The Year of the Rat (3 page)

‘Right. I’m off to the hospital.’ Dad has a last swig of coffee and takes his toast with him in his hurry to leave. ‘And I’ll be going there
straight after work too, so I won’t be back till late. Rose had a good night last night apparently.’

He’s trying to make his voice all bright and breezy, like he can fool us both that everything’s OK. But his face is lined and pale. Sometimes I wake up in the night and I hear him
crying quietly. I lie in the dark, feeling like I’m eavesdropping, wishing I knew what to do about it. Once I’ve heard it, I can’t get back to sleep. Those nights stretch on and
on until I’m not properly awake or properly asleep. Sometimes I think it will never get light, and I’ll be stuck on my own in those in-between, shadowy hours forever.

‘Are you sure you won’t come with me?’ He asks the same thing every day, just as he gets to the door, like he’s trying not to, but at the last minute he just can’t
help himself. He wants it to sound like he doesn’t mind one way or the other. I can’t look at his face because I know it won’t match his voice, and seeing how much he wants me to
care about The Rat makes my insides squirm. Instead, I poke at the soggy cornflakes in my bowl with my spoon.

‘Are you going to eat those?’ he asks. But he already knows the answer.

‘You have to eat, Pearl.’ He can’t keep the frustration out of his voice. ‘I’ve got enough to worry about without you—’ He stops himself, but his words
hang between us in the chilly air.

‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry, love. I just meant . . .’

He searches for a way to finish the sentence, but he needn’t bother. I know what he meant.

‘Pearl,’ he pleads. ‘Look at me.’

But instead I look at four small rainbow squares painted on the flaking grey kitchen wall behind him. Mum painted them months ago when we first moved in, trying out different colours from tiny
sample paint pots. She’d had great plans for redecorating when we first looked round the house. She was always coming back from the shops with curtain swatches and wallpaper. But like always
with her projects she lost interest after a while. The move dragged on for so long, with things going wrong down the chain and Mum shouting at solicitors and mortgage people on the phone, that by
the time we moved in her energy and enthusiasm quickly vanished. As she grew more pregnant, she just got tetchy and tearful about the state of the house: the grubby old wallpaper, the draughty,
rattling windows, the leaking roof.

I wrap my dressing gown a bit tighter round me.

‘I thought you were going,’ I say.

‘OK,’ Dad sighs, too tired to push it. ‘Try and get some revision done then. I know it’s hard, Pearl, but you’ll be back at school next week. Your exams will be
here before you know it.’

I don’t reply. It’s almost a month since I was at school. With the Easter holidays coming straight after Mum’s funeral I haven’t been back since she died. While
I’ve been here, hidden away on my own, everything has stopped. I hate the thought of being out in the real world again, of life carrying on without Mum. And I know exactly how it will be at
school: everyone knowing, watching but pretending not to, whispering when they think I’m out of earshot, like when Katie Hammond’s dad went to prison or when we first found out Zoe
Greenwood was pregnant. The thought of going back makes me feel sick.

‘Don’t look like that,’ he says. ‘Molly’ll look after you, won’t she?’

Molly always has. Before this.

‘I’ll stop at the supermarket on the way home tonight,’ Dad says. ‘Get us something nice for tea if you don’t mind eating late. Or I could get us a
takeaway?’

I get up and scrape the cornflake mush into the bin. ‘Don’t bother,’ I say.

‘I’m trying to help,’ he says wearily, and for a second I’m so breathless with anger that I have to turn my back on him. I grip the side of the sink and look out of the
window at the grey-green wilderness of the back garden.

‘How can you possibly help? How can anyone?’ The words stick painfully in my throat. Of all people he should know, he
must
know what an empty, pointless thing that is to
say.

But when I turn round he’s already gone.

I try to feel pleased that I’m on my own, but instead I just feel small. The silence and emptiness of the house weigh down on me, room after dingy room of it. And now
I’m alone I can’t ignore the tense, sick feeling in my stomach. I switch on the radio. I boil the kettle and make a cup of tea that I don’t drink. I force myself to take a shower,
turning my face against the hot spikes of water. I pull on yesterday’s clothes. But none of it works: I try not to, but all the time I’m waiting for her.

Almost three weeks have passed since the funeral and there’s no trace of her: not a glimpse or a whisper or a sign that she might have been there while I wasn’t looking. I leave the
patio doors open sometimes, half hoping she’ll close them. She always had a thing about draughts. But Dad just gets annoyed.
For heaven’s sake, Pearl, what are you playing at? This
house is cold enough without any help from you.

One night, when Dad had to stay over in the hospital, I found her perfume in the cupboard under the sink and I sat on my bed and sprayed it into the air in the hope of conjuring her up. I closed
my eyes. And for a moment, breathing in the scent of her, I thought she was really there. I thought that when I opened my eyes she’d be standing there watching me, saying,
Don’t
waste
that, it was bloody expensive I’ll have you know.
But she wasn’t, and the smell of the perfume made me ache inside so that I could hardly breathe and I had to close
my eyes again to stop the tears escaping. So I’ve put it away now, back in the cupboard under the sink.

I even went back to the church. I thought that if I knelt in the same place and bowed my head and closed my eyes she’d have to come back. But the church was all locked up. A woman in a
headscarf turned up with the key saying she was there to do the flowers for a wedding tomorrow. Did I want to come in? I just shook my head. Why had I come here? It was stupid. Of course she
wasn’t here. What was I thinking of? But still, as the woman pushed the door open with a woolly-gloved hand, I peered in, half expecting to see a movement in the shadows, or a telltale trace
of cigarette smoke. I can’t help it. It doesn’t matter how many times I tell myself she won’t come back or I imagined it or I’m mad. All the time, I’m waiting for
her.

As I walk down the stairs, taking care not to catch my feet on the bare carpet tacks, I hear a rustling sound from the small room next to my bedroom. I stop dead. It’s the room that Mum
had planned to turn into her study. For a moment I stand completely still, palms prickling, listening to the silence. There it is again! I run back up the stairs, my heart thudding.

‘Mum?’

I reach out, my hand shaking. But when I push the door open the room is empty apart from Mum’s desk and chair and several removal company boxes, still unopened, marked STELLA’S STUDY
in Mum’s brash handwriting.

Soot appears from behind one of them, purring loudly.

‘You,’ I say. She saunters over and winds herself round my legs and, despite my disappointment, I sit down on the chair and settle her on my lap.

We’ve been here more than four months now, but it still feels like someone else’s house. There are packing boxes everywhere, left where the impatient removal men dumped them on the
icy day we moved in, a couple of weeks before Christmas. We’ve taken out the essentials: pots and pans, duvets, alarm clocks. But Mum said it wasn’t worth unpacking everything until
we’d sorted the house out a bit, redecorated. So the rest of our old life is still in the boxes, safely packed away out of sight. The bareness of the rooms just emphasizes how shabby and
depressing they are. The whole house looks like it was last redecorated when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

‘You don’t half exaggerate,’ Mum had said when I voiced this opinion the first time we looked round the house, late last summer. ‘It just needs a bit of TLC.’

‘And about twenty grand thrown at it,’ Dad had muttered. ‘There’s no way . . .’

But Mum just laughed and kissed him on the cheek and said, ‘You’ll see.’ And as we traipsed from room to gloomy room she transformed them, imagining jewel-coloured walls and
velvet cushions, polished floorboards and oriental rugs and roaring log fires with Soot stretched warm in front of them, dreaming of mice.

‘Dreaming of them?’ Dad said. ‘I bet this place is infested with them.’

But the estate agent stared at Mum, impressed. ‘Blimey,’ he said. ‘You should do my job. Don’t fancy coming to my next viewing with me, do you?’

In the end the only room she got round to redecorating was the baby’s. She was determined it would be perfect. She sanded and varnished the floorboards. She cleaned the dusty paintwork and
painted it glossy white. She stripped the mildewed wallpaper, Dad lurking anxiously by the door as she teetered on top of the step-ladder. ‘Let me do that,’ he pleaded, but she
wouldn’t. There was a lot of crashing about and swearing, but she got it all done. Then she pasted up smooth, pale lining paper and painted it the colour of bluebells. She hung mobiles and
fairy lights and even made curtains on Nanna Pam’s old sewing machine.

‘I didn’t know you could sew!’ I said.

‘Course I can sew,’ she replied. ‘I used to make all my own clothes when I was at art school.’ I stared at her, as amazed as if it had suddenly turned out she could
levitate. She just smiled and said, ‘There’s more to me than meets the eye, Pearl.’

It’s like it belongs in a different house, that room, or perhaps this house in a parallel universe where everything turned out different. Going in there feels like that bit in
The
Wizard of Oz
when everything changes from black and white to colour.

Not that we ever do go in now. The door – painted shiny white – stays shut.

My phone buzzes. I know before I look at it that it’s Molly. She phones and texts every day to see how I am, desperate to meet up. But every time she phones I just let it ring. I
don’t know why. I thought I’d want to see her. She’s always been there for me, ever since we were little kids first starting school together.

I look at her text:
Can u meet tomorrow? Hope u r OK xxx

She’ll want to talk, about Mum and the baby. I can’t tell her about Mum. She’ll think I’m mad. And I know she won’t understand about The Rat. Molly loves babies.
All that time we spent looking at baby clothes and thinking up names . . .

I don’t want to talk. Not to Molly. Not to anyone. Except Mum. But I know she’ll be hurt if I don’t get back to her, and school starts next week. I can’t hide away in
here forever.
OK,
I type, but then my thumb hovers over the send key. Perhaps later. I put the phone back in my pocket.

Soot jumps off my lap, giving me a reproachful look, then leaps up on to a box marked STELLA’S STUDY (PERSONAL) and settles down into a cat-shaped hollow she’s made there. PERSONAL.
What’s in there? I wonder. But I think of the perfume and how it made me feel and I know I can’t open it.

I walk over to the window. The greyish net curtains left by the old couple who used to live here are still hanging there. Mum hated them, but I like the way everything looks soft and blurred
through them, no sharp edges. I pull them back for a moment and everything comes glaringly into focus: the pale pink blossom unfurling on the cherry trees that line our road, the buses thundering
past, graffiti etched on their windows. The old dear next door is out in her front garden, tending to the flower beds. As I watch, she stands up, grimacing with pain as she straightens her back,
and catches sight of me at the window. She smiles and cheerfully waves a pair of secateurs at me. I let the net curtain drop down again.

Dad will be at the hospital by now. I imagine him, rushing through those awful green corridors that I remember so well, eager to get to
her
. What does he do there, all day every day?
Just sit staring at The Rat? Does he talk to her, tell her things?

‘Mum?’ I say one last time. ‘Are you there?’ But all I hear is the cat purring and a car alarm going off down the road.

It’s raining so hard I get the bus to meet Molly. As I stand at the bus stop, I wish I hadn’t agreed to meet her after all. Maybe I should text her and say I
can’t make it. But then the bus pulls up and the old man in front of me says, ‘After you, dear,’ and ushers me on so there’s no getting out of it.

The bus is pretty empty when I get on, but after a couple of stops it’s crowded and the air is thick and damp. A very wide woman laden with shopping sits down next to me so that I’m
all squashed up against the window. Her wet carrier bags rest against my leg, making my jeans clammy and cold.

I think about the last time I met up with Molly; remember the two of us stumbling out of the dark cinema that day, into the dazzling afternoon. It was only a few weeks ago.
That’s
weird,
I’d said, switching my phone back on.
Dad’s phoned fifteen times. What’s he playing at? He knew we were going to see a film . . .

The bus windows are so steamed up it’s like being in a cave and I start to feel claustrophobic. I make a small clear square on the steamed-up window with my finger so I can see out to the
rainy streets. The doctor’s surgery, the chippy, the petrol station. Everything, inexplicably, just the same as it’s always been my whole life.

This bus route goes past the end of the street where we used to live. There’s a little boy in yellow wellies at the corner, holding his mum’s hand and jumping in puddles. I peer at
them through the gap on the window which is starting to cloud up again. As I do, I see the back of someone, a dark figure with an umbrella, turn into our old road. Was it Mum? Yes! Wasn’t
that a glimpse of red hair I saw before she disappeared from view? Suddenly I’m certain of it. It must be her. I know it was.

‘I’ve got to get off!’ I blurt at the wide lady. I jump up, pressing the bell and clambering over her shopping as she tuts at me.

‘Watch it,’ she says as I dash for the doors. ‘There’s eggs in there.’