The Scrapbook (9 page)

She starts to gather the photographs up and push them into the pocket of her cardigan. She won't look at me now. Her movements are hesitant and graceless.

‘Don't say things like that, Fern, don't be cruel. These are private. They're mine.'

I bend to pick one up which had spun to the floor unnoticed. It's another picture of my father and me together, my toddler-self walking, penguin-like, on his feet. We're laughing.

I sit down on the rug and stare at it. ‘Look at him, mum. He's laughing. He's having fun. With me. He looks like a proper dad. He looks like he loves me.'

She stays silent. I try to retrieve my anger. ‘Anyway, you can't decide what's important and what isn't. There could have been something in one of these that could help. What else are you hiding?'

Mum holds her hand out for the photograph and when I lay it onto her palm she smiles down at it, stroking it gently with her forefinger. She still won't look at me.

‘Maybe you should tell me what you've been hiding, Fern.'

I draw my knees up to my chest and wrap my arms around myself, holding my heart close. ‘What are you talking about?'

She looks up then, leans slowly over so that our foreheads are nearly touching. ‘I know you're pregnant.'

I shake my head and start to say something, some kind of denial, but the words keep slipping out of my head. She waits while I gather myself, clear my throat. ‘How? How did you …?'

She shrugs and looks defiant, a little sheepish. ‘You're not the only snoop in the family. I saw the picture of the scan in your handbag. I've been waiting for you to tell me, but then I finally realised that you weren't going to. Were you?'

I don't answer her.

‘Is it Rick's?' Mum asks. ‘Have you told him? Is he pleased? You know it'll be a girl, don't you? You know it will be.'

I stand up and walk to the door.

‘Then god help the poor little bugger.'

A Blood Soaked
Shoe Lace

You said it was your fault for walking too quickly, for making me rush in my heels to keep up. I never told you that I was frowning down at my snagged black nylons, at the pearl-glint of flesh zigzagging down the thigh. They were new on that evening as well.

The broken bottle bit deep into my shin as I spilled onto the ground. The tiny crunching noise it made as it broke the skin was somehow satisfying and I didn't scream until I saw the glossy jut of glass below my knee and my blood on the cobbles.

You'd been speaking, throwing words over your shoulder as you strode ahead, and then you were by my side and silent as you stared. I scrabbled for you but you held me away and raised my leg, braced my foot against your chest. You pushed me gently back so that I could see the apricot smear of street lamps tainting the night and you told me to be still.

I thought I knew what you were doing and even despite the pain and the panic I wouldn't have stopped you, would even have welcomed your body on mine, but you unlaced your shoe and tied the brown cord around my ankle. Tight, and then tighter. You lowered my leg to the ground and raised me up and the blood poured. I screamed again. And then I was in your arms and you were running to the car. A stray tomcat, tatty as an over-loved teddy bear, balanced on a dustbin lid and kept sombre watch as you wrapped your suit jacket around my leg. Its faded eyes fixed on me and I couldn't look away.

At the hospital they stitched me and scolded you for tying the tourniquet below the wound. You held my hand and told me you were sorry. By the time they finally let us go we'd missed the film so we went straight to the hotel with our champagne in your weekend bag and me, a hop-a-long, beside you. I didn't really need to limp, the painkillers had done their job, but I liked the way you slowed your pace and held my waist.

The bath was too hot but I got in anyway, leg straddling the side as you stroked water over me with a flannel. Foam in scented peaks around my face. You kissed each toe and wrapped me in a towel, carried me to the bed. The lamps were lit and I lay and watched you undress. Watched you tremble. When I stretched out my arms to gather you close you shook your head and sat on the edge of the bed, face in hands.

So much blood.

I curled my body behind yours and licked the abacus parade of bone at the nape of your neck. I didn't speak.

I'm going to take better care of you, Iris, I promise.

We were quiet for a while. Your flesh flickered and dampened beneath my tongue. Your breath came fast. I knew you'd turn around.

Later, in your sleep, you muttered my name and clasped my hip so tightly I nearly cried out. The imprint of your fingers stayed on my skin long after you'd dropped me home and left me once again.

5

I was sixteen when I fell in love with the guitarist of the school's rock band. I was sixteen when I got pregnant.

He was sat outside the science lab, guitar across his lap and notepad on his knee. As I walked past he began to pluck at the strings of the instrument, humming a tune. I knew he was watching me. I fumbled with the straps of my book bag, slowing my pace until I was stood before him, and then I dropped the bag and began to dance. We stared at each other as I stepped back and forth, swinging my hips to his song, and then he jumped up and came over to me, wrapped his large palms around my upper arms and pulled me against him. His dark hair pooled against my cheek, tickling the corner of my mouth. It smelt of Love Hearts.
I shuddered and leaned into him, and finally understood what kept my mother waiting at the living room window day after day.

He knew my reputation; the crow chasing and the compulsive counting. He wrote anguished poetry in clumsy, stumbling rhyme that tortured the ear
(‘I gasped and flailed / under the stab of your eyes / You laughed as I swayed / You told nothing but lies.')
and he was looking for a muse. He'd been born on the mainland and his otherness set him apart from the other boys, the islanders
.

By the end of that day I'd skipped my first maths, English literature and geography classes, and I'd stolen my first bottle of wine from the off-licence near the park, the one that my mum never went into. By the end of that day I knew how it felt to slot my naked hipbones against another person's. The gentle scuff and scattered goosebumps as delighted skin crept across delighted skin, and then the hard press of the skeleton beneath.

Again! And again! And again!

Two bodies curling up and stretching out and winding around each other. Two bodies grasping and clutching and cradling. He was the oak tree that guarded my home, and I the honeysuckle that clung and gripped, that scaled his body until he was completely covered by me.

His parents worked and so he had a key and the house to himself for a couple of hours each day after school. After we'd tugged our clothes back on and opened the windows to release the moist tang of each other, he'd read me his poetry or sing one of his songs and I'd listen and smile, watching his mouth, shivering with the need to feel his weight upon me again. He begged me to stay on past six, to meet his mum and dad, but I always refused. I didn't want to see him as somebody's son, as existing apart from me and away from me. Just sixteen, and I was already an echo of my mother, carving out a private world for me and my love, working to separate it, and him, from the realities of meal times and laundry and all those other domestic routines. And besides, I'd then have to return the favour and there was no way I was going to let him anywhere near my shabby home or my mother's gin-soaked breath.

I was fascinated by his house, by its tidiness and its lemon-zest smell. I looked through the cupboards while he dozed and discovered furniture polish and special cleaners to apply to metal and leather. I'd collect the brass ornaments that were crowded on the mantelpiece and spread them out across the dining room table, anointing and buffing them until they gleamed, and then carefully replacing them. I wonder if anyone ever noticed. I sprayed my shoes with the polish every day so that I'd take some of that clean smell home with me, and there I'd walk from room to room, stomping my feet, and imagine it drifting off onto the carpets and rugs.

The refrigerator was filled with food that I had never tasted: avocados and olives and soft French cheeses. I sampled each new flavour, my fingertips leaving crescent-shaped grooves in the Camembert. In the bedrooms I would tread carefully between bed and dressing table, wary of the beige carpets so soft my footprints left dents. The bedside drawers were a treasure trove of old diaries and exotic looking ointments, tins with tiny teeth inside and little pots of hand creams. My mum's bedside drawer never held anything more exciting than a bottle of gin and her sleeping pills.

Photographs in silver frames marched up the walls of the staircase and clustered on the half-landing. Faces, smiling or solemn, gazed at me and at each other. Arms grasped shoulders and hands clasped waists. Mother and father, mother and son, father and son. This unabashed flaunting of the bonds of love and family made me feel queasy and hollow, but nevertheless compelled me to return to stare again and again.

I took one of the photographs home, a group one of the whole family together, grandparents as bookends, all sitting in a line on a beach and juggling ice creams and sun hats. My poet, grinning and gritty with sand, teetering on toddler legs, held up a dead crab triumphantly. I eased it from its hook and pulled the hook from the wall, licking my finger to smooth out the puncture hole left behind. Once home, I wrapped the photo in a pillowcase and slid it into the oak tree: the keeper of my secrets since I was old enough to have any. I nestled the bundle into the head-height cavity carved between two branches, imagining it settling deep inside that wooden heart, flavouring the sap and gilding the leaves. My oak, now a literal family tree.

I saw my love one weekend, in the newsagents with his mother, and I watched them together for a while before he turned and spotted me. The rage I felt then, the grief, left me breathless and tearful. In those moments before he registered my presence he belonged utterly to her. It was as if I didn't exist. Was he thinking about me? When she picked up a music magazine and tapped him on the wrist, and he glanced down at it, shook his head and plucked it from her hands, was he calculating the hours until he could see me again? He didn't look as if he was. He didn't even look like him. Boredom and embarrassment at being out with his mum had hardened the angles of his beautiful boy's face and his eyes flicked constantly from place to place. When he laughed it was grudgingly, unwillingly.

I'd been in the chemist's for the last hour, glazing myself with different scents until my head ached and I smelt like a bowl of potpourri. I wanted to march up to them and reclaim him, make him mine again, but I also wanted to run away and change my clothes, shower and brush my hair, and then return as clean and untainted as their home. I stood and stared.

And then he turned his head and saw me. He jumped as if I'd reached over and prodded him, but then he smiled and started to walk towards where I was huddled by the comics. He said something to his mother and she looked straight at me, her face creased with pleasure. She followed after him and they reached me together, standing shoulder to shoulder, closer to each other than to me. My poet said my name, said hers, and she smiled and offered a laughing comment, her hand on his arm and then on the nape of his neck. They were the same height.

I don't remember what I said, or if I said anything at all. I couldn't take my eyes from her hand as it moved against the skin of his neck, cupping the knob of bone at the top of his spine. He grimaced and wriggled, bringing his shoulders up to his ears, and shrugged the hand away. There was an expectant silence.

She was dressed in a pretty cream skirt and blouse, this mother, and her hair was the same dark colour as his. Her eyes were different, though, lighter and wider, or maybe they just looked that way because of her use of shadow and mascara. Her fingernails were painted coral.

Fern?

My poet finally moved to touch me but she moved at the same time, her face a frown of concern.

Are you okay, honey?

And they touched me together, bumping hands against my arm. I recoiled, pushed past them both, harder than I'd intended, and she stumbled backwards. I didn't pause to see if she was all right. I barely made it to the door of the shop before I threw up.

They drove me home and I sobbed for the entire journey, doubled over with my face in my lap. The boy sat with me in the back of the car, his skin waxy with nausea and distaste. He patted me awkwardly, hissed his helplessness to his mother. He was terrified of my tears.

The mother was terrified of something else. She stopped the car in the lane outside our house and helped me out, held onto me for a moment.

Is this the only time you've been sick lately, sweetheart?

I could make out the outline of mum at the living room window, lamp-lit, haloed in bronze. As I gently pulled away and started to walk towards the front door, the outline wavered and melted. This wasn't the car she was expecting, but what joy must she have felt, just for a second, when it actually stopped outside the house? Enough joy to salve the last decade and more?

As I walked up to the front door I realised that I had become my mother. But unlike my mother, I was going to learn my lesson, and I was going to learn it right now. We both loved too fiercely, and too much, but unlike her I wouldn't ever again wrench at my heart with both hands and thrust it with such wanton eagerness at another person. I wouldn't ever again scour myself out with love, until I was raw and emptied of me, ready to be filled by them.