The Museum of You Page 14

  As far as she knows, her mother didn’t draw. Perhaps she just liked the pictures. But what, in particular, did she admire? Clover can’t decide whether her mother preferred the muscly, bare-bottomed men or the group sketches, like The Holy Family and St John, which has a mother holding a very fat baby boy while a man, presumably St John, leans in close and a chubby toddler grabs at the mother’s skirts. The group is completed by a fluffy dog, though it could be a sheep – Clover isn’t sure. The best thing about the picture is the way the mother’s hand cradles the whole sweep of her baby’s calf and it is as clear as day, literally, that she adores him.

  Clover looks through the book again, more carefully this time. She likes The Annunciation. Like the other pictures, it is black and white – ‘a pen and ink wash over black chalk’, it says in the description underneath. A sturdy angel and two chubby, cherub-ish creatures are floating just above the ground, reaching out to Mary, who seems surprised, one hand held against her chest, as if she’s asking, Who, me? Are you sure? Mrs Mackerel has a full colour picture of the Annunciation on the wall in her lounge; it’s gaudy, not as nice as the one in the Rubens book. Mrs Mackerel’s angel is holding a bunch of flowers – the small, £2.99 kind, not what you’d expect from a heavenly messenger. And the ring of yellow around Mary’s hair looks very much like the foam shampoo shield Clover used to wear in the bath when she was small. But at least Mary looks surprised, that’s the main thing.

  Rubens’ picture of the Annunciation was probably her mother’s favourite, too. After all, Becky Brookfield, like Mary, was taken by surprise. Clover has a vision, then, of a series of heavenly encounters cut out, mounted and lined along the bedroom wall. A mural of angels and surprised women. It would be epic! She can use the colouring books Dad rescued from the recycling. They are full of heavenly figures, hovering just above the ground, with straight lines shooting out of them to indicate radiation. No, radiance.

  The next pile is a mix of sheets and towels. She places it on the floor. She doesn’t want to miss anything and so, as before, she unfolds and shakes each item before making a new pile. Some of the towels feel new. They’re still soft; they don’t have that coarse, crispy texture that towels get when they come out of the washing machine. It’s the other way round with the sheets: the crispy ones feel new and the soft ones have a smoothed, slept-on feel. She smells them, rubs any softness with the flat of her hand in case it was made by the press of her mother’s side or back. When she has worked her way through all the towels and sheets she fetches a whole roll of bin bags from the kitchen. Dad won’t notice, there are others in the cupboard. She rips off a bag and packs the towels and sheets into it, keeping a navy bath sheet to go with the holiday display and one set of very soft bedding that might bear her mother’s stamp. There’s a danger the bag will split, so she carries it downstairs carefully. She moves the unfastened radiator and opens the understairs cupboard, where Dad keeps the charity bags people are always stuffing through the letter box, and searches for one with WEDNESDAY written on it. It’s tricky to fit the charity bag over the bin bag. It’s like putting a sleeping bag back in its cover, something she did once or twice with the sleeping bag Dad bought in case she preferred it to a duvet. Eventually, she manages it. Where to put the bag? Dad started work at eight o’clock this morning, so he’ll be back just after four. The charity van should have driven past by then. But will it definitely spot a bag at the dead end of a cul-de-sac? She isn’t sure, and she doesn’t want to keep watch all afternoon, so she struggles along The Grove with the bag, careful not to scuff it on the pavement. She takes the first left, and then turns left again, down Mrs Knight’s road. No one is about, so she leaves the bag outside her house.

  Folded up on the bed, previously crushed by the sheets and towels, she finds a T-shirt. It is black with ‘I’m flying without wings’ written on it. It looks like it could be the one her mother is wearing in the first of the pictures of the two of them together, the one that was taken in the hospital. She examines the T-shirt in the photograph, which is waiting to be incorporated into the ‘SURPRISE’ display. It is black and baggy with some partially obscured white writing across its chest. It might be the same one, and if it is, it’s an actual piece of history and she should display it properly. She is considering attaching a hanger to the picture rail when she has an amazing idea. She peels off the blue gloves, dashes down the stairs – careful! – through the kitchen and into the garden.

  It’s not a small job: it isn’t just a matter of getting it out of the shed, there’s other stuff to move first. She steps into the tropical, timbered space and lifts buckets and spades and canes and tools. One by one she puts things on the grass, glancing up at Mrs Mackerel’s window, just in case. The dressmaker’s dummy has no head and no arms or legs; it’s just a wooden stand that supports a dark velvety torso. It has a pair of bumps for boobs, a pinched waist, and a sort of hook-ish handle growing out of its neck in place of a head. There are cobwebs on the velvet and she nearly dies, literally. There’s no way she can lift it into the house like that. She finds one of those sticky roller things under the kitchen sink and runs it up and down and over the bumps. Once she is certain that the possibility of spiders has been eliminated, she places her hands around the nip of its waist and lifts the dummy indoors. Then she stuffs the other things back in the shed in any old order and dances the dummy up the stairs.

  She places the T-shirt over its head. It looks horribly creased and far too baggy, so she fetches a hair bobble from her room and pulls the T-shirt tight at the back before wrapping the bobble round the clumped material. There. It’s not quite right, it looks like a minidress on a one-legged woman, but it’ll do for now.

  The last of the things on the bed are pillows (without cases), cushions (with covers – plain, cream), a book – Faster Pasta: Good Value Family Meals, two pairs of shoes (flip-flops with pink sparkly flowers on the toe-divider and a pair of plain, black patent heels), three framed pictures (one of a sunset, one of a puppy that looks like it’s been cut out of a calendar – the grid of the days is ghosting through the dog’s golden coat – and, best of all, an old school photograph of Uncle Jim and her mother), a key ring (YOU ARE THE KEY TO MY HEART), a selection of fridge magnets and a couple of other kitchen-ish things with nice sayings on them, a box containing a half-used bottle of perfume (J’adore by Christian Dior) and a blizzard of carrier-bag flakes. She sprays the perfume and follows the mist with her nose, inhaling deep and long. It’s a bit like oranges . . . and also flowers. It’s as close as she will ever get to smelling her mother. She lifts her arm up to her nose to sniff the bare crease of her elbow – funny how you can’t smell yourself. Dad smells of soap and deodorant and sometimes of outdoors, especially when he has been at the allotment and the soil has snuck under his nails and into the whorly creases of his fingers. She sprays again, this time directly on to the inside of her arm, and as the perfume smells like her mother, she decides to like it.

  Now the bed is cleared she can climb on it. She tries to brush the carrier-bag flakes off the bare mattress but they cling to her fingers and arms like feathers. The more she brushes, the clingier they become. In the end she has to fetch the hoover.

  The room looks much better afterwards, despite the fact that it is still quite crowded. She opens the first of the boxes by the window. It strikes her that the air in the box might be old, from the time when she was a baby; air that passed in and out of her mother’s tissues. She leans into the box and breathes it in.

  The box contains underwear. Bras and knickers, all different colours; some are matching sets, others are plain. Several are slightly grey from the wash. She fastens a red and white polka-dot bra around her torso and slips her arms through the straps, just to see. It is massive. If she ever needed to be winched off a mountain, she could probably lie in it.

  There are tights and socks and some of those longer, fancy bra things with hard bits in, like ribs, but going down instead of across. There is a moment when she feel
s like she might be poking her nose into something that is not her business. But the feeling doesn’t last long – these are her mother’s belongings, after all.

  She keeps the polka-dot bra and the matching pants. She also keeps two pairs of socks: one for the display and another – black, patterned by small pink rabbits – for herself, to wear in the winter, under jeans. She unfastens and flattens the now empty box and stuffs the remaining underwear into a bin bag. She’ll dispose of it later.

  Her stomach is rumbling. Time for lunch and then her jobs at the allotment. This has been her best day yet. She has got so much done. Before she goes downstairs, she slips her feet into her mother’s high-heeled shoes. They are slightly big: both a little too wide and a little too long. She steps along the floor at the foot of the bed, her toes and heels pressing in the exact same places that her mother’s toes and heels pressed. She wobbles over to the window, feet knocking against the floorboards. She squeezes around the boxes and looks out at the gardens: hers and Dad’s (untidy), Mrs Mackerel’s (paved), and beyond. This was her mother’s room. This was her mother’s view. These are her mother’s shoes. She teeters over to the cleared space at the end of the bed. Back and forth she treads, back and forth, and back and forth, as if, eventually, she might step into her mother’s life.

  Dagmar is sitting outside the corner shop with her trolley. Clover brakes and stops. This is the third time she’s happened upon her waiting here. She hopes she doesn’t wait every afternoon on the off-chance, but she suspects she might.

  ‘We are going to the allotment?’ Dagmar asks, as if she is inviting her.

  ‘Okay,’ Clover says. But she stays on her bike, skating it along the pavement with the tips of her toes. Dagmar will have to keep up.

  ‘You have gone to Blackpool?’

  ‘Nope. At the weekend.’

  ‘You are lucky.’

  ‘I suppose. It might be fun to go on a proper holiday, though,’ Clover says. ‘Somewhere abroad. I’m trying to get my dad to think about it.’

  ‘And is he saying?’

  ‘You don’t have to go somewhere foreign to be happy; you can just as easily be happy at home.’ She speaks in a mean voice that doesn’t sound at all like Dad. ‘Who’d look after the allotment?’ she says in the same silly voice.

  ‘And your mum is saying?’

  ‘It’s just me and my dad.’

  Dagmar makes the usual surprised face and Clover braces herself for questions, but Dagmar continues, ‘I am looking after it for you.’

  ‘Oh, it’s okay – it won’t, he won’t . . .’ she tries to explain, suddenly ashamed of herself for making so much of Dad’s refusal.

  ‘He is not letting me?’

  ‘We aren’t going.’

  ‘But if you go, he is not letting me?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  She is going too fast. She slows a little and lets her red trainers drag. Dagmar’s trolley wheels scrape against stones and her breath hisses in and out. She sounds like a bicycle pump.

  ‘What does your dad do?’

  ‘He is watching television.’

  ‘Is it his day off?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Mine gets two days off every week. One week out of five, he gets a long weekend. He sometimes helps Colin, his mate, with jobs if he’s got a day off in the week.’ She pauses to allow Dagmar to reply. When she doesn’t, Clover carries on. ‘He’d get more money if he did some overtime on the park and ride, but he likes to do stuff with Colin. They’ve known each other since they were tiny. They’re like b—’ she nearly said it, the bosom word, ‘. . . like best friends,’ she says.

  ‘My dad is not working.’

  She feels as if she is forcing Dagmar into a corner. But Dagmar could change the subject and talk about something else if she wanted, couldn’t she?

  ‘Maybe he’ll find a job soon,’ she says firmly, ending the awkwardness for them both.

  They turn off the road. Clover dismounts and they walk down the track. She takes the key out of her pocket, but when she tries to place it in the lock, the gentlest of nudges sends the heavy gate swinging open by itself.

  ‘Oh, it’s dropped again.’

  ‘Dropped?’

  ‘The gate. It’s heavy. Sometimes it drops and then you don’t need a key to get in. You can just give it a little push and it opens on its own. Someone will tighten it up, eventually.’ She holds one of the bars so the gate doesn’t pivot all the way back. They step through and she closes it carefully, making sure the latch has caught.

  It’s hot. The air is thick with dust and pollen and the thrum of growing. Someone has trimmed the long grass at either side of the path. It’s so hot that the sun has bleached the offcuts to hay. It lies there, white and soft, like fur. They kick it as they walk.

  Dagmar grabs the bucket from the bike and Clover lifts the carpet to uncover the watering can. It takes a few journeys back and forth before they’ve watered everything.

  ‘Want to do some weeding?’

  ‘How are you knowing what is a weed?’

  ‘Basically, it’s anything you didn’t plant. If something’s not growing in the right place at the right time, it’s a weed. So you could say the raspberries are weeds. We didn’t plant them, they just keep growing every year. But we let them, because we like them. The nettles keep growing, too. But we don’t like them, obviously, and you mustn’t weed them without gloves, not even if you get them right at the bottom – they’ll wreck your fingers.

  ‘I don’t know all the names of everything, Dad does, he’s epic at it, but it doesn’t really matter, you don’t need to know what everything’s called. See these ones? And these? They’re weeds. Just rip them up and chuck them on the grass.’

  They crouch on the pathways that dissect the plot and pick the weeds. The soil is so dusty in the places they haven’t watered that it only takes a gentle tug to make the roots slide right out.

  ‘My dad, he was in Afghanistan,’ Dagmar says.

  ‘I thought it was just America and us.’

  ‘No.’

  She would like to ask if Dagmar’s dad killed anyone. But it might be rude.

  ‘He was working in the field hospital in Kabul.’

  Clover looks down: it will be easier for Dagmar to keep talking, she thinks, if she carries on with the job, uprooting the weeds and dropping them on the grass beside her.

  ‘He was seeing things.’

  Clover stands for a moment and stretches the crouch out of her knees before squatting again. Dagmar’s face is pinched. There is a stripe of colour along each cheek.

  ‘Very bad things. And now . . . he is like you say about your uncle. He is not himself.’

  Dagmar’s dad is big. Clover saw him at parents’ evening: a pale-skinned, mournful-looking man, the tallest person there by miles. Luke Barton called him Frankenstein, afterwards. ‘Dracula’s dad looks like Frankenstein – course he does!’ he said.

  ‘This is a weed?’ Dagmar asks.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What is the name?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And this one here is a weed?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What is the name?’

  ‘Clover.’

  ‘Your name is the same as a weed?’

  ‘It’s only a weed if it’s in the wrong place at the wrong time, remember. Some farmers grow clover. On purpose.’

  The clover roots mat the ground. Dagmar pulls, and a whole network lifts.

  ‘Maybe your dad will get better.’

  ‘The field hospital was closing when I am seven.’

  Clover slides from the crouch on to her bottom and sits cross-legged on the grass, all pretence of weeding abandoned.

  ‘It is not so bad when I am going to school. In the holidays I feel the shouting coming. And I go out.’

  ‘All day, by yourself?’

  ‘If he is having a bad night it has to be very quiet.’

  ‘Recalculating’ – a
harsh, computerised voice blasts out of Dagmar’s trolley.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Oh, it is . . .’ Dagmar reaches into the trolley. She stirs its insides, her hand eventually emerging with a chunky rectangular device. ‘It is a satnav,’ she says, passing it to Clover so she can see it properly. ‘From eBay.’

  ‘Like Google Maps, but old? Where are you going?’

  ‘Nowhere.’

  ‘Why is it recalculating?’ There’s a sliding button on the top of the device. Clover flicks it with her finger and a map appears on the matte, old-fashioned screen. Despite what Dagmar said, there’s a route and, in the bottom left-hand corner, an estimated time of arrival: early tomorrow morning. ‘So where are you going, really?’

  ‘I am going nowhere.’

  ‘All right. Where is it set to go?’

  ‘Home.’

  Clover puzzles over this. She doesn’t know where Dagmar lives, but it can’t be all that far away. At the moment the map fills the screen, but it only shows as far as the roundabout at the end of Moss Lane. There must be a way to zoom out.

  ‘Last holiday we drive home and use the satnav. I press here: Recently Found. See? And I am finding all the places. Now I know how far I am from Uherské Hradišteˇ.’

  ‘From where?’

  ‘Uherské Hradišteˇ.’

  ‘Oo-her-ske Rhad-deesh-de-yeh,’ Clover tries. ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Home.’

  ‘I thought you meant here when you said home. So how far is it?’

  Dagmar takes the satnav and presses the screen. ‘One thousand, nine hundred and twenty-five miles.’

  ‘You miss it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Clover thinks. Sometimes when people miss things they’d rather not talk about them. Like Dad, for example. Perhaps Dagmar is different. ‘What do you miss?’ she asks.

  ‘The Christmas market.’

  ‘We have one, you know. In December, at the weekends.’

  ‘I miss name days.’