Alarm Girl (12 page)

VALERIE SAT IN BED
reading. Her skin cleansed and moisturised, according to her nightly ritual, and the day over, she couldn’t concentrate on the book in her
hands. Doug would be home soon. Partly she welcomed his return after a weekend’s separation, but partly she dreaded the possibility of an awkward atmosphere like the one that marked his departure. Some couples thrived on awkwardness. Some women she knew seemed to have some permanent misdemeanour of their husbands’ to report. They were always punishing their menfolk for something or other.

Doug wouldn’t stand for punishment but he was no stranger to her withdrawal from him. Sometimes he wouldn’t know what he had done wrong. Sometimes he hadn’t done anything wrong. He put these retreats of hers down to what he called her ‘dark days’. Well, he had dark days too.

No sooner had she conjured him in her mind than she heard the slowing of a car’s engine and the crunch of tyres on gravel, as if she had summoned him with the power of thought. She tested herself, as if taking her own temperature almost, to see if she was willing to provide an attentive audience for his traveller’s tales, but, in the time it took him to fetch his bags out of the boot of the car and walk from the car to the front door, she decided he wasn’t deserving of such a performance. She switched off the bedside lamp, the sound of it masked by the simultaneous click of the front door, and when he came into their bedroom she lay still in the dark, facing the wall.

The next morning she was awake early. She made them both a cup of tea, bringing it back to bed as was
their custom. Light filtered into the room through the flowered curtains. She arranged her nightgown under the bedcovers and waited for him to sit up and put on his glasses.

‘It’ll get cold,’ she said, after some minutes passed without him stirring. Then, ‘How was the trip?’

In a mirror image of the way in which she had presented herself to him the previous night, he remained with his back curved away from her. She could tell he was awake. Karen’s alarm clock sounded in the room next door and after a few moments their daughter’s footsteps padded across the landing to the bathroom.

‘It was a success,’ he told her, in answer to her question, but not until much later, when all three of them were seated at the breakfast table.

‘Did the others enjoy it?’ she asked.

By others she meant Margie Lawrence and the rest of the wives.

‘Yes, everyone did. You were missed.’

She shrugged. ‘I’m not one for travelling.’

‘It was only France, Val.’

‘Yeah, it’s only France, Mum.’ Karen said. ‘When I went to Dieppe with the school it only took a few hours.’

‘Let’s not go into all that again,’ she said, sensing them ganging up on her as usual. ‘Are you ready?’

Doug got up from the table and went out into the hallway where his salesman’s briefcase and Weekender luggage sat neatly under the coat hooks.

‘I got something for both of you,’ he said, coming back into the room with two plastic bags with
Duty Free
written on. Inside Karen’s bag was a clear plastic cylinder containing a doll in French regional costume. The doll wore a full skirt and white blouse with puffed sleeves and a red cape. Her black pinafore apron was decorated with tiny flowers and lace. The nylon fibres of her brown hair shone and her mouth was a dainty rosebud. Her eyes, though, were clumsy dashes of the same black paint that covered her pink plastic feet to represent shoes. The doll looked as if she had been blinded in some violent attack. Or perhaps she had been like it from birth. Catching herself wondering if the disfigurement was an inherited condition, Valerie thought she must be going mad. This Margie Lawrence business had tipped her over the edge.

‘Thanks, Dad.’ Karen kissed her father. ‘I’ll call her something French. What’s a French name?’

‘Françoise,’ Doug suggested, and he caught Valerie’s eye as he said it.

Karen asked if she was going to open her present too. She reached inside the plastic bag. Her husband had evidently been so taken with Margie Lawrence and her charms, or indeed so occupied with ‘Françoise’, that he hadn’t thought about his wife or daughter until he was passing through Duty Free on the way home. In the bag was a flat cellophane package. She unwrapped it and held up the silk square it contained. It was brown
and gold, with the word P.A.R.I.S spelled out in bronze letters over and over.

‘Very nice, thank you, Douglas.’

‘Some of the other wives bought them,’ her husband

‘It looks expensive,’ she said.

After Karen left, he said he should be making tracks too. Valerie sat at the dining table without clearing the breakfast things. She wondered if the other wives really had bought silk scarf souvenirs. It wasn’t the kind of thing she would wear. It wasn’t the kind of thing any of the other wives would wear. It was just something else coming into the house for her to find a place for. She folded the scarf. She would put it in Karen’s drawer when she went upstairs. The thought of all the things in all the drawers of the house oppressed her.

Margie Lawrence was probably having a lie-in this morning, after yesterday’s travel. She would be exhausted after the weekend. She would have got on with the other wives, even the ones she had never met before, and the husbands too. She would have tried out her schoolgirl French in the shops and restaurants and at the hotel she would have laid out all her purchases on the hotel bed for Dave Lawrence to admire before going down to dinner with the others. Dave would have offered to pay for everyone’s meal and called the trip a ‘team effort’. The others would have raised their glasses in a toast to the company. Doug and Valerie would have raised their glasses too, if she had been there, but, as she
had told Doug often enough recently, they weren’t that kind of couple.

DAD TOLD NAN AND GRANDAD
about the idea of us staying with him in Africa. Nan and Grandad went quiet. It’s a big life out here, Doug, Dad was saying, but Grandad didn’t say anything back. Everyone crowded around Dad’s laptop and we looked at the website of the girls’ school Dad told me about. There was a different school for Robin that had a swimming pool with diving boards. Dad had it all planned out. He said he would pay for Nan and Grandad to come and visit us whenever they wanted. Nan asked me and Robin what we thought. Robin said he wanted to go to school in South Africa. He didn’t mind if me and him went to different schools. He said our school in England was rubbish because it didn’t even have a swimming pool, let alone diving boards. I said What about Beautiful, would she be here too? Dad said we didn’t have to decide right now.

Robin didn’t believe me that I nearly drowned. I wanted to tell him that maybe Dad did it on purpose but I knew he wouldn’t believe that either. He would get annoyed and call me a nutter. We were on the tyre and I told him I lost your scarf at the beach. He said it was a good thing because I looked like a moron fiddling with it the whole time. I said That scarf was the only thing of Mum’s I had but he said we had loads of your stuff.
Not here, I said, her scarf was the only thing I brought with me. There’s nothing about Mum in Africa, it’s all in England. He stopped talking then and I could tell he was thinking about you. He said Let’s go and get Zami, it’s better when there’s three. I said What if Dad marries Beautiful and wants her to be our new mum? Robin said We would just have to suck it up like Beth had to when her mum and dad split up. Beth’s mum didn’t die though.

Zami was mending a hole in the fence where the jackals got in but he came with us on the tyre. When I told him about nearly drowning he said there was a river nearby where boys jump off a ledge into the water and one got eaten by a crocodile. I imagined the boy jumping straight into the crocodile’s open mouth, even though I know it wouldn’t happen like that. If I was drawing a picture of it happening I would draw it like that because it would make a better picture than the crocodile twisting the boy around and around and holding him under water until he drowned, which is what really happens. The true version would be more difficult to draw.

No one was talking, we were just taking turns swinging backwards and forwards over the giant hole that’s going to be a swimming pool, thinking about what it would feel like to drown and thinking about me and Robin going to different schools instead of the same one.

You better make sure the school Dad gets for you has a good art teacher, Robin said, which showed he
was thinking about the same things as me. Then he said maybe the nicest thing he’s ever said to me in his whole life. He said I was a better drawrer than Beth and a better drawrer than him (it’s true) even though they’re both older than me.

Even though he won’t let me speak to him at school because he says it’s embarrassing, I like it when I catch sight of him in the corridor. Our new schools would be two different schools instead of the same one. Robin’s would be the one with diving boards.

The next morning the big living room window was right open so the whole world felt like it was coming into the house. Dad and Robin were doing exercises in their bare chests. Grandad had sweat patches on his shirt even though it wasn’t him doing the exercises. He was looking through the telescope. Nan was sitting on the sofa with her handbag, like she was going somewhere. I said Where are you going but she said Nowhere, I’m just taking in the view.

I ate my cereal in my room. Robin came and found me when I was drawing family against CatladyUK and waiting for Picasso to guess my suitcase. I drew a label like the ones me and Robin have got on our suitcases with our names on as a clue for you. We were up to thirty-two non-stop right guesses.

Robin told me to be nice to Beautiful. I said You don’t like her either. True, he said, but I’m doing it for Dad. He started doing press-ups in the middle of my
room. I don’t want him to marry her, I said. Robin put his headphones on but I carried on talking. Maybe Mum wasn’t ill, I said, and Robin had to turn his music off to hear me. I said it again – Maybe Mum wasn’t ill. He said What are you talking about, you numpty? If Dad was in love with Beautiful and wanted to marry her, I said, maybe it was murder. That made him angry and he stopped doing his press-ups and snatched the iPad off me. He said why were girls so mental and wasn’t it about time I stopped thinking about you the whole time. Nan heard us rowing and made him give me my iPad back even though she says I’m addicted to it. She made Robin go and have a shower and wash his mouth out with the soap.

I couldn’t believe he would say that. I’m never going to stop thinking about you. I am like a tree and you are the sky all around. There is nothing apart from you and me and maybe a family of lions that comes to lie in the shade of me when the sun gets too hot.

In my room I thought about when it was my birthday when I was going to be nine. I wish I had never opened any of my presents because they were the last ones that you ever wrapped up. I had a daydream that you bought all my presents and wrapped them up but then you found Beautiful’s lipstick on Dad’s shirt and you tried to attack him with some scissors but he got them off you and stabbed you instead and the police never found out. It was a daydream but it felt like it could be true. What made it feel real was how Nan and Grandad
act when they’re with Dad. You were their daughter so they wouldn’t like to be near someone that murdered you. They have to be nice to him but you can see they’re pretending.

I wanted to tell them what I knew but when I found them I couldn’t say the words. I asked if we were going out instead. Nan was still sitting on the sofa with her handbag. She said her and Grandad were going with the flow. I couldn’t stand to be sitting with them and everyone not saying what they were thinking so I went to find Zami.

He was wearing an old T-shirt with holes in it instead of the new football one Dad gave him which made me think he doesn’t support Manchester City or he is a boy who doesn’t like football. Or maybe he is saving it for best. I said to him Why don’t you wear your new football top? He just sort of smiled without saying anything.

Zami says a child never stops loving its mother because a child chooses its mum out of all the mums in the world so why would we stop loving that special one? Before I was born I must have chosen you so that’s why I will always love you and think about you even when you’re dead.

IT WOULD BE INDIGO’S
birthday soon – they had talked about getting her a bike or a dog, maybe. Wrapping her coat more tightly around her, Karen took Ian’s arm and
drew herself into his warmth. Her leaning her weight against him caused them to veer momentarily off the path. She looked back over her shoulder to see how far behind Robin was trailing. He was sulking because they had insisted he come on a walk with them instead of allowing him to stay at home on the computer. Every now and then there was a flash of orange plastic bag among the trees where his sister moved about gathering sticks and bark for a school project.

There had been moments in the past when Karen had doubted her capacity for this kind of a life; when she’d doubted that what constituted ‘normal’ standards of happiness could be hers. Medication helped. The ringing in her ears had stopped and she had a feeling of having reached a kind of plateau. From this height she felt safe. She was able to look out on everything that might have caused her anguish before.

It was possible to be happy. It was possible to walk in the woods with one’s sulky pre-teen son and one’s daughter hopping about collecting debris in a plastic bag.

‘So what if we destroy the planet?’ she said, realising too late that Ian hadn’t had the benefit of the thoughts leading up to her statement.

‘Er, what? Where did that come from?’ He was laughing.

Thinking about Indigo’s birthday and planning a family get-together now that she was feeling better, she had been thinking about her parents and how different
they were from Ian’s. They could seem so narrow in their outlook compared with his, who always seemed more cosmopolitan. Ian’s parents were separated and living with new partners. They owned second homes and travelled widely. Her own parents lived more modestly. They could appear small-minded and unadventurous but they lived their lives without harming anyone. They were insignificant, in the best possible sense.