Unbecoming (33 page)

‘Are you mad? I'm not going to tell him.' Caroline stabs a finger at Mary. ‘You better not breathe a word. I swear, if you do, I'll never speak to you again. He'll divorce me. I probably won't even get custody.'

‘Steve loves you, Caroline. He's not going to use the children to hurt you.'

‘You know him best, do you?'

‘I'm just suggesting you trust him, otherwise all that fear and resentment is going to sit there festering.'

‘Please stop. I really don't need any of this hippy shit right now.'

‘You'll end up blaming Steve for not understanding you, when you don't even talk to each other.'

Caroline gives her a long look. ‘So, your advice is that I tell Steve I had a seedy fling with a waiter and ask him to forgive me, because if I don't, it'll eat us up like cancer?'

Mary shrugs. ‘Something like that.'

‘And if it breaks his heart, should I swap him for another model? That's what you told Pat, isn't it? Leave Lionel, divorce him, be
happy. Well, look where that got her – walking into the sea with her pockets full of stones. So much for your good advice, eh?'

That hurts. Mary takes a breath.

‘I'm nothing like you,' Caroline says, jabbing a finger across the table. ‘You're the most selfish woman in the universe. You dump me, bugger off for years and then come back and steal me away. By the time I get home again, my mother's suicidal and my grandfather's a broken man. I gave up everything to look after him –
your
father. That should have been your job.'

‘Not my job,' Mary says, ‘and not your job either. No one asked you to do it and you didn't listen when I told you not to.' She pulls her shawl from the back of the chair. She'll go out for a cigarette. She needs to calm down. ‘It's no one's fault Pat died, and yet you stayed there because you felt guilty. Chris's disability isn't your fault. Stop punishing yourself for everything.'

‘Shut up,' Caroline says quietly. ‘Please shut up and go away.'

‘Steve might understand about Spain. He might like to get to know your fire.'

‘Fire? I don't want to be someone who dumps their kids to run off to Spain to shag a waiter. I don't want to be someone who throws my guilt at my husband to make myself feel better. Stop going on about fire.'

Katie appears in the doorway shivering in her pyjamas. She's half asleep, disorientated. She looks from her mother to Mary. From Mary back to her mother. ‘What fire?'

Time slows down.

Caroline holds out her hand. ‘Baby, what are you doing down here?'

‘I heard noises.'

‘That was us. Were we loud? I'm sorry.'

‘I didn't like it.'

‘Come here and have a cuddle. Shall I take you up to bed?'

Katie sticks her thumb in her mouth. ‘Why are you here?'

‘I've come home.'

Mary sees the girl frown, like perhaps she's still asleep and doesn't trust this dream mother, this thin brown woman with braids in her hair who she hasn't seen for weeks.

Go to her
, Mary wills.

She can't bear to see Caroline sitting at the table with her arm out to welcome a child who seems stuck in the doorway.

‘I didn't like it,' Katie says again.

Caroline scrapes her chair back and stands up. She half stumbles to the door, sweeps Katie up and plants kisses on her hair. ‘Let's go upstairs to bed, come on.'

‘You smell funny.' Katie squirms to get down. ‘I don't want to go to bed. I want sugar milk.'

‘What?'

‘Hot milk with a little sugar,' Mary says. ‘Sometimes she wakes in the night and it soothes her.'

‘I want to sit outside,' Katie says, still wriggling to get down. ‘Can we do that? There might be wolves.'

Mary shakes her head. ‘Not now, Katie. Mummy wants to take you to bed.'

‘Wolves?' Caroline says.

‘Big ones,' Katie says, holding her arms out wide. ‘We ride them.'

‘It's just a story,' Mary says. Which sounds ridiculous as soon as she says it, because of course Caroline knows there aren't real wolves in her garden.

Caroline stands in the doorway looking at Mary. She's thinking terrible thoughts – Mary can see them roaring behind her eyes. She's thinking her daughter is different. She's thinking it's Mary's
fault. She's also thinking she's given too much away, that Mary's not to be trusted with children, husbands, secrets. But the worst, the very worst thought of all is – what if she is the same as Mary? What if abandoning children and loving the wrong men is in her blood? It cannot be. She has to make it go away.

‘You need to leave,' Caroline says. ‘I'll book you a taxi. There'll still be plenty of trains.'

She sounds ridiculously polite, as if cold practicality will keep the child from knowing her mother is raging. But look at the girl. She knows. She's pushing away from Caroline, reaching her arms towards Mary.

‘Stop it,' Caroline says, pulling her close. ‘You're going to bed.'

‘I'm not. I don't want to.'

Mary takes a step forward. ‘Could I take her up?'

As soon as the words fall out, Mary knows they're preposterous. As if Caroline would ever leave the two of them alone together now. They'd be climbing out of windows, shinning down drainpipes, riding off on wolves …

‘You need to pack your things,' Caroline says. She takes a step back, licking her lips as though something bitter is there.

Mary looks at her feet. She nods. She'd hoped for a few minutes alone with Katie, to say sorry for leaving, to promise to love her always. But she isn't going to get it. ‘A goodnight kiss then?' she smiles at Katie. ‘How about one of those before you go to bed?'

‘Why are you getting a train?' Katie's voice is small and fearful. ‘Where are you going?'

‘I have to go home now, to my own house.'

‘Will you come back?'

‘I hope so.'

‘Can I visit you?'

The question fills Mary with a dull pain. ‘Of course you can. Whenever you like.'

‘Don't,' Caroline breathes. ‘Don't tell her that.'

She expects them to give each other up, just like that. She wants Mary to pack her stuff and vanish. She wants Katie to be obedient and stop resisting every damn thing.

Steve will have his part to play. If he wants his dutiful wife back, he needs to ask no tricky questions.

And Caroline? Instead of thrashing it out with her husband, instead of saying,
You know what? I can't do this, I need your help, I need us to be closer
, she's going to pretend everything's fine, that her absence was a never-to-be-repeated aberration. Nothing happened, nothing went wrong, nothing needs talking about. She's going to lock all her feelings in a box.

Mary feels as if she's stepped away from herself, out of her body, and is observing, watching herself as she leans in to kiss the child, to stroke that beautiful hair one last time. ‘I love you,' she says and she hears how desolate she sounds and she hates it about herself, hates that Katie hears it too, is looking at her uncertainly now.

Caroline frowns, as if telling Mary not to display emotion in front of the girl when here she is, ripping them apart. ‘I'm going to take her up.'

Mary watches as they go down the hallway. A mother and her daughter. At the turn of the stairs, Katie waves, her chubby hand a pale starfish in the dark.

‘Goodbye,' Mary whispers. ‘Goodbye, my beautiful girl.'

There it was – the heart of all that Mary was missing. Two little girls – one her daughter and one her granddaughter – had both been taken from her. And, as her memory failed, she’d only been able to recall the pain of their absence, but none of the details.

Katie drew a line under the story in the memory book. There were no pages left. The story of the photo was told, in so far as it was possible to recall it today.

She was glad Mary seemed so relieved to have the facts at last. ‘That’s right,’ she’d said. ‘Every scrap of that is true. I remember it all now.’

‘I can’t believe I did it,’ Mum had said. ‘It feels like something I heard once or something I read about. How could I have done such a thing? How could I have pushed you out into the dark after you’d looked after my children for weeks?’ She’d looked around the room bemused, as if expecting answers from the furniture or the walls.

Mary had reached out a hand and smoothed Mum’s hair. ‘You needed me to be the bad one. It’s all right. I don’t mind.’

Mum had turned her head to look at her. ‘Mum,’ she’d whispered to Mary. ‘I’m so sorry.’

No one died because Mum threw Mary out. Mary went to live with Jack. Dad came home. Chris got back into a routine. Katie started
nursery. Letters were never written (both women agreed this was the case) because Mary didn’t want to interfere and Mum was trying to be the good one all over again.

And Mary slipped from Katie’s memory, because eight weeks is no time in the life of a child and kids need help to hold onto memories. They need photos and videos and family stories told again and again –
Remember when Mum left? Remember when Mary came to stay?
No one was going to tell horror stories like that round the dinner table, so it became a secret – kept inside by Mum, studiously ignored by Dad, never really known of by Chris, let go of by Katie, and eventually forgotten by Mary.

Katie shut the book and placed it on the coffee table. Hopefully, the pain of Mary’s blue blank would recede now she had the facts to hook it on. And when those facts slipped her mind, as they inevitably would, they existed in the book and Katie would tell her the story again.

Although, perhaps she should start a new book and transpose Mary’s stuff across? Because when Mary went into a care home, she’d need her memories with her and the nursing staff were definitely not having access to the things Katie had written at the back!

She smiled at that as she stood up and gave Mary a kiss on her fuzzy sleeping cheek. She peered round the kitchen door to wave goodbye to Mum (on the phone to social services), who frowned and looked surprised.

‘Where are you going?’ she mouthed.

Katie pointed at the world beyond the window, then waggled her mobile to show she’d keep in touch and blew Mum a kiss.

Mum looked ridiculously pleased to be given so much.

Outside, Chris was still in goal.

‘You can go back if you like,’ Katie told him through the fence. ‘The worst is over.’

‘Can I stay out if I want?’

‘I guess.’

One of the boys ran across and looked her up and down. ‘You know Chris?’

‘He’s my brother.’ She tried to make herself sound hard in case he was thinking of using Chris as a drugs mule, but the boy just grinned.

‘Thought so, you’ve got the same hair.’ He turned to Chris. ‘You going?’

‘Not yet.’

The boy nodded, as if that was good news and ran back to the game.

‘Go away now,’ Chris told Katie. ‘You’re embarrassing.’

A story, Katie decided as she crossed the courtyard to the gate, is like a bolt of material or a woollen scarf, and you might pull out a thread and look at it boldly because there it is sitting in your palm. But there are countless threads tangled together and some belong to you and some belong to other people, and incoherence and inconsistency become part of the narrative.

Mary had her version of the time she came to stay and Mum had hers. Dad would have something to add. If Katie interviewed the old neighbours, she’d get more. If Jack was alive – more still. Maybe she’d seek out the Spanish waiter and find out what he thought. All the threads bind and twist together. And every time you look it’s different, because stories change in the retelling.

Even now, if Katie was challenged to repeat what she’d heard, she’d add bits, miss bits out, maybe ramp up her own role. She might accidentally sit on Mary’s lap when her four-year-old self came down the stairs, or make Mum miss her in ways it sounded as if she hadn’t. If she really wanted to embellish, she’d let Mary live next door with Jack, let Dad forgive Mum and not hold a grudge so
deep he’d find himself attracted to another woman. Or maybe Mum could come back with the waiter (Katie secretly loved this part of the story, because it made Mum so much more human and gave Katie so much more room to trip up in her own life). Maybe they’d all live in a commune – waiter, Dad’s girlfriend, Dad’s baby, Jack and Mary – a happy sprawling family.

Katie laughed out loud as she crossed the road to the garage, because that was possibly stretching the realms of believability.

And this next story – the one she was walking into right now. How would that pan out?

What if she lost her nerve? What if she got arrested? What if Simona came storming out of the café and went crazy? The plot lines would all adjust, the narrative would shift and who knew what would happen next …

Katie walked over to the menu board and grabbed the little box of chalk from the shelf underneath. Simona pretended not to notice, but her shoulders tensed as Katie walked past and back out the café door.

She crossed the road to the library. It felt important to be close to the garden, as if she might rebalance what happened there. She knelt down on the pedestrianized area in front of the bike racks and shook the chalks from the box. She started with a long curved pink line on the pavement. It was supposed to be red next (she’d checked the colours on her phone) but there wasn’t a red chalk, so she drew an orange line underneath and went over it with pink. Both lines looked a bit thin and nondescript, so she went back over them and fattened them up.

Katie had always tried very hard to avoid danger. Why not? Hadn’t her mother always warned her? But in avoiding danger, you have to keep to yourself. To guarantee not catching Ebola or Sars or bird flu, for instance, you have to live in isolation and see no one. Viruses are transferred by bodily fluids, by intimacy. If you don’t touch or kiss another person or breathe near them, you’ll never catch anything. But you’ll never know closeness either. Or what it is to love. Or really be alive.

Yellow was for sunlight and green for nature. Katie liked the fact
that each colour had an ascribed meaning. She’d never known that before. There wasn’t a turquoise chalk, so she used blue.

A little boy came over. ‘That’s a rainbow.’

Katie smiled at him. ‘That’s correct.’

‘Why are you doing it?’

‘Guerrilla action.’

‘Can I help?’

She handed him the green chalk and he took it. He glanced at the library door where a woman was strapping a baby into a pushchair. ‘What shall I do?’

‘Go over the blue line and turn it turquoise. That’s the colour for magic.’

He squatted next to her and began to chalk. Katie had a brief fantasy that his mother would let him stay, that other children would join in, that by the end of the afternoon this drawing would arc down the high street.

‘We’re doing a rainbow,’ he told his mum as she came over.

‘Any particular reason?’

Katie looked up at the woman’s polite puzzled face and tried to remember all the meanings she’d just Googled. ‘It’s about being proud of your identity. It’s about humanity and also sexuality.’

The boy giggled. ‘You said sex.’

‘No, I said sexuality.’

‘OK,’ the woman said, ‘we have to go now.’ She pulled the boy to his feet and made him give the chalk back. ‘If this is to do with gay pride, then you probably shouldn’t be doing it here,’ she told Katie. ‘You should do it somewhere else, somewhere that isn’t outside a library where there are kids about.’

Katie swallowed hard as the woman hauled the boy away. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t important. She was just a stupid woman. Not very many years ago, the cops would probably have been called
and Katie would’ve been arrested. And not many years before that, she might’ve been put in the town stocks and pelted with rotten fish and vegetables. And before that, she’d most likely have been burned as a witch. Progress in the UK might be slow, but at least it wasn’t one of the many countries in the world where loving someone of your own sex was still illegal.

There wasn’t an indigo chalk for serenity, so Katie did blue again and there wasn’t violet for spirit, so Katie blended pink and blue together. Now the rainbow was complete, she began the first figure. The little stick-girl reminded her of Jack’s post-it note and she wished with her whole being that he wasn’t dead. Imagine if he walked up right now and sat down beside her? He’d understand why she was doing this, she knew he would. She drew a second girl next to the first and another next to her. She wondered if there was a collective noun for girls. A pride of girls? A tribe?

A bloke unlocked his bike behind her. Katie didn’t look up, but as he wheeled past, she heard him whistle the song from the
Wizard of Oz
.

That made her smile. That made her think Jack wasn’t so far away after all. Mary was right about so much. Katie hummed the song under her breath as she drew another girl.

Mary knew that young women in nineteen-fifties England were supposed to be modest, self-deprecating and demure. They should not have too much self-confidence, not assert their sexuality or independence and never express their appetite or desire. They should be restrained, make sacrifices and put others first.

Mary knew it, but she thought it was poppycock.
Baloney
, she thought,
what a load of nonsense
, and she cocked a snook at it.

There were a whole row of girls now. They reminded Katie of a string of paper dolls her dad had cut out for her birthday years ago. She wondered where Dad was right now. In the hotel pool with
his baby daughter? Drinking cocktails on some French beach?

Katie picked up the orange chalk. She’d give all the girls orange dresses. Orange was for healing.

If Mary was never a good girl, Mum went in the opposite direction. She even blamed herself for Pat’s death and spent years atoning. Good girls don’t come any better than that. But being good all the time makes you resentful. And the resentment leaks out as you get quietly and politely furious.

Two elderly women pulled shopping trolleys towards Katie. One of them said, ‘You don’t see kids using chalk any more.’

The other one said, ‘Remember how we used to play hopscotch?’

Katie didn’t know if they expected a response, but she smiled anyway and they waved and smiled back at her as they walked away. She wondered if they were a couple. She wondered if they’d been together for sixty years and no one had even noticed.

There were twelve girls in a row now. Like dancing princesses, or months of the year. She’d run out of rainbow, but she wasn’t ready to stop. What was the point of that? She needed a witness before she could go home. Wasn’t the definition of ‘brave’ being afraid and doing it anyway? What if she took a photo and sent Simona a Snapchat? Would that count for anything? What if she made this rainbow her Facebook picture? She made the lines neater while she thought about it, she blended colours together, drew more girls, spilling out from under the rainbow, no longer protected by its arc.

Would it be brave to text Esme? She could text, LIBRARY. URGENT. Esme wouldn’t come alone, of course – she wouldn’t dare. She’d bring Amy and a whole load of girls from school and they’d look like they were in a girl band with their miniskirts and brown bellies and their hair all dip-dyed and they’d stand looking at Katie as if she was an exhibit in a gallery.

Then Amy would say something hateful like, ‘Oh my God, you are so entirely weird. What are you even doing?’

Because everyone needed a fall guy, someone to blame so they could keep looking good. And when Katie had dared to lean in and kiss Esme, she’d broken all the rules. Good girls mustn’t be threatening or strange, or they’ll be punished. They’ll be left out, talked about and marginalized.

But Katie knew if she texted Esme, she’d only end up getting into a fight with Amy, and it wasn’t time for that yet and it wouldn’t help with what she really wanted, which was for Simona to believe in her. So she texted Simona instead: I AM UNBECOMING. Which felt very apt, because Mary’s father used to say she was ‘unbecoming’ when she misbehaved. It meant perverse, incorrect and unseemly. Everything a girl wasn’t supposed to be. Of course, it also meant unravelling, which was true of Mary in another way, but Katie wouldn’t think about that now …

She wondered at one point if she’d gone mad, because she’d drawn about thirty girls. She wondered what would happen if she didn’t stop. Would Mum come looking? And what would she say? And thinking about that, Katie felt sadness creep through her, because there were clearly so many difficult conversations still to come, so many tears still to be shed. She distracted herself by thinking of Chris playing football, of Mary’s contented face when she said, ‘Every word of that story was true.’

‘A rainbow?’

Katie looked up, heart slamming, to see Simona frowning down at her.

Simona folded her arms. ‘You think this is going to impress me?’

‘Probably not.’

‘Did your mum kick you out? Is that what’s happened?’

‘No. Apart from talking about herself most of the time, she was remarkably OK.’

Simona looked surprised. ‘Well, that’s good. I’m glad about that.’

Ah, so she did care …

‘So,’ Simona said, ‘why a rainbow?’

‘I wanted to show you I meant what I said. You know, about holding my hand up.’

Simona scowled down at it. ‘Are they supposed to be people?’

‘They’re girls.’

‘It looks like a queue for the toilets.’

Katie smiled and held out a stick of chalk. ‘I’m not very good at drawing.’

Simona took the chalk, but didn’t sit down. She said, ‘I don’t really believe in all this rainbow shit by the way. I’m not interested in joining a gang or a group. I’m my own person.’

‘I think it’s supposed to represent diversity. You know, each of us is unique?’

Simona rolled her eyes. ‘Then why are all your girls wearing orange skirts? That’s not very diverse, is it?’

She was so close and so gorgeous that Katie didn’t know which bit of her to look at. They were only a metre apart. Katie could reach out and grab her ankle, pull her down to the pavement and hold her close.

‘Please sit down, Simona. You’re making me nervous.’

She looked pleased about that. ‘Nervous of what?’

‘I don’t know. That you’ll go away?’

Simona sat down and began to chalk over one of the orange skirts with blue, turning it muddy brown. ‘I wish black chalk existed,’ she said. ‘Or gold.’

Katie loved having her this close, loved watching her beautiful hands swap the second girl’s skirt for trousers and give her sandals
and rub out some of her hair, so it was shorter. She was drawing herself.

Katie gave the first girl a green tea dress with pink roses and boots. She made her arms longer and gave her little chalk hands that reached out to the second girl.

‘Her fingers look like fish fingers,’ Simona said, but she had a smile in her voice as she allowed her girl’s arms to stretch just far enough for the chalk girls to touch.

Katie drew the sun, bright orange. Simona drew clouds and the rain and they both drew birds flying high. Katie wondered what would happen when they ran out of rainbow-themed things. She started on a tree in case Simona said she had to go, because a single tree could lead to a wood, to acres of forest, to hours sitting drawing together.

‘Unbecoming?’ Simona said.

‘Improper,’ Katie said.

Simona nodded. ‘I see.’

‘Or like someone who can be anyone. A work in progress.’

A bloke stopped his bike right by them. ‘You girls are sort of in the way there,’ he said.

Simona smiled at him. ‘That’s sort of the point.’

‘The point of what?’

‘Recognition.’

He looked intrigued. ‘What do you want to be recognized for?’

‘Surviving,’ Simona said.

‘Hope and pride and diversity,’ Katie said, remembering what she’d read on Google.

He got it then and looked a bit embarrassed, but he gave them both a high-five before walking round the rainbow and locking his bike up. He didn’t say anything else, but he grinned as he walked away.

‘That told him,’ Simona said.

‘What’s the collective noun for girls?’ Katie asked.

‘A sapphist of girls?’

They both laughed. Katie’s entire body felt warm, like she’d been at the cocktails again. Nowhere was better than this. Tuesday afternoon washed in warmth, chalky fingers, a slow breeze lapping at her dress.

She drew roots for the trees. She buried acorns beneath their folds, summoned worms and strata of rock. Simona set a fire with sparks of orange and yellow and pink chalk. Katie drew a tent. Simona a blanket.

‘Did you know,’ Simona said, ‘that some bloke in America bought a house and painted it the colours of the rainbow just to piss off the preacher from the fundamentalist church opposite?’

‘A house?’ Katie said. ‘Maybe that should be our next project?’

‘Our?’ Simona said. But her voice was still warm.

‘I hate Amy,’ Katie said.

‘She’s an anomaly. Don’t worry about her.’

‘I still hate her.’

Each girl had a different outfit now, like the paper dolls on the back of old-fashioned comics. There was a sun and a moon and countless stars. However much they wanted to carry on (and Katie definitely did) there was nothing else to draw and no room to depict it. They sat there contemplating it, occasionally leaning over to blend lines together. Cyclists walked round, like they shouldn’t wheel their bike on it. One woman even tied her bike to the railing instead of using the last rack which was directly behind them.

Katie told Simona about a magician she’d seen on TV once who’d drawn a chalk circle round a five-pound note and crowds of people had walked right by and not one had dared pick it up.

‘That reminds me,’ Simona said. ‘I forgot to tell you – my boss wants to see you. That’s actually why I came over.’

‘Your boss? Why?’

‘You stole the chalk.’

‘I was going to give it back.’

‘Well, you’ll just have to explain that to her then, won’t you?’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘Sorry, but she asked me to come and get you, so you’d better hurry up.’ Simona grabbed Katie’s hand and it was like a powerful jolt surged through Katie’s entire body, like her hand became some kind of conductor.

‘Where are we going?’

‘I just told you.’

‘Are you actually serious?’

‘Yeah, she was really quite angry.’

Katie followed Simona back across the road and into the café and she had no idea, none at all, where they were going and Simona led her past the counter and past the customer toilets and through a door marked
staff only
and through a little steamy kitchen where a bloke in a chef’s hat looked both amused and pissed off and Katie thought the door ahead must lead to the manager’s office and was she really going to get bollocked for pinching chalk? But actually it led into a stockroom – shelves and boxes and packets and tubs of things and then total darkness as Simona shut the door and switched the light off and said, ‘I was kidding about my boss.’