Alarm Girl (7 page)

Dad laughed and laughed but me and Robin didn’t know what was so funny. It was because I was only
four when I said that, Dad said, and it was the first time I looked outside myself. I didn’t know what he was talking about. He was kind of laughing and crying at the same time. He had to wipe his eyes. He said I was a confident girl who was growing into a confident young woman. Sometimes I don’t feel all that confident but I didn’t tell him that. And I’m not a woman because I haven’t got my periods yet. Obviously I didn’t say that either because that’s not what to talk about at the dinner table. Then it was Robin’s turn. Dad said he was going to be a successful young man and asked if he had lots of friends and if teachers liked him. You’re quite a success, am I right, Robbo? At school? Robin said I guess but Dad told him off for being modest. He was talking in quite a loud voice. I think he was a bit drunk. Don’t be so modest, man! Your friends, Indigo, they like him, right? Girls, I mean? All the girls in my year say he is fat and what a dork but I told Dad Yes, girls like him and Dad said That’s what I thought. Then our dinners came and my burger had a little South African flag on a stick poking through it that Dad said I should keep as a souvenir. Robin said crocodile meat tasted just the same as chicken.

I said It’s surprising really, when you consider. Consider what, pumpkin? Dad said. He was all smiley and a bit drunk. Robin gave me a look but I didn’t let that stop me. I said It’s quite surprising that me and Robin are okay when you consider that our mum’s dead. It is, pumpkin patch, Dad said, and he stopped
talking loudly and just nodded his head, saying It is, and I thought again about what it is that Beth says he is so guilty about.

HER PARENTS WERE EXPECTED
but she was still in bed. She drifted in and out of a queasy kind of sleep, listening to Ian and Robin downstairs. When she opened her eyes Ian was standing in the bedroom doorway.

‘Still sleeping?’ he said. ‘They’ll be here soon.’

She closed her eyes and he came further into the room.

‘Karen.’

He moved about, picking clothes up from the floor and folding them, opening and shutting drawers. She kept her eyes closed and soon became aware of a smaller, silent force. Ian murmured something and there was a shuffling close by.

‘Sleeping, yes,’ Ian said. His voice was gentle. He rarely spoke to her in such a voice any more. ‘Mummy asleep.’

A salty smell. Warm breath. A child’s whisper. ‘Ssshh.’

‘That’s right, ssshh. Good boy.’

Soft movement and then silence.

‘Karen. Your mum and dad are here. Get up.’

The bedclothes were pulled back.

‘This isn’t funny any more,’ he said. ‘Are you ill or what?’

When she opened her eyes his face was pushed right up close to hers, a giant looking in through a window at a doll.

‘Do you feel sick?’ he said. ‘I brought a bucket.’

The red plastic bucket they used for washing the car. On the floor next to the bed, a towel spread underneath it. The towel had an image of a leaping dolphin on it. She pretended to retch. He snatched the bucket and held it under her chin. She hung over it, hiding behind her hair.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, patting the bedclothes.

She pulled the duvet over her head, heard him go downstairs. A little while later her mother came into the room. ‘This morning sickness, then,’ she said, ‘it’s more like morning, noon and night sickness, eh?’

Karen didn’t reply. Her mother sat down on the bed.

‘How many weeks are you now? Coming up for fourteen, something like that? You’re meant to be blooming!’

There was a silence. Karen didn’t move.

‘I had it bad, too. Couldn’t keep anything down for the first few weeks – they were quite worried, thought they might have to take me in – but it passed eventually. You’ll feel better soon.’

Her resistance to all of them – to Ian and her mother and even Robin – gave her a perverse kind of strength. Once her mother had left the room she pushed off the
bedclothes and slipped her feet into a pair of old suede moccasins. She put on a cotton dress over her pyjamas and a cardigan over the dress. In the bathroom she splashed water on her face and drew a comb through her hair. She checked her reflection in the bedroom mirror. She looked like someone else.

With one hand on her belly and the other pawing the walls, she moved down the stairs like a blind person, like a person weak with hunger or dying of thirst. In the hallway outside the living room, framed photographs hung on the wall: holiday images, wedding pictures and photos of Robin when he was newly born all testified to a togetherness she had shared. Now she felt remote.

Her father was on his hands and knees building a Lego city on the carpet. Robin leaned against his grandfather with one arm hooked casually around his neck. Ian and her mother directed operations from the sofa.

The door handle felt as if it might melt under her touch. She had a vision of it dripping to the floor and then the door itself cracked and splintered, breaking into sawdust. The Lego city seemed about to dissolve into a pool of molten plastic that threatened to fill the room. It would ooze through the door and move inexorably through the rest of the downstairs rooms, carrying Robin and her father and Ian and her mother in its glutinous mass. The walls of the house bulged, threatening to explode. Everything was about to dissolve or combust.

‘Here she is!’ Her father noticed her in the doorway. ‘Feeling any better, love?’

On seeing her, Robin left his grandfather’s side and came over to take her by the hand. Her father stood up, rubbing his knees. She could tell that Ian was embarrassed by her dishevelment as he explained how on top of her morning sickness they had all been a bit below par lately. He hoped her parents wouldn’t catch the cold they had all been suffering with.

‘That’s the trouble with little ones, isn’t it?’ her mother said. ‘What with them spending all day on the floor and so on, they pick up all the germs going. If you want me to have a go at your skirting boards, Karen, I’ve got a pair of rubber gloves in the car.’

‘You’re our guest, Val,’ Ian said. ‘You don’t need to bring your cleaning equipment!’

‘That’s what I told her,’ Karen’s father said, ‘but would she listen?’

Even though she recognised their words, Karen could make little sense of them and she had no words of her own to bring to the conversation. It was as if they were speaking a foreign language that she understood only in part. She hadn’t mastered the spoken version. She felt her parents’ eyes on her, darting away from hers if she caught them looking, but watching her all the time, taking turns to follow her, listening closely to the few words she said – as if trying to crack her code.

It was only Robin that she could understand with any confidence. The savoury smell of him and his biscuity breath – none of this required translation. She concentrated on the warmth of his small hand in hers and
got down on her knees to be next to him. Before Robin, she hadn’t known it was possible to feel such connection – not to anything, not even to herself. With his soft voice in her ear as he talked her through the cityscape laid out before her on the carpet, she felt herself return to the world of others. Light from the living room window sharpened their features and she began to see them more clearly now. She felt like Sleeping Beauty, awoken with a kiss, returning to the normal, waking world.

‘Sorry if I was tough on you earlier,’ Ian said, once her parents had gone and Robin was in bed. ‘It’s no picnic being pregnant and your parents can be hard work.’

‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘It was fine, wasn’t it? In the end, I mean. Robin had a nice time.’

‘You’re not feeling so sick now?’ he asked, watching as she wiped a piece of crusty bread around the casserole dish, mopping up its remnants.

She heard the need in his voice, registered the baffled look on his face. She nodded. What he didn’t know was that she recognised the dullness that hung like a mist all around. Mostly, she could pick her way through it. With Robin as her guide and the green and red and yellow of his Lego pieces like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs, she was able to find her way. Sometimes, though, it descended so thickly it was impenetrable. Everything was cloaked and she too was cloaked and veiled in a mist of her own, that might lift at any moment or might remain in place, obscuring her from the world
and removing the world from her. She had never found words sufficient to explain this veiledness to him, never when she was under it and not even at times like now when she was more free of it. Perhaps it was better for him not to know.

I WOKE UP THINKING
the worst because I drank two Cokes at the restaurant but I was dry. I put on my elephant pattern dress to celebrate. Today was what Dad called a Chilling Day. He was on the phone loads so he said we could just hang out. I was glad. It reminded me of when he lived in England and he was at work and you would say Today is a Pyjama Day. I asked him if Beautiful was coming round but he said she was working. He said it in his annoying gentle voice. I said What is her job and he said she was a seller of houses. I wanted to know if she sold Dad his house but I didn’t ask.

I was getting really good at the drawing game. I kept guessing Eleanor O and CatladyUK’s pictures. I thought Picasso might be you because I could guess Picasso’s drawings straight away and Picasso could guess mine. We never didn’t guess and the drawing of a baby was exactly how you would draw one – all chubby with a wiggly line on top of its head for its hair. I thought maybe you weren’t dead and instead you were living somewhere with a new family and new children playing the drawing game with me while they were at school
and not having Pyjama Days. Maybe you found a new boyfriend and had a baby and Dad thought we would be so sad to find out that he told us you had died instead and had a fake funeral and sent us to live with Nan and Grandad.

Another possibility was if Dad wanted to live in South Africa and be girlfriend and boyfriend with Beautiful maybe you weren’t living with a new family. Maybe Dad killed you. People get money when another person dies. Maybe that’s why Dad is so rich. When I look at him I am wondering if he could do it and how he did it if he did it. On the news in England there was a man who killed his wife by driving her car into a river. If I think about the car sinking and the water coming in if you open the windows I feel like I’m drowning and my legs and arms start swimming even though I’m on dry land.

Zami said he would take us into the village if we wanted. Robin said Are we allowed? I went indoors to ask Dad but he was on the phone. I heard him say The kids don’t know yet and I wanted to know what we didn’t know so I hid in the corridor to our bedrooms and I heard him talk about an airport pick-up. He didn’t know I was listening but the front door was open and Tonyhog came tip-tapping in so Dad got up to shoo him out and saw me. He laughed and said What are you doing lurking around here, Indy? I thought you were outside. I could tell he was nervous that I would find something out.

I went back outside and I told Robin that Dad said we could go to the village even though I didn’t ask. We walked along with Zami like he was our proper friend and like we lived in Africa instead of being on holiday. He taught us some of his language and when people said hello we said hello back and when they asked us how we were we said we were cosy. Zami was going to see his sister on a bus and I wanted to see her too so that meant Robin had to come. I bought us all Cokes with my own money and I told him Dad said we could, which served him right.

The bus journey took ages and there were no seats free so we had to stand up. When the bus went around corners we fell over. It was hot and bumpy and the driver played loud music. Some of the people on the bus talked to Zami and even though they were speaking a different language I could tell they were talking about Robin and me. Robin didn’t like it. He wasn’t saying anything to anyone. Why aren’t you speaking to me, I said, but he wouldn’t answer. We got off the bus in a marketplace. People were carrying shopping on their heads but they stopped what they were doing when we walked past. There were lots of dogs, but the kind you don’t touch in case they’ve got rabies. The buildings were sheds made out of tin. Robin said we should be getting back now but we had only just arrived and me and Zami wanted to say hello to his sister. Zami said we would be quite quick. I whispered Africa Time to Robin, which is when nothing is quick, but he ignored me and took my scarf
off me so he could hold it up against his nose to stop the smells coming in. The smells were of burning cooking and rotting rubbish.

We came to a battered old door with its number painted on the front. The woman who opened the door was Zami’s sister. She had a pink towel tied around on the outside of her clothes. Her house was really dark. Robin didn’t want us to go in but Zami made us by waving his hand and saying please and frowning when Robin said we wouldn’t. A toddler was on the floor and there was a bed in one corner and some shelves with nothing on them. The floor was red and the walls were blue. The toddler liked the bows on my new shoes and if I moved my feet he tried to get them. Zami was talking to his sister in their language and I was playing with the toddler but Robin was just standing there holding my scarf over his face even though there were no smells inside Zami’s sister’s house. I tried to get him to give my scarf back but he wouldn’t. Zami’s sister had a serious face and she didn’t speak to us, only to Zami in a foreign language, but when she saw the toddler playing she laughed and her laughing voice was different, just like Zami’s. When he’s with Dad he doesn’t laugh but when he is with me and Robin he does sometimes laugh and it is a different sound from his normal voice, as if he’s got two different voices, one for speaking and one for laughing.

I noticed there was a tiny baby wrapped up in the towel that Zami’s sister was wearing over her clothes.
It was having a piggyback but it was fast asleep. It was a boy, Zami said, and thank goodness he was healthy. When Zami’s mum died him and his sister had to live with his grandmother. Same with me and Robin, I said – but the difference is that Zami’s grandma got too old to look after him and there wasn’t enough food so first his sister came to South Africa and then him. The last words their mother said were to his sister and what she said was Look after Zamikhaya. It was our mother’s dying wish for us to stay together, Zami said. His sister’s name is Nomsa and Zami said her husband was a bad man. At first he helped them and said he could get jobs for them but after the baby was born he wanted Zami’s sister to go and live far away. In Africa the baby belongs with the father’s family. Zami’s sister wanted to stay with Zami so she ran away from the husband and now she was all alone. The toddler who liked my shoes wasn’t her baby, she was looking after it for somebody else and they would give her food in return. I said to Zami Why don’t you bring your sister and her baby to live at Dad’s? Not the toddler but the tiny sleeping baby in the towel. I said I would ask Dad but Zami didn’t want me to. I said Why not, he wouldn’t mind but Zami said Your father has done enough for my family already. When he says father he says it like this – fatha.