The Artificial Anatomy of Parks Read online

  “No rest for the wicked, eh?” he says.

  “You must be very busy then,” I say. He guffaws, but Gillian gives me a look.

  After Paul leaves she brings up Georgia’s wedding again. “She looked so beautiful you know,” she says. “We bought this beautiful ivory-coloured gown. And a cream, diamond-studded crown.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  Gillian fishes in her handbag. “I have some photos. You must see them, since you couldn’t be there. Now where are they?” She rummages some more, then makes a little triumphant sound and pulls out a pocket-sized, leather-bound photo album. I lean in, and feel my eyes pop. Cousin Georgia has changed since I last saw her. She used to be chubby and placid. Aunt Gillian said it was the result of quitting her swimming training, but we all knew it was because Georgia ate hunks of butter by themselves.

  The Georgia in the photos before me is slim and fresh, with large brown eyes and a vibrantly scarlet shade of lipstick. I think she looks beautiful. Beautiful and lost.

  “You two look so alike now, dear,” Aunt Gillian is saying. “One would think you were sisters.” She’s always had active hands when she talks, and now she flutters them in my direction. She’s slightly drunk though, and her glass of wine gets knocked over and starts to bleed onto the album. “Oh,” she says. “Oh, how silly of me.” She fusses with napkins, mopping the wine from the photo of Georgia (alone with her bouquet in a garden setting), and makes faces of distress. She is berating herself, under her breath and very fast. Instinctively I put my hand on her arm. She stops muttering and mopping and looks up; we’re both surprised. I take my hand away.

  “Well,” she says. “Well, I think I’m going to have dessert. Perhaps the sticky toffee pudding. How about you, Tallulah?”

  Three

  In the beginning, you are two separate entities – spermatozoon, and ovum. When the two cells come together, the ovum is fertilised. You (fertilised-egg-you) leave the fallopian tube, pass through the utero-tubal junction and embed yourself into the endometrium – the lining of the uterus. You need nourishment, sustenance, and foetus-you does not take in oxygen or nutrients the same way you will outside the womb; your lungs remain unused for the gestation period. Instead you get everything you need from the placenta and the umbilical cord. During pregnancy, your mother’s heart rate will increase by as much as twenty percent to produce thirty to fifty percent more blood flow for you. This blood is carried from the placenta by the umbilical vein, which connects with veins within you. Oxygenated blood is collected in the left atrium of your heart; from here it flows into the left ventricle, is pumped through the aorta and travels around your body. Some of this blood will return to the placenta, where waste products such as carbon dioxide will leave you and enter your mother’s circulation. This is part of what is called the ‘communication’ between foetus and mother.

  Even before I was born, therefore, my mother’s heart and mine were working for the same purpose.

  Like me, my mother had been an only child, and sometimes she worried I would get lonely.

  “Were you lonely?” I asked her.

  “Not always.” She was mending my dungarees as I stood in them, kneeling in front of me, holding up buttons to see which was the right one. I was wearing a short-sleeved check shirt underneath the dungarees, my favourite shirt from the age of seven to ten. She had a flowery dress on, and she was wearing her tortoiseshell reading glasses for the first time, which must have made it 1989. “It would still have been nice to have a little sister, or a brother to run around with.”

  “What about your mum and dad? Did you play with them?”

  She held up a big pearly button with brown rings around the holes. “What about this one? Do you like it?”

  “Yes.”

  “They were quite old when they had me,” she said, biting off the thread. “They used to call me their little surprise.”

  “And you didn’t have any other family?”

  “No. And my parents died when I was sixteen, so then I was an orphan.”

  She’d made a mistake, I thought – orphans were children, like Annie, or Sophie in The BFG.

  “Hold still,” she said. “You’ll get stabbed if you keep on wriggling.”

  “Are you lonely now?”

  “Not now,” she said. “I have you and Daddy now, don’t I?”

  “When did you meet Daddy?”

  “When I was twenty-one.”

  “How did you meet?”

  “At an ice-rink.” She patted my bottom. “There – all sewn on.”

  “I want to hear about you and Daddy.”

  My mother started packing her sewing kit away. “I was there with a friend,” she said. “And she fell over. She couldn’t get up, and then your father suddenly appeared and said he was a doctor. It was all very romantic.”

  I went and stood on her feet and she walked us across the room, wrapping her arms around me to keep me upright.

  “What was wrong with your friend?” I asked.

  “He said her ankle was twisted, so we sat in the bar for the rest of the night with him and his friend.” She kissed the top of my head. “He had a moustache back then, and a big hat, and I thought he looked like a blond Omar Sharif.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “An actor I used to have a crush on.”

  “What happened to your friend?”

  “She ended up going out with the other boy,” my mother said. “And then she moved back to Wales and we lost touch.”

  “And you and Daddy got married?”

  “Not straight away.”

  “But you stayed together forever?”

  She smiled, but she lifted me off her feet and started tidying up, shuffling my drawings together. “That’s nice,” she said, turning the top one to me. “Is it Snow White and the seven dwarves?”

  “It’s me and my cousins,” I said. “I wrote it at the bottom.”

  “I see it now.”

  “Anyway, I’m not lonely,” I said. “I’ve got Starr and Georgia.”

  “And Michael and James.”

  Because my mother was so worried about me being lonely we saw a lot of my cousins. We all lived in London, but usually, when the weather got hot, we would visit our grandmother out in Shropshire.

  Our grandmother was terrifying – she towered over us, all bones and dark eyes. Her fingertips were yellow after years of smoking and she smelled like lavender with an undercurrent of mushrooms. She walked four miles every day; she didn’t believe in being ill. She never spoke to us, unless it was to tell us off, and she cleared her throat all the time, making a sound like ‘hruh’. If she wasn’t there, James said, going to hers would be great. I agreed, the house seemed like a castle to me, with a gardener and a cook, a lake, and stables – although, sadly for us grandchildren, no horses. My grandfather had been the rider and within a week of his death, she’d sold them all off to the farmer two fields away.

  Most of the house, my mother told me, had been built in the Victorian period, but little extensions had been added over the years so that from the outside it looked like a puzzle with the pieces jammed together in any order. There was a long, tree-lined drive leading up to it that twisted and turned and suddenly opened out onto a clearing and the house and a silver glint of the lake in the garden beyond. The windows on the ground floor were the biggest, at least three times as tall as me; the first floor windows led on to a little balcony that ran along the front of the house and the second floor windows were small, where the ceilings were lower. The outside of the house was a pale yellow colour, like it was made of sand, and the roof was covered with grey tiles.

  There was an older wing, made of small, grey stones, to the left of the house. It slanted upwards like a church, and it was the only part of the original Tudor house left after a fire destroyed the building in the nineteenth century. My grandmother had a painting of the house in flames that she hung in the entrance hall. When I was older, I asked her why she kept it; she said it was a r
eminder that our family had been through disaster and come out the other side.

  The Tudor wing was where I slept, in a yellow room that faced the walled garden at the side of the house. I was separated from the others by a short, uneven corridor, and a thick, wooden-beamed doorway. My parents’ room was just beyond the doorway; it was rear-facing with a view of the lake, but I liked my sloping ceiling, and the latticed window high up in the wall. I had to climb onto a chair to see out of it, which was forbidden because the chairs at my grandmother’s were all at least a hundred years old, or so she said.

  One visit we were having milk and malt-loaf in the kitchen when a rabbit limped up and collapsed against the open French door. Its eyes were glassy and it had red all over its fur, like something had taken great bites out of it. Aunt Gillian shrieked when she saw it.

  Michael stooped to pick it up. “It’s hurt,” he said.

  “Michael, don’t touch it,” Aunt Gillian said. “Get the gardener,” but my grandmother snorted and strode over.

  “Let me see that,” she said, and Michael held it out to her. She looked it over quickly then put her hands on it and twisted the neck until we all heard the snap.

  “Foxes,” she said. “Or dogs. Nothing else we could do.” She took the body and went out into the garden. Next to me, I heard Georgia whimper softly, and Michael turned away from us, white-faced.

  That night I had a nightmare about a ghost being in the room with me, and stumbled down the corridor to my mother. My father steered me back to my own bed and tucked me in again. “There are no such things as ghosts,” he said, but he sat at the end of my bed until I fell asleep again.

  We spent most of our time by the lake, seeing who could skim stones furthest across the water, launching paper sailing boats that Michael taught us to make, or eating cold chicken or cheese and pickle sandwiches that we had to sneak from the kitchen. The grown-ups stayed indoors, playing cards and arguing, especially Aunt Gillian and Aunt Vivienne. My father usually sat apart from the others, reading a newspaper. Sometimes he’d save the cartoons for me, especially ones about Alex, the businessman in a pinstripe suit and his friend Clive and wife, Penny. I wasn’t always sure I understood what was going on, but I liked how hopeless Clive was.

  Our grandmother sat apart too, watching everyone from her special armchair. There was another, matching armchair that Starr told us had been our grandfather’s while he was alive, but no one ever sat in it. The grown-ups never talked about our grandfather either. Michael, who was eleven at that point, said our family was a matriarchal society, like elephants, and men weren’t important, although one time when me and Georgia were on a food raid we heard Aunt Vivienne and our grandmother in the hallway fighting about one. They didn’t mention his name, and Aunt Vivienne seemed pretty angry by the end.

  “You just want me to be a fucking doormat, say please and thank you and kiss their feet.”

  “No one forces you to come down and see everyone, Vivienne.”

  “And look what happens when I’m not here.”

  There was a pause.

  “I know you’re strong, my girl, but sometimes circumstances are stronger.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Mother. Just because you failed to stop it doesn’t mean it was inevitable.”

  There was another pause, then, “You’re a cold person and no mistake,” my grandmother said, and her voice was even more terrifying than normal.

  We heard footsteps start in our direction. Georgia, her hand deep in the biscuit tin, looked at me with widened eyes. We slipped out of the kitchen and back to the others. Without agreeing on it, neither of us said anything about the conversation.

  At four a.m. I give up trying to sleep and drag my duvet into the kitchen to watch TV. I’m addicted to it in the way my mother was to afternoon plays. She used to talk about the characters as if they were real. I used to come home from school and find her in the kitchen with the radio on, eyes wide and hands paused mid-action: chopping a tomato, scrubbing the table, feeding the cat. I guess she liked the company. My mother didn’t work. She’d been a waitress, like me, when she met my father at the ice-rink.

  Later that morning my eyeballs feel like someone’s pushing them back into their sockets. Aunt Gillian calls me as I’m sweeping up china shards from a bowl I smashed in the kitchen.

  “Paul’s gone to Glyndebourne,” she says. “To see The Magic Flute. I don’t like Mozart all that much, although I know you’re not meant to say that. Madame Butterfly is really more my cup of tea.”

  “Aunt Gillian… ”

  “Anyway,” she continues. “I just thought it might be nice if you could come and keep me company for the day. Maybe we could go to the hospital together. That’s if you don’t have any plans? You’re not working, are you?”

  “No,” I say, before I can stop myself.

  “Oh good, maybe Georgia will join us. I doubt Vivienne will.” She sniffs.

  I meet Aunt Gillian at the bus stop by Hyde Park Corner; she’s brought two teas and more photo albums.

  We sit at the front of the top deck.

  “Let’s see which one this is,” Aunt Gillian says, bringing out another slim black volume, with ‘Memories’ written in gold calligraphy on the bottom left corner. I cradle my cup in my hands, blowing on the liquid to cool it down. She licks her thumb and opens to the first page – I’m surprised to see a black and white photograph of Aunt Vivienne as a young girl. She’s wearing a knitted jumper dress, long socks pulled up to her knees and t-bar sandals. Her hair is in two bunches on either side of her head, which is tilted away from the camera, though her eyes are definitely on it. She’s laughing at something.

  “She loved that dress,” Aunt Gillian says. “The sixties died for Vivienne the day it unravelled past repair.”

  “I didn’t think you two were close,” I say.

  Aunt Gillian’s leaning over me, looking down at the photo and shaking her head. “She always was a hoity-toity little madam. Just like you when you were younger.” She smiles at me. I’m not sure how to respond, so I take a sip of my tea.

  “Do you remember my second husband, George?”

  I remember George, a wheezy red-head who used to squeeze all the girl cousins inappropriately, until Starr complained. Aunt Gillian and Aunt Vivienne didn’t speak to each other for a year after that. The last I heard of him, he was going to prison, although I’m not completely sure what for.

  “He used to say you were going to grow up to be a real handful,” Aunt Gillian tells me. “You certainly used to drive us all to distraction with that mangy old cat you carried around.”

  She’s talking about Mr Tickles.

  A week after my sixth Christmas, I found a cat in our garden. It had half an ear and one eye and clumps of fur missing; I wanted to adopt it straight away.

  My mother was washing up when I ran in and tugged at her skirt. “There’s a cat in the garden,” I said breathlessly. “But I think he’s hurt.”

  “Tallie,” my mother sighed. “Are you sure he’s hurt? Is he just lying down?”

  The week before I had dragged her over to see a squirrel who walked funny, who was walking fine by the time she got there. And I was always scared that pigeons would get run over – they didn’t seem to have ears to hear the cars coming. If I saw a pigeon in the road I would chase it off, flapping my arms at it.

  “No, really hurt,” I said. “Can we help him, pleeease?”

  My mother was resistant at first to bringing an animal indoors, but she gave in when I showed her the frost on his coat.

  “Can I name him?” I asked as my father wiped his wounds and sprayed them with antiseptic.

  “What would you name him?” my father asked.

  “Mr Tickles.”

  “That’s a good choice.” My father shone his penlight in Mr Tickles’ ears and down his throat. “He seems pretty healthy, all things considered. Although we should probably take him to a vet.”

  “Don’t get her hopes up, Edward,” my moth
er said. She put her hands on my shoulders. “Tallie, this is someone else’s kitty. See, he has a collar. We’ll have to advertise in case anyone wants him back.”

  “But he ran away.”

  “Cats run away a lot,” my mother said. “Don’t get too attached to him. I don’t want you to be upset about it if someone gets in touch.”

  We advertised in the local paper. I spent a month in fear every time the telephone rang, but no one came forward to claim him. It wasn’t that surprising – the cat ate like a horse and smelt like an onion. From that moment on, wherever I went, Mr Tickles came too.

  Aunt Gillian is looking out of the window at the road ahead of us. I think I see water welling up in her eyes.

  “We never really know what we have until it’s gone, Tallulah,” she says.

  My father is no longer under anaesthetic, but the rhythm of his heart hasn’t stabilised yet, and they want to keep him in Intensive Care.

  He’s asleep when we enter, his face still the colour of papier-mâché. Aunt Gillian and I pull chairs up next to the bed. She starts talking to him in a low voice. After a few minutes I realise she’s singing. Some song I don’t know – from their childhood, probably. I feel ridiculous, like I’m an imposter.

  I think about what she said on the bus. I wonder who she was talking about. John, her first husband? George, my grandparents? Not my father, anyway, he’s not gone yet. I catch myself trying to imagine my life without him; it’s hard to see how it would be different, when we haven’t spoken in so long. I can’t see it being like when my mother died – if my father stopped breathing now, I don’t think I would even cry.

  “What was that?” I ask Gillian when she’s finished.

  “It’s something our French nanny used to sing to get him to sleep,” Aunt Gillian says, waving her hands. “It was from the region of France she grew up in.”

  “It was from France, period,” a voice from the doorway says. “So it’s probably all about adultery and fine wines.”

  Aunt Vivienne enters the room. She’s wearing a black suit; the jacket is fitted and the skirt is pencil-style. Her hair is shoulder length and chestnut coloured – a dye job, but a good one. I tried to describe her to Toby once, but now I think I might have underplayed her old-Hollywood magnetism.