all, Margot missed her mother. She was with her, but she missed her. If only her real mother were here now, and not this imposter. Ma, she could say, I never got it, your whole homemaking thing. And her real mother would say: Of course you did, darling – just look at the wonderful child you’ve made! Or she could say: Ma, I had a terrible show last night; Pia woke me up early, worried about Leroy’s visit, and now I’m exhausted. And her real mother would say: Poor thing. You have a nap while I take care of supper. I’ll make sure there’s fair play.
If only it were possible to say to a living person: I miss the way you were in the eighties. Leroy today, for example, bore no resemblance to the Leroy that once was. He’d changed so horribly over the years that you’d have to identify him from his dental records. For a long time she’d stayed in the marriage, waiting for the original Leroy, as though he were a missing person who might return if she were only faithful to his memory. Leroy would be in the same room, and yet she almost strained towards the door to see if the real Leroy wasn’t about to arrive. That time when he’d left her at a restaurant table and chatted for ages to a gorgeous theatrical agent dining alone at an adjacent table. Talk, talk; laugh, laugh. Not once did either of them look back at her. She’d eaten her soup surreptitiously, not sure whether to observe her husband flirting with the beautiful, engaging woman. Once he’d talked to her, Margot, in that animated way, reaching out to touch her wrist when they were in accord on some point. If only she had poured soup all over him there and then, instead of thinking about it forevermore. What a missed opportunity: life was full of them. Tureens full of hot tomato soup not poured. Not so much to humiliate him as to mark him out for other women: beware.
Curtis said he was going inside to write an e-mail. Pia said she was going to investigate a murder.
“How will you do that?” asked Curtis.
“I’m going to look for clues. I’ll probably find some on Ponder Steps or on Duignam Road.”
She contemplated the jackets hanging on pegs near the door and settled on Mr Morland’s pea coat, with the collar turned up. The shopping list was an ideal size for a notebook, so she tucked that into the jacket pocket, along with a plastic bag for evidence.
“What else do you need to solve the murder?” asked Curtis solemnly.
“A magnifying glass.”
He smiled and brought it to her. “Will you be safe?”
She scowled at him from inside her middle-aged male character.
“Sorry,” said Curtis.
The street looked quite different to her now that she was a detective. She hadn’t realised what a suspect place it was, awash with evidence. She picked a discarded train ticket out of the gutter and examined it through the magnifying glass. A pedestrian walked by, and Pia adopted a casual demeanour, almost the lounging teenager. When she felt safely unobserved once more, she climbed through the railings of Ponder Steps to explore the long grass. She felt aware of her new size. Once she would have slid through easily, but now the railings resisted her. The land on the other side of the railing was unkempt, rocky and littered. No one gardened here – plants seeded themselves at will, taking what rain they could collect. Curtis said that burglars sometimes stashed their stuff in dense vegetation and came back for it later. She parted the sun-baked grass. There it was: incontrovertible evidence. A T-shirt belonging to the deceased. She stuffed it into her plastic bag.
Some girls she knew were passing along Duignam Road above. They wore tight vest-tops that showed their new breasts.
“What are you doing down there, Pia? Are you playing? Pia’s playing, everyone.”
“Why are you wearing that funny jacket, Pia? Who are you pretending to be?”
Pia hid the magnifying glass in one of the capacious pockets of Mr Morland’s coat. They saw through her, the bitches. All the joy of the morning drained away. She was not a detective but a clumsily sized thirteen-year-old girl wearing a ridiculous, hot coat.
“I’m not playing, stupid,” she lied. “I’m collecting rubbish.”
“But why are you wearing that coat? You look like a homeless person.”
Pia went home in shame and lay face down on her still-rumpled sheets, watched by the sympathetic trolls. The bitches were right. She had failed to turn into a teenager. She hated herself.
Bella sighed as she brought her aching bones down onto the mat beside the child of the house.
Curtis found Mr Morland’s used toothpick and took it to the kitchen bin, since it would slip through the weave of the study’s wastepaper basket and irritate Margot. Then he sat down to type an e-mail to his father.
Hi Dad,
How are you getting on? I have had some thoughts about the pasture. There is still time, I believe, to disc, lime, seed and fertilise. You could phone around to ask for help with the ploughing. Hell, your neighbours owe you a favour or two. The water problem can also be solved if you can just get Dick’s backside onto that bulldozer to push the earth wall into place.
I really think you can’t risk losing out on this calf deal just because you haven’t done a simple thing like get the grass to grow! I hope you’ll take this in the right way.
Your straight-talking son,
Curtis
So many things were falling apart on the farm. Curtis would like to be there, repairing fences and chicken hoks, devising systems against jackals, buying dip and putting the Ngunis through the crush before redwater struck, and not afterwards, as his father so often did. He took care not to make the mail sound patronising. It was robust, he thought, but not unkind. There was a limit to what the eighty-four-year-old could achieve.
The phone rang. It was Leroy, wanting Margot or Pia. Curtis took a message. Then he sat there for a moment, listening to the house. It felt sad. He walked upstairs and called out, “Pia?”
There was no answer, but a sound from deep within the house like a breath or a shifting sheet. Curtis looked into Pia’s room. She was lying face down on her bed, but in a way that suggested her awareness of his presence. Bella thumped her tail at Curtis’s arrival.
“What’s the matter, girl? I didn’t hear you come in.”
“I want to throw everything away,” Pia mumbled into her sheet.
“What?” asked Curtis. “What is it that you want to throw away?”
Pia reached her hand out and threw a troll across the room.
“You don’t like your trolls any more?”
“They’re babyish.”
Curtis sat on the edge of the bed and listened to Pia’s story.
“I think those girls were secretly jealous of you because you were happy. Keep playing for as long as you like. Let childhood end when it wants to end. As for these guys,” he said, picking up a troll, “they’re not toys, they’re collector’s items. Do you know how they came about?”
Pia turned over and rested her face on her hand as Curtis told the story of the poor Danish woodcutter who could not afford a Christmas gift for his daughter and so carved the world’s first troll, with sheep’s wool for its
