The Third Person
By Stephanie Newell
Published by Philistine Press at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Stephanie Newell
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I. August
Mon 1st August
Our mother says infants don’t have language, and this means they don’t have proper memories either, only fragments and broken impressions.
But I remember everything.
I remember touching his prickly beard when I was a baby, seeking out his lips with my fingertips. As I admired my reflection in the lenses of his glasses, a vast warm mouth would suddenly close over my hand and trap my fingers, making contented munching sounds.
His mouth always looked so lonely, tucked away in his beard.
****
Wed 3rd August
Even though she’s only nine and should be playing proper games with children her own age, my little sister spends most of her time nursing her collection of houseplants. What a ludicrous hobby! Whenever I spy on her through the crack in her bedroom door, I see her crouching on the floor, curly black hair scraped back in a crooked ponytail, taking cuttings, putting seedlings in pots, tending and feeding and watering her specimens, humming made-up tunes to herself.
It’s funny to watch her face when she doesn’t know she’s being observed, especially when she’s having a conversation with herself. She looks like a cartoon character: eyebrows up, eyes left, eyebrows down, mouth down, eyes forward, eyebrows up, mouth up. It goes on for ages.
Gardening is for OAPs and idiots.
I barge into her room while she squats by an untidy row of seed-trays and tell her that I have given her an amusing new nickname.
‘What is it?’ she asks, looking pleased.
‘You’re called Whore from now on,’ I tell her.
She protests, whining, saying that she doesn’t want that name.
‘You don’t even know what it means!’
She says it doesn’t sound very nice. After a pause, she asks, ‘what’s it called when someone makes words sound really difficult, like grownup words?’
I search for the right expression. ‘Adulterate.’
‘Well, Lizzie,’ she comments primly, ‘sometimes you adulterate words, and I don’t know what you mean.’
But when I tell her that her new name is short for ‘horticulturalist,’ a term that is used in honour of good gardeners, she looks pleased again. She paws at my arm and says thank you in the annoying little-girl voice she always used with Dad. I hate that voice. It’s turned on deliberately to melt grownups. And look what she has done. She has melted our dad clean away.
****
Fri 5th August
I’m the first person to see everything around here.
I always inspect the post, but leave it where it falls unless there’s a letter for me in my dad’s writing. He always writes Elizabeth rather than Lizzie. You can tell he’s in a good mood if he deliberately sticks the stamp upside-down in the corner. When a letter arrived from New Zealand today, however, I noticed he had put the stamp the right way around. I spent the whole morning trying to work out if he was in a good mood or a bad mood because New Zealand is upside-down compared to us: therefore perhaps a stamp placed the right way up in New Zealand is a clever joke about me being upside down over here? Or perhaps he was angry again.
I’ve thought about it for hours and I still can’t decide.
When our mother emerges from her bedroom, rubbing her eyes, she scoops up all the letters, sorts the white envelopes from the brown ones, and puts them on the desk in her study.
Wherever she goes in the house these days, a cloud of cigarette smoke lingers around her head. Sometimes we can hardly see her face. When she cries, we see big drops of rain falling out of the cloud. Since he disappeared, the cloud has grown fatter and heavier: it sucks out all her energy. She says she’s too tired to play Scrabble or Monopoly any more in the evenings. She used to be fun. Now all her love seems to dangle over our heads, just out of reach. It’s lucky that I’m taller and stronger than Helen. I can reach higher.
****
Tues 9th August
Helen nudges open my bedroom door with her elbows, keeping a finger buried in each ear.
‘What’s happening?’ she whines. ‘What’s that noise?’
I jump up.
‘Out!’ I spit, trying to focus on her so I can push her out of my room. ‘You’re not allowed in here.’
I’ve been working on my Gothic script this morning. It takes a lot of skill and concentration, and the violent thumping sounds downstairs have barely registered in my thoughts. I’ve copied out the full alphabet in capital letters fifteen times in rapid succession. That’s 390 letters in the space of 150 minutes. That’s an approximate rate of one letter every 23 seconds. When I finish this exercise, I’m going to copy out Hamlet’s soliloquies in my neatest Gothic script.
‘It’s giving me a headache. What is it?’
I would probably find my sister less irritating if she didn’t whinge in a high-pitched voice whenever she opens her mouth. I’m the one with the headache. The sight of her is bad enough, but whenever she speaks it grates against my bones and makes me clamp my teeth together.
Children of her age should not be seen, and they should also not be heard.
I need to complete one more sheet of capitals, and then I’ll move onto the small letters.
‘If you’re so worried, go downstairs and find out,’ I tell her.
‘I’m scared. What if it’s beagles? Come with me.’ She says beagles instead of burglars.
‘You’re unbelievably stupid! Burglars try to be quiet, imbecile. Go away!’
I know she’s hovering on the landing in-between our bedrooms because I can hear the floorboards creaking gently.
I can’t not hear the noise now that she’s alerted me to it. The silences are more disturbing than the thumps. They open up a network of spaces where my imagination plants images of strange men raiding cupboards and drawers downstairs before hammering their way up to get me.
I try to focus on the sixteenth sheet of paper, crisp and blank, specially prepared for this moment. Unlike the other sheets, which I tore out of my A4 pad, this last page is good quality cartridge paper. Each line has been pricked out with a pin at half-inch intervals so that each letter of the alphabet will occupy an invisible box the same size as its neighbour. My fresh sheet awaits the curl-spike-curl of the beautiful Gothic parade.
One of my Rules is to make whatever I write as beautiful as possible.
The banging noise begins again downstairs.
I stamp out of the room, grabbing one of Helen’s elbows on the way. ‘Come on!’
When we get to the top of the stairs we start to tiptoe, just in case there are burglars in the house. We lean on the banisters and tread on the edges of each dusty stair to stop the boards creaking.
Normally, the kitchen door is propped open with an earthenware Victorian flask that our mother borrowed from my bottle collection but, to our amazement, today the door is firmly closed.
We stand outside for a while and listen.
Buried in the core of the banging noise we hear a strangulated gasp, rising and falling. Here’s a sound I recognise at last. It reverberates through my memory, echoing all the way back to before I could speak.
Helen reaches out and tries to grab my hand, but I shake her off.
Tentatively, I twist the door handle and peep around the crack just in time to catch the first in a new series of thumps.
Everything in the kitchen is covered with a film of white powder, including our mother. She stands at the table holding a rolling-pin vertically over her head. Down it comes like a caveman’s club, again and again. She’s beating the living daylights out of a large grey thing on the table, hitting it with all her strength. The mixing bowl leaps up and down on the table, beside the ashtray and a half-empty packet of Marlboro.
‘What’re you doing?’ Helen whines from the doorway.
Our mother looks up, but her face doesn’t seem to register who we are. Her glasses, cheeks and forehead are covered with wet white streaks and there’s sticky stuff in her hair. ‘Sorry?’
Pebbles of putty dot the room. Helen repeats her question, and her whine gets even louder.
‘Do you need any help?’ I call calmly, in a voice strong enough to be heard above my sister’s racket. I know how to handle these situations. If a person is angry or upset, you mustn’t make them feel threatened by asking confrontational or silly questions, or bursting into tears.
Our mother still looks a bit confused. She sits down and reaches for her cigarettes.
Helen and I push forward a few inches into the kitchen. The air is full of white powder.
‘Can we help with what you’re doing?’ I ask.
Our mother’s chest heaves so much she can’t inhale her cigarette. I reach out for Helen’s hand and squeeze it, not too tightly this time.
‘No thank you, girls,’ our mother says, working hard to control her voice.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask next.
She turns her head towards the dead thing on the table. ‘Pizza bases,’ she says, gazing at the dough, exhaling a cloud of smoke at it.
‘Oh!’ we both say, together.
‘Everything’s gone wrong.’ She pronounces each word slowly.
The flesh around her eyes and cheeks is puffy, and her nose is bright red. When our mother cries, her sobs are silent, stealing quickly and quietly out of her mouth. When she cries, her face puffs up and slowly changes colour. After an hour or two, you can hardly see her eyes any more. Only then does she start to wail. Then she doesn’t stop for days. Me and Helen always try to intercept her at the puffing-up stage.
Helen drops my hand and moves deeper into the kitchen. ‘It’s okay. I know how to do pizza. I saw a man do it on telly.’
I try to snatch her arm, but she escapes.
‘You’re not supposed to hit it with a rolling-pin. You’re supposed to push it around, like this.’ Helen waves her hands helpfully in a dough-kneading motion.
Our mother blows her nose on a flour-covered paper tissue. ‘I don’t think I can cope any more.’
I relax a little because even though she’s crying, I’ve heard her say this lots of times before. I sense that we are floating towards safe territory, away from days of wailing.
‘Maybe we should all think about a holiday,’ Helen says in her most grownup voice, moving towards our mother’s chair. She heard Wendy Craig say that on Butterflies.
‘Shall I make a cup of tea?’ I ask, trying to deflect my sister’s ridiculous suggestion.
I walk through the channel Helen’s opened up in the carpet of flour and veer away when it gets to our mother’s chair. I create a new channel leading up to the sideboard, and fill the kettle. But when I turn round to look, Helen has climbed onto our mother’s lap and wrapped her arms round her sticky neck. A rope of smoke twists around their bodies, binding them together.
****
Sun 14th August
I wake up with a buzzing sensation in my stomach. When I roll onto my back and look at the ceiling, the buzz pushes its way into my throat and hovers there impatiently before moving into my ears. I know it’s a bottle-hunting day.
I lie in bed and picture all those treasures peeping out of the mud, waiting to be found and brought home. Then it’s impossible to stay indoors a minute longer because I’m bursting with excitement. I grab my tools out of the shed and leave number eleven immediately.
The banks on our side of the creek are covered with tall, golden grasses, transformed into hay over the summer. Swallows dart over the water and small gulls plod through the mudflats, heads dipping sporadically. Along the sea-wall, the mudflats have split into thousands of mosaic pieces, cracked and chiselled by months of heat, waiting for the autumn rain. The breeze scoops up flakes of mud in big handfuls and scatters them away towards the bone factory.
I discovered the old rubbish dump shortly after Dad disappeared. I was sitting cross-legged on top of my table staring out of my bedroom window one morning, trying to remember the funny angle he held his fork when he spiked a breakfast sausage, when suddenly the wasteland started to sparkle in the watery sunshine on the other side of the creek. I thought it was fairy-dust, and ran out of the house towards it.
The old dump is half way up the flat road. I can see the back of the bone factory when I walk around inside the site, but nobody from the factory can see me because there aren’t any windows in the corrugated walls of the warehouse on that side, just a row of grey plastic pipes jutting out of the building, covered with green slime. Sometimes brown liquid trickles out of the pipes and splashes thickly into the pool of water at the back of the factory.
The whole place is surrounded by a fence, and the rotten planks are plastered with signs saying, ‘Danger Keep Out’ and ‘Trespassers will be Prosecuted.’
There’s an opening behind a hawthorn bush where I can still crawl through, although since I first discovered this place I’ve grown a lot bigger, and I’ve had to loosen some extra planks on either side of the original hole.
My mother’s size six wellies flap against my legs as I crawl in, dragging the fork through the gap behind me. Its teeth graze the verge. I need to carry a full-sized gardening fork because creek mud is heavy and sticky, and I need to dig down as far as possible. The more I go bottle-hunting, the more I manage to dig deeper into the mud. That’s where the best treasure is hidden, lurking in the darkness. The mud is so thick it bends the teeth of smaller forks.
My pockets bulge with crumpled carrier bags. They crackle when I move. Gulls circle above me in the sky.
Everything else is completely still.
Coming through this fence seals me off from the rest of the world.
All the old rubbish pits are full of muddy water. I walk carefully along the uneven mounds dividing the pits from each another, using the fork to keep my balance. I never take my eyes off the shallows.
Flecks of white foam from the factory pipes nudge the shoreline.
The mud’s slippery. Places that are firm one week can be soft the next, and my feet sometimes get stuck. Once I nearly had to leave a wellington boot behind, sticking out of the shallows, because the mud closed round my foot and gripped it so tightly I couldn’t escape. This place isn’t ‘dangerous,’ though. ‘Dangerous’ is people, not places.
Mud sticks to the fork when I dig, and I push the clods off with my foot.
The creek is tidal, so the mud’s always shifting, pushing things up to the surface to be found.
Most of the bottles are broken, but when I find an intact one I squat down and swish it about in the shallows before putting it inside one of the carrier bags. When I rinse a bottle, I always think I can see the story inside it leaking into the water. If I find a rare item, like a clay pipe or a bottle with a marble in the neck or a blue poison bottle, there’s a Rule that I’m not allowed to rinse it or inspect it until I get home. I put it straight in the bag, covered in mud, and try to imagine what it looks like all the way back to number eleven, how it’s been perfectly preserved since Victorian times.
The bottles are always heavy with mud from a century of burial.
I’m allowed to imagine lots of things when I’m here in this place. Today I picture my dad coming home with armfuls of exotic gifts from all the countries he’s visited this year. The presents are piled so high we can’t see his face, but I know he’s smiling. For me, he’s brought a telescope. When handing it over, he whispers that he’ll teach me how to use it. He’s also brought me a set of twelve calligraphy pens with platinum nibs of different widths, and some sticks of gold, silver and bronze sealing wax. He’s bought a diamond ring for our mother, to replace the one she sold to pay the legal fees. (For Helen he brings a pair of cheap plastic roller skates.) After a cup of tea in the kitchen, made by me, he asks politely if he can see my bottle collection. I take him upstairs and describe each exhibit on my special glass shelf, showing him the labels I’m in the process of writing in miniature Gothic script.
I always keep my bedroom spotlessly clean in case Dad comes back and wants to see it. I’ve designed three separate Exhibition Areas, one for my calligraphy, one for my bottles, and one for my sealing wax and seals. I also have an extensive personal library containing twenty-nine books arranged with my favourite one, The Mill on the Floss, first, followed by The Lord of the Flies and Hamlet. I had to wedge Hamlet on top of The Lord of the Flies because I like them both equally and they share second place. Third is Crime and Punishment. (I love the way Raskolnikov kills the old woman: he thinks it through so carefully before he does it.) Last on the shelf is the worst book ever written: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott with those creepy goody-goody sisters and that irritating sweet mother. I won’t throw it away. I keep it on the shelf as a reminder. Sometimes I read it just to make myself angry.
I walk around the site and try to decide on a spot for today’s excavation of bottles. A small mound beside a pool of water looks hopeful. I imagine a cluster of buried bottles lurking under the surface, and start to dig.
There are four Rules to bottle-hunting, and they must be strictly observed at all times:
When digging for bottles, you must insert the fork at a right-angle, and press firmly so that each tooth sinks smoothly into the mud.
If the fork hits a firm object, you must withdraw it instantly. Then you must move back half a footstep and reinsert the fork so that you are never to blame for breaking anything underneath the surface.
You are not allowed to bring anybody here with you.
You must daydream when you are here.
If I break a cardinal Rule, I have to smash one of my bottles when I get home. Not one of my ordinary bottles from the cardboard boxes in the shed, but one of the special bottles from the glass shelf in the Bottle Exhibition Area of my bedroom.
My bottle collection contains tiny blue poison bottles which are as delicate as spiders’ webs, no bigger than my thumb. I also have two intact smoking pipes made of clay. They have brittle stems which look like slender bones, and you can still see yellow marks where the man sucked and puffed. I’ve got heavy earthenware beer bottles and flasks, too, like the one our mother borrowed to prop open the kitchen door, and disinfectant bottles, and countless translucent ink bottles with ridges on their shoulders to support the nibs of pens.
The fourth rule is the most difficult to follow, especially at the moment. The thing is, I can’t stop thinking about why my dad went away, and whether I should have tried harder to stop him. I try to force myself to continue my daydream, where he returns home loaded with presents.
I’ve been concentrating so hard on digging that when I look up, my vision is blurred. Number eleven slowly comes into focus on the other side of the creek. As my eyes adjust, I catch sight of a figure gazing out of my bedroom window.
I grab my fork and carrier bags, and race home. My bedroom has a sign on the door, on the outside, saying ‘No Entry.’ It’s the Golden Rule.
‘Boots off! Outside!’ my mother says the minute I come in. She waves an orange cloth in my face.
‘Who’s been in my room? Where’s Helen?’
To my surprise, while I’ve been out our mother has vacuum-cleaned the whole house, washed the dirt off the skirting boards in the hall, and scrubbed the paintwork of all the downstairs doors and windows. She hasn’t done this since before Dad went away.
‘Who’s been in my room?’ I demand.
‘I poked the vacuum cleaner through your door, darling, but it was so tidy in there I didn’t need to spend more than a minute inside.’ She’s really happy for once.
‘You’re not allowed in there! Where’s Helen?’ I demand, eyeing the stairs.
‘Gone to see friends or something. Down the road, I think.’
My mother’s cheeks are pink. She takes a swipe at the study door with her cloth. I’m suspicious. All the brass handles gleam in the light. She makes me carry the muddy bags in one hand and the wellington boots in the other hand through to our back garden, where I am instructed to wait until she’s filled a bucket with hot water and Fairy Liquid.
I sit on the back doorstep with the bucket, a nailbrush, a cloth, and an old crochet hook which I use for digging the mud out of the neck and body of each bottle. But I’m not in the mood to clean up my treasures now. Normally I can stay in my daydream all the way back from the dump until the last bottle is out of the bag and cleaned up. But now all I can think of is my mother snooping around in my bedroom, picking up my things. Or Helen.
The water is so hot that my fingers turn scarlet in the bucket.
My mother is in a good mood for once. She pops out every five minutes to ask what I’ve found, and if I need anything, but I can’t be bothered to talk to her. Why’s she so happy?
‘Nothing. Just the usual stuff,’ I mutter when she asks if I’ve uncovered any good specimens today. She pretends really hard to be interested in my finds: a Bovril bottle with a fat belly from the 1930s and some chipped Victorian ink bottles.
When she’s out, I use the kitchen sink. It’s far more comfortable to clean the bottles inside the house, even though I’m forbidden from doing so because the mud blocks our drains like glue.
The best things turn out to be broken when I dig out the mud.
Inside me, I know they’ll be broken. That’s why I’m not allowed to inspect them on site. But if a bottle is whole, I can’t throw it away, no matter how many of the same type I have in my collection. That’s because I’ve rescued it from burial in the mud. They’ve been thrown away once already. They survived. You can’t reject something twice. It’s bad luck.
I can imagine what it feels like to be buried alive like a bottle.
Our garden shed is packed to the ceiling with cardboard boxes containing all the bottles I’ve collected over the last year and a half. The boxes sag sadly, with damp bottoms and corners sucked by slugs. But inside each one, all my bottles are wrapped tenderly in newspaper and placed snugly side by side. I don’t care if they’re the same as each other.
But as I see each crack and chip emerge through the froth in the bucket, I try to call my daydream back, but I can’t. It’s gone.
****
Wed 17th August
From now on, I have decided to call our mother by her forename, Rebecca, because she has forfeited the right to be called Mum by letting my dad disappear like that.
Rebecca didn’t try hard enough to make him stay. She is guilty on several counts, but I’m thinking especially of the occasion when we tried to eat the meal he cooked, but couldn’t. Of course, Helen made the situation a whole lot worse, sitting there at the table howling with all her lung-power, huge-mouthed, shoulders sagging, tears heaving down her face like runaway tadpoles.
I tried to concentrate on keeping my neck stiff because a lot of air was trying to get out of my mouth all at once. My chin twitched and puckered uncontrollably because I was trying not to cry.
We all should have tried harder, but most especially Rebecca because she’s a grownup.
Usually the meals he cooked were delicious.
But this time he’d served lukewarm tinned tomatoes on white sliced-bread toast, with a wet lump of luncheon meat on the side of each plate. The tinned tomatoes looked like skinned animals floating in a watery pink pool on the toast.
I have to confess that I felt very disappointed in him. He knew I hated luncheon meat.
Rebecca kept pleading with him to come away from the table and discuss things in the study. When he refused, she insisted that Helen and I should be allowed to leave the table instead, as if we were babies.
He told us to stay right where we were and finish our meal.
Hannah said he was being deliberately provocative.
I could see that Helen wanted to leave the table. I started to feel that I might want to leave the table too, maybe in the next ten minutes or so, but nobody asked us and we weren’t allowed to interrupt.
Our mother should have left it to me.
The thing is, I knew how to handle him when he was acting like this. But because she made everything worse, he started to bang the palm of his hand on the table and insist that we put every last morsel of the food in our mouths.
When he threatened to give us second helpings, I laughed with relief and looked at his face to confirm that his eyes were joking, but he kept thrashing his head from side to side, making it impossible for me to see what was going on.
Our mother wasn’t trying to calm him down any more. She was being deliberately provocative in order to make the situation worse. She said she couldn’t decide whether he was a talentless chef or a talentless show-off, but either way, he should start to act more like an adult and less like one of the kids in his drama class. With his culinary skills, she observed, he should go to work for Wimpy and give her some peace and quiet to finish writing her book.
But finishing her book was the funniest thing he’d heard for years. He couldn’t stop laughing.
That’s when Helen and I slipped off our chairs. We didn’t even consult each other. We crept out of the kitchen and retreated to the staircase. I sat on the seventh stair. She sat somewhere underneath, but the main thing was we debated the merits and flaws in each side’s case until the noise calmed down in the kitchen. We were the staircase referees, ensuring fair play inside the ring.
Ever since Dad went away, Rebecca keeps asking me to brush her hair in the evenings. I don’t like doing it because I don’t like touching any part of her body, but I’ve decided to humour her for the time being. She stops crying in the evenings if I brush her hair.
‘Mmm!’ she says as the bristles tug down. Her hair is thick and brown, with wiry strands of grey.
I lift the brush towards her head in preparation for the next stroke. All the hair rises up in waves of static, following my hands and making me laugh to myself. She sits upright in her chair. She doesn’t mind how firmly I wrench down on the strands.
But when I stare at her hair for too long, I start to feel really sick at the thick mass of fibre. It looks alive at the roots, clinging to her white scalp like millions of tiny claws. And when I tug too hard on the brush, strands of hair snap off in my hands. Then I hear a roaring noise in my head, and large spots roll across my eyes.
‘Mmm!’ she says in anticipation if I pause for too long, so I have to continue.
With each stroke, she drifts farther away from me. I stare blankly at her shoulders and continue to brush.
****
Sat 20th August
‘Shoo! Haven’t you got homes to go to? Don’t touch that box!’ The really fat woman swats us like bluebottles and tries to usher us out, but every time she manages to bat one child out of the door, another slips past and flies erratically along the corridor to explore the living quarters at the back of the shop.
The whole place is alive with children, rushing about. They’re running, upstairs and down, shouting, banging doors, looking for hidden treasure in all the dusty nooks and crannies. The thing is, word leaks out whenever people move house in the village and all the local children run over to scamper through the empty buildings. But we are more excited than usual this time because the village shop has been vacant for years.
The fat woman lumbers around, pregnant belly as tight as an elephant’s. Sweat gathers on her freckly forehead in translucent beads. She keeps grabbing the hand of a toddler, shouting, ‘Stop it, Sammy!’ when he tries to join the other children’s games.
‘Don’t lift anything heavy,’ he warns when he sees her fidgeting with the corners of boxes.
‘Can’t you get these kids out of here?’ she complains, massaging the small of her back. ‘They’re getting in the way.’
She adjusts her ponytail. Her hair looks like a rusty Brillo Pad and her ankles are swollen.
‘I doubt it,’ he says, that man, and his laugh is so infectious that I can’t help smiling too, and looking at my shoes.
I’m not running around any more because I can’t stop staring at the man. He’s tall and thin with bright blue eyes, hair the colour of straw and a turned-up nose. He skips through the empty spaces, light as air, calling to the removal men with a voice like a flute. It’s as if somebody has taken a boy my age and stretched him into grownup size, but far nicer.
Seeing me standing quietly by the empty shelves watching him, he walks over and ruffles my hair. I feel a tugging sensation inside my stomach.
‘Good afternoon. I’m delighted to make your acquaintance, mademoiselle,’ he says, bowing low before me and flourishing an invisible hat.
‘The honour is all mine,’ I say, curtseying, and he looks at me in great surprise. Maggie Tulliver would be okay in this situation. I think of her. Clearly he’s impressed by me. I can tell by the way he addresses me next.
‘And what might be the name of this uncommonly delectable and cultured young lady?’
‘You may address me as Miss Elizabeth Osborne. I’m thirteen,’ I inform him. Like a sprinkle of water, my words tickle him all over.
‘Well, Miss Osborne the Thirteenth, my name is Lord Phillips the Younger, if you would care to write it on your card for the next dance.’
‘Peter!’ the Elephant Woman snaps. ‘Stop messing about!’
Trunks, boxes and dustbin sacks sprout in every corner. The Elephant Woman waves her hands around, issuing instructions.
The removal lorry blocks the road, casting a black shadow through the window.
My sister appears in the corridor behind the counter, clutching a handful of rusty keys, tripping on the lino as she dives into the shop.
‘Whoops!’ The man catches her arm. ‘What have you got there?’
Helen looks at him, rolling her little-girl eyes, and says in her most irritating, wheedling voice, ‘I found these upstairs.’
‘Well, you can keep them if you like,’ the man says, peering at her hands in amusement. ‘What’s your name?’
‘She’s called the Vilest Creature in the Village,’ I say.
This causes two unwelcome responses in the man. First, he staggers back in alarm. Second, he takes a Milky Way out of a box, leans forward, touches my sister’s shoulder with it like a magic wand, and tells her that it contains a secret potion to protect her from big sisters. I know now I must never introduce her as Whore, because this lovely man will definitely stop liking me if I use dirty words like that.
He winks at me, and disappears in a flash through the door.
****
Tues 30th August
My sister has been wandering out of the house on her own. Sometimes she returns clutching an open bag of Monster Munch, or a packet of Opal Fruits. I reckon she’s visiting a poor old lady in the village in order to plunder her reserves of snacks, carefully collected over the last few months to give to her grandchildren at Christmas. Old people plan ahead like that. Anyway, I’m going to discover where my sister goes and protect this old lady from further child abuse from Helen.
For now, I tell my sister that I’ve finished the delicious chocolate caramel doughnut Rebecca bought us as a reward for keeping out of her way this week, and I watch as my sister gobbles up her doughnut to catch up with me. She looks a bit sick at the end of her feast, but you can see she’s pleased that we’re equal again.
‘Not really,’ I say, and show her the pristine doughnut which I’ve been holding in a pincer grip behind my back. Voila! I haven’t taken a single bite out of it yet.
Helen’s face is completely blank.
I am always several steps ahead of her. Partly this is a consequence of our age difference, but mostly it’s because Helen is flawed and impaired and mentally retarded. However hard she tries, she’ll never catch up with me. Every time she changes her strategy or tries to outwit me, I catch up with her and pin her down like a Cabbage White butterfly.
****
Wed 31st August
Helen must have told somebody outside about my nickname for her, and somebody must have laughed and told her what it really means, because this evening she tells me categorically that I mustn’t call her Whore any more. She doesn’t like that name. So now, whenever she walks past me in the corridor, fingers picking at her hair, I whisper ‘Whore’ under my breath. My voice sounds like the sigh of a ghost. It’s filled with inconsolable H’s. I think I’ll shorten her nickname to a simple ‘H’ and use it publicly when addressing her. Other people will think this is my affectionate abbreviation of Helen, but she’ll know what the letter really stands for. She’ll know what it really means.
****
II. September
Sat 3rd September
I dawdle by the fridge in Finefare and ask if we can buy some processed cheese.
‘Don’t insult cheese,’ Rebecca replies.
She also refuses to buy any type of crisps because she once worked out what a pound of potatoes would cost if you multiplied the weight and price of a packet of crisps.
My mother has no imagination. She’s incapable of trying new things. She really needs to relax a lot. She needs to learn to take risks.
****
Fri 9th September
I am invisible. Invincible. I creep into the cloakroom to pilfer things from people’s bags. The subtle odours of people’s homes mingle with the smell of their plimsolls. I open the zips, strings, buttons and press-studs. All this week I’ve been sneaking in at break-times to pull out fountain pens, scented felt-tipped pens, glitter pens, pencils in rainbow colours. I store the hoard in my own gym bag, which I made out of denim in our Domestic Science class last year. It hangs on my peg with my Blue Peter badge pinned to the front. It feels good to deprive people of their treasures.
****
Sat 10th September
Today, when we run back to Katie Nelson’s house and tell Mrs Nelson how the ambulance men hurried into the shop, strapped an oxygen mask over Mrs Phillips’s mouth, bundled her into the back and sped off while she cried and screamed and clutched her stomach, Mrs Nelson remarks that it’s unusual these days for pregnant women to be taken to hospital like that. What women are supposed to do is pack a middle-sized holdall bag with essential products and their husbands take them to hospital by car.
‘She must be mad. Once was enough for me,’ Mrs Nelson wraps her arms around her middle, frowns, hunches over, grimaces. She’s so funny when she says this. ‘It was like being ripped open down there. “That’s it! No more babies,” that’s what I told him when we got home.’
‘But, when an ambulance comes, does it mean something has gone wrong?’ I try very hard not to sound too hopeful.
Until today, the only time I’ve seen an ambulance close-up was when the old man with the zimmer-frame tripped over his doorstep at number thirty-two. All his carrier bags burst on the road as he fell, and he landed on top of the glass bottles. The woman who lives next-door to him phoned for an ambulance and placed the old man on his side, head propped on a coat. Then she said he was a filthy drunk who encouraged rats into the house.
The road stank of beer and his front-door was wide open. We all came out to watch.
Me, Helen and Katie Nelson stared at his body on the road, feeling strange to be towering over a grownup, especially a man, and we peered into his house. But we couldn’t see any rats, only stacks of yellowed newspapers on the stairs and a pile of unopened letters on the floor.
‘When he gets better, maybe we can offer to open his letters and read them out to him, in case they’re important,’ Katie Nelson suggested. Katie goes to my school. She’s in the year below me. I’m not sure if I like her yet. First of all, she’s got to pass some tests.
Helen nodded. ‘Maybe he can’t read.’
When the ambulance arrived, the old man was awake again, rolling around, making crunching noises in the glass. I felt sorry for him. He’d made it all the way down to the pub with his empty bottles and all the way back with the full new ones, then tumbled at the last hurdle, his very own doorstep.
Clearly he had forgotten the important Rule about concentrating on the details.
Anyway, when they took Mrs Phillips off in an ambulance today, he stood in the doorway of the shop, hands dangling by his side, frowning. In-between screams of pain and gulps from the oxygen mask, Mrs Phillips kept shouting instructions to him about Sammy and the shop. But he just stood there looking like a kid who’s got lost in the supermarket. When the ambulance drove off, he hung his head, crept back into the shop and turned the ‘open’ sign to ‘closed.’ He didn’t even say hello to me.
****
Sun 11th September
I clatter over the threshold. Mr Phillips appears from the corridor, chewing something. He swallows melodramatically when he sees me and breaks into applause. Well, he’s clearly feeling a lot better than yesterday.
‘Look who we have here.’ Then he screws up his eyes comically and looks around the shop. ‘Where’s little Miss Messy today?’
‘Helen? She’s round at Katie Nelson’s,’ I explain. His behaviour is a bit suspicious, like my dad just before a big row with Rebecca. ‘And you’re right, she is messy. You should see her bedroom. It stinks! I’m surprised there aren’t any rats in there.’
Mr Phillips’s blue eyes twinkle. His hair is glossy and fair. He reminds me of the Handsome Prince in that story Dad used to read me when I couldn’t get to sleep.
An overweight black-and-white cat tries to sneak into the shop through the connecting door. Mr Phillips shoos it back. I long to explore the house behind the shop to see what things he’s put on the shelves and in the corners. I imagine how he’s transformed the dusty corridors and rooms, hanging crystal chandeliers to channel beams of light in unexpected directions, and how he’s hung mirrored globes from the ceilings to capture the sparkle in his eyes a million times over.
My pound coin presses into my palm. I’ve managed to shake off my sister and sneak up to the shop for some special time alone with Mr Phillips, just him and me.
‘And what can I do you for, young lady?’ he asks, making me laugh at the way he mixes up the words to give them new meanings.
His eyes are full of laughter and jokes.
When Mrs Phillips is serving in the shop, the toddler burbles in the background and the air reeks of cabbage. But today the air smells of lavender and fresh laundry.
I hand him my shopping list.
‘Would you take a look at this!’ he exclaims, whistling, bringing my list up close to his face, slowly going cross-eyed until his pupils almost touch his nose.
I try hard not to laugh.
Using my superfine calligraphy nib, I’ve listed each item in order of priority, with the price per ounce marked neatly beside it. I used one of my dad’s old shopping lists as a model.
Patiently, Mr Phillips measures and weighs half an ounce of lemon sherbets, followed by half an ounce of Mr Humbug’s rhubarb-and-custards. After twisting the corners of each paper bag, he bends forward so that his nose almost touches the counter and places a tiny tick beside each item on my list using the pencil that peeps out of his hair behind his ear.
When he comes to my order for chocolate buttons, he says he needs assistance to measure such a small amount, because I only want a quarter of an ounce. He asks if I would kindly step behind the counter to help him. He raises the hatch like a drawbridge, and I’m through to the cramped space behind. He stands on my right and holds my elbow steady as I dip the scoop into the jar, lean towards the scales, and solemnly drop one, two, three chocolate buttons into the open mouth of the bag.
His hand is really warm. My skin prickles and burns all along the right-hand side of my body.
Suddenly he levers my arm so that all the disks scatter everywhere, and says, ‘Whoops!’
I scream. I don’t like surprises. But I feel pleased about the sweets.
Mr Phillips puts his finger on his lips and I do the same. Together we promise not to tell anybody about the incident with the chocolate buttons. From this experience I have learnt a useful Rule for next time: always put your favourite thing last on a shopping list, not first, just in case.
I hand my coin to him and give him my sweetest smile as I take my change and reach out for the paper bags. He guides me back through the hatch into the familiar space of the shop, and thanks me for helping an old man whose wife is in hospital.
I love Mr Phillips, but I haven’t told him yet.
I stand on the lino and inform him that from now on I’ll be helping in the shop.
Mr Phillips is adamant that he doesn’t need any assistance, but I know he’s only being polite.
I insist. I rearrange the Delmonte fruit tins so that the colour schemes match properly. It’s hardly surprising that the shop is such a mess, because all Mr Phillips does is scuff around behind the counter and fidget with his pencil.
After about half an hour, Mr and Mrs Nelson appear in the door, blocking the entrance and spoiling the romantic atmosphere I’ve created.
‘Have you seen our little girl?’ Mrs Nelson asks. She looks around the empty shop. ‘Katie! Where are you? She came up here to buy crisps with your sister, Lizzie. We haven’t seen them for over an hour.’
It’s obvious that Katie and my sister aren’t here, but Mrs Nelson comes into the shop anyway, disturbing the peace.
Mr Nelson stands on the ‘Welcome’ mat in the doorway. ‘Got this place on the cheap, did you?’ he asks, inserting his forefinger into the doorframe and wriggling it around.
‘We’ll soon get the business up and running,’ Mr Phillips says. His voice sounds completely different when he talks to grownups. From this I can tell he’s a shy person, just like me.
To my utter amazement, Katie Nelson suddenly bursts through the connecting door behind the shop counter, shrieking with laughter. She ducks under the wooden hatch and runs up to her parents excitedly, waving a dusty mousetrap. ‘We’ve been finding things in the old cellar.’
Why didn’t Mr Phillips say that she was here?
The white fur collar on her jacket is covered with cobwebs. Her pink rah-rah skirt is smeared with streaks of dirt. My sister bursts out of the corridor behind her and rushes into the shop with equal vigour, followed by the cat.
‘Look at the state of you both!’ Mrs Nelson screams. She turns to Mr Phillips and rolls her eyes. ‘I hope they haven’t been annoying you, Mr Phillips. And I hope you know what you’re letting yourself in for, having another one. One’s bad enough. How is your wife? Caesarean, was it? Home soon?’
‘Come here, princess,’ Mr Nelson says, reaching out his arms to Katie. ‘We’ve been looking for you.’
Mrs Nelson eyes the messy stack of boxes in the corner, and pats the tight curls in her perm. ‘Shopkeepers before, were you?’
‘We’re starting a new business. Change of scene.’
‘Where were you living before?’ Mrs Nelson asks. ‘In town?’
‘Quite a way away,’ Mr Phillips says, and waves his hand vaguely towards the creek.
‘We’re at number sixteen. We only moved in ourselves a few months ago. Wanted to get out of town. Nice safe environment for our little girl…’ She glances briefly at the strings of edible necklaces on display in Mr Phillips’s cabinet. ‘Let me know if we can be of any help.’
‘Thanks for the offer.’
I glower at Helen and Katie. What I can’t work out is precisely how these girls got in when I’ve been here all along. Perhaps they crept through the back door without him knowing, and now he’s too polite to mention it to Mr and Mrs Nelson?
‘What did you do before?’
‘Actually, I was made redundant. Fresh start.’
Mr Nelson shakes his head. He pauses, twitches his moustache, and then says vehemently, ‘Bloody unions!’
‘But what was it you did before?’ Mrs Nelson asks.
‘I really must phone my wife.’ Mr Phillips fidgets with the paper bags and looks at the door. ‘Nice to meet you both. I hope you’ll make the most of having a shop in the village again. Bye-bye girls. Off you go as well, young Elizabeth.’
****
Mon 12th September
On the way home from swimming lessons in town, our car gets stuck behind a convoy of slaughterhouse trucks which trundle towards the bone factory with their loads. Slimy bones protrude from the tarpaulins strapped over the skips. When the truck in front of us hits a pothole, some bones bounce out and roll to the side of the road.
I stare at the threads of red stuff hanging off the bones on the verge.
As soon as she sees the convoy, Helen clamps her eyes closed and clutches her skinny knees. ‘Tell me when they’ve gone,’ she whimpers.
I know that the bones she imagines behind her tightly closed eyelids are far worse than the ones I can see in the truck.
‘It’s always better to keep your eyes open if you want to see what’s really going on,’ I tell her. ‘Otherwise your imagination starts to play tricks, and that only makes things worse. You should know that by now.’
‘I don’t want to see it.’
‘For God’s sake, shut up both of you,’ Rebecca shouts, jamming her foot on the brake and pulling into the verge. ‘Stop being so neurotic!’
I don’t know why she always tries to blame me as well as Helen. I’m not neurotic. I’m totally different from my sister.
Rebecca allows the convoy to move off ahead, onto the flat road on the other side of the creek.
When we get back to number eleven, the first thing we do is run around the house closing the windows and slamming the doors, plugging any gaps leading to the outside world.
Above the gentle, melodic rattle of rigging on the creek, the air fills with the clatter of bones as they’re tipped into the factory yard. They sound clean and dry, like pencils dropping on a classroom floor.
If it’s a school morning when a convoy of trucks arrives, we always rush to get in the car and leave the house before the stench reaches the village. If it’s half-term or the school holidays or a Saturday, we have to stay sealed indoors. Sometimes Helen and I take our dad’s old pestle and mortar, which he used to grind some white powder, and we mix butter and sugar together to make a delicious creamy snack. My sister is allowed to lick the pestle while I have the mortar. But on Bone Days the mixture always tastes sour because the backs of our throats are coated with the smell.
Rebecca refuses to cook proper meals on Bone Days. She shuts herself in the study and listens to Bach. She says the stench from the factory destroys the flavour of anything she prepares for us. I think she’s just using the factory as an excuse, though, because Rebecca believes that cooking is a waste of time: you spend hours making something, and what happens? People eat it in just a few seconds.
Today, Helen creeps into her bedroom with a bucket from under the sink, retching.
I make sandwiches which I carry into the living-room and eat in front of John Craven’s Newsround. Scooby-Doo comes on. I start to feel bored.
Out of pity I decide to play a game with my sister to take her mind off the bones. My favourite indoor game is called Pulse Beat. I made it up when I was small. You have to mix equal handfuls of split peas with dry kidney beans on two dinner plates, and then you compete with each other to see how quickly you can separate them out again.
Helen squeals with excitement when I suggest we play this game, and she demands repeat matches until I refuse to play any more.
My favourite game is hide-and-seek.
Slowly, the bone-smell drifts over the creek and seeps into the house.
****
Tues 13th September
Rebecca wants me to keep an eye on my sister in the two-hour period between our arrival home from school and her return from the campus because Mrs Nelson phoned up last night to complain that Helen was leading Katie astray in the village. Now my sister is under instructions to come straight home from the village school and wait for me at number eleven until I arrive back from my school in town.
This arrangement suits me because although, legally speaking, I will not be old enough to babysit for another seventy-eight days, Rebecca has agreed to pay my rate of seventy-five pence per hour. She complained bitterly and attempted to negotiate with me, saying that I shouldn’t charge a fee to my own mother for the care of my sister, but I held firm and refused to alter my price. I always win in the end.
I’m saving up for a microscope so that I can examine things in detail. In June, Helen caught some tadpoles in a jar. Using her pipette, I sucked each one up by the tail. As each tiny body got stuck in the nozzle, a strange dark liquid swirled out of its tail. I want to be able to see what’s really going on.
****
Thurs 15th September
That girl with bright white hair, white eyelashes and a pale freckly face approaches our English teacher’s table.
‘I’m learning the violin,’ she tells our teacher proudly, in a voice loud enough for all of us to hear. She explains that she’s approaching the first exam. She calls it the ‘Royal Academy of Music Examination,’ and says that her violin teacher expects her to get a distinction.
Our teacher’s admiration for this girl radiates through the whole classroom; it reaches out to where I sit and tweaks sharply at my ears. I can’t let this Pale Girl take the upper hand with our new teacher. When you move into a new year-group at school, it is very important to establish your status and credentials early on with all the teachers.
Our task in class today is to write an essay entitled ‘My Summer Holiday.’ How boring! Year after year we have to write on the same topic at the start of term. Teachers have no imaginations. I make use of the opportunity to describe how, during the holidays, my violin teacher got me to audition for the Royal Academy of Music. I’m so gifted that I exceed their standards and they want to offer me a scholarship.
I pause, wondering why I wouldn’t have mentioned this to anybody, then write that I haven’t confided in anybody because, given what happened to my dad, my mother prefers me to stay in the village, sheltered by anonymity, avoiding the limelights of London.
As I try to think what to write next, I look around the classroom. People’s lips move in quiet concentration as they attempt to spell the names of their holiday resorts.
Why can’t I go to London? I start to panic, struggling to think what might have happened to my dad. I can’t cross out what I’ve written, and we’re not allowed to tear the pages out of the exercise book. We’ve only got ten minutes left. What would stop me from being able to accept my scholarship at the Royal Academy?
At the start of the summer, I write, an IRA letter-bomb to my dad was intercepted. Naturally, after that my mother has been nervous about taking me to London. We like to keep quiet about my father’s important political position. We even have to pretend that he doesn’t live with us any more in order to shelter him. I would be grateful if school didn’t publicise the fact or tell my mother that I’ve mentioned it here. Nobody is safe in these dangerous times. Our house in particular is under threat from the IRA. All the letters that come through our front door are screened by officials.
I hand in my exercise book.
For the rest of the morning I worry in case our teacher doesn’t believe it.
After school, I seek her out in the staff room and tell her shyly that I’m worried about my essay because it contains some disturbing information and disclosures. I sketch the bare bones of my story. Her frown deepens, and she looks at me in amazement. But when she reaches out a hand and pats my arm, I know that I’ve defeated that Pale Girl’s story.
****
Sat 17th September
‘But I want to help while she’s away.’ I fidget with the crooked tower of baskets by the door, trying to make each one fit neatly into its neighbour.
He’s standing opposite me, stacking a shelf with tins of spam.
‘That’s a very kind offer, but we’re all ship-shape here. There’s not a lot to do apart from sing to myself and practise my ballroom dancing!’ He jiggles his hips provocatively and grins at me.
‘You don’t have to pay me. I’d like to do it.’
The tinned vegetables and packet soups are in complete disarray. Obviously, Mr Phillips is not capable of seeing how things look to the outside world. He needs me because I have an eye for detail, and that includes the way I’ll look after him when we get married in the end.
‘She’s only been gone a couple of days, Lizzie, and there hasn’t exactly been a mad rush of people fighting over the last loaf of bread. People in this village,’ he widens his eyes, leans forward, and puts a finger to his lips, ‘haven’t yet realised that a massive slick of volcanic lava is rolling down the creek to hit the village, so you’d better not tell them if you want to consume this last packet of chocolate digestives.’ The packet appears in his hand, conjured out of thin air.
I try not to laugh. I want him to see how serious I am about my proposition. ‘But she might be gone for ages. I can clean the shop while she’s away. I like cleaning. Or the house? I’m a very clean person at home. You should see my room. You don’t have to pay me.’
He laughs and looks at me fondly. ‘And what would people say to that? Not only am I employing an underage worker, but I’m not even paying her. They’d have my guts for garters. You run along now, Lizzie. You’ve got better things to do than hang around here chatting to an old man.’
Reluctantly, dreading the fact that he might say yes, but knowing I have nothing else to offer, I play the last card in my solitaire pack. ‘Or maybe,’ I say, ‘if you need, I can look after Samuel while you work through here?’
‘Irene’s parents are lending a hand with things like that. In fact, they’ve got Sammy at the moment.’ He pauses. ‘But you’re nearly fourteen, is that right?’
I nod.
‘I tell you what, after your birthday, we might take you up on that offer. We’re looking for a local babysitter, a paid one.’
Before he has time to expand on his idea, an old woman comes into the shop and I have to move out of the way. Perhaps I should let Mr Phillips mull over my various suggestions and come back tomorrow?
‘I’ll be off now,’ I say. ‘See you soon.’
He raises his elegant hand in a seafarer’s salute and immediately turns his attention to the old woman.
****
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