Interpreters (11 page)

It appears that Anna and Eleanor share the room that used to be Max’s. It is dominated by a sturdy pine bunk bed and posters of androgynous boy bands that I vaguely recognise but cannot name. Bisecting the pale pink carpeted floor, from the centre of the base of the bed to the opposite wall is a thick, slightly wobbly chalk line. I wonder what the rules are for crossing it. The resident of the zone on the right is clearly tidier than the one on the left, where pyjamas, notepads, cuddly toys and half-eaten tubes of sweets cover much of the territory.

I lie down on the bottom bunk. On the slats of the bed above me are written the words ‘
Eleanor stinks like a scunk
’ in blue biro. A little further to the left is a large heart, neatly coloured in with red felt-tip pen. An arrow runs through it with the word ‘Anna’ at one end and ‘Jack’ at the other. I see that under ‘Jack’, but fainter and with angry lines crossed through it, is ‘Liam’.

I lie here listening for the sound of the violin but, apart from the ticking of one of the girls’ alarm clock, the room is silent.

‘You know what they say about violinists?’ I asked Max once, sitting down on his bed and idly opening his copy of
Sherlock Holmes.

‘What?’ said Max, continuing to play his scales. He could practise for hours at a time and it drove me mad.

‘They’re all really weird. Violinists. The real loners in an orchestra.’

 ‘That’s viola players, actually, if it’s stereotypes you’re after.’

‘Viola players, violinists – they’re all the same. The sort of people who are really quiet and stuff and then go and hack the oboists to bits.’

‘Oh, yeah?’

‘Why don’t you listen to Radio Luxembourg like normal people? What’s the point of all that scraping away? It sounds like you’re grating chalk.’

‘When did you last listen to the sound of chalk being grated?’

‘Well, you know what I mean. What’s this like?’ I asked, holding up the novel in Max’s line of vision.

‘It’s good,’ said Max, pausing as he reached the top of a scale. ‘About the search for the killer of a teenage girl with spots. A talented but tortured violinist is the prime suspect. They’ve already found the murder weapon – a sharpened bow.’

‘Oh, ha, ha, very funny.’

He finished the scale. ‘So go away if you don’t like me playing.’

‘You can hear it all over the house.’

‘You can’t hear it all over the house.’

‘And anyway, I’m bored.’

But I wasn’t bored. I was frightened.

‘What if she never comes back?’ I asked Max, putting the book down.

He propped his violin up against the wall and sat down next to me on the bed.

‘Of course she’ll come back. Why wouldn’t she?’

‘Why
would
she?’

‘Because of us.’

‘Maybe we’re not enough.’

‘Enough for what?’

‘Enough to make her want to come back.’

‘Of course we are. She came back last time. And the time before. And the time before that.’

My mother disappeared for the first time when I was nearly fourteen. At least, for the first time since her sudden disappearance eight years before. One day, we came home from school to find that she had packed a small bag, and was sitting with it by her feet in the kitchen, waiting for us.

‘Where are you going?’ I asked, eyeing the bag.

‘Just away for a while.’

‘But where?’ asked Max.

‘I don’t know yet.’

‘When will you be back?’ I insisted, my voice shaking.

‘I don’t know that yet either.’

‘But you will
be
back?’

‘I’ll be back.’

‘What about Dad?’ I asked.

‘What about him?’

‘Does he know you’re going?’

‘You can tell him if you like. Or don’t if you don’t want to. I really don’t mind.’

‘You can’t just go.’

‘I’m afraid I can. I should have done it years ago.’

‘But what about us?’ I said, beginning to cry.

‘You’ll be fine,’ my mother said, kissing me on the cheek. ‘There’s absolutely nothing to cry about. There’s food in the freezer, Mrs Woodley will be in to clean as usual on Wednesday, and it’s not as though you haven’t got a father.’

Then she kissed Max and left.

There was no point checking to see if she’d taken her passport with her. It was a running joke between Max and me that she never went anywhere without it. We used to ask her why she always kept it in her handbag when she rarely went further than London, or wherever it was that she’d started going off to for a couple of hours every fortnight, but I don’t remember her ever giving us an answer.

It was quite a while before my father realised my mother had gone, that first time. If he wondered why there was no supper waiting for him, he didn’t say anything. He just helped himself to a couple of gherkins from a jar, fishing them out very efficiently with his long, thin fingers, and went back into his study. At about nine o’clock, he came up to my room, swaying very slightly. ‘Any sign of your mother?’

‘She’s gone away.’

‘Where to?’

‘She didn’t say.’

My father raised his eyebrows.

‘No, really, she didn’t say,’ I said quickly, worried that he would think Max and I knew something that he didn’t and were somehow party to her plan, whatever it was.

‘Did she say when she’d be back?’

‘No. But she did say she
would
be back.’

‘
Did
she?’ he said, wearily.

‘I’m sure she won’t be gone long,’ I said, feeling that it was my duty to make the best of what felt like a pretty disastrous situation. ‘She only took a very small bag.’

I think she was gone for a couple of weeks that first time. We ate our way through the meals she’d left in the freezer for us. When they were finished, Max or my father put together strange but not unpleasant meals from whatever I bought at the little Spar on my way home from school. None of us mentioned our mother during those meals, but it felt as if we were all sitting there waiting for something to happen – for a phone call, or the sound of her keys in the door.

‘Where did you go,’ I asked tentatively when she finally returned.

‘Oh, nowhere very much,’ she said. And that was that. Until the next time.

‘One day she won’t come back,’ I said to Max as he picked up his violin again and started playing a Bach partita. ‘Why don’t you care?’

 ‘Of course I care. I care terribly.’

‘Well, you don’t look as though you do,’ I said angrily.

Max stopped playing again and rolled his eyes. ‘Can you really imagine Mum going off for good and never seeing us again? It isn’t us she’s getting away from.’

‘So why don’t they just get divorced?’

‘She’d never do that. She doesn’t believe in divorce.’

‘How do you know? Have you ever asked her?’

‘No.’

‘Well, then.’

‘But I’m sure she doesn’t. She once said,
If you marry, you marry for life, whatever that life may be like.’

‘I know Dad thinks we’re lying about not knowing where she is.’

‘Well, we’re not.’

‘But he doesn’t know that. It must
feel
to him like we’re lying.’

‘You can’t know what he feels.’

‘What do you think he tells Clara?’

‘God knows! I’d love to hear the tale he spins! Want a game of Monopoly?’

‘OK. Anything to stop you playing that horrible thing.’

If I had drawn a heart with an arrow through it at that time, I think it would probably have said ‘Julia’ at one end and ‘Tony’ at the other, with a couple of crossed out names underneath it. ‘Tim’. And ‘Chris’, I think.

In all the months we were ‘going out’, I made sure Tony Wealden never met my parents.

‘What’s wrong with them?’ he asked. ‘They can’t be worse than mine.’

‘Nothing,’ I said. Nothing, I thought, apart from the fact that my dad would probably be drunk and say something really embarrassing about me in front of you and my mum would probably not say anything at all or just not be there.

Sometimes, when we got fed up with wandering up and down the dreary High Street with its endless shoe shops, lighting showrooms and bakers, or got too cold lying in a secluded corner of the park with our hands up each other’s jumpers or down each other’s waistbands, he’d persuade me to go to his house, in the hope that his parents would be out. They never were. So we’d sit in the sitting room, well away from each other, trying to cover up the grass stains on our clothes and bruises on our necks, sipping Nescafé and eating digestive biscuits, while his parents looked at us with politely disapproving expressions.

‘How’s O-level revision going, then, Julia?’ Tony’s father would ask.

‘Fine, thank you, Mr Wealden.’

‘Wish I could say the same for Anthony. When was the last time you opened a textbook, son? You’ll never pass physics at this rate. Never make anything of yourself.’

I was impressed that Mr Wealden knew his son was taking physics. I wasn’t sure my father even knew that I was taking O-levels.

‘Would anyone like a sausage roll?’ Mrs Wealden chirped up one time, possibly to divert Mr Wealden from his animated, but not particularly interesting, lecture on the relative merits of a polytechnic or a university education. Then she made a little squeaking noise and covered her mouth with her hand. She had beautifully manicured fingernails, I noticed. And rather flushed cheeks.

‘Oh, silly old me! Of course you wouldn’t want pork, Julia.’

‘Actually I’m not a vegetarian any more, Mrs Wealden. I stopped being one last Christmas,’ I told her. ‘I’d love one. Thanks.’

The one advantage of my mother’s absences was the increased opportunity for Tony and me to indulge in undisturbed, unbridled foreplay. Once my father had shut
himself in his study for the evening, I’d bring Tony in through the back door and up to my bedroom where, to the sound of Max’s arpeggios, we’d snog for hours, our lips chapped and swollen, my cheeks rubbed raw by Tony’s emerging stubble, the flies of his shiny black school trousers stretched to bursting point.