The Bower Bird (2 page)

Daddy isn’t being at all helpful. He keeps saying he’ll let me have his family tree, but he hasn’t even given me a leaf yet. Mum is being positively obstructive: she doesn’t want anything to do with Daddy’s family and assumes they won’t want anything to do with us. Anything Daddy related is a no-no. She has the screaming abdabs if I even mention him.

There’s a wildlife warden we met out at Peregrine Cottage – the house we rented on the cliff – who said she has some relations called Stevens, but I’ve sort of lost touch with her since we moved. Ginnie.

It’s sad how people drift in and out of our lives. Like my London friend Summer. I call her my friend, but I haven’t seen her since we came to Cornwall. Maybe now we’re settled in our own house, she will come and stay during school holidays. Or maybe I’ll never see her again.

I don’t suppose I’ll ever see Shoeburyness again. Or smell the smell of it: cockle shells and seaweed and mud. The tide comes in very fast from a long way out, where the longest pier in the world ends. The water is a muddy brown colour though, not like the clear blue-green of St Ives. But there were wooden breakwaters to climb and balance on and I liked the pebbly beach, and finding white quartz stones to rub together to make a spark. Illuminations and neon lights shone all along the Golden Mile at Southend, where we bought fish and chips. Under the arches of a bridge there’s a row of cafés with striped awnings and plastic tables and chairs set out on the pavement. Cafés with nautical names like The Mermaid, The Barge, Captain’s Table. That was where I had my first experiences of eating out: sausage and mash or egg and chips, always with a cup of tea.

Grandpop and Grandma would take me to the pebbly beach and they’d hire deckchairs and we’d have fish-paste sandwiches and apples for tea. I could still run and climb then, and I would jump from roof to roof of the beach huts. (The beach huts had names too:
Sunny Days, Happy Days, Cosy Corner, Chez Nous
. That’s French for
Our House.
)

Grandma was scandalised and tried to stop me, but Grandpop would cheer me on.

‘You can do it, princess.’

I don’t look like a princess. I am small for my age and skinny and my skin is rather mauvish, I think. My hair Mum calls dark blonde, but to be honest it’s mouse. ‘Nothing Wrong with Mouse.’

‘Oh, the elephants!’ I unpack a troupe of elephants, three of them, each one a bit bigger than the one before, all with turned up ivory tusks and mother of pearl toes. I remember them standing on a window ledge. They are made of some heavy black wood, and carved. Looking closely, I see that they are slightly damaged – a piece of ear gone here, a tusk there. I remember them as being perfect, and Grandma saying, ‘Be careful, my love.’ I used to invent journeys for them across Africa, searching for greener pastures. I imagined them as a family – father, mother and baby. That was before I learned that the bull elephant doesn’t hang around to bring up his baby. The mother has to do that on her own.

There’s a pink-brown stone Buddha too, which I always loved to hold as it felt cold even on the hottest day, as if it contained something otherworldly. It has a smiling face, as if this god has a sense of humour. You don’t get that impression about Jesus or God.

‘Where shall we put them, Mum?’

‘Have them in your room if you want.’

I put them on the stairs so I can carry them up next time I climb to my attic room. There are little piles of towels and sheets, clothes and books there already, waiting to be carried to their homes, like travellers in family groups at a bus station.

Grandpop travelled all over the world when he was in the Royal Navy and brought back lots of exotic souvenirs. We unpack a Japanese tea set they used to keep safe in a glass cabinet, thin porcelain coloured red and gold with little figures and landscapes.

‘We’ll use these,’ Mum says.

‘But aren’t they terribly precious and worth lots of money?’

‘No, it’s only Japanese export stuff. We should enjoy them. What’s the point of having pretty things gathering dust?’

Mum’s good about stuff like that. She never makes a fuss if I break something. They’re Only Things and Accidents Happen. I pick up a cup and look through it at the sun shining. It’s a lovely thing.

‘No dishwasher for these, Gussie, you’ll have to wash them by hand.’

‘No probs, Mum.’ I am learning how to speak Strine – Australian – for when and if my new friend Brett comes to see me. No Worries. Crikey.

Mum sleeps in the main bedroom, the master bedroom, or I suppose it should be called the mistress bedroom, on the floor below me. There’s a big bay window and the same view that I have, but slightly lower of course. The terrace faces south, there’s plenty of sunshine all day long, and there’s a little slab of concrete along the front path that gets the last of the sun. We sit there together on cushions and she drinks her whisky and I have a freshly squeezed orange juice or elderflower juice and we talk.

I think we talk more easily because we are not looking at each other. It’s as if we are in a car, sitting next to each other, but looking ahead, and it’s easier to say important things if you are not looking into each other’s eyes. We have our eyes closed, because the sun is still so bright, and it’s as if we are in a dream. I feel close to Mum when we talk like that.

‘Don’t you still love Daddy just a little bit?’ I sometimes ask.

‘No I bloody don’t. He slept with other women. Why should I love him?’

‘Okay, okay. I only asked.’

‘I still feel very hurt, Gussie. Bastard! He betrayed me – us. He betrayed us.’

‘Yeah, but if he wanted you to forgive him and he wanted to be with us, here, now, what would you say?’

‘Fuck off, probably.’ She sniffs. ‘Anyway, we’re okay on our own, aren’t we?’

‘I suppose.’

MUM HAS GONE
out for the evening with Dr Dobbs – Alistair.

I’m playing Scrabble with Mrs Lorn. She is letting me win without much of a fight. Also I keep getting good letters – the high scoring C, Q and X so far. I put down all my letters straight away – QUIXOTIC, how about that! That’s got to be the best score I’ve ever had. Probably the best score anyone has ever had in the entire history of Scrabble – 72, as it was on a double word score, plus 50 for putting down all my letters at once. She’s getting all the rubbish, lots of vowels. She calls me ‘my girl’ with an extra ‘r’ in girl. Mrs Lorn has this habit of whistling when she’s thinking – hymns, mostly. Sometimes she breaks into song. I do like Scrabble. I wish I wasn’t winning so easily though. She’s so old, she has probably given up the idea of winning.

‘How old are you, Mrs Lorn?’

‘As old as my feet but younger than my teeth and hair.’

She cackles like an old witch. ‘Anyway, my girl, don’t you know it’s bad manners to ask a lady her age?’

‘Why is it? Mum says she’s fifty-two but her tits are only thirty-nine.’

Mrs Lorn screams with shocked laughter.

I like old people, apart from when they hug me or do that thing with my lips, you know, pinch them together so your mouth is an O and they make you say ‘Sausages’. Though no one’s done that to me for years. It’s a torture aimed solely at small children who can’t defend themselves. Like when they pull off your nose and show it to you and put it back again before you realise it’s only their thumb and your nose is still where it always was, in the middle of your face. You’ve got to be very young to believe that. When you get to five it’s too late, except for Father Christmas and fairies.

When I was three I can remember sitting at the window on Christmas Eve and I saw Father Christmas’s sleigh pulled by reindeer in the sky. I really believed I saw it.

It must be wonderful to grow old like Mrs Lorn and know so much and have experienced a lot of life. It must make you wise if you can remember all those things you have heard and seen and read.

There’s a old man who has three retriever dogs on leads accompanying him as he braves the roads at Carbis Bay in his electric wheelchair. He looks very heroic, as if he’s in a horse-drawn chariot or on a dog sledge. I haven’t seen him for a while, not since we left the cottage. We used to wave to him from the car but he didn’t wave back. Probably he isn’t able to. I wonder what he knows, and what he used to be before he became lopsided? And another very old man, always dressed immaculately in tweed suit and pork pie hat, straw hat in summer (Mr Dapper we call him), walks with the help of a stick all the way from Carbis Bay to St Ives and back each morning along the main road. He looks sad. Lonely. He’s a guest at an old people’s home.

Why do they put old people’s homes in out of the way places? If I were old I would want to be in the middle of things, not on the outside ready to be shoved out of life when the time came. I suppose that’s what I felt like when I was in the wilderness out at the cottage on the cliff. Apart from society. An outcast, cast away. Here in St Ives there’s human life all around me.

Mum and Alistair have come back and he’s off again, giving Mrs Lorn a lift home. She was delighted.

Mum looks flushed and smells of cigarettes and whisky and other people’s beer. Her hair looks good. Her skirt’s a bit short though. She must like him a lot.

Alistair’s not half as handsome as Daddy. Daddy looks like a cross between Keanu Reeves and Bob Geldof, but not as scruffy as Bob Geldof. Alistair looks like a Dobbin horse, with his big ears and long face and nose. But he has kind eyes and a nice smile and always wears interesting ties. It must be difficult being a man and having to wear boring suits to work. I suppose a tie is one item you can decorate yourself with.

Like the bower bird. I think they attract females by making their nests, or bowers, look interesting.

‘Bed, Gussie, Bed. Off You Go, Late. Late. Late.’

‘Where did you go, Mum? Did you have a good time?’

‘Sloop Inn. Fun, it was fun.’

‘Did you meet anyone?’

‘Alistair knows everyone.’

‘Might he know Dad’s relations, do you think?’

‘Gussie. It’s not the sort of thing you ask a man the first time he takes you out. You ask him. I’m going to bed, and You Should Too. Tired. You Look Tired.’

‘Okay, okay, I’m going.’

I take my time getting upstairs, stop halfway to stroke Flo, who is on guard on the landing. She is such a school prefect, always keeping the other two cats in order, on their toes. I would be too, in their shoes. On their toes, in their shoes… interesting, these foot metaphors or whatever. Standing up for your beliefs. Filling his shoes. Knocking the socks off… Language is interesting.

I’d like to go to a school where they teach Latin, so I could study the roots of words. The local school is good apparently, but doesn’t have Latin. I’ll have to teach myself if I really want to learn. There was a
Winnie the Pooh
in Latin at our last house.
Winnie ille Pu
.

Lucus Lucubris Joris
is Eeyore’s Gloomy Place, which is
tristis et palustris
, rather boggy and sad.

Locus inondatus
– floody place.

Domus mea
– my house.

What about this one!
Fovea insidiosa ad heffalumpus catandos idonea
(Pooh trap for heffalumps).

I wrote those down so I could remember them. They were on the maps at both ends of the book. I like maps. There are lovely maps on the end pages of the Swallows and Amazons books too.

Mum said she entered her O-level German oral exam only knowing two phrases. One of them was –
Ich erkannte ihn an seinem Bart
– I recognised him by his beard. And the other phrase was –
Ich muss nach Hause gehen
– I must go home now. She managed to incorporate both into her conversation, and charmed the examiner with her knowledge of art – there was a Pieter Brueghel print to talk about. She spoke in English for most of the time and still passed.

I don’t believe everything she tells me. She’s a dreadful exaggerator.

Mum potters about downstairs, filling the dishwasher and putting the washing in the drier. Then she comes up too, carrying her hot water bottle. She feels the cold almost as much as me.

It’s comforting having her in the room below, moving about, snoring in her sleep.

Our gulls are settled on the roof, hunkered down for the night, their heads tucked under their wings. There’s no moon tonight and it’s very cloudy. The wind is coming from the back of the house, the west, so I can open the front window without it rattling.

Tomorrow I’ll go to the library and look for poetry books. There were loads at our last place.

I wonder if I’ll ever meet Mr Writer – that’s my name for the man who owns Peregrine Cottage. Maybe he’s a murderer doing time. Or a famous poet on a world tour. He could be a bank manager, or a drug dealer, or a gunrunner. So many possibilities. Does anyone ever want to grow up to be a gunrunner or a car park attendant or a dinner lady?

I always wanted to be a cowboy until I realised, because I was a girl I could never ever be a cow
boy
. I was devastated that God had done this to me. It wasn’t fair.

It didn’t stop me dressing as a boy for quite a while afterwards though. I felt I had to gradually dissolve my boyhood and think myself slowly into being a girl. It wasn’t easy.