style="font-size:15px;"> I kick open the kitchen door, my hands full of my colouring book and pens.
Inside, Mum is telling Dad, ‘She should have a proper meal.’
I slide onto a chair, sit up at the table.
Mum says to me, ‘Can’t you go in there?’ and her head jerks towards the door, the living-room.
‘I need a surface.’
Noisily clearing too much space for my book and pens, she continues, ‘I don’t want her to go back again without having had some proper food.’
She means Alison.
‘Well,’ Dad says cheerily to his newspaper, ‘she said she’d have salad.’
‘But when she says salad, she means salad cream. She pushes the salad around her plate then mops up the salad cream with bread; haven’t you seen her do that?’
‘Her grandmother is a greengrocer, remember; I’m sure that she has plenty of greens.’
‘Her grandmother works too hard, her grandmother is too old and tired to play mum. I wouldn’t be surprised if the last thing that she wants to see at the end of the day is a green; I wouldn’t blame her if she nips two doors down to Giuseppe for chips.’
Whenever Mum takes us into the shop, Alison’s grandma gives each of us an apple: this means three apples now that Michaela has teeth. Eliza and I say Thanks-Mrs-Mortimer, Michaela’s version is Ta-Mi-Moma. None of us are keen on apples, but we pretend. Mum tells Dad that the apples are embarrassing, that they make us look like scroungers; but when he says that she can always go somewhere else, her answer is I’ve shopped there since the day I was married and I suppose I’ll shop there until the day I drop.
Dad says, ‘I think that Mrs Mortimer and Tim are coping very well.’
Mum’s hands are propped on her hips, they look like claws. ‘Coping. They’ll need to do more than cope. You think she’s coming back, don’t you. You’re a fool, like Tim.’
Uncle Tim, Alison’s dad, has a gold tooth in the corner of his smile. I love that tooth, it must have a story to it, like a locket or a scar. Mum says, That tooth always surprises me, you’d never think that he was the type. I could try a gold tooth for the face I am drawing in my book; but of the pens that I have, the closest to gold is yellow. And yellow is not quite the same. A yellow tooth would be quite different.
Across the table from me, Dad warns, ‘Shhh,’ and cocks his head towards the door.
‘Oh, she knows,’ Mum says. ‘It’s you men who won’t believe that her mother has abandoned you.’
Another, ‘Shhh,’ but this nod is for me.
‘Oh, Madam’s oblivious when she’s drawing.’
I hardly even remember what Alison’s mum looked like; she went away so long ago. She was not around for Christmas last year, or even the summer holidays. Of course I remember her hair, the colour of her hair: close to the colour of Uncle Tim’s tooth. One of the tricks of the trade, was Mum’s joke, because Auntie Anne had been a hairdresser. Perhaps she is a hairdresser, in her new life – Mum told me that she has a new life. She was supposed to have given up when she married Uncle Tim but she never quite did, because sometimes we were put on a high stool in the middle of her kitchen so that she could trim our hair. When she was trimming my hair, I could smell her perfume, handcream, and washing powder, I would close my eyes and listen to her special scissors, her sleeve on her arm, her high heels whenever she took one of her definite steps to one side or the other. Sometimes a cold blade would brush my forehead, the tip of my ear. Feathers of hair would fall and settle on my shoulders, then eventually topple and fall onto the tiles in a circle around me. My fallen hair was darker than Eliza’s: we dropped trails of hair that did not mix. And then, not wanting to leave her out, Auntie Anne would graze Michaela’s baby fluff with her blades.
Dad leans harder over his newspaper but says sideways to Mum, ‘You worry too much, Alison’s hardly tubby.’
‘Oh, I know that; that’s my point: she’s a scrap, she’s looking poorly.’ Mum has come to the table and picked up my black pen, she is tapping the tabletop with the white lidded tip.
Dad says, ‘She’s missing her mum.’
‘Aren’t we all, but we have to keep going.’ The pen returns to the others, is slotted into line.
‘Her brother seems better.’
‘Oh, that bruiser. I’m glad we never had a boy.’
‘But, he’s older, he has friends.’
And today he is with those friends, playing football somewhere, leaving us in peace. The boy in my picture is wearing shorts which are too long to be football shorts. His knees are chubby, like the girl’s cheeks; I am going to have to use a lot of pink.
When Mum went to have Michaela in hospital, Eliza and I had to stay with Auntie Anne whenever Dad was at work. Just like Alison and Jason, now, staying sometimes with Mrs Mortimer. Mum had problems with Michaela, she was in hospital for weeks before Michaela was born. So for weeks I stayed in Auntie Anne’s kitchen while she cooked, washed up, tidied, ironed. And this was what I wanted: I did not want her to worry over me, I wanted to colour in the pictures in my books while she hummed and turned between the sink, the cooker, the cupboards. I wondered about Mum: where she was, what she was doing, and what if she never came back. While I was colouring, I liked to listen to Eliza playing with Jason and Alison in the garden, their laughs sliding into the kitchen on the sunshine, over the blue and white tiles. I liked to hear Auntie Anne’s laugh, too, when she was on the phone in the hallway: there was something in this laugh of hers which told me that she had forgotten that I was there.
During the summer, I moved from the kitchen down the hallway to the living-room, to try to draw some of Uncle Tim’s tropical fish: drawing from life, Auntie Anne called this. I drew and coloured a whole book of fish. The day when Mum came to fetch us, she took brand new Michaela into the kitchen and stayed for a while. I could hear her laughing and complaining that Michaela had been born early, a few weeks before Auntie Anne’s birthday, because otherwise they could have shared the same birthday. Whenever I looked up, I could see her and Auntie Anne through the serving hatch. They were both sitting on those high stools. Auntie Anne’s legs were crossed, but so closely that her bare feet were side by side on the same rung; her legs looked like a long silvery tail. I called through to ask Auntie Anne how old she was going to be. Her quick laugh could have been a cough. ‘Rox!’
Mum said, ‘Twenty-one,’ and smiled without moving her mouth.
Then Auntie Anne told the truth: ‘Twenty-one years older than you, I’m going to be twenty-seven.’
‘I’m six.’ I was thinking aloud, although not very loudly.
‘I know you are,’ she said, more quietly.
And now I am eight. Like Alison. Alison and I are the same. Our mums were the same, too.
Now Mum leans back on the twin-tub and complains about Alison: ‘What’s she doing in there? She watches too much telly. And much too close to the screen. Kids – why do they do that? What do they
