Closed Doors
Authors: Lisa O'Donnell
Contents
‘There are no strangers in Rothesay, Michael. Everyone knows who you are and always will. It’s a blessing but it’s also a curse.’
Eleven-year-old Michael Murray is the best at two things: keepy-uppies and keeping secrets. His family think he’s too young to hear grown-up stuff, but he listens at doors; it’s the only way to find out anything. And Michael’s heard a secret, one that might explain the bruises on his mother’s face.
When the whispers at home and on the street become too loud to ignore, Michael begins to wonder if there is an even bigger secret he doesn’t know about. Scared of what might happen if anyone finds out, and desperate for life to return to normal, Michael sets out to piece together the truth. But he also has to prepare for the upcoming talent show, keep an eye out for Dirty Alice, his arch-nemesis from down the street, and avoid eating Granny’s watery stew.
Closed Doors
is the startling new novel from the acclaimed author of
The Death of Bees
. It is a vivid evocation of the fears and freedoms of childhood in the 1980s and a powerful tale of love, the loss of innocence and the importance of family in difficult times.
Lisa O’Donnell won the Orange Screenwriting Prize in 2000 for her screenplay
The Wedding Gift
. Recently she took a break from screenwriting when she moved to LA with her two children.
The Death of Bees
is her first novel.
The Death of Bees
Lisa O’Donnell
To my sister Helen, our wee Nelly.
I’M NOT SPYING
on Mrs Connor, I only watch her dance because her windows are so low and I can reach. All the houses have low windows where we live because all the houses are the same. A sort of sandy orange colour, except Alice McFadden says they’re peach and I don’t know the first thing about colour because I’m a boy.
‘Michael Murray, I hate you, you don’t know anything about anything and your fly is always open.’ I look down when she says this in case my fly is open but it’s not open and then she goes ‘Ha, made you look’ and skips away to find someone to tell. I want to punch her in the face for it and if she was a boy then that’s what I’d do. I’d smack her so hard. I wonder if I can punch her on the arm next time I see her but I know she’ll go bawling to her brother and so I shout after her and call her a ‘cow’ but then she goes bawling to my ma who calls me in and makes me apologise to Alice and her fake tears. She loves getting people in trouble, that Alice. I don’t know how Marianne Cameron can stand her. They hang around together all the time, mostly singing and dancing. They’re practising for their talent show and who knows when that will be. They’re always going on about it. I bet it never happens. They’ve had posters Sellotaped on every lamp post in Barone for months and months. They’re mostly drawn by Marianne who’s brilliant at art, although Alice drew the one next to Mrs Connor’s house. It’s rubbish. They say they’re going to have the concert in the car park and are having auditions, but some of the girls on the street don’t want to sing because Marianne is singing and they can’t dance either because Marianne is doing some Highland dancing and some ballet. Tracey Stewart and her mad ginger hair says it isn’t fair Marianne is doing all the good stuff so Marianne says Tracey can make the costumes and Fiona Brown with the longest legs in the whole wide world is going to help her. They’re also doing some backing vocals on a few of Marianne’s songs with Alice. Paul MacDonald is going to dribble his football for everyone to see because Paul thinks he’s great at football, but he’s not as good as me. I’m going to do keepy-uppies on my knee. Fat Ralph wants to flip over but because the car park is made of concrete Marianne says he’ll kill himself and it won’t be safe, so he’s going to jump up and down with an invisible guitar or something like that. I’m looking forward to hearing Marianne sing, she sings really well. Alice doesn’t. Alice can’t do anything Marianne can do. Marianne is brilliant. Her hair is nice and she looks clean. Alice looks dirty and so I call her Dirty Alice, but not to her face, behind her back. It always makes people laugh when I say it, except Marianne, she doesn’t laugh, not one bit.
‘That McFadden girl needs a good bath and a comb put through her hair,’ says Ma.
‘Poor man,’ whispers Granny and then crosses herself because Dirty Alice’s ma died, leaving her with her big brother and a father who never opens the curtains.
‘Can’t move for the grief and there’s Luke left to do everything for the girl and him only fourteen years of age,’ says Ma.
‘I saw him taking two big bags of shopping into the house last week,’ Granny says. ‘It’s no way to live,’ she adds.
‘Know you’re lucky,’ Ma spits at me even though she’s always sending me to the shops for this thing and that thing and sometimes for women’s things. That’s what Da called them.
‘It’s a disgrace. Get them yourself. Don’t be embarrassing the boy. Hide them under your jacket, son.’
And that’s what I did. I don’t mind really. I do all sorts for my ma.
‘Angel baby,’ she’ll say, ‘go do your ma a wee favour.’ Angel baby is her special name for me. It also means I’ll get some money out of it for sweets. I love this name.
All the houses on Barone sit high on a hill and overlook the sea and the town where we live. Ma says people in other parts of the world pay huge fortunes for beautiful views and stretches of sand.
‘Good luck to them,’ says Da.
Ma loves where we live and like Da and Granny she has lived here her whole life. She doesn’t want to go anywhere else, not even when she could have. Everyone says Ma is very smart and could have gone to university or something like it, but she was too in love with my da and mad for the island, even though people here gossip all the time and want to know all your business. It makes my granny crazy, even though she gossips all the time and wants to know everyone’s business.
‘You can watch the ferry going in and out from the harbour all day long,’ says Ma. ‘Who wouldn’t want a view like that?’ she tells my da.
Ma says we did good getting a house on Barone Hill and it was brilliant of Margaret Thatcher to build them for us. That’s when Da tells her to ‘Shut the “F” up’ because Da hates Margaret Thatcher and because she didn’t build them anyway. A big fight always happens when he says the F-word, and words like ‘beer’, ‘bitch’, ‘dole’, ‘stupid’, ‘unemployment’ and ‘lazy arse’ go flying around the kitchen until a door slams and locks all the words away. Da quickly grabs his coat and goes to the pub after a fight like this and Granny says that’s why he started the fight in the first place, so he can get out of the house and drink.
‘He’ll be home later stinking of beer and eating chips,’ says Granny. ‘You see if he won’t.’
Later I sneak out of bed to share the chips. Da is always pleased to see me. He does smell of beer but I don’t care because the chips are so good. He’ll switch on the telly and we’ll watch Barry Norman telling us about all the great films we can see when we go to the mainland in Glasgow, except no one ever goes to the mainland in my house. If you want to see a movie with Al Pacino or Indiana Jones in Rothesay you have to get it on pirate tapes from Knobby Doyle, but you also need a video recorder and we don’t have one of them. Da says he can borrow one, maybe at Christmas, and that gets me excited.
‘Why do you hate the prime minister, Da?’ I ask him.
‘She only cares for rich people,’ he says.
‘Ma likes her and she’s not rich.’
‘Ma likes the house, Michael, and she wants to buy it with my old man’s money and pretend she’s rich.’
‘It’s a nice house. I like it.’
‘Let me tell you something about Margaret Thatcher. If she gets away with it she’ll have us paying for everything. Education, son. Medicine. Now she wants me to buy the house and make all her problems my problems. I wouldn’t waste one penny of my father’s money buying this place. Your mother’s a madwoman. The place would blow away in a storm.’
‘Is there going to be a storm, Da?’ I ask.
‘No, son,’ he sighs. He lets me finish the chips first before he packs me off to bed. He’s like that, my da.
MRS CONNOR LOOKS
like Blondie but then all the ladies look like Blondie round here, except Katie Calderwood, she wants to be Suzi Quatro and has her hair all spiky and wears a leather jacket. Ma says Katie Calderwood looks like a man but she would never say that to her face.
‘She’s built like a brick shithouse,’ says Granny. ‘She’d smack you in the gob.’
This makes Granny and Ma laugh until they’re falling about the place.
‘And what about that father of hers?’
Ma and Granny exchange looks.
‘What about him?’ Da says from behind his paper.
‘You know fine well,’ says Granny to Da, but Da doesn’t know ‘fine well’ and tells her so.
‘He’s a willy woofter,’ says Granny.
‘Away you go,’ says Da.
‘He definitely curls his hair,’ says Ma.
‘The man has a natural kink. He has two children for gawd’s sake.’
Da is getting annoyed. He hates the gossiping of Ma and Granny.
‘You’re only defending him cause you drink with him,’ says Ma.
‘I’m defending him because he is a man like I am. He drinks pints, has babies and works in construction, that’s no place for a homosexual,’ says Da.
‘What’s a homosexual, Da?’ I ask.
Da looks uncomfortable, so do Ma and Granny. This means I’m going to get tossed from the room or lied to. I get tossed from the room.
I take my football to the garden and think of Mrs Connor, who mostly wears a dressing gown when she’s dancing, except when she goes down the road to the shops, she dresses up then and wears a stripy skintight dress or a pair of satin trousers like Olivia Newton-John from
Grease
. She looks paler in the sunlight, but she’s still Mrs Connor and looks nice.
‘It’s a shame her husband left her,’ Da says. ‘He must have been mad.’
‘She looks like a prostitute,’ says Ma.
‘And drinks like a fish,’ says Granny.
Da tells Granny to be quiet and mind her business, but Granny can’t. She loves to talk about other people and their business, it’s her favourite thing in the whole world, and so she waits till Da is out of the room and calls Mrs Connor a slut. Then she whispers a story to Ma. I can’t hear them but Ma nods and tuts and sighs.