Alarm Girl (13 page)

‘As long as we don’t mess things up too badly it hardly matters how we live, does it?’ she said. ‘Sooner or later something else will come along; someone else will take over. Like when the dinosaurs died out – it will be something else’s turn.’

She really was feeling more robust.

‘This is Robin’s area,’ Ian said. ‘Robin? Robbo?’

He called to their son, who couldn’t hear them above the music on his iPod.

‘He reckons ants and cockroaches would be the only things to survive a nuclear future,’ he said, revealing that Robin had talked to him about his theories too. Karen had shown him public information films on YouTube containing advice about how to make a nuclear shelter for the family out of tables and mattresses. As if hiding under a table could protect anyone against a searing nuclear blast.

She took Ian’s hand and swung it, jovial, then brought it to her lips and kissed it.

‘What was that for?’ he asked, but she couldn’t say. It would be too much like tempting fate to tell him
that suddenly everything seemed possible. Instead, she proposed they get Indy a dog for her birthday.

‘How about a bike?’ Ian said. ‘Fewer turds to pick up.’

‘True.’

‘Imagine it – all four of us cycling through the woods – how wholesome would that be?’

‘You won’t get Robin on a bike.’

‘True.’

Back home she showed Indigo how to crumble flour, butter and sugar and the basement kitchen, warmed by the heat of the oven, grew fragrant with cinnamon and cloves. Fairy-lights glowed around the misted window that ran with condensation. After dinner she sat at the table reading the Sunday paper while the others were upstairs, elsewhere. Occasionally, she and Ian still talked about travelling or about moving to the country and getting a place with a bigger garden, but at times like these she felt they had found their true home.

At last, she went to find him.

‘Ten more minutes, Robin,’ she said, standing in her son’s bedroom doorway while he twitched in front of a gunsight on a computer screen.

Indigo was already in bed. ‘I can’t sleep.’ It was her daughter’s way of asking her to stroke her head.

‘What, even after that big long walk?’ Karen said, sitting on the bed. She combed her fingers through Indy’s hair and scanned the grubby lilac-painted walls of the room, decorated with years’ worth of her own artwork going right back to dried pasta collages made at nursery.
Drawings of mermaids and princesses crowded posters of Disney’s versions cut out from comics. She would be nine on her birthday but she was growing up fast. The previous week she had asked for a Facebook account. Maybe instead of a bike or a dog they should give her a room makeover. Karen’s gaze fell on the dressing-up trunk and, testing herself, she tried to recall its contents: as well as a Cinderella dress and a Snow White outfit and a selection of wands, there were handbags and scarves of her mother’s that had been in Karen’s own dressing-up box when she was a girl. Indigo didn’t dress up any more. Soon it would be time to store the collection in the loft space above the landing, along with Robin’s Lego, ready for the next generation. The idea of her children’s children, and this image of the future skidding and unwinding like cotton off a reel, made her giddy. In the past, this vertiginous sensation could feel unmanageable, as if she stood on the brink of an abyss, teetering, the ground underneath her feet threatening to crumble and fall away. Now, though, as her fingers traced the contours of her daughter’s skull, she felt calm. It wasn’t a false stupor that she had experienced before, where no feeling seemed able to penetrate her surface; it was a true calm. Her foothold felt secure. She had found her place – in the universe, in her life, in this small town, in this cramped little house, sitting on her daughter’s bed. Indigo’s breathing slowed in sleep. She stood up and the bed creaked. She heard a murmured, ‘Night, Mum,’ as she tiptoed out.

In their bedroom, Ian watched her take off her makeup. ‘I’m mad to cycle on the spot in a sweaty gym next to strangers when I could be thrashing through glorious English woodland with my family,’ he said. ‘Let’s go to Bike World and buy a whole set.’

She laid her silver bangle on the chest, opened a drawer to fetch a clean nightdress.

‘What do you think the collective noun for bikes is?’ he asked. ‘A “zeal”, maybe?’

‘An idiocy of bikes,’ she replied.

Her nightie held the coolness of the pine drawer. Among her underclothes, the foil packet of white tablets. Not for the first time recently she wondered if she might discard it. She glanced at the wicker basket in the corner of the room. ‘Shall I put my cap in?’

‘Cor, wouldn’t say no.’

Foreplay.

Afterwards, she padded to the bathroom and then back to bed, shivering with cold. She threw away the foil packet. She felt safe and strong. As if hiding under a table could protect anyone against a searing nuclear blast.

MY SHEETS AND PYJAMAS
were wet every morning but I left my pissy things on the bed. At home if it happens, I wait until Robin’s gone then put everything in the washing machine. When I get home from school Nan’s
washed and dried it and the bed’s all made again so it looks like nothing’s happened.

At Dad’s I left the wet sheets on the bed. I didn’t even mind the smell. I liked it. Nan asked if I wanted her to ask Dad if we could put a few things in the wash. I said No thanks and she didn’t know what to say then. She was standing in my room while I was sitting on the floor with my iPad. The wall felt cold against my back. Indigo, she said, I think we should get your sheets and things washed. She said she hadn’t seen a washing machine anywhere but she could take them to Dad if I didn’t want to.

The wall was nice and cool and I was pretending to be a marble statue of me. I stayed still with my face really serious. Nan said Are you alright Indy but I didn’t answer and I didn’t move. She said my name in a sharp voice so I snapped back into life again. You’re spending too much time on that thing, she said, meaning my iPad, you’re getting addicted.

She started taking the sheets and everything off. Come along, let’s get this lot sorted, she said, but then she sat on the edge of the bed and I could tell I was going to get a talk. There’s a lot on offer in the new South Africa, she said, A lot of opportunities for people like your dad and not just people like him, either. Everyone. You’ve got to think what you want, though.

The washing machine was disguised as a cupboard – that’s why Nan couldn’t find it. She told Dad that I sometimes had a bit of trouble at night. I didn’t care that he knew. It’s stress-related, Nan said. Luckily Robin
didn’t hear because he had his headphones on. After we found the washing machine I wanted to play the drawing game on my iPad but Nan made me put it away and go outside.

Even though everyone says there’s so much to do, there’s not much and there’s nowhere to go. It was too hot outside. Dad was on the phone to some customers who were coming on a golfing holiday and everyone else was lying around like they had melted. Even Tonyhog just wanted to lie in the shade with the chickens. I spied on Zami who was with Lindisizwe and the skinny stick man outside the gate. It looked as if they were having an argument but I couldn’t tell because they were talking in a foreign language. The stick man was waving around a bit like as if he was drunk. When Zami saw me he gave me a sad look. Then again his look is always sad.

I went in Dad’s room and tried on some of the necklaces hanging on the wardrobe door and I took some money I found on the table, even though I knew it was stealing. When I look at the paintings in his house I can’t remember what they were like when I first saw them. I thought they were just blobs of paint then, but now all I can see is the people. I stared and stared at the one in his bedroom, trying to make it blobs again.

THE BABY WAS TEN DAYS OLD
and she still didn’t have a name. For Karen it summed up the chaos they were in.

‘She’ll have a name soon enough,’ Ian said. ‘Robin wants to call her Fluff.’

Every day he brought her their son’s latest suggestion, like a cat bringing a dead bird into the house.

‘Are you going to be okay?’ he asked, pulling on his jacket. It was his first day back at work.

She let out a sound and he stopped getting ready and came to sit on the bed. ‘I don’t know why we don’t ask your parents,’ he said.

She let her head drop forward over the baby at her breast. She couldn’t speak.

‘If we tell them we need help, Karen…’ He parted the curtain of her hair and took their daughter’s hand in his, studying her delicate fingers.

‘Where’s Robin?’ she managed to ask eventually.

‘I put the TV on.’

They both listened to the sounds coming from downstairs.

‘Let’s ask them at least,’ Ian said. ‘Give your mum a ring. If you don’t, I will.’

He made her promise she would call her mother and he stood up from the bed, ready to leave. ‘I love you,’ he said.

‘How’s little Grace?’ asked her mother when she telephoned later that afternoon.

‘It’s not Gracie yet, Mum, not for sure,’ Karen said, looking down at the baby at her breast.

‘Well, what’s she called, then? Poor little thing needs
a name! And nothing too wacky, Karen. She’ll have to live with it for the rest of her life. I liked Grace – Grace is nice. Is she a good little girl, do you think?’

‘Of course she’s good, Mum.’

‘And is she feeding alright?’

‘Yes, fine.’

‘My milk wasn’t enough for you,’ her mother said. ‘You wanted the good stuff.’

‘I’m sure your milk was fine, Mum.’

‘I used to put an extra spoonful in – of the powder, you know, that you use to make up the bottles. You were such a skinny little thing, always crying.’

It felt like an accusation.

‘Of course, it meant your dad could feed you, so it was good in one way. Probably why you were always Daddy’s girl.’

‘Was I then?’

‘Daddy’s girl? I think so, don’t you? I never got a look-in.’

There was another silence.

‘Do you think it was because of… you know, was I closer to Dad after… that time?’

‘Possibly.’

‘We’ve never talked about it.’

‘Yes, well, your generation are all for talking, that’s your way of doing things.’

‘I can’t stop crying,’ she said.

‘You’ll feel better in a few days. It’s just a touch of the post-natals.’

‘It’s not that, Mum.’

‘Baby blues, we used to call it – it’s normal, what with all the hormones whizzing around. You’ll feel better in a few days.’

‘You’re not listening,’ Karen said, panic rising. ‘I’m not normal.’

‘What are you talking about?’ her mother said, and Karen could picture her sitting at the tiny table in the hallway of her home, the outside world blurred through the distorting glass of the front porch. ‘Of course you’re normal! We’re the most normal people I know.’

‘I’m not coping,’ she said. Her voice cracked and she felt her mother shift away from her at the other end of the telephone line, as if in that instant extra miles of cable were placed between them, looped and coiled and knotted in places, stretched to breaking point at others. Not for the first time, she became aware of how her parents struggled with the way she experienced the world. It pained her to know that her mother found it as hard as she did.

‘You’ve got to admit…’ her mother said, her voice confident, strident even, as if she was compensating for the extra distance that was suddenly between them. ‘You have to admit there’s a dissatisfaction in your generation, isn’t there?’

Karen didn’t answer. She wished her mother would speak truthfully instead of cloaking the conversation in speculation about generational difference.

‘All the travelling you and Ian did,’ she continued. ‘I’m not sure it helps.’

Karen closed her eyes and, at the other end of the phone line, Valerie caught a whiff of her daughter’s resistance.

‘Does he know?’ she asked.

Even though she couldn’t see her, Karen shook her head. Her mother thought she endlessly wanted to talk about everything, but there were some things that couldn’t be said.

‘It might be as well to tell him. He has a right to know.’

Both women listened to the sounds of other things around them. Valerie could hear voices from next door’s radio coming through the wall, while Karen listened to her baby’s barely audible breathing and the sound of the television downstairs.

‘Not that this is the same thing,’ Valerie added.

‘How do you know?’ Karen asked.

IN THE CODE I MADE
with Zami, shining for a long time then off then on again means you’re happy. Shining for only two counts then off and on again means sad. It was dark and I was doing our code out of my window but Zami didn’t do it back so I went to his shed to say why didn’t you shine back. I had to creep quietly in case Dad heard me.

He was copying the words in Robin’s guidebook as per usual and his writing made me want to scribble all over the page. I wanted to tear it out and screw it up, stuff it in my mouth, chew it then spit it out. If I did, he would just look at me in his usual way. When he stares at me I never know what he’s thinking.

For an experiment, I picked up his exercise book and threw it on the floor. What’s the point of all this, I said. He picked it up. I said Who is that skinny guy you talk to outside the gate, the one in the woolly hat – is he a friend of yours? It is no one, he said. A mosquito was humming next to my ear. Come on then, I said, and Zami said Where to? To see Young Lady, I said. It’s good practice if you want to get a job with tourists.

He looked out of the window of his shed at the house where all the lights were on, then he looked at me. Without saying anything he stood up and took a shirt off a nail in the wall. He put the shirt on over his T-shirt. He put on some old trainers that went on his feet without undoing the laces, like a pair of slippers. We went outside and he shut the door of his shed. Jack started barking but Zami spoke in his calm voice and he stopped. Another dog started barking somewhere else far away. Zami said Wait here while I open the gate. I felt a bit sick. Are we going then, I asked, and he looked at me without smiling and said If you want to. I said Of course I want to.