Half-Sick of Shadows (8 page)

‘Father is sad,’ I said.

Mother removed her hands from the water, dried them with a tea towel, and leaned on the edge of the sink looking at the window.
Mother
sniffed. Her hands were red and bloated. After some time, when I thought I might as well sneak off and find Sophia, she began to speak, but quietly, almost to herself. Although she dried her hands less than a minute ago, she put them back under the suds. But the hands were motionless in there, as though trying to drown. I took a soft step closer, but still had to strain to hear. All of the words she spoke joined together like a sadder kind of sigh.

‘How is it, I wonder, we get where we end up? I don’t know. If there’s a god, he’s a plan more impossible than I’ll ever imagine.’

‘Father says God knows everything.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Father says God knows everything.’

‘Aye, well, your father doesn’t know everything.’

Father doesn’t know everything? It was almost blasphemy!

I said, ‘He talks like he does.’ I meant it to sound more matter-of-fact than it did, and less sarcastic. ‘I mean, nobody in the whole world knows everything, so there must be lots and lots of things God knows but people don’t. God doesn’t tell even Father everything.’

‘Holy smoke, Edward, what a mouthful! You’re right there. Whatever it was, I’d never thought of it like that and certainly never will.’ She looked down at me as if I had fish growing from my ears.

She turned back to the soap suds in the sink and warmed her hands in them. In time, she talked to me quietly again, or to herself.

‘There’s a connection between sons and their mothers that’s stronger than a spider’s silk. A mother knows her son for twenty years as a child, but a wife knows her husband as an adult for longer than that. A wife gets to know her husband better than his own mother ever knew him. Hazel never knew him like I do. Mothers only see the good and have a blind spot for the bad. Only his mother could restrain him from wicked excesses without even knowing she was doing it.’

Wicked? Father? Excesses? What were excesses?

‘Now Hazel’s gone up to Heaven or down to Hell, or to wherever she wound up, there’s no restraint. He’ll do what he likes.’

Wicked? Father? The two words were hardly fit to inhabit the same sentence. Mother must have meant an adult thing beyond my understanding. Asking her what she meant would have made me uncomfortable, so I remained silent and a little dizzy with confusion.

‘Are excesses like excuses?’

‘Well,’ she said, turning her brain’s dictionary pages. ‘Do you know when you have too much of something? That’s when you’ve an excess amount of that thing.’ It made sense. Father had too much breakfast, so his breakfasts were excesses. And they were wicked ones because people were starving in China.

‘Go now and chase dreams with your other half.’

When Mother smiled the sun shone in my heart. My smile and I went out through the back door to look for Sophia.

Exactly as I had last seen her, Sophia was still arranging daisies on Granny Hazel’s grave. Less time had passed than I thought. Although I meant to join her there, I held back and watched. Wrapped in moving daisies around on the palm of her hand. Mouthing the words of some song. Happy. That’s what she was experiencing: happiness! If only for this moment, feeling neither too hot nor too cold, lost inside herself, Sophia had found happiness. I belonged to no part of her now. Something of the nature that used to bind us had dissolved for ever.

5

The Horrible Wipple

Wellington boots and dirty hands were permitted in the kitchen, but forbidden elsewhere in the Manse. I kicked off my Wellingtons at the back door and washed my hands at the kitchen sink, then dried them with the tea towel that Mother dried dishes with and said that I mustn’t keep using as a hand towel.

The hall sounded normal – like my socks on the floor – and smelled of fresh flowers. The flower smell should have warned me to advance cautiously; the hall normally smelled like wet coats. Innocently, I opened the living-room door, went inside without looking and shut the door behind me – Mother constantly reminded us to close the door and keep the heat in.

Orange and hairy, like an orangutan getting off all fours and on to two! Although I saw the creature for a split second only, that was long enough for it to transmogrify from its demonic into its human form – a head and the correct number of arms and legs. A poker shot up my spine and my hair stood on end. Father said the Devil wears many disguises. I made a noise of fright. Even as I spun on my heels and ran into the shut door, my senses confirmed that I had seen the Devil change himself into a hideously ugly woman who had no right to be there. My hand found the handle, and I escaped into the hall to almost collide with Mother carrying a tray containing a pot of tea,
two
cups, two saucers, and a plate of shortbread. She spoke my name with considerable alarm while swinging the tray clear of my head.

Nothing spilled, luckily for me.

‘There’s a, there’s a …’ I trembled, pointing.

‘There’s a there’s a, is there?’

‘No,’ I whined, tugging her dress, but in no particular direction. I wanted whatever waited for us in the living room to be a figment of my imagination, like the smoke-shaped people I saw in the cemetery from my bedroom window at night. Mother said they were figments of my imagination, which meant I had to ignore them, as if they were unreal. ‘You have to look.’

‘Let go, Edward. You’re behaving like a big baby.’

Mother pushed past me, taking tea and shortbread to the very place where I had seen the ghost – or monster – or disturbed the burglar who had broken out of an asylum – or done whatever I’d done, accidentally. I didn’t mean it.

‘A dead crow fell on Tennyson’s grave from nowhere,’ I said, but Mother ignored me the way she expected me to ignore the figments of my imagination. As she entered and rounded the door out of sight, I hung back, half expecting a scream and a clatter as the tray and its contents hit the floor. My feet stayed on the ground, but I jumped when I did indeed hear a dreadful sound.

Not a scream, but a voice. Several seconds passed before I recognized the language it spoke as the same as my own. Its accent was the same too, but different. I had read about accents in the encyclopedia … something to do with talking. In the Garden of Eden, the Devil disguised himself as a talking snake. People don’t normally expect snakes to talk, so it was a pretty good disguise.

‘Oh, shortbread! My absolute favourite! How did you know? What adorable china! You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble for wee old me.’ The Devil tempted Jesus in the desert. Don’t do it, Mother. Resist. ‘I think I made your wee boy jump clean out of his skin. Is he your youngest?’

‘That’ll be Edward.’

Unfamiliar laughter followed. Horrible laughter. Laughter like the baying of a madwoman. Laughter without sincerity, high-pitched, with each ha distinct and a garden fence between it and its neighbour: ha/ha/ha, ha/ha/ha.

‘Edward! Get your sorry backside in here.’

I advanced and peered into the room.

She had a breathtaking ginger head. Without having seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed that ginger could be so ginger. Her head extended beyond her shoulders and made her seven feet tall.

I entered the room. My sorry backside followed.

The woman had taken a seat and Mother was pouring the tea.

The woman spotted me, and I almost bolted again, but her words – ‘Hello, Edward’ – accompanied by a smile like the smiles of madmen who die laughing and crying at the same time glued me to the spot, and I could only move when Mother broke the spell by telling me to come in.

This was my first experience of ‘a visitor’.

Invited to take a seat, I took one on the battered sofa, as far away as I could get from the scary woman. Mother handed me the plate and I took a slice of shortbread. I sat on the edge of the cushion because if I sat back my feet dangled.

‘This is Mrs Wipple, Edward. She’s here to cut my hair.’

But Mother cut her own hair! She kept the fringe out of her eyes with scissors and a mirror. The back grew largely unattended, although I did see her once clipping the tail end. If she hadn’t clipped the tail end now and then it would have trailed behind her on the ground. She cut Sophia’s hair too, and mine. And Father’s, Gregory’s and Edgar’s. When Granny Hazel was alive, Mother cut her hair too. Perhaps Mother and her scissors is why we all looked half baked.

Things became pleasant as we ate the shortbread, Mother and Mrs Wipple chattering and me listening. Mother took the tray and empty
cups
away, with me hanging on to her tail, and returned with a hard chair from the kitchen – and me still hanging on to her tail. She placed the hard chair in the middle of the floor facing the fire. Mrs Wipple opened her large bag and took out various hair-cutting tools. She pointed a tin of beans at Mother’s head and the tin hissed. Not beans but a fine mist came out. She sprayed Mother’s hair so much I thought she would empty the can. Mother did have an awful lot of hair. Then Mrs Wipple combed Mother’s hair until it looked as if she had been out in the rain without her hat. As a final preparation before the cutting, she fitted a sort of towel with a hole in the middle over Mother’s head. Fascinating. I stayed to see the show.

When Mother’s hair had been cut, dried and brushed, Mrs Wipple turned her horrendous, toothy grin on me. I panicked as if pressurized to say something in response to a question I hadn’t heard. Before I could think of anything, she asked, ‘What about you, Edward? Would you like your hair trimmed?’ Seeing panic greater than my own on Mother’s face, she added, ‘… at no extra cost, of course. After all, I’m here, and you’ve been kind enough to provide refreshment. Come and have your hair tidied for school, Edward.’

Because Mother simply chopped at my hair when it got too long, I must have resembled a sea anemone removed from its habitat to Mrs Wipple. I sat on the chair. She put the hair-catching thing over my head before tilting it this way and that, frowning at it, and muttering about salvage operations. As she snipped, ruffled and combed she asked me if I thought I would like school.

‘Yes,’ I said, meaning no.

What did I want to be when I grew up, she asked.

‘A spaceman,’ I replied, meaning an astronaut but unable to remember the word. The encyclopedia had a spaceman from Russia called Uri something under G. Gargargle: Uri.

‘A spaceman!’ Mrs Wipple howled. I feared her scissors might put an eye out. I must have said the wrong word. To cover my embarrassment, I said, ‘Or a librarian.’

‘A librarian!’ Rather than laughing, this time she looked impressed. Mother, sheepishly, told her I was a great reader. ‘Is he indeed? How wonderful! Why do you want to be a librarian?’

‘I don’t really know.’ I wanted to be a librarian, primarily, because it was less embarrassing than being a spaceman.

‘I have no doubt you’ll make a first class librarian.’

Just when I thought that Mrs Wipple had shut up, she asked, ‘And what school will you attend, Edward?’

Mother answered because she must have seen on my face an unwillingness to cooperate any further in my interrogation. ‘He’ll board at Whitehead House.’

‘Really!’ Mrs Wipple’s scissors stopped snip-snipping. She came round from behind me, scissors raised in one hand like a weapon, comb in the other. ‘Then you’ll meet the principal, Mr Mulholland. His wife’s a client and very good friend of mine. What a coincidence.’

‘It’s a small world,’ said Mother, trying to be impressed.

I disagreed with her, but kept my disagreement to myself. The world had lots of islands and oceans. In fact, it had more water than land. I’d seen a globe, and an atlas too. An atlas is a flat globe made into pages. You can turn both of them, but in different ways.

‘You’re in good hands there, Edward,’ said Mrs Wipple, who had started clipping, ruffling and combing again. ‘I happen to know that Mr Mulholland is the
crème de la crème
when it comes to headmasters.’ My ears pricked up, but not too high otherwise she might have pricked one with her scissors.
Crème de la crème
sounded interesting. ‘Mr Mulholland is very distinguished in educational circles. Yes. He has friends in high places.’ Like, sitting on roofs? Up Everest? ‘I’d keep in with your headmaster, Edward. Oh, yes. If anybody can make a librarian out of you, he can. You scratch his back and he’ll scratch yours.’ I was only five, and still resistant to having my back scratched by a stranger. Nor did I fancy my fingernails working across someone else’s fatty, gunky old back. In fact, I would rather have bathed in
porridge
. Nevertheless, there was something in what Mrs Wipple said that needed thinking about.

‘I must tell Edith I’ve met you,’ said Mrs Wipple to Mother. ‘You never know, Edward, she might put in a good word, eh?’

What good word? Precocious? Precocious was the best word I knew, although diphthong retained an element of mystery.

‘There!’ Ten minutes after she started, I had a straight fringe for the first time in my life. She stood behind me, stroking my head, wiping my cheeks, pinging loose hair off my ears. ‘Finished! Don’t you think he looks just like a little librarian, Mrs Pike?’

‘He’s a little something all right.’

Mrs Wipple packed her tools. Mother apologized because she didn’t have the correct amount of money and had to ask for change. ‘Never mind,’ smiled Mrs Wipple, counting notes and handing one back. ‘Whenever you can, my dear. Whenever you can.’

Mother saw her out the back door.

‘Who is she?’ I asked, as Mrs Wipple drove off in her red car with the sun roof open and her big red hair sticking out like a bonfire.

‘What a nice lady,’ said Mother. ‘What a very, very nice lady.’

‘Who is she?’

‘That’s Mrs Wipple!’ Mother sounded proud to know her.

‘I know. But, I mean, who is she?’

‘She’s a hairdresser. She cuts people’s hair for a living, and she owns a salon. When people are old or ill and can’t go to her salon, she comes out and cuts their hair in their own homes. Isn’t that a fine idea? Now, off you go and show Sophia your new haircut.’