How You See Me (3 page)

‘What girl?’

‘We call her Tatty,’ she finished, proudly, ignoring my question and pointing at the dog.

Cue long calculations of Tatty’s age in both human and dog years. This whole conversation was conducted, of course, in the middle of the street. Finally it came to an end when the dog took up barking and we realised Dad was trying to make it down the steps in his long johns.

So now we have a dog (I can’t quite bring myself to call her a bitch) and no one seems able to agree on breed. She really does look like a bundle of tatty rags: white, copper and black. I’m sure Freya would love her. She is nice enough and worships Dad. When I got them both inside they settled down to sleep, Tatty like a rug at Dad’s feet in front of the wood burner. That at least explains the fleas. I’ll have to sort out some powder and some special food. Dog or human years, I suspect I’ve acquired another ancient.

We’re quite the little family, I can’t help thinking, sitting here writing to you and watching them sleep. I’ve even stopped whining for home, I hope you’ve noticed. Alice is on my mind, but I won’t bother you with any more details because, if your last letter was anything to go by, you will never understand. I’ll just send you these dull updates of our dull days and you’ll keep sending your cheques and your postcards and we’ll all get along just fine. Won’t we, Mab?

Daniel

21st October

The Studio

Dear Alice –

My sister is inexplicable. She just refuses to let me leave. I’m so sorry, my darling. She’s busy, of course, with her masks and her daughter. And Corsica is far enough away for her to ignore my pleas to be back with you. Mab has never understood love; it’s not in her character. Queen Mab. No love in her name, either.

We were born into our names, you know. They were already waiting for us. No anxious ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ for our parents. My Dad just asked, ‘Is it Mabel or Daniel?’ and then, ‘Is it Agatha or Daniel?’ The change in mothers didn’t affect that particular question.

We have different mothers, you see. Dad dropped the moneyed and impeccable Eleanor as soon as he glimpsed my pale, frail mother. He left his first wife with his name – Ms Laird, she is to this day – and his daughter, whom she immediately packed off to boarding school for part of the year and back to him for the summer.

Agatha never appeared – the very possibility of her disappeared off the edge of that bridge with my mother when I was four years old – but Mabel and I took our places and our allocated titles.

Mabel Anne Laird
. What did they expect when they put that together? Someone steady and reliable, even a little dowdy? Certainly not the raw, screaming, red-fisted infant who fought her way out of the womb to gnaw on her mother’s nipples with her sharp pink gums. Vampire baby – suckling blood. Her mother loves to expand on that
particular story. Mabel bit her name in two as soon as she could say it. Keeping the first syllable, the one that filled up your mouth, re-shaping it into a grab, a stab. She spat away the softening -
el
.

Mab with a trick up every sleeve; Mab with an answer for everything; Mab, my sister, who saw and heard all there was to see and hear and only spoke the truth when she wasn’t lying.

Mab was named for a friend of my father’s, a friend I never met but whose Christmas cards would sometimes hang up among the others, strung from beams in the studio. They were unimaginative cards that Mabel sent, obviously selected from a variety pack: plump robins and snowy scenes printed on cheap, flimsy paper. Always the same message:
Hope you’re all keeping well! Much love, Mabel xx.
Mab would study these cards intently; I caught her fishing them down from their rope to look again at the message, hunting for clues to the shape our father had wanted her to take.

Mab was her own creation.

As I say, she came to us for the school holidays every year. Strange, that. I remember her as always there, as if life started and ended when Mab came to stay, but actually our close contact spanned a bare handful of summers. After it became clear that I would grow to bear no resemblance to my mother, my dad rather lost interest in me. The models brought me up, but it was nice to have real family to hand.

When she was fifteen, frankly too old to be hanging around with us, Mab turned up sporting the lipstick, the rolled-up skirt and the chewing-gum-smacking insolence that had signified her move into secondary school. My
friends and I were playing on Marchmount Street, between the studio and the church. The tarmac on the road had melted and coated the soles of our sandals so we could pick up gravel from the raised footpath. Hobnail boots. Mab was with us, but apart, picking at her cuticles and leaning up against the church wall. She may even have been sent out to keep an eye on me.

Sebastian Collie walked his bike down the pavement on the other side of the street. Coloured beads ticked along the spokes as the wheels turned. The problem with the Collies was that they’d moved up to the village later than the rest of us. They were the first of the commuters to come, taking advantage of the easy access to the dual carriageway and the otherwise ‘idyllic rural surroundings’. They’d settled in one of the new builds that had appeared at the end of our street. Maggie had told us Mrs Collie asked for lime in her gin and tonic when they’d visited the Bull and she wore make-up all day, even first thing in the morning.

Back there on the street, it was Rachel Spencer from my class who was the first to speak to him.

‘You’re Sebastian from London.’

‘Nice hair,’ shouted Martin Phillips.

This was true: Sebastian did have nice hair. Not hair like any of ours, but long tresses of blond curls that reached past his shoulders. Hair a bit like yours, my darling, though not as fiery.
It’s a shame he’s a boy
, I remember Maggie saying to us,
with hair like that
.

We’d seen Sebastian before, in the shop by the bridge. He was standing in the doorway hand in hand with his little sister whose name I never knew. Both were dressed in neatly ironed London clothes. They were staring at Jack’s
tractor which was parked out front. I had wanted to grab those beautiful locks and stuff a handful into my pocket. I imagined it would feel like the spun sugar Maggie had boiled up for us in the studio kitchen. Long strands of gold: brittle, slippery and sticky, all at the same time. I could break off a piece and pop it in my mouth, feel it dissolve.

‘Only girls have hair like yours,’ Mab called from her place by the church wall. ‘Are you a girl, Sebastian?’

I can’t remember him speaking. Try as I might, I can’t remember the sound of Sebastian Collie’s voice. He may have shaken his head, or maybe he just tried to walk on and leave us behind. I think that’s what I would have done. Maybe he just stood there.

The others took up the call, and I suppose my voice joined them. ‘Girl! He’s a girl! Sebastian Collie wears dresses! He wears skirts! Want a go with my skipping rope, Sebastian?’ We surrounded him; we caged him in, still gripping the handlebars of his new bike. There was no escape.

I don’t know when the shoving started; I don’t know when Mab joined us, but I know it was her voice that shouted, ‘If he’s a boy, he better prove it. Let’s pull down his pants and see.’

We took hold of him, pressing him down on to the sticky tarmac. He was small, and we were stronger than him. His arm was pale and rounded like a doll’s, his skin rubbery as he twisted under my hands. I don’t remember him saying a word.

I don’t know what it was that made us pull back. I’d like to think it was a moment of self-awareness: that we suddenly saw ourselves and what we were doing. Maybe
it was Sebastian’s silence, his lack of any real resistance. Someone probably thought they saw a grown-up coming. Mab must have gone home, because it was just me and my friends. We crossed the street and stood together by the church wall, leaving Sebastian sitting in the road with his bicycle by his side. In the end Martin went over to check on him.

‘Pissed himself,’ Martin told us when he came back. ‘Right through his trousers. It stinks over there.’

The Collie children didn’t join us at the local primary school for the next term. Maggie told us their parents had dipped into their university fund to pay for a private school.
Airs and graces
, Maggie said. Sebastian’s curls were cut and he had to wear a blazer and a tie. The daily commute to London must have proved too much for Mr Collie, because the family started using the village house only at weekends. Then they put it up for sale. I didn’t see much of Sebastian after that. He never rode his bike past the studio; he would take the long route across the fields.

I’ve often wondered why Mab took against Sebastian like that. Whether, if it weren’t for her, anything would actually have taken place. I don’t think it was his hair and clothes that offended her so much as his obvious difference from the rest of us. Sebastian had the magazine version of a happy family: Father, Mother, Son and Daughter all lined up in little steps; and, latched to his well-groomed back, he had London. Sebastian Collie had somewhere to escape to.

It was only a year before Mab followed the Collies’ example and turned out on to the dual carriageway, away from the village, away from her mother and away from us. After that she never stopped running, but she would always
send me postcards from everywhere she visited. I would pin them up round the window frame in my bedroom, a circular chart of my sister’s flight from city to city, continent to continent. Their messages were generally simple:
I was here – love to you, Mab.
A biro line would stretch around to the front of the card, where arrowheads plunged into foreign cities, with white houses piled one on top of the other like building blocks or clinging limpet-like to the sides of cliffs; they speared tropical beaches and sun-washed seas; and once even a dirty French street with rubbish piled in its gutters and a street sign reading ‘Paradis’.

On occasion, Mab would veer close enough to visit and we would have couple of snatched hours. She would arrive bearing gifts of carved wood, silks and stories, like a visiting foreign merchant, the scents of strange places on her skin. I’d make her breakfast as she filled the ashtray and told me of her adventures. She never had much to say to Dad.

Once, she turned up early in the morning, glittering with coloured beads, her skirts heavy with rainwater; her hair was dreadlocked and she had sewn bells and ribbons into the matted lengths which flapped against her cheeks. A carnival sister. Her face was swollen and she looked as if she hadn’t slept in days. It was the only time I managed to convince her to stay the night and meet some of my friends at a burger bar in town. She arrived creaking in a leather suit and stinking of motorbike grease, her hair shorn and twisted into tight little spikes across her brow. Each spike’s tip had been dipped into bleach or colour. A row of poisoned arrows. She charmed my friends within minutes. They gathered to share her anecdotes; to taste that wild, loose laughter. I hardly recognised her.

Mab was never one to be captured. Not even by me. I pity the people that attached themselves to her. She did have a way of making you feel important. But there was always somewhere else to be, someone else to meet, and the friends and lovers would be left behind. A row of bodies with biro arrows embedded in their chests.
Mab was here
.

Only once did my father ever try to paint her. It was one of the early summers in the studio. Mab had fallen asleep on the armchair in the work-room. I watched my father creep around her, gathering his paints, slotting the easel into place. He stretched a piece of fabric across the top of the chair, its tattered ends whispering against her brow. He lifted one of her hands and laid it against her cheek. Once satisfied with his composition, he took his place behind the easel. I didn’t like it – too sentimental.

When he works with his feet on the floor, my father paints like a fencer, straight-backed, his arm extended in front of him, his brush a foil held in his languid grip. He attacks a canvas with smooth slick strokes, leaning for a moment on his back foot and pausing before his riposte. As Mab slept she was gathered into oils and I trundled my toy train around my father’s feet. He whispered to himself as he worked, but I couldn’t catch what he said.

Finally, Dad stood back from his painting. A streak of burnt sienna painted a deep scar from his left cheekbone to his lip. He looked exhausted.

I pulled myself to my feet to look at the canvas. There was Mab sleeping in her chair, the throw folded over her, its corner reaching down to her like a beneficent hand. But there were flaws: her nose was wrong, and her lips seemed plumper than I had ever seen them. This was back when
I took my father’s work literally. I looked for truth, not beauty. It was not quite her face. I thought there was something wrong with his eyes.

Mab woke up; she stretched and kicked her feet out from under her. Then she saw my father. I had never seen her so angry.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Oh, you’re awake – that’s a shame, but I think I’ve done all I need to today. Come and see, darling. You looked so lovely I couldn’t resist. Look what your daddy’s made of you.’

‘What have you done?’

My father turned the easel and Mab screamed. She ripped the drape down from above her head and balled it.

‘Now, Mabel – ’

Mab ran at the painting and my father caught her hands before she could push a fist into it.

The next day the painting was missing from the workroom. Maggie found it a week later stuffed into the corner of the woodshed. The frame had been broken and the image, or what remained of it, had been obscured by liberal doses of my black poster paint. Someone had tried to set it on fire; the edges of the torn canvas were rotten with stale ashes. My father took the broken portrait from Maggie without a word. No one was punished. But there were no more family portraits.

From that day on Mab seemed never to sleep if there was anyone there to catch her. She was the blur at the edge of photographs, darting out of shot, swinging her head, faster than any camera shutter. I was always there in the background of those family shots. The little brother, his face
lit up by the camera flash, his expression caught in every detail, his eyes following his sister’s constant departure.
Watch the birdie, Daniel.