The Museum of You Page 6

  Clover was born at lunchtime. In the kitchen. There was a racket. Mrs Mackerel banged on the wall, and when the noise didn’t stop she came round to see what was happening. No one answered the door, so she rushed round the back, let herself in and found Clover’s mother kneeling on the floor like an animal. Mrs Mackerel knew what was happening, she has had four children, all boys, which means she might as well not have bothered, because boys are no use whatsoever.

  Clover has seen people having babies. Not in real life, obviously, but on the Scientific Eye video everyone watched at the start of Year 7 and on One Born Every Minute. It’s quite frightening. The worst bit is right at the end when the mothers make these mooing noises. Sometimes it looks like things are about to go wrong, but they don’t – or maybe they don’t show those bits – and people cry (with happiness) and say things like, ‘It’s a miracle’ and ‘What tiny fingers.’ The dads talk about how amazing it was to be part of it all, and when they phone family and friends their voices wobble. A lot of babies seem to be born in the night, which might be the best time because everything is quiet and it’s not long until morning when you can wake up with your brand-new baby beside you. What a lovely beginning.

  Every time Clover asked her to repeat the story last summer, Mrs Mackerel added something. If Clover asked about any of the new bits, Mrs Mackerel made out she’d always told the story that way, so Clover zipped her lips and listened.

  ‘There’s absolutely NO NEED to MAKE A RACKET,’ Mrs Mackerel said. ‘I told your mother – God help her – to SHUT HER GOB and OPEN HER LEGS.’

  Her mother was what Dad calls cuddly. Mrs Mackerel says she was big-boned; a woman who liked her food. Clover has seen photographs. There is one on the mantelpiece in the lounge which Dad took on the beach. Her mother is facing away from the camera and the wind has lifted her hair and spread it skyward, which means you can hardly see her face. There is another in her bedroom, a high-school picture, taken when her mother was all teeth and nose, before she had grown into her face. And there are also two photographs of Clover and her mother together, in a small plastic album in a kitchen drawer. What she would really like is a photograph of her mother with Dad, like the one of Mr and Mrs Mackerel on Mrs Mackerel’s mantelpiece. Of course, it wouldn’t be of a wedding because Dad and her mother never got married, but to have a picture of the two of them dressed up smart would be epic. In the pictures she has, her mother looks like the kind of person who would be really good at hugs; soft and pillowy, not massive – not like people on the telly who can’t get out of bed. But big enough, perhaps, not to notice Clover attaching herself, cells dividing and multiplying, settling in, certain of a welcome.

  Her mother had probably realised that she was having a baby by the time Mrs Mackerel burst into the kitchen, but Clover sometimes worries that she hadn’t and the exact moment it dawned on her was when she heard, ‘SHUT YOUR GOB and OPEN YOUR LEGS.’

  That is not a lovely beginning.

  ‘The air may have been BLUE, but you CAME OUT PINK,’ Mrs Mackerel said. ‘And that’s the MAIN THING.’

  Mrs Mackerel meant that her mother was swearing. Clover wishes she had asked about that. It would be nice to know her mother’s swearwords of choice; whether she stuck to the usual or got creative, like Uncle Jim, who calls people ‘lard-fondlers’ and ‘twunt-biscuits’.

  ‘I CAUGHT you, Clover Quinn. A catch IAN BOTHAM would have been PROUD of! I cut the cord with THE KITCHEN SCISSORS, and I wrapped you in a TEA TOWEL. Looking back, I probably should have PASSED YOU STRAIGHT TO YOUR MOTHER, it might have been GOOD FOR BONDAGE, but I didn’t think of it AT THE TIME.’

  Instead, Mrs Mackerel carried her into the hall and telephoned for an ambulance, leaving her mother on all fours, skirt rucked round her waist. The ambulance drove right to the end of The Grove, blue lights flashing. Everyone came out to look.

  ‘I was going to CARRY YOU OUT,’ Mrs Mackerel said, making it sound like she’d hoped to hold her up to the neighbours, like in The Lion King. ‘But one of the PARAMEDICS took you while the other PUSHED your mother IN A WHEELCHAIR. Nothing wrong with her. NOTHING BUT STUBBORNNESS. She could have walked if she’d wanted to.’

  One of the neighbours had parked awkwardly, which meant the ambulance had to reverse out of The Grove. ‘Backwards and downhill,’ Mrs Mackerel muttered when she got to that part of the story. ‘Like everything that happened next.’

  Since listening to Mrs Mackerel’s account, Clover wants to hear a longer version of Dad’s story. The version he tells is short, learned and always the same. It has a careful feel about it. She suspects she will feel better about Mrs Mackerel’s story when she hears the whole thing in Dad’s words. So far she hasn’t managed to ask. Sometimes the question is there, in her mouth, all the words lined up in the right order: ‘You know the story of when I was born?’ Once or twice the beginning of the ‘Y’ has slipped out like a string of spaghetti and Dad has said, ‘What?’ But each time, she has retreated: ‘Oh, nothing.’ She doesn’t want to upset him or, perhaps worse, lead him to shrug and say, ‘What’s done is done, Clover. Don’t waste time thinking about it.’ But she does, she thinks about it a lot.

  Exhibit: ‘Becky Brookfield – the Untold Story’

  Told through her belongings, this compelling exhibit will give a unique insight into Becky Brookfield.

  (Add some unique insights below)

  EXPLORE a room where she slept.

  TOUCH some of her personal items.

  Other highlights include:

  (Think of some other highlights)

  Location: First floor. This exhibit will be in the second bedroom, which is next to her daughter Clover Quinn’s room and across the landing from the bathroom. See floor plan. (Draw floorplan)

  Entry: FREE.

  Opening times: 10am–5pm daily from the beginning of September.

  Facilities:

  Café located on the ground floor, offering cups of tea and a selection of biscuits.

  Free Wi-Fi

  Toilet

  Parking

  4

  When Jim gets like this, it helps to go and see him. He should have gone last week, should have checked on him the same day he talked him off the bus, instead of visiting Dad. But although it helps to see Jim, it’s also hard work and he has to brace himself for it. He’ll stay for a bit; long enough to have a chat and make sure there’s food, that’s all. It’s only a five-minute walk from the bus stop on Lord Street. He strolls past the war memorial and the station, glad to be outside and on his feet after another sticky day at the wheel.

  Jim lives by Asda in a room in a big old house; a bedsit, or studio flat, as he prefers to call it. The house was probably nice once, before its front gardens were paved and jammed with unroadworthy cars and communal wheelie bins. Its bay windows add character, but the inconsistency of their coverings indicates decline: some are shrouded by grubby net curtains, others by roller or venetian blinds and, in one case, the glass has been shattered and replaced with a square of MDF and a few strips of cardboard secured by brown tape. A group of lads straddle the crumbly, red-brick front wall, sitting between the beheaded posts of redundant TO LET signs, lean and tired, shirts off, smoking as they soak up the last of the day’s sunshine. Polish, Darren thinks. Jim says they live upstairs, squeezed in like sardines. They’re picked up in minibuses, early, and taken to work in the meat- and fruit-packing units outside town. He nods to them as he turns into the drive.

  The front door is open: someone has left it on the latch. Darren steps inside and heads down the tiled corridor to Jim’s door, which is also open. He leans in and announces himself by knocking on its thick layer of once-white paint. Jim is lying on the sofa, one that houses a pull-out bed which can be hidden away during the day, though he never bothers with the bed, preferring instead to curl up on the cushions. He is barefoot, dressed in striped boxers and a stained T-shirt, perhaps the same one he was wearing the other day. He waves and Darren enters, making a point of closin
g the door behind him.

  The place is a shithole. It smells like an ashtray and the floor is littered with empties and jigsaw pieces. At first Darren tries not to stand on the jigsaw pieces, but it’s useless. The bundle of Jim’s duvet takes up the spare half of the sofa and Jim makes no attempt to rearrange it, so Darren sits on it, noting the cigarette burns on its cover as he nudges the lids of two jigsaw boxes with the toe of his shoe: a 1,000-piece Where’s Wally? and a 2,000-piece Mona Lisa. There was a time when he would have tried to retrieve and regroup Jim’s scattered jigsaws, momentarily comforted by the thought that he was at least putting something back together.

  The telly’s on a rolling news channel. A couple of suited blokes are discussing Ebola while a ribbon of text runs along the bottom of the screen: air strikes targeting Islamic State fighters, possible negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, residents in Hawaii preparing for a hurricane – anyone’d be miserable listening to this all day.

  Jim jabs the remote with a swollen finger. ‘I’d turn it off but it won’t bloody work,’ he says, as if it’s doing it on purpose, to piss him off.

  ‘Probably just the batteries. I’ve got loads at home. I’ll bring some, next time.’

  ‘It. Just. Won’t. Argh.’

  Darren watches as, head bent, Jim continues to assault the buttons. Jim’s hair is like Becky’s, but yellower. Perhaps the cigarette smoke has stained it, along with his teeth and fingers. The skin on his elbows is scaly and white, scabbed so thickly in places that it looks like it could be lifted with the tip of a spoon, like the crust of a pie. Darren reaches across and rescues the remote.

  He talks about the allotment and his latest job with Colin, a house clearance on Lancaster Road. In an effort to cheer Jim up, he makes self-deprecating jokes and exaggerates his and Colin’s ineptitude.

  Jim picks an almost empty can off the floor and tips his head back to catch the dregs.

  ‘Your psoriasis tablets and those – you’re not supposed to, are you?’

  Jim folds his arms and gazes past the TV, at the bare wall behind.

  ‘I’ve seen you, out and about. Wearing down the pavement. What’s up?’

  He’s wasting his breath, Jim never listens – he just waits for his turn to talk. But it helps to calmly point out the bleeding obvious; it’s what Becky used to do.

  ‘Are you feeling stressed? It looks like you’ve been scratching – your elbows are a right mess. Shall we get a bin bag and get rid of some of this crap?’

  Darren asks these questions in a lilting, cheerful voice he probably should have used when Clover was a baby. The one time he went to the Mother and Baby Group – ‘and Father’, someone added hastily, on his arrival – he was struck by the way everyone spoke to their babies, almost as if they were singing. He’d thought it might help to go to a group, but it didn’t, it just made him feel as if he was doing it all wrong. Although he never went back, he did a bit of actual singing afterwards, at bedtimes, in case it was important. Just him, by himself, before Colin gave him the ukulele. Mostly hits from the 1990s; he found a few cheerful staples: ‘Rhythm Is a Dancer’, ‘Roll with It’ and ‘Three Lions’. Clover seemed to like it.

  ‘You don’t want Clover to see you like this, do you?’ he asks, shaking his head, effectively answering his own question.

  Jim finally stops staring at the wall. ‘Have you finished boring the shit out of my arse?’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose.’

  ‘Question for you.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘When was the last time you picked Clover up and carried her?’

  Darren is surprised to realise he can’t remember, and he braces himself – sometimes Jim says stuff that makes him feel sick; Jim doesn’t just get under his skin, he digs a tunnel and drives a bus down it.

  ‘So, one day you were carrying Clover around, right? And you put her down, yeah? And then you never picked her up again. Never. Ever. And you didn’t tell her it was the last time you’d ever pick her up, did you? You didn’t explain. You just stopped doing it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m saying there was a time, a very last time that you ever carried her, and you don’t even remember it.’

  ‘You’re serious?’

  ‘It’s true, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, not the way you’re saying it, you’re making it sound –’

  ‘True is true.’

  This is not helpful. There is a new separateness in the way he and Clover belong to each other. At home he has started to step around her, hands hesitating on either side of her bony shoulders, hanging in the air like a pair of brackets. When they are outdoors there is room to resurrect the old physicality; to loop an arm through one of hers or swing his hand around her waist. Outdoors, she has the space to lean in or spin away, to clasp him back or evade him with a playful push – it’s up to her. So much of the intimacy has ended: the carrying and the tickling, the piggy-backing and the fireman’s lifts. Colin has stopped, too. They haven’t conferred, it just seems to be time. Jim’s relationship with Clover is different. It is punctuated by winks and nudges and the pulling of daft faces. There’s no point in trying to explain, no point in talking to him at all when he gets like this. It’s a matter of resisting the impulse to shout, and coming back later in the week for round two.

  ‘It doesn’t matter how you say something, as long as it’s the truth,’ Jim continues. ‘Not that you’d know the truth. Not if it grew legs and chased you.’

  ‘Stop being such an arse crack.’ Darren stands and rubs his hands together in a busy, I-was-just-about-to-leave way. ‘Right, is there anything you need?’ He steps over the cans and into the kitchenette, where he checks the fridge. It’s brimming with cheap lager, but there’s also a packet of ham, a carton of milk, a six-pack of cola and a box of eggs. The cupboard beside the fridge houses a half-empty multipack of crisps and a couple of tins of baked beans. ‘No? I’ll be off, then,’ he says. ‘Next time I’ll bring some batteries.’

  As Darren opens the door to let himself out, Jim mutters, ‘I’ve got toothache.’

  ‘Well, take some painkillers and phone the dentist.’

  There’s a bus stop right outside Jim’s, but the walk home will give him twenty minutes to decide whether things have reached the stage where he has to do something. It’s difficult – sometimes Jim has a social worker and sometimes he doesn’t; sometimes he takes medication and sometimes he doesn’t; sometimes there are meetings and care plans and sometimes there aren’t; sometimes Darren goes to the meetings – just so they realise someone is watching – and sometimes he doesn’t. His kindness comes in bursts and he tires quickly. It was easier in the early days, when it seemed as if it was going to be more of a sprint than a marathon. He is tired. And he has discovered that tiredness is not the bottom of it; there are moments when his resignation subsides and he tumbles into a shaft of anger. He is not as good as Becky. Not as patient or kind, not as understanding.

  He increases his pace as he approaches the hill of the railway bridge. He has been enjoying the newness of returning to an occupied house. Years ago, after work, before he collected Clover from Edna’s or Dad’s, he occasionally sneaked home in search of echoes of his old life. He eased the front door open, as if by not startling the house, he might catch it reminiscing. But he never heard Dune FM playing; never smelled food cooking or saw the post stacked on the side in tidy piles of catalogues, holiday brochures and the surveys Becky used to complete in exchange for the chance to win £100.

  He stops at the top of the bridge. Leans up against the warm of the wall for a moment and glances at the ripening blackberries growing in tandem with the tracks, not entirely reconciled to the way the present shunts and rearranges memories so all that came before, even the good things, leads to this sunny evening in August, to him, heading home to Clover, on her own.

  Clover is already watching Bake Off when he gets back. She glances up at him from the recliner, skin golden brown and freckle
d. People used to say she looked like Becky when she was small, but the resemblance has lessened as she has grown – a matter of both sadness and relief. Although it’s not quite as fair as her mother’s, her wild hair has been bleached by the sun and is getting there. Such impossible hair, spiralling and bright, like the shiny ribbon people wrap around presents and curl with scissors; the kind of hair people want to stroke. He remembers buying Super Noodles when she was little because they were shaped like her hair. He’d mix them with a jar of passata and whatever was cheapest on the deli counter – salami, pepperoni or ham, back when they had the cutting machines in the supermarket and you could ask for just two or three slices. Then he’d top the curly mountain with grated cheese; pizza-pasta, that’s what he used to call it. It’s been a while, he’ll have to make it again, she’d like that.

  ‘Did you remember your suncream today?’

  ‘Course.’

  He glances at the scar on her knee. The skin has zipped neatly shut and is darkening in the sunshine. Girls her age shouldn’t be shaving their almost invisible body hair – it’s far too dangerous. The horror of hearing her yelp and subsequently discovering her in the bathroom, bleeding, razor in hand, is not something he can easily forget.

  ‘Have you watered?’

  She nods.

  ‘Had some tea?’

  ‘Yeah. I did beans on toast.’

  ‘Good girl. I’ll make myself some toast in a minute – oh, I found some colouring books in the recycling pile. You should probably keep them. You might want them one day.’

  ‘They’re really old. From Mrs Mackerel. They’ve been in a cupboard at her church for centuries.’

  ‘I’ve left them on the side for you, just in case.’