Alarm Girl (9 page)

When we got to the prison a man gave us a talk. He told us before it was a prison the island was for lepers, and I noticed Nan kept rubbing her hands with handwash after that.

The man giving us the talk used to be an actual prisoner. Everyone was interested apart from me. I wanted to go on the iPad but Dad said it would be inappropriate. Inappropriate is a word that teachers say. They could say something is bad or wrong but instead they always say it’s inappropriate. It’s annoying. Nan asked the man was it true about Nelson Mandela knitting to stop himself getting bored and the man said yes it was true and he was the father of our nation. I wished I had some knitting to do.

Everyone apart from me was sick again on the ferry back. I was the odd man out. Nan said I was like an ox. When we got back Dad asked us for some business advice. He showed us the website he is designing for his company. Nan said I was too big to sit on Dad’s lap but I stayed where I was. Dad’s website has photos of his house and the beehive cottage and loads of countryside and animal pictures and one of Dad playing golf. It says Taylored Travel – Travel With You In Mind on the homepage and there is some writing about how South Africa is a safe and exciting place for family holidays.
Nan asked if it really was safe and Dad said It’s perfectly safe, Valerie. He called her by her name and she said to him You know Doug and I are more than happy to hang on to the kids, Ian, calling him by his name too. Dad said It’s perfectly safe. Then Nan said But there are no memories for them in South Africa and Dad said Maybe that’s a good thing.

We were all staring at a page on Dad’s website that said This Blog Is Still Being Built Please Come Back Later and Dad said we could do with a fresh start. Then I said to Nan Have you met Dad’s new girlfriend? Of course Nan said no. Her name’s Beautiful, I said, and Nan thought I meant she had a beautiful name so I had to tell her that her actual name was Beautiful. She got confused but in the end she said That’s an unusual name and I said Yes because what if you were called that and you were really ugly? Dad said he could introduce Beautiful to Nan and Grandad and Nan said that was entirely up to him. He tipped me off his lap after that and I could tell he wished I didn’t mention Beautiful to Nan.

Later when I was in my room Nan came in and asked me loads of questions. She said it was only natural Dad would want someone special in his life. Everyone needs someone, she said. I was feeling a bit sick. I don’t feel like me, I said, and Nan thought it was because of the ferry but that wasn’t right because when everyone else was being sick Grandad said I was like a sailor with sea-legs.

I was afraid it was malaria not seasickness and Nan could read my mind because she asked if I had taken
my medicine. When I told her that Dad took my pills away because they would make me go weird Nan said what would I prefer, going weird or dying of malaria? She said I was too precious to take a chance so I should carry on taking the medicine. I said What about Robin and Nan said he was precious too. She said she would speak with Dad and she would make sure everyone kept taking their medicine.

SHE WENT TO SEE
her doctor. She wasn’t well. The doctor gave her a prescription and she collected it from the pharmacy while Indigo stood patiently by her side, as patiently as she waited now, for her mother to fetch down paper and crayons from a shelf that was too high for her. The vulnerability in the slope of her shoulders as she stood waiting, her gaze fixed on the shelves in front of her, and the round of her buttocks in red corduroy trousers that were a size too small and hoisted too high, slayed Karen. She had to look away. There was a tightness in the room, like the increasing pressure of a migraine attack. Holding on to the edge of the kitchen counter while the whole room slanted away, she moved to the sink, steadying herself on furniture like Robin and Indy had when they were learning to walk.

She held a glass under the tap. The rush of water was deafening. She placed the glass carefully on the table, barely disturbing the surface tension of the water.
Its transparency was a relief – its nothingness and its purity – but, as she stared, the glass and the rim of the water’s surface became an aggravation, its surfaces and boundaries defining too much the end of something and a beginning of something else. She yearned for an absence of lines or shapes or elements or objects. A blankness, like the white of a page for drawing, like the white of a smooth oval tablet.

Tired of waiting, the little girl came over and took her mother’s hand. Karen felt the transfer of droplets from the glass of water between their fingertips.

‘Wait a minute,’ she said, and she gulped from the glass, tipping back her head to swallow the tablet.

Together they moved to where the drawing things were and Karen fetched them down. Soon her daughter was bent over paper, the ends of her hair skimming the page.

The phone rang and the earlier tightness crept into the room once more. Karen listened to herself have a conversation with her husband. There was a thickness in her throat, as if she might vomit or weep. Their talk soon dwindled into nothing, matching the sensation she had of herself. If only she had something of the vigour of her child, who clutched two crayons in one hand, dragging a red trail and a blue trail across the page and on to the table top.

‘I can’t talk,’ she told Ian. ‘I’ve got nothing worth saying.’

Indy lay down her crayons. She picked up the piece of paper and turned it around for her mother to see, holding the page in front of her own face. ‘Guess.’

Karen stared at the swirl of red and blue, two loops either side of a triangle and a circle, two long spidery lines. It was a figure of some sort. Even though the images were basic, mostly she was able to guess them accurately. She couldn’t tell if her rate of success pleased her daughter or if she would prefer her to get it wrong sometimes. She cleared her throat before speaking.

‘Lady?’

‘A Mummy with wings,’ Indy said, and, replacing the page on the table top, she took up two crayons in one fist again and began hailing down a shower of red and blue bullets. Karen reached out a hand to stroke her head but Indy shook her off so instead she combed through the collection of pens and crayons, finding comfort in the simple task of putting on lids and testing colours. Making a pile of ones to throw away gave her a sense of purpose, although she knew even as she separated them that she would be incapable of disposing of them and would end up putting them back with the others.

At the doctor’s surgery she had listed her symptoms and the doctor had tapped out a rhythm on his computer keyboard. Now, sitting at the kitchen table, the thud of her daughter’s crayon on the paper seemed to echo the doctor’s beat, as if both daughter and doctor were trying to tell her something. She closed her eyes against the stark white of the page, against the white of smooth oval tablets in their packet, one dissolving in her bloodstream now. She tried to decipher the communication, concentrating on the punctures of
sound emitted by each stab of the blue and red: two colours clenched in the fat little fist.

‘Why have you got your eyes closed?’

There was no pause in the thudding rhythm for the question but, when Karen didn’t answer, the noise stopped.

‘Why are your eyes shut? Are you making a wish?’

Karen nodded, trying to relax her mouth, trying to un-frown her brow. Then, the tap-tap-tapping of the doctor’s computer keyboard started up again, his typing re-patterned in the stab of red and blue, blue and red, pressed tight together, thumping over and over on the page, making a blizzard of tiny marks.

‘A wish, yes.’

She opened her eyes. The room billowed and pulsed. The walls throbbed, as if she and Indigo were inside the beating heart or bowels of a beast. She gripped the table edge.

‘Did it come true?’

Karen opened her mouth to answer but her tongue was stuck, as if she hadn’t uttered a word for a hundred years.

‘Did it come true?’ came the question again.

‘I don’t know yet,’ she said.

ON CHRISTMAS EVE
I stayed in my room all morning. Everyone was annoying me. Nan was being annoying,
Dad was being annoying and of course Robin was annoying. In my room all the folded-up things in my case were annoying so I scribbled and scrabbled them up and threw them all about so there were clothes on the bed, on the floor, everywhere.

In the yard the sun was beating down even though it was Christmas. There was no sign of Zami or Tonyhog and there was no sound, just the buzzing that Robin says is insects taking over the world. The chickens were hiding from the heat under Dad’s car. I opened my shutters and held on to the bars at my window, seeing what it would feel like to be Nelson Mandela in prison.

I was thinking about you and Dad and whether you were really in love. The way Dad and Nan are is a clue. Say Dad didn’t love you and he wanted you and me and Robin all to die so he could be with Beautiful, a good way of doing it would be to kill you and make me and Robin catch malaria. There would be no evidence.

Eleanor O drew a desert island and I guessed it. She guessed my kitchen and CatladyUK got computer. When I got Picasso’s birthday cake there was a message. It said ‘What colour is Indigo?’ Robin would say don’t answer because it could be a paedophile but I knew it was you because you guessed my birthday cake in two seconds when I drew a Little Mermaid one like the one I had when I was eight.

Dad said Wow, what a mess! when he saw all my stuff on the floor. Why don’t you come and have some lunch, puppy doll? I didn’t go and I didn’t go and at last
Nan came to find me. She said We’re going to a posh hotel for tea, I think your Dad’s trying to impress us. I tried to think what his plan was and if he could sneak poison into the food. I knew I was being stupid and that kind of thing only happens in stories but it didn’t stop me thinking it.

Dad said it would be nice to wear a dress or a skirt to the hotel. I wore shorts instead. Everyone was waiting for Beautiful. Nan was giving me looks and checking I had sun cream on even though I knew all that because I had been here longer than her. She always fusses over me but not Robin. She says it’s because I’m a girl and girls are a worry but that’s sexist.

I was with Tony when Beautiful came. He lets me scratch his back now, and I can pull him quite roughly by the tusks like Zami does. His eyes are brown, like mine and yours, and just like a human’s. Robin doesn’t believe it but he understands everything we say, even more than a dog. When he heard Beautiful’s car he ran around to the front of the house to say hello. I hid behind the Jeep where the chickens go. She didn’t even look at Tony. She walked straight past him. She was wearing an orange dress with a thin belt. She had flat orange shoes to match, and white bracelets on both wrists. The white showed up against her skin. Dad came out of the house and kissed her. I got in the Jeep and picked more stuffing out of the torn seats. Soon there will be none left and the seat will be just metal. It will be too uncomfortable for Dad’s clients to sit on.

Robin came out and called my name but I ducked down and he didn’t see me. I picked and picked the seat stuffing. Zami came around shushing with his broom like he does every day even though there’s nothing to sweep. Tony went with him. Then Silumko came out and him and Zami sat on the back step eating porridge. They ate it with their hands instead of with spoons and they ate it in silence. I tried to make the sound of the bird I always hear but they knew it was me not a bird. I whistled at them and they looked but they couldn’t see me. In the end Tony showed Zami where I was. It was a good game and I wanted to play it again but Robin came out and said it was time to go. While the grown-ups were getting ready Zami taught us how to drive the Jeep by showing what pedals to press and how to change gears.

I didn’t want to go in Beautiful’s car and Robin didn’t either, even though it was an Audi. We made Nan and Grandad go with her and we went with Dad. It was a long journey. I watched Dad’s driving the whole time but he didn’t do it like Zami did. He put it on to Automatic Pilot and it drove itself. Beautiful’s car was in front and I could see Nan and Grandad’s heads like they were little children. I knew Nan would be talking in the posh voice she uses in shops and on the telephone. I thought about who would die if we had a crash. Beautiful and Dad could have a sign and suddenly smash their cars into each other but duck down at the last moment so they didn’t go through the windscreen. They would live happily ever after.

We did a walk at a place where there were colourful birds and monkeys so tame you could touch them, even though Nan said not to. It wasn’t a proper safari, though, it was more like a zoo. The monkeys were scratching in the dust and making patterns. Beautiful said they were looking for insects to eat but it seemed like they were trying to draw. One of them drew a line that looked like a path going up a mountain. It looked like he was doing a drawing of where he lived. Beautiful was pretending to be a safari guide even though she works in an office. She kept getting me and Robin to stand with Dad and have our photo taken. Grandad was sweating. Dad asked if he was alright and Nan said did he want to stop and have a sit-down but Grandad said he was fine and would everyone stop treating him like he was ninety-nine instead of sixty-nine.

We went to have a look at where Beautiful works. The people in her office shook our hands. Her name was on the desk and a sword was on the wall. She let Robin hold the sword. It was a Zulu sword even though Beautiful isn’t a Zulu. She’s from another tribe. Beautiful’s tribe are famous for their dancing. She said tourists like Zulu swords and Nan said They like dancing too – one day you must show us your dancing. Robin asked if the sword had killed anyone but Beautiful said it was just for ceremony. She should have told him it killed someone, it would have made him like her. Grandad was sucking up by asking all about history and Beautiful was just talking to him all the time, no one else. Whenever Nan
said anything she was talking in her posh voice and Dad was smiling the whole time and pretending we were a normal family. Me and Robin were the only normal ones.