Swallowing Grandma (13 page)

‘Then Vince went too, pretty much at the same time, so that left me and Poll, and that’s been the household ever since. She made it legal by adopting me when I was about four, although sometimes I think it was just so she could avoid having a Castle around, that was my mother’s name; your mother’s name, obviously. I wish I could say we were as close as you and your mum, but we’re not. I look after my grandma because she’s disabled and she needs me, but at the same time she hates relying on me so she’s usually in a foul temper. I can’t ever call her Grandma to her face ’cause that’s too cuddly a name. She’s not a cuddly sort.’

‘Sounds grim. So where did Vince go? Is he still in touch?’

‘God, no. Poll would have him shot if he ever turned up on our doorstep. He didn’t just leave, he ran away with a fancy-woman; I heard that part from Cissie. And we’ve not heard a dicky bird from him since. Alien abduction, emigration, the Foreign Legion; take your pick. He’s not coming home again though, that’s for sure. Not unless he wants a bullet through his neck.’

‘Jeez,’ said Callum, swirling his coffee mug round and staring into it. ‘Hey, you don’t think they’re together, do you? Elizabeth and Vince? Love on the run?’ He smirked in a way that made me cross.

‘No I bloody don’t. He was old enough to be her dad, for a start.’ I wondered then if I’d told him too much. Just because he knew some Latin didn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t up to something. ‘By the way, how come you’re not called Castle, Callum Castle?’

He laughed easily and drained his cup. ‘My mum married my dad. David Turner. They may only have been together for a year but she kept the name. Couldn’t be bothered to change it, probably. Any more questions?’ He put his head on one side, and his earring glinted in a way that made me think of the Ladybird book of
Pirates
. You’d suit a bandanna, I nearly said.

‘Yeah. How come you didn’t go to your maternal grandparents first if you had questions about your aunt? They’d be the ones with the info, surely?’

He sighed and folded his hands on the table in front of him.

‘They’d have been my first port of call. But my gran’s got Alzheimer’s, doesn’t know me from a root vegetable, and my grandad, ahm, passed away eighteen months ago. At Christmas. Not a good time to lose someone. We knew he’d been ill, although my grandma was having trouble taking it in, Alzheimer’s makes you totally selfish, you know. Then she wouldn’t believe he’d died. Mum was on antidepressants. It was—’

He broke off.

‘Sorry. I wasn’t casting doubt. I was interested in the process of finding someone.’

He got to his feet, scooped up the mugs by their handles and placed them on the draining board. ‘Sure, of course.’

I stood up automatically to rinse the cups clean and, for a moment, I almost put my hand on his arm. I didn’t, because a zillionth of a second later I came to my senses and turned the movement into a stretch towards the tea towel.

‘All right?’ he asked, turning round suddenly.

Through the glass, Miss Dragon raised her eyebrows at me. I gave her a smile but she carried on watching until old Mr Gardner tapped her on the arm and thrust a newspaper clipping under her nose. She led him away to the photocopier and I heard myself saying, ‘I’ve got a photo of her, of Elizabeth, if you want to see it sometime.’

‘Cool. I could get to meet the one and only Pollyanna.’

I was pulling the door open as he spoke, but I turned back to stare at him. ‘Haven’t you understood what I’ve been saying? Don’t you get it at all? She hated your aunt and she’ll hate you on sight. She’ll probably attack you with her stick. No way are you seeing her.
No way
.’

He shrugged. ‘Whatever. I don’t mind. I’d really like to see this picture, though.’ He took hold of the door and held it for me, and as he raised his arm I smelt a sharp tang of, not sweat, but maleness. His forearms stretched showed the shape of muscles under the tanned skin. His face was close to mine. ‘It would mean,’ he said, ‘an awful lot.’

*

Part of the problem was my weight. I thought the weight got expelled along with the baby. I’d never been fat before in my life, but I was now, just when it really mattered. I took his Debbie Harry poster down in the end, I couldn’t stand to see her tiny thighs. When he complained, I burst into tears. I said to him, ‘This isn’t me, you know. This is not my body.’ Not my baby either, it felt like.

This is what I felt for that baby: zero, zip, zilch, nothing, nowt. ‘That’s normal,’ said the health visitor, the nasty big liar. You look at the front of all the parenting magazines and what you don’t see is photos of bloated mum sulking in the background while the baby cries its lonely lungs out a few feet away. New motherhood was meant to be a naked pastel heaven, smiley smiley hormones, and little gums clamped on your breasts. I thought that was gross and I said so.

When he came home that Easter, I was miserable. It had been just me and the girl-baby, stuck in his bedroom. Poll clattered about downstairs, beating up the furniture it sounded like, and Vince hung around the garden, prodding at the frozen soil. I couldn’t go out. At first I’d wanted to, before the baby was born, but Poll kept saying everyone would stare. So I tried, and they did. Village of the Damned. Everyone stopped to gawp but no one spoke to me. I don’t know how Roger stuck living here for so long. So then I used to sneak into the fields where you hardly met anyone, and that was better. Poll didn’t like it, though. ‘Don’t go so far. What if that baby comes and you can’t get to a phone? Max Jolley across t’ road were only in his back yard when he had a heart attack and died.’ I took no notice; I’d have gone just to spite her. But then, after the baby was born, I stopped wanting to go out. I don’t know why. I stopped wanting to wash and get dressed as well.

I made an effort when Roger came home, though. ‘Blimey, you’ve put some meat on,’ he said when he first saw me. In the back of the car, Poll smiled; I caught her in the mirror.

The first few hours he seemed pretty cheerful, but he got twitchy towards the evening. He went up the village for a breath of fresh air and he palmed a stack of ten-pence pieces before he went. When he got back, they were gone, I checked his pockets.

That night he became furious with the baby. ‘Haven’t you got her into a routine yet?’ he snapped. ‘She shouldn’t be waking all through the night. You’re doing it wrong.’ He took a blanket out of the wardrobe and stomped off downstairs, and I’ve never come so close to hurting Katherine as I did during those next few hours. I didn’t, though, and I’m proud of that.

I’d looked forward so long to him coming home, and yet it all went wrong. I knew there was something on his mind, it wasn’t just dealing with the baby. ‘Can’t you shut her up?’ he kept saying. Whenever Poll had her, Katherine went quiet as a lamb. ‘You have to know how to handle them,’ she said smugly, ‘I’ve never had a peep out of her.’ But a month after the accident, I found out she’d been slipping her sugar lumps to suck on, and teaspoons of brandy. So no bloody wonder.

Even Poll noticed something was up with Roger. ‘You’ve ants in your pants,’ she said, patting his hair as she walked round the back of the settee. ‘Are you missing your pals in Sheffield? I bet y’ are.’

All I could think of was that song, Please please tell me now. Except I didn’t want to know, and if he hadn’t told me, he might still have been alive.

This is how the last few minutes of his life went:

It’s true, I did want to kill him at that precise moment but I’d never have had the wherewithal to do it on my own. It was his bad luck about the lorry on the other carriageway.

We met again in the library, with Miss Dragon as unofficial chaperone. I wasn’t ready to have him in the house, I couldn’t be doing with the subterfuge just yet.

‘Is it not a bother to keep coming all the way up from Nantwich?’ I asked as we settled ourselves into the study corner.

He pulled off his backpack and shoved it under the table. ‘Soon as I pass my test I’m getting a Micra, Mum’s promised she’ll go halves with me. In the meantime she runs me into Crewe and there’s a train goes straight through, although I seem to be the only one that ever gets off at Bank Top. I think it carries on to Blackpool. One day I might stay on it. I’ve never been, have you?’

‘Not since I was about ten. My dad used to go a lot, to see the waxworks. Apparently there was a fantastic display of diseases there.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Wax models of an arm covered in the measles rash, a foot with gangrene, various degrees of burns on flesh. You were supposed to be over eighteen to view them, but he used to march in long before that and no one ever challenged him.’ Poll had told me she thought this display had been responsible for making Roger want to go into medicine. ‘He used to pore over them cases,’ she said. ‘All the other children wanted to see the famous murderers, but not my Roger.’ There were some terrible venereal diseases on display too. It was from Poll I learned that syphilis can eat away your nose and make you mad. She didn’t tell me there was a cure. Sex was dangerous, all heartache and humiliation, she said; and a waste of time for women. Think on.