Clover bought the notebook during the end-of-term trip to the Maritime Museum, a few weeks ago. The day began badly. As the train sloped into the station Mr Judge told people to pick partners and she was filled with a panicky, musical chairs feeling.
This school year, friendship has evolved from something easy to a complicated performance that requires a lot of pretending. It has become vitally important to like and dislike the right things; to have committed certain acts or to at least understand the acts that other people claim to have committed. Take fingering, for example, which sounds like it could be to do with playing the ukulele, but is something else entirely – something Abbie Higham claims to have had done to her.
Abbie Higham has the kudos that comes from having been kissed. She won’t name names, but she is happy to be pressed for details and proffer advice.
‘When you kiss, you have to open your mouth or you’ll suffocate.’
‘If you wear red lipstick it means you’re a slag.’
‘You shouldn’t go swimming in the sea when you have your period. Sharks, duh!’
Clover glanced left and right, pulling her best not-bothered face; she wouldn’t look desperate by dashing about from person to person. It wasn’t a case of not being liked, just of not being liked enough, of not being anyone’s first choice, of not having a bosom friend, something she can’t ever say out loud, obviously – bosom! – but has been mulling over ever since she and Grandad read Anne of Green Gables in their book club last summer.
In the end Mr Judge took pity on her. ‘You can sit with me, Clover,’ he offered.
They crowded on to the train. Mr Judge secured four seats, two sets of two, facing each other, and placed his bag beside him. Clover sat opposite, in the aisle seat, and watched as further down the carriage Abbie, Jess and Emily attempted to stop Dagmar from occupying an empty seat by piling their bags on it.
‘Clover!’ Abbie called. ‘We’re saving this for you.’
Dagmar waited in the aisle, one eye obscured by the slope of her dark fringe.
‘Clover! Get here! I’m not sitting next to Dracula.’
‘She vants to bite us.’
They needed Clover’s help to complete their meanness, but she didn’t move. In the end Mr Judge stood, twisted and, clutching the headrest of his seat, called, ‘For goodness’ sake, Dagmar, just sit down.’
Dagmar looked helplessly at the piled bags.
‘Clover, move up to the window. Dagmar, come here. There’s a seat right here.’ He sat down hard. ‘Honestly, girls.’
Dagmar sat, head bowed, hands clasped, and not for the first time Clover wondered what to say to her. It was easy to assume that she didn’t care. She never blushed. Her expression remained impassive and she held herself small, as if she was used to pretending invisibility. But she must care, Clover thought, she must.
Dagmar felt the looking and glanced up, face cross, forehead crinkled. If she had spoken, she might have said, I didn’t ask for your help and Don’t you dare feel sorry for me.
The Manchester and Liverpool lines run in tandem for a few hundred feet before they split and the line to Manchester heads west, curling past back gardens and sneaking under road bridges, while the Liverpool line arrows south, right in front of people’s houses. As the train barged down the middle of Railway Street and Railway Terrace, forcing buses and cars to stop at level crossings, Clover pressed her face up to the window. Once the houses and roads had been replaced by golf courses and pine woods, she turned to Mr Judge and began to tell him some of the things she’d read the previous night, in one of Dad’s books, in preparation for the trip.
‘Did you know some of the bodies from the Titanic sank to the bottom of the sea and never floated back up because of the pressure and the cold? Sea creatures ate them. All that was left was their shoes.’
He didn’t know.
‘Did you know the wreck was only discovered in 1985? It’s covered in rusticles, which are underwater icicles.’
He didn’t know that, either.
‘Did you know –’
He said she could put all the details in the report she’d be writing for homework. And she could have a merit for being a good researcher. Then he pulled out his phone and played Fruit Ninja for the rest of the journey.
The museum was made of red bricks, all of it, even the arched ceiling. Standing in the foyer was a bit like standing in an enormous old tunnel. The lights hung from steel wires and the floor was made of cobbles and pavement slabs. The air stank of coffee from the museum café, and when the glass doors opened and people stepped in and out of the building, Clover could hear seagulls squawking. Outside, tall ships and tugs floated in the Albert and Canning docks, on either side of the museum.
Mr Judge said they could explore by themselves, as long as they were back in the foyer at lunchtime. Staff in blue museum T-shirts handed out trail booklets to accompany an exhibit called ‘Seized! The Border & Customs Uncovered’. There would be a prize for the first person to complete the booklet, so most people headed downstairs. Clover wasn’t interested in the prize. She climbed the metal staircase. It was open on one side so you could see the drop to the museum shop and a display of a wooden canoe filled with tiny human figures. On the other side of the staircase a wall had been painted to look like the side of a ship. There were glass-fronted portholes, and along the top, by the high museum ceiling, was a railing, from behind which MDF silhouettes of passengers waved.
On the first floor Clover stopped beside a model of the Titanic in a glass case. It was long, perhaps as long as her bedroom, though it was difficult to tell. It had tiny lifeboats hanging from its sides and dozens of little portholes. She wished she could open the case and look through the Titanic’s portholes – it would be epic if it was filled with replicas of things that were on the real ship: flower arrangements, tablecloths and candlesticks; fancy curtains, paintings and cutlery; wooden beds, tools and musical instruments, all carefully placed on board to help people have a lovely time. All sliding about as the ship tilted. All crashing into the walls and ceilings as it sank. All sitting in the thick quiet at the bottom of the sea.
On the other side of the display case, Clover noticed a woman scribbling into a notebook with a stubby pencil. She was too old to be a student and she wasn’t wearing a Maritime Museum T-shirt like the people who guarded the exhibits that visitors weren’t supposed to touch. Her navy jeans were smart and her painted toenails poked out of red wedge sandals. Clover edged around the case, pretending to examine the Titanic. When she got close to the woman, she glanced at the open notebook. The woman wasn’t drawing and her writing was too small to read.
‘Do you like the model?’
Clover nodded, embarrassed to have been caught staring. But the woman seemed friendly, so she asked, ‘What are you doing?’
‘A gallery check.’
‘What’s that?’
The woman tucked the pencil behind her ear, like a builder. ‘Once a week, we check to make sure everything’s working: the lighting, the touch screens on the computerised parts of the displays, and the objects themselves – some of them have environmental controls so we check to make sure everything’s okay.’
‘And that’s your job? Checking things?’
‘Part of it.’
‘What are the other parts?’
‘Coming up with ideas – concepts, that’s what we call them. Thinking about which exhibitions will be permanent and which will be temporary. Selecting the objects and deciding how we’ll interpret them. Making sure we get the text right –’
‘Did you always want to work in a museum?’
‘For as long as I can remember. When I was a little girl, my mum was a keeper at Liverpool Museum. That’s what the job used to be called.’
‘A keeper?’
‘Lovely name, isn’t it?’
‘Like a zookeeper or a park keeper, but for museums? Someone who’s in charge of keeping stuff?’
‘Yes! But we’re called curators now; it’s a good word, too. An old word – it’s Latin. We take care of the displays and objects. And we make lots of lists.’ She waved her notebook to demonstrate.
‘So you’re in charge of all this?’ Clover glanced at the displays, the models and the wall-mounted screens showing black and white footage of passengers waving from skyscraper-high decks.
‘There’s lots of people involved: designers, conservation people –’
‘What do they do?’
‘The designers work on the displays. They decide how to mount things and they think about the best way to show the objects. The conservation people clean things, they have to –’
‘Do you have stuff that isn’t on display at the moment?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Where do you keep it?’
‘There’s some onsite storage. But we keep a lot of it in a big object store for Liverpool Museums.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘I can’t say, sorry. For security.’
Clover imagined a library, but with things sitting on miles of shelves, and curators pacing down the endless aisles, their footsteps echoing in the vast space as they agonised over which objects to display. ‘But how do you get all the stuff in the first place?’
‘Sometimes we borrow objects from other museums and sometimes we buy things. Often, people give us objects, things that have been in their families for ages.’
‘And they don’t mind having their stuff on display?’
‘No, I think people like sharing their lives.’
‘How do you decide what to display and what to leave in the store?’
‘Well, it’s all about which objects fit the narratives we’re telling. We do some research – there’s a database; every object has a unique catalogue number that stays with it. We have photographs and text about the history of each piece. And a section about its provenance – that’s the story of the object: where it came from, why it’s important and so on.’ She pulled the pencil out from behind her ear and tested its end with her front teeth. A moment later she lowered it, leaned forward and whispered, ‘Do you know what the best bit about this job is?’
Clover shook her head.
‘Touching things – with gloves on, you have to be careful – touching things that are part of the past, especially personal items. You get a feeling about them as you hold them. You’re doing something special . . . looking after culture and history, looking after people’s stories. That’s what it’s all about.’
That was how the idea started.
Light streamed through the big windows of the industrial building and the idea sat in the warmth all afternoon as Clover explored the main exhibit, ‘Titanic and Liverpool – the Untold Story’. She had to pick a card about a passenger to carry with her until the end, when she would find out whether the person lived or died. She picked two, just in case. Violet Jessop, a pretty, soft-faced nurse, and Mildred Brown, whose features were completely obscured by the shadow of an enormous hat. ‘My name is Violet Jessop,’ the first card read, and it was as if Violet’s voice was calling across the years. At the bottom of both cards it said, ‘Discover my fate at the end of this exhibition.’ She held the women’s cards against her chest and hoped for happy endings.
Clover learned that there were five grand pianos on the Titanic and twelve dogs, three of which survived. She saw a display of items salvaged from the debris field: a ceramic sink, a chamber pot, a ventilation grille, tiepins, glasses, a watch and a letter opener. Perhaps Violet and Mildred had touched some of the things. The curator had almost certainly touched them before they were placed in the glass display cases. Did she really get feelings about objects just by touching them? Did the stories seep out of the metal and glass and leather, through the protective gloves and into her fingertips? Clover thought of Violet and Mildred; she wished them lifeboats, life jackets and childhood swimming lessons.
The idea fed on details. By the time Clover reached the end of the exhibit it was ready – full of energy and wrapped in a protective coat of patience, like a seed. She paused to read about the women whose cards she’d carried. Violet Jessop survived and went on to work as a nurse in the British Red Cross during World War One. Mildred Brown also survived. It was a good sign, further evidence of the idea’s rightfulness.
She sat beside Dagmar on the train home and was daunted to silence by her stillness and the way she kept eyes trained on some distant spot, lips locked like cockle halves. Dad says the danger in spending your kindness on other people is that you might not have any left for yourself – it doesn’t stop him from being kind, though. Shielded by the dark as they passed through a tunnel, she whispered, ‘Are you okay?’
‘I am fine, thank you,’ came the reply.
Clover couldn’t think of anything else to say, so she opened the notebook she’d bought in the museum shop and slipped the passenger cards between the pages. There were plans to make, words she might forget if she didn’t write them down: concept, object, text, curator, keeper, exhibit, display. She pulled a pen out of her blazer pocket and, for the rest of the journey, toyed with the notebook and tended the idea.
When she got home from school, Dad was kneeling in the hall. He’d unscrewed the radiator and his thumb was pressed over an unfastened pipe as water gushed around it. The books and clothes and newspapers that used to line the hall had been arranged in small piles on the stairs. Beside him, on the damp carpet, was a metal scraper he’d been using to scuff the paper off the wall.
‘Just in time!’ he said. ‘Fetch a bowl. A small one, so it’ll fit.’
She fetched two and spent the next fifteen minutes running back and forth to the kitchen emptying one bowl as the other filled, Dad calling, ‘Faster! Faster! Keep it up, Speedy Gonzalez!’ His trousers were soaked and his knuckles grazed, but he wasn’t bothered. ‘Occupational hazard,’ he said, as if it wasn’t his day off and plumbing and stripping walls was his actual job.
Once the pipe had emptied he stood up and hopped about for a bit while the feeling came back into his feet. ‘I helped Colin out with something this morning,’ he said. ‘The people whose house we were at had this dado rail thing – it sounds posh, but it’s just a bit of wood, really – right about here.’ He brushed his hand against the wall beside his hip. ‘Underneath it they had stripy wallpaper, but above it they had a different, plain kind. It was dead nice and I thought we could do that.’
Dad found a scraper for her. The paint came off in flakes, followed by tufts of the thick, textured wallpaper. Underneath was a layer of soft, brown backing paper which Dad sprayed with water from a squirty bottle. When the water had soaked in, they made long scrapes down the wall, top to bottom, leaving the backing paper flopped over the skirting boards like ribbons of skin. It felt like they were undressing the house.
The bare walls weren’t smooth. They were gritty, crumbly in places. As they worked, a dusty smell wafted out of them. It took more than an hour to get from the front door to the wall beside the bottom stair. That’s where Dad uncovered the heart. It was about as big as Clover’s hand, etched on the wall in black permanent marker, in Dad’s handwriting.
‘I’d forgotten,’ he murmured. And then he pulled his everything face. The face he pulls when Uncle Jim is drunk. The face he pulls when they go shopping in March and the person at the till tries to be helpful by reminding them about Mother’s Day. The face which reminds her that a lot of the time his expression is like a plate of leftovers.
She didn’t say anything, and although she wanted to, she didn’t trace the heart with her fingertips. Instead, she went up to the bathroom and sat on the boxed, pre-lit Christmas tree Dad bought in the January sales. When you grow up in the saddest chapter of someone else’s story, you’re forever skating on the thin ice of their memories. That’s not to say it’s always sad – there are happy things, too. When she was a baby, Dad had a tattoo of her name drawn on his arm in curly blue writing, and underneath he had a green four-leaf clover. She has such a brilliant name, chosen by her mother because it has the word love in the middle. That’s not the sort of thing you go around telling people, but it is something you can remember if you need a little boost; an instant access, happiness top-up card – it even works when Luke Barton calls her Margey-rine. Clover thought of her name and counted to three hundred. As she counted she drew her finger through the dust on the Christmas-tree box. Once she’d finished counting she wondered about the factory where the tree was made – who assembled it, who touched it and packed it? ‘Made in China’, it said. There were probably workers’ fingerprints all over the box; there might even be specks of skin and hair inside it. She thought of all the things her mother might have touched in each room of the house. Had she a favourite mug? Was some of the dust in the second bedroom made up of her skin? If the police came, might they find her fingerprints?
When she went downstairs Dad had recovered his empty face and she couldn’t help asking a question, just a small one.
‘Is there any more writing under the paper?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘She didn’t do a heart as well?’
‘Help me with this, will you?’
They pulled the soggy ribbons of paper away from the skirting and put them in a bin bag. The house smelled different afterwards. As if some old sadness had leaked out of the walls.
Clover kneels on the small square of floor she has cleared. Dad used to sleep in this room. Before. It isn’t quite as big as hers – it’s almost square shaped, whereas hers is rectangular. The sun stabs a sharp slice of light through the window – there’s only one here; it’s larger than either of hers and it looks out over the back garden. On the first day, she squeezed past the boxes and tried to push up the sash, hands already sweaty in the blue plastic gloves she’d taken from the dispenser at the petrol station. But the window wouldn’t budge.
Underneath the jumble of boxes and other stuff there’s a double bed. No duvet and no sheets, just the base and the bare mattress, topped by sheaves of papers, envelopes, shoes, books, a pile of folded-up material – bed sheets? curtains? towels? – a few cushions and several carrier bags that are beginning to dissolve, snowing plastic on to the floorboards below. From in among the piles of stuff she can see the sharp poke of picture frames. Wait there, she thinks, I’m coming for you.
The bed sits in front of the chimney breast. In the alcove on either side of it are matching wardrobes. They are old, with corrugated fronts like window shutters; they were probably white before the sun sleeked through the window and toasted them yellow. Access to the wardrobes is blocked by bigger boxes, the kind Colin keeps in his van for when people are moving house. Some of these are fastened with brown tape, others are open. She’ll reach the wardrobes, eventually.
The walls are wrapped in old paper. Swirls of orange, yellow and lime-green flowers on a milky blue background. Some of the flowers are definitely roses. There are daisies too, but she isn’t sure whether the others have names or are just flower shapes, like the kind you draw when you are small. The paper is interrupted by a picture rail. Above the rail, the wall is painted lime green. The floor-length curtains are green, too. After she failed to push up the sash, she held one of the curtains and fanned it open. It was striped where the sun had bleached the material; the stripes were light, dark, light, dark, like bamboo stalks.
The room is half and half, which is to say, if a stranger stepped into it, they might think it half packed or they might think it half unpacked; it seems it could be either. She imagines Dad beginning the packing, initially determined, sustained by the idea of how it would look once it was done; folding, lifting, arranging, and then standing with one hand on his hip, rubbing the fuzz of his hair with the other, thinking about the best way to proceed. At some point he must have got disheartened. Perhaps it made him sad. Perhaps he was too busy; looking after a baby is hard work. Or it could be that he had another idea in the meantime and the enthusiasm trickled down his arms and out of his fingers until, shoulders slumped, he closed the bedroom door.
But now she’s here. And she will sort it out.
The floor is wooden, not polished and shiny, just exposed, bare. It is already making divots in her knees. She lifts a pile of paper off the end of the bed and places it beside the boxes and the carrier-bag flakes. Specks of dust take flight and she blows a following wind after them. Then she unfastens her red mock-Converse trainers and settles, legs crossed.
A quick rifle reveals that the pile consists entirely of unopened mail addressed to her mother. She slides her hands out of the blue gloves and unwraps letters offering double glazing and conservatories, and credit card applications, along with shopping surveys and requests from charities. Catalogues: clothes, kitchens and seeds. And holiday brochures: cruises, skiing, beaches and canal boats. All sorts. Nothing important. When she has finished, she has a new pile that’s bigger and messier than the one with which she started. But that’s okay. If she’s going to get all this cleared up, she’ll have to make a mess first.
She doesn’t need to record any of these things in her notebook. Instead, she pops downstairs – mind the motorbike helmets, and the newspapers, and the Dulux Black Satin paint – for a bin bag. As she heads down the hall the letterbox snaps. Yikes! But it’s not Dad, inexplicably back from work early. It’s just the postman. Her breath escapes in a relieved puff.
Dad has never said she isn’t allowed in the room, he just says:
‘Oh, it’s such a mess.’
‘Don’t go in there, you’ll break your neck.’
‘I’ll sort it out one day.’
On the few occasions when they’ve stepped inside together he has allowed her to have a brief look; opened a few of the boxes, lifted the odd thing off the bed and stroked it while she watched, mouth closed tight, because to speak would break the spell and return them to the other side of the door.
Back in the room, she chucks the junk mail in the bin bag and, having slid her hands into the blue plastic gloves again, lifts another pile of papers off the bed. Just as she begins to flick through the pile, the telephone rings and she dashes down the stairs – careful – to answer, in case it’s Dad.
‘IS THAT YOU, CLOVER?’
Mrs Mackerel is a bit deaf. When she talks she cups her mouth and, if you didn’t know better, you’d think she was about to whisper. Then her voice explodes out of her, literally. She has two settings: loud, for normal words; and extra loud, for the words she wants to be certain have been heard.
‘I’ve got some SWEETS. Will you COME AND GET THEM?’
‘You mean now?’
‘No, I mean next week – OF COURSE I MEAN NOW.’
Clover trudges up the stairs. She places the gloves on the bed and picks up her red trainers before stepping out on to the landing and closing the door. Mrs Mackerel doesn’t usually buy her sweets, she’s just checking up on her. Still, there’s plenty of time. Weeks and weeks of it.
Mrs Mackerel’s bell plays a selection of tunes on a loop. Today it does ‘Jingle Bells’.
Mrs Mackerel opens the door. ‘NOT TODAY, THANK YOU,’ she says, and then she closes it in Clover’s face.
Clover waits. The door opens.
‘It was a JOKE! Now, COME IN.’
She follows Mrs Mackerel down the hall, past poor bleeding Jesus on a cross as long as her arm, and into the lounge, which is a mirror image of hers and Dad’s and almost as crowded.
‘You’d better SIT DOWN, then.’
Clover sits on the edge of the two-seater sofa.
‘NOT THERE.’
She flits to the three-seater instead.
‘THAT’LL DO.’
Mrs Mackerel’s lounge is full of chairs. It’s as if she went to the furniture shop, found a fabric she liked – turquoise with a spattering of fat pink roses – and ordered everything they had in it: a three-seater, a two-seater, an armchair and a matching footstool. She picked the same material for her curtains, the swoopy kind that look like they should be in front of a stage. Everything is so big, it’s a wonder it was able to fit through the door. Clover wouldn’t be surprised if the furnishings started out tiny like those dehydrated flannels she used to like when she was a little girl, and Mrs Mackerel watered them until they swelled into three flowery sofas and a fancy pair of curtains.
There’s not much room for any furniture besides the chairs. Instead, Mrs Mackerel has filled the remaining space with cottage ornaments. Every surface – windowsill, television stand, a small display cabinet and the mantelpiece – is decorated with them, all slightly different but essentially the same: whitewashed walls and thatched roofs with tiny flower-filled gardens wrapped by hedges. The houses have names like Rose Cottage, Thistle Cottage and Midnight Cottage. Clover used to line them up on the carpet when she was younger, deciding which she liked best, which she would live in if she were a centimetre tall. Although she knows several collectors – Grandad (clocks), Uncle Jim (jigsaws), Dad (well, everything) – and could, if pushed, suggest reasons why Grandad and Uncle Jim and Dad keep the things they gather, this particular collection mystifies Clover. Mrs Mackerel has lived in The Grove since she got married, nearly fifty years ago. Her house, like Clover’s, is made of red brick; the windows are encased in white plastic and its roof is protected by thin slices of slate. She doesn’t have an allotment, and many years ago she paid workmen to bury her back garden and driveway under paving slabs. She would hate living in the countryside – if anything from outdoors ever sneaks inside she takes off her slipper and fights it to the death.
‘And what have YOU got to SAY FOR YOURSELF today?’
The question makes the visit seem like her idea, and she doesn’t have anything to say for herself. She only came for the sweets.
‘CAT GOT YOUR TONGUE? Well, I’ll tell you what I’ve been up to then, shall I? Now, I’m telling you this IN CONFIDENCE . . .’
Mrs Mackerel says a lot of things in confidence, but because she says them so loudly, she pretty much ends up saying them with confidence, instead. Dad’s always telling her to go and see the doctor. ‘Hearing aids don’t cost anything, they’re free, Edna,’ he says. But Mrs Mackerel won’t put any old rubbish in her ears. What she wants is some of them proper digital hearing aids from the telly, not a pair of NHS whistlers. She goes on and on, until Dad gets all huffy and says, ‘You haven’t listened to a word I’ve said.’ Then she looks pleased, as if the whole point of the conversation was to get a rise out of Dad.
‘. . . and so I told Mrs Knight, God forgive me, IF YOU THINK I’M GOING TO BRING YOUR BIN IN AGAIN, YOU’VE GOT ANOTHER THINK COMING . . .’
Mrs Knight is a nice old lady from round the back. Mrs Mackerel keeps an eye on her and they seem like best friends – they shop together every Wednesday and Saturday, they have lunch in the café at BHS, and they do little favours for each other, like lending Catherine Cookson books and telling each other which supermarkets have gin on special offer – but Mrs Mackerel keeps a mental count of every good deed and Mrs Knight is in arrears. Sometimes it seems Mrs Mackerel is Mrs Knight’s best friend and her greatest enemy, all at once. On Tuesday afternoons Mrs Knight comes round to Mrs Mackerel’s and they drink gin and orange squash. Just one or two, they say. And then it’s three, and four, and five. Last summer, Clover endured trips to the café at BHS and stagnant afternoons in Mrs Mackerel’s conservatory, but she looked forward to Tuesdays. Once, Mrs Mackerel even said a rude word. Mrs Knight started it, by trying to rest her glass on her tummy, which rolled out like a little hill when she sat down. Some of the gin splashed on to her trousers.
‘GET YOUR AUNTY PEARL A CLOTH,’ Mrs Mackerel said.
Clover did as she was told, even though she doesn’t have any aunties.
Mrs Knight dabbed at the mound of her waist. ‘Oh dear, it’s my belly, it’s –’
‘Your chest’s ON YOUR BELLY and your belly’ll be ON YOUR KNEES before you’re finished, Pearl.’
‘Oh!’
‘You need a PANTY GIRDLE.’
‘Really? I –’
‘SEVEN POUNDS AT BONMARCHÉ.’
‘Well, I don’t know what I’d . . . I’ve never – would you wear knickers with one, Edna?’
‘OF COURSE. I always wear knickers with mine. In fact, in the WINTER, when I’ve got my KNICKERS, my GIRDLE and my TIGHTS on, I’m always LOVELY AND WARM! I can’t be doing with a cold B.T.M.’
‘A cold what?’
‘BEE – TEE – EM.’
Mrs Knight rubbed at her damp patch and shrugged.
‘A cold ARSE, Pearl.’
And then – funniest of all – Mrs Mackerel did a burp. Not a loud one, just a little pop that she tried, and failed, to swallow.
Clover smiles as she remembers.
‘. . . I won’t have her HOLDING ME HOSTILE with her power washer. And I don’t know what’s SO FUNNY about that,’ Mrs Mackerel is saying. ‘I SUPPOSE YOU’LL BE WANTING YOUR SWEETS.’
Her nylon trousers crackle when she gets up from the armchair. She is wearing a sort of jacket like the ones the school dinner ladies wear. She calls it a housecoat; she has several in different pastels – there must be a catalogue or a special shop – and she wears them over her clothes, only taking them off when she goes out or has important visitors. Mrs Mackerel likes to keep things for best: blouses, trousers, glasses, biscuits – even the turquoise, rose-spattered sofas have white napkin-ish flaps dangling over their arms and tops, just where your arms and head rest. While she is gone, Clover peers at the silver-framed wedding photograph that sits among the cottage ornaments on the mantelpiece. You can tell it’s Mrs Mackerel, it’s exactly how she would look if you excavated her face: remove the wrinkly topsoil, dig under the eye-bag mounds, flatten the badlands of her neck, and there she is, young and skin-tight, looking wonderfully glamorous in a sparkly crown and a white lace dress with sleeves like bells, her hands covered by little white gloves that stop at the wrist, fingers clasping a small bouquet – lilies, gardenia, iris? It’s hard to tell because the photograph is black and white. Mr Mackerel is smart in a dark suit and a striped tie. He is tall and slim, his hair so short and shiny-slick that it could pass for plastic, like Barbie’s Ken.
‘CUP OF TEA?’ Mrs Mackerel calls from the kitchen.
‘No, thank you.’
‘DON’T ANSWER, THEN. Why do I bother?’ She bursts back into the lounge, holding a bag of Jelly Babies. She usually buys mints: soft mints, humbugs, mint imperials, Murray mints, Tic Tacs, Polo mints and Werther’s butter mints. She must have stood in the sweet aisle of the shop, imagining what Clover might like; the thought makes Clover happy.
‘HERE.’
‘Thank you.’
‘ROT YOUR TEETH.’
Clover nods.
‘FULL OF SUGAR.’
She nods again, clasping the yellow packet in case Mrs Mackerel changes her mind and takes it back.
‘DON’T EAT THEM ALL AT ONCE.’
‘No.’
‘AND I FOUND THESE.’ She delves in her knitting bag for something that is clearly not knitting, because it rustles when she touches it. ‘THERE. We were cleaning out the cupboard at CHURCH and LO and BEHOLD.’
Clover opens her hand to receive a small stack of colouring books – Our Lady of Fatima, Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal, The Story of Mary – and a booklet, browned and curling at the corners, called Latin Words and Phrases for Beginners.
‘Oh. Thank you.’
‘YOU’RE WELCOME. What are you UP to? Aren’t you BORED on your OWN all day?’
‘It’s not all day, and I’ve got jobs. I’m doing the watering –’
‘And you’ll be KNITTING THE SCARF FOR YOUR DAD, won’t you? Bring it with you NEXT TIME and I’ll HAVE A LOOK. What does HE THINK about you being at home ON YOUR OWN ALL DAY?
‘Well, I’m not, it’s not all day, but he’s –’
‘HE’S A GOOD MAN – God help him. He wears his HEART on his SHOULDER.’
Clover makes an agreeing noise.
‘Well, you’ve got JOBS to do. You’d better BE OFF.’
As Clover leaves, Mrs Mackerel presses a £2 coin into her hand. ‘THERE,’ she says. ‘You could BUY YOURSELF some of those LOON BANDS.’
‘Loom bands?’
‘That’s right. Someone made a DRESS out of them and got a MILLION POUNDS for it. YOU COULD DO THAT – God love you.’
Clover hurries to the door, conscious of Mrs Mackerel’s partiality for what Dad calls the tablecloth trick.
‘And Clover?’
Here she goes, everything’s lovely, now she’ll whip the cloth out from under it.
‘Tell your dad he’d better SORT YOUR BACK GARDEN OUT. He’s been PROMISING to do it for TIME AND MEMORIAL.’
Clover sits on a stack of empty milk crates in the back garden, the Latin booklet and Jelly Babies resting on her lap. The colouring books top a pile of papers in the kitchen destined for the recycling bin. She rearranges the press of her bottom on the criss-cross of the crates – Colin borrowed them from somewhere when he was having a go at being a milkman; one day Dad will line them with plastic and use them as planters.
Mrs Mackerel is right, the garden could do with a tidy. The shed is bursting with tools, buckets and spades, canes for the allotment, collapsed lilos, a stack of six plastic garden chairs and a matching table, jars of screws and nails, half-emptied seed envelopes, two sleds, and a dressmaker’s dummy Dad thought she might like in her room – she didn’t like it; it terrified her, that’s why it’s out here. Other stuff rests against the shed’s outer walls or lounges on the lawn, waiting to be put somewhere. All the bikes she has ever owned lean up against it like a sculpture of her growth to date, in metal and rubber. A boat engine Dad bought on eBay is beached on the grass beside her. At least Dad keeps the grass quite short; Mrs Mackerel can’t complain about that. When it’s time to cut it he gets Clover to lift everything – the plastic slide she played on as a toddler, the slimy-bottomed paddling pool, the balls and water pistols – while he trails behind her, not mowing neatly, in stripes, but backwards and forwards, in a vacuuming sort of pattern.
A car alarm whistles and every dog in the neighbourhood answers. She flicks the Latin booklet open and scans the words: collector, curator, idea, museum – she recognises lots of them. The sayings are trickier. Acta non verba – deeds, not words. She likes that, it makes her think of her notebook, upstairs, waiting.
Knock, knock.
Shielding her eyes, she stares up, past the cusp of the garden fence, at the square window of Mrs Mackerel’s second bedroom, where she is standing, draped in the net curtain, jabbing the pane with her index finger, pointing, pointing, pointing . . . at the bag of Jelly Babies. Her lips are moving. NOT ALL AT ONCE, she’ll be saying. And possibly, YOU DON’T WANT TO END UP LIKE YOUR MOTHER. Clover puts the bag down on the crate and waves.
Mrs Mackerel knew her mother. That’s what everyone calls her – your mother. It’s not friendly like mum, ma or mam, but she quite likes it because it sounds special and a bit posh, and she is used to it now; she couldn’t call her anything else if she tried. It’s the same with Mrs Mackerel: by the time she said, ‘Call me Edna,’ when Clover was about eight, it was far too late. She would like to put Mrs Mackerel in a juicer and squeeze the story of her mother out all at once, but Mrs Mackerel trickles her comments and sometimes says mean stuff on purpose.
‘She could have done with losing a few pounds, God love her.’
‘She wasn’t much of a mother, God forgive me.’
Mrs Mackerel always mentions God after she has been mean. Sometimes she is not a very nice person – God help her! Dad says she’s had a hard life, so allowances must be made. When she is especially mean he calls her ‘Evil Edna’, who was a witch of extreme wickedness, from a cartoon he used to watch when he was a little boy, and sometimes, when she’s going off on one, he says rude things under his breath, very quietly. Dad has had a hard life, too. But he isn’t mean.
Clover was a surprise. Dad has always been clear about it. When she was small he delivered the story while pantomiming a surprised face. ‘One day your mother had tummy ache and then, suddenly, you arrived! She had to go to the hospital in an ambulance. When it was time for my break, someone met me on Lord Street and told me to go to the hospital. I jumped on the 44, and when I got there I couldn’t believe it. What a surprise!’
She had always imagined that she was the good kind of surprise, like when it’s a party and everyone jumps out and shouts, ‘Happy birthday!’ But the way Mrs Mackerel told the story of her birth made her wonder whether she had in fact been the kind of surprise someone might get if, after the party, they got home and discovered their house had been burgled.
‘I suppose you know the FACTS OF LIFE, now?’ she began, one afternoon last summer.
Clover did – does, in fact, know a lot of disgusting facts, even more than she knew last summer. She shifts slightly on the milk crate; her knickers are climbing into her bum, they’re a bit too small, and since Dad told her his version of the facts there has been a growing carefulness between them when it comes to things like snogging on the telly and romantic songs, and she has been putting off saying I need some new ones. The carefulness intensified last autumn when Dad announced that he thought it would be a good idea if they went to Marks and Spencer to buy some new underwear. She knew he had to be talking about bras, because they usually grabbed knickers and vests in packs of fives or sevens from the supermarket, chucking them in the trolley with the fish fingers and ice lollies. She wondered how he knew about Marks and Spencer and who had told him about the measuring service. Girls at school joked about it, said the ladies who worked there volunteered specially so they could cop a feel. It was probably Kelly, she thought. Which also meant that Kelly might have said, ‘Clover’s getting boobs,’ or words to that effect. Clover couldn’t decide if it was worse for your dad or a family friend to notice your boobs first. ‘Would you like Kelly to come with us?’ Dad asked. Clover absolutely DID NOT want Kelly to go on a boob-measuring trip with them. Kelly would want to make it into a special occasion. There would be a cosy chat afterwards: How does it feel to have your first bra? So she went with Dad. He accompanied her through the forest of underwear, right up to the fitting room, where he mumbled something about measurements to one of the women. The woman was friendly and brisk. ‘You’ll want at least three,’ she said, and she helped Clover choose. Dad retreated to the border of Lingerie, occupying the no man’s land between it and Menswear. He kept a lookout and joined them at the till once the measuring and choosing was over. Afterwards, they went to the café for the first time. It was full of old people. Dad bought hot chocolate and shortbread squares. She held the bag of bras tight on her lap, half scared that, given the opportunity, they would slide out and expose themselves. Dad said she was growing up fast and cleared his throat. Then they talked about burning the rubbish at the allotment before winter, and Mrs Mackerel, who had recently described herself as a DEAD-IN-THE-WOOL TORY. ‘We live in hope,’ Dad said, and they sniggered. It was a sort of celebration, but without any fuss. Later, he did a clearly rehearsed speech and presented her with a precautionary packet of sanitary towels. ‘Nothing to be embarrassed about,’ he said, as his face and neck turned red. ‘I bought these at Lidl. In broad daylight. And I wasn’t bothered at all.’
Clover was born at lunchtime. In the kitchen. There was a racket. Mrs Mackerel banged on the wall, and when the noise didn’t stop she came round to see what was happening. No one answered the door, so she rushed round the back, let herself in and found Clover’s mother kneeling on the floor like an animal. Mrs Mackerel knew what was happening, she has had four children, all boys, which means she might as well not have bothered, because boys are no use whatsoever.
Clover has seen people having babies. Not in real life, obviously, but on the Scientific Eye video everyone watched at the start of Year 7 and on One Born Every Minute. It’s quite frightening. The worst bit is right at the end when the mothers make these mooing noises. Sometimes it looks like things are about to go wrong, but they don’t – or maybe they don’t show those bits – and people cry (with happiness) and say things like, ‘It’s a miracle’ and ‘What tiny fingers.’ The dads talk about how amazing it was to be part of it all, and when they phone family and friends their voices wobble. A lot of babies seem to be born in the night, which might be the best time because everything is quiet and it’s not long until morning when you can wake up with your brand-new baby beside you. What a lovely beginning.
Every time Clover asked her to repeat the story last summer, Mrs Mackerel added something. If Clover asked about any of the new bits, Mrs Mackerel made out she’d always told the story that way, so Clover zipped her lips and listened.
‘There’s absolutely NO NEED to MAKE A RACKET,’ Mrs Mackerel said. ‘I told your mother – God help her – to SHUT HER GOB and OPEN HER LEGS.’
Her mother was what Dad calls cuddly. Mrs Mackerel says she was big-boned; a woman who liked her food. Clover has seen photographs. There is one on the mantelpiece in the lounge which Dad took on the beach. Her mother is facing away from the camera and the wind has lifted her hair and spread it skyward, which means you can hardly see her face. There is another in her bedroom, a high-school picture, taken when her mother was all teeth and nose, before she had grown into her face. And there are also two photographs of Clover and her mother together, in a small plastic album in a kitchen drawer. What she would really like is a photograph of her mother with Dad, like the one of Mr and Mrs Mackerel on Mrs Mackerel’s mantelpiece. Of course, it wouldn’t be of a wedding because Dad and her mother never got married, but to have a picture of the two of them dressed up smart would be epic. In the pictures she has, her mother looks like the kind of person who would be really good at hugs; soft and pillowy, not massive – not like people on the telly who can’t get out of bed. But big enough, perhaps, not to notice Clover attaching herself, cells dividing and multiplying, settling in, certain of a welcome.
Her mother had probably realised that she was having a baby by the time Mrs Mackerel burst into the kitchen, but Clover sometimes worries that she hadn’t and the exact moment it dawned on her was when she heard, ‘SHUT YOUR GOB and OPEN YOUR LEGS.’
That is not a lovely beginning.
‘The air may have been BLUE, but you CAME OUT PINK,’ Mrs Mackerel said. ‘And that’s the MAIN THING.’
Mrs Mackerel meant that her mother was swearing. Clover wishes she had asked about that. It would be nice to know her mother’s swearwords of choice; whether she stuck to the usual or got creative, like Uncle Jim, who calls people ‘lard-fondlers’ and ‘twunt-biscuits’.
‘I CAUGHT you, Clover Quinn. A catch IAN BOTHAM would have been PROUD of! I cut the cord with THE KITCHEN SCISSORS, and I wrapped you in a TEA TOWEL. Looking back, I probably should have PASSED YOU STRAIGHT TO YOUR MOTHER, it might have been GOOD FOR BONDAGE, but I didn’t think of it AT THE TIME.’
Instead, Mrs Mackerel carried her into the hall and telephoned for an ambulance, leaving her mother on all fours, skirt rucked round her waist. The ambulance drove right to the end of The Grove, blue lights flashing. Everyone came out to look.
‘I was going to CARRY YOU OUT,’ Mrs Mackerel said, making it sound like she’d hoped to hold her up to the neighbours, like in The Lion King. ‘But one of the PARAMEDICS took you while the other PUSHED your mother IN A WHEELCHAIR. Nothing wrong with her. NOTHING BUT STUBBORNNESS. She could have walked if she’d wanted to.’
One of the neighbours had parked awkwardly, which meant the ambulance had to reverse out of The Grove. ‘Backwards and downhill,’ Mrs Mackerel muttered when she got to that part of the story. ‘Like everything that happened next.’
Since listening to Mrs Mackerel’s account, Clover wants to hear a longer version of Dad’s story. The version he tells is short, learned and always the same. It has a careful feel about it. She suspects she will feel better about Mrs Mackerel’s story when she hears the whole thing in Dad’s words. So far she hasn’t managed to ask. Sometimes the question is there, in her mouth, all the words lined up in the right order: ‘You know the story of when I was born?’ Once or twice the beginning of the ‘Y’ has slipped out like a string of spaghetti and Dad has said, ‘What?’ But each time, she has retreated: ‘Oh, nothing.’ She doesn’t want to upset him or, perhaps worse, lead him to shrug and say, ‘What’s done is done, Clover. Don’t waste time thinking about it.’ But she does, she thinks about it a lot.