The Race (16 page)

I shook my head silently. I wondered what would happen if I told her about the broken radio, the way the dust kept covering up the other dust on the fogged-over dial.

She let me go. I was late for maths, but only by five minutes.

~*~

Derek started going out on the van with Dad when he was eight. By the time he was fifteen, he was working in the house clearance business full time.

Mum wanted Derek to go to university. The rows about Derek’s future went on for hours – usually they finished with Mum in tears. In the end – just before she left, this was – the school sent her a letter saying that Derek had been classified as ‘ungovernable’ and they had ‘regretfully come to a decision’ to exclude him permanently.

Derek blu-tacked the letter to his bedroom wall. When eventually it fell down he threw it away.

Derek took to the business straight away. Partly it was the sense of freedom – driving around in the van all day, with no two days ever the same and always that feeling of something new happening. But he also had a genuine liking for old things. He handled objects carefully and with precision, and sometimes if you went out on the van with him he’d tell you about them. He was fascinated by the interiors of old houses and by what you could find there. He ended up knowing more about antiques than Dad, and Dad had been in the business practically from when he was in kindergarten.

There was a picture Derek kept in his room for a while, an old oil painting of a woman leaning on a veranda rail. The woman in the painting looked just like Derek’s girlfriend Monica. The day after Monica dumped him, Derek took the picture outside into the yard and kicked it to pieces with his Doc Martens. For ages afterwards there were tiny shining patches all over the concrete, flecks of gold colour from the smashed picture frame.

Sometimes, if he felt like it, Derek would take me with him when he went to price up a job. I enjoyed those drives. It was good to get out of the house, to see other places. In the week after the Christmas of the first year – no Christmas card from Mum, no nothing – Dad and Derek were booked to do a house clearance on West Hill Road in St Leonards. Derek had been given the keys in advance, because the property was empty and there would be no one there to let them in on the morning of the job. It was a massive job, Derek said, seventeen rooms in total. When he asked me if I wanted to go and have a look at the house with him I said all right.

We drove there along the sea front. The tide was in, and even though the temperatures were close to freezing there were still windsurfers out.

“Morons,” Derek said. “In this weather? I hope they drown themselves.”

The sea was clear green, softly ruffled with mother-of-pearl, like antique jade. The surfers were ploughing through it, whipping the surface into whiteness, like the froth you see on top of a glass of champagne. I had tasted champagne only once, at a party for my mother’s aunt who had just died. I found it strange that any family would hold a party for a dead person, but Mum explained that her Aunt Louise had been an actress on the London stage.

“She was quite famous, in her day,” Mum said. “This is what she would have wanted.”

Mum was wearing a dress made from pale blue silk. There were tiny beads of glitter all over it, like pinpricks of light. Later, once she’d had a glass or two of the champagne, Mum told me that the blue dress was one of Aunt Louise’s.

“I snuck upstairs and pinched it,” she said. The alcohol on her breath had the same sour smell as stinging nettles. “Right after the funeral. Aren’t I a riot?”

She raised her glass to me and giggled. She looked like she was made of glass herself, tall and bright and gleaming, exquisitely fragile. I never saw her like it, before or since.

West Hill Road is on the Bexhill side of St Leonards. It runs along the top of the cliff, behind the large, ship-shaped apartment block called Marine Court and above the road that runs along the sea front called the Marina. The house we were going to see was called Charlotte House. It stood on the south side of West Hill Road, close to the cliff edge and with nothing between it and the English Channel but empty air. There was a car park at the back, half overgrown with brambles and with notices that said ‘keep out’ and ‘unauthorised vehicles are liable to clamping’. The building itself was massive, with steep red gables and a long veranda, the kind of oversized Victorian villa my father always referred to as a white elephant. Charlotte House used to be a hotel in the old days, then a nursing home. Eventually it became too expensive to run and so the owners closed it down and boarded it up.

“It’s just the top floor we’re doing,” Derek said. “The rest is empty already, apparently.”

He parked the van in the car park. He didn’t seem nervous about being clamped, so I supposed we were authorized. The sight of the house gave me goosebumps, because it was so large, probably.

“Are you sure it’s okay to go in?” I said.

“Of course. It’s a job, isn’t it?” He took the keys out of the ignition. “Let’s go.”

The entrance to the fourth floor flat was through a side door.

“Belonged to the caretaker,” Derek said. “Gone gaga, probably. Either that or he can’t manage the stairs any more.”

The stairs were very steep, and uncarpeted. I wondered about the old man and where he was now. It made me sad to think of him being taken away. The stairwell was a dark and dingy green, lit by a single overhead bulb that somehow had to do for the entire hallway.

Dangerous for an old man, I thought. Perhaps if they’d put in better lighting he could have stayed here longer. Derek unlocked the door to the flat and we went inside. There was a strange smell, a musky, sweetish odour that Derek said was mothballs.

The flat was stuffed with things. Some of them were in boxes already, but most of what remained still had to be packed. A job this size would take most of a day but it would pay good money. The main room was at the front. It was filled with light, the sea-green, liquid light of the water below. The floorboards were bare and dusty. There was a big cloth-covered sofa, an enormous glass-fronted cabinet crammed full of ornaments, so many of them that the cabinet doors wouldn’t close properly. The things inside were pretty: porcelain egg cups shaped like baskets, blue Wedgwood beakers and china horses, stuff like that.

“See that?” Derek said. He opened the doors of the cabinet, easing them gently apart so that nothing fell out. “That’s Capodimonte.” He reached inside and drew out a porcelain ballerina, one leg flung delicately outwards and raised at the knee. Her skin was a bluish, translucent white. Her costume, her
tutu
, was a soft violet colour.

Her hair was yellow like Mum’s, and like Derek’s.

Derek rested the ornament on the palm of his hand. His fingers gripped the base, very lightly, just to steady it.

“That’s worth a good couple of quid, that is,” he said. He tapped the porcelain with his thumbnail, making it ring. “There’s other stuff here, too. Good stuff.” He put the ballet dancer down on the sofa. “If you see something you like, let me know.”

He wanted to give me something. We hadn’t exchanged presents at all that Christmas, none of us had. I thought this was probably Derek’s way of trying to make up for that.

I liked the little dancer’s purple
tutu
. I thought Derek would probably give her to me if I asked him to, even though she was valuable. Derek was like that sometimes. I left him taking more ornaments out of the cupboard and walked away to explore the rest of the flat.

Beyond the main room there were many smaller rooms, a labyrinth of corridors and storage closets and oddly shaped lobby areas. The place gave me the creeps, just a little bit, and I could see why Derek hadn’t been too keen on coming here alone. Some of the rooms were empty, others were piled high with old furniture. I realised this was what happened when a world got dismantled: the actual space remained the same, but its meaning became altered. Whole lives were erased.

Most of my mother’s things were still at Laton Road. We edged cautiously around them, pretending they was invisible, or that if we left them alone for long enough our mother’s possessions would go away by themselves.

I ended up in a room that had once been a bedroom. As well as the bed there was a desk and a wardrobe, a heavy-looking oval mirror in a dark wood frame. The single window was narrow and pointed, too high up the wall to see out of unless you stood on a stool. On the floor underneath the desk was a box of books. I bent down to examine them, old novels by John Wyndham and C. S. Lewis and E. Nesbit, all writers I had heard of but not yet read. The books were in hardback, all with their original dust jackets. There was something about them I liked – the smell probably, musty and time-soaked, like old library books – and I thought I might perhaps ask Derek if I could have them. They were more interesting than the china ballerina, at any rate. I stood up, and as I turned around to face the door I caught sight of myself in the mirror. Looking into it was like staring into a pool of murky water. I saw my own neat figure, my own dark, rather wispy hair and wire-framed glasses. I knew the girl in the glass was me, yet at the same time she seemed not to be me. Indeed I knew she was not, that although she looked just like me she was someone else.

She gazed back at me from out of the glass, and in the moment when our eyes met I understood that she knew it, too.

I felt cold all over, then hot. I stretched my hand out towards the glass, reaching for the other girl’s fingers. It seemed suddenly very important that we should touch. If we touch, I thought, then we will swap places. I will be where she is, and she will be here.

The idea was scary but it was also exciting. There’s a whole other world out there, I thought. Let’s do it. I stepped forward to touch the glass, but in the instant before I could do so I heard Derek’s voice.

“What are you doing in here?” he said. He’d crept up on me without my hearing him, and as I span around to face him the other girl slipped away. I felt her go, disappearing silently into the deeper, greyer spaces of the huge apartment that l now knew lay somewhere on the other side of the mirror glass.

I understood at once that our moment had passed. A chance had been offered to me and I had missed it. I still don’t know if I regretted the girl’s departure, or if I was relieved.

“Just looking,” I said to Derek. “Can I have these?” I gestured towards the box of books under the desk.

“Okay,” Derek said. “Are you sure that’s all you want?” He spoke absently, his attention already elsewhere. The books he barely glanced at. “Christ,” he said. It was the desk he was looking at, one of those dinky little slant-topped bureaux with candy-twist legs. “I think that’s a Sheraton.”

“It’s nice,” I said, not caring. “Is it worth anything?”

He gave me a look. “Only twenty thousand quid,” he said. “If I’m right, that is.” He ran his fingers reverently over the surface of the polished wood then turned sharply away, making it look as if he’d lost interest, although I knew he had not. I picked up the box of books with their musty scent, like the newspapers we had at home only stronger.

I could feel the girl in the mirror watching me leave. I knew if I turned around right then I would catch sight of her, but I did not dare.

I thought about the incident afterwards, from time to time, but mostly I just accepted it as something peculiar that had happened but that was over now.

I did sometimes wonder though, how it would have been if I’d had a sister instead of a brother.

~*~

It was Derek’s girlfriend Monica who helped me fill in my application form for college.

Derek had girlfriends before Monica, but Monica was the first one he really cared about. She had slightly slanted eyes and very fair hair. Not yellow hair like Derek’s – Monica’s hair was the colour of hay at the height of summer. She lived in a tiny two-room flat on the top floor of one of the crummier-looking terraces on Braybrooke Road. The ground- and basement-floor maisonette was the home of a retired policeman. When he sold up and moved to somewhere smaller he hired Derek and Dad to clear away all the stuff he no longer had room for. Derek met Monica when she came home on her lunch break. He asked if she’d go for a drink with him when she finished work and she said yes.

Monica worked in a flower shop down in the Old Town, and not long after she started going out with Derek she fixed me up with a Saturday job there. I liked the job because it meant I had some money to spend. Also I enjoyed the work. I liked fixing up the window displays, and helping customers choose the right flowers. The shop’s owner, Diane, did all the more complicated stuff, the wedding floristry and so on, but she taught me how to create simple bouquets and sometimes she let me cash up the till.

Diane was seriously obese and often found trouble breathing when she went upstairs. She was always carefully dressed, though. She liked soft colours – rose pinks and primrose yellows, the same colours as her flowers. She had a thing about gloves. She owned dozens of pairs of them, maybe hundreds – I don’t think I ever saw her wear the same pair twice, although I suppose she must have done, it was just that I only ever saw her once or twice a week. She wore gloves winter and summer, and when she came into work in the morning the first thing she’d do would be to take them off and lay them down on the counter, one neatly across the other in an ‘x’ shape. It was like a ritual with her, a way of settling herself for the day ahead. Diane’s gloves fascinated me, not just because they were beautiful – many of them were hand-made – but because of the way they made you stop thinking about Diane’s large body and concentrate instead on her dainty hands. It was almost like a magic trick, an act of vanishment, something I suppose she’d learned to do long ago and that was now so much a part of her she no longer thought about it.

In spite of her fatness, Diane was graceful and pretty. And unlike my mother Marcia she was naturally kind.

“You have a real gift for floristry, Christy,” she said to me not long after I started working for her. “I’d take you on full time if I could afford to.”