The Year of the Rat (13 page)

‘Oh, you’ve missed him now,’ Mum says. ‘He’s gone indoors. Shame. He was ever so good-looking.’

‘No he isn’t,’ I say, trying hard not to think about how blue his eyes are, and the way his hair falls down over them.

‘And how would you know?’ She turns to me, interested.

‘I’ve met him already.’

Mum’s face lights up. ‘Oh,
have
you indeed? When?’

‘A couple of times.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘Did you speak to him?’

I feel myself blush as I remember the utter horror of the first time I met him, and then the second time when he realized I’d left The Rat on her own. What must he think of me?

‘Yes.’

Mum notices the blush, I know she does, and misinterprets it.

‘
And?
’ she says, grinning.

‘And what?’

She sighs. ‘You are hard work sometimes, Pearl.’

I shrug. ‘And nothing.’

‘But what’s he like?’

‘He’s just – I don’t know. He was just in the garden. We didn’t say much.’

She tuts impatiently. ‘Oh, Pearl. Honestly.’

‘Well, what do you want me to do?’ I say. ‘Make stuff up? Fine. His deep-set dark eyes met mine across a herbaceous border. He took me in his strong, muscular arms and I looked
up at his chiselled, masculine jawline and—’

‘Have you been reading Mills and Boon novels?’

‘Molly’s gran in Ireland reads them. Molly used to sneak them back in her suitcase.’

Mum smiles. ‘Darling Molly. How is she?’

‘Fine. Still on holiday. With Ravi.’

‘Ah.’

She goes quiet for a while.

‘Are you lonely?’ she says at last.

I smile. ‘No!’ I laugh. ‘Course not.’

It turns out lying isn’t so hard after all.

An asteroid is going to hit the earth. It’s all here in the paper Dad left lying on the kitchen table before he took The Rat off to the park.
NASA scientists identify
asteroid threat
. . .
Armageddon
. . .
Could hit Earth in 2040.
I can see it in my head, this huge, lethal, unstoppable lump of rock with our name on it,
hurtling silently through space towards us.

I stare at the piece of burnt toast on my plate and decide I’m definitely not hungry after all. I go upstairs to get dressed; but then I decide that maybe, as it’s Saturday and I
don’t have to look after The Rat, I’ll go back to bed. It’s not like I’ve got anything else to do. Molly’s still on holiday and no one else bothers trying to get hold
of me any more.

I stop for a second, remembering how we all used to hang out together on Saturdays, Molly and me and the others. It seems so long ago, unreal almost, as though it didn’t really happen to
me at all. I’ve got used to being on my own, and it turns out it’s really easy to avoid people without a phone. And I haven’t opened my laptop in months.

I’m just climbing back into bed when I hear some kind of small commotion going on in the street. I peer out of the window to see what’s happening. A black taxi has stopped a couple
of doors down from us and there’s an argument going on between a woman I can’t see, because a tree is in the way, and the taxi driver. There’s also a yapping dog somewhere. Its
bark bounces off the walls.

I head back to my bed and close my eyes. But a few moments later there’s a very long ring on the doorbell. I think about ignoring it, but almost immediately there are another two impatient
rings. I pull on an old jumper of Mum’s over my pyjamas, go downstairs and open the door.

On the doorstep is a small glamorous woman, old but not
really
old: about sixty I’d guess, though she’s wearing a lot of make-up and I’m rubbish at ages. She has
cropped blonde hair with designer sunglasses perched on top and she’s wearing an expensive-looking cream jacket. Behind is the taxi driver I saw from the window, laden down with matching
violet-coloured leather luggage.

‘This “gentleman” is trying to make me pay extra!’ she says in a posh Scottish voice, jerking a manicured thumb at the taxi driver. ‘For
Hector.
’ She
looks at me outraged, evidently expecting a response. I stare back at her, bewildered. She’s clearly mad. I look to the taxi driver for some kind of explanation, but he’s red and
sweating both from carrying the cases and from being very angry.

‘NO dogs in my taxi. Except for guide dogs obviously,’ he adds apologetically to me, as if to prove he’s not a monster.

‘Well then, you should have said something when we got in,’ says the woman, sounding like the Queen.

‘Um,’ I start to say, not quite knowing where to start. Who is she? Why is she here? Why are they both talking as if I know what’s going on? I’m also a bit confused by
the fact that she seems to own an invisible dog.

‘How was I supposed to know you had a bleedin’ dog? You smuggled him on in that!’ He points accusingly at the large bag tucked under the madwoman’s arm and, as I look at
it, I realize there are two large black eyes gleaming out of it suspiciously, which at least answers one question.

‘Smuggled him on indeed.’ She glares at him. ‘I’ve never heard such nonsense.’

‘Excuse me,’ I begin again, ‘I think you’ve made a mistake—’

‘It’s not hygienic I’m afraid, love,’ the driver explains to me. ‘And I’m allergic.’ As if to prove the point, he sneezes loudly, sending the bags and
cases tumbling to the ground.

‘No, I mean—’

‘
Not hygienic?
’ For a moment I think the madwoman is actually going to hit him. She covers the gap in the bag where Hector (presumably) is peering out, as if to protect him
from the distress of hearing the slur. The bag begins to emit a low grumpy bark, which gets louder as the madwoman gets angrier. ‘How dare you? You are a silly, ignorant little
man—’

‘Now wait a minute.’ The taxi driver pulls out a handkerchief and blows his nose loudly, then glares at the woman. ‘I’m not putting up with that, not even from an old
lady.’

She turns a similar colour to her luggage and draws herself up as tall as she can, which is about chest height to the taxi driver.

‘Just who exactly are you calling an
old
lady?’

‘
EXCUSE ME! WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?
’ I shout. They both turn their full attention to me for the first time and I remember I’m still in pyjama bottoms and one of
Mum’s old jumpers. The woman looks me up and down and clicks her tongue.

‘Dear, dear,’ she says. ‘There’s no need to shout, Pearl.’

I stare at her. She knows my name.

‘Who are you?’ I say it slowly because, as I’m speaking, I realize there
is
something familiar about her, something I know, but can’t quite remember . . .

The taxi driver looks from her to me, bemused. ‘I thought you said your granddaughter lived here?’ He looks at me and taps the side of his head. ‘Sorry, love, I think
she’s got a screw loose.’

‘
Granny?
’ I stare at her in disbelief. But yes, I know it’s her now, even though I haven’t seen her since I was four.

She looks at me as if I’m the one who’s behaving oddly.

‘Of course. Who else would I be? Now enough of this nonsense. Shall we go in?’

‘No,’ I say. She looks at me.

‘Pardon?’

‘You can’t. It’s Mum’s house. She wouldn’t want you here. You’re not welcome.’

She smiles at me as if I’m still the four-year-old I was last time she saw me. ‘Don’t be silly, Pearl.’

‘I mean it,’ I say. ‘Dad’s not going to be too happy if he comes back and finds you’ve just turned up out of the blue.’

She looks at me, her plucked and pencilled eyebrows arched with surprise. ‘Pearl, dear,’ she says. ‘Who do you think asked me to come? Did he not tell you?’

He wouldn’t have gone behind my back. Surely. But of course. The conversation we never got round to having. The phone call I interrupted. That’s why he was being so shifty. I shake
my head slowly.

‘I wasn’t supposed to be arriving till next weekend,’ she says, ‘but I managed to change my plans at the last minute and I thought I’d surprise you both.’

‘Looks like you’ve done that all right,’ says the taxi driver.

‘You needn’t look like that, my girl,’ Granny says as if the taxi driver no longer exists. ‘I’ve come to help. To sort you all out.’

She empties Hector, who turns out to be a pug, from her bag. He sniffs at a dandelion growing from the cracks in the garden path with his black, snub nose. Then he cocks his leg against the
porch wall and trots into the hall, his little claws tip-tapping on the tiles. Soot, who had been sitting on the bottom stair, licking a paw, puffs her tail up like one of those old-fashioned
dusters on a stick and scoots towards the back door.

‘I’m not
your girl
,’ I say to her. ‘And I don’t need sorting out.’

She smiles as if I’m a small child who’s said something very funny without realizing.

‘You really are so like your mother, God rest her soul. Poor dear Stella.’ She stops for a moment, puts her hand on my shoulder and looks genuinely sad. But it doesn’t last
long. ‘As for
you
,’ she says, turning to the taxi driver, ‘you can help me in with these bags if you please.’

‘I don’t think so, love.’ The taxi driver sneezes again.

‘You will if you want paying,’ she says and grumbling he collects up the bags again and heaves them into the hall.

‘London,’ she says scathingly as she sweeps past me into the house, leaving a trail of relentlessly floral perfume in her wake. ‘There’s obscene graffiti on your front
wall you know. And it’s not even spelt correctly.’ I wonder vaguely what she expects me to do about it. Remove it? Or go out with a spray can and correct it?

Within ten minutes it’s like Granny’s been here forever. She’s bustling about the kitchen, making tea, feeding Hector dog biscuits produced from one of her
many cases, wondering aloud when Dad and The Rat will be back, complaining about the state of the house. Damp in the hallway. Woodworm in the floorboards. Kitchen hasn’t been renovated since
the dawn of time. Garden like the jungles of Borneo. I look out through the patio windows. It’s wilder than ever out there.
Mature
, the estate agent had said.
A challenge for the
keen gardener.

He’d looked at Dad hopefully and Dad had said,
We’d better hope the baby has green fingers then, hadn’t we?

‘Well, we like it,’ I lie.

‘The whole place is a bomb site, Pearl. What on earth possessed them to move into this place with a baby due any minute?’

‘Actually, the baby wasn’t due for months.’ So if you want to blame anyone blame her, I don’t add.

‘Still.’ Granny inspects the range, which is now covered in a thick layer of dust. ‘Gracious. My grandmother had one of these.’

‘We were supposed to move in months ago. Things kept going wrong. Down the chain. I don’t know . . . Mortgages. Surveys. Some boring thing or other. Anyway, Mum said all it needed
was a lick of paint and elbow grease.’ As it happens, when Mum said this, I told her she was probably clinically insane and should seek medical attention, but I have to defend her against
Granny since she’s not here to do it for herself.

‘Yes, well, she always did have a good imagination,’ Granny says disapprovingly. Then she sighs. ‘I really am sorry about it, Pearl. About your mum.’

‘No you’re not,’ I say. ‘I know how things were with you and her. You hated her. So you needn’t pretend to be upset.’

She shakes her head. ‘That’s not true, dear. Really it isn’t. We had our differences, but I didn’t hate your mother.’

‘You never even wanted her and Dad to get married. You thought she was a horrible single mother.’

Granny puts two cups of tea on the table. ‘I worried, like all mothers do,’ she says, giving the chair next to me a thorough clean with The Rat’s wet wipes which Dad’s
left lying on the side. ‘I just wanted Alex to be happy. And maybe at first I did have reservations. But I could see that he was happy, with Stella. And with you. Happier than I’d ever
seen him.’ She sits down at last and clicks sweetener into her tea. ‘He loved her. And he adored you. I’ve never seen anyone dote on a baby like he doted on you. Whether I liked
Stella or she liked me didn’t come into it.’

Well, she would say that now, wouldn’t she? I don’t speak. Just stare at my tea. Hector comes sniffing round my feet. He seems very at home already. I wonder if we’ll ever see
Soot again. If I could run off into the garden and hide, I’d do it too.

‘Anyway,’ Granny says briskly, ‘now isn’t the time to be going into all that. Let me have a good look at you, darling.’

Darling?

‘The last time I saw you, you were about so high and a chubby little thing. I used to call you “my precious Pearl”. Do you remember?’

My precious Pearl?

‘No,’ she says, hoisting Hector up on to her lap, and I realize that she
is
older than she seems, under the make-up. She looks tired. ‘I don’t suppose you do.
Dear me.’ She sits there, gazing at me, lost in thought, until I feel so self-conscious I have to get up from the table and pretend I’m searching for something on the other side of the
room.

‘You do look awfully thin, dear,’ she says at last, snapping out of it. ‘I’m going to have to feed you up a bit. What shall I cook us for dinner? Shepherd’s pie
used to be your favourite.’

I’m just turning round to protest when I hear the sound of the key in the front door, followed by the familiar sound of Dad wrestling the stupid pram in. You still have to get it at
exactly the right angle or it won’t fit, even since Dad moved the chest of drawers in the hallway.

‘There they are!’ Granny’s face lights up. She’s so excited she even empties Hector off her knee, and he stands, squat and belligerent, at her feet, looking up at her.
Dad comes into the kitchen and Hector starts up his gruff barking again. When Dad sees Granny, he stops, shocked. Then he looks anxiously over at me.

‘I thought you weren’t coming till next week?’ he says to Granny.

‘Well, that’s a nice welcome,’ she says. ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’

‘I am, Mum, of course I am.’ He walks over and gives her a hug, and he looks so relieved and she looks so happy I want to be sick.