Mountains of the Moon (47 page)

My lungs refuse air, my ribs is an empty bird cage. My voice cracks with my lips.

“This is my place, Bernard,” I says. “I wants to stay here and die.”

“The baby came too soon,” Michael says. “It’s in the sink. Nothing to do with me.”

Angels come down from the ceiling and stand all around me.

“We’re going to take you out,” they say.

My backbone lifts up off the bed.

“Hold on.”

“Hold on.”

We sit in the car at the traffic lights.

“They’re very nice people,” Maud says, “a very nice family.” She sits watching the lights change, must be one color she likes. Social workers int fit to drive; I learned that much.

“They’re all looking forward to you coming.” She goes on red.

Maud took over my case from Sarah Waters, who lost me for three and a half years and never got me the two right sneakers. I look down at the two left ones, falling to bits with the heels trod down. Maud indicates with the winder wipers.

“One of the girls is just fourteen, the same age as you, so you’ll have lots to talk about. I think the others are seven and five. When I spoke to Mrs. Smith earlier she said they’d baked you a cake. I think you might be going to Wimbledon on Sunday, Center Court, strawberries and cream. Lucky you.”

Here we is freezing in a June cold-sack. House with the weeping willow and a blue Peugeot estate under the carport. Bastards to fix. Here they is, all waiting on the lawn. Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Hope and Faith and Charity. They got names from out of fairy tale. It don’t matter which one is which, all the same, white-haired princesses with light blue
pinafore dresses and braces on their teef. Useless legs, can’t hardly hold them up.

Maud holds me out like I was material for them to see. I don’t say nothing.

“Let us not all stand here staring,” Mrs. Smith says.

“It’s not going very well, is it?” the little one says.

I look at the sky. At the lawn. At cars passing on the getaway road. I look at these people.

“You’re most welcome, Catherine,” Mrs. Smith says.

“Yes,” he says. “On behalf of all of us we join together with thanks and welcome you to our happy home. Now should it be Catherine, or Cathy?”

Puffed-up little twat.

“Or Katie?”

“Or Kit?”

“Or Kitty?”

“Kitty-Kat, no,” the littlest says.

“Is it spelled with a K or a C?” arsts the middlest.

“I don’t know,” I shrug, “with a C, I think, C for Car, C for Cunt.”

“That’ll do,” Mr. Smith says. “I’ll not have you bring that filth into my house; you can go back to where you came from.”

“I’d love to, Mr. Smith,” I says, “but they won’t let me.”

“We’re not off on a very good foot,” Mrs. Smith says. “Come in, Catherine, come inside and let’s get you settled in.”

“When you’ve got three girls in one room, another girl is neither here nor there,” Mrs. Smith says. She squeezes around the bunk bed and the single bed and my camp bed in the middle. “There!” She leaves handprints in my new fluffed pillows.

“We made this space for you to put your things.” Littlest bites her lip.

“Now where is your bag? Did we leave it in the sitting room? In the hall?” Mrs. Smith goes off searching. I lean on the door frame, looks at all the posters.

“We love Abba,” Littlest says. “We do, don’t we? We love Abba.”

Suddenly all three of them is up on the bed, snapping their fingers and doing a dance and singing something about Waterloo. Wonder sometimes if I’m real. When they finish I’m sposed to clap.

“Do you know, I think Maud must have driven off with your things? I’ll ring Social Services now and get her to bring them back.”

“There int a bag, Mrs. Smith,” I says.

“You don’t have your own personal things with you?”

“I int got personal things,” I says.

“I see,” she says. “I see, I see, I see. Now why don’t you and I make a cup of tea and go and sit in the front room and get to know each other a little bit?”

I turn the bright cut stone in my pocket, follow her to the kitchen.

“How are you feeling now, Catherine?” Mrs. Smith says. “Maud tells me you’re a very, very lucky girl.”

But the littlest comes in the kitchen.

“Shall I show you everything?” she says.

I shrug, why not. The back door is open. There’s a small grass garden with a plain high fence. They got a tennis ball, on a string, on a post, Mr. Smith whacking it around, Biggest missing.

“Dad,” she says, all loop-da-loop.

Middlest is trying to skip but can’t.

“Garage,” Littlest says.

Three pink bikes, two with stabilizers. Big doll’s house, all the furniture in the attic. Paddling pool. Trampoline. Roller skates. Workbench, loads of tools hung up on the wall, saws and drills, rows of chisels and sizes of hammers, a full metric set of spanners, none of them done a job in their life. They’ve been drawed around in black, so you know the shape of something missing.

“If it’s raining, Catherine, you can come and play in here,” Littlest says. She picks up a baby doll from a pram, wants me to hold it but I can’t. We go back in the garden. The tennis ball is still whacking around, now with the middlest.

“Dad!” she says.

“Your turn, Catherine,” Mr. Smith says. “We might as well see what you’re made of.”

I was only there ten days. Sometimes wonder who broke who. The school didn’t ask my mother again, after “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” And now I’m here, off the coach walking down Buckingham Palace Road, following signs to Victoria Station and the Underground. The air is so cold it’s granulated. Head full of multi-purposes and snot. The arcade coming into the station reminds me it’s the week before Christmas. One thing at a time.

District line—Westbound—South Kensington.

The Underground is warm and packed with Saturday-morning Christmas shoppers. They’ve used the photograph on the posters, advertising the exhibition. I go up past them on the escalator. Apparently the printers have had trouble reproducing the red.
Arresting
is the name of the picture, coined off the top of Tony Gloucester Road’s head, when he was filling in the entry form. He’s a film cameraman, works for the BBC Nature Department. He came around again last night. Stayed over. Still don’t know what he looks like. I feel ever so unlikely, like a terrible mistake. We were doing all right til we got to his dick. My guts flutter just thinking about it. He was OK about it, well, as OK as a bloke could be, opened the windows, got me some air, put a blanket around my shoulders, fetched the bucket, case.

“Sorry, Tony,” I said.

He gave me a white gardenia that turned into a tissue.

“I’ve never had anyone react in this way before,” he said.

“I’m ever so sorry,” I said. “It’s a…hhuck!…dick thing and fannies are…hhuck! Out of the fucking question.”

Has to turn my face from the memory. Remember to breathe. Think instead about the pavement passing under my feet. Think about railings. Bars.

This is the place. I stand and smoke two cigarettes on the steps. I take off Tim’s anorak and stuff it in a carrier bag. A security man inside the
building glances in the bag and lets me through. I wait in the long line for general inquiries. Tiredness adjusts my ears to the echoing din of kids and dinosaurs.

“I have an appointment, eleven o’clock,” I say, “with Chris Plum.”

Someone takes me to him, through the Jurassic Period and a gallery full of precious stones. We turn down some stairs and then down again and through some corridors with coded doors.

He’s a quietly spoken man, used to handling fragile things. It’s been so interesting. The vault is cool and dimly lit, just one spotlight over a metal table. He slides a shallow drawer from a cabinet and puts it gently under the light. It’s under glass but I’m scared to breathe. A tiny label names it.

“January the 10th 1797. Mozambique.” Mr. Plum’s glasses blow up his eyes, like a pair of duck eggs. “Last seen two hundred years ago, almost exactly.”

“I’m amazed, Mr. Plum,” I say.

The Camera
magazine is on the table,
Arresting
is on the cover. The other twenty-three photographs from the same film are more interesting to him. Two are particularly sharp and close up on individuals. There’s no denying the sameness of it, its tufty head and swallowtail and blue-black iridescence.

“Very importantly, can you remember when?”

“December the 17th,” I say. “My second day in Africa. My first roll of film. Everyone else photographed the view.”

“Unbelievable,” he says. “Thrilling.”

“They disappeared as quickly as they came,” I say, “in a series of rapid blinks.”

Starts crying. Don’t know how come.

I leave the museum with Mr. Plum; he only works half-day on Saturday. He wraps his scarf around his neck and claps his gloved hands together. I wrap my arms around my ribs.

“Keep the photos, Mr. Plum,” I say.

“I can send them back to you?”

“Keep them, Happy Christmas with love from me.”

“Well thank you,” he says and nods. “Are you going to the Tube?”

“No, I’ve got to go around the corner, to
The Camera
magazine’s exhibition. The launch lunch. I’ve got to shake some hands and get my prize.”

“Is it worth having?”

“According to a friend of mine, it’s the best camera ever made.”

He nods.

“And, a paid freelance assignment to go back to Africa,” I say. “Fuck that. Nearly killed me the first time.”

Makes Mr. Plum smile.

“Bye,” I say.

In three strides he’s swallowed whole in the pavement rush. I put Tim’s anorak on and stuff the carrier bag in the pocket. I’m an Englishwoman, I’ve decided. Even without leaves, I know the name of everything. Sycamore and London plane. Size you can get your head around. Stepping off the plane at Heathrow I thought I had so much African heat in my marrow it would glow in me for the rest of my life. But here I am with frozen blocks for feet. I ask a passerby for directions. Ask four people, none of them lives here.

It’s a very posh side street. This is the place. Glass-fronted. I cross over the road and crouch down opposite between some bins, to smoke a cigarette out of the wind. Some people arrive in a taxi and the doorman opens it for them. So tired. I close my eyes and rock a minute on my heels. When the cigarette is finished I fold a chewing gum into my mouth, something for my nerves to chew on. I take Tim’s anorak off and put it in the carrier bag and get up and cross the road. At the top of the steps, through the glass door, can see a party in the foyer. Christmas party dresses, yards of white linen and sparkling glasses; tinkling piano; scarlet pompoms and black butterflies, exploding out of every wall. My booming heart. I walk up the steps. The doorman is a solid thing standing in my way.

“Come on now,” he says. “Back down. We don’t want your sort in here.”

I don’t say anything. Just chew, produce the folded invitation from the top of my sock.

I don’t know how they could choose a winner. My guts are churning now, watching the clock. The best camera ever made is on my hip like a sharpshooter, seems fangled-dangled to me. Can’t remember anyone’s name, everyone looks the same. The wine makes me shudder. And this creep. He’s so pissed he can hardly stand up, bow tie on the wonk and the back of his shirt hanging out. Staring at me.

“
What?
” I lift an eyebrow.

He toasts me with a wine glass swaying with his knees dipping.

“I’m trying to make my mind up,” he says, “if you are actually attractive or not.”

“Probably not,” I say.

Every day I meet a candidate.

I should leave, if I’m going to get the seven ten to Chester. People are starting to leave. Everyone is red-faced, on the occasion, on the wine, in the glow
Arresting
makes. Butterflying eyes. I find the main man to say thanks and good-bye.

“You’re off,” he says. “We’re all going on to party in Piccadilly if you’d like to come?”

“Thanks,” I say, “but I have to go, I’m meeting my brother later, I haven’t seen him for twenty-five years.”

Baby Grady didn’t want to communicate with me. He asked the Salvation Army Missing Person Service not to make contact again on my behalf. Philip, he’s a biochemist. Went to university. Married a girl he met there. I’d like to ask him if he knows how I got to be
Catherine Clark
, if he can remember the man who went and registered my birth. I’m an auntie it turns out, two nephews and a niece. Thomas, Lulu and Jake. In the photograph he sent, they seem complete, with each other and the swing in the garden. They live in Chester. Have always lived in Chester. I can’t see myself in their picture.

“Yes please,” says the ticket man.

“A single please,” I say.

The tannoy is blaring. My nose is dripping.

“A single. Where to?”

“Sorry?”

“Where do you want to travel to?”

The tannoy is blaring.

“Sorry, I can’t hear very well?”

“Where do you want to travel to?

“Portsmouth,” I say.