A rustling in the overgrowth.
Rats.
I saw a pack of them in the back garden just the other morning, scampering about leisurely, bold as brass. They were fat, with well-fed rounded bellies and tails as thick and pink as the strawberry cables you can buy for 30p from the corner shop. I’m certain they’re in the house too. I haven’t spotted one yet, but I’ve seen the droppings – skinny black pellets – and I can hear the scrabbling of their tiny sharp claws at night.
With a shiver, I push open the creaking gate. Faded red paint flakes off on my sweaty hands, the prickly shards sticking to my palms. I follow the path round the side of the house, weeds tickling my ankles and ivy tangling in my hair. The front door hasn’t been used since I was tiny. I’ve never even seen a key for it. Not that a key would make much difference, seeing as the doorway is totally blocked from the inside anyhow. It’s painted the same shade of red as the front gate. Sometimes I like to close my eyes and imagine what it looked like when it was freshly painted – shiny and bright. Above the door there’s a stained-glass panel of a sunburst, each of its panes, once brilliant shades of orange and yellow, now covered with a thick layer of grime. The letter box is sealed with layers of peeling gaffer tape accompanied by a handwritten note in a dirt-splattered plastic sleeve, attached to the door with rusting drawing pins, instructing the postman to go round the back.
I unlock the back door and push it open as far as it will go. As I squeeze into the kitchen, the familiar smell of home hits, filling up my lungs and nostrils with its stale, dusty, rotten, chemical scent. It’s the same scent that seems to cling to my clothes and hair, no matter how many times I wash them, and forces me to keep a miniature bottle of Febreze at the bottom of my school bag.
I grope for the light switch with my left hand. The fluorescent strip lights take a few seconds to flicker on, buzzing angrily like a disturbed beehive. During this thin slice of time I sometimes fantasize that while I’ve been out, some sort of miracle has occurred, and the lights will turn on to illuminate the sort of sleek, orderly kitchen you see in the pages of the IKEA catalogue. It never does though, no matter how hard I wish for it. Instead, it’s the same old chaos – overflowing cupboards, a kitchen table groaning under piles of rubbish and an endless supply of dirty dishes stacked in the sink.
I inch across the overly bright kitchen, navigating the boxes and bags and gravity-defying piles of papers, climbing and squeezing, ducking and contorting like I’m a contestant on The Cube.
I imagine a parallel universe where I invited Jamie in. Just the thought makes me want to shrivel up with embarrassment. And fear. Because it’s not just about him thinking I’m weird or disgusting. It’s about him telling an adult. And that adult making a well-meaning call to Social Services. And Social Services coming to take me away. And then what would happen? Because as bad as the house is, it would be a hundred times worse if I wasn’t around. How long would Bonnie last without me? I dread to think.
I shudder and continue into the hallway. It’s similarly packed, the flowery wallpaper almost entirely hidden from view. A string of fairy lights winds round the bannister – a remnant of a time when my mum and I actually celebrated Christmas properly, with presents, and a real tree, and turkey for lunch. I’ve been waiting for them to run out of juice for years now, but they stubbornly hang on, their bulbs emitting the weariest of rainbow glows as I pass.
There was a time when I could walk down the hallway more or less normally, but over the years, as more and more junk has been piled up against either wall, the floor space has become narrower and narrower, forcing me to edge along it sideways, like a crab. According to the internet, the ‘experts’ call these narrow passages ‘goat paths’, because they resemble the well-trodden trails goats follow on mountainsides. Only whereas the goats are treading on grass and dirt, I’m treading on paper – mounds and mounds of it, the surface slippery and bumpy beneath my feet. It’s been so long since I last saw the hallway carpet, I can’t remember for certain what colour it is.
My mum, Bonnie, doesn’t really discriminate when it comes to her ‘collecting’, but it’s definitely paper that dominates – newspapers, battered paperbacks, leaflets, catalogues, bills, receipts, handwritten letters, postcards, travel brochures, shopping lists, old telephone books, calendars and diaries from years gone by, notebooks filled with empty pages, recipes and vouchers clipped from the pages of magazines, envelopes separated from their original contents, old train tickets. And greetings cards. Hundreds and hundreds of unsent greetings cards – birthday cards, Christmas cards, congratulations cards, thank you cards, get well soon cards – each one of them blank inside.
Sometimes, I try to ignore the mess, not to let it get to me. Or I try telling myself that it could be worse, that Bonnie could be what is known as a ‘dirty’ hoarder and the house could be full of used sanitary towels and human excrement, so aren’t I actually quite lucky? Occasionally my pep talks work. Not tonight though. Tonight, every single scrap of paper makes me want to scream at the top of my lungs, until my voice is hoarse and my throat red raw.
I brace myself and push open the living-room door. Bonnie is sitting in the one available spot – a floral armchair with a broken footrest and lumpy seat cushion, the fabric discoloured from years of occupation. A large glass of red wine is balanced precariously on the stack of old newspapers acting as a makeshift side table.
Bonnie.
Never Mum or Mummy or Mother.
Just Bonnie.
We look nothing like each other. While Bonnie is tanned (albeit out of a bottle) and blonde and comic-book curvy, I’m pale and mousy and straight-up-and-down. The only feature that’s vaguely similar is our eyes – big and rain-cloud grey and exactly the same shape, drooping down ever so slightly at the sides.
‘Sad eyes,’ my gran (my dad’s mum) once remarked with more than a hint of disapproval. ‘Just like your mother’s.’
I spent ages in the mirror after that, smiling inanely at my reflection in an attempt to fight what nature had given me. But it was no good. My gran was right. Even with the biggest, toothiest grin on my face, my eyes can’t help but tell a different story.
Bonnie is wearing one of her stage outfits – a low-cut red sequinned dress with a split up the right thigh. From afar, it looks great, but up close it’s difficult to miss the loose threads and numerous sequinless patches. Her shoes, a pair of matching glittery heels that she has to respray before every gig, lie abandoned on the floor, the soles scored with scissors to prevent her from slipping on stage. The red clashes with her brassy blonde hair, hard and crunchy to the touch from all the backcombing and hairspray she subjects it to before each gig.
I don’t know for sure, but I’d hazard a confident guess that when Jamie imagined the sort of person who might live in place like this, he wasn’t picturing Bonnie.
My eyes fall on the half-smoked cigarette smouldering in an ashtray on Bonnie’s lap.
‘You do know that if that goes over, this whole place would go up in flames,’ I say. This entire house is one massive fire hazard – a big fat bonfire just waiting for a match.
‘Sorry?’ Bonnie says, her eyes flickering with annoyance at the interruption.
Both the television and radio are blaring – ‘Sweet Talking Guy’ by The Chiffons battling to be heard over an episode of a reality TV show I don’t know the name of.
I swear under my breath as I search for the radio, eventually locating it nestled amongst the pile of junk covering the sofa. I turn it off, and repeat what I just said.
‘Don’t get at me, Ro, not tonight,’ Bonnie says, lifting the cigarette to her lips and taking a hungry drag.
‘Why? What happened? I thought you had a gig,’ I say, looking for somewhere to put the radio before giving up and tossing it back where I found it.
‘Ha!’ Bonnie says, stubbing out the cigarette.
On the TV, a group of bronzed and bejewelled women are gesticulating wildly as they screech at each other. Bonnie appears enthralled, but it makes my head hurt.
‘Can you turn that down a bit?’ I ask, pointing at the screen.
Bonnie sighs, lifting the remote like it’s made from lead and reducing the volume by a few notches.
‘What happened to your gig?’ I ask, finally able to hear myself properly.
‘It was cancelled,’ Bonnie replies, peeling off her false eyelashes, each of them thick with layers of old glue. Discarded on the arm of her chair, they look like a pair of dead spiders.
‘Why?’ I ask.
‘Oh, booking cockup at their end. Bloody bastards rang me when I was halfway up the pissing M1 and told me not to bother turning up.’
‘Are they still paying you?’
She tuts. ‘I wish.’
‘But that’s not fair.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘Have you spoken to Pip? What did he say?’
Bonnie removes her chandelier earrings, draping them next to her eyelashes. The cheap glass catches the light.
‘Bonnie, did you hear me? Have you spoken to Pip? It’s his job to sort out stuff like this.’
‘Pip’s not working for me any more,’ Bonnie says, not quite meeting my eye as she massages her red earlobes.
‘Why not?’
‘I sacked him.’
‘You sacked your manager?’ I splutter. ‘When?’
‘Just after Easter.’
All I can do is stare. She sacked Pip over three months ago and didn’t think to say anything. Even now she’s acting like it’s no big deal, humming as she reaches for her wine.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I ask.
She breaks off from her humming. ‘Because I knew you’d only go and make a big deal out of it.’
‘We had a falling out.’
‘Over what?’
‘He was rude about my set. And I can’t work with someone who has no faith in me. It stifles my creativity.’
‘But we’re skint!’
Over the past few months I’ve opened our bank statements and watched our balance steadily fall. Now I know why.
‘Oh, don’t be dramatic. We’re fine,’ Bonnie says.
‘We’re not “fine”!’ I cry. ‘We’ve been overdrawn for ages now. I keep telling you, but you never listen!’
Bonnie closes her eyes and rubs the bridge of her nose. ‘Please don’t get at me, Ro, not tonight. I’ve just driven halfway to Manchester and back for sweet F.A. I’m tired and I’m fed-up and all I want to do is have a glass of wine and watch a bit of telly and forget about the whole bloody fiasco for a few hours. Is that really too much to ask?’
‘Yes! We’ve got a load of bills coming out of the account next week. If we don’t top up it up we’ll be even more in the red!’
‘So, we go a bit further into the overdraft. Isn’t that what they’re for?’
‘How would you even know? You haven’t opened a bank statement in about five years.’
‘Attitude!’ Bonnie cries, pointing an accusing finger towards my face.
I shake my head. ‘Attitude’ is Bonnie’s go-to reprimand when she has no other defence left.
‘Look, I never asked you to deal with the banking,’ she says.
My eyes bulge. Is she for real?
‘Fine. I’ll stop doing it then. Just don’t come whining to me when the bailiffs come knocking. Which they will, if you have anything to do with it.’
Bonnie responds by picking up the remote control and turning up the volume to maximum.
‘Nice!’ I yell over the racket. ‘Really mature, Bonnie!’
Bonnie pretends not to hear, her gaze fixed stubbornly on the TV screen.
‘Oh, grow up!’ I snap.
I stamp out of the room, acutely aware of how topsy-turvy this all is. I’m the child, not Bonnie. And yet every one of our exchanges these days seems to slip into this messed-up dynamic.
You’re a weird girl, you know that, Ro Snow? Jamie’s words echo in my ears as I stomp up the stairs.
Jamie Cannon, you have no idea.