrated into sawdust, knocking his head repeatedly against the window. Her weatherman faced her. His body shook. And just above the din he muttered, “Forgive me.”

He'd scribbled an address down for her near Liverpool Street he'd said, the road right after the petrol station that had the man without legs in the sign grinning maniacally, the faulty pump and the car wash at the back.