The Cornflake House (25 page)

Valerie seemed pleased with my sentence but then she doesn't have to start over in a new prison, laying down ground rules with a fresh cell mate and fighting off another load of bullies. They can have my biscuits this time. I shall emerge in three months, thinner and unscarred. Until then I don't want you to see me. Forgive me if this sounds harsh. I need this extra time to myself and I think you do too. I want you to meet as many women as possible while I'm away. Draw comparisons, I shan't be offended. I think I've awakened in you an understanding that you may be attractive. This being a novel concept, you might now be wondering if you could have done better for yourself. You do love me, Matthew. You just don't know if you love
only
me, yet.

They're coming to take me away. See you in three months.

Thirteen

Thanks for your letter, Matthew. I can't repent and let you visit, the three months apart has become part of the process of healing for me. I need to hurt before I can fully enjoy. But believe me I'm delighted to hear that you're missing me. Not falling into the arms of another woman yet? I'm astonished to find you haven't been snapped up, but then I'm biased. Of course I'd know if you had found a new love; the magic has stayed, making my life in this hell-hole a lot easier. The other prisoners don't bother me. I walk in peace, surrounded by an invisible iron curtain. Big Bad Eve, don't mess with her. Sometimes it seems I've been inside so long I shan't know how to be free; freedom is a lesson I'll need to learn from scratch. I've taken on a prison persona, a tough, abrupt woman of whom I've grown quite fond. She and I shall have to say goodbye in a month's time. One month, surely you can wait 'til then?

I have had one persistent visitor here. She won't leave me alone, although at first I refused to see her, sending messages to say I was ill or busy. I am busy, funnily enough. I've been given the task of rearranging the library. Not simply A-Z, but sub-divisions in the existing categories. Now fiction is split into Romance, Thrillers, Sci-Fi etc. It's made me realize how much reading I've yet to do, so many authors, so little time. Since I stopped writing to you, I read until my eyes ache, until they turn out the lights, but I'll never catch up with myself. And I've made a new friend, well two actually. I said I'd try this out, friendship, and I rather like it.

I share a cell with a woman called Maggie who is so ordinary that at first it was hard to think of her as anything other than a housewife who had popped in for a chat. She is middle-aged, has a kind, honest face, a Birmingham accent and hair which is growing out from a fairly disastrous perm. Our conversation centres around ideal ways of cleaning sinks and how to get stains out of T-shirts. Not my specialist subjects, but Maggie has knowledge enough for two. For days, assuming she was simply missing her kitchen and her pile of washing, I humoured her, nodding when she recommended this soap powder over that, playing interested. Then I discovered that she's in here for stabbing her husband eight times with a carving knife and that the T-shirt and sink in question had been haunting her since the night she tried in vain to wash pints of blood out of one and down the other. Suddenly I wasn't
playing
interested any more. Sadly Maggie has blanked all but the washing from her memory and can tell me no more about her night of crime. I don't even know how the husband fared; neither, it seems, does she. Frustrating, isn't it? Was the man a complete bastard, making her life a misery for years on end? Or did he play around, meaning to leave his homely wife for a younger, more attractive woman? Maybe neither, perhaps Maggie just flipped from boredom, finding herself tied to the kitchen one day too long. We'll probably never know. Maggie is stuck at her sink, in her imagination, a modern Lady Macbeth, endlessly trying different cleaning products.

My other friend is the librarian, Stella. True to her name, she's a real star. Stella treats me with unqualified respect, not showing a scrap of interest in my crimes but being genuinely enthusiastic about my background.

‘Can't waste skills like yours,' she insisted and set me straight to my task. For hours on end we work side by side, passing each other with arms full of books, absorbed in searching, filing, checking. Prisoners come and go but I hardly see them. What I do envisage is the impression their choice of book will make on them. I'm not talking of reform, simply of the marvellous impact of reading. A book adds to a person. When they reach the end, readers have expanded themselves. Take two women, criminals say, shut up here for a couple of years. Then take a novel, let's choose
Oliver Twist
in this instance. One woman reads Dicken's poignant work, the other doesn't. The reader will leave with more, will go away having had a relationship with Nancy, Bill and Fagin; she'll be greater by the sum of that book. Also she will have joined the club, the band of those who know this work. Do you see? As I said, so many books … It was easy to convince myself that I was too busy reading and growing to see my visitor.

But this was no ordinary caller, not one to be fobbed off, never one to take no for an answer. She came repeatedly, leaving little calling cards, notes scribbled on the back of bus tickets, written on the inside of chocolate wrappers. ‘See me,' they pleaded. There was one worked painstakingly between the lines of a telephone bill. She must have picked this bill up on the bus to the prison, I suppose, where it had been dropped by another visitor. This is how it reads:

Breakdown of information

‘Don't try and avoid me, Evey,'

Summary of call charges

‘I only want a chat after all,'

Total call charges £67.94

‘I come a long way'

Family & Friends

‘and I need to sit and talk.'

As I studied it I had this vision of her on the bus, anxious, eager. An elderly woman making a difficult journey, riding that route taken only by family and foolhardy but firm friends of the incarcerated. I was still shocked by another, clearer message I'd had from her, one written on thin, white, lined paper. Shocked doesn't do my feelings justice. Infuriated comes closer, or staggered. But the telephone bill was a missive straight from the land of childhood, taking me back to the muddle, the absurdities of The Cornflake House which is where, despite everything, I have wanted to be all this time. I couldn't refuse to see her any longer. My visitor had every right to ride that bus along with those other long suffering relations. It was my mother, you see, pestering, begging, longing just to see me.

My mother. It takes a bit of getting used to, I can tell you. Such an emotive word, that and its companions, mothered, motherless. I'd begun to get used to motherless, now I have to adjust to the likelihood of being mothered again. Loved in that unique way, as I love Bing. I have no mother. I have a mother. Very little difference, on paper; but away from the page, everything is changed.

The woman simply will not leave me alone. Burning The Cornflake House was supposed to liberate me, to free me for the remainder of my life and to release Mum's spirit. Instead I'm a prisoner, physically constricted and mentally trapped in a web of family which even my own death wouldn't unravel.

I mentioned the letter, didn't I? The one that preceded the scribbled notes? I'll copy the letter out for you. It's a classic, a schoolteacher's nightmare:

‘Darling Girl,

You must be wandering why you was asked to burn down your house,'
she wrote,
‘and now you must be feeling cross'
(cross!)
‘because you've landed up inside. Don't blame her, Evey, there was things inside The Cornflake House should never have been kept, but Vic was like that, kept every bloody thing, specally papers cos she thought these should be kept when others would have throwed them out.'

It rambled on in this vein and I almost gave up on it. Almost. Now I wish I had chucked it in the bin unread. Not that I'd have escaped. As I said, the writer was intent on being either seen or heard. To continue:

‘These papers that got burnt I suppose along with your clothes and stuff told to many secrets, I'm not saying Vic wasn't a true Gypsy and wanted to go that way and take it all with her, but most important was those papers. They had to go. Do you see, Lovey? Are you following? It was all written down and stuffed in a box somewhere then knowing Vic it got lost, about your Dads, the truth about them and about your Mum as well. Not one of you was her own flesh and blood. I can't keep quite any more. Maybe Ill be sorry, but my days are numberd and I have to have my say. Sorry to shock you Sweetheart, but Vics gone, God bless her, and I kept shut up to long.'

Are you following, Matthew? Can you love a woman who's been duped right through her life? Can you love the bastard child of an old tart like Taff? More importantly, can I love myself, or at least learn to
like
being who I am? The letter went on to explain, gushingly, how Taff had given birth to me in a place far from home. But being ‘a flighty soul' she hadn't felt able to give me the love I deserved. Victory, on the other hand, wasn't flighty, didn't even like male company, and therefore, not being driven by similar urges, was happy to take on the role of mother. So happy that she offered this service not once, but seven times. We Cornflake House kids were as good as orphans, seven souls without a proper parent between us.

I was shaken at first. Mum was not Mum, but Taff was. It look hours to sink in. Then I was embarrassed for having been simple-minded. I was eight when Samik was ‘born'. I didn't know the facts of life in detail but I understood that babies came from a mother's stomach. Shouldn't I have noticed the flatness of Victory's tummy? I suspect her of trickery. She must have been capable of puffing herself up. I can't have been the only one who was fooled. After this I grew angry. Secrets are all very well, but we are talking basic human rights here. A child should know its parents, or at the very least, its parent. Neither Victory nor Taff had any right to leave me in the dark so long. I'm in no fit state to receive a shock of this magnitude now, either. How dare they? I hated them both for a while, and Grandma Editha who must have known too. What fun they must've had, all in on the act, cosy together. I wished I had a kitchen of my own, I was in just the right mood for smashing some china. Beyond anger was a void, numb surprise; back to being staggered, in fact.

I couldn't believe that during our formative years, while we were dreaming of and searching for our fathers, we children should also have been looking out for our mothers. No wonder Victory could only conjure phantom men for me that night, she probably never even met our dads. Perhaps when I eventually capitulated, walked to the Visitors' Room and sat opposite Taff, it was because at least she really did know who's sperm had made me. Except, in retrospect, having been flighty and given to urges, she's not a reliable informant either.

Well, I've seen Taff several times since reading that letter, very awkward meetings at first, with her weeping into a pile of Kleenex and me studying her wrinkled brow for family likenesses. It is from her that I get my fair hair and my tendency to put on weight. It seems my dad was a dark, handsome hunk; but then she would say that. Taff's been with some pretty horrendous men and I've yet to hear her admit that any of them were less than perfect. Please God I haven't inherited her lack of taste. At night I lie awake imagining my future self in a home full of orange glass ornaments and plastic flowers. During these bedtime stories, as I grow older, I begin to resemble Taff in every way, getting fatter, coarser, more eccentric, until, having also inherited her sense of humour, I can see the funny side of the situation. My inheritance isn't a home or possessions, it is Taff. If I couldn't be Victory's daughter, I might have been anybody's; but I'm not. I'm the flesh and blood of the woman I've spent my life loathing; of the woman my ‘mother' loved best.

I, who mourned the loss of my mother deeply, have been given a second chance. Isn't that what bereaved folk long for? You lose a mother, you want a mother; it's every motherless child's dream.

It was during my second meeting with Taff that a blinding thought occurred to me. I hardly dared to ask, not sure which would be most alarming, an answer of yes, or a disturbing no. She was chatting away at the time, telling me how she'd got something for me, how she hoped the size was right. I wasn't paying much attention, my mind being occupied by my blinding thought.

‘Here you go, Lovey,' she said and passed a Tesco's carrier bag across the table to me. I put my hand inside before looking. The contents were soft as candyfloss, but without the stickiness. When I pulled the gift out it was actually the colour of candyfloss but garnished with a bright orange. Three knitted tubes, joined at the shoulders by thick blue thread.

‘It's a woolly,' Taff told me. I was grateful for this information.

‘You made it?' A fairly safe guess.

‘Just,' she grinned. My blinding thought was momentarily banished to a dark corner as I pictured her in the Home, knitting furiously into the night so as to have this thing ready to present to me on time.

‘Thanks,' I offered as graciously as I could. ‘Taff?' I hadn't yet managed to call her mother, and the name Mum was taken, but since her revelation I used the name Taff awkwardly. She waited. ‘I've just had a thought. Maybe it's absurd but I have to ask. You say that you're my mother…'

‘I am, I am,' she cried and many heads twisted to look at her earnest expression.

‘Yes. Well, I was wondering if that was it, surprise-wise, or if there's more you'd like to tell me?'

The woman blushed deeply, turning her thick make-up from suntan to sunset. She played with the Tesco bag, twisting a corner into a horn.