She spent the evening alternately staring at her computer screen and the pages of Baudelaire. Twice she thought she was going to be sick, but when she went to the bathroom there was nothing. After a while she took the yellow hat out of the drawer and put it on her head. She wished Rebecca was still there. There were things they never talked about. For example, even after all these years she didn’t know what Rebecca’s parents were called, or how they died. She didn’t know anything about Rebecca’s childhood in York. But still, they were friends, and sometimes it was enough to be with someone. Sometimes you didn’t need to talk.
It was true, she didn’t need to be at college to write the essay. She could go home to Ely. She could write her essay at the kitchen table or at the library in town. Her dad had sent a message three weeks ago to say that Lee had left. There was no one staying in her room.
She stared at herself in the mirror. There was a razor on the desk that she had brought with her from the bathroom. It would be easy to break the blade out of its plastic casing.
For nineteen years, home had been a safe place. Maybe it would be fine. Her books were in there in her room, her cuddly toys from when she was a kid, the diaries she’d kept from age twelve to fifteen. Her dad would be in the house. Maybe she could even talk to her mum about Easter.
She swiped at the desk and knocked the razor to the floor. Then she looked back in the mirror and stuck her tongue out. She took the yellow hat off and put it back in the drawer.
The next morning she sat on the train south, watching the hills outside the window flatten into broad plains. Leeds, Wakefield, Peterborough, square block landscapes giving way to fields which stretched as far as the eye could see. Black birds hovering way up, loose ‘m’s scrawled on the sky. The nearer the train got to home, the less Jen noticed what was outside. The flatness sank comfortably into her consciousness.
After Manea Station the wash had flooded into the fields, and it seemed as though the train passed across a lake, a still mirror which held the reversed top branches of submerged trees, huge motionless clouds, and the undersides of swooping birds hoping to catch dragonflies. She could see the cathedral now, the huge stone ship, docked and beached, pinning the city of Ely into the flatness of the drained fens.
The train passed through wet green meadows, lower than the tracks, dotted with butter-coloured cows. Everything was so normal here, so unchanged. Here she was still a child. She would get home and Donna would scold her for being away. Danny would be out in the garden kicking a football.
She walked from the station down to the river. She hadn’t told her mum and dad she was coming. Now she didn’t feel ready to face their surprise and hugs of welcome. What she wanted was to slip unnoticed through the back door and up to her room, wait there lying on her bed until she was called down to tea. Later, when her dad was watching telly, she would help her mum with the washing up. They might talk. They probably wouldn’t.
She could slip into the city, even if she couldn’t slip into the house. She wove through the tourists who were milling down by the river with their brightly dressed children, clutching bags of breadcrusts for the ducks. Some boys from the King’s School were getting boats out of the boatsheds. One had his hair dyed in blonde and black stripes and Jen looked twice to check it was hair and not a tightly pulled cap. He caught her gaze and threw her a cheeky wink, a grin. One of the other boys whistled and Jen smiled.
She shoved her hands into her jacket pockets and walked on, aware of the boys watching. Further up, a new white-board fence marked off an area of wasteland adjacent to the river. Jen stopped to read the notice attached to it – an archaeological dig, looking for signs of habitation from the recent past. She wondered if they’d find anything of hers. Lost lipsticks or hairclips, experimental cigarettes, puffed and thrown away with a dark red gloss ring round the filter. Mementos of summer nights sitting on the walls with Rebecca, watching the light fade over the water, gossiping, giggling, smoking. Something of Danny’s, maybe.
It was gone six when she eventually walked up the drive to her parent’s front door. The house was semi-detached, pink-bricked, built in the sixties, the door painted custard yellow. The roses which outlined the square front garden were blooming red and pink, their fleshy petals inking her with perfume as she brushed by.
Jen rang the bell. She had a front door key in her bag, but she didn’t want to just walk in when they weren’t expecting her. A dark shape loomed behind the frosted glass and the door opened. On the mat, a pair of large male feet in navy blue socks and brown sandals. A smell wafted over her, musty like brown leather and old books. She looked up and her hands were grasped in two much larger ones.
“Jennifer, how wonderful.” She was pulled across the threshold. “So lovely you could come. Your mother will be delighted.”
Terence. Oh God!
He was wearing olive green cords, rubbed bare at the knee, and a dark red sweater, machine knitted in an elaborate cable pattern with clusters of what looked like grapes. His dark hair was smoothed from a side parting, streaked with grey, and wisps of his beard tickled Jen’s cheeks as he threw an arm round her.
“Donna,” he called loudly. “Donna, Jennifer’s here. Isn’t that lovely! I hadn’t realised you’d invited her.”
Jen tried to say, ‘Invited me to what?’ but her voice got stuck, and by the time she’d cleared her throat her mother was there, tea towel in hand, pulling her out of Terence’s arms and into her own.
“Jennie, love. How lovely. You’ve just missed tea, I’m afraid. We had to eat early, because it’s our big night. We’ve got everyone coming to us this evening, and we’ve got to get down to the church to get things ready. Did I tell you about the week of prayer, love?”
Jen shook her head.
“Well, they’ve included us, properly, for the first time this year – the council of churches, you know. We’ve always gone along of course, and been welcomed, but this is the first year we’ve actually been on the list. Would you like to come? We’d love to have you. It doesn’t start ‘til seven so you’d have time to grab a sandwich.”
“Of course Jennifer will come.” Terence’s arm landed on the back of her neck again. “Everyone will be so pleased to see her.”
“Sorry Mum, I’m pretty tired. I think I’ll give it a miss this time. Is Dad in?”
“He’s watching the telly.” Donna nodded her head in the direction of the living room and turned back into the kitchen, pulling the tea towel from her shoulder. Jen glanced towards the living room door, the flicker of multicoloured light from the TV showing through the open gap, then she followed her mum into the kitchen. She’d talk to Steve when the others were out. She wondered if Lee had left town, or just their house.
Terence sat down at the kitchen table and wrapped his large fingers around a mug of tea. Long black hairs clustered on the back of his hands, between the first and second joint of each finger. He looked enormous in their ordinary semi-detached kitchen. He was six foot two, and broad as well as hairy. Jen leaned against the sink.
It was four years since Donna had been born again. Terence didn’t even have a church building then, he preached in the market square and held study groups in his home. One Saturday when they were shopping in town, Donna had stopped to listen. Jen got bored and moved on, said she’d wait for her in Wilko’s. She waited a long time before going back to the market square. Her mum was still there, deep in conversation with Terence and his wife, Stella. She was animated and her face shone with tears. Later she told Jen it had been a miracle. She had heard Jesus knocking on the door of her heart, and suddenly she just knew. It was the easiest thing in the world to open that door and let him in. She was flooded with warmth and love, and also sorrow for Him that she had ignored Him for so long, that so many millions still refused to let Him in.
They were called the Friends of Jesus, and four years on there was a congregation of forty-three and an old scout hut which they’d clubbed together to buy as their own. Jen had never opened the door of her heart, despite being dragged along to many meetings. Her refusal to sing songs with the rest of them to Stella’s guitar in the marketplace had been the cause of many arguments.
When Donna and Terence went out to their prayer meeting, Jen sidled into the living room and snuggled up next to her dad on the sofa.
‘Hi, chicken,’ said Steve, putting his arm round her. ‘How’s tricks?’
They watched a crime drama together, then at nine-thirty Steve went to the pub. Jen, left alone in the house, went up to her bedroom. She picked up her teddy from the chest of drawers and held it to her chest. She couldn’t lie on the bed. She pulled the duvet onto the floor and lay there, knees pulled up to her chest, squeezing the teddy hard enough to crush the life from it.
When she got up the next day, there was no one in the house. She walked into town, all the time scanning the streets. She’d not asked her dad if Lee was still in town; she hadn’t wanted to mention him.
The sun was shining in yellow pools on the pavements between the shadows of trees. It was the twenty-first of June – Midsummer’s Day. The grass by the cathedral was emerald bright. Jen could feel her shoulders starting to burn. She walked into the massive porch of the cathedral and through the little wooden door carved out of the big door. She searched in her pockets for coins for the entrance fee. She didn’t have quite enough, but she recognised the lady behind the desk – it was Mrs Shepherd from St Peter’s. Jen promised to bring the rest of the money later. Mrs Shepherd shrugged and nodded her through.
As always, she was awed by the vast space above and around her. Here, she felt she should be able to fly. It seemed like some awful mistake that she couldn’t leave the ground behind and skim right up to the gargoyles and painted kings, touch noses with Christ in His lanterned majesty, dance high over the organ pipes. She was so ordinary here on the ground.
Just beyond Mrs Shepherd’s till was a flat mirror at waist height for people who wanted to look at the ceiling without craning their necks. Jen stood right up against it so that her hip bones jutted against the mirror’s support. She closed her eyes and stretched out her back as though she were going to take a dive. Then she looked into the mirror. She nearly fell, but steadied herself with a hand on the frame. The cathedral yawned below her like an enormous u-shaped valley, a sculpted gorge of which she stood on the brink. Strata of pillars and upturned arches marked the cliff face, and religious paintings divided the valley bottom into a patchwork of distant fields. The light in the valley was crystal bright. She closed her eyes again and stepped backwards. She thought of Finn, wondered if he’d like it here.
The cathedral’s chill kissed her skin. Sweat from her walk trickled down her armpits and cleavage. She ran a finger inside the front of her t-shirt to remove the moisture, then looked round quickly in case anyone had seen.
Jen walked the length of the nave, quickly, through the Octagon and along the south choir aisle to the far end of the cathedral. St Etheldreda was here. The honey-coloured lady standing serene, surrounded by a small scaffold of candelabra. Few candles were lit, so Jen took one from the box and fitted it into the holder nearest Etheldreda’s face. She lit it and watched as the yellow glow gave colour to the saint’s cheeks, painted shadows into her eye sockets and behind her ears.
She looked over her shoulder. There was no one else at this end. She edged softly behind the statue. It stood on a raised platform, two feet from the stone wall. Jen leaned back and the stone was like cold metal on her bare skin. She shuddered, then looked at the back of Etheldreda.
She wasn’t finished. Or rather, she was only half a statue. The back of Etheldreda was rounded, uncarved stone, not meant to be seen.
Jen slid her back down the stone wall until her bottom touched her upturned heels. She heard a sound like someone choking, which she realised she’d made herself. She put her palms open on the walls at her sides and let the tears fall, running in lines down her face and dripping onto her chest, dampening her t-shirt. She stared at the back of the statue of Etheldreda, and each time the white raw stone swam into focus through the tears, Jen felt the choke claw its way back up her throat.
She might have been there for ten minutes when the brown leather sandals of Mrs Shepherd appeared on the other side of the statue.
“Are you alright?”
Jen wiped her eyes on her arms.
“Um, yes.”
Mrs Shepherd didn’t move. Her feet were solidly planted on the right side of Etheldreda. She had varicose veins running from her ankles into her feet. Jen slid out.
Mrs Shepherd said again, “Are you alright?”
Jen nodded and smiled at her. The tears had stopped, although her face was still wet.
“Can I call someone for you, Jennifer? It is Jennifer isn’t it? Your mother, perhaps.”
The best thing Jen could do for this woman was to get out of her morning as quickly as possible. Let her and her cathedral to return to normality.
“Thank you, Mrs Shepherd,” she said. “I’ll be fine. I’m going home now.”
They walked back together the length of the cathedral, and despite the kindly slope of Mrs Shepherd’s peach cotton shoulders, Jen couldn’t help feeling that she was being escorted out.
Mrs Shepherd said goodbye at the desk. Jen gave a cheery smile and said, “Bye, Mrs Shepherd,” as if she were leaving Sunday School. Mrs Shepherd smiled nervously back at her.
The sun was cooking the grass. Jen walked back home. She could work on her essay.
There was still no one in. In the kitchen she found bread in the bread bin, butter and strawberry jam in the fridge. She piled up a plateful and sat at the table. The sun slanted in through the ivy on the outside wall, making sharp pictures of pointed leaves on the table by her plate. The ivy leaf shadows were dark grey, while the table shone bright gold. There was no breeze to speak of. The outlines could have been drawn with a pencil. Jen stood up abruptly. The contrast of light and shade was putting her off her food.
In the hallway was a door which led to the back garden when Jen was very small. Now it led to Dorothy’s room which had been built onto the back of the house after she’d had a stroke and couldn’t live on her own anymore. Jen was seven when her gran came to live with them. At first she had been angry because some of the garden had been eaten up by this new part of the house, but she’d soon realised that Dorothy more than made up for it. Jen would sneak in to see her after school, and Dorothy would tell her stories and jokes and they would giggle like schoolgirls. She gave Jen old-fashioned sweets like humbugs and barley sugar and told her the names of plants which grew in the garden. Now she was dead. Her room was empty except for her things. The curtains were half drawn and there was a softer light.
Jen sat on the edge of her gran’s bed with the plate of bread and jam on her lap. Although this room was newer than the rest of the house, it felt older because the furniture was old and dark. The bed was high. Her toes only just reached the floor. She bent them so they curled under, stretching the tops of her feet. This hurt her ankles a little, so she flexed them the other way. She remembered trying to walk round this room on the point of her toes, telling Dorothy that was how ballet dancers walked. Dorothy said ballet dancers must have different shaped toes than the rest of us then, or else different shoes. Jen imagined having a baby one day when she was grown up, and when the doctor handed it to her after it was born, noticing that it had square toes, like the end of a wood block. She would smile and say to the doctor, “this one’s going to be a ballet dancer.” After that, she gave up trying to walk on en pointe, but she still walked on tiptoe a lot. She liked the feeling of balance.
As far as she knew, Lee had never been in this room.
She put the plate on the bedcover and stood on tiptoe. There wasn’t much space to walk. On the far side of the bed was an armchair with wooden arms and side wings, upholstered in dark green shiny material. In some places, the threads had come loose. Behind this, right next to the bed was a little cupboard where Dorothy kept library books, sweets and biscuits and her teeth at night in a glass of water. At the end of the room beyond the bed was a wardrobe with blank mahogany doors and a bookcase filled with school textbooks. Dorothy used to be a teacher at the girls’ grammar school, but that was long ago. Between the window and the door was a tallboy in dark wood. When Jen was little, she couldn’t see the top of this even when she stood on tiptoe. Now she could look down on the embroidered linen cloth and the glass bottle that stood on top.
Inside the bottle was a tiny model of the Cutty Sark. Jen knew the story behind this ship-in-a-bottle, although she couldn’t remember anyone ever telling it to her. It was bought by her grandad, Fred, on an outing to the Greenwich Maritime Museum in London on the day he first met Dorothy. She was taking a party of schoolgirls to the museum as part of a history project. He was on a work outing.
Fred worked at the sugar factory. Every year in the summer, the factory owners paid for the workers to go on an outing. Before, it had always been boat trips up the river followed by a hotdog party down on the quay. That particular year, 1969, the factory had a new boss and he thought it would be a good idea to make the annual outing a bit more educational. He thought if his workforce had a broader outlook on life then they would be more contented and work better. He booked coaches and took the factory workers to the museum at Greenwich, wanting to carry on the boat theme of previous years.
It was the first and the last time Fred ever went to London. The size of the city unsettled him. He didn’t like to think of so many people living in the world that his mind could not encompass them. He liked to be able to walk the streets of Ely in his head as he lay in bed at night and always know where he was going, be sure what he would find around the next corner. Here, in this metropolis, a person could walk for days and days and never see the same street twice.
What made it worse, the thing that made him vow never to set foot on London tarmac again, was that he became separated from his party at the museum. He got lost. If he’d been on home soil, he’d have just hitched a lift or walked to the nearest bus route, but here he was as helpless as a child. He had to swallow his pride and ask one of the museum staff to help him. By the time they had located his party it was too late; the coaches had left for home and he was stranded.
Which was where Dorothy came in. She was shepherding her girls out of the museum when she overheard Fred talking to the museum staff about the best way of getting back to Ely, and she offered him a lift. Fred was so grateful that he gave her the Cutty Sark ship-in-a-bottle that he’d bought for his mother. Three weeks later, after they had met twice to go to the pictures and once for a walk in the park, he asked her to marry him and she agreed. He was forty-six and she was thirty-eight.
Jen picked up the bottle and turned it in her hands. The little ship inside was perfect. She held the bottle between her palms and revolved it slowly so the Cutty Sark capsized then righted itself, capsized, righted itself. She was still standing on tiptoe.
Then the door to Dorothy’s room crashed open and Jen dropped the bottle. It hit one of the drawer knobs on the tallboy and shattered, spraying glass across the carpet and Jen’s feet. The ship landed sideways on the floor halfway between the tallboy and the bed.
Jen looked at the ship and at the glass on the carpet. She looked at her feet, flat on the floor now, with shards of glass shining near her toes. Then she looked at the doorway where Donna was standing. Their eyes locked. The stare lasted for ten seconds, by which time Jen had contracted inwards away from her skin. She felt sick at breaking Dorothy’s bottle. She wanted to hold her gran’s liver-spotted hand and beg her forgiveness. She thought about Finn leaving on the train.
“What are you doing in here?” Donna’s voice was thin as a wire.
“Nothing. Just looking – thinking –”
Donna looked down at a piece of glass just under the edge of the bed.
“Do you know where that came from?”
Jen nodded.
“It had sentimental value. It was the only thing I had of my father’s.”
Jen bit her lip. She wanted to say that the bottle didn’t belong to Donna but to Dorothy, and that it had never been Fred’s as it had been intended as a gift from the moment he bought it.
“Have you nothing to say?”
“I’m sorry. It was an accident.”
“Speak up. You’re mumbling. What did you say?”
Jen lifted her head. “You startled me,” she said loudly.
“Oh, so it’s my fault, is it? You come in here poking around, dropping crumbs all over the floor – and guess who’ll be the one who has to clear them up? – God knows what you were looking for. And when I find you here, you’re so edgy that you drop a family heirloom and destroy it. It can’t replaced, you know.”
Jen hung her head. “Could the ship be put in another bottle?”
“How? Do you have any idea how they get those things through the neck of the bottle? Because I don’t. It’s probably done by a machine these days. I doubt anyone knows how to do it. And anyway, it wouldn’t be quite the same, would it, the Cutty Sark in a milk bottle, or a Chardonnay empty. The bottle was part of it. I can’t believe you were so careless. I thought you respected your grandma’s things.”
“I do. And I said I’m sorry.”
Jen pushed past her mother through to the kitchen. Donna followed and watched Jen get the dustpan and brush from the cupboard.
“I hope you’re not going to do that with bare feet. I don’t have time to rush you to hospital. I’ve got to be down at the chapel by one to help with the cleaning.”
Angrily, Jen thrust her feet into the first pair of footwear she saw, Steve’s wellies standing by the back door. She stared at Donna with tears in her eyes and stamped back through to the extension. Donna looked as though she was about to say something else, but thought better of it.
Jen brushed the glass into the dustpan. She picked up the tiny model ship and placed it back on top of the tallboy. Out of its bottle it looked small and insignificant, like a cheap toy. The dustpan shone with the light held in the pieces of glass. Jen closed her eyes hard so she saw blackness, then opened them again. She carried the dustpan back to the kitchen.
Donna had found some newspaper and spread it out on the table. Jen emptied the glass into the middle of the paper and together they wrapped it up.
Donna said, “I’m sorry. I overreacted. I know you didn’t mean to do it.”
“I’ll get the hoover,” said Jen. “In case there’s any splinters.”
“Are you OK, Jennie?”
Their eyes locked again.
“I’m fine.”
“Look love, I’m going to be out most of the day. I’ve got the cleaning, and then I’ve got to catch up on the shopping and visit Mrs McCreadie. But later on, this evening, we can have a nice chat after tea.”
“OK.”
Jen vacuumed the carpet in Dorothy’s room. She did the bed cover too in case there were any breadcrumbs. She carried the empty plate out to the kitchen. Donna had thrown the newspaper parcel in the dustbin outside and gathered her cleaning things. She kissed Jen on the cheek.
“Have a nice afternoon, Jen.”
“Mmm. You too.”
At the front door Donna stopped, one hand on the door and one on the jamb.
“I just remembered: Terence, Stella and Lee are coming round after supper this evening to chat about the programme for the next quarter. But that’s OK, isn’t it? We can still have our little chat. They’re just like family, after all.”
She beamed at Jen and then stepped out, pulling the door closed behind her.
Jen stared at her mother’s shape through the patterned glass. Donna adjusted her handbag strap and walked away. Jen threw the plate she was holding onto the kitchen floor and watched the pieces bounce back up from the tiles. They landed in an irregular circular pattern. This time a piece hit Jen’s bare calf and cut her skin. The pain was sudden and hot and Jen lifted her leg onto a chair to watch the blood flow up in a feathered line. She washed it with a piece of kitchen roll dampened under the tap and found a plaster in the cupboard. The plaster went red straight away, so she took it off again. She dampened another sheet of kitchen roll, folded it into a small square and fastened it with a long bit of plaster. She put the rest of the plasters into her pocket.
Two minutes of watching and no blood showed through, even when she put weight on the leg. She went upstairs and packed her things back into her overnight bag.
Before she left, she looked into Dorothy’s room. There was no sign of glass or crumbs, but the room still looked wrong, empty. The bottle had provided a point of focus, had been a piece of Dorothy. The ship without the bottle looked pathetically small and dull. On impulse Jen reached out, grabbed the Cutty Sark and pushed it into the front pocket of her bag. Then she walked out of the house and headed back towards the station.