The Museum of You Page 15

‘What are they?’

  ‘All the names are having their own day. Mine is the twentieth of December. I get a present. The window of every flower shop says DAGMAR, to remind people.’

  ‘What’s the day for Clover?’

  ‘Clover is not on the list.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘There is a list of the names and a calendar. One name for every day. People are choosing names from the list in the old times. Now they don’t have to.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Going to Vlcˇnov to see Jízda králu˚.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘In English, it is . . . the Ride of the Kings. There is a boy riding a horse. He is being the king, but he is dressing as a lady because he is in a . . . he is pretending . . . in a . . .’

  ‘Disguise?’

  ‘Yes. And the horses – lots of them – are covered in flowers. And there are costumes. The ladies have folded sleeves . . .’ She demonstrates, bending the edge of her T-shirt over and over itself.

  ‘Pleats?’

  ‘Yes, pleats. And big skirts and long boots.’

  ‘Do you have one of those costumes?’

  ‘Yes. And I learn the dancing. I think it is a bit silly at home. But here, I am missing it.’

  ‘And friends?’

  Dagmar tugs another web of clover roots. ‘Yes. At home I am having friends.’ She clears her throat. It’s an impatient, that’s enough, sort of sound. As if she is cross with herself for talking like this. ‘You will tell people about my dad?’

  ‘No.’ Clover considers telling her a secret too, by way of reassurance. A sort of information exchange. Then she remembers Uncle Jim and supposes that Dagmar witnessing his bedsit counts for something.

  ‘And you are promising?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  When someone tells you something, you like them more, not less, she thinks. It’s nice to hear stuff from Dagmar that she would never have guessed. If only Dad would tell her stuff, too.

  They finish the weeding in silence then walk back up the path to the gate, accompanied by the tick of her bike, the knock of the bucket against its frame and the scrape as the hard wheels of Dagmar’s trolley graze the ground.

  At the end of Moss Lane, outside the corner shop, Dagmar extends her hand. Her palm and fingers and the translucent skin of her wrist are bobbled by a series of nettle stings.

  ‘It is the weeds. The last one I pick is wrong.’ She rubs the stings against her shirt and the leg of her trousers and laughs in a pained, funny-bone way.

  ‘Come with me.’

  ‘But your dad is not –’

  ‘Oh, he’s fine,’ Clover says. It seems that they may be turning into friends, which means Dagmar will have to meet Dad at some point, and she’ll realise he’s not scary at all, won’t she? ‘Come on. We’ve got some cream.’

  When Dagmar steps down the hall and into the dining room and sees Dad’s makeshift shelves and all the stuff: cuckoo-clock boxes, shoe boxes, unstrung ukuleles, empty sweet tins, reference books, candles – everything, she whispers, ‘Wow,’ and it is fine.

  The cream is in a box in one of the kitchen cupboards with other medicine that isn’t dangerous if it’s taken by accident. Clover hands the tube to Dagmar and watches as she smears it over her hand and wrist.

  Next, she loads two spoons with crunchy Biscoff spread and passes one over. ‘You have to try this. I think it might be the yummiest thing in the world.’

  Dagmar sniffs the lump and licks its edge before sliding the whole spoon into her mouth. She nods her head and makes a noise of agreement. It seems she thinks it might be the yummiest thing in the world too, and Clover enjoys the dual pleasures of biscuity spread and sharing.

  She and Dad watch Bake Off together. Tonight it’s bread. When the bakers are doing the signature challenge, which is rye bread, Dad starts talking.

  ‘Edna says she saw you this afternoon as she passed the shops on Bispham Road.’

  ‘I didn’t see her,’ she says, hoping he’ll shush.

  ‘She was on the bus. You were with a friend?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says.

  ‘A boy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Edna says it was a boy.’

  ‘It wasn’t.’

  ‘Is he your boyfriend?’

  She turns away from the rye bread. ‘No! It was Dagmar. She’s a girl. With short hair.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Am I sure she’s a girl?’

  ‘I just want you to tell me the truth.’

  ‘I am!’

  ‘Does she come here while I’m at work?’

  ‘No! Well, only –’

  ‘I don’t want people round while I’m not here.’

  ‘I know.’ She feels in the wrong, like she’s in trouble, but she hasn’t done anything.

  ‘And if – if – you had a boyfriend you could tell me, you know.’

  ‘I haven’t!’

  ‘All right. I’m just saying. Because you’re growing up. And one day you will – have a boyfriend, I mean.’

  She turns back to the telly. Stares straight ahead at it, trying to focus on the rye bread.

  ‘Or a friend who’s not a boy – if that’s what you . . . you can tell me anything.’

  Rye bread, rye bread, rye bread . . . Is he asking whether she fancies boys or girls? Why does he think it’s okay to do this on a Wednesday evening, completely out of the blue, when she is trying to watch her programme?

  ‘You might not want to tell Colin, though. He’d probably have a heart attack. Say you’re far too young.’

  She wishes he’d stop trying to smooth things over and just shush.

  ‘He loves you.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘He’s thought the world of you since you were a baby.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Remember that time when you were little and he said, “I really don’t want to go to work today,” and you said, “I bet you don’t want to be bald, either”? He thought it was hilarious.’

  ‘Dad.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Can we watch the baking?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  For the showstopper the bakers make pesto pinwheels, cheesecake brioche, a Spanish crown topped with gold-foiled olives, and all sorts of amazing, bready delights.

  Dad gets up while the judges are deliberating and returns a few minutes later with a couple of rounds of buttered toast cut into triangles.

  ‘I reckon it’s a nice structure and a good consistency,’ he says.

  ‘Me, too.’

  ‘A soft white bread with hidden wholegrain and no bits,’ he adds.

  ‘I didn’t knead to know that, Dad.’

  ‘Do you want me to prove it to you?’

  ‘No, it’s okay, I’ll use my loaf.’

  ‘I give up. In fact, I seed . . . no? Really? All right, you win,’ he says.

  It’s too hot. She lies in bed, duvet kicked into a bundle on the floor, listening to Dad, who is downstairs trying to work out the chords for ‘Happy’. ‘I’ll be just fine, I’ll be just fine’: he sings the same line again and again, testing different strumming patterns.

  The house feels different. It’s as if her mother is seeping through the walls. She presses her arm to her nose; she can still smell the perfume on her skin. She has a new sense of the fact that she is made of her mother. Bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh – she has heard that somewhere, it’s probably religious, in which case Mrs Mackerel will have said it. Her mother runs through her bones and flesh.

  Her feet, if she stretches, can almost touch the end of the bed. She is growing into herself. She wonders what her mother looked like age twelve. Had she started her period? Is everything you will ever be already there, inside you, like a seed, or are you only partly put together, like those cake mixes Dad sometimes buys – just add oil and water? Once, her mother was inside Nanna Maureen, and once, she, Clover, was inside her mother, like those nestin
g dolls: inside, inside, inside.

  Since she bought the notebook, she has written down the things she remembers people saying about her mother. Colin: ‘Becky thought I was a bit of a twat, which I probably was.’ Grandad: ‘She knew how to be quiet and didn’t talk all the time, unlike some.’ Uncle Jim: ‘She was good at looking after people.’ Mrs Mackerel: ‘A big girl, God bless her. I’ve seen bigger, mind.’ They’re scraps. Fragments. A jumble. But jumbles are sometimes nice, she thinks. Like the back wall of the allotment with the raspberries and nettles and rosemary, the crocuses, bluebells and pussy willows, all higgledy-piggledy. Anyway, once she has arranged the displays and written the text, her mother’s life will be less of a jumble, and when she finally shows Dad the room it’ll be like one of those renovation programmes where they do a big reveal. It will be a nervous moment – it always is because no one knows how people will feel about the newness, and it sometimes takes them a moment to get used to it, but they are mostly pleased. There are times when they aren’t, of course. She rolls on to her stomach and buries her face in the puff of her pillow, allowing herself a moment of worry. Rolling back, she decides it will be okay. She’ll have thought of a proper speech by then, an explanation of what she’s done and why. And once she’s explained, she’ll open the door slowly, and Dad will be shocked but pleased, and he’ll tell her about the items, and why he kept them; he’ll make sure she’s got all the pieces in the right places. There’ll be details and descriptions. No fobbing off, no cul-de-sac conversations.

  And then, and then . . .

  And then, maybe after a little while, once the exhibit’s purpose has been achieved, it will be okay to move it, like they do at real museums; to box it up and put it in the object store – otherwise known as the loft – and use the second bedroom for something else.

  Dad’s singing floats up the stairs: ‘Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth.’ Happiness is so many things. They made a list in English last term, a mixture of other people’s ideas and their own. Happiness is a warm gun (The Beatles) and a warm blanket (Schulz). Happiness is Mini-shaped (Mini). You can’t buy happiness but you can buy tea and that’s kind of the same thing (Lipton). Happiness is amazing first impressions and having breakfast outside every morning (Jet2). Happiness is a super-comfy sofa bed, a few side tables and a strong Wi-Fi connection (IKEA). Those things may be true, but she suspects they’re not. She has her own list. Happiness is Grandad saving links to cat videos in a Word document so he can share them when she visits. Happiness is when Uncle Jim and Dad accidentally get on with each other. It’s eating Biscoff out of the jar with a spoon. It’s Mrs Mackerel getting her words mixed up and Dad making crappy things to eat during Bake Off. And it will be learning all about her mother.

  The sheet is warm. She moves her legs around, searching for a cool spot. Her room is crowded with shadows; it is almost as full of stuff as the second bedroom was. It occurs to her that she could also empty and arrange her own things. There is so much she doesn’t want, despite Dad’s concern that she might one day need it. But it will have to wait. The summer is melting away and she hasn’t finished her mother’s exhibit.

  Exhibit: ‘Becky Brookfield – the Untold Story’

  Catalogue

  Object: Art book. ‘Rubens’ Drawings’.

  Description: A book of drawings by the artist Rubens. It says in the book that he did not sign his drawings because he did not think they were as important as his paintings. They are still very good, though.

  Item Number: 15.

  Provenance: Becky Brookfield (my mother) chose this book because she especially liked Rubens’ drawings of families.

  Display: On page 40, ‘The Annunciation’, a drawing of Mary, a big angel and two small fat angels that is done in pen and ink wash over black chalk.

  Curator: Clover Quinn.

  Keeper: Darren Quinn.

  10

  She’s gone up to bed early. He’s meant to think she’s tired, but she’ll be knitting the scarf he isn’t supposed to know about. He missed University Challenge when he was doing a late on Tuesday and he couldn’t watch it last night because it was the baking programme, so he’s found it on the iPlayer instead. There’s something razor-ish and wit-sharpening about the violin music at the beginning of the programme. Ready, steady – think, it seems to say.

  In this episode the University of Sussex is up against St Peter’s College, Oxford. They’re all dead posh and there isn’t a woman on either team. It wouldn’t have even registered before he had Clover; having a daughter does that to you – makes you wonder where all the women are.

  He always aims to get at least one question right. If he gets two or, God forbid, three, he allows himself a beer before bed. The first question is about The Beatles. It’s a gift. ‘What short adjective links a tea, lighter in body than green tea, and The Beatles’ ninth official album?’ Any old fool’d get it. Now he can relax. Questions about poetry, Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and politics follow. He doesn’t know any of it. But a cloud formation question saves him and he gets up from the sofa to fetch a beer from the fridge.

  He was supposed to go to university. Birmingham – far enough to leave home and near enough to come back regularly. He still has the letter offering him a place. The prospectus will be somewhere, too. And the letter agreeing to a one-year deferral. In the dining room, perhaps. Or here in the kitchen, in one of the drawers or a cupboard. He used to get them out and look at them sometimes when Clover was small – idiot. He read that bloody prospectus a thousand times when he was still at college. He used a luminous highlighter to score through the words he was looking forward to appropriating: meteorology, deforestation, globalisation, geomorphological processes – pretty soon the page headed ‘Geography BSc Hons’ was a resplendent yellow.

  ‘Darren’s not going anywhere, are you?’ Dad said that summer, after the exams, when Mum was first diagnosed. ‘He wouldn’t dream of it, would you, son?’

  It was a warning, disguised as reassurance. Don’t you dare leave me to cope with this by myself – that’s what Dad was really saying. It was hard to take in: university had always been part of the map of his life. And Mum didn’t offer any encouragement. There was no ‘you go on, love, I’ll be fine’, no sense that it would be okay for him to continue with his life as planned. So he didn’t.

  He slumps back on the sofa and slurps the beer. If he’d gone away he’d be someone else entirely now. If wishes were horses.

  *

  When Mum was first ill he got a part-time job working in the newsagent where he’d been a paper boy. Something to do while he waited for her to get better, he thought. Somewhere to go when he wasn’t taking it in turns with Dad to ferry her back and forth to radiotherapy and chemotherapy and laser treatment and photodynamic therapy. Somewhere to go in between hospital visits. Somewhere to go in between hospice visits. Something to do while he waited for her to die, he later realised.

  On the mornings when he wasn’t at the newsagent from daybreak, folding papers for the boys and girls who would deliver them, he looked after Mum, just as she’d looked after him. He helped her down the stairs and made her milky tea and white-bread toast. He cut the toast into triangles and slotted it into a rack, serving it with Marmite, marmalade or the last of the previous year’s home-made raspberry jam, while GMTV played on the portable telly in the kitchen.

  The prospectus remained on his desk. Bedtime reading. It was easy to believe that the world it contained was as flat and two dimensional as its pages, just waiting to be animated by his arrival. Easy, until mid-December, when people who’d gone away started coming home for the holiday, and the sight of them in town or at the social club on a Friday night nudged his equilibrium.

  Weekends back then began with TFI Friday, which he and Colin watched through a cloud of Lynx and hairspray. Darren arranged his curtained locks à la David Beckham. Colin’s hairline was already creeping away from his forehead, it wouldn’t be long before he’d adopt the Jason
Statham, but back then he still brushed what hair he had forward and sprayed it into a brittle, Shredded Wheat-like fringe. Sometimes they’d walk to Bliss and pick one of the building’s three sticky-carpeted floors: pop, indie or dance. They’d wonder whether they were dancing or drinking in the exact spot where Tom Jones and The Beatles once stood. And when they’d had a few drinks they’d engage in a game of spot-the-Everton-player. Other times, they’d go down the social club for an evening of passive smoking, karaoke and snooker. They’d drink. Talk to girls – it’d be another couple of years before Colin came out. Provide a bit of hands-on snooker tutelage – let me help you with that, love. Follow up with a snog in the car park – cop a feel, if they were lucky. Go back to Colin’s for a few more beers and watch Eurotrash with Kelly until Colin teased her away.

  ‘She’s stayed up specially, just to be in the same room as you, haven’t you, Kel?’ he’d say. ‘She gets the fanny gallops whenever she thinks about you, don’t you, Kel?’

  Kelly’d take so much, and then she’d rise from the armchair like a queen and disappear upstairs.

  Mum died in the November, just over two years after she’d been diagnosed. It was too late for him to start university – he was going to have to reapply anyway, he’d lost his deferred place when he hadn’t taken it up the previous October. There were the new tuition fees to consider; he’d done a bit of reading, it seemed he’d be all right, but maintenance grants were in the process of being scrapped and replaced by loans. Dad watched the news, muttering, ‘Neither a borrower not a lender be.’ Christmas happened. Darren wondered how to stay with Dad and how to leave.

  They settled into a routine. Between them they mastered an adequate, if somewhat boring, menu: beans on toast, cheese on toast, omelettes, ham and salad, frozen fish with oven chips, and, for an occasional treat, Fray Bentos pies with mushy peas. It would be better in the summer, when the vegetables came in. After they’d eaten, someone did the washing-up, and the other someone dried the dishes and put them away, and then there was the rest of each evening to get through. They put the telly on, but Coronation Street wasn’t the same without Mum’s exclamations and commentary. They still had dial-up back then, so Dad would boot up the second-hand Intel Pentium PC he’d bought and allow himself thirty minutes of clock browsing on eBay. He set an alarm and repeatedly glanced from it to the clocks on the screen, racing against time. Before he logged off he’d reread the ‘Know Your Prostate’ section of the ‘Chronic Prostatitis’ web page. ‘There’s no link between prostatitis and prostate cancer,’ he’d say, as if voicing the facts was its own kind of preventative medicine. Afterwards he’d flip open an encyclopaedia. And sigh. Flick through a couple of pages. And sigh again. It was difficult to figure out how to be a good son without Mum acting as mediator: ‘What your dad means is . . .’ And perhaps Dad was experiencing a similar lack: ‘Darren would really like it if you’d just . . .’ They’d always been spokes on the wheels of her conversations.