Half-Sick of Shadows (4 page)

There were other evolutions on the way. Running water! Electricity! I understood electricity to mean we would never run out of candles. Mother said everybody had electricity up north.

Me, Sophia, Gregory, Mother and Father had death on our lips, and in our eyes and ears. Edgar, however, came from a different planet. Nobody knew where Edgar’s mind wandered when free to wander where it would. Mother and Father never scolded Edgar the way they scolded the rest of us when we needed scolding. I had an idea that he had a special status and, therefore, had been set apart. I assumed they liked him more than the rest of us.

I liked him too.

Father and Mother often quarrelled over education. Long before we were born, however, Father let Mother teach him how to read and write. Father never took to reading – apart from his bible. Writing came in handy for notes in the margins.

Mother thought so highly of education she sowed the importance of letters in the form of words on paper into our brains almost before
we
had teeth. I could sing the Alphabet Song – albeit twenty-six letters in a single note – before I could locate my mouth with a spoon. She taught us well. She gave us the gift of word boats. She made us one each by folding sheets of paper into tub shapes. When we came across a new word worth remembering, we wrote it down, cut it out, and dropped it in our word boats.

Gregory was by far the best at words. I came second best. Sophia used to be as good as me, but then she stopped, as if her head held enough of everything and had no space for anything new. By the time Granny Hazel fainted under the table, I had an ocean liner for a word boat and Sophia had a tug. Nevertheless, there were words I thought I knew but discovered, when called upon to use them, that I didn’t. Words like posy. Edgar displayed as much talent as anyone when the words could go with pictures, but he was hopeless at non-picture words, like precocious.

He’s a precocious child, Mother occasionally said. I, for my sins, held the dubious honour of being the precocious child in question. This invisible stamp, this identity, became all the heavier to bear because Gregory and Sophia were never referred to as precocious, and Edgar was its opposite.

When Father said precocious it sounded wrong, like a walrus performing a capriole. He said precocious as if he had a taste in his mouth like sour milk. He always directed his words to Mother, or the air; he seldom spoke to my face. He never punished me for being precocious, although his scowl was disapproval enough. I didn’t like being precocious. I never knew if my precociousness leaked out like dribble.

When Mother called me a precocious child, however, precocious sounded special rather than warped. When I learned to read, and discovered how to use the dictionary, I trawled through the pris, the pros and eventually the pres. The word I sought remained elusive. It even managed to evade the encyclopedia. The meaning came to me some time later, as most words do to all people, by magic.

Suddenly, my eyes opened in pitch darkness. I had a space behind them where sleep had been. Morning had arrived, but not dawn.

‘Are you awake?’ I called across the gap between our beds.

‘Where have you been? I’ve been awake for ages and ages and ages and ages,’ replied my other half.

‘You should have woke me.’

‘I did, but you didn’t wake. I dreamed. Did you dream it too?’

‘I don’t think so. What was it about?’

‘I can’t remember,’ said Sophia. We often dreamed the same dream. Dreaming the same dream was like having four arms, four legs, and one head. ‘Sometimes I can’t remember my dreams, but I know I’ve had them. There’s a big space where they were in my head … Mother’s been up for hours and hours. Why hasn’t she come?’

Not a clue on earth did I have appertaining to Mother’s absence. Nevertheless, ‘She’s gathering eggs for breakfast,’ I said.

I couldn’t wait any longer. I needed to wee, which meant sitting on the edge of the bed, exposing myself to the Cold. While I went, Sophia went too. I went in my bottle; she went in her pan. It’s a wonder our pee didn’t freeze solid on the way down.

When we had done what needed doing, we jumped back into bed with shivery noises and wrapped our blankets tight against our necks. Just as our shivery noises stopped, Mother stormed our rooms and opened the curtains, first in the bedroom shared by Gregory and Edgar, then in the bedroom I shared with Sophia. If Mother stopped starting our days in this way none of us would have got up ever except to wee.

Mother had a sunny word for each of us as she shook us to life one by one. Gregory first – he took most shaking. ‘Morning, dreamer.’ Then, Edgar, ‘Rise and shine, sleepyhead.’ Sophia next, ‘Come along, my angel.’ And, finally, me, ‘Hurry up, precocious one.’

Precocious was a Mother word, like reduce (over saucepans) and obligatory (over Gregory doing his homework). Sin and punish
were
Father words. Mother’s words were prettier, in my opinion.

… and, last, Gregory again, ‘Come on, you; shift your arse.’

On this particular morning, she echoed something she said last night: ‘Don’t forget what day it is.’ As if we could!

None of us spoke much first thing in the morning. Mother said it was because we Pikes slept like the dead. I don’t know why she said that; it wasn’t true. We didn’t speak more than a word or two at a time in the morning for an opposite reason: because the Manse’s groans and whines often broke our sleep. There’s another reason why we didn’t speak: our jawbones took an hour or two to thaw.

Our harsh weather had chapped Sophia’s red, red lips. They looked fatter than they were. She had a delightful pout. When Sophia pouted for a kiss, and when she thought hard about how to solve a problem – like how to turn the door knob with jam on her fingers – her lips formed a red bud.

When problem-solving, Sophia’s eyebrows narrowed. She folded her arms across her chest – except if she had jam on her fingers. Problem-solving involved making herself as compact as possible. With eyes closed, eyebrows raised, and arms at her side, she presented her kissing pout while leaning forward as if lips were allowed to touch but toes had to stay apart.

Sophia threw back the blankets and sat on the edge of her bed, slumped and shivering. Her feet were white, tiny and sharp. A girl of her age should have had plump feet and piglet toes. I saw my first plump girls’ feet when I went to school. It was a boys’ school, but girls came to partake in a sports day. Until then, I thought all girls were skinny by nature. Sophia’s feet were hard, like the stones ancient people used as knives to skin bears and lions. They wore the skins as coats and shoes because those were the days before shops.

I knew farms, churches, and houses because I’d seen them. I knew about shops too, although I’d never seen one. Shops were where you got things because you were out of them, like washing powder, matches and bleach; those were the kinds of things Mother most
often
found herself out of. Father only ever found himself almost out of gas for the cooker, which he cycled home with from Farmer Barry’s farm in two green bottles, in a bag on his back. You needed money before you could go to shops. Everything costs money, Mother said and it didn’t grow on trees. Shops were far away and maybe you had to travel across the sea in a boat to get to one. There were pictures of boats in the encyclopedia. One, called the
Titanic
, crashed into an ice cube and sank, drowning everybody except Robinson Crusoe, who washed up on a desert island and ate coconuts.

Edgar rose next. He collected water in a jug from the pail and poured enough into the basin to threaten his hands and face with damp. Sophia rallied at the noise from next door and did the same in our room. Sometimes the water froze overnight and first to the pail had to crack ice with the jug. Sometimes it froze outside, in the well, and Mother had to break it by dropping the bucket hard, or with a pole. One year she broke the bucket. The next year she broke the pole.

While Sophia tried to wash without allowing icy water to touch her skin, I edged my feet from under the blankets and rose bit by bit, even though I knew I would warm faster by rising all at once and getting dressed quickly. I dressed while Sophia washed. Then she dressed while I washed.

I dressed in hand-me-down-from-Gregory patch-arsed trousers, washed-to-see-through-thin white cotton shirt buttoned to my neck, and my heaviest pullover – which had holes at the elbows.

Mother came upstairs briefly to put a Windsor knot in my black tie. The hand-me-down-from-Edgar black jacket hardly fitted over the pullover; I looked stuffed. My shoes had such a high shine they reflected my face when I looked at my feet. I took off my jacket – wrestled with it for two whole minutes – so as to feel the benefit of it when I went outside.

Gregory, last as always, needed yet another shake from Mother.

Father appeared downstairs smelling of soap. Normally, he smelled of farm animals. The top half of his weatherworn face was as red as raw meat and the bottom half, shaved for the first time in years, looked like bone. He did it last night while we were asleep. His greying hair stuck upward and out. He must have washed it. No comb could tame its rebellion at the shock of shampoo, when it had known nothing stronger than water all its young life – and in its later life, water and a blob of grease. Father had dressed in a black suit shining with age.

Since his eyes in the hall inadvertently collided with hers through the open door to the kitchen, he mumbled Mother an aye-aye. He said aye-aye often, in preference to talking. I used to think he said eye-eye because everybody has two of them. He was confirming to whoever he said eye-eye to that they still had both.

‘Sleep well?’ she asked, with plainly feigned interest. Mother’s enthusiasm always sagged when Father appeared. Sometimes she spat on to his eggs – I’d seen her doing it when she thought herself unwatched.

Nothing smelled better than the sound of frying bacon. I later went off bacon when I learned those crackle-fizzing strips of goodness were bits of cut up pig. But these were innocent times. Crispy aroma crackled out of the pan and snaked through the air. The bacon was for Father; we only received a crispy breakfast at Christmas. The rest of the time we got porridge and buttered toast – more than they got in China, Father often said, with cut up pig fat glistening in his beard.

Mother danced with kitchen utensils for partners; she and they were as one. She brought the kettle to the boil, milked the cups, turned the bacon and scooped it on to a tray to keep warm under the grill with the soda and potato bread. She fried sausages in the pan and buttered toast. Eggs were last. Father loved his eggs and bacon. Thick farm bacon with plenty of fat. He waited by the fire, reading his bible, for Mother to place the tray and saucer of
toast
and mug of tea and stacked plate of breakfast upon his lap.

Mother’s enthusiasm returned by the time she reached the top of the stairs. She existed for us, her alpha and omega, she said often, having learned the phrase from Reverend Burrows. We loved to hear that we were her alpha and omega. It sounded grand even if we had no idea what it meant. At least, I had no idea what it meant, and I’m sure Sophia had no idea either. Edgar, to the best of my knowledge, never had an idea about anything. Gregory might have known. It was hard to tell what Gregory knew because he lied so often.

Father never missed a day at work, not even when snow reached the window sills, not even when thunder and lightning frightened our chickens to death, not even when he woke up in the morning dying from flu, or when one of us woke up dying from Plague, Famine or Ennui. He said he couldn’t afford to miss a day at work. Father pedalled through summers and winters, through darkness and light, through thunder and snow blizzards to get to Farmer Barry’s farm.

However, he had taken a day off work today to bury his mother. Her coffin occupied the kitchen table. We were to have breakfast on our laps in the living room. Father had shoved Granny Hazel’s empty bed into a corner to make space.

Having already eaten one breakfast, Father waited for us to arrive for ours in his armchair by the fire. We arrived one by one. When everyone had presented themselves, Mother left the living room and returned a minute later with a large tray containing six small bowls of porridge so thick it was nearly biscuit.

Father gave thanks for the Lord’s rich bounty, bearing in mind – lest we forget – that because of the Devil’s work people were starving in China. Father always remembered the starving in China. If he kept on eating two breakfasts, Father would be unlikely to starve in China or anywhere else. I was truly thankful we had a fire on that morning; most mornings were too warm for a fire – Father said.

After porridge, Mother brought mugs of tea so hot they lifted skin
from
the roofs of our mouths, and a stacked plate of toast, the black scraped off and heavily buttered to hide the scars. We were big toast people in the Manse. Bread’s cheaper than meat, Mother said. It fills you up and you don’t have to kill it.

The toast-stack rapidly diminished. Edgar was butter and crumbs from ear to ear. Mother returned our empty mugs and plates to the kitchen when we had done.

The lamp flickered. Threadbare curtains kept out the bit of Cold that wasn’t already inside. Cooked breakfast smells hung in the air. Father cleared his throat and said to Gregory, in a stern voice, ‘Do you know what you’ve to do?’ God help him if he’d forgotten.

Gregory said he did, and they left the room.

We waited quietly for them to return. I waited fidgety, wishing today was over. Sophia whispered to me, ‘What’s he to do?’

‘What?’ said Mother, before I got a chance to reply.

‘Gregory. What’s he to do?’

‘Carry one end of the coffin. The end her feet are at, I dare say.’

‘Oh … Why?’

‘Your Father can hardly carry it on his own, can he?’

‘I mean, why’s he to carry her feet end?’

‘I don’t know, child. Just because!’

We were quiet again.

Occasionally, one or other of us coughed.

Father and Gregory didn’t come back – at least, not as soon as I thought they would. Maybe Granny Hazel was too fat and they couldn’t lift her. In case that was the reason, I made a suggestion.