go out, I say.
It’s an evening in the middle of summer, because it’s light, but I know it’s late from the indigo band of cloud that moves over the Thames and lies like a basking shark in the depths of the sky opposite our window.
It’s so late that Anna and Harry have missed their date. They are imprisoned here with me. They hate me for keeping them under lock and key.
After all, they’re young.
But I have never known my mother in such a rage. The lovely dress she was wearing, the kinetic dress that looks like a sorcerer’s robe, with moons and stars and wild cabbalistic patterns, is scrumpled up and lying on the floor, near her kicked-off shoe.
Harry stumps out of the flat and the door bangs.
Anna locks herself in her room now, sobbing into her pillow.
*
– I discovered later, Jasmine says, they’d been planning to get engaged over dinner.
But they did make a scapegoat of Muriel, you know. When she was there she was in the way, like mothers-in-law are conventionally meant to be. When she was out, she was no good to them because she wasn’t there to look after you, so they could go out.
*
– I was in the way, I say.
– Still, it was bad luck that evening, Jasmine reproves me, but in a kind tone. They’d booked a table at a romantic restaurant – you know the kind of thing …
I don’t, but I say nothing. For I remember what happened later that night. And this time I tell Jasmine how it really was.
*
I’m in my small bed in the room with the old wallpaper that my grandma says should be replaced with something I would really like – teddies perhaps, or cartoon characters disporting across the walls – and I’ve had to climb in by myself, without a bedtime story or even cleaning my teeth.
I hear the door – first the front door, at the bottom of all that purple and white swirling lino, then the door of the flat.
I know I’m not supposed to get out of bed, but I do. I stand for what seems like for ever at the door of my little room.
Then I hear footsteps. I can feel my face, all these years later, puckering into the frown I must have worn then, at the unfamiliar sound of those footsteps in the corridor outside.
At the far end of the passage the door of the sitting-room opens; I can hear the creak of the hinge that Anna always says she really will get round to oiling.
I’m just about to slip down the passage too, when the two doors go again, one after the other, like a couple of shots going off.
Someone has come in angry or – I’m too young to know about this yet – drunk.
Steps come up the stairs and turn left to the sitting-room.
And I, like a fool in one of the books Muriel reads to me – for there are stupid girls sometimes in the stories she chooses, and then Anna fights with her and says thereshouldn’t be – like a baby (as I suppose I really still was), I walk down that passage to find Harry is in the far end of the room, which is dimly lit; he’s at the end where my mother’s dress lay, when she hurled it from her in a rage.
Harry is standing behind a woman, and he has his arms round her, he’s squeezing, he’s muttering something …
I bang the door with my head and the noise makes them turn round.
Harry growls at me to get the hell out.
But the woman, who smiles down at me but seems a million miles away, is wearing my mother’s dress and she’s not my mother at all.
Harry seems only dimly to realize this as I stand there, for he pulls away from the stranger and takes a long, hard look at her.
– Well, I’m damned, says the man, whom I suddenly recall with such horrible, painful clarity. And he takes the woman’s hand playfully. She smiles straight back at him, right in the eyes. Then she looks at me.
– Go on, Ella, it’s time to go to bed, she says.
I run along the passage and climb for the second time alone into my bed. Then I get out again, I go into the bathroom , and it’s the first time I’ve ever been ‘naughty’ on purpose. I push
It’s an evening in the middle of summer, because it’s light, but I know it’s late from the indigo band of cloud that moves over the Thames and lies like a basking shark in the depths of the sky opposite our window.
It’s so late that Anna and Harry have missed their date. They are imprisoned here with me. They hate me for keeping them under lock and key.
After all, they’re young.
But I have never known my mother in such a rage. The lovely dress she was wearing, the kinetic dress that looks like a sorcerer’s robe, with moons and stars and wild cabbalistic patterns, is scrumpled up and lying on the floor, near her kicked-off shoe.
Harry stumps out of the flat and the door bangs.
Anna locks herself in her room now, sobbing into her pillow.
*
– I discovered later, Jasmine says, they’d been planning to get engaged over dinner.
But they did make a scapegoat of Muriel, you know. When she was there she was in the way, like mothers-in-law are conventionally meant to be. When she was out, she was no good to them because she wasn’t there to look after you, so they could go out.
*
– I was in the way, I say.
– Still, it was bad luck that evening, Jasmine reproves me, but in a kind tone. They’d booked a table at a romantic restaurant – you know the kind of thing …
I don’t, but I say nothing. For I remember what happened later that night. And this time I tell Jasmine how it really was.
*
I’m in my small bed in the room with the old wallpaper that my grandma says should be replaced with something I would really like – teddies perhaps, or cartoon characters disporting across the walls – and I’ve had to climb in by myself, without a bedtime story or even cleaning my teeth.
I hear the door – first the front door, at the bottom of all that purple and white swirling lino, then the door of the flat.
I know I’m not supposed to get out of bed, but I do. I stand for what seems like for ever at the door of my little room.
Then I hear footsteps. I can feel my face, all these years later, puckering into the frown I must have worn then, at the unfamiliar sound of those footsteps in the corridor outside.
At the far end of the passage the door of the sitting-room opens; I can hear the creak of the hinge that Anna always says she really will get round to oiling.
I’m just about to slip down the passage too, when the two doors go again, one after the other, like a couple of shots going off.
Someone has come in angry or – I’m too young to know about this yet – drunk.
Steps come up the stairs and turn left to the sitting-room.
And I, like a fool in one of the books Muriel reads to me – for there are stupid girls sometimes in the stories she chooses, and then Anna fights with her and says thereshouldn’t be – like a baby (as I suppose I really still was), I walk down that passage to find Harry is in the far end of the room, which is dimly lit; he’s at the end where my mother’s dress lay, when she hurled it from her in a rage.
Harry is standing behind a woman, and he has his arms round her, he’s squeezing, he’s muttering something …
I bang the door with my head and the noise makes them turn round.
Harry growls at me to get the hell out.
But the woman, who smiles down at me but seems a million miles away, is wearing my mother’s dress and she’s not my mother at all.
Harry seems only dimly to realize this as I stand there, for he pulls away from the stranger and takes a long, hard look at her.
– Well, I’m damned, says the man, whom I suddenly recall with such horrible, painful clarity. And he takes the woman’s hand playfully. She smiles straight back at him, right in the eyes. Then she looks at me.
– Go on, Ella, it’s time to go to bed, she says.
I run along the passage and climb for the second time alone into my bed. Then I get out again, I go into the bathroom , and it’s the first time I’ve ever been ‘naughty’ on purpose. I push
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