When I was little I adored him, even though he sometimes let me down. I always forgave him. You do, when you’re small; you have to. For instance, there was my Kanga house. I didn’t have any dolls, I don’t think I wanted any, but I had a grey knitted kangaroo. I held Kanga wherever I went and I told her everything. In her pouch she had a small Roo made of tighter knitting. Dad had promised me he’d make them a house. He was the one who suggested it; there were lots of planks around. When I reminded him he kept saying he’d do it tomorrow, he had a lot on his plate at present.
That autumn, I must have been eight, they were building a petrol station at the end of our drive, right beside the main road. I used to watch the workmen for hours; they were my friends. One evening, when I’d given up asking him in case he lost his temper, he came into the kitchen looking ever so pleased, with some plastic panelling under his arm. It was fancy, hinged panelling, punched with holes. I recognized it.
‘But Dad, did you get that from the garage?’
He stopped in his tracks. ‘Me?’ His eyes wide. ‘Little me? Oh no.’ Then he winked. ‘It came by special delivery.’
I knew he’d pinched it after the workmen had gone home. I minded a lot, of course, but what I minded more was that he’d lied to me.
After a week or so he did build a sort of house, a sort of lean-to. I made sure that I was popping Kanga in and out of its gap whenever he was around. But from then on I didn’t talk to the workmen in case they became too friendly and dropped in for a cup of tea and saw it. They thought I was sulking. Soon they even stopped calling out, ‘Give us a smile, ducks’ or ‘It might never happen’. It took all winter before the petrol station was built and they left.
Something else I remember. When he had a short job on, he would take me with him. He loved me looking nice, to show me off to his mates, so I’d wear my best dress. I’d sit up in the cab, lording it over the dual carriageway. By the time I was nine he’d let me steer, if he was in the mood, and I’d sit pressed next to him, the gear-stick digging into my bottom. He’d laugh, urging me on. Actually I steered very carefully, but tense, because just when I wasn’t expecting it he’d put his foot down and we’d shoot forward, too fast.
Anyway, he often made promises. Like at the end of the delivery he’d take me to the Excelsior Hotel Coffee Shop – that was the newest place – where he’d buy me hot chocolate with sprinkled foam on the top. All the customers could see me in my tartan frock. But before we got there he was detained at the Spread Eagle. I sat in the cab. I knew I was in for a wait when he came out.
‘Won’t be long, Podge.’ He gave me a bag of crisps, pinching my cheek.
I can’t remember if this episode happened once or several times blurred together. I watched it growing darker and more cars pulling up until the car park was crammed. The street lights flickered on, one by one, red fading to orange. It was so cold that I could easily stay awake. There was a sign over the door, lit up, saying, ‘Tonight: Shaun and the Sounds’. The Spread Eagle was a big place built in a bygone style with pointy roofs and attics. When it was nearly dark the neon light was switched on; it was a thin blue line zig-zagging up and down the eaves. Later, when my eyes started closing, the lines danced and it was a palace out there, far off, and if I reached it something beautiful would happen.
When I heard the door handle turning I woke up quickly and pretended I hadn’t been asleep. It took him some time to open the door. He had some of his friends with him; they were all very affectionate, their faces crowding in, with fruity breath and cold air. I wanted him to be proud of me so I laughed at their jokes. I never had my chocolate drink. Last thing I remember was falling asleep against his shoulder, lights swinging as we swerved round the roundabout, and his hand rubbing my thighs to warm me up.
Next day he was full of remorse. In fact, over the next few years, when things became more confusing, his remorse was one of the worst aspects because I didn’t know how to make it better. I tried to think up excuses for him but that made him angry. Sometimes he cried, his big body shuddering, and that was the most terrifying thing of all.
That was when I was older, when I didn’t want to sit in his cab. In fact, when I had to find any reason not to go.
I’d always been closer to him than to my Mum. As I said, she wasn’t one for showing affection. I never knew how much she felt, deep down – I wondered about it a lot but I don’t think I wanted to come up with an answer. She never hugged me, but then I never saw her hug my Dad either; she wasn’t the type. The way I remember her best is from the back, walking down our drive to catch the bus. She looked sadder from the back. I wasn’t nervous of her then. The cars would be speeding past, there was always the hum of traffic where we lived. She would be picking her way around the potholes, wearing her headscarf with the polka dots and her ageless turquoise coat with its fitted waist. Then her thin beige legs with the flat shoes. She always carried her plaid shopping bag, with a change of shoes and her purse in it. She’d never been in an aeroplane and yet there they were, slicing up into the sky in front of her, trailing smoke. Watching her go, I felt I should be running down the drive to tell her something that she’d been waiting to hear.
She made it plain, without saying it in so many words, that she was disappointed. For instance, she never went near the pigs. The usual number was three sows, and piglets when they had them. It was a small field – we didn’t have much land – its tussocks roughed up by the pigs’ rooting, and with pitted mud around the troughs. There was a container crate where they went when it rained. It didn’t look much, but Dad’s sows meant a lot to him. The only contact she had was to empty the peelings into an orange plastic bucket which she wouldn’t allow in the kitchen – she had to carry the damp handfuls right out to the back porch. She set herself these tasks, you see.
She must have loved him once. I tried to believe that I was the result of passion – that tenderness had made me – though it was hard to credit it later. He must have been a fine figure in his younger days, and her so shy, and petite as a deer. She must have gazed at his balancing act on the dodgems and known, with a pang, that he wouldn’t be there next week. Our bungalow showed some signs of their early married bliss: curtains she’d rigged up below the kitchen sink, matching the window ones, and cones of plastic flowers on the wall. Above their bed hung a framed photo of a woodland glade with sunlight slanting through the branches. Those trees must have blessed them once. It was made of wood, our bungalow, and stained by the rain, but two wire baskets hung outside the front veranda. I’m sure I remember, when I was a toddler, blooms trailing down from them. I saw them. Later the veranda was just the place where things were dumped – mostly Dad’s empties, the bottles cobwebbed together.
She’d expected something better from life, no doubt about that. I felt included in the general dissatisfaction, I suppose because I was big and clumsy, like my Dad, and content with our lot – I mean you are when you’re a child, aren’t you? She wasn’t. She gave up with the house; she tidied it, with sighs, but there weren’t the little touches. But she still put her hair in rollers. They weren’t for us, her faded blonde curls, but I’m sure they weren’t for some fancy man at work either; that wasn’t her temperament. They were for something that nobody could supply.
They had their rows, her and Dad, but most of the time they just didn’t talk, except for where did you leave this or that, or when are you going to do something about the lounge ceiling (our roof was always leaking). That was parents, I thought. It was only later that I realized what an outsider would see, after one glance: that they didn’t get on. I don’t suppose they ever admitted that they weren’t happy; neither of them thought in those words. If they’d admitted it they would have to start making decisions and neither of them was used to that. Anything was better than a choice.
And, really, it’s remarkable how seldom two people meet each other, even when they’re living under the same roof. Either she was out at work, or she was home and he was off on some job. She
didn’t drive; she preferred the bus and she knew the timetable by heart. She’d be off to the supermarket in West Drayton; or she’d be in the kitchen and he’d be fiddling about outside. Days at a time she’d be out each evening on the late shift; and then he had his deals to negotiate down at the Two Magpies or the Spread Eagle.
Then, when they were together, there was the telly. They could both watch it for hours; they looked quite content then. They even made the odd remark; they both knew the programmes so well that these remarks sounded quite intimate, for them. And their cigarettes made them look companionable; my Mum was a surprisingly careless smoker, she was always leaving them lying around, smouldering in ashtrays, something my Dad never did even though she considered him such a slob. Although she smoked Embassy and he smoked Weights they were always running out – they never bought more than one packet at a time – so, eyes on the screen, they’d fumble around for each other’s and he’d light hers. A man looks tender doing that, doesn’t he? Although I knew it was bad for their health it made me happy, seeing them at that moment.
What happened in their bedroom is something I still don’t want to know. He tried to tell me several times, later, but I could make my mind go blank then – a knack I’d learnt in the same way that people chant ‘om, om’ with their guru. I locked a muscle in my brain. He said she was cold . . . his voice thickening. But I knew, when I was little, that through the wall I’d heard noises as if she were in pain, even though something, thank goodness, stopped me rushing in to save her. At school the girls read Photo-Love and talked about animal charm. That’s what my Dad must have had once, when he was younger. He must have had it for my Mum.
But as I said, she wasn’t too keen on the bodily functions. I remember being sick; it was Dad who knelt beside me supporting my clammy brow. She was always going on about the way he ate, though I didn’t see anything wrong with it myself. He irked her, the way he sprawled in the armchair, his legs spattered with mud, such a big man in our cramped lounge. When he came out of the toilet, in she’d go and we’d hear the puff-puff of the air freshener.
I don’t remember her playing with me. I don’t think she found children interesting. When I was helping her like a little housewife, that’s when she seemed most at ease. Sometimes she talked to me then, when she was washing up and I was drying, the sun through the window shining on the brushes in their Nescafé jar. She talked about her childhood in Ipswich. Her father, my Grandad who I never knew, he’d worked on the trawlers. One day he’d sailed off and never come home; he’d disembarked in Oslo and started another family, all over again. She would pause, her arms in the suds, and gaze out at the sky with the gulls blown about in the wind and the planes taking off. She used to dress up in her hat and coat, she said, and walk to the end of the pier to wait.
I always felt awkward; a conversation was what I wanted, so much, yet when it actually happened I didn’t know how to answer . . . No wonder she was disappointed with me. In fact I don’t know if she expected me to answer; she was remembering out loud. The only way I could please her was by putting the crockery away without fumbling it. She wouldn’t say anything, of course, but I could feel her silent approval. I did long to please her. My Dad was so hamfisted; he was always breaking things. Then he’d say ‘Fuck me’, which made it worse.
She didn’t exactly neglect me; she simply wasn’t there. Before I was old enough for school it was mainly my Dad who looked after me. We went our separate ways but we always knew what the other one was doing. Thinking back to that time is difficult, but I try to picture us as companionable. We were; I’m sure we were.
We both liked messing about outside. I’d drag a square of carpet through the dust. On it lay Kanga, and Prod, my rubber duck, and an ambulance. I’d just drag them around; I wasn’t an adventurous child. No wonder my Mum thought me dull. I’d sit them on one of Dad’s piles of sand, surveying their domain. Roo would be out of his pouch, ready for action. Then what? Nobody ever came to play with me; this was long before Teddy my brother was born. The only things I wanted to make were homes. I’d put a White’s Lemonade crate under the apple tree and sit them on that.
But the best place was the caravan. Our yard was good to grow up in because there were so many places where nobody went – my Dad rarely, my Mum never. The cats dozed in the caravan but they were wild creatures and leapt out when I arrived. Inside, things were stored which Dad had forgotten about – paint pots, and sticky bottles of pig linctus. All our outbuildings were full of junk. Mum had given up complaining about them.
I called the caravan the Rosy Arms; I suppose it must have been a pub because I collected Dad’s empties from round the front and laid them out on the caravan floor. I sat in there for hours; the name Rosy Arms comforted me. I sat humming to Roo. When Dad’s whistling approached I stopped humming and pretended I was clearing my throat. I was embarrassed, you see; but in those days I didn’t dread his step.
There were other places, surrounded by nettles and that long, pale grass. There was a chilly concrete building full of farm machinery that was probably left by the people before us. Beside it was the railway carriage where I collected the eggs. There was a shed, with our dog tied up and stacks of dusty flowerpots that perhaps my Mum had once used. There was an old car, a Ford Anglia. Years later, Teddy would sit in it all afternoon, heaving round its wheel and zooming off towards horizons only he knew about. Its seats were broken, with the wires sticking through.
Then there were more daring places to explore, farther away from our bungalow. Down by the road, before the petrol station was built, there was a tangled, brambly plot. In the evenings rabbits came out, nibbling unconcerned as the cars passed by. Little did they know the fate in store. The sunlight lit their fur, like haloes . . . You see, I do remember it as sunny.
Outside, the sun has sunk. I’m trying to tell you exactly what it was like. It’s not just for you that I’m trying to fix these memories, it’s for myself. Just now, talking about the potholes in our drive, I suddenly remembered squatting there beside the puddles. There’s this oily film on puddles like that, isn’t there? Aren’t I right? I was there, I know I was, dangling string into the sheeny violet . . . Mauve swirls . . . I shifted them with my string. My sandals were canvas, and scuffed paler round the front. And the edges of the drive were muddy . . . Ribbed mud, where my Dad had steered around the holes.
I’m getting it back; I thought I’d never be able to. Can you picture it now, with me telling you? Last week, when the doctor saw what had happened, he suggested I visit a colleague of his. A psychiatrist, he meant. No fear, I said.
Perhaps that’s why I decided to tell you, because it’s easier. I couldn’t tell a real person what I might be able to tell you. And it’s working . . . It’s coming back to me. This little girl . . . I can recognize her now as somebody who once was me. You’ve helped me, you know.
I’ll continue the conducted tour. Out front was the pigs, and the road, and the brambly garage site. Up beside our drive ran another road which led past our bungalow to a brick depot out the back, behind our yard. This didn’t belong to us. I didn’t know who it belonged to, I hardly ever saw a human being there, though each morning cars drove up to it and at lunchtime a hooter sounded. Like most of the buildings down our way, it was a block put down in a field, just like that, and fenced in with ornamental shrubs. Years later it was bought by Avis Self-Drive and then it was Cortinas driving in and out, shiny saloons with UK visitors inside, wide-eyed from the airport. They stared at our yard.
Behind the depot stretched a large, flat cabbage field. I never went there – it was too big. In winter the smell of rotting vegetation hung over us, with the kerosene. The few fields around us, they all belonged to the market garden down the road. Down there were rows of greenhouses, and along the road stood a sign saying ‘Chrysanths!’, then the next saying ‘Bedding Plants!’, then the next, ‘Buy Now!’ . . . So people had time to slow down.
Cars, cars, whizzing to and fro. Cars out the fro
nt; and way across the field, at the back, misty-far, the elevated motorway. But you don’t notice that when you’re little, do you? You just sit there in your nest of grass with nothing larger on your mind. I was like that too, then . . . I’m remembering it. I’m sure I was just like you.
My Dad made the meals, before I was old enough to take over the cooking. He fried sausages in a haze of fat. When my Mum came back she tut-tutted at the mess, but what could she do? There was no one else to look after me.
I think of her a lot now. I try to work things out, how we might have been if events had been different. She was inhibited, but she wasn’t deep-down cold. I don’t think most inhibited people are. It just takes more skill to reach them, and when I was young I didn’t know how. I was too little to be a companion and that was what she needed – companionship. She must have been lonely, with my Dad. And stuck in that place, with the airport lit like a city at night, but not for her, and the black fields behind with their far string of lights. Nobody except us lived along that stretch of road; they only worked there.
We would have got on better when I was older, I’m sure we would. I think she was looking forward to that. We could have discussed what clothes suited me, what matched my eyes and so on, like mothers and daughters do. I could have asked her about my periods. She’d never mentioned this but I’d seen her sidling through the kitchen with a newspaper parcel in her hand. Once, in my innocence I asked her if it was fish and chips and she’d been furious; I realize now that she was just terribly embarrassed. But later, when I wasn’t a stupid kid asking stupid questions, and old enough to have female problems myself, then I’m sure we could have become quite comfortable together.