Mountains of the Moon (3 page)

“Telli-wison,” he says cos I squashes his lips.

He opens his eyes. Sees how I is.

“You’re going to be in big trouble again, Lulu,” he whispers.

Then he gets out of bed and picks me up, even though I is too big and carries me shush past Mum’s bedroom. Bryce snoring sounds like growling. We close the bathroom door and Pip gets soap on a stinky flannel, rubs it hard on my chin.

“Big big trouble.” It int coming off.

In our room I show him the pen.

“That’s permanent ink,” he says.

“What’s perm-nant?”

“Means it won’t come off.”

“Not like charcoal?” I says.

“No.”

“Not like poster paint?”

“No.”

“Not like shoe polish?”

While we was in the bathroom Sheba pooped on the rug. Pip tries to get it up with newspaper but it’s squishy and stinks so bad he gets hick-sick. Makes me go hick-sick. Even Sheba goes hick-sick. But nothing don’t come up. We all breathe hard by the winder and try not to do hick-sicks.

“Hhuck!”

Terrible. Pip rolls the rug up and drops it out of our winder on to the porch. But it comes unrolled and hangs down over the front door. The porch int safe, bits of concrete keep dropping off it, the posts wobble stead of holding it up. I climb out. I is a feather. Pip holds my wrist, case, and I kick the rug off. Then Pip goes down the stairs and takes the rug over the road, dumps it with our old fridge. It’s lucky to live this side of
the state, with the trees and the Humps for playing in. It is a Leafy Lane and they named it good and proper. But we int allowed in the generator, sides it’s got high walls and barbed wire with Sheba’s hair on. Pip goes around the back of it case the Sandwich Man has chucked his packed lunch. Sometimes sandwiches is paste, sometimes cheese. Sometimes we get an apple or crips. Pip coming back shakes his head. It’s too early for the Sandwich Man.

Now Sheba thinks we moved the rug for dancing, does creamy swirls chasing her tail. Pip sees me gain. Big big trouble. He goes under the drawers where he keeps his matches and bits of ciggi from Mum’s ashtrays. Sometimes he has a whole new one. Calms his nerves. Mum don’t know how come she got such a gibbering wreck. He lights one up. I sit up sides him on the windersill. We watch the milk float come and stop at the Baldwins’ house. Pip arst the milkman for a job but he int old enough, not til he’s fourteen, still got two more years to wait. The Baldwins only get one pint, now that James is dead. They got him the car for his birthday, eighteen, red Mini with a ribbon around it. That’s how come he drove to Portsmouth and jumped off the top of a big tall car park. No one knows how come it was Portsmouth. The milkman steps over the wall with the pint and walks on the big corner grass. Mr. Baldwin’s grass int for walking on. Then the milkman drives long and stops on the corner of Merrylands, it don’t go no where like a cold-sack. Smithers get six pints cos they live in the first house and there is loads of them.

Pip looks at me gain, I wishes I had brown curly hair, mine int no good. Auntie Fi says it’s fine but Mum says it’s a piece of piss. Don’t know what color, they keep trying to work it out. On Saturday Pip’s going to Powys, in France, to be with his dad what’s different from mine and not as filthy dirty. Never seen Pip’s dad, he arst for Pip in a letter. Mum arst Pip what he wanted to do. He must have give the proper answer cos now he’s going with good riddance and a made bed to lie in. One time Mum said I should arst Father Christmas for a daddy, that’s how come I got Bryce, I int arst for nothing else since cos now my name is King. Auntie Fi cheers
Mum up, says someone called King got shot. Mum says we can hope like it’s only men what gets it, but I move fast, case, and keep my head down.

Auntie Fi int a real auntie, Mum found her crying on the steps of the DHSS. Now she’s married to Uncle Ike, he’s only got one leg and cos it hurts he’s a helium addict and drives his car into chemists. Mum goes to all Auntie Fi’s weddings.

“Will your new sisters be as good as me?” I arsts Pip.

“No,” he says. Then he gets the big fat trouble pen and colors in the bits I missed. He turns my face to see the giraffe.

“Zulu-Lulu.” He shakes his head. “Why don’t you talk properly, Lulu?”

Can’t tell. Secrit.

“I’m going away on Saturday.”

I looks at Pip.

“Is it a secret?” he says.

I nods. He waits long time. He looks sorry, looks like he’s going on Saturday, looks like my secrit should be a present, looks like he int my brother no more, looks like he’s going back to bed.

“I wants to be
especial
,” I says.

Surprises me. He stands up on the chair, gets a box off the top of the wardrobe. In the box is a string of conkers and he comes and ties them around my neck.

“Seven conkers,” he says, “
cos
that’s how old you
is
.”

“Going into care,” I grims at him. “Mum promised, if I done it gain.”

“I think you’ve done it,” he says, “this time.”

He puts another conker, drilled and ready, in my hand.

“That’s for when you’re eight,” he says.

H
e’s always there in the dark, on the other side of the door to sleep. It’s not the frenzy, not his hands trying to drag me from the foxhole, from the long narrow pipe; it’s not the endless pursuit dream or the little girl dead in the storm-sewer nightmare. It’s got nothing to do with physical pain or with the end of the will to live. It’s the taste of the fly agaric, the sound of it screaming when I picked it.

The fog hasn’t lifted. Daylight has a dark green tinge sapping the color from everything. It’s my birthday, I’ve got seventeen pence. The heating pipes from a boiler in the basement bang and rattle. I pay the housing association a compulsory six pounds a week for the sound of central heating but no actual warmth. I have to get out of the apartment. I have to. Tim, at the pottery, lent me an anorak; I put it on and flip-flop down the stairs, meet Techno on the landing below, coming out of his front door with a dead rat on a platter.

“Dinner,” he says.

“I’d want it cooked,” I say.

I look to see if his ears are bleeding. Mine are, fucking bastard. I go into the park next door and sit on a bench. I sit and sit. I’m Louise Alder. I’m thirty-one today. I sit and sit. Voices come through the noise in my head.

“Will you please state your full names?”

“Kim Hunter. Beverley Woods. Jackie Birch. Dawn Redwood. Catherine Clark.”

“You have at one time or another used all of those names?”

“Yes.”

“Remind us. How old are you, Kim?”

“I was twenty-one in September.”

“You have come into the police station of your own accord this evening?”

“Yes.”

I sit and sit in the park. A kid is hurling sticks up at the horse-chestnut tree. Stick hits stick, like rattling bones. Rattling cold.

“Have you got a habit, Kim?” DI Wilson says. “Something that you’ve not told us about? Do you need to see a doctor?”

“About that blanket?” Mr. Book says.

“Can we turn this fan off?” DI Wilson wonders out loud.

I sit and sit in the park.

“Shall we get it over with?” DI Wilson says. “Are you OK to continue?”

Resume.

“Was it your gun?”

“No.”

“Where is the gun now?”

“I threw it off the Suspension Bridge.”

“When you pulled the trigger did you know what you were doing?”

“Yes.”

“You intended to kill?”

“Yes, the person I was aiming at.”

“Why did you want to kill the person you were aiming at?”

“I’m not prepared to say.”

“You shot Quentin Sumner by mistake?”

“Yes.”

“You were aiming at someone else?”

“Yes.”

I sit and sit in the park. The horse-chestnut tree looks unreal, in this fog and green light, like a pantomime prop. One limb spreads wider than the others. Perfect for a noose. Perfect drop.

“Nice day for it,” a man says, walking his hyena past.

Every day we begin again. I go back to the apartment and unpick stitches with frozen teeth and fingers, cut and pin together a patchwork of velvet from charity-shop dresses. The floor cushion is half made when the lamp
dies, the sewing-machine needle stops mid-seam as my meter runs out of electric. My giro didn’t come. I sit down and light the camping stove, it’s running low on gas. A blue light starts casting around the apartment. Something has happened in the pub, an ambulance is in the street. I didn’t hear any screaming, usually I hear the screaming. I sit down; imagine that I can see my bones in X-ray over the stove’s blue flame. Out of the corner of my eye I see the woman in the mirror, flitting backward and forward to the window, like Madam fucking Butterfly.

“Sit. Down,” I say to her.

A car door slams.

She doesn’t listen. Techno music drones through the floor. Peter hasn’t forgotten her birthday; he’s never known when it is. There’s a heavy knock on the door. The woman in the mirror goes.

“You want number 24,” I hear her say.

I should write to Irene and give her my new address. I light a candle to see. My life—in a shoebox; I empty the contents on to the floor. I don’t own a photograph. With the apartment comes evidence that I exist: I must be real, I’ve got a tenancy agreement and the first lot of paid bills. I feel my ear for the butterfly, get just the smooth lobe. I’ve got a folded one-pound note. I’ve got Irene’s letters; beautiful handmade papers with flower petals pressed in them, tore a corner off one once and ate it. Her letters came from Scotland first, then America, Australia and Japan. I sniff at the bundle of letters, don’t know if the perfume is still there but the idea of it fills me up.

I don’t know why Irene kept on. She didn’t believe the verdict when none of the jurors had a doubt. At first I didn’t trust the kindness in the letters; she always asked for a visiting order but I thought she might attack me. Eventually I came to wish that she would attack me and requested a visiting order for her. But then, after all those years, when she came I was concussed, in the hospital wing. Women hunt in packs, like wild dogs, there was something not right about me being there.

A warden took me in a wheelchair. I’d always imagined wire mesh and glass screens, but the visiting suite was a big hall, with spaced out tables.
My mind caught on a thread of scent; it was clean, intensifying, glorious. I knew it. I closed my eyes, went chasing after fluttering names through scented fields of memory.

“She’s not all that coherent,” somebody said.

I looked across the table; saw a posy of spring flowers that formed into a face.

“Lily of the Valley,” I said.

It made me cry.

“Visitor, sit back down, please,” the warden ordered. “Sit back down.”

“No.” A pink lady with a lacy collar was kneeling down holding my hands.

“Let go, please,” they ordered. “Let go.”

“No.”

“Let go.” It had a final tone.

“No,” she said. “I will not let go.”

They lifted Irene up and away, her legs pedaled in mid-air.

“Put me down,” I heard her say. But she must have ducked back under their arms because I saw her little forget-me-not eyes. I looked down; saw my palm and her wrist pressed swirling against mine.

“Yardley,” she called. “Lily
of the Va-lley
!”

It was faint, from a long, long time ago. But it was sweet and it lingered.

It lingered.

Dear Irene, I think she imagines what she wants to see. She must be seventy now, more, seventy-five. She had Quentin really late in life. A shaman is working with him now.

“If that’s Grandad tell him to fuck off.”

That’s how come when we got the phone in I had to answer it. It was always Auntie Fi, or Uncle Ike looking for Auntie Fi. The one time it was Grandad I wasn’t ready. He said, “Is that little Lulu?” I said, “Yes.” He
said, “Is that the African Queen of the Mountains of the Moon?” Don’t know how come I started crying.
Grandad, Grandad,
Mum said, in my voice cept smaller. There was only one word for it:
Path-e-tic
and
Dis-loy-al.
After we looked them up in the dictionary Mum wrote
Judas
with her finger in the steamed-up back-room winder. I climbed up on a chair to write it underneath. Especial lesson, case I forget, and it don’t matter how long it takes, she does me with words til I drop. And she still int talking to them.