Owen crumpled the newspaper and tossed it into the bin. She peeled off her rubber gloves, and fumbled in her pocket for cigarettes. She wouldn’t smoke one: she just liked to remind herself they were there. ‘You’ve made a good job of those,’ she said, eyeing the racks. They gleamed. ‘Stick ’em back in the oven, and we’ll have a nice cup of coffee.’
A drink and a chat were Mrs Owen’s only reward for her labours, and I never had the heart to refuse. I filled the kettle.
‘Not too strong, petal,’ Mrs Owen warned. ‘Gives me palpitations.’ She settled herself at the table. I knew she would have liked that cigarette, but my father didn’t smoke, and the scent of tobacco mixed with the cleaning smells would get us both into trouble.
The kitchen in our house was small, and hadn’t been altered since my father and mother had moved in after I was born in 1962. There was just room for the red Formica-topped table and two red plastic chairs. The cream paint on the units was chipped, and the plywood cupboards on the walls had sliding doors that had warped and sometimes got stuck half open. I hadn’t been able to close the one from which I’d taken the coffee jar, and I saw Mrs Owen staring thoughtfully at it. ‘Time your dad redecorated,’ she said, as I put the coffee in front of her.
I imagined the smouldering Gary Bennett, on a ladder slapping paint on the ceiling while I watched his overalls tightening over his muscular bum every time he lifted his arm. I knew it wouldn’t happen. My dad wouldn’t pay someone else to decorate; he’d be up the ladder himself. Or, more likely, he wouldn’t do it at all.
‘He always says he’s too busy,’ I said, hoping this would prompt Mrs Owen to talk about Gary, who had recently done her kitchen. But she wasn’t so easily led.
‘And them cupboards ought to go,’ she said. ‘Don’t cost much to buy a whole new kitchen from MFI. Wouldn’t take a practical man like him long.’
Poppy’s mother had ordered a German-made kitchen that had cost more than a thousand pounds. It had little violet and green sprigs of flowers on the doors, and a lovely marbled worktop. But Poppy’s kitchen was three times the size of ours, and there was a swimming-pool in their garden. Her dad drove a big grey Daimler, and her mum had a sky-blue estate as a runaround.
‘You are quiet,’ said Mrs Owen. ‘What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Tired. Didn’t sleep too good.’
‘Your father should never have sent you to that school.’ Mrs Owen’s brow corrugated like her curls. ‘It’s wicked how hard they work you. And you always with your nose in a book. I don’t know, mine were never like you.’ Mrs Owen’s two daughters had both married sensible milkmen. They’d met them together at a dance in the church hall, and had moved into neighbouring streets to raise fat, milky babies. Their idea of serious reading was the knitting pattern in Woman’s Weekly. ‘What I say is, what’s the point of teaching girls about science?’
My fingers traced an ammonite’s spiral on the tabletop. I was keeping an ear open for the pips.
Mrs Owen took the hint and lumbered to her feet, her coffee only half finished.
‘Better be off. Keith’ll be on his way.’ She always pretended she was going because her husband would be home soon, rather than my father. ‘My goodness, it’s gone black over Bill’s mother’s.’ She peered out of the kitchen window at the gathering rainclouds. ‘Switch the light on, Katie, let the dog see the rabbit.’
She was always coming out with these weird phrases, invocations to appease the everyday gods of women’s things and weather. I peeled myself from the plastic chair and got up to find a clean tea-towel while she rinsed the mugs.
‘Your dad’ll be soaked. Give him my best, won’t you?’ She knew full well I never told him she’d been there.
As she put the mugs away, I had a sudden urge to give her a hug, yearning for the feeling of her big soggy bosom against my cheek. But that wasn’t something I ever did. She ruffled the top of my head when she went past me on her way to the door, and like a cat I pushed up against her hand. That was the closest we came to physical affection. When I heard the front door close behind her, I sat down again at the table and thought about my mother.
My last memory of my mother isn’t even a memory. It’s more a feeling of being warm and enclosed, the details so sharp yet at the same time insubstantial that I may have made the whole thing up. It’s Christmas, or near it, I think–there are lots of glittery things around, and I can see firelight on shining spheres. A rack of clothes is drying in front of the fire, wet mittens, socks and my little blue coat, giving off a damp woollen smell. I’ve been playing out in the snow, but now it’s dark and time for bed, and I’ve eaten a bowlful of something sloppy and sweet and comforting that’s a bright orange-yellow. I’m wearing my pyjamas, and I’m sleepy, curled up on the wing backed sofa, and my mother is reading to me, a story about Wynken, Blynken and Nod, three fishermen who are being rocked to sleep in the arms of a crescent moon sailing through the sky like a boat. Or was it a wooden
shoe? I am drifting too, wrapped in the wet, warm smell of the steaming clothes.
Whether that was the last time I had seen my mother I wasn’t sure, but it was what I remembered as the last. Before the New Year she was gone. Every December after that my father brought out the packets of tinsel, the lantern-shaped Christmas-tree lights that always seemed to fuse and that he patiently fixed, year after year. But it was never the same. The unearthly boat in which Wynken, Blynken and Nod sailed the skies had taken away my mother too.
My father never talked about how she had left, or why.
‘She’s gone away,’ he said vaguely, if I cried for her when I was small. ‘Sssh now. Be good, or she might hear you and never come back.’
But she never did come back, however good I tried to be.
Nobody ever explained. What I knew, I overheard. One day, in the school holidays–I must have been eight or nine by then, but I still hid under the dining-table, playing house by myself–Mrs Owen was babysitting, while my dad was out at work. She had invited two of her friends round. They sat in the back room, with the french windows open to waft out the smell of their cigarettes. They didn’t know I was there.
Mrs Pegg must have spotted the photo of my mother on the mantelpiece. ‘Imagine that,’ she said, exhaling a whispery stream of smoke, ‘going off and leaving your kiddie.’
I sat Beau Bunny against the table leg, and lifted the edge of the cloth to hear better.
‘No grandparents?’ asked Mrs Joad.
‘All dead,’ confirmed Mrs Owen.
‘Poor lamb,’ said Mrs Joad.
‘Poor little petal,’ Mrs Owen agreed. That was what told me they were talking about me. She always called me her little petal.
‘Don’t she even write? Send birthday cards?’
‘She went off just like that. Wouldn’t think a mother could, would you? Cut off completely.’
‘Heartless.’
‘Cut his balls off, I’d say.’ Mrs Pegg sniggered. ‘You’d think a man’d go after her.’
I heard a rustle as
