Someday Find Me (12 page)

The day he moves in, I stand at the top of the steps and watch him unload his boxes from the back of Eddie’s little car. I don’t have any shoes or socks on but I’m so fizzy with excitement that I don’t even notice how cold the November concrete is. We leave his boxes on the pavement and, as Eddie drives off, he picks me up and carries me down the steps and over the threshold.

In the shower, warm water pouring down over me, soft like rain, beating out a relentless rhythm on my scalp and sending tingles down my spine. Turning the dial slowly, feeling the water turn from rainforest shower to cold drizzle and then clicking off. The drops of water on the glass catch the light as they run away. Picking two and watching them race, trying to guess which will reach the ground first. The drops on the tiles are different, tiny beads, still and silent. Smudging them into a long wet smear with my thumb. Furry black mould creeping round the edge of beige tile. Mould is all around, oozing out of every gap, sliding fingers around the edges of floor, crawling up old bottles and blunt razors. The air is thick. Stepping backwards out of the shower door quickly and shutting it tight behind me. The touch of the tiles on the soles of my feet, flat and solid and cold and smooth. Lying down on my front and feeling the flat solid cold smoothness of it all along my skin, from the tops of my feet to my cheek and ear.

There is an evening once, just a normal evening, when we talk and talk. We sit together, then sit apart, stretching legs and arms over and around each other. We sit on the floor, we lie on the floor, all the time talking and talking as if we have never seen each other before. We move round and round, the streetlamp’s light stretching through the tiny window and the sun slowly coming up over the grey of the pavement. As the orange of the lamp clicks off and grey dawn washes over us, we are lying with his face next to my hip and his breath hot through my thin dress. He kisses me gently through the fabric and I don’t think he even means me to feel it. We stay there for hours, rolled onto our sides. We talk and we laugh until the sun starts to sink back down through the little window.

Lying on the dusty floor, head spinning. That night seems to belong to a different lifetime, two different people speaking a different language. I’m an outsider, even from my own memories.

The last waves washing over me, stretching out the minutes and making every touch and every sound seem far away and strange. Walking naked to the bedroom, water cooling on my skin. Wrapping myself in an old jumper. My wet hair drying in curls around my neck.

Fitz on the sofa. Curling up next to him and pulling his arm around me and letting the music from the TV wash around us. The air is sparkling and the tips of my fingers are gold. I turn to look at Fitz and the tears on his cheeks are gold too.

Headlights from the road above shining on the wall, lighting up the flat and letting the outside in. Fitz lifting me, leading me to the bedroom. My legs feel weak and the world starts to swim. He lays me down carefully. Waiting to feel his weight on me, holding me down and keeping me safe. But he’s gone.

Sounds in the hall, voices, footsteps. My mother and father. They loom in and out of view, the sounds of them muffled and
far away. Clothes folded into a bag and clothes forced onto me as my eyes roll in and out of black.

Lifted, up and away. As the car door closes, my eyes do too. I don’t even get a chance to look back.

I opened my eyes to flat white ceiling. No meringue, no possibility, no shape. For a moment I thought I was back at Happy Blossoms where everything was flat and white or flat and pink and everything and everyone was different degrees of dead. I lay there for a minute and imagined what it would be like never to get up, to lie there until I just stopped being. From outside the window I could hear Lulu in the front garden, riding her bike up and down the front path. I knew she’d have on a helmet, knee-pads, armpads, wrapped up in cotton wool just to ride back and forth along the twenty-three flagstones that led up to the house. They’d bought her these beads that slotted on to the spokes of her wheels, all beautiful blues and pinks and purples and one very bright green, and they clattered around as the wheels turned. Everyone was always fussing over how lovely they were, how unusual. Nobody remembered that I had asked for them for my first bike, or that my mother had said that the noise would bring on her migraines.

My window was open, the curtains lifting gently in the breeze. The windows in our house were always open; as if they were afraid that without an opening to the outside we would all suffocate. I could hear the sharp clip-clip of my mother’s pruning scissors, and every so often Lulu would shout to her, ‘Mummy, look at me!’ They sounded close; as if I could sit up and peer through the window and see them right there in front
of me, instead of a storey down and a world apart. The front door opened and Dad stepped out.

‘Ginny on the phone for you, love,’ he said, in a voice that was trying hard not to carry further than the privet hedges. The clip-clip stopped and I heard my mother sit back on her heels on the grass.

‘Tell her I’ll call her back, will you? She’ll only want to go on about Georgie and the doctors. And it’s so lovely out.’

‘Right you are,’ he said, and I heard rubber slipper-soles step carefully back onto parquet floor. ‘Looking good, Lu,’ he said, as the door began to creak shut, ‘Maybe get those stabilisers off next week.’

They carried on for a while, the clip-clip of pruning and the clattering of plastic diamonds on shiny spokes and the singsong of birds in the trees all along the street. The ceiling stayed flat and white. No cars passed, the odd starling was the only traffic from house to house to the post office and back. I could hear the baby two doors down crying in his bedroom faintly. After a while, the squeak of a pushchair passed the window and stopped by the pruning scissors.

‘Morning, Pippa. Hello, Bluebell!’

Lulu grunted in response and the diamond clatter barely slowed its cycle of sparkly sound, but the clip-clip stopped and I heard my mother stand up and brush her hands on the legs of her jeans. ‘Hi, Una! How are you? Hello, little ones, hello.’

Una lived at the end of the street in a pretty white house in a leafy plot. She was beautiful in a pinned-back kind of a way, flicked hair and eyebrows and cheekbones all sprayed and pumped and pushed until they were fighting their way off the back of her head. Her husband Rupert worked in the City; when I’d first moved to London my parents had tried for ages to get me to meet him for dinner. They gave up soon after; or maybe they remembered it was better if I went unseen. The previous year Rupert and Una’s third cycle of IVF had worked and she
had become pregnant with twins. She’d waddled through the village in kaftans and leggings and flip-flops, skin stretched across her huge centre, ankles fatter and fatter and her face filling in until her neck was just the rest of her chin. You could hear the pavements creaking as she walked past and her muscles being slowly torn and pulled like Play-Doh over the things growing inside her and filling her up. The babies were born in the spring of that year, freakishly hot and feeling like summer in March. Two boys, fat and white and pink, paraded around the village along with the number of stitches and the hours in labour and the needles and the forceps and the stretchmarks.

‘They’re growing so fast,’ my mother said, and I heard her hands fiddling with the stray stems of the privet, mentally marking them for head-chopping. ‘Can I have a squeeze?’ she asked, and before Una said yes I heard plastic buckles unbuckled. ‘Ooh,’ my mother said. ‘Aren’t you lovely? Yes you are, yes you are. Are we a bit windy? I think we are. There we go, there we go. All better. Isn’t that better? Hello. Yes. Hello. Aren’t you gorgeous? Yes you are. Ah yes you are. Gosh, so beautiful, Una. Just goes to show, doesn’t it? Hello, baba. Hello. Who’s that? Ah, who’s that? Wave at him, Bluebell. Wave. He likes you, doesn’t he? Do you like her? Ah yes you do, yes you do. Don’t do that, darling. Don’t teach him things like that. Lovely, aren’t you? Aren’t you lovely?’

Wheels squeaked over and over as Una rocked the buggy back and forth to comfort the abandoned and neglected twin. ‘How’s everything with you?’

My mother sshed and cooed in response.

‘Terrible, isn’t it,’ Una said, over the squeak of wheels, ‘about the car?’

‘Gosh, yes.’ My mother switched out of baby voice. ‘Darling, go and see if Daddy’s ready to go to the garden centre soon.’ The bike and the diamonds clattered to the ground, the door creaked open and slammed shut. ‘Awful news. You know, I really thought they’d find her one of these days. But this news about finding
the car. Well, it doesn’t look good, does it? Makes you grateful, doesn’t it? To have your babies close.

‘Ooh dear, you are a whiffy one, aren’t you? Time for a change, I think, Una. I’d invite you in but we’re just this second heading out.’

The sound of plastic buckles rebuckled. ‘See you, Pippa.’

‘Yes, see you, Una. Bye-bye, tiny ones. Bye-bye.’

The wheels squeaked their way back up the spotless pavement. I heard a few more privet twigs snap, my mother sigh. It was just us, this side of the house, her ten feet below me. She hummed two bars to herself and then stopped. Snap-snap. The sound of her wandering back towards the house, looking at the flowerbed as she went. I imagined her running one hand through her hair and then, carefully, one finger underneath her fringe. I knew she was standing just beneath my head, looking out at the Redleys’ roof across the road, at the reclaimed pre-war tiles she had lusted after since they’d had them put on, and thinking about fat baby wrists and brand-new blonde roots. She was probably touching her own hairline, wondering if it was red or brown, or if grey was sneaking through. I heard her fresh white shoe turn in the grass and then one or two steps forward. She would be reaching up to fix her hanging baskets, one on either side of the door, one of them right beneath my window, where I would stub out stolen cigarettes when I was a teenager. She was reaching up to me, just inches from my face. I turned away and closed my eyes.

When I woke up an hour later, everything was quiet. My bedroom door was open, propped ajar with the tiny china house I used to play with for hours when I was a child. I always liked things that weren’t really toys. Instead of my own presents I’d play with the boxes everyone else’s came in.

There was a tray on the white desk in the corner, a straight silver rectangle with curly leaves on each corner.

The same things on it as ever:

There would be soup on the hob downstairs, made from scratch. That was the next stage. I stepped past the tray and into the hall. The carpet creaked as I walked along, as if my feet were new and strange compared to my dad’s hard skin and my mother’s perfect pedicure and Lulu’s dirty soft soles. I stopped at the stairs and looked at the pictures positioned every three and a half steps. Perfect portraits of each of us as tiny babies, the same painted blue sky behind us, the same pervy old photographer behind the lens. Here was Lu, on her front and gurgling cheerfully with a white china rattle clutched in one pudgy hand. Here was Jel, flat on her back on a white sheepskin rug, grinning at the camera with a wicked smile or a particularly violent bout of gas. Here was me, lying silently against a fluffy white bear. Here was Ella, the eldest, tiny white feathered wings strapped to her back, gazing at the camera with pink cheeks and an angelic smile. Down past the curve of the stairs to the seven straight steps that led down to the sitting room. Only two pictures hung here. In one, my parents were married in a cloud of batwings and puff-balls. In the other, the six of us stood in front of the house, the same photographer kneeling on the pavement with a black silk cloth over his head and just the camera eyeing us suspiciously.

It’s the middle of summer, the sun round and hot in the sky, all the windows open and the air inescapably thick, closing in. I have on a beautiful dress I bought from a market one day, on one of my wanders. Pale blue cotton, with a full, short skirt and a sailor collar, sleeveless with big white buttons down the front and white swallows printed over it. As I reach the door, feet bare, my mother springs.

‘Put this on,’ she says. She’s holding out a white cardigan, thick knit with pearl buttons down the front.

I stare at her, the white jumper waiting between us. ‘It’s thirty degrees outside.’

‘This is going to be on our wall for ever,’ she says. ‘You want to look nice, don’t you?’

Into the sitting room where the coffee-table sat at right angles to the sofa and two chairs, both facing straight ahead. I ran my fingers along the windowsills but there was no dust, nothing to leave a mark in.

Through the dining room and the kitchen, not stopping there.

I sit at the table, arms crossed, trying not to shake. My dad stands opposite me, leaning on a chair, looking down at the table. He hasn’t said anything in forever. There is just the plate between us. My mother stalks back and forth. ‘We can wait here all day, Saffy. We’ve got nowhere to be. I’m not giving up today. Two spoons. Just two spoons, and then we can all get on. I’m sure you’ve got things you’d rather be doing. Something on telly? The others are watching telly. Wouldn’t you like to? I know you can hear me, it’s no use ignoring me.’

Maybe it’s something I do. Maybe it’s a slight curl of my lip or a flinch of my face. Maybe she just runs out of space to pace. But in that second, I hear her snap. I hear it, and I turn to look, and even as she’s rushing towards me, even as she’s picking up the
spoon and jamming it in my face, even as the food is running down my chin and tears are falling down my face, I’m just staring. Even as my dad is pulling her away, even as the shouting fades deeper into the house, shut behind doors, even as I’m left alone with lumps dripping into my lap, I’m just staring. I can’t feel anything any more.

Into the garden. The sun was sinking slowly, the air dense and heavy. I looked at the wishing well in the corner of the lawn and wondered if I could fit inside, if I could pull the lid closed and sit there until I died. I thought probably not. Huck, my mother’s basset hound, would smell me and give the game away. I went to the apple tree and walked the whole way around its trunk, tracing the ridges in the bark beneath my fingers. I climbed the six planks of wood, without needing to look where my feet should be put, grabbing at them and not caring if I missed.

The wooden porch of Lulu’s tree house had once been big enough for two to sit and swing legs; now even she could barely fit. Green apples hung all around me and the sky was a clear, bright blue between the branches so everything around was bursting with quiet colour. When I was younger I would creep out there in the dark and listen to the rain falling softly around me. I hugged my knees and stared down at the grass, which grew long around the trees, short and uniform everywhere else in the garden. Up here things were wild and beautiful, a secret magic world away from everything else.

Beauty is a funny thing. In a tree it can be a colour or a bud or the way light dapples the leaves. In a view it can be the blue of the sky or the purple of sunset clouds or the curves of huge hills. But in a person beauty is not so simple. A single thing can’t make someone beautiful. You can have nice hair or pretty eyes or a lovely dress and still be ugly. My mother told me once, when I was only small and I asked her to put make-up on me, that
beauty was only skin deep. When Fitz would tell me I looked beautiful, that I was beautiful, I knew he was lying. Because beauty really is only skin deep but ugly goes all the way in. The more you peel away the more you find.

I wondered how long it would be before Lulu could no longer fit in the tree house and my mother got someone in to rip it out. I could picture her standing on the lawn, hands on hips as men with tools tore down the walls and took them away in pieces.

We’re walking down the high street. That’s what I do at weekends, because I don’t have any of my few friends left any more, apart from Quin, and he’s being tutored at weekends and in the holidays by the university student who lives next door to them and who eventually introduces him to Brideshead. So I just wander around, sitting in cafés and bars, right at the back with a coffee or a water, and just watching people and seeing what they eat; looking at overcooked fried eggs split open to spill their still wet core over the browned and frilly whites, or burgers cooked too long, until the meat curls up at the edges, and the buns are shiny with fat and the lettuce translucent and dripping away onto white plates. Or I walk through bookshops and look at recipes and photographs, always flicking past the glossy author pictures or the scene-setting ones, the rivers or the rolling fields or the château, straight to the doughy pizzas and the fat fish and the carnival colours of peppers and red onions and fresh rocket. Rows and rows of symmetrical candy-coloured cupcakes with tiny sugar snowflakes and sharp crystals of sugar sinking into inches of icing. And I walk away feeling full.