Things to Make and Mend (13 page)

‘Oh Colin, I love you. I love you …’

Slap, slap, went her shoes through the broken-coloured
puddles.

‘Where’s the fire, love?’ asked an old man she nearly flattened as she ran past.

‘Sorry,’ she shouted back over her shoulder, and continued to run, past the neon restaurant lights, past closed shops, past the new roundabout, past people clutching dreary plastic bags at East Grinstead’s bus stops. They stared as she ran on, towards the dim orange lights of distant London. It was five-thirty, dark and cold, and she felt that she was at the beginning of something. Colin’s flat was almost within her sights now: the small, white building above the kebab shop, the dark, depressing stairway, the smell of tomcats. Here was the municipal bin and the lamppost and the lone, brave little silver-birch tree. She had run so fast that she was here even earlier than her racing brain had calculated. The clock on the hotel said five-forty, and she knew it was five minutes fast.

And now she was doing what she’d imagined. She was looking at the peeling paint and the sign that said ‘Beware, you are
entering
the house of a genius.’ She was looking at the metal door
handle,
knocking on the door; hearing him walk towards it.

And here he was, opening it.

‘Wh–’ he said.

This was the point at which the imagined and the real
collided,
and she was not prepared for it. She was actually a little unsure what to do next. She had not envisaged Colin with that
expression on his face. She had not captured the smell of Heinz Winter Vegetable soup emanating from the kitchen; or pictured the damp grey underwear flopped over the radiators. In her imaginings, the door to the bathroom had not been open, with its view of an economy-sized pack of salmon-pink toilet rolls and the broken-seated toilet. Undeterred, she strode straight down the hallway, past the broken-legged table and into his room. Her eyes were wide, all-seeing. She felt wild, almost insane, rainwater dripping off her mother’s trench coat. Tonight she was going to proclaim her love; she was ready emotionally, spiritually,
physically
–

‘What are you wearing that for? What the hell’s the matter?’ Colin was asking in a not very affectionate voice. She noticed how white his face was.

‘Oh Colin,’ she began, and as she spoke she glanced down at the carpet, because some curious object at her feet had suddenly caught her attention. For a second she couldn’t quite understand its significance – why the sight of it should appall her so much. Colin’s flat was such an incongruous setting for it, and it looked so ridiculous and out of place that she almost laughed. It was lying on the floor at the foot of his bed: Rowena’s stripy orange blouson (
very easy / très facile
). 

Know what is meant by the International Textile Care Labelling Code, and how you would care for the items you have made. Understand the importance of labels.

The Guide Badge Book,
1998

I’m an airport regular. I fly to Paris at least four times a year, and have become the sort of woman who pulls her wheeled luggage through town, irritating the local residents. I own ‘crushable’ dresses and scarves that double as sarongs or ‘evening cover-ups’. I own noise-reducing headphones, a travel iron, magnetic chess, a palm-pilot on which I sometimes play Solitaire.

Together, Kenneth and I have been to over half the countries in Europe, as well as parts of Africa, South America and Iceland (a trip I made, a very cold trip with Joe, aged eight, and someone called Craig Pinski. We saw whales, the Northern Lights, a
sulphurous,
mud-flinging geyser around which delicate butterflies congregated. That was the holiday when Craig Pinski told me he couldn’t see me any more because he would never be able to commit; it was a problem he had; he had forgotten to tell me about his commitment problem.)

After breakfast (muesli served from a silver bowl; dates; thick yogurt; nice coffee), I phone Joe. He sounds slightly hungover. His voice is low and flat. Maybe he was up all night after we left, drinking whisky.

‘Are you OK?’

‘Yes,’ he replies, defensively.

He suggests a visit to the Botanic Gardens, which is a good place to go, I suppose, if you have a headache. Airy. Optimistic. I would have done this with my parents, I think, as I put the phone down; I would have shown them the ponds and banana plants
and the Chinese lanterns. I would have taken them to admire the ferns and the winter jasmine.

I consult our
Guide to Edinburgh.
Then Kenneth and I put on our coats, pick up our bags and leave the hotel. We get on a 23 bus, career fast down The Mound, across Princes Street, up a short hill and down a long one, past art galleries, corner shops, antique shops, round a bend and – quick – get off the bus. Joe is already waiting for us at the gates: there he is, tall and quiet,
my
son, my son,
and not wearing a warm enough coat. It is just gone eleven on Thursday 27 November. He is not even going to be with us for Christmas. I hurry towards him, to give him a hug and kiss his cheek.

The sky above is flat white. We peer into the fine drizzle.

‘This is known as a haar,’ Joe says.

‘A-hah,’ says Kenneth.

‘So,’ says Joe, and we all turn and troop silently through the
silver
gates and into the gardens. Signs point us to the Rockery, Café, West Gate, Demonstration Garden, Glasshouses.
Everything
today seems glassy, silvery, intangible. Even the flowers. The flower beds seem to be filled mainly with young mothers extricating their children from beneath low-spreading trees. On the lawns toddlers pick up damp leaves and pine cones and chase the pigeons. Squirrels canter fatly past.

‘It’s a nice place, the Botanics,’ Joe says. ‘A nice place to come and think.’

I expect he used to come here with his girlfriend, on summer’s evenings, hand in hand.

‘Where shall we go then? The Rockery?’

‘How about the glasshouses? It’s nice and warm in there.’

And we wander on, past red-leaved trees, purple autumn
crocuses
, a pond with swans, until we come to a door marked ‘Glasshouse Experience’. Kenneth pulls open the door and we step inside, into the jungly warmth of the tropics. It is a kind embrace.

‘It’s fantastic on a day like this,’ Joe says.

It reminds me of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. The scent of leaves and ferns.

I pull off my scarf and gloves.

England was oddly hard to leave. It was a wrench, twenty-two years ago, to give up its parks and pavements, its daily walks. No more school! No more college with its vending machines, its linoleum floors, its student bands! No more Tetley’s tea-bags! No more home!

We were impoverished in Paris for a while, me and Joe, but it was not like
La Bohème.
It was not moving. To begin with, my grant cheque did not come through. My French bank account had yet to disentangle itself from red tape. I broke out in
stress-related
eczema during our first week there, and had to spend most of our minuscule funds on a French version of Betnovate cream. Then Joe contracted hand, foot and mouth disease – something I had previously thought only occurred in livestock. He was ill for a week with a fever and a different type of rash. He blamed me for this unsatisfactory turn of events. He didn’t want to be covered in rashes in France. He didn’t want to visit the Orangerie or the Jardin des Plantes: he wanted to take his bike to the park in Maida Vale, the one that always smelled of wallflowers in the spring.

‘I’m sorry, darling,’ I used to say, stroking his hair and trying to resist the urge to scratch my own rashes, ‘I’m sorry. But we can’t go back just yet. Not just yet. Let’s give it a bit more time.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we’ve only just got here.’

‘But why can’t we go back?’

‘Because … we’ve got to give it more time. You have to,
sometimes.’

I had nothing comforting or reasonable to say. No justification
for my words or actions. What on earth were we doing here? At the age of twenty-two I felt the weight of being a selfish mother.

We spent the first two weeks before the start of my course
wandering
the streets. Moving from A to B because there was nothing else to do. One day we got caught up in a carnival in the eleventh arrondissement, squashed against people’s backs and legs. All around us was the sound of drums and whistles, the smell of sweat and marijuana. People looked down at Joe and put out their hands to him. I hung on to him so tightly that he
complained
I was squashing his fingers.

By the end of our first week I concluded I had made a
dreadful
mistake, removing my son from England for
this
– a poor, unstructured life in a foreign country. We stopped being able to afford Métro tickets and spent our time wandering around a local market, confronting stalls full of pigs’ trotters and skinned rabbits (‘Look, Mummy – meat with eyes!’). We walked to the Pompidou Centre and Les Halles, our footsteps echoing around the
underpopulated
shopping-malls. We sat and ate an approximation of English sandwiches in formal, unaccommodating parks. Joe sat seriously by my side and watched the huge numbers of dogs and their owners that Parisian parks seemed to contain. ‘What is the French for dog?’ he asked, wrapping his chewy crusts into small, clingfilmed bundles. He seemed very small and pale.
What if he hates school in France? What if he detests it here?
I used to buy very cheap oranges and apricots and biscuits and bags of bread for him in the grubby and
non-touristique
market. Ramshackle pigeons barged against our feet. Stall-holders tried to sell me glass bangles and plastic necklaces, telling me how pretty they were, and how cheap.

At the beginning of our second week my grant cheque came through. We went to the
laverie
a couple of blocks away and
drycleaned
our fusty, rented duvets. With the change, I bought Joe a small toy lion which he christened Gary.

‘That’s a nice name for a lion,’ I chirped brightly, wondering if his choice of an exceptionally British name said something about our being in France.

‘Bonjour, Gary,’ Joe said to the lion.

Joe seemed fine in fact, after a very short time. He did not resent me. And the people we met on the streets and on the dark oak staircase of our apartment block began to seem kinder. ‘Ça va, mon petit? Ça va, le p’tit m’sieur?’

He had never liked English primary school anyway.

I missed my parents. I was homesick for their house. The
polished
piano, the clean carpets, the magazine rack, the big sliding door into the garden.

In the evenings, after Joe had fallen asleep on his fold-out bed, I would sit in our tiny kitchen and look through the window at the empty sky (our apartment faced the wrong way for a view of the Eiffel Tower). In the courtyard below, people hung out their washing or shouted or kicked footballs around. It sounded almost like home. But I didn’t know anyone. I would sometimes write a letter to my cousin in Wolverhampton or Jane King (a girl I’d met at a mother-and-toddler group) or Susan Temple (a girl I had known at school) or listen to the World Service on the radio. I thought about Sally Tuttle, my old best friend. I mourned my parents. Sometimes loneliness seemed almost like a physical presence, sitting in front of me.

I pulled myself together after a while.

My course began.

I found a place for Joe at a local school.

I bought:

I met a guitarist called Julien at a bookstall on the Left Bank. I bought:

The store cupboard became populated with new tastes: pots of tarragon and packets of madeleines and dried mushrooms and couscous. Some evenings I would look across at Joe, asleep on his fold-out bed and think:
This is a way to exist; this is one of the ways.

‘Look at that red flower,’ Kenneth says as we are walking through the Temperate Room. He stops to gaze at it. ‘Just like a
pom-pom,’
he says.

I am turning to smile back at him, to say ‘Isn’t it calm in here? Isn’t it lovely and peaceful?’, when suddenly it is not: there is suddenly an extremely loud noise – so loud that I am aware of a tiny, primitive twitching of the bones in my ears.

For some reason I feel instantly, oddly, upset. The noise – a young, human wail – is so out of keeping with the tranquillity.

‘That’s quite a pair of lungs,’ Kenneth says, ‘for a baby.’

‘Babies have the biggest lungs,’ I reply.

The sound is coming from the room next door.

The three of us do our best to ignore it. Quietly we walk past the pom-pom flowers, the tree-trunks covered in bright green moss, the creepers, the purple orchids – and over a bridge beneath which huge Coi carp flail and splash. But the screaming continues. We stop on the bridge and look down at the carp. The largest – a white, cantankerous-looking one with orange, cow-like splotches – must be nearly two foot long. We lean over the
railings
, watching the fish swim beneath us, before heading for the Aquatic Room walkway.

But the scream is even louder here. It is more a series of screams. And then I realise it is not coming from a baby at all. It is coming from a young child, about three years old, who has her head stuck in the walkway railings. Her parents are crouching on the walkway beside her, white-faced and resigned. They are not attempting to ease her head out; they have presumably already tried and failed. They have curious expressions on their faces: a mixture of fear and fatigue. The girl’s older sister stands next to them, twisting a huge, illegally-plucked banana leaf between her fingers. The three-year-old continues to howl. In the jungly
surroundings,
it is like the sound of a monkey.

I am not sure what to do.

‘Is there anything we can do?’ I ask the child’s mother as we approach. The mother looks up. There are tears in her eyes. She looks only a few years younger than me.

‘They’ve phoned for the fire brigade,’ she says.

The little girl’s father has his hand through the railings and he is stroking his daughter’s hair. All I can really see of the girl is her mousey hair and her pink anorak. The father looks withdrawn, as if he has mentally removed himself from the proceedings and is sitting in some café somewhere, reading the football scores.

‘We could –’

‘No, we’re fine, thank you,’ says the mother.

And I want to say something comforting, something to help.
I know what it’s like,
I want to say.
You have to watch your children doing these things. It starts so young. And you just have to watch them.

‘In twenty minutes it’ll all be over,’ is all I can come up with. I reflect that this is exactly what the midwife told me when I was giving birth to Joe. I remember that I didn’t believe her.

The woman looks at me. ‘Oh God,’ she says.

‘Well, if we can be any help,’ Kenneth says, ‘we’ll be in the next room.’

And the three of us hurry, as fast as we can, away from the scene where we are not needed. Three mature people who don’t get themselves into scrapes. We go into the Aquatic Room, where we stand, silently, and look at dozens of tiny fish vacuuming themselves to the side of the tanks, their mouths perfect grey Os.

‘Poor little girl,’ I say. ‘Poor woman.’

‘They’ll be dining out on that for years,’ Kenneth says. ‘The day little Susie got her head stuck in the railings.’

‘Did I ever do that?’ Joe asks. Sometimes he still asks the kind of questions he would have asked at the age of eight.

‘I got my head stuck in our banisters once,’ Kenneth says. ‘My dad had to saw one of them off. I don’t remember it.’

‘Fortunately.’ 

‘Blanked it out.’

‘They shouldn’t be more than four inches apart,’ Joe says.

We remain in the room with the little glass-kissing fish for quite a while. Maybe ten minutes. Tranquil fish. Zen aquatic snails. After a while there is the wail of a siren in the gardens, and a fire engine appears and stops outside. Men run in with
equipment
. There is the buzz of cutters, the clang of a felled railing, the wails, the sobs, the murmurings and finally the gradual, gradual cessation of noise.

When we emerge discreetly from the Aquatic Room, the little girl is sitting in her buggy, still as a statue, transfixed, but still managing to suck a lollipop.