When I opened my eyes someone had turned my bedroom light off and pulled the duvet up to my chin. I was roasting and I think that’s what woke me up. I looked around me. If I’d gone back to sleep that second I wouldn’t have remembered anything about waking up at all. It’s a fact, that – people wake up ten times in the night, on average, but as long as you surface for less than three minutes you never remember it.
That night I woke up worrying. It was dark. I could hear the telly downstairs and Barbara laughing every now and again.
I used to get sent to bed after my tea as a punishment when I was little. I would get out of bed and lie on the floor with my ear against the carpet, listening to the echo of Terry doing the six o’clock news between the floorboards. I could always imagine Donald and Barbara very clearly. Having a great time and completely forgetting about me.
It was still Boxing Day and I imagined them again. Barbara was going to stand up at the end of the film and brush imaginary crumbs from the front of her skirt.
‘Well, that’s that for another year,’ she’d say, and turn the lights on the Christmas tree off. Donald would nod absently.
‘You did us proud, love.’
And they’d laugh as if that was the remains of a hilarious joke the pair of them started years and years ago, before I was born and when they were still young.
I lay there, something fluttering in my stomach, and wondered about how long they were married before I was born. Fourteen years, which is ages. And I thought about how old they were when they had me. Old. They didn’t go to work anymore. They didn’t look too much like old people, they could still walk and everything, but when it came to getting picked up and parents’ evenings and things like that, it was humiliating.
Didn’t they really want to have children? Didn’t they worry about me turning out funny, like Wilson? Didn’t they realise I’d get hammered for it at school? In my bed I tried to muster up the energy to hate them again but Wilson was in my head, those hands tucking the ends of the scarf into his jacket, and my throat got so tight I felt like I was going to suffocate.
Chapter 7
It was New Year’s Eve and I should have been at Chloe’s house, not at home with too many boxes of Ritz crackers. Barbara had bought them cheap because the boxes had fallen off the display and had to be patched up with brown tape.
Chloe had said there was going to be a party, with cousins and friends of the family. There would be a room set aside just for us, with films up to certificate fifteen, and a limited amount of booze. Her mother had said she could invite one friend, and it was a toss-up between me and Emma right up until the last minute. But on the last day of school, Chloe had hugged me and said she was going to lend me her pointy shoes. I’d bought some white tights to match. The tights were still in the packet and Chloe hadn’t called me since Boxing Day.
I could have telephoned her. We both had our mobile phones – heavy, brickish objects we flashed about at school. We had no one to send messages to but each other because hardly anyone else had them. They were secrets from our parents. Donald would have been suspicious about radio waves that near to your head, and Barbara liked to listen on the upstairs extension. People at school knew, of course. We’d let them beep and then refuse to let anyone else have a go. Other girls were jealous, or hated us. Not even Emma had one. I loved that phone. It was what made me special.
I never forgot, because Chloe never wanted me to forget, that we only had them because Carl worked in Currys. He liked to keep tabs on her, and it wasn’t as if he could ring her at home. She gave her first one to me and told Carl she’d lost it so he’d get her another. Now and again, she’d promise to get Emma one. Emma would shrug and pretend she didn’t care, but when she thought I wasn’t looking she stared at Chloe’s phone like it was a lump of chocolate.
I didn’t ring Chloe. I remembered her saying ‘bring you out’ and I was angry. It was her turn to phone me, and she hadn’t. By tea-time on New Year’s Eve I was in a full-blown sulk, loitering sullenly around the kitchen and thinking about Emma’s lumpy feet in Chloe’s pointy shoes, wearing her glitter eye-shadow and drinking my share of the limited amount of alcohol. I wasn’t going to ring and invite myself. Wasn’t going to act desperate. Barbara had her own plans for the three of us, and was standing at the draining board hacking tomatoes into garnishes.
‘Will you take that look off your face and put a dress on?’ she said, without turning. ‘We’re going to have a nice evening,’ she insisted, ‘the three of us together. It’s going to be quiet, and civilised, and nice.’
Donald sat at the kitchen table and flattened empty cornflake packets. He was making Secchi disks by cutting circles out of the cardboard and using a black marker pen and a bottle of Tipp-Ex for the design. He used my school ruler to divide the circles into half, and then four, and then started to colour in the quarters. The kitchen stank of solvents instead of cocktails. The point of these disks was to measure the transparency of sea water. The depth to which light from the surface could penetrate. Donald had a theory. He always had a theory.
‘I think twelve should be enough, for the first outing,’ he said.
I was almost at the bottom of the stairs, escaping to the silence of my room with a bag of clementines and a magazine, but Barbara turned and looked at me pointedly, pursed her lips, and nodded at the kitchen chair next to Donald’s. She wasn’t fond of his projects and the effect they had on his moods but we had a deaclass="underline" when she was cooking or otherwise occupied it was my job to babysit him, and how I did that was up to me.
‘What are you going to do to make them waterproof?’ I asked. I’d asked the same question the last time, and the time before that.
‘I could cover them with sticky tape, I suppose,’ he said thoughtfully, as if he’d never considered it.
‘How long do they need to last in the water for? Sticky tape might not be enough.’
‘I really don’t know.’ Donald smiled and shrugged and started colouring in with his black marker. I watched him, and I wondered if all families were like this: sitting in kitchens, speaking their lines and acting in a soap they already knew the ending to. For a minute, the peaceful, vacant expression Donald had on while he was colouring, the way the rims of his eyelids were pink – it reminded me of Wilson.
I picked up a pen, started to help, and asked another question – something not in the script – just to take the thought away.
‘Are you going to get the boat soon?’
Donald nodded. He looked excited.
‘I need to collect all the evidence for the article before the spring sets in. The tides, the organisms in the water – they’ll all change once it starts getting light.’
Donald looked up as he spoke but carried on moving his marker. The nib of the pen slipped from the edge of the cardboard and made a mark on the table, but he didn’t notice.
‘As soon as I’ve got my statistics,’ he went on, back onto his script, ‘I can write up the article and send it off whenever I like. I’ve got months before they’ll be deciding on the trip.’
I wasn’t really listening. It was the kind of thing he said a lot when he was planning his application to the National Geographic Field Trip Sea Eye Programme. It was an annual programme and this year they were accepting proposals from parties interested in coming along on the first manned trip of a deep-sea submersible in years. Last year, it had been the jungle somewhere, and the year before, one of the Poles.
Donald hadn’t been interested then – he was still on magic or hot air balloons. But this year, it had caught his eye and he was determined to impress them with his investigations and win a place as a research assistant. Barbara told him it was for PhD students and university professors and they didn’t mean people like him. She said there was more to being an assistant on a trip like that than typing up, making tea, and cleaning lenses.