There’s an art book, Rubens’ Drawings. It’s turquoise, with a sketch of the head and shoulders of a thoughtful toddler on the front. Clover flicks through the pages. The drawings are of people. Black and white, mostly done in chalk, it says. The people are fleshy, soft. They have round shoulders and feathery hair.
As far as she knows, her mother didn’t draw. Perhaps she just liked the pictures. But what, in particular, did she admire? Clover can’t decide whether her mother preferred the muscly, bare-bottomed men or the group sketches, like The Holy Family and St John, which has a mother holding a very fat baby boy while a man, presumably St John, leans in close and a chubby toddler grabs at the mother’s skirts. The group is completed by a fluffy dog, though it could be a sheep – Clover isn’t sure. The best thing about the picture is the way the mother’s hand cradles the whole sweep of her baby’s calf and it is as clear as day, literally, that she adores him.
Clover looks through the book again, more carefully this time. She likes The Annunciation. Like the other pictures, it is black and white – ‘a pen and ink wash over black chalk’, it says in the description underneath. A sturdy angel and two chubby, cherub-ish creatures are floating just above the ground, reaching out to Mary, who seems surprised, one hand held against her chest, as if she’s asking, Who, me? Are you sure? Mrs Mackerel has a full colour picture of the Annunciation on the wall in her lounge; it’s gaudy, not as nice as the one in the Rubens book. Mrs Mackerel’s angel is holding a bunch of flowers – the small, £2.99 kind, not what you’d expect from a heavenly messenger. And the ring of yellow around Mary’s hair looks very much like the foam shampoo shield Clover used to wear in the bath when she was small. But at least Mary looks surprised, that’s the main thing.
Rubens’ picture of the Annunciation was probably her mother’s favourite, too. After all, Becky Brookfield, like Mary, was taken by surprise. Clover has a vision, then, of a series of heavenly encounters cut out, mounted and lined along the bedroom wall. A mural of angels and surprised women. It would be epic! She can use the colouring books Dad rescued from the recycling. They are full of heavenly figures, hovering just above the ground, with straight lines shooting out of them to indicate radiation. No, radiance.
The next pile is a mix of sheets and towels. She places it on the floor. She doesn’t want to miss anything and so, as before, she unfolds and shakes each item before making a new pile. Some of the towels feel new. They’re still soft; they don’t have that coarse, crispy texture that towels get when they come out of the washing machine. It’s the other way round with the sheets: the crispy ones feel new and the soft ones have a smoothed, slept-on feel. She smells them, rubs any softness with the flat of her hand in case it was made by the press of her mother’s side or back. When she has worked her way through all the towels and sheets she fetches a whole roll of bin bags from the kitchen. Dad won’t notice, there are others in the cupboard. She rips off a bag and packs the towels and sheets into it, keeping a navy bath sheet to go with the holiday display and one set of very soft bedding that might bear her mother’s stamp. There’s a danger the bag will split, so she carries it downstairs carefully. She moves the unfastened radiator and opens the understairs cupboard, where Dad keeps the charity bags people are always stuffing through the letter box, and searches for one with WEDNESDAY written on it. It’s tricky to fit the charity bag over the bin bag. It’s like putting a sleeping bag back in its cover, something she did once or twice with the sleeping bag Dad bought in case she preferred it to a duvet. Eventually, she manages it. Where to put the bag? Dad started work at eight o’clock this morning, so he’ll be back just after four. The charity van should have driven past by then. But will it definitely spot a bag at the dead end of a cul-de-sac? She isn’t sure, and she doesn’t want to keep watch all afternoon, so she struggles along The Grove with the bag, careful not to scuff it on the pavement. She takes the first left, and then turns left again, down Mrs Knight’s road. No one is about, so she leaves the bag outside her house.
Folded up on the bed, previously crushed by the sheets and towels, she finds a T-shirt. It is black with ‘I’m flying without wings’ written on it. It looks like it could be the one her mother is wearing in the first of the pictures of the two of them together, the one that was taken in the hospital. She examines the T-shirt in the photograph, which is waiting to be incorporated into the ‘SURPRISE’ display. It is black and baggy with some partially obscured white writing across its chest. It might be the same one, and if it is, it’s an actual piece of history and she should display it properly. She is considering attaching a hanger to the picture rail when she has an amazing idea. She peels off the blue gloves, dashes down the stairs – careful! – through the kitchen and into the garden.
It’s not a small job: it isn’t just a matter of getting it out of the shed, there’s other stuff to move first. She steps into the tropical, timbered space and lifts buckets and spades and canes and tools. One by one she puts things on the grass, glancing up at Mrs Mackerel’s window, just in case. The dressmaker’s dummy has no head and no arms or legs; it’s just a wooden stand that supports a dark velvety torso. It has a pair of bumps for boobs, a pinched waist, and a sort of hook-ish handle growing out of its neck in place of a head. There are cobwebs on the velvet and she nearly dies, literally. There’s no way she can lift it into the house like that. She finds one of those sticky roller things under the kitchen sink and runs it up and down and over the bumps. Once she is certain that the possibility of spiders has been eliminated, she places her hands around the nip of its waist and lifts the dummy indoors. Then she stuffs the other things back in the shed in any old order and dances the dummy up the stairs.
She places the T-shirt over its head. It looks horribly creased and far too baggy, so she fetches a hair bobble from her room and pulls the T-shirt tight at the back before wrapping the bobble round the clumped material. There. It’s not quite right, it looks like a minidress on a one-legged woman, but it’ll do for now.
The last of the things on the bed are pillows (without cases), cushions (with covers – plain, cream), a book – Faster Pasta: Good Value Family Meals, two pairs of shoes (flip-flops with pink sparkly flowers on the toe-divider and a pair of plain, black patent heels), three framed pictures (one of a sunset, one of a puppy that looks like it’s been cut out of a calendar – the grid of the days is ghosting through the dog’s golden coat – and, best of all, an old school photograph of Uncle Jim and her mother), a key ring (YOU ARE THE KEY TO MY HEART), a selection of fridge magnets and a couple of other kitchen-ish things with nice sayings on them, a box containing a half-used bottle of perfume (J’adore by Christian Dior) and a blizzard of carrier-bag flakes. She sprays the perfume and follows the mist with her nose, inhaling deep and long. It’s a bit like oranges . . . and also flowers. It’s as close as she will ever get to smelling her mother. She lifts her arm up to her nose to sniff the bare crease of her elbow – funny how you can’t smell yourself. Dad smells of soap and deodorant and sometimes of outdoors, especially when he has been at the allotment and the soil has snuck under his nails and into the whorly creases of his fingers. She sprays again, this time directly on to the inside of her arm, and as the perfume smells like her mother, she decides to like it.
Now the bed is cleared she can climb on it. She tries to brush the carrier-bag flakes off the bare mattress but they cling to her fingers and arms like feathers. The more she brushes, the clingier they become. In the end she has to fetch the hoover.
The room looks much better afterwards, despite the fact that it is still quite crowded. She opens the first of the boxes by the window. It strikes her that the air in the box might be old, from the time when she was a baby; air that passed in and out of her mother’s tissues. She leans into the box and breathes it in.
The box contains underwear. Bras and knickers, all different colours; some are matching sets, others are plain. Several are slightly grey from the wash. She fastens a red and white polka-dot bra around her torso and slips her arms through the straps, just to see. It is massive. If she ever needed to be winched off a mountain, she could probably lie in it.
There are tights and socks and some of those longer, fancy bra things with hard bits in, like ribs, but going down instead of across. There is a moment when she feels like she might be poking her nose into something that is not her business. But the feeling doesn’t last long – these are her mother’s belongings, after all.
She keeps the polka-dot bra and the matching pants. She also keeps two pairs of socks: one for the display and another – black, patterned by small pink rabbits – for herself, to wear in the winter, under jeans. She unfastens and flattens the now empty box and stuffs the remaining underwear into a bin bag. She’ll dispose of it later.
Her stomach is rumbling. Time for lunch and then her jobs at the allotment. This has been her best day yet. She has got so much done. Before she goes downstairs, she slips her feet into her mother’s high-heeled shoes. They are slightly big: both a little too wide and a little too long. She steps along the floor at the foot of the bed, her toes and heels pressing in the exact same places that her mother’s toes and heels pressed. She wobbles over to the window, feet knocking against the floorboards. She squeezes around the boxes and looks out at the gardens: hers and Dad’s (untidy), Mrs Mackerel’s (paved), and beyond. This was her mother’s room. This was her mother’s view. These are her mother’s shoes. She teeters over to the cleared space at the end of the bed. Back and forth she treads, back and forth, and back and forth, as if, eventually, she might step into her mother’s life.
Dagmar is sitting outside the corner shop with her trolley. Clover brakes and stops. This is the third time she’s happened upon her waiting here. She hopes she doesn’t wait every afternoon on the off-chance, but she suspects she might.
‘We are going to the allotment?’ Dagmar asks, as if she is inviting her.
‘Okay,’ Clover says. But she stays on her bike, skating it along the pavement with the tips of her toes. Dagmar will have to keep up.
‘You have gone to Blackpool?’
‘Nope. At the weekend.’
‘You are lucky.’
‘I suppose. It might be fun to go on a proper holiday, though,’ Clover says. ‘Somewhere abroad. I’m trying to get my dad to think about it.’
‘And is he saying?’
‘You don’t have to go somewhere foreign to be happy; you can just as easily be happy at home.’ She speaks in a mean voice that doesn’t sound at all like Dad. ‘Who’d look after the allotment?’ she says in the same silly voice.
‘And your mum is saying?’
‘It’s just me and my dad.’
Dagmar makes the usual surprised face and Clover braces herself for questions, but Dagmar continues, ‘I am looking after it for you.’
‘Oh, it’s okay – it won’t, he won’t . . .’ she tries to explain, suddenly ashamed of herself for making so much of Dad’s refusal.
‘He is not letting me?’
‘We aren’t going.’
‘But if you go, he is not letting me?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
She is going too fast. She slows a little and lets her red trainers drag. Dagmar’s trolley wheels scrape against stones and her breath hisses in and out. She sounds like a bicycle pump.
‘What does your dad do?’
‘He is watching television.’
‘Is it his day off?’
‘No.’
‘Mine gets two days off every week. One week out of five, he gets a long weekend. He sometimes helps Colin, his mate, with jobs if he’s got a day off in the week.’ She pauses to allow Dagmar to reply. When she doesn’t, Clover carries on. ‘He’d get more money if he did some overtime on the park and ride, but he likes to do stuff with Colin. They’ve known each other since they were tiny. They’re like b—’ she nearly said it, the bosom word, ‘. . . like best friends,’ she says.
‘My dad is not working.’
She feels as if she is forcing Dagmar into a corner. But Dagmar could change the subject and talk about something else if she wanted, couldn’t she?
‘Maybe he’ll find a job soon,’ she says firmly, ending the awkwardness for them both.
They turn off the road. Clover dismounts and they walk down the track. She takes the key out of her pocket, but when she tries to place it in the lock, the gentlest of nudges sends the heavy gate swinging open by itself.
‘Oh, it’s dropped again.’
‘Dropped?’
‘The gate. It’s heavy. Sometimes it drops and then you don’t need a key to get in. You can just give it a little push and it opens on its own. Someone will tighten it up, eventually.’ She holds one of the bars so the gate doesn’t pivot all the way back. They step through and she closes it carefully, making sure the latch has caught.
It’s hot. The air is thick with dust and pollen and the thrum of growing. Someone has trimmed the long grass at either side of the path. It’s so hot that the sun has bleached the offcuts to hay. It lies there, white and soft, like fur. They kick it as they walk.
Dagmar grabs the bucket from the bike and Clover lifts the carpet to uncover the watering can. It takes a few journeys back and forth before they’ve watered everything.
‘Want to do some weeding?’
‘How are you knowing what is a weed?’
‘Basically, it’s anything you didn’t plant. If something’s not growing in the right place at the right time, it’s a weed. So you could say the raspberries are weeds. We didn’t plant them, they just keep growing every year. But we let them, because we like them. The nettles keep growing, too. But we don’t like them, obviously, and you mustn’t weed them without gloves, not even if you get them right at the bottom – they’ll wreck your fingers.
‘I don’t know all the names of everything, Dad does, he’s epic at it, but it doesn’t really matter, you don’t need to know what everything’s called. See these ones? And these? They’re weeds. Just rip them up and chuck them on the grass.’
They crouch on the pathways that dissect the plot and pick the weeds. The soil is so dusty in the places they haven’t watered that it only takes a gentle tug to make the roots slide right out.
‘My dad, he was in Afghanistan,’ Dagmar says.
‘I thought it was just America and us.’
‘No.’
She would like to ask if Dagmar’s dad killed anyone. But it might be rude.
‘He was working in the field hospital in Kabul.’
Clover looks down: it will be easier for Dagmar to keep talking, she thinks, if she carries on with the job, uprooting the weeds and dropping them on the grass beside her.
‘He was seeing things.’
Clover stands for a moment and stretches the crouch out of her knees before squatting again. Dagmar’s face is pinched. There is a stripe of colour along each cheek.
‘Very bad things. And now . . . he is like you say about your uncle. He is not himself.’
Dagmar’s dad is big. Clover saw him at parents’ evening: a pale-skinned, mournful-looking man, the tallest person there by miles. Luke Barton called him Frankenstein, afterwards. ‘Dracula’s dad looks like Frankenstein – course he does!’ he said.
‘This is a weed?’ Dagmar asks.
‘Yeah.’
‘What is the name?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘And this one here is a weed?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What is the name?’
‘Clover.’
‘Your name is the same as a weed?’
‘It’s only a weed if it’s in the wrong place at the wrong time, remember. Some farmers grow clover. On purpose.’
The clover roots mat the ground. Dagmar pulls, and a whole network lifts.
‘Maybe your dad will get better.’
‘The field hospital was closing when I am seven.’
Clover slides from the crouch on to her bottom and sits cross-legged on the grass, all pretence of weeding abandoned.
‘It is not so bad when I am going to school. In the holidays I feel the shouting coming. And I go out.’
‘All day, by yourself?’
‘If he is having a bad night it has to be very quiet.’
‘Recalculating’ – a harsh, computerised voice blasts out of Dagmar’s trolley.
‘What’s that?’
‘Oh, it is . . .’ Dagmar reaches into the trolley. She stirs its insides, her hand eventually emerging with a chunky rectangular device. ‘It is a satnav,’ she says, passing it to Clover so she can see it properly. ‘From eBay.’
‘Like Google Maps, but old? Where are you going?’
‘Nowhere.’
‘Why is it recalculating?’ There’s a sliding button on the top of the device. Clover flicks it with her finger and a map appears on the matte, old-fashioned screen. Despite what Dagmar said, there’s a route and, in the bottom left-hand corner, an estimated time of arrival: early tomorrow morning. ‘So where are you going, really?’
‘I am going nowhere.’
‘All right. Where is it set to go?’
‘Home.’
Clover puzzles over this. She doesn’t know where Dagmar lives, but it can’t be all that far away. At the moment the map fills the screen, but it only shows as far as the roundabout at the end of Moss Lane. There must be a way to zoom out.
‘Last holiday we drive home and use the satnav. I press here: Recently Found. See? And I am finding all the places. Now I know how far I am from Uherské Hradišteˇ.’
‘From where?’
‘Uherské Hradišteˇ.’
‘Oo-her-ske Rhad-deesh-de-yeh,’ Clover tries. ‘Where’s that?’
‘Home.’
‘I thought you meant here when you said home. So how far is it?’
Dagmar takes the satnav and presses the screen. ‘One thousand, nine hundred and twenty-five miles.’
‘You miss it.’
‘Yes.’
Clover thinks. Sometimes when people miss things they’d rather not talk about them. Like Dad, for example. Perhaps Dagmar is different. ‘What do you miss?’ she asks.
‘The Christmas market.’
‘We have one, you know. In December, at the weekends.’
‘I miss name days.’
‘What are they?’
‘All the names are having their own day. Mine is the twentieth of December. I get a present. The window of every flower shop says DAGMAR, to remind people.’
‘What’s the day for Clover?’
‘Clover is not on the list.’
‘Oh.’
‘There is a list of the names and a calendar. One name for every day. People are choosing names from the list in the old times. Now they don’t have to.’
‘What else?’
‘Going to Vlcˇnov to see Jízda králu˚.’
‘What’s that?’
‘In English, it is . . . the Ride of the Kings. There is a boy riding a horse. He is being the king, but he is dressing as a lady because he is in a . . . he is pretending . . . in a . . .’
‘Disguise?’
‘Yes. And the horses – lots of them – are covered in flowers. And there are costumes. The ladies have folded sleeves . . .’ She demonstrates, bending the edge of her T-shirt over and over itself.
‘Pleats?’
‘Yes, pleats. And big skirts and long boots.’
‘Do you have one of those costumes?’
‘Yes. And I learn the dancing. I think it is a bit silly at home. But here, I am missing it.’
‘And friends?’
Dagmar tugs another web of clover roots. ‘Yes. At home I am having friends.’ She clears her throat. It’s an impatient, that’s enough, sort of sound. As if she is cross with herself for talking like this. ‘You will tell people about my dad?’
‘No.’ Clover considers telling her a secret too, by way of reassurance. A sort of information exchange. Then she remembers Uncle Jim and supposes that Dagmar witnessing his bedsit counts for something.
‘And you are promising?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Thank you.’
When someone tells you something, you like them more, not less, she thinks. It’s nice to hear stuff from Dagmar that she would never have guessed. If only Dad would tell her stuff, too.
They finish the weeding in silence then walk back up the path to the gate, accompanied by the tick of her bike, the knock of the bucket against its frame and the scrape as the hard wheels of Dagmar’s trolley graze the ground.
At the end of Moss Lane, outside the corner shop, Dagmar extends her hand. Her palm and fingers and the translucent skin of her wrist are bobbled by a series of nettle stings.
‘It is the weeds. The last one I pick is wrong.’ She rubs the stings against her shirt and the leg of her trousers and laughs in a pained, funny-bone way.
‘Come with me.’
‘But your dad is not –’
‘Oh, he’s fine,’ Clover says. It seems that they may be turning into friends, which means Dagmar will have to meet Dad at some point, and she’ll realise he’s not scary at all, won’t she? ‘Come on. We’ve got some cream.’
When Dagmar steps down the hall and into the dining room and sees Dad’s makeshift shelves and all the stuff: cuckoo-clock boxes, shoe boxes, unstrung ukuleles, empty sweet tins, reference books, candles – everything, she whispers, ‘Wow,’ and it is fine.
The cream is in a box in one of the kitchen cupboards with other medicine that isn’t dangerous if it’s taken by accident. Clover hands the tube to Dagmar and watches as she smears it over her hand and wrist.
Next, she loads two spoons with crunchy Biscoff spread and passes one over. ‘You have to try this. I think it might be the yummiest thing in the world.’
Dagmar sniffs the lump and licks its edge before sliding the whole spoon into her mouth. She nods her head and makes a noise of agreement. It seems she thinks it might be the yummiest thing in the world too, and Clover enjoys the dual pleasures of biscuity spread and sharing.
She and Dad watch Bake Off together. Tonight it’s bread. When the bakers are doing the signature challenge, which is rye bread, Dad starts talking.
‘Edna says she saw you this afternoon as she passed the shops on Bispham Road.’
‘I didn’t see her,’ she says, hoping he’ll shush.
‘She was on the bus. You were with a friend?’
‘Yes,’ she says.
‘A boy?’
‘No.’
‘Edna says it was a boy.’
‘It wasn’t.’
‘Is he your boyfriend?’
She turns away from the rye bread. ‘No! It was Dagmar. She’s a girl. With short hair.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Am I sure she’s a girl?’
‘I just want you to tell me the truth.’
‘I am!’
‘Does she come here while I’m at work?’
‘No! Well, only –’
‘I don’t want people round while I’m not here.’
‘I know.’ She feels in the wrong, like she’s in trouble, but she hasn’t done anything.
‘And if – if – you had a boyfriend you could tell me, you know.’
‘I haven’t!’
‘All right. I’m just saying. Because you’re growing up. And one day you will – have a boyfriend, I mean.’
She turns back to the telly. Stares straight ahead at it, trying to focus on the rye bread.
‘Or a friend who’s not a boy – if that’s what you . . . you can tell me anything.’
Rye bread, rye bread, rye bread . . . Is he asking whether she fancies boys or girls? Why does he think it’s okay to do this on a Wednesday evening, completely out of the blue, when she is trying to watch her programme?
‘You might not want to tell Colin, though. He’d probably have a heart attack. Say you’re far too young.’
She wishes he’d stop trying to smooth things over and just shush.
‘He loves you.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘He’s thought the world of you since you were a baby.’
‘I know.’
‘Remember that time when you were little and he said, “I really don’t want to go to work today,” and you said, “I bet you don’t want to be bald, either”? He thought it was hilarious.’
‘Dad.’
‘Yes?’
‘Can we watch the baking?’
‘Sorry.’
For the showstopper the bakers make pesto pinwheels, cheesecake brioche, a Spanish crown topped with gold-foiled olives, and all sorts of amazing, bready delights.
Dad gets up while the judges are deliberating and returns a few minutes later with a couple of rounds of buttered toast cut into triangles.
‘I reckon it’s a nice structure and a good consistency,’ he says.
‘Me, too.’
‘A soft white bread with hidden wholegrain and no bits,’ he adds.
‘I didn’t knead to know that, Dad.’
‘Do you want me to prove it to you?’
‘No, it’s okay, I’ll use my loaf.’
‘I give up. In fact, I seed . . . no? Really? All right, you win,’ he says.
It’s too hot. She lies in bed, duvet kicked into a bundle on the floor, listening to Dad, who is downstairs trying to work out the chords for ‘Happy’. ‘I’ll be just fine, I’ll be just fine’: he sings the same line again and again, testing different strumming patterns.
The house feels different. It’s as if her mother is seeping through the walls. She presses her arm to her nose; she can still smell the perfume on her skin. She has a new sense of the fact that she is made of her mother. Bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh – she has heard that somewhere, it’s probably religious, in which case Mrs Mackerel will have said it. Her mother runs through her bones and flesh.
Her feet, if she stretches, can almost touch the end of the bed. She is growing into herself. She wonders what her mother looked like age twelve. Had she started her period? Is everything you will ever be already there, inside you, like a seed, or are you only partly put together, like those cake mixes Dad sometimes buys – just add oil and water? Once, her mother was inside Nanna Maureen, and once, she, Clover, was inside her mother, like those nesting dolls: inside, inside, inside.
Since she bought the notebook, she has written down the things she remembers people saying about her mother. Colin: ‘Becky thought I was a bit of a twat, which I probably was.’ Grandad: ‘She knew how to be quiet and didn’t talk all the time, unlike some.’ Uncle Jim: ‘She was good at looking after people.’ Mrs Mackerel: ‘A big girl, God bless her. I’ve seen bigger, mind.’ They’re scraps. Fragments. A jumble. But jumbles are sometimes nice, she thinks. Like the back wall of the allotment with the raspberries and nettles and rosemary, the crocuses, bluebells and pussy willows, all higgledy-piggledy. Anyway, once she has arranged the displays and written the text, her mother’s life will be less of a jumble, and when she finally shows Dad the room it’ll be like one of those renovation programmes where they do a big reveal. It will be a nervous moment – it always is because no one knows how people will feel about the newness, and it sometimes takes them a moment to get used to it, but they are mostly pleased. There are times when they aren’t, of course. She rolls on to her stomach and buries her face in the puff of her pillow, allowing herself a moment of worry. Rolling back, she decides it will be okay. She’ll have thought of a proper speech by then, an explanation of what she’s done and why. And once she’s explained, she’ll open the door slowly, and Dad will be shocked but pleased, and he’ll tell her about the items, and why he kept them; he’ll make sure she’s got all the pieces in the right places. There’ll be details and descriptions. No fobbing off, no cul-de-sac conversations.
And then, and then . . .
And then, maybe after a little while, once the exhibit’s purpose has been achieved, it will be okay to move it, like they do at real museums; to box it up and put it in the object store – otherwise known as the loft – and use the second bedroom for something else.
Dad’s singing floats up the stairs: ‘Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth.’ Happiness is so many things. They made a list in English last term, a mixture of other people’s ideas and their own. Happiness is a warm gun (The Beatles) and a warm blanket (Schulz). Happiness is Mini-shaped (Mini). You can’t buy happiness but you can buy tea and that’s kind of the same thing (Lipton). Happiness is amazing first impressions and having breakfast outside every morning (Jet2). Happiness is a super-comfy sofa bed, a few side tables and a strong Wi-Fi connection (IKEA). Those things may be true, but she suspects they’re not. She has her own list. Happiness is Grandad saving links to cat videos in a Word document so he can share them when she visits. Happiness is when Uncle Jim and Dad accidentally get on with each other. It’s eating Biscoff out of the jar with a spoon. It’s Mrs Mackerel getting her words mixed up and Dad making crappy things to eat during Bake Off. And it will be learning all about her mother.
The sheet is warm. She moves her legs around, searching for a cool spot. Her room is crowded with shadows; it is almost as full of stuff as the second bedroom was. It occurs to her that she could also empty and arrange her own things. There is so much she doesn’t want, despite Dad’s concern that she might one day need it. But it will have to wait. The summer is melting away and she hasn’t finished her mother’s exhibit.