Inchworm (16 page)

‘Allowed alcohol, are you?’ she asks as Mum pours herself a large whisky.

‘Better the painkiller I know than the drugs I don’t,’ she replies. ‘I recommend it. One for you?’

Using a pencil I rescue a fruit fly from Mum’s whisky and examine in through Dad’s Lupe (a magnifier especially for examining transparencies). Actually I thought it was dead and deceased, a late fruitfly, passed on, gone to the other side, fallen off its perch, pushing up daisies, but it sits on the pencil point, wiping its face with its forelegs, staggers around a bit and falls over. Now it’s drying its face again and exploring the pencil. Whisky has damaged its brain. (It’s damaged Mum’s, Daddy reckons.) Mum always eats a fry-up when she has a hangover: eggs, bacon, fried bread, tomatoes and mushrooms; the full English. Then she needs sugar – chocolate, or fudge and lots of it. It works a treat, apparently. But she’s always a bit wan that evening. Wan is a lovely word – onomatopoeic – woozy, weepy, weak, wilting – wan. Several minutes after I have removed the fruit fly from the whisky it seems to recover from the near drowning and soon it’s flown. It will be back in Mum’s single malt, betya. Yes, it’s back, circling the glass for a hair of the dog that bit him. She ought to have one of those little cotton circular thingies with beads at the edge to put on top of her glass, like they used to have for milk jugs. Grandma had them. When I was little I used to wear them on my head, pretending to be a princess. I’ve seen them at car boot sales and thought how pretty they are. It’s something I can look out for – a useful present. Oh dear, she’s just spat it out. Mum, the fly. Poor fruitfly. I expect it died happy. That’s better than being squashed
before
you’ve had a chance to taste a special single malt whisky.

It’s Mum’s birthday soon. April
1
st. I don’t know if we’ll be back in St Ives for it, or will we be able to celebrate it with Daddy? I probably won’t be able to find a doily or whatever it is called before then, unless I find one at the Hampstead antique market. We’ve been to no car boot sales here. I bet a Hampstead car boot would be brilliant. All the rich people could sell their old designer clothes and trainers and practically new furniture and antiques they are bored with. We could find all sorts of treasures, not like in Cornwall, where lots of the stall-holders are poor and are trying to sell clapped-out kids’ clothes and toys.

I better remind Daddy about her birthday. It must be strange for him, for both of them, to be thrust together like this, when they’ve been apart for so long. Like being on a desert island with someone you hate but have to get along with in order to survive. My idea of hell is to be on a desert island with Siobhan – my rival in affection for Brett. She is girlie pretty, has a padded bra and a belly button ring and I hate her. Her little sister Bridget is cool. But Siobhan is definitely the woman in the
Three Musketeers
, Milady: no morals whatsoever, completely cold-blooded, played by Faye Dunaway. Called in the movie Lady de Winter. How funny – like the first Mrs de Winter in
Rebecca.
I’ve never known a de Anybody. I call Siobhan
SSS
– which stands for… but my Grandma used to say – if you can’t say something nice about someone, say nothing. So… I’ll say nothing.

Moss phones and says that Gabriel is missing Claire badly and is living almost entirely in the tree, like Cosimo in Italo Calvino’s
The Baron in the Trees
, who at the age of twelve, vowed to always live in trees. There’s a problem with a pet spider that’s gone
AWOL
, though Claire says she can’t imagine what he means, as Gabriel hasn’t got a pet spider, and Phaedra is staying out all night long doing goodness knows what on the back of a boy’s motorbike, and he can’t go searching for her as he has to stay and look after Gabriel, and Troy is being a pain in the arse, as ever. ‘What’s new?’ says Claire.

Long discussions. Mum phones Daddy and they’ve come to a new arrangement. Claire is going home.

‘I don’t know what I would have done without you. Thanks Claire.’ Mum cries as she says goodbye.

Claire says to me, ‘You’re a good girl, Gussie. Home soon, yeah?’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘we’ll be home soon.’

Daddy comes each morning and is being very attentive. He does the washing and dusting and sorts the laundry but draws the line at ironing my pyjamas. I don’t allow him in the bedroom as I can’t hide the kitten anywhere else really. Mum isn’t able to do much around the flat, and rests in the afternoon on the sofa. I can’t do much either, like hoovering, which is a nuisance because there are still fleas. Also,
I
have to rest in the afternoon too.

I’m ploughing my way through
Gone with the Wind
. It’s huge, heavy to hold in bed. Having seen the movie once (one of Mum’s favourites) it’s easy to follow and I keep imagining thingy with the thin moustache as Rhett Butler and Vivienne Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara. What a wonderful name! Why can’t I be called something exciting like that? Augusta Stevens – I ask you, what sort of a name is that?

I do love reading better than anything. It’s like dreaming – an escape into another world. I can become anyone and be part of another universe, forget my own problems and reality. When I finish a book, I’m lost until I can find another to immerse myself in. I suppose because of being ill and having to stay in bed lots and not go to school very often, I enjoy the other worlds I find in the pages. A book is a magic carpet that takes me anywhere, anywhen, anyhow. I can be waiting in my hospital bed for some horrible treatment, yet I’m a million miles away in another skin, the skin of a girl with a real working heart, who has a mother and father and brothers and sisters. I can be an ace pilot; a boy who lives with animals in the jungle; a brilliant detective; an American beauty a hundred years ago; I can be anyone. If I could be anyone in any book, who would I choose? That’s difficult. Perhaps one of the family in
Swallows and Amazons.
Or George in the
Famous Five
, or Ellie, the girl narrator in the John Marsden book
Tomorrow when the War Began
; or Scarlett O’Hara. I love it when she tears down the green velvet curtains to make a dress.

Probably, actors escape into the character of the part they are playing, become them for a while.

Willy, dressed very smartly in a dark grey, double-breasted suit and with a blue tie has brought a huge bouquet of spring flowers; narcissus, daffodils and tulips, for both of his ‘
Schönen Frauen’.
They smell of Cornwall. The kitten jumps onto his lap.

‘She likes you,’ I say, but Willy is worried about his suit and the kitten soon jumps down.

Mum is searching the bathroom cabinet. ‘Where did I put my tweezers?’

PROCEDURE—A MODE OF PROCESSING; A METHOD OF CONDUCTING BUSINESS; A COURSE OF ACTION

SOME PEOPLE THINK
that when you die your spirit or soul becomes another creature. If you have lived a good life you might become a more developed creature and if you’ve not been good you live again as a lower being – an ant or a beetle.

But who’s to say what is higher or lower? How is a tiger, say, a higher creature than a hedgehog or a penguin? What’s wrong with life as an inchworm? Okay, you might not have long to live, but you get to spend all your time outside eating marigolds or whatever.

Sounds pretty good to me. No pain, no anxiety, no worries about your parents not getting on or taking your pills at the right time. You simply eat and excrete – I suppose they do that, every creature does.

I would preferably like to come back as a cat – one of ours. They have such a fine life and if I had fur like my kitten or Charlie everyone would love me. Is it fur or hair? Perhaps if I am good enough in this life I will come back as a cat.

Not one in China, though. I saw a horrible programme on the news about how the Chinese treat some dogs and cats. They trap them, skin them alive and use their fur for clothes or even toys. Tigers are hunted or even farmed to be killed, and every part of the animal – not just the skin, but blood, bones, private parts, is sold for lots of money to be used in medicine by people who mistakenly think they are being made strong or virile. It’s all too horrible to think about – poor innocent creatures cruelly killed for money.

I think I’ll give up eating Chinese takeaways as a protest. I must remember to tell Mum to do the same.

Though, I suppose if you are an English Chinese restaurateur, you won’t have the same culture as a Chinese person living in China, and you are not in the habit of killing dogs and cats. So I shouldn’t punish them for the sins of the Chinese Chinese.

Phew! That means I can go on eating take away. Except for king prawn and other shellfish, of course.

I’m very lucky that most of the people I know are humane to each other and animals. Thinking about reincarnation: some people do believe in it – Hindus, I think. If a person has done bad things in one existence he returns after death as a lesser creature – a warthog or a wallaby, maybe. But how does a wallaby lead a good life in order to be reincarnated as a higher being? And is there a progression of higher and lower creatures? Who can tell if a cockroach is more worthy than a chicken? I read somewhere that cockroaches can live a week without a head. I think chickens can run around without a head too, but only for a few seconds. And what difference does the life of a chicken make to the world? At least while we are human we have the opportunity to make a difference, do something meaningful, even if it’s only to have a child who will grow up to be someone who will make a difference, like Nelson Mandela or Mozart or Charles Darwin. Of course, one might have a child who becomes the next Adolf Hitler or Robert Mugabe, so each of us has to make the effort to do something worthwhile in our one life, like help orphans or make a beautiful piece of work, a painting or a poem or a novel that lasts forever.

Poem about reincarnation to send to Brett:

I wannabe

A wallaby.

Will you be

One too?

It’s great not to have to hide the kitten from Mum, though she has suggested we keep her secret from Daddy for now. Beelzebub seems to have been the cause of rather a lot of destruction. Mum still hasn’t decided what to do about her, whereas Beelzebub knows exactly what she wants – a warm soft bed, lots of strokes and petting, grooming each day, and plenty of Greek yoghurt and pilchards in tomato sauce. Daddy cancelled the hire car when Mum was in hospital but Claire found a corner shop that delivers. The driver is a young square-jawed Armenian, dishy, according to Mum, and he carries the groceries into the kitchen for her. We unpack together. I notice she has ordered plenty of kitten food so she can’t be thinking of disposing of Beelzebub just yet.

‘When are we going home, Mum?’

‘We have to wait for your last biopsy and my six week check-up, but I see no reason why I can’t travel on the train soon,’ she says. ‘Except that I can’t carry luggage, and you certainly can’t. I think the car might be more comfortable, if Alistair can take time off to collect us.’

‘Couldn’t Daddy take us back in his car?’

I have fantasies of Daddy arriving at our house and staying overnight and then falling in love with Mum all over again and staying forever. He could get a job as a film studies teacher at Falmouth University Art College.

‘It might be fast, Gussie, but comfortable in the back seat? I don’t think so. It’s basically a two-seater, and then there’s our luggage.’

And Beelzebub, I think.

‘Anyway, he’s got to go away again soon.’

‘When? Who’s going to drive me to hospital?’

‘We’ll get a bus or a cab, don’t worry.’

My biopsies are uncomfortable procedures. They insert a catheter into a vein in my neck to go down into my heart and into the right ventricular myocardium. They do an x-ray so they can see the area where they are slicing off a piece of heart tissue. Afterwards, when the local anaesthetic wears off, I feel sore.

I hope we do get a cab.

A postcard from Mrs Thomas, with a picture of the harbour:

Dear Gussie,

Sad news. Shandy has passed away. He was 15 years old – a good age for a cat, but I miss him terribly. He has been my constant companion since my late husband passed away. My eye is settling down nicely. Give my best wishes to your mother and I hope you are both recovering from your operations as I am from mine.

Love to you both,

Mrs Thomas.

Our bodies are so fragile. We aren’t well designed, us humans. Our skin breaks and bones crack and split and things go wrong so easily. Our cells don’t do what they are supposed to do and become diseased. We are attacked by viruses.

Mum says it’s amazing that so many babies are born with nothing wrong. But even if they are perfect, so many diseases and accidents can happen.

Some of the people waiting for transplants were
born
with heart problems, like me, and some were healthy to start with but at some point caught a virus that damaged their organs, like Precious.

As Mrs Thomas says – you never know what’s around the corner in life.

DUBIOUS—DOUBTFUL; CAUSING DOUBT; UNCERTAIN; AROUSING SUSPICION OR DISAPPROVAL