What We Hide (9 page)

Home again, home again, jiggety jig. Luke zizzes next to
me in the backseat and I wish I could too, but that seems a bit rude.

“When is Dad getting here?” Kirsten wants to know.

“In time for supper.”

“When’s supper?” asks Kirsten.

Ann laughs and gives Kirsten a jolly swat with her scarf. We stop at a shop partway home called Top Drawer.

“I’ll wait in the car,” says Luke. “I know you’re getting nasties.”

Ann buys Kirsten a purple bra and some tights. She buys us both saucy knickers with lace bits.

“You don’t have to,” I say, but honestly they’re dead nice and I’m touched. By the time we get back, it’s nearly evening.

“Good birthday, eh?” says Kirsten.

I punch her and pretend it was mine too.

“He’s here!” calls Ann.

“Dad!” Kirsten’s down the stairs in a flash and Luke lopes along behind. I give them time for the mushy part and show up as Ann’s pouring drinks.

“Hallo, I’m Geoffrey,” he says. He’s sort of an old Sean Connery type.

“Penelope.” I shake his offered hand, as if I’m a new business associate.

“Ah yes,” he says. “You’re the one who draws so nicely. Didn’t you do a portrait of Kirsten for last year’s exhibit?”

I’m impressed that he remembers.

Kirsten’s menu is duck breast—
duck
breast!—and something called risotto, which looks like rice pudding but
tastes cheesy and divine. Also salad with loads of cress, and a huge cake shaped like a tortoise, which is some kind of family joke. The inside is marbled and the outside has got thin chocolate wafers stuck on, to look like the shell. Ann made it herself, a flipping masterpiece.

I do the dishes with Luke, Ann being the cook, Kirsten being the birthday girl, and Geoffrey being the dad. No dad I ever met does dishes. No brother I ever met does dishes either, but Barney the Oaf is likely not a fair example. Or, maybe it’s Luke who’s weird.

We’re back in Kirsten’s room when we hear the unmistakable sound of pissed-off parents having a row downstairs, not quite shouting. Her dad is leaving, going back to the office apparently.

“What’s up?” I say.

“Mum gets fed up with him working all the time, that’s all.”

“Like now, on a Saturday night?”

“Yeah.” She seems not bothered.

Kirsten goes to sleep with her face on this old stuffed dog, grey with years. It’s sweet she still has him on her bed, and sweet that she leaves him here, since we’d tease the crap out of her if she brought him to school. Little Woofy is too precious for that, with his tufts and straining-apart stitches.

It’s warm in the bed, but I can hear Luke still twiddling about in his room, so I pull on socks and a flannel shirt of Kirsten’s over my knickers, but making sure tits and legs are still on view. I go in to see if he nibbles.

He’s at the desk, hunched over a notebook, drawing skeletons with all the parts labeled.

“Luke.” I stand in the doorway. “Knock knock.”

“Uh-huh.” His eyes flit over my legs and he flushes, but he just hunches further over. “I’m doing bio.”

I sit on the bed. His duvet cover is diamonds like Kirsten’s, only navy.

“Kirby is such a wanker.” Wrong thing to say, I guess, from the look on Luke’s face. “I mean, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, but …” Luke’s Biro does this jiggly thing against the page. “You can’t blame a teacher for the existence of biology.”

He’s a nerd in disguise, I should have known. Perfect like his sister. “I like skeletons,” he says. “I like the shape of bones.”

“Huh.” I wrap the shirt around me better, might as well, since it’s bloody freezing and he’s clearly not getting heated. I sit there for a sec and he looks at me sideways.

“Anyway,” I say, getting up. “Can’t sleep, that’s all.”

“You don’t have to go,” he says, but he’s lying. The desk lamp lights his shaggy hair. From behind he’s got this glowing halo.

“Anyway,” I say. “See you in the morning.”

“Sleep tight,” he says, like he’s a bleeding mother or something.

“Yeah.” Sheesh. That was illuminating.

Kirsten’s got this old-fashioned seat-thing built under the window, with a nice cushion and a couple of woolly jumpers I can wrap around my legs. I sit looking out at the street where a faint drizzle is falling.

The last time I saw my mother, she was sitting by the window in the “common room” at St. Dymphna’s Refuge. St. Dymphna was some teen virgin whose father slashed her head off while she was defending her purity. Somehow this qualifies her to be patron saint of nervous afflictions. That’s what my mother is, nervously afflicted.
Seriously
nervously afflicted.

But she’s calm there, she likes it. I used to think I’d driven her crazy somehow, and then I was bloody positive it was all Dave’s fault. At St. Dymphna’s they asked us to meet with a counsellor, but Dave never showed. They tried to make me believe that blame is dumb.

The Day My Mother Cracked Her Nut, by Penelope Fforde

Wake up on school time even without bells
.

Go to the loo. Flush toilet before use. Flush toilet after use
.

Listen to snoring in parents’ room
.

Go to living room, find Mum lying there as if she’d just tipped over to one side, hands folded in lap, eyes wide open
.

Lights on, nobody home. I suddenly get what that means
.

Silky’s paw goes tap tap tap tap on Mum’s wrist
.

She looks dead, and I sway. I kneel beside her, whisper, Mum? soft as a paw. She doesn’t blink or twitch or swallow
.

Dave lumbers in, hair flat on one side, sticking up like autumn grass on the other
.

Jesus H. Christ, is she dead?

Because my hand is on her arm, I feel what is not visible, a slight but certain clenching of her entire nervous system at the sound of his voice
.

Or was that me?

What comes next has more than one part. The crazed-Dave part where he shouts two inches from her face. The scared-me part where I cry. The scared-Dave part where he calls an ambulance. The brave-me part where I climb in next to her and stick around for all the rest of it. The wank-Dave part where he never goes to see her again. Where he pretends she died
.

I hear Luke go to the loo, see the patch of hall carpet go dark when his light goes off. Unbelievably, I’m hungry again. There’s definitely cake left, or a slice of duck. Maybe they’ve got a bag of crisps in a cupboard. I move carefully in the dark, not wanting to kick anything and wake the whole bloody house. Socks are good for silent shuffling. I slide my toe over the edge of each stair on the way down, so when I hit the ground I won’t do that idiot lurch-thing and go flying. I pause at the bottom remembering which way to the kitchen. Along the hall past the row of happy family photos, edging through the dining room, so’s not to smash my hip on some antique chair or topple some treasure. I slide my hand over the wall, find the switch, and—
bam!
—the light snaps on. Holy crap.

Ann is at the table hunched over the leftover cake, using a spoon to cram cake into her mouth. Frosting is smeared on her lips and crumbs are spraying everywhere. She’s
making a ravenous smacking sound. Her nightie is hitched up, so there’s this white thigh as part of the picture. Her eyes bug out when she sees me, and she sort of spits cake onto what an hour ago was a warm, rosy floor. All this in a hideous half second before I jam off the light and turn to run. I hear a nasty gurgling, but I’m not waiting around. Kirsten’s mother has been devoured by a scarygreedy-goblin version of herself.

I skid toward the stairs, knee crunching into the railing—
ow!
—tear upstairs, career into the bedroom, and dive onto the bed, sure my frantic heart will crack a rib. Kirsten jolts up like I’m a nightmare. “What the
hell
?”

“Oh, sorry. Sorry.” What do I say to Kirsten? Does she have a clue that she is the spawn of a lunatic binge eater? Oh, crappity crap crap.

Clock on Kirsten’s nightstand says 3:17, that’s A-bleeding-M.

“What are you doing up?” Her eyes aren’t even open.

I could tell her. I could smash another cup on the floor under her feet.

“I saw something.”

She pulls a pillow over her head. “Tomorrow,” comes muffling out.

Well, sure. You deserve one more night of sleep. Since you’ve just joined the nut club and need to rest up for a life of denial.

I stick my head back into the hallway. Ann must have run for cover. The quiet is practically crackling with
ominous
. Now what? Climb into bed and pretend it never
happened?
“G’morning, Ann! Yeah, ta, slept fine. Lovely to have a weekend away from the dorm.… ”

Obviously time to leave.

Kirsten’s rucksack is on her desk, full of homework. I rip a corner from a page in her notebook, slow, quiet rip. I use her eyeliner:
Had to go. See you at school. Ta
. I put it on the toilet seat with a toothbrush lying on top so there’s no way she’ll miss it.

I leave the door unlocked, because how am I going to lock it behind me? It’s dark outside, but no psycho lurking in the bushes can be as creepy as the one in the kitchen. Why did it take me so long to notice something wrong?

And haven’t I sworn not to hitchhike again? But here I am at three-thirty in the bloody morning ambling along the motorway praying for a lorry. Instead there’s an angel on earth, shaped like a podgy woman named Jean who’s coming back from looking after her sick old mum. She’s grateful to have someone keep her awake for a couple of hours, because she has the morning shift at a grocery market.

“I don’t have kids,” she tells me. Then there’s this minute of dead quiet, like she’s inhaling a cigarette, except she’s not smoking. This stretch of road is dark, and her face is lit by the dashboard, aglow with spots of red and green.

“I never even had sex,” she says. “And look at me. Now it’ll never happen.”

“Well, I’ve had enough for both of us,” I say. “And maybe your sick old mum as well.” I think I might have gone too far but she laughs.

I tell her about tongue-kissing and hand jobs and blow jobs, and then about Kirsten, about
my
sick mum and even about Kirsten’s mum’s midnight feast.

“That poor, sad woman,” says Jean. “We all have our secret sorrows, don’t we? She sounds downright miserable.”

Jean takes me all the way up the drive and around back into the courtyard. It’s just past five. I figure I’ll nap in the changing room rather than risk the stairs and Hairy Mary’s supersonic hearing.

“Thanks for the lift.”

“Well,” says Jean, laughing, “you’ve certainly added to my vocabulary.” She does a tidy three-point turn and zooms off.

I see a light in the kitchen. Vera D. is already cooking up today’s slops. I tap on the door, making her jump, but then she stirs up cocoa in a pan just for me. I sit on a stool and slice the margarine, carving wedges off a great block and dropping them onto plates for the breakfast tables.

Sunday afternoon, Kirsten comes blowing into the dorm like a wind off the moors. She pulls up short at the vision of me lounging in knickers and tee.

“Whoa,” she says. “You’re here.”

“I said I would be. Didn’t you get my note?”

“You scared the crap out of me, Penelope! How the hell did you get back? My mother totally wigged out. Toe. Ta. Lee. I mean it.”

I think,
That’s an understatement
.

“I better zip down and tell her you’re alive.” She peels out of the room and I tweak the blanket masquerading as a curtain, enough to see Ann’s car parked right below on the front sweep. She’s having a chat with Richard, a perfectly normal woman passing the time of day with the headmaster. No sign of Luke. He must have hauled himself back to his dorm without lingering, not giving two thoughts to what happened to the enchanting weekend guest.

Just pray Ann is too mortified to mention anything to Richard about me coming back on my own or I’ll have quintuple detention for thumbing. Kirsten hops down the front steps and skids to a stop. My efforts to telepathically transmit a psychodrama defence appear to be successful. Richard departs with a wave, mother and daughter spiky heads meet for a moment, Ann glances up but can’t possibly see me. And please, never wants to again.

Eventually Kirsten comes back upstairs. “How did you get here?”

“I hitched a ride.”

“Can you imagine the
hell
shit my mother would be in if anything had happened?”

“I got picked up by a nice veiny-nosed lady whose mum was dying,” I say. “Safe as anywhere on earth.”

“Well, I was worried,” she mutters. “Selfish cow.”

“Hey, sorry,” I say. “Really.”

Kirsten glares at me. “That was whack, Pen. What happened?”

I find a thread to pull on my blanket.

“You can ditch my family,” she says. “But you can’t ditch
me. We’re sisters here in the big happy parcel of kin who inhabit the Jane Austen dormitory.”

I smile at her for that.