The Bower Bird (17 page)

And I was.

But when we saw my paediatric cardiologist in London, Mum told him what had happened and he said I shouldn’t go to hot countries any more. Getting too hot or too cold would be a strain on my heart.

Daddy was hardly ever with us in the winter. He had to stay home and work. He did come to visit us once in Africa for three weeks. They shouted at each other.

Mum tucks me up on the sofa. I don’t feel like climbing any more stairs just now. She has frown lines between her eyebrows as if she’s angry with me for being ill, but I know she’s only anxious, scared I’ll die suddenly. What she doesn’t seem to be aware of is that I could die of something else, not my failing heart, something totally unrelated to my pulmonary atresia. I could get run over by a bus – maybe not in St Ives, but when we’re in Penzance or Truro. I could prick my finger on a rose and die of tetanus fever. I expect that’s what the Sleeping Beauty had. Didn’t she prick her finger and go into a coma?

Alistair has arrived. He examines me. He’s gentle. I like him, even if he does look like a horse. A very
friendly
horse with an unusual taste in halters.

WORD FOR YESTERDAY
, but I have carried it over to today as I forgot to use it, was:
subterfuge: an evasive devise, especially in discussion; a refuge
.

Another reminder from the library arrived in the post today and I only just intercepted it in time. I’m not up to all this subterfuge. I feel especially guilty since Mum has suggested that Hayley tutors me at home. Brilliant idea. I do hope she agrees. I know she hasn’t found a full time teaching job locally. Mum also wondered if I would like Brett’s Dad, Steve, to teach me some Maths and Science. That would be so cool. I might even go to their house for lessons. That way I’d see more of Brett. Haven’t seen him for a while.

Our young gull flies well now. He still comes back to roost on the roof at night with his parents. He must be feeding himself, as he no longer asks his parents for food. Or rather, he does ask sometimes, but his mum simply turns her head away and looks pointedly towards the harbour as if to say – dinner’s out there, go and find it.

He is the same size and shape as his mother but is patterned like a tabby cat with brown speckles. He still can’t talk properly though, and still has only one word to his vocabulary – Wheeee.

I haven’t looked at the pond lately. It hasn’t stopped raining for a week.

NOTE
: The real word for today is:
Plash – a shallow pool, a dash of water, a splashing sound, to dabble in the water: to splash.

I’ll try and use it at least once today so I don’t forget it.

Great news! Steve can give me one lesson a week, after school, and Hayley is coming twice a week to work with me on English. I don’t think of that as work at all. I love books. Hayley’s bringing me a reading list.

How ace is my mum!

I’m having a close look at the wedding photograph of Mum and Daddy in my room. She looks so pretty, so much younger than she looks now. After all, it was thirteen years ago. Age has suddenly caught up with her. Daddy is much younger than she is. She was a cradle snatcher, Grandma used to say.

Mummy says when you have been admired for your prettiness it’s hard getting old. (One problem I won’t have, then.) You feel the loss so much more than if you have never had that luck. She’s says she’s gone from hippie rock chick to Mother Theresa in a year.

Mother Theresa is a nun, isn’t she? Does that mean Mum’s not sleeping with Alistair? Or is she referring to the fact that she is dressing like a nun? She started to cover up her arms, neck, chest, legs, everything. What’s left to expose? Shoulders, wrists and hands, and her feet. She still has pretty feet (apart from the hairy toes).

‘Mum, are you sleeping with Alistair?’

‘Gussie! My love life is my Own Private Business.’

‘Yes, but are you, Mum? I think I have a right to know. Anyway, isn’t it illegal for a doctor to be intimate with a patient?’ I know that from a
Woman’s Hour
programme.

‘He’s not my
GP
, he’s yours.’

Ah. So that answers that question. She is sleeping with him.

I suppose she has every right to find someone else. Daddy left her for another woman even if the other woman has now left him. But somehow it makes me feel that my parents’ divorce is one step closer. I know I hadn’t really believed that my parents would get together again, but I can’t face the idea that there isn’t ever going to be that possibility: never to be a family again.

Here’s what I know about my Cornish family:

My father is Jackson Stevens, born
1955
.

His father was Hartley Stevens, born
1900
, died
1975
.

Hartley had a sister, Fay.

Daddy’s mother was Molly Jackson, born
1920
, died
1980
.

Grandfather’s father was a photographer, Amos Hartley Stevens.

That’s it. Not much, but it’s a start.

Having decided to become a writer, I have writer’s block. Where shall I write? I haven’t got a desk or anything in my room and I certainly don’t want to write in the sitting room in full view of my mother. What if I want to write something rude or horrible about her? She’d see it. Also, I need a really good pen and a beautiful notebook. And what can I write about anyway? How do writers get to be writers? My journal is the only thing I write every day. I really would like a computer.

Perhaps photography would be easier. It’s in my Cornish blood, after all. I hope I haven’t lost that particular blood through my various operations. You do bleed a lot when you are undergoing major surgery. And I’ve had lots of other people’s blood in transfusions. I feel as if I have got some Cornishness deep inside me, nevertheless. I feel as if this is Home with a capital H.

We have breakfast out, Mum and me, every Saturday. We take turns choosing where to go. Today we are in a café on Tregenna Hill and sit by a window so we can see people passing. Claire is joining us with Gabriel. Mum is having the Full English. She says she deserves it after a week of All Bran and apricots. I’m having a bacon sarni. That sounds as if it could be Strine. I’ll ask Brett. There are lots of shoppers in the street and people stop and talk to each other. I expect everyone knows everyone else. It must make you feel safe when you recognise most people around you. It’s like a huge clan or one large extended family.

At the next table there is a family with a little girl about four. She’s wearing a pink dress and eating a huge pink ice-cream. She says to her daddy, ‘I’m going to cut off your head and eat your brains with a spoon.’ He looks mock horrified and she screams with laughter.

There’s a small group of elderly men standing on the corner at the bottom of the hill by the bank. There’s no seat, but they gather there in a row on the narrow pavement most days and watch the world go by, laughing and greeting old friends, and I suppose talking about their aches and pains, and who has just died, and how the local rugby teams are doing. One of them I recognise from the fishermen’s lodges but he doesn’t notice me.

Claire invites us out to their place tomorrow for lunch. We’ll meet the rest of the family, unless the surf is good somewhere, in which case Phaedra and Troy will follow the waves. Gabriel is of course up in his tree. He has built a veritable palace of platforms and ropes. All the trees have lost their leaves and only the bare bones are visible. The chicks are now pullets and the kittens have all gone to new homes. The floppy-eared rabbits haven’t changed a bit, except that they spend more time in their hutch. The ducks are still waddling or limping and worrying the grass.

I have a present for Gabriel: a Darth Vader sword. Last time we came here he was playing at Star Wars with a rolled paper weapon. Mum said not to give it to him until we leave for home but it starts to rain very heavily and Gabriel comes in looking bedraggled and miserable so I give him the gift. He unwraps it and his little face lights up. He loves it. Claire isn’t too happy though. And Phaedra and Troy, who have been in their rooms, come out to see what the horrible noise is, and Troy, who is about six feet tall, confiscates the offending toy that’s flashing lights and playing a dreadful tinny sound, and puts it on a high shelf, and Gabriel goes back outside in a huff.

‘He’ll be all right, dear of him,’ Claire smiles at me.

Phaedra is auburn-haired, slender and straight-backed and looks like a ballet dancer. Troy looks like a surfer – blond straggly hair and tanned still from a summer of riding waves. He’s taller than his sister.

‘Sorry, that was my fault,’ I say.

Troy goes back to his room and his music and Phaedra, who is the most beautiful girl I have ever seen, joins us at the huge kitchen table, which their father built. He comes in soaking wet and dries his hair on a towel. He washes his hands and sits down at the head of the table in a string-seated hand crafted chair with arms.

‘How’s your back?’ he asks Mum.

‘Better thanks, much better, thanks to Claire.’

‘And what are you up to, young Gussie?’

‘I’ve been taking photographs of old men,’ I say. I have my camera with me.

‘What old men?’ Mum is disbelieving.

‘Old fishermen, mostly, on the harbour.’

‘My mother’s father was a good photographer, wasn’t he, Claire?’

‘He was, honey, yes.’

That’s the trouble with modern cameras. If you own a camera and can take a picture that’s in focus you think you are a good photographer.

‘Moss, your Mum’s arrived.’

A tall, handsome woman with a halo of frizzy white hair appears from under a large black umbrella, which she shakes vigorously at the doorway before taking off her wellington boots.

‘Hello, everyone.’

‘It’s very plashy out today, isn’t it,’ I say, to impress them with my vocabulary.

They look at each other as if I’m mad.

We’re all having tea – Mum made a carrot cake especially, and I helped. They provide most of the food though: duck-egg Spanish omelette with courgettes and herbs from the garden and home-made bread, cooked that morning by Gabriel’s dad. Gabriel comes in shortly after his gran and sits next to her, stuffing himself with everything in sight and gazing longingly at his sword on the high shelf. She puts an arm around him to hug him and he wriggles out of her embrace.

Phaedra goes to sixth-form college by bus every day and Troy is in his last year at St Ives School. He says it’s pretty boring. Can’t be half as boring as being at home all the time, I think, but don’t say.

After tea we play Monopoly. Or rather I play Monopoly with Gabriel and Phaedra and their gran. We play at the big table. I sit on a very handsome chair, which has pale coloured wood arms and a string seat. The other dining chairs are different shapes but all hand-made, or craftsman-built.

Treasure is asleep on a blue and yellow rag rug by the Rayburn, enjoying a well-earned holiday after bringing up her babies. She doesn’t seem at all bothered at not having them around any more. She’s got Spider of course, her best friend Spider. He is curled up on a beautiful chair, like no other chair I have ever seen. It has curved arms and a seat of woven string and the back looks as if it has been carved from one piece of wood. There are similar stools, I notice.

‘Did your dad make the chair?’ I ask Phaedra.

‘No, Grandpa Darling did. He made furniture too.’

There’s the lovely homely smell of clothes airing above the Rayburn, almost scorching but not quite.

Phaedra is in a St Ives Youth Theatre production soon. It’s a local theatre company for
6–18
year-olds, and she has been going to it for years. They do all sorts of musicals, like
The Wizard of Oz
and
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat
and they did
Fame
in the summer. She has to go to rehearsals several times a week in an old Wesleyan chapel in St Ives that has been made into a theatre. She’s got long rubbery legs and this amazing fuzzy hair the colour of sunsets.

Gabriel is very quiet. Does he still speak? I don’t think I have heard him say a word today. It’s stopped raining and he wants to go outside with his sword. He speaks!

‘Is that all right, love? (to Claire). ‘Go on then, Monkey,’ says his gran, and he whoops for joy and climbs like a chimp to the high shelf.

‘He’s got a crush on you, Gussie.’ Phaedra says.

‘Really? A crush on me?’

‘Yeah, he thinks you’re geet ace.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It’s Cornish slang for wonderful,’ says their gran.

The game sort of falls apart when he goes, which is a shame as I had managed to buy two of the orange properties, Park Lane and three stations. Phaedra says she has homework to do and goes to her room. Mum and the other adults are drinking wine and laughing. Mum looks quite young when she laughs.

I’d like to stay here forever.

When their gran says she better get back to her cabin, I say, ‘Oh, please may I have a look inside?’