The Bower Bird (10 page)

We go inside the cricket pavilion, where it’s much warmer, and sit huddled together, looking out through the doorway. It’s hilarious: the players are hidden in mist. The occasional head appears, moving fast, or an arm and hand thrown up into the air. It’s a match between invisible men. A clunk, a shout, and the red ball runs out of the fog and over the boundary, hit by a ghost Alistair I think.

‘Four,’ shouts one of the spectators and throws the ball back into the whiteness.

Inside the hut a woman is busy setting sandwiches and cakes on plates. A little girl, about six years old, is helping her. Oh strewth, it’s the woman who was in the same pew as me at the funeral. I hide under my cap and put up the collar of my parka. I don’t think she’s noticed me. That’s the trouble with a small town. You keep bumping into the same people.

The local team is out, which means they’ve all been bowled or caught or run out, or were called out
LBW
– leg before wicket – and they all come inside. Time for tea. The little girl runs to her daddy, who is one of the local team, and he lifts her up and kisses her.

The sea-mist has gone as quickly as it appeared so we go outside again, thank goodness. Alistair gets his plate of sandwiches and cakes and brings them out for us to share. He gets Mum and me cups of tea. He’s quite pleased with himself as he scored
55
runs. He says he should have got more: it’s a flat wicket, whatever that means.

The team is a great mix of people: there’s the vicar, a policeman, a convicted burglar (just out of prison, Alistair says, and when he isn’t being a burglar he’s usually a night club bouncer) a schoolboy, a barman, an undertaker, a cabinet maker, a teacher, a double-glazing fitter, a window cleaner, and a doctor, Alistair. He plays for a cricket team of doctors in Cornwall too, and he says they are going to play on the Scillies soon. They’ll stay on St Mary’s, and hire a boat to play on St Agnes and Tresco over a long weekend.

This is my cue. If I miss it now, I’ll never get another chance.

‘Mum, can we go too? I’ve always wanted to go to the Scillies. Oh, Mum, please.’

‘Yes, what a good idea, Gussie,’ says Alistair, ‘I could try and get you into my hotel.’

‘Well, I don’t know. How much will it cost?’ Mum is looking for problems.

It’s time for the other team to bat and Alistair has to field so we don’t get a chance to come to any decisions.

We watch for a little, while the men’s green shadows get longer and longer in the low sun. The horses are standing quietly, dozing on their hooves.

Mum drives me home and we pick up Indian take-away. Chicken chilli masala, pashwari nan, tarka dhall, rice and pappadoms. Yum.

Charlie takes up a ringside seat so I can feed her spicy chicken. Flo only likes the pappadoms.

We sit on the floor on cushions and eat from the low table, as we’re watching a movie,
Local Hero
. I’ve seen it three times. There’s a baby in a buggy that gets pushed around by various men throughout the story. I love the bit when the American asks who the baby’s father is, and the men look shifty and no one answers. It’s a car-free little village in Scotland, and every time the American goes onto the street he nearly gets run down by a moped. Also, the music is great. It reminds me of going to see movies with Daddy in London.

Oh, why did he have to leave? Mum is much better looking than any of those anorexics he runs after. She might be crotchety sometimes, but she’s a good cook and hasn’t let herself go to pot just because she’s old.

Charlie hangs around until I give her some chicken. She prefers spicy meat to ordinary cat food and if ever she smells coriander she’s sniffing the air and looking at me beseechingly. I clear away the dirty dishes and load the dishwasher in an attempt to keep Mum sweet.

‘Mum, can we go to the Scillies, ple-ease.’

‘I’ll think about it, darling.’

Alistair rings the next day and says there’s no accommodation left in St Mary’s. It’s always difficult getting a room there, apparently, and you have to book up weeks in advance.

‘Brett is birdwatching in the Scillies in October, could we go then?’

‘Birdwatching? I don’t particularly like birdwatching. Anyway, there’s nothing for me to do in the Scillies.’

‘Mum, you are so selfish. I like birdwatching. I could go on my own. You don’t have to come.’

‘On your own?’

‘With Brett and his mum and dad.’

‘But we don’t know them. No, definitely not. Maybe another time, darling.’

‘What other time? I might not have another time,’ I shout.

‘Gussie, that’s emotional blackmail. I’m ashamed of you.’

‘Anyway, Alistair is going.’ I hurl that titbit at her, slam the door, climb up to my room, wishing I could run, and have a good cry. I haven’t even got the consolation of cats as I shut them in the sitting room.

I hate feeling in the wrong or wronged. Somehow, everything has gone badly lately: not being able to start at the school, ruining the library books, crying at the funeral, not getting anywhere with the search for my Cornish family, and now this.

I really want to go to the Scillies.

I can’t go anywhere or do anything any more. I feel all knotted up and twisted inside my head and stomach.

I DON’T BELIEVE
it. Mum is dressed in shorts and T-shirt and trainers and she’s going for a run with Alistair. She still has the full make-up, her hair is tied back and she has sweatbands on her wrists and forehead.

‘You aiming on perspiring, Mum?’

‘I might.’ She takes a long look at herself in the full-length mirror.

‘Is my bum saggy?’

‘Yes it is. You should be in purdah.’

‘Thanks, Gussie darling. See you later.’

I’m sitting in the front garden in the sunshine under the sun-brolly, reading. The washing line next door is full of striped sheets flapping in the wind, though I didn’t see who put them there.

Half an hour later Alistair brings Mum home. She’s done something to her back. They were running along Porthmeor Beach and she made the mistake of twisting her head round to enjoy the view of the sea and ‘Something Went.’ That’ll teach her to try and act younger than her age.

She lies on the sofa and he gets her a painkiller and a whisky. He says scotch is a good analgesic, or was it anaesthetic? Why doesn’t he rub it on her back then?

‘Gussie, can you keep an eye on her tonight? I think she may have damaged a disc.’

Oh great.
I’m
going to have to look after
her
now. I fill up a hot water bottle and put it on her back and get a blanket to cover her.

‘Mum, do you know you’ve got hairy toes?’ Cripes, I hope I don’t get hairy toes.

‘Oh shut up Gussie, just shut up.’

She starts to cry. She looks awful. I fill up her whisky glass.

‘Oh that’s Far Too Much, darling,’ she says, but drinks it anyway.

MUM HAS MADE
a friend: the physiotherapist who is sorting out her back. We go to visit her at her house in Horsetown – spelt Halsetown – a mile or so outside St Ives. It’s so quiet and peaceful here among the granite outcrops, hardly any topsoil on the hills, just gorse and heather and furze, the eerie cry of buzzards wheeling above us, buttercups and daisies in the little fields, an invisible skylark singing.

There’s a little boy; he’s eight, called Gabriel. There’s also Phaedra, sixteen, and Troy, fifteen, who aren’t there today as they are surfing. Gabriel shows me his floppy-eared rabbits, two of them, lolloping around on the grass, and three stand-up straight ducks, mother, father and daughter, who are worrying the grass with their beaks. One of them is lame but is still a good layer, he says. A large pond is fed by a little stream. The ducks don’t ever go in the pond; they prefer the grass. Gabriel says there are frogs and toads and newts, but we don’t see any. There’s a golden cockerel with a very fine tail and smart red comb, two brown hens and six chicks. The mother hen is in protective custody in a little triangular hut and pen with her babies. One is black and the others are yellow. The black one spends most of its time on its mother’s back. Gabriel saves the best until last. We go upstairs and he opens the airing cupboard door and there on the bottom shelf on a layer of blankets and towels is their tabby cat, Treasure, with four kittens, three tabby and one black. They are three weeks old. The kittens tumble over each other and wobble on shaky legs. Treasure, whose original name was Tricia, but they changed it, looks very proud of herself. She is less than a year old, and this is her first litter, but she is a good mother, very attentive to her babies. There’s a tomcat too, Spider, who is tabby and white, not the father, as he’s been neutered, but he nevertheless brings Treasure mice every day.

Gabriel, having done his tour guide duty by me, races off and the next time I see him he is up a tree, wielding a full-sized saw and a hammer. He has made a whole system of platforms and roofs in the oak tree. His dad makes staircases and furniture and built their entire house. There’s a sign – James Darling and Son, Cabinet Makers – by the gate. There’s a painting of a staircase on the sign. Gabriel has obviously inherited a talent for building things.

His mum, whose name is Claire, says Gabriel spends most of his time up the tree, only coming down to go to school or sleep or eat, though sometimes he takes his tea up there. He has fixed a rope and pulley to get himself up into the branches. There’s also a Tarzan rope for swinging on.

I wander around the garden, following the ducks and rabbits. There’s a herb garden with bronze fennel and mint, clumps of thyme and basil and the tallest sunflowers, and huge bushes of lavender; a vegetable plot with potatoes and bean-poles, and a huge sweet-smelling poly-tunnel for salad vegetables, aubergines, tomatoes, pak choi and other exotic vegetables I don’t recognise. One part of the garden has been left wild, like a meadow, with all sorts of wild flowers – poppies, cornflowers, hemp agrimony and tall feathery grasses. Butterflies and bees love this place. So would I if I was a butterfly.

My favourite thing in the garden is a little hut tucked behind the house, a cabin, with a rounded roof made of corrugated metal, a little like a gypsy caravan. There’s a deck all round it with potted scarlet pelargoniums and marigolds, and a little garden of its own with white and grey pebbles in patterns around the plants.

I am desperate to look inside. I can’t see Mum or Claire to ask permission, but I make an executive decision, climb the wooden steps and peep through the red checked curtains of the window. There’s no one in. It looks very tidy: a sofa, a single divan bed with a red-checked blanket on it and a low table at one end by the stove, the kitchen and table at the other end and a bead curtain doorway to the bathroom, I suppose. There’s a bookshelf and a framed old photograph, a black and white portrait of a girl, slender, frizzy-haired, in a white muslin frock. She holds a posy of flowers. It could be a wedding photo.

A stream runs alongside the cabin, with a little wooden bridge over it where a large fluffy tabby sits watching me watching her. ‘Hello,’ I say to her, but she turns her head away and gazes haughtily into the stream, where tiny brown trout flash in the sun.

Beyond the stream are huge Scots pines with broken off lower branches, and young crows making a horrible din as if they are strangling each other. Hidden cows moo and breathe heavily in the next field. There’s a poem about the cow I read the other day – something about one end milk the other moo.

We eat tea under an apple tree, with a blanket spread on the grass. There’s fresh bread baked by Gabriel’s dad, who appears briefly and makes himself a sandwich.

‘Saw you with Alistair, didn’t I, at cricket, Saturday?’

‘Oh yes,’ says Mum, ‘I thought I recognised you, you were batting with him, weren’t you?’

‘He’s a proper batsman, not like me. He can hit it.’

We stuff ourselves with crabmeat, ham, cheese and salad. Then summer pudding with cream. The floppy-eared rabbits, ducks and chickens go ambling by in their own little worlds, intent on searching for food. Wasps try their luck but no one gets stung.

I think of Grandma and her wasp trap: a jammy jam-jar half full of water. The unsuspecting wasp crawls into the pot after the sweetness and stickiness and drowns. She was a stealthy killer, my Grandma. She had a running battle with caterpillars and spiders. No cobwebs allowed in her house.

I’m always arguing with Mum about cobwebs. She seems to think they shouldn’t be in the corners of rooms or wrapped around the lampshades or books, but what about the poor little spiders that depend on food that gets caught in their traps: bluebottles and fruit flies, wasps and other flying insects? She hates those, so she should encourage spiders. I expect she’s inherited her arachnophobia from her mother. I think she enjoys wielding the very beautiful feather duster I gave her once for a birthday. It is made of ostrich feathers. I should never have given it to her. Perhaps I could hide it. I wonder what those very thin spiders you find in kitchen drawers live on? And old shoe boxes? What do they find to survive on in enclosed spaces? Mites or something, I suppose.

Treasure joins us and eats our scraps of cheese and the fatty bits on the ham. I expect she’s hungry all the time, with four growing babies to feed. Gabriel remains in his tree, sawing away and singing to himself a made up tune of made up words. I wonder if he has ever tried to saw off the branch he is sitting on. The saw is nearly as big as he is.