The Scrapbook (5 page)

Does she cover her mouth when she laughs, or does she throw her head back and show the world her teeth? Do you watch her when she sleeps, and will yourself into her dreams?

Does she stride across the earth with long, confident steps, dance beneath the hectic sky during a summer storm, or does she take your arm and lean into you? Does she believe in ghosts, and fairies, and monsters?

Does she know about us? Does she?

Does she ever think about me?

I slid onto your knees, took your chin gently in the palm of my hand, and turned your head. We looked at each other and I peeped between your parted lips, saw the confession squatting on your tongue. The need to press words like bruises onto me. I kissed that need from your mouth, and then I smiled. I laughed. And I felt so tremendously happy.

You wouldn't understand that. The elation. The relief. So crooked, so twisted, when I say it aloud. But that kiss was a farewell to all the harsh mornings that would never be. Your wrinkles written on your face and crumbs around your mouth. Turning your pillow over with discreet pity, to bury your fallen hair. Looking down at my hands in the sink, reddened and rough from soap powder, and wrapped around your underpants. That future was no longer mine to experience.

And so I laughed with a joy that came from being given the freedom to love you outside reality, as it were. In a magical place of half-light and shadows. A place you would return to again and again and find me waiting for you, unchanged and unmarked. Fingers cupped around the flame of what we shared, keeping it bright and steady. Keeping it safe.

And, of course, there was our child. Our Fern. Already curled inside me, the size and shape of a sweet pea blossom. My secret to share.

I'm not saying that I could manage to plumb those depths of joy and faith as deeply ever again, or even at all. Because I loved you. Because of course I wanted it all. I wanted the wrinkles and the fallen hair and the hands red and raw. And then I didn't. And that's how it's been ever since that night; the relief and contentment followed so swiftly behind by the need and the longing that I can barely separate the push and pull of it all.

I held your face between my palms and I kissed you, and I laughed, and we never spoke about it. Not once. I didn't ask you to confirm it, because I didn't need to. I'd seen it in your mouth.

I think you always regretted that, and maybe you even resented it a little. I never gave you a chance to explain, did I? You wanted the opportunity to confess and excuse, make promises and then retract them, and I denied you that.

But what I did, I did for us, and I did for me. I still believe that was right. Would it have helped me to see the photographs of your home, to imagine your heart beating against her spine through the night, to shout and cry and call you names?

It wouldn't have changed anything.

But what if it had? What if all you'd needed was for me to imprison you with words, not set you free with silence?

3

I was twelve when Granny Ivy died and gave herself the ultimate final say during a huge row with my mother. Mum was furious with her for months afterwards. I was furious with mum.

I was on the fringes of the row though not part of it, curled in the very same armchair that mum now glowers from every night and claims didn't even exist then. She's wrong about that, I know she is.

I was huddled in my dressing gown and slippers, hands wrapped over my head as spite arced across the living room in thin, sharp slivers. Words spat like pins. They dug through skin and flesh until they found my granny's core and pierced it. She flung her hand out – To me? To mum? – and then plummeted to the floor, apron fluttering. A peace flag raised too late.

The memory does make me pause when mum and I are in the middle of one of our insult hurling competitions, and for a second, as I look at her across the jagged pieces of all the things I wish I'd never said, I see in her pupils the tiny twin images of my granny's felled body. And, though mum would never admit it, I know she looks at me and sees the same thing.

I massaged Granny Ivy's stricken heart, cradled it in my hands as it quivered and plunged in the cage of her chest and tried its hardest to fly away from me. Her lips the same grey as her hair. My mother standing over us both.

Don't you dare die! Get back up! Get up!

By the time the ambulance arrived and two solemn men confirmed the worst, my knees were so cramped that I couldn't straighten properly. Mum pulled me to my feet and helped me hobble into the kitchen, where I was sick in the sink until there was nothing left of my porridge. I stayed draped against the slippery porcelain for a while, gripping onto the taps and staring down the plughole, and I wondered how much of Granny Ivy had just come out of my mouth. She'd breathed her last breath deep into me during my clumsy resuscitation, had caught me unawares and filled my lungs full to the brim of her.

For the funeral, held in the local church, mum wore one of her flowery chiffon dresses. Collisions of violet and peach on black satin. I bet she still has that dress somewhere and I know it would look better on me these days than on her. She shivered constantly but I didn't offer her my cardigan. She'd piled her hair up onto her head in a lopsided chignon and looped pearls from Granny Ivy's jewel box around her throat.
Her
jewel box now.

I wore brown, not black. Brown was the colour of decay. The colour of death. The tooth I'd had pulled when I was ten had been brown at the tip, rotting deep inside the soft pink of my mouth.

Seated together in the family pew but not touching, we both pretended deep interest in the vicar's words as he plodded through the service. My eyes were raw and dry, as they had been since Granny Ivy died. Each time I blinked the lids rasped together. When mum started to cry I had to fist my hands together so that I wouldn't poke a finger into each of her eye sockets and gouge out those guilty, healing tears. She wasn't allowed to cry if I couldn't.

The church was full of people who had known my granny in a way I never had and now never would. Customers from the post office who'd received her scribbled remedies for arthritis with their change. Old women, gnarled as tree branches, who swore that they'd survived the long winters only because of my granny's charms and potions. They nudged memories from pew to pew, snatched sentences from their neighbour and passed them back and forth. The vicar may as well not have been there, for all the attention they paid him.

Kindle a candle of purest white, she said …

And drip wax along the silk, yes, I remember that one …

No, it was ‘drip wax along the skein …'

Worked a treat, that one did!

They nibbled the ends of pencils and muttered The Toothache Charm to each other, spearing the spell onto paper with their leaden scrawl and slipping it onto my hymnbook
when we all stood to pray.

Just in case you ever need it, lovey. Better than aspirin.

As the mourners around me chanted
Our Father
, and mum buried her face in her hands, I stared down at the words, mouthing them as Granny Ivy would once have done.

Find a stone of perfect oval

given hair by weed

or moss.

This shall be your human head.

Wrap it up in paper

soaked overnight in gin

and tie it up with string.

Knot it round and round

And leave it in the full moon's light …

If I covered my ears I could hear her voice inside my head and imagine her standing next to me. I began to chant.

Toothache that resides in me

transfer your woe and let me be.

Toothache, no more make me moan.

Live forever in this stone.

In the quiet that followed the prayer, the reminiscences started up again, and tendon-webbed fingers squeezed my shoulder briefly.

That's the spirit, girl.

Each kindly remembrance forced more air between me and mum and when she uncovered her face and reached out a trembling hand to pat me she had to lean awkwardly and lunge with her arm. I stared ahead and pretended I hadn't noticed.

I started to choke during one of the hymns and had to stumble the length of the chill building. Past all of those stares and then out into the rain. Hands over my mouth, I gasped and struggled with the lump that had lodged inside me, trying to keep it down. The lump that was Granny Ivy's soul, newborn and scrabbling to get free.

Stay with me. Don't go. I'll keep you safe.

Every time I tried to re-enter the church my windpipe would spasm, the lump swelling with panic. We were forced to wait in the dark side porch for the service to end, me and my granny's soul together. I peeked in once and saw her string of pearls exploding away from the warmth of my mum's skin, as if someone, spectral or invisible, had tugged at them. They fired like milky bullets over the coffin, ricocheted off the lectern.

I waited and I circled the gloom. Fractured flagstones zigzagged across the floor, sticky beneath the soles of my shoes. The damp and neglect coated my nostrils with a fine dust, making me sneeze. It clung grittily to the collars of my blouse. If I stayed still I too would start to curl at the edges, bones crumbling within me and collapsing me down onto the filthy floor. I brushed my fingers against the stained walls and then pressed them, lightly, to my tongue. They tasted brown.

A bird's nest spilled from a shelf, oozing feathers, speckled with four tiny skeletons. I stroked each thumbnail-sized head and felt grief bulge briefly behind my eyes as two of them disintegrated beneath the gentle pressure.

The window frame was knobbly with carvings. Letters and numbers, some shapes. A tree; a man, crude and stick-like, but unmistakeable.

And there in the topmost corner, winding around and around itself, a trail of ivy.

Finally, I could cry. I didn't think I'd ever be able to stop.

I met my great-aunt for the first time, after the funeral. The neighbours and Granny Ivy's customers from the post office were gathered in the front room. Muddy footprints and sandwich crumbs all over the carpet. I was outside, alone, under the oak. The rain had stopped but a miserable winter gloom was draped over everything, squeezing the light.

A lady with an umbrella and my granny's stoop came around the side of the house, headed straight towards me. She jerked when I stood up and I realised then that she hadn't been looking for me, wasn't about to fold me to the jut of her upholstered bosom and make it all better. If anything, she looked frankly annoyed to see me there, intruding on whatever she'd been planning. I studied her with open curiosity and the ready affection the young have when they're bereaved and presented with their kin. I was already jumping ahead to fantasies of her moving in with us, donning Granny Ivy's apron and making me pancakes on the weekend. I didn't even think to question why I'd never seen her before, or why my granny had never done more than mention her name in passing. It was enough that she was family, and she was here.

Pins and needles and a mushroom vol-au-vent robbed me of grace and I spluttered a response to her sharp greeting. She stood for a moment in silence and then reluctantly came closer.

So, you're Iris' girl.

I wanted to tell her that that my granny's spirit was safe inside me, was right now snuggled somewhere under my bellybutton, but her face was crisp with disapproval. So I just nodded.

She watched me and sighed impatiently. Tapped the ground with the spike of her umbrella. Fast, fierce little taps.

You take after your mother.

Nobody had ever told me that before. I pondered it with a pang of mingled pride and horror.

She tells me I take after my granny.

The woman bit out laughter, as if it pained her to be amused. She took a step closer.

Then good luck to you. I hadn't spoken to her in years. Ivy. Saw the notice in the paper and thought I'd take the ferry over.

Of course. She lived on Sorel. So Granny Ivy must have come from there originally. To my twelve-year-old self there was something deliciously exotic about not being from this island. And there was so much she could tell me about what Granny Ivy had been like as a young girl. I took an eager step forwards but she took a step back and turned away.

You'd better get inside and deal with your mother. Halfway through a bottle of brandy and singing songs the last time I saw her.

I wiped at my face with the sleeve of my jacket and shook my head.

She doesn't drink. The doctor said she's not allowed to.

The great-aunt lifted one shoulder in a shrug of disinterest. She speared her umbrella tip into the lawn and leaned on it, watching me. I turned and started towards the house, breaking into a run as the sound of mum's singing spilled through the open windows of the front room.

I still wince when I remember that panicked flight across the lawn and the moment when I realised that I wasn't being followed. I slowed and spun around and ran back to the great-aunt, who stood and watched me trip and stumble. It was then that my granny's death became a solid thing. It crouched like a beast in front of me. It roared. My granny was dead.