‘Come near me and I’ll kill you.’
That’s what my mum said when I tried to wake her. Then she cried when she realised it was me and said she was sorry. ‘It wasn’t me who said that,’ she said. ‘It was him. It was him.’ She tapped her neck as she spoke and shook her head violently. I used to be scared. I still was, a little. But it was amazing what I managed to get used to.
Dad was sitting on the sofa in just his pants and a white t-shirt. He and Mum hadn’t slept in the same bed for a while. Not since she’d started to get more and more upset. I think Dad had tried, hoping it would make her calmer, having someone next to her during the dark hours of the night, but then I would hear shuffling around and then Dad going downstairs before the clock had even reached twelve.
‘Mum’s crying,’ I said to him. For a moment, I thought he was going to cry too, but then he just sat up. ‘It’s good you’re awake. You can start loading the car. The smaller bags and boxes. Not the big ones. I’ll do those once I’ve sorted out your mum.’ He wandered away, the light from the window turning him yellow-gold. I sat on the sofa for a bit, then did as I was told. Some of the bits we’d packed that night had been put in supermarket bags when we’d run out of the boxes Dad had brought home with him. I picked some of these up and went out to the car, which was already unlocked, and threw them in, not caring if anything broke. The day had only been new for a matter of minutes, and I was already starting to feel cross. It didn’t look like I’d be going to play in the garden, or to the library to get some more books. Nothing seemed certain any more.
The street was completely empty. The sun was still low, the ground untouched by its warming light. Although the summer weather had lasted into September, you could tell autumn wanted to break in and ruin the fun. Before Mum had become like she was now, early last year or the year before, she used to paint the autumn leaves on the trees. Browns and reds and golds. She’d sit outside and paint the trees in the neighbours’ garden. I used to sit with her sometimes, making little finger paintings of different plants or animals, often insects and squirrels. Then Mum would beam at me and tell me I’d created another masterpiece and how she’d phone up the Tate at once. Then we’d laugh, and she’d show me what she had created. Her pictures didn’t really look like the trees in the way I would sometimes paint them – she used to zoom in on a particular branch and just paint the leaves on that one. Then one day she painted this big, amazing tree – an oak tree, she said – one she remembered from when she was younger. Then, over the top of it, she painted flames. Big flames licking at its trunk, snaking up towards the leaves, and all of them were burning, smoke covering the sky. That was when things started to get bad.
Mum tried to help with the packing of the car but eventually Dad just told her to sit in the front passenger seat and we’d finish the job. She sat there working her way through a pack of garibaldi biscuits while we heaved and stuffed and pushed everything that would fit into the car. We weren’t taking that much – not as much as when my friend Melanie moved house back when we were both in playgroup and a huge lorry turned up to take all their things – but even so, by the time we were finished packing the car, there was just a small hole in the side for me to sit, all our stuff almost covering the seat. I liked being in there. It felt like I was a dormouse, settling in for hibernation.
‘Why are we going away?’ I asked. I had been thinking about asking the question since I’d woken up, but sometimes asking my dad questions sent him into a ‘flaming rage’. That’s what our old neighbour Mrs Slater used to call it. He used to have a go at her about her ‘bloody cat’ when it left us dead mice on the doorstep. ‘You in one of your flamin’ rages?’ she used to say when he’d try to hand her the corpse of a rodent as she left for the Quicksave to do her shopping. She would never take it from him. She’d wander off, leaving him holding it. Dad used to say ‘that woman is a bitch’ to himself whenever they had one of their disagreements. I didn’t think she was a bitch. She sometimes gave me books from the charity shop. Most of them were about posh girls at boarding schools – the type where they have stables and games they play with sticks – but sometimes a really naughty one would slip in. My favourite of the naughty ones had been a book called The Count Comes for What He’s Owed. It was about a count in a castle somewhere foreign and he’d been promised a young woman’s hand in marriage by her father. I tried to write a sequel myself, in an old notebook I found under the stairs, about when the count started forcing her to have so many babies her body starts to break in half, until she dies giving birth to their twelfth child. I submitted it at school as a part of my writing homework. Mrs Bolton just wrote on it ‘See me’ in red biro. When I did, she wasn’t very pleased. I had to sit outside while Mum had a whispered conversation with her about me. Mrs Bolton had used the words ‘unhinged’ and ‘depraved’. My mother just cried and advised her I was probably going to hell anyway and a ‘horrid little story about the sins of the flesh’ was the least of her worries at that moment in time. Even so, my paperback of The Count Comes for What He’s Owed was thrown onto the fire. Mrs Slater was forbidden to give me any more books after that.
‘You haven’t answered my question,’ I said, louder than necessary, as Dad packed stuff around me and I nestled up against one of my pillows.
‘Quiet,’ he said. ‘I really, really just need you to do as you’re told and not ask questions. I will explain when we get there.’ I saw, through the gaps in the boxes loaded around me, that he turned to look at Mum, as if he was scared she’d flip. She didn’t flip. She was staring into space and humming ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’ to herself.
‘Does Mum know where we’re going?’ I asked, ignoring his previous plea.
Dad glared at me. ‘She knows we’re going away for a peaceful break,’ he half-whispered to me, ‘and while she seems content with that, I ask you not to say anything that may make her upset again.’
After a tense pause, I nodded, and he moved away to get another bag.
I don’t know what time it was by the time we were packed – the boxes hid my view of the clock in the front of the car – but it was starting to get warmer. I think it was probably 8.30 or 9. ‘Will we be stopping for food on the way?’ I asked, ignoring Dad’s instruction again. I just got a short ‘Yes’ from him as a reply.
We set off eventually, driving away from the streets I’d always known and out into the big wide world. I’d only really been out of our town twice – once on a trip to London when I was really young, and another time to France to a place called Lourdes. The London trip was a disaster. A bomb went off somewhere near some soldiers’ barracks and everyone started screaming and crying. We didn’t see the bomb, but we heard it and saw the smoke. We were standing outside Buckingham Palace when it happened. I was on my dad’s shoulders, back before he was blunt and liable to ‘flamin’ rages’. Back when he’d pick me up and spin me around and tell me I was special and bright and clever. He’d been especially happy during our trip to London – he’d got some qualifications at his work that meant he could earn a bit more money, and he’d let me sit on his shoulders for ages, not once telling me to walk for a bit because his back was aching. When we’d reached the gates of the palace, I’d been trying to see in through the queen’s bedroom window – my friend Gwendolyn had told me she only ever wore knickers made of gold and I was desperate to have a look. Then there was a loud bang and everyone started running and Dad lifted me off his shoulders and shouted at Mum, ‘Christ, it’s the IRA. It’s the fucking IRA.’
The visit to France, a few years later, went a lot smoother. No bombs. No fucking IRA. Although by that time, Mum had started to change. She’d drifted around the place, touching things and crying silently, while Dad shook his head and moaned about the lack of food choices. ‘I can’t stand hunger,’ he had said. ‘I wish they had a cure for that, here.’
The food choices on the way to wherever we were going weren’t that amazing either. We’d eaten the last pieces of cold pizza early on during the drive, so ended up stopping at a café called Susan’s Sausages. Upon sitting down, we were told they’d run out of sausages. When I said to the woman taking our order (she wasn’t Susan; her badge said Janice) that they should change their name if there weren’t any sausages and it wasn’t even Susan talking to their customers, she glared at me and then said to Dad, ‘She fuckin’ retarded or something?’ Dad slammed his fist down on the table and said, ‘Just get the food,’ and she went off and started crashing things around in the kitchen while a little boy played with chewed Lego bricks on the filthy floor. We managed to get through most of our three portions of ham, egg and chips before Mum started to suspect the chips had been poisoned. ‘Marjory, please, just eat the damn chips,’ Dad hissed. ‘You’ll be starving.’ She hissed something back about preferring to starve than eat what he fed her.
‘Are we going to a hospital?’ I thought hazarding a guess might make Dad want to share some more details on where we were actually going.
‘Why would you ask that, Kitty?’ He was sprinkling a lot of salt onto his food – something I’d learned at school wasn’t a healthy thing to do.
‘Because that’s what Miss Reid said about Mum, after that time she came running into the playground to take me home before the devil could take me. She said “Christ, she needs to be in hospital.” So I thought that might be where—’
Dad, whose eyes had flared at the word ‘devil’, cut me off with another slam of his fist on the table. ‘We’re not going to a hospital. Nobody is going to any place like that.’ He glanced at Mum, who had flinched at the fist-slam, but she carried on moving her food around her plate nonetheless.
‘Why not? Miss Reid is a very sensible teacher, you know. If she said it would be a good idea, I think it probably would be.’
‘I won’t tell you again, Kitty,’ Dad said back, still hissing in a whispery voice. ‘People don’t come back from places like that. Unless you want your mum to end up like your grandmother—’
He stopped himself mid-sentence, as if he’d realised what he was about to say, then changed his mind. ‘Anyway,’ he said in a calmer voice, ‘hospitals like that won’t be around much longer. I heard them say so on the radio.’
Dad mentioning Granny had made me confused, since he couldn’t have been talking about Mum’s mum, since she had died in a car accident when I was younger. I could only really remember her a tiny bit. He must have been talking about his mother, my other Granny who I never met and neither him nor Mum spoke about much. I thought about asking more about her, but decided this might make his mood worse.
After the food, I asked to use the toilet. The moody Janice woman pointed to the back of the café without saying anything, so I found them by myself and peed in peace and quiet, until a little boy who looked around five wandered through the door.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Could you go away and close the door?’ Then Janice burst in and shouted, ‘Tyler, you nasty little pervert, get out,’ and he scurried away, giggling. ‘Sorry, it’s his dad’s fault,’ she said. ‘He lets him get away with murder.’ She said all this to me without looking at me. She was tired – I could tell from the dark rings around her eyes. And there was a purple bruise on her cheek that she’d tried and failed to cover with make-up. ‘How did you do that?’ I asked, pointing at her face. She looked at me as if I was something vile. ‘Piss off,’ she said, then slammed the toilet door.
I got myself together and washed my hands, then went out to find my parents. Dad was trying to stop Mum from making a scene. She’d become quite an expert at ‘scenes’ in the past few months. When she’d first started to get bad, a couple of years ago, she used to do it quietly, finding a corner to cry in or waiting until she got home. Then she stopped seeming to care where she was or who was around to see it. She had caused quite a few major scenes in Debenhams, at the swimming pool, in the park, at the newsagents run by the little man with no teeth, and at the theatre when Dad took us as a treat to see Grease on Ice. In each of these situations, Dad had shoved us all into the car and said, ‘I’m flaming mortified.’ He hadn’t said it yet, but we hadn’t made it to the car either, so there was time for it to come.
‘She fucking mental or something?’ Janice with the bruised face was saying to my dad.
‘No, she’s not fucking mental,’ he snapped at her, starting to sound stressed. ‘Can you just give us a minute?’
Mum was standing on her chair, staring at the floor and jabbing her finger at random areas of the stained tiles: ‘There! There! There!’ Shouts. Tears. Shrieking.
It was in moments like these I used to try to think of my perfect happy place. A nice little desk with lots of sheets of paper; colouring pens all in a rainbow line, which I could use to draw creatures; a tidy bedroom filled with lots of clean, folded things that would be slightly warm to the touch if you were to rest your cheek on them. I think I must have lived in a place like that once, when I was very small. Before Mum became … Mum.
‘There’s nothing there,’ my dad said. He sounded tired.
‘I swear it. I swear it upon … upon my sweet baby daughter’s life.’
It was as if I wasn’t there. She didn’t look at me. Just kept on with her pointing.
‘She thinks she’s seen a spider,’ my dad said.
I wasn’t properly listening. ‘A what?’
‘A spider!’ he snapped.
‘Where? Have you seen it?’ My mum shrieked.
‘There’s no bloody spider,’ he shouted at her.
‘They are the devil’s spies.’
‘They are harmless insects that are more afraid of you than you are of them!’
‘I’m not sure they are insects,’ I chipped in, but my dad sent me one of his looks and I sat back down at the table.
‘They listen and watch and tell their masters all our secrets.’ With this, she clasped her hands together, like she was praying, and began muttering something under her breath. ‘He’s coming. I can hear it. He’s rising. He’s rising. He’s rising.’
‘If she don’t come down from that chair and stop with this shouting,’ Janice with the bruised face said, ‘I’m calling the fucking police.’
‘Don’t call the police,’ he said. ‘We’re leaving. Marjory, come down, please. I promise you, you’ll be fine.’
My mother stared at him like he’d suddenly told her it was her birthday. ‘Nathan? Have you come to rescue me?’
‘Yes,’ he said, instantly. ‘Here we go, rescue in progress.’ Before she had time to argue, he’d taken her arm and helped her step down off the chair.
‘I was tested, just then, Nathan. And I resisted. He didn’t rise.’
‘I’m glad,’ he said, then turned to Janice. ‘Show’s over. How much do we owe you?’
She murmured something about how she should bloody charge extra for the stress, then totted up the bill and my dad gave her a banknote.
We didn’t talk as we left the restaurant, nor when we started driving. Only after we’d been travelling for half an hour did I ask again. ‘Dad. Where are we going?’