The Scrapbook (8 page)

It never came to that.

I can still remember parts of that conversation with my teacher, as I listened from my seat in the hall.

Miss Gilbert, it's good to finally meet you … Fern's a very capable pupil, one of the brightest in her form … She seems to be suffering from some kind of neurotic hysteria …

My mum's voice shrill with panic, vowels pulsing like a blackbird's alarm call. They snipped through the door's wood as if it were paper, skidded along the polished floorboards and into all the classrooms. I sat with my head in my hands and tried not to hear the straining silence of my classmates, the odd, embarrassed giggle.

She started her period last year. That's probably what brought this on. All those hormones swilling around.

I nearly ran then, but where would I have gone? It wasn't as if I had an indulgent aunt waiting to take me in and feed me biscuits. I'd carelessly lost Granny Ivy's spirit, and I'd chased my own father off. It was just me and mum now.

So I remained where I was and started to count the cracks in the ceiling tiles. If each tile had an even number of cracks, it would return ….

It was when the talk turned to possible solutions, possible therapeutic interventions, that mum's voice really took off. I didn't have to see her to know that she was clutching at herself, scrabbling at the skin of her arms with those ragged fingernails. The expression of cool disdain on the face across the desk from her, the dignified contempt. So at odds with my mum's throbbing, twitching attempts at control.

Would you like a glass of water, Miss Gilbert? You seem agitated.

A big glass of something stronger was what she'd like. What she needed. She cleared her throat and shifted, constantly shifted, on her chair. I held my breath and cradled my kneecaps, and started to count the cracks on the floor tiles.

But then something happened that surprised me. My mum straightened her back and met the form mistress' eyes, and she curled her lip. I could
hear
her doing this.

No, thank you, Mrs Mitchell, I'm quite all right. I'm so grateful to you for your interest in Fern but there's no need for you to involve anyone else at this stage. I'll talk to her tonight. No, please don't get up.

Her voice was sweet and low, with just a hint of sharpness; a lemon segment rolled in brown sugar and brushed across the lips. A chair squealed as it was pushed along the floor and then the door opened and she stood there before me. She pulled on her faded satin gloves and nodded a goodbye without turning her head, glided from the room as steadily as if she were the figurehead on the prow of a ship. I stood up and followed in her wake, without speaking.

As we both reached the double doors at the end of the corridor, where the outside world gleamed distortedly through reinforced glass, she paused and blinked at me. She looked bewildered.

Haven't you got lessons to go to?

I shrugged and linked my arm through hers, planted my shoulder against the thick wood, preparing to push. I smiled at her.

Double gym. Don't worry, you wrote me a note excusing me for the rest of term. Let's go home.

She hesitated and I thought that she was going to withdraw her arm, send me off to join my classmates, but then she smiled back and squeezed my flesh.

Sod it,
let's stop on the way for an ice cream, shall we?

She led us out of the building, into an afternoon fondant-sweet and drowsy with cherry blossom. I loved her then more than I ever had before, and when a crow swooped low over my head I didn't falter or look up. Her warm arm against mine was all the comfort I needed.

*

While mum's in the bathroom I sneak into her bedroom and have a good snoop around. The curtains are drawn against the morning and I pull them wide and open the window to let in some air. They are the curtains of my childhood, the graceful pink dancers, now hanging limp and unkempt as discarded mistresses.

I finger the straggly hems, the threads trailing like un-brushed hair. Beyond them, silvered by dew, the oak tree strains to grasp at the fabric. It's so close to the house now that if I lean over the sill and reach my arm out I can touch one of the furthest flung branches. I lean and reach, twist off a leaf. The oak will soon be completely naked, etched like a filigree brooch against yet another winter sky. I wonder whether it's aware of my presence, my touch. Whether it resents me robbing it of one more leaf, when it's already lost so many.

Water rushes into the pipes and I turn my attention to the bedside cabinet, rifling quickly through the little cupboard. I check the dressing table, the chest of drawers, under the bed.

The jewellery box that she inherited from Granny Ivy gapes on the rocking chair, half buried by clothes and spilling a rainbow tangle across the dark wood. I dig around inside it, scooping out huge chunks of costume jewels. A pretty little amethyst ring catches my eye and I slip it into my pocket. It'll be mine eventually anyway. My fingernails catch on paper at the base of the box. A photograph.

I prise it out and take it over to the window. It's a faded black and white one of my father and me, worn shiny and thin. He's turned away from the camera, in the act of swinging me onto the bonnet of his car, and I'm slightly blurred as I sail through the air, legs stuck out rigidly in front of me. I'm squealing or laughing and there's a field in the frame behind the car. I wonder if this photo was taken just before the infamous hand-biting scene. But I look too happy, as if I'm having too much fun, to be moments away from sinking my teeth into his flesh. I bow close over the tiny image of myself and examine it but there's definitely no hint of a snarl on that cheery little face, no matter which way I turn the picture.

I pile the gems back into Granny Ivy's jewellery box and grab at the heap of clothes. There, hidden beneath her dressing gown, I finally find mum's cache of tablets. The familiar striped boxes of anti-depressants and sleeping pills. Others with complicated names which I don't recognise. These are unopened, the security seals pristine. I empty the lot onto the floor and stir through it with my foot.

The bathroom door opens and I hear mum shuffle down the hall. She jumps when she sees me and lets out a small shriek. Then she spots the spill of cardboard on the rug and her face becomes smooth and shuttered, impenetrable. ‘What are you doing with those?'

I pick up one of the boxes and read out the name of the drug. ‘What are these ones for, mum? And why haven't you been taking them?' I don't let her answer. ‘They're for your heart, aren't they?'

She sits on the edge of the bed and starts a one-handed shuffle into her socks, wincing. ‘I could really do with a hand here, Fern.'

I kneel at her feet and we work together, silently, to get her dressed. She's seemingly engrossed in the task and studiously avoids looking at me. The helpless way she sticks her legs out for me to slide her trousers on disarms my anger and I'm still groping to recapture it when the phone begins its shrill wail beneath us. She turns to me eagerly. ‘Aren't you going to get that? It could be the restaurant, or Rick.'

‘It's not a restaurant, mum, it's a cafe. And I'm not managing it, I just waitress there, as I keep telling you. They have no reason to call.' I stand up and lean over her. ‘I want to know why you're not taking your pills.'

‘It's none of your business, I've already told you that.' She tries to get up but I don't step away and she butts me gently in the chest before losing her balance and sinking back onto the bed. She rubs her head and glares up at me. ‘I could report you to Social Services.'

I laugh and, after a moment, she joins in. But the scowl is still there.

‘Is this why you want me to look for dad all of a sudden? Because you're ill and you're not going to take your tablets or even stop drinking? A kind of slow motion suicide. How can you be so selfish?'

She takes advantage of a weakness in my stance to heave herself up and push past me. There's no pretence at humour now, from either of us.

‘You're a fine one to talk about being selfish. How long has it been since you visited me? If Tommy hadn't phoned you wouldn't be here at all and we both know it. I don't want to take the tablets so I'm not going to and you can't make me. I don't want to stop drinking either. It's all I've got. As to your father, there's no suddenly about it. I want to know why he left and I want him back. I've always wanted that.'

I hold my hands up. ‘You're right, I can't make you.' I bend to pick up the boxes. ‘I might as well bin them then, if you're sure.'

She stares at me, at the tablets, and then turns to pull the window closed. ‘Yes. You might as well. And then you can get on with looking for Lawrence. Do something useful while you're here.'

‘Then where do you suggest I start? You've already said you don't have anything I can use to trace him. I'm not a bloody magician.'

Mum grimaces quickly over at her bookcase, a brief tic of guilt. The bookcase is slippery with magazines and I decide to give her a gin with her lunch and go through every one of them while she has her afternoon nap.

‘Well, I'm sure you'll think of something,' she says.

It's nearly lunchtime when I get back from watching the late morning ferry come into dock. Mum's sat in the front room, chair angled towards the window and body tense with watchfulness. I can see her face creased into corrugations of hope and anxiety as I open the gate and walk up the path, and I wince and wave apologetically. ‘Only me.'

She bites her lip and leans back, sinks below the ripples of the half-net. I have a sudden image of her dead in her chair, drowned and serene. She's sulking but I reckon my peace offering, the most expensive bottle of gin the local supermarket has to offer, will raise a smile, or at the very least a grudging word of thanks.

I get both. And she doesn't even notice the tablet I've crushed into her food, so busy is she sucking down that second drink before I change my mind. She's half asleep before I've finished washing up and she doesn't complain when I tuck a blanket around her and pull the curtains closed. I stand still in the centre of the room for a moment, enjoying the dusky drape of semi-darkness in the middle of the day and the accompanying thrill of the illicit. She's snoring before I've reached the top of the stairs.

Every shelf of her bookcase is packed with bridal magazines. Too many to count. I can follow the trends of decades as I leaf through them, shake them upside down over the rug and then put them aside. Hazy young women, frothy with lace, gasp and clasp their hands in delight at this fulfilment of their life's dream. The pages are brittle from years of licked thumbs. Scraps of paper mark certain articles. I imagine mum sitting patiently through years of perms and trims, empty carrier bag folded in her pocket, the petty thief's flush on her cheeks. And then hurrying home with her latest acquisitions and poring over them for hours, studying the section on wedding etiquette and deliberating between a veil and a head dress.

Tucked into one of the pages, covering a dress that must surely have been The Dress for mum, is part of what looks like a spell, scribbled onto a sheet of creamy writing paper. A love spell? My mother's writing but definitely my grandmother's words.

… Take in your cupped palms two flaming pieces of fire opal and two gentling pieces of rose quartz. Linger a while with sweet thoughts …

Had she written it from memory? From years of stolen peeks at her mother's
Cooking Book
? I wondered if she'd ever cast the spell. It clearly hadn't worked, if she did.

On the bottom shelf of the bookcase, buried beneath the last pile of euphoric smiles, I see an envelope, stiff with photographs. Photographs of my father.

My father walking away from the camera, towards our gate, with me in his arms.

My father asleep in a bed, in a room I don't recognise.

My father leaning over me in a wood, one huge hand engulfing each of mine.

My father sitting behind the wheel of his car, staring down at a map.

My father cradling a sleeping me to his chest, a book propped open on my back.

My father naked, towelling himself down, framed in an open doorway.

My father…

I sit and look through them, again, and again, and again. There must be ten or more and in none of them is he looking at the camera or holding himself with the self-conscious poise of the observed.

I run downstairs and throw them at mum, scattering him over her. ‘Look at these. So much for having nothing. What else are you hiding?'

She jerks awake and holds her hands up to her eyes, blinks down at the photographs, up at me. Down again. ‘How did you find these? Have you been going through my room?'

I'm too angry to feel any embarrassment, too shocked by the images of my father, naked, vulnerable, captured and committed to paper without his knowledge.

‘I knew you were lying to me, hiding things. Look at him. He didn't have a clue that you were taking his picture.
Do you know how weird that is? Like you're his stalker rather than his lover; the mother of his child. No wonder he left.'