11

Tilly

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Tilly had heard them say it on the television when a bad man was taken to court, and lots of people came to stand in a little box and tell tales about him.

It sounded perfectly simple, but now Tilly was beginning to think that the truth was a bit like cat’s cradle; it was easy enough at the start, but lose your grip for a second and soon there would be knots and tangles all over the place. Tilly was sure that her mother was telling the truth when she had said that her daddy was dead. She might be a bit mad, but even she wouldn’t lie about a thing like that. A lie like that would definitely make your tongue turn black and fall out, and your eyeballs bleed as though they had been stabbed by a million needles. God and his angels would drop a thunderbolt on you, and your head would splatter open like a squashed melon. Tilly didn’t know exactly what a thunderbolt was, but she knew God dropped them on people who did a really big sin, and that sort of lie would definitely count. Even if you did a confession in church, your rosary beads would break before you could say “sorry” enough times to make things right. You could never make it right.

But when it came to the whole truth, that was a slightly different matter. Tilly had learned that telling only some of the truth could be a good way of avoiding trouble. A big truth told could often distract from the little truths kept secret, and sometimes it was the little truths that made all the difference. It was like drawing a picture of a zebra and leaving out the stripes; it ended up looking like a horse. Her daddy used to take her to the pub called The White Horse and she would sit and drink lemonade through a straw and eat salt and vinegar crisps while her daddy drank beer and talked to people who had died. Sometimes he used cards, but mainly he just looked at someone’s hand, or held something like a piece of jewelry or a letter. On the way home they would buy a present for her mother, sweets or cherries in a brown paper bag, or sometimes a bunch of flowers. Her daddy would always tell her mother that they had been for a walk to the shops. He never mentioned the bit about the pub.

When her mother had first told her that her daddy was dead, Tilly could only think of how much it hurt. The pain roared through her again and again until she was sick. And she was sick until there was nothing left but spit, and then she slept. But later, only days later, Tilly wanted to know the whole truth. She wanted to know the “how,” “when,” and “where.” But her mother did not want to tell. She said he had drowned in the place where he was away working. He had been walking back to the pub at night along the promenade and had gotten too close to the edge and slipped. The sea had carried him away. Tilly wanted to know why she hadn’t been to his funeral, and her mother said that he had never been found and so there hadn’t been a funeral. Her voice was choked with anger or sorrow, but Tilly didn’t know which. Then her mother had started to cry and said that she didn’t want to talk about it anymore. But Tilly couldn’t leave it there. Her mother’s tears didn’t seem real. They were “get out of trouble” tears. Rosemary Watson was always doing them at school. Rosemary Watson was a very pretty, neat little girl with long blond plaits and big blue eyes. She had a new pencil case at the beginning of every term and her socks were always very white and pulled up straight. She was also what Auntie Wendy called “a right little madam.” She was always causing trouble and blaming someone else, and if she was ever caught, she would produce the most convincing tears as soon as the first harsh word was fired in her direction. Tilly hated her, but really wished that she could do the crying thing half as well, as she could see that it might come in very handy. She had tried it once at school when Mrs. Mould had caught her flicking little balls of chewed-up paper at Billy Ellis, who had pulled her hair in the playground. Her melodramatic performance of sobs and shudders had been seriously weakened by frequent hiccups and giggles, and had quickly reduced the rest of the class to helpless laughter. Tilly had to stand in the corner for the rest of the lesson, and wash the paintbrushes and pots after school for a week. Her mother’s tears were more convincing, but Tilly still thought that she was hiding something.

One night after tea, Tilly began her questions again. Even though she was afraid of what her mother might say, she was more afraid of never finding out the truth.

“How do you know that my daddy drowned if you weren’t there?”

Tilly’s mother, steadied by half a bottle of Scotch, was teetering on the tightrope between mellow and monster. She twisted the gold wedding ring on her finger round and round and sighed.

“Because, Tilly love, there were other people there who did see it happen.”

The tears were already shining in Tilly’s eyes and threatening to spill down her pale cheeks.

“What people? Who were they?”

Her mother didn’t answer, but stroked the rim of her glass lovingly.

Tilly was tumbling downhill fast now and couldn’t stop.

“Who were they?” she shouted. “And why didn’t they try to help him?”

Her mother’s grip tightened on her glass. Her balance was beginning to tip.

“They did. Of course they bloody did! But it was dark, and the sea was rough. God, Tilly, do you honestly think that people just stood around and did nothing?”

Tilly shuddered at the thought of her daddy alone in the dark, struggling to keep his head above the waves.

“I don’t know,” she sobbed, “and you don’t know either, do you? Why don’t you know? Why didn’t you ask someone?”

Her mother didn’t reply. She topped up her glass and drained it angrily before slamming it back down on the table.

“Do you think I really want to talk about this? Don’t you think that I miss him? You’re not the only one who’s hurting. I lost him too! I loved him too!”

Tilly’s tongue was too quick for her own good.

“No, you didn’t. You were always shouting at him.”

“And for good reason, my girl! You think he was so perfect, but you don’t know the half of it!”

Her mother refilled her glass. The bottle was almost empty.

“Go to bed.”

It was said quietly, but the threat was loud and clear. Tilly knew that she was about to push too far and that she only had to go to bed to be safe. But she couldn’t. She needed to know if it was a zebra or a horse. It turned out to be the Kraken.

“But how do you know he’s really, really dead?” unleashed a maelstrom of such dark fury from her mother that it left Tilly cowering on the floor as slaps and threats and curses rained down on her. Crouched frozen in terror, Tilly did something that she hadn’t done since she was three years old. While her mother raged herself dry, a hot, wet stream coursed down Tilly’s leg and soaked into her sock. Her mother’s final words were spat so closely into her face that Tilly could feel the warmth of her sour breath.

“You’ll be the death of me too when you break my heart and then what will you do?”

Her mother’s tears this time were real, but whether of sadness or madness it was impossible to tell, and while she sobbed as she spilled herself another drink, Tilly crept upstairs to clean herself up as best she could. She lay in bed in the darkness, terrified and ashamed, trying to breathe as quietly as she could, thinking about what her mother had said. Even the constant guard of Eli could not comfort her. If her mother died as well, what would happen to Tilly? She wasn’t the soap powder mummy that Tilly wanted, but she was all she had. If she died too, Tilly would probably end up in a children’s home where she would have to sleep in a dormitory and eat porridge for every meal like Oliver Twist. She made a promise in her head never to talk about her daddy again and her heart broke. But if it kept her mother alive, it would be worth it. Her last thought before she fell asleep was Please God, don’t let me kill my mummy.

The following day, when Tilly got home from school, her mother behaved as though nothing had happened, but she had cooked Tilly’s favorite tea, and there was red fizzy pop.

The following week, Tilly’s Advent calendar had been fixed to the wall with a drawing pin, and two doors were open revealing a robin and a snowman. Tilly was busy chasing spaghetti hoops around her plate with her fork. She needed five hoops on each small square of toast to eat alternately with a mouthful of scrambled egg. Although her mother was being extra nice to her at the moment, Tilly sensed that this was a fragile and temporary state of affairs. It was her rituals that were a constant and would keep her safe. Her mother had pushed away her plate, food only half eaten. She had lit a cigarette and was drinking Scotch from a tumbler. Tilly had noticed that her mother was much better at cigarettes now. She had bought herself a gold-colored cigarette lighter with her initials engraved on it, and she pulled the smoke deep into her lungs and then blew it out in a thin stream, through lips softly pursed, as though for a kiss. It was a shame about the lighter, because it meant that now the only box of matches was the one kept in the kitchen to light the cooker, and Tilly could only risk taking one occasionally or else her mother might notice they were disappearing. Tilly placed her knife and fork neatly in the center of her plate.

“Have you ever seen a dead person?”

Eli, who was sitting next to Tilly, lifted his head and looked straight at her mother, just as though he was waiting to see if she would answer. Her mother didn’t even hesitate.

“Yes, I did, once, a long time ago.”

“Was I there?”

“It was before you were born.”

“Who was it?”

Tilly’s mother flicked her ash into the cut-glass ashtray and sipped the golden liquid in her tumbler.

“It was a little girl who was knocked down by a car.”

She stared out at the darkness that was the view from the kitchen window, as though trying to picture the scene. She shuddered as the heat and blood, the scent of lilac and the noise of the traffic swept through her like the echo of a nightmare.

“She was holding a red balloon.”

Tilly tried to picture it.

“Was she on her own?”

“No, her daddy was with her.”

Her mother bit her lips as she recalled his broken frame slumped helplessly in the gutter as his daughter died.

“Was she covered in blood?”

Tilly’s mother ignored her final question and took another deep gulp from her tumbler. She seemed to be somewhere else. For some reason she couldn’t explain, Tilly felt suddenly afraid, as though she was standing on the edge of a deep, dark hole. One more step and she would fall. She waited. Eventually her mother noticed the silence.

“Go and put your things in the sink, and then you can do the washing up.”

Tilly did as she was told, ever afraid of rousing the Kraken. Besides, she liked washing up. She loved all the swooshing and sploshing of water and bubbles, and the little mini-mop for cleaning the dishes. She squirted an overgenerous arc of green liquid into the plastic bowl, and turned both taps on full blast so that water splashed up all over her chest and all over the draining board, and bubbles quickly multiplied into a wobbling mountain of foam. Tilly’s approach to the task in hand was enthusiastic rather than skillful, and she wielded the mini-mop more like a conductor’s baton than a domestic utensil. By the time her performance was completed, the floor and draining board were awash with water and bubbles and Tilly’s sweater sleeves were sodden. She glanced across at her mother to gauge her mood. She had lit another cigarette and refilled her glass from the bottle on the dresser.

Tilly decided to risk one more question.

“Where do people go when they die?”

Her mother swirled the liquid in her glass round and round.

“Nobody knows.”

Tilly was surprised. In her experience, grown-ups knew pretty much everything, or at least they pretended to.

“Don’t the good ones go to heaven, and the bad ones to hell?”

Tilly’s mother didn’t lift her eyes from her glass.

“That’s just what people tell themselves to be less afraid of dying.”

Tilly didn’t understand how this would make the bad people feel better about dying. According to Mrs. O’Flaherty, hell was a really horrible place to end up, full of flames and demons, and people screaming and writhing in agony. Still, if Rosemary Watson carried on the way she was, there was a good chance that she would end up there, which would certainly make Tilly feel better. Rosemary Watson had started saying things about Tilly’s mother in the playground. She said that her mum had told Mrs. Dawson at the Co-op when she was paying her money into the Christmas club, that Tilly’s mother was a “mental case’ and “far too fond of the sauce.” When Tilly had confronted her about it, Rosemary had said that she’d better watch out because she’d probably turn out the same way.

“Like mother, like daughter!” she sniped, as she flounced away with a prissy swish of her silly plaits. The name-calling troubled Tilly, perhaps all the more because she didn’t really understand it but knew that it was intended to be cruel. It was like being scared of the dark; it wasn’t the darkness itself that you were afraid of, but the unknown monsters it concealed. And anyway, Tilly’s mother didn’t even put tomato sauce on her chips.

Later that night, cozily tucked up in bed, with Eli asleep on the rug, Tilly thought about the dead little girl her mother had seen. She had never really thought about children dying. She knew that poor, starving children died in hot countries far across the world. To help them, she had once saved pennies in a little cardboard money box she was given at Sunday school. But she had never really imagined children like her dying. She wondered what it would be like if she died; what it would feel like, where she would go, and who would have all her clothes and toys. Tilly thought that tomorrow she might make a list saying who she wanted to have what, just in case. Perhaps Rosemary Watson could have her doll that weed out of its bum, and then she would feel bad about being horrid to Tilly, and the doll might wee all over Rosemary’s skirt. Tilly lay very still and straight, with her arms by her sides, and held her breath. Perhaps if she could make herself stop breathing for long enough, she could get an idea of what it would feel like to be dead. Instead, she fell asleep.