Playing with the Grown-ups Page 22

  The street compared to the house was blessedly quiet, and the lights were off in the tidy row of houses. Her skin shone bright white, electric in the dark.

  "'My mother said, I never should, play with the gypsies in the wood. If I did, she would say, naughty, naughty girl to disobey,"' she sang quietly, liking the neatness of the rhyme as she ran to the sign that began the street, and touched it with her hand, as if she were playing one of the nameless that children play, and she sailed to the other end, her bare feet slapping against concrete, tapping the crumbling brick of the last house's garden wall, the place where the street officially ended.

  She was tired. Her bones felt chipped and dry. Kitty washed her face religiously and, sitting on the edge of the bath, scrubbed the street from her feet.

  She put her clothes back on. She walked into the sitting room, where they huddled, frozen in the same places, snorting and talking over each other, as though time had simply stopped. The air had changed, thickened, and rounded with some dark intention.

  'I'm going to bed,' Kitty said.

  'Goodnight,' her mother said. She could not look Kitty in the eye.

  She peered in to check on Sam and Violet, who both slept, arms open, as if to catch the snow. Their long eyelashes made shadows on their heart-shaped faces. Their room seemed to belong to another house, in which a fire died softly in the grate as the parents slept upstairs, warm from wine and conversation. The alarm set for 7 a.m. in time for breakfast-making, and the school run.

  Kitty lay on the floor and watched them for a while, and imagined an angel with a wing-span of twenty feet shielding them with a great impenetrable wall of creamy feathers, which met in the middle as he spread his arms.

  She got into bed, throwing the covers over her head, and curled up like a foetus.

  'Kitty.'

  Someone was sitting heavily on her bed, pulling her from sleep with an insistent voice.

  'Kitty! There's something wrong with your mum. She's really fucked up.'

  'What do you mean?' She sat up to see Con looking at her with wide and frightened eyes.

  'She seemed to be having a really good time, and she asked me to call some chick at a hotel and get more stuff, but she's lying in the bathroom and I can't wake her up. I think she may have taken some pills or something.'

  Kitty leapt up, away from him.

  'Have you called an ambulance?' she said, as she ran down the narrow hall.

  'No. I didn't want to. The house is loaded with drugs.' He started crying.

  The bathroom door was open. Her mother lay on the floor and her eyes were shut. Her legs were crumpled to the side of her, carelessly, as if someone had thrown them away.

  'Mummy! Mummy! Mummy!' Kitty shook her.

  Her mother was heavy in her hands and Kitty couldn't move her properly. As she tried, her mother's head grazed the side of the bath with an almost comical thud.

  'Help me,' Kitty said to Con.

  He dragged her mother's feet, and her legs splayed, showing her white knickers. She didn't want Con to see, so she pulled her mother's skirt down and held it against her.

  'Get the phone from next to the bed, the portable one. Bring it here.' Kitty cradled her mother's head in her lap.

  'Mama, Mama, can you hear me?'

  She called 999. The man on the phone spoke with a soft Scottish burr.

  'What's your emergency?' he said in a voice trained with calm.

  'It's my mother - I think she's taken an overdose, she's not moving, and we need an ambulance as soon as possible, please.' She told him the address.

  'All right, love, we'll send someone right now. What's your name?'

  'Kitty,' she said.

  'Is she breathing, Kitty? And do you know what she's taken?'

  'I can't tell if she's breathing. I know she took some coke, some cocaine, and I think she's taken pills as well,' she said.

  'All right, my love, someone will be there very soon. Do you need me to stay on the phone with you?'

  'No, just please tell them to hurry up. Please make them hurry!'

  Her mother's eyes started rolling back in her head, like a scene from The Exorcist.

  'Oh my God! Oh fuck, this is really heavy. I've got to get out of here.' Con Brown began to retch.

  Then it was just the two of them, her mother and she, in the bathroom with the blue-and-white-striped wallpaper. There was a poster on the wall of some happy children dressed in woollen clothes on ice skates, heading home for some Ovaltine. Things she looked at every day, bath salts, her mother's skin cream, cold mundane everyday things.

  'I love you, please don't die, Mummy.'

  Kitty rocked her mother in her arms. Her skin was cold.

  She wrapped her arms around her, putting her mother's hands in the sleeves of her nightdress. She looked at the almond-shaped nails, the long painter's hands. There had been no paint on them recently, Kitty saw now. They were too white and clean. She missed the hands that were flecked with paint, which smelled of turpentine when her mother stroked her face, and danced with chips of colour when she told a story.

  'You'll be all right,' Kitty said. 'I promise you. I'll make it all better, just please don't die. It will all be all right, I know it. I don't hate you. I'm sorry I said that, I didn't mean it. I love you. We need you.'

  They took her away down the narrow stairs. It wasn't like television or a film: they put her neatly on the stretcher, and they spirited her away into the ambulance, the only sign of their visit the tube from the stomach pump, and the howling wail of departure.

  Sam and Violet did not wake.

  Her mother's bed was unmade. Kitty crawled in, trying to fit into the grooves that her body had left in the sheets, placing herself in them carefully like she was a piece from a jigsaw.

  She buried her head in the pillows, the soft satin ones Ingrid and Elsie had sent from Frette in Paris, breathing in, holding the ghost of her mother's scent in her lungs, until it stung, each count of her breath willing her mother's breath to correspond from the hospital bed by osmosis, so they could take the rubbery oxygen mask away.

  The sun was rising, a milky newborn thing, above the jagged roofs and aerials of Clapham. Outside the window in the rows of houses, in the massive grey tower blocks that hung spare in the distance, the curtains were shut, and she knew that people carried on, often without ever knowing who they shared breathing space with, as other lives were lived right next to them.

  The number was tattooed in her brain. She waited as the phone rang. She knew they were asleep, his arm as always propped behind the crook of her neck, his nose inches from the shoulder where her silver hair fell in a thick cloud. Outside their bedroom birds would be just beginning to call each other to day, the window would be dulled by frost.

  'Yes?' He sounded old, impatient. Kitty heard her grandmother murmur in the background, still dreaming maybe.

  'Bestepapa?' she said.

  * * *

  Sam and Violet sat in the back of the BMW. Between them, Torty lay nestled in a bed of lettuce. Sam had said he would simply starve on the journey from London without it.

  'I remember it here, Bestemama!' he said, as the car turned into the lane. 'That's the train bridge, and Kitty used to tell me a troll lived underneath there.'

  'There isn't really a troll, Sambo,' Kitty said. 'I was making it up.'

  'I know that,' Sam said. 'Obviously I was little when I believed that.'

  Kitty smiled at Bestemama.

  'It is sunnier here than where Mummy is working?'

  Violet asked.

  'Oh about the same, I should think, darling,' Bestema-ma said. 'Now what shall we have for supper?'

  'You buggers are enormous!' Bestepapa shouted down the garden. 'You could be a basketball team if there were a few more of you.' He stopped in front of Kitty. 'Hello, little Kit-kat.' His voice shook. 'I'm very glad you're here, all of you, my rabble.'

  Sam and Violet looked at him with interest.

  'Now who's this fellow?' Be
stepapa said, pointing at Torty. 'He looks a very wise beast. Is it a bird?'

  'No, silly. It's a tortoise,' Sam said.

  'Ah, a tortoise. Shall we take him round the garden and see whether we can find him a girlfriend?'

  'He doesn't like girls. He's an old man,' Violet said, laughing.

  'Well, as a very old man, I can tell you, he might have the spirit in him yet. Come on, up we go, your sister can help your Bestemama with supper.' He held out his hands.

  'How's Rosaria, darling? Gosh, you two can chat.' Beste-mama was sitting by the fire, reading the papers, when Kitty came out of the study after being on the phone for an hour.

  'She's well. She's got a boyfriend called Constantine.'

  'How exotic,' Bestemama said. 'I do like her.'

  'Her uncle is the headmaster of a boarding school in America, in Connecticut. It's meant to be a really good school.'

  Bestemama stared at Kitty.

  'You have a school, darling. You've just come back from America.'

  'I think it might be better for me to go far away. They're going to send a prospectus. I'd like to sort of start again, and I know Connecticut isn't far away from New York, and I thought I could stay with Elsie some weekends if she doesn't mind, and come to you and Mummy for the holidays. I couldn't live at Hay if Mummy lived in London; it would be too strange, and I don't think I can live there with her.' She took a deep breath.

  'You don't need to run away, Kitty,' Bestemama said fiercely. 'You haven't done anything wrong. I feel so angry with myself. I felt in my bones that things weren't right from the moment all of this began with that bloody woman and her bloody tambourine. I think Marina should move back here, to the cottage, with all of you. She was fine here. She wasn't doing any of this nonsense when she lived with us. It breaks my heart . . . I'm just so sorry - oh my Lord - to think of it.' She placed her hand on Kitty's cheek.

  'I think . . .' Kitty said. 'I think it doesn't really make a difference where she is, because she always takes herself with her.'

  Chapter Fourteen

  The night before she left Tommy came over to say goodbye, and as he left he pressed a battered copy of his favourite book, The LittlePrince, into her hands. 'I'm sorry if I ever made you feel bad,' he said.

  'You didn't. I'll write to you. Come and visit and fall in love with an American girl so I don't have to hear about the Fraulein any more,' Kitty said, kissing his cheek.

  'I'll come by and see your mother - I won't let anything happen.'

  They stared at each other.

  'I have to go. I'm crap at goodbyes,' he said.

  She slept in her mother's bed. They played the alphabet game, and her mother made her laugh so hard her ribs felt like they had been broken.

  Her mother cooked her breakfast, French toast with maple syrup, and she laid the table with snowdrops from the garden, and used her Irish linen napkins.

  Nora, Sam and Violet slept, because it was early, early even for them, but she had said goodbyethe evening before. Her mother carried her case downstairs, and on Kitty's head she placed her favourite hat, a tweed newsboy cap.

  'Are you sure?' Kitty said.

  'Yes. I need to know your head will be warm.'

  'I'm not going to Antarctica, Mummy, I'm going to New York. The school's in Connecticut, they'll have central heating.'

  'New York gets very cold,' her mother said. 'Don't you remember?'

  As she stepped into the red beetle, Kitty looked up at the windows of the house. She saw Sam and Violet, their faces squashed against the glass. She waved, and in her wave she tried to convey everything she knew of love. Swallowing hard, she sat down and shut the door. Dusty Springfield sang from the radio.

  'You don't have to go,' her mother said by the gate. 'Everything can be different, it can go back to how it was. We can ring Elsie and tell her that we've changed our minds. It doesn't need to be this dramatic. Why are you going so far away?'

  A voice announced the flight to New York on the tannoy.

  'I think I sort of have to go. I don't think I have a choice.'

  Her mother started to cry.

  'I'm sorry,' she said. 'Please know that I love you more than anything, that it is infinitely easier to love you more than I will ever love myself. Please know that always, that you are loved.'

  Marina seemed to lose her words as Kitty kissed her and walked down the orange-carpeted tunnel, looking back at her mother silently watching her. She waved, mouthing 'I love you', until she disappeared from view, teetering long-legged towards her future.

  Her mother lies in a ward full of other people who have tried to hurt themselves in irrevocable ways. They are all women, twelve of them. Kitty holds her stomach trying to fend off the communal despair of the room. Her mother's eyes are shut. She touches her arm lightly. She finds it miraculous that her mother bears no ravages on her face. She is, in her hospital nightgown with mascara staining her cheeks, still breathtaking.

  'Hello, Mummy,' she whispers softly.

  Her mother opens her eyes. Kitty doesn't feel the anger she thought she would; she looks at her mother small in the stiff white sheets of her hospital bed, amongst these sad strangers, far away from home.

  Kitty looks at the faces of her mother, brother and sister, feeling the tiny little life beating inside her, and she is overwhelmed by compassion for all of them, including herself. She knows that tomorrow there will be another morning, and in that morning their lives will continue to muddle along, as lives do. She prays for the baby girl within her, she prays that she won't fuck it up, this all-consuming job that no one seems equipped for, however hard they wish and try.

  'You all came.' Her mother's voice is small, but she smiles at them, and love burns from her. Turning her head, she shuts her eyes, and says quietly, 'I'm so sorry.'

  'I know, Mummy,' Kitty says, taking her hand. 'I know.'

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you and biggest love to my family: Tessa and Julian, for their unerring support, humour and love. Maureen for her wings, wisdom and lentil soup. Clover, Luke and Ned, who share my history and make me proud. Bloomsbury's magic trinity of Alexandra Pringle, a paragon of patience and encouragement, Victoria Millar for her sense and eye and Mary Tomlinson for understanding the finer points of grammar and my writing. Ed Victor, my friend and agent. Felicity Dahl for letting me stay in the annexe whenever I needed a dose of England. Daniel Baker Sr. for opening his doors and letting me write in the bliss of his garden. Mary Conley for her cards, wit and love. Justine Picardie, heroine and surrogate big sister. And last but not least, Caitlin Blythe, for her letter, which reminded me why I wanted to write the book in the first place.

  A Note on the Author

  Sophie Dahl is the author of The Man with the Dancing Eyes. She lives in England.

  A Note on the Type

  The text of this book is set in Linotype Guardi, which was designed by Reinhard Haus in 1986 following a visit to the Bibliotecca Marciana in Venice. The labels on the old picture frames there inspired him to develop his own letter forms based on Venetian Renaissance roman. The letters have the appearance of being formed by the stroke of a broad nib held at an angle. This is reflected in the slanting axis, the minimum contrast between hairlines and stems and in particular the sloped bar of the small e.