The Artificial Anatomy of Parks Read online

  “Vivienne,” Aunt Gillian says icily.

  “Gillian,” Aunt Vivienne drawls, eyebrow raised. “And Tallulah. The prodigal daughter returns.” Maybe it’s a good thing he never got to know my family, I think.

  I can feel Aunt Gillian fuming next to me. “Why the hell are you dressed for a funeral?” she snaps.

  I slip out while they’re arguing and find a nearby nurse. She’s not best pleased; she rushes in and I can hear her scolding from outside the room, “This is an intensive care unit. If you two want to continue whatever this fight is, then you’re going to have to go outside to do it.”

  One of the aunts murmurs something.

  “If you’re finished, then you can stay. But one more word from you, and I’ll have you out so fast, don’t think I’m afraid of you” – that must be to Aunt Vivienne – “I have a duty to my patients you know.”

  I lean against the wall in the corridor. I’ve hardly smoked all day and my body is screaming for some nicotine. I close my eyes and concentrate on the buzz. While I still did ballet all the spinning made me feel dizzy and sick. I learnt to turn my focus inwards, and then I could shrink the dizziness to a tiny, manageable lump inside me. I try to do that now, but it’s been a while. When I open my eyes I have to blink twice. I can see someone far off down the hall being very still – they look familiar. It takes me a few moments to realise it’s my reflection. “You’re cracking up,” I say out loud, and a passing nurse gives me an odd look.

  I walk to the lift and push the button, but it takes too long, so I find the stairs and jump down them two at a time.

  Outside, I light my cigarette, disconcerted to see my hands shaking. I tell myself to get a grip, smoke two cigarettes in quick succession and go back inside.

  It doesn’t seem real, being here for any reason other than waiting for my father to finish his shift. My mother used to bring me after tea-time on a Thursday. She had a friend who ran an old book-binding shop and we’d go there for biscuits and orange squash first, then walk the ten minutes to the hospital, sometimes with my mother’s friend, too. Her name was Vicky; she had dark, curly hair and lots of rings on her fingers. She was the only person who ever babysat me, and only once – my parents can’t have gone out much. I guess most families have the grandparents around to help out with things like that, but my grandmother lived too far away, and her husband had died of a heart attack when my father was thirty-one. Not – as Starr once informed me – because my granny poisoned him, but because he drank like a fish right up until the day he keeled over.

  I was jealous of other kids at primary school, who had all their grandparents left. My best friend Kathy lived next door to hers; she used to go across the front lawn every afternoon to have tea while her granny plaited her hair. When I was young, I thought my grandmother was so different to Kathy’s granny, and to all grannies in books and TV shows, that she almost didn’t count. It was my mother who first let me see my grandmother as a real person – not a figure of authority – on a fruit-picking trip.

  My mother used to make all our jams and marmalades herself. She said her own mother had started doing it during the war years when there was rationing, and then she’d taught her daughter. Now she was going to continue the tradition by teaching me. I had a special stool to stand on, so I could reach the counter where all the fruits and glass jars were lined up neatly, freshly washed. I wasn’t allowed to use the knife, so I stirred the pulpy messes in their pans. Every so often I would lick my finger then stick it in the bag of sugar.

  In 1990 – the year I turned nine – we had an unusually late autumn that was still sunny in October, so my mother and I went blackberry picking. “They’ll be extra big and juicy,” she told me. “It’ll be nice to choose the best ones for ourselves, won’t it?”

  I waited impatiently in the hallway while my mother searched for the pails.

  “You have to wrap up nice and warm for me,” she said, when she finally appeared. “I don’t want you to catch a cold.”

  “I don’t want to wear my scarf,” I grumbled. “It’s scratchy.”

  “Hmmm,” my mother considered me for a moment, turned around and walked towards her bedroom. She came back holding her pink cashmere jumper, my favourite of hers. “What if you put this on underneath the scarf and coat?” she asked. “Then if the scarf feels scratchy you can just concentrate on how the jumper feels instead.”

  I stroked the cashmere. It was unbearably soft and feminine. “Okay,” I said. She slipped it on over my outstretched arms and pulled it down; it felt like cream being poured over me. I rubbed my face with the sleeve. My mother handed me my coat and scarf and watched as I buttoned up. I was still wearing my red duffel coat with the hood from when I was seven. Back then I used to like to think I was Little Red Riding Hood. My mother would pretend to be the wolf and jump out of bed at me. Now that I was upstairs at school with the oldest kids, we didn’t play that game anymore.

  “Where are we going?” I wanted to know.

  “Richmond Park woods.”

  We walked hand in hand. The air was cold enough to turn my nose and feet numb.

  “How come I can see differently out of each eye?” I asked. We were swinging our linked arms for warmth. My mother carried the pails in her other hand.

  “What’s the difference?” she asked.

  “Things look more colourful out of my right eye than my left.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. And when I look at something then shut my left eye and look at it out of my right, then it looks the same, but when I shut my right eye and look at it out of my left then it moves a little bit, like I’ve moved my head, but I haven’t.”

  “Well,” my mother said. “That means your right eye is stronger than your left.”

  I thought about that for a while. “Does everyone have a stronger eye?”

  “No,” my mother said. “Not everyone.”

  “Is it good to have a stronger eye?”

  My mother squeezed my hand. “There’s nothing wrong with it,” she said. “Your aunt Vivienne is short-sighted in one eye, even though she won’t wear glasses. And your grandmother is blind in one eye.”

  “How come?”

  “Something happened to her.”

  “What?”

  My mother paused. “Someone hit her,” she said eventually. “On the left side of her face. Her cornea was damaged and she never saw out of that eye again.”

  “What’s a cornea?”

  “It’s the part of your eye that you can see.”

  “Who hit her?”

  My mother stopped walking and put our pails down. She took her hand back from mine and rubbed it against her cheek, not looking at me. I waited for a minute, then asked her again.

  “Your grandfather,” she said, still not looking at me.

  I tried to grasp this idea. “Why did he hit her?”

  “They fought a lot. And your grandfather grew up in a time when it was accepted that a man might hit his wife. He could be very respectable on the street, but what happened behind closed doors was his business.”

  “Oh.”

  She picked up the pails and we tramped on. The woods smelt like earth and cold air. The leaves underfoot weren’t crunchy anymore, but stuck to the ground.

  “Why did Grandma stay with him?”

  My mother smiled at me. We stopped by a blackberry shrub and she picked some blackberries. She put one in her mouth. “Open up.”

  I opened my mouth obediently. She gently placed a berry on my tongue. I brought my teeth down and the juice was sweet, just right. Not like some blackberries, where it was so sharp it made my mouth sting.

  My mother was picking more blackberries and tossing them into her pail. “I don’t know,” she said. “I imagine it’s because there was nowhere for her to go. Things were harder for women back in the 1950s. And she loved him.” She turned away then.

  “How can you love someone who hits you?”

  “Sometimes people are drawn
to each other because they’re both damaged by something that has happened to them,” she said. “And sometimes, if you’re damaged, then you can’t see past it, and then you hurt the other person, or you expect the other person to hurt you.”

  “I don’t understand what you just said,” I said.

  She sighed. “Sweetheart. It’s absolutely wrong to hit someone, and most people know that. But sometimes you can love someone so much that even when you know they’re wrong, even when they hurt you, you still go on loving them.” She placed a pail in front of me.

  “That’s stupid,” I said. “If someone hit me, I would stop loving them.” I kicked my pail. It tipped over and rolled away.

  My mother cupped my face in her hands. “It’s not always simple,” she said. “But you’re clever and brave, and I’m so thankful for that. Every day.” She kissed me on the forehead. “Now go pick up your pail.”

  I buy a coffee from the café by the entrance and find a place to sit in one of the chairs that line the hallway.

  Maybe I took in what she was saying more than I realised. Maybe I’ve even used it as an excuse.

  If I had to describe myself, ‘damaged’ would probably make top of the list, and look at me now – best friend gone, a family of strangers and a dead-end job.

  I rip off the top of the sugar packet with my teeth; my mother used to make a tear in the middle, my father opened them like a bag of crisps, but I use my teeth.

  I tip the sugar into the liquid. I’ve forgotten to pick up a wooden stirrer, so I wait for it to cool then use my finger. No one gives me a second glance here – hospitals are like train stations, or hotels without the complimentary toiletries, an endless round of people turning up, staying, moving on. Everyone blends into the background unless they do something drastic. Or maybe I’m particularly good at being inconspicuous.

  Maybe I never really tried to make my life any better because I assumed this was my lot. I wouldn’t be the first Park to do that.

  I didn’t see my grandmother until the following Easter. It was 1991 and I’d just had my tenth birthday. My parents decided to celebrate with the whole family in Shropshire; it was dark by the time we set out and I had a blanket to cover my legs. Mr Tickles was purring in his cage next to me. I watched the houses become fewer and farther between, until the only light came from lampposts along the central reservation, and occasional cars overtaking us. My mother peeled an orange and handed back the segments for me to eat. I fell asleep in the backseat, a Roald Dahl tape playing on the car stereo.

  The next morning I woke up in my bed at my grandmother’s. I didn’t remember arriving the previous night. I shuffled along the corridor and down the stairs. My cousins were all in the kitchen, eating cereal.

  “Tallie,” Georgia said, when she saw me standing in the doorway. “We’re having an Easter egg hunt.” She patted the chair next to her. “Can we be on a team together?”

  My mother and the gardener were responsible for the hunt, with paper clues scattered around the house and garden and a prize at the end of the trail. The prize was a pillowcase full of miniature chocolate eggs that we were supposed to divide equally between us, but later that afternoon James was sick, which made me think he’d managed to sneak more than everyone else.

  I hadn’t run into my grandmother much by that point, but on Easter Sunday I was made to take her a plate of hot cross buns that the cook had baked. She was asleep in the living-room, or at least I thought she was. It was a warm day so she’d rolled up the sleeves of her jumper, and her hands were clasped across her stomach; I noticed how the skin on her arms was still smooth like a younger woman’s, and see-through, but her face was wrinkled like an old apple, especially around the mouth. She had a mole on her cheek, and I strained to see if there were hairs growing out of it, but I couldn’t find any.

  I lingered for a moment after balancing the plate on her knee, watching her breathing in and out. Her teeth made a sucking sound. I wondered if they were false, although my mother hadn’t mentioned that on our fruit-picking trip. I tried to remember what her eye looked like, but I’d never been brave enough to look her directly in the face.

  At the door to the living-room I turned around and caught her sitting bolt upright, her eyes wide open and looking at me. I fled.

  The grown-ups were arguing less than usual that weekend and, apart from my grandmother, we all ate together in the garden every night. Uncle George and my father carried the kitchen table outside and my mother strung lanterns up on the roof of the porch. The cook made potato salads, meat pies, and meringues, and put dishes of butter out with ice cubes nestled among the yellow pats to stop them from melting. A cake with candles was brought out for me and everyone sang happy birthday. Afterwards, Aunt Vivienne said how Aunt Gillian had always been the loudest singer, even if she was the most tone-deaf. Uncle George bellowed with laughter. Aunt Gillian’s face flushed, but she just said, “I suppose you’re right, Viv.”

  My mother put us to bed that night. Georgia and Starr brought their mattresses into my room and she read us a bedtime story. After she’d gone, Starr and I talked while Georgia snored gently in between us.

  “You know I’m going to a new school soon, right?” she said.

  “Yeah – I heard your mum say.”

  “She’s enrolled me in a boarding school – all the Parks went to it, she says.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Not that far from here.”

  “Are you going to come and see Grandma by yourself?”

  Starr shuddered. “No way. She probably eats children when no one’s watching.”

  I giggled.

  “Where are you going to secondary?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t even finished Year Five. But I just want to go wherever my friends go.”

  “Oh,” Starr said. “Well, you should think about boarding school. You get to be away from your parents – it’s really grown up.”

  “I don’t want to be away from my parents,” I said.

  Starr rolled over. “Yeah, I guess not,” she said. “Anyway, I’m tired. Night night, Tallie.”

  “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

  Starr snorted softly. “You can’t say that when you go to secondary,” she said.

  The next day after breakfast my grandmother suggested we go for a picnic. None of us grandchildren said anything.

  “That’ll be nice, won’t it?” my mother said, smiling at me over the rim of her mug.

  “We’ll go to the field at the back of the garden,” my grandmother said. “They’ve got horses – we can take them apples.”

  I looked at Michael, who raised and dropped his shoulders slightly.

  “If we can pat the horses,” I said.

  Starr came and stood in front of me when I was putting my wellies on.

  “I’m not coming,” she said; she looked fed up. “Picnics are boring anyway.”

  “They’re not,” I said. I knew Starr didn’t think they were either, and I was going to ask if she was okay, but then my mother called for me to help her pack the picnic basket.

  Outside, my grandmother led the way and carried the blanket. She wore old people’s clothes – a long tweed skirt and an old, cream woollen jumper whose arms she kept rolling up – but she walked very quickly and upright. Michael tramped behind her, a cricket bat under one arm. After him was Georgia, limping because of blue jelly shoes that were too small for her. She was wearing split-coloured cycling shorts – one leg lime green, the other hot pink – that I’d seen once in C&A. My father had refused to buy them; he said I’d thank him when I was older.

  Behind Georgia and Michael, James carried the apples and sugar for the horses. My mother and I were at the back, holding the basket between us. I let it bang against my legs, not caring if it hurt because my mother seemed so happy. She had her hair up in a ponytail and it rose from side to side like a swing-boat when she turned her face to smile at me. She looked young and beautiful, I thought, and was I
proud of her.

  “What a lovely day,” she said.

  “What’s Starr doing?”

  “I think your aunt wanted some alone time with her,” my mother said.

  “Why?”

  “Well… ”

  “Dad said she just didn’t want Starr spending time with Grandma,” James said, keeping his voice low so our grandmother couldn’t hear.

  “I’m sure that’s not true, James,” my mother murmured, but she didn’t finish answering me.

  We reached the wooden fence at the bottom of the garden. My grandmother swung her legs over the top and landed on the grass on the other side, then took the cricket things Michael was handing over. He jumped up to sit on the fence and held his arms out to Georgia, who let herself be picked up and dropped lightly into the field. Michael stood up, balancing on the top rung.

  “Michael,” my mother said. “Are you sure it’s safe to do that?”

  “I’m on the gymnastics team,” he said, and walked to the nearest post and back without wobbling. He looked so confident and grown up that I stared at him; he was actually quite handsome, I thought, and then I was embarrassed to be noticing my cousin that way.

  James looked annoyed. “I can do that too,” he said. “You don’t have to be on the gymnastics team to be able to walk.”

  “Bet you can’t do this,” Michael said, and somersaulted backwards off the fence. He landed off balance and had to take a step forward to stop himself from falling. “I learnt that last week.”

  “I’m sure it comes in handy,” my grandmother said, raising an eyebrow.

  “You’re so clever, Mike,” Georgia said, and Michael grinned. For a moment, I was jealous of how close she was to him, then James started climbing onto the top of the fence and my mother dropped the picnic basket and put her hand out to stop him.

  “James, please,” she said. “I wouldn’t be able to face your mum if you got hurt.”