The Artificial Anatomy of Parks Read online

  Her voice made me feel hot and cold at the same time.

  “But you managed to make quite a comfortable little nest for yourself, didn’t you?” Uncle Jack said, louder now. “He probably couldn’t believe his luck when you went back to him. Edward’s not strong. He always did drool over you.” His voice dropped again. “You took advantage of my brother, Evie, of both of us. That’s not what nice girls do.”

  I was digging my fingers into the metal. There was a slap and an intake of breath then I heard the stones on the gravel walkway scattering and what sounded like two people struggling.

  “Viv was right to warn me about you, Evie.”

  “Get off.”

  More gravel scattered. I ducked instinctively.

  “Tea was served an hour ago, you two,” another voice said loudly. It was Aunt Vivienne. I could hear her now, walking down the path between the house and the garden walls. I imagined her entering the garden, looking at my mother and Uncle Jack, that half-smile on her face.

  “Tallulah’s been looking for you, Evelyn,” she said. “I told her you might be here, but it doesn’t look like she’s found you.”

  My mother said something I couldn’t catch. I heard quick steps leaving the garden.

  There was a silence from below. I pictured the other two facing each other, not blinking.

  “You should leave it alone, Jacky boy,” Aunt Vivienne said finally. “She’s not your type, good little soul that she is.”

  Uncle Jack laughed colourlessly and said: “Poor Evie.”

  “I sent the girl out here after you two – I thought it’d be a nice surprise for her.”

  “Catty, Viv. You always did try to make trouble where there wasn’t any.”

  “That wasn’t quite the impression I got, darling.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Well, I can’t help it. I can’t stand how faultless she thinks she is.”

  “I need someone with a bit more edge then?” Uncle Jack asked.

  “Exactly,” Aunt Vivienne said. I heard the scratch of a match being lit and a deep breath.

  “Someone dark and depraved like you?”

  “You’re perverted,” Aunt Vivienne said evenly. “Let go of my wrist, my darling.”

  Uncle Jack laughed again, but he must have let go of Aunt Vivienne. I heard him sigh. “How can you even bear to be here?”

  “It’s my house too.”

  “Doesn’t it give you nightmares?”

  “No.”

  “I can’t stand it,” Uncle Jack said. “All this tea and politeness. And the bloody people – even the kid.”

  There was a pause. My lungs and throat felt like they were filling up with stale air. I’d stopped breathing.

  “Don’t let it get to you, Jack.”

  “Don’t be stupid, Viv,” Uncle Jack said. “This is my life.”

  “Yes it is,” Aunt Vivienne said. “So fuck them. Now come inside and have tea. Gillian’s such a bitch these days, I need an ally.”

  Their voices passed beneath my window, then were gone.

  I climbed down from the chair as quietly as I could. I heard footsteps coming up the stairs; my mother was calling me. I opened the door and walked to the top of the staircase.

  “There you are,” she said, as if nothing had happened. “The boys said you’d hurt yourself. Do you want me to take a look?”

  I shook my head. My mother watched me for a moment, then stretched her hand out. “Tallie,” she started to say. “If anything’s wrong, you know we can talk… ”

  “I’m fine,” I mumbled.

  I slipped past her and took the stairs two at a time, passing Starr at the bottom, who screwed up her face in disgust as I went by. “You know, Tallulah, you’re going to have to start acting like a girl sometime,” she said.

  I made the V sign at her back and carried on running.

  I sat inside a bush at the back of the garden with my knees drawn up to my chest, wishing I had Mr Tickles with me. I closed my eyes and imagined I could feel his wet nose wiping itself on my skin, his small furry head butting into me and pushing at my arms, trying to get past them and into my lap. This had been the first time I wasn’t allowed to bring him to my grandmother’s – my mother said he was too old for long journeys.

  When I thought about my mother I got a knotted feeling in my stomach.

  It was Georgia who found me. I was lying on my side, my knees still hugged against my ribcage.

  “Tallie?” she said. I could see her anxious eyes peering in at me. “Tallie, are you alright? Everyone’s been calling you for hours.”

  I crawled out of the bush and wiped myself down. Above us, the sun was sliding down a pink, waxy sky. We walked back to the house. My father was standing in the doorway frowning at me. “Dinner’s cold,” he said.

  “Sorry.”

  “Go and wash,” he said. “We’re going to eat in five minutes, whether you’re down or not.”

  Georgia came upstairs with me and laid out some clothes while I was washing. She sat on my bed and watched me get dressed, playing with her plait; it was nice to have the company. I wanted to be nice to her back, but I was full of my mother and Uncle Jack, and I could only think of one thing to say. “Your hair is really pretty.”

  “Thank you,” Georgia said, going pink.

  Dinner was almost silent. Aunt Vivienne ate with an amused expression on her face. Uncle Jack drummed his fingers on the table. Starr asked me why I looked so pale and I said I had stomach ache.

  “We can go home tomorrow if you’re still not feeling well,” my mother said. I could feel her trying to catch my attention, but I wouldn’t look at her.

  “Maybe it’s the weather,” Aunt Gillian said brightly. “It’s still unbearably hot, isn’t it?”

  My father said nothing.

  The next day I have seventeen missed calls listed on my phone. I go to work like nothing’s happened. My boss still thinks the heart attack was an excuse – he narrows his eyes at me and asks if I’ve recovered, overly polite; I don’t bother to try to correct him.

  The café is small – there’s space for ten tables and, at the far end of the room, a formica counter, with a cheap, plastic register, a tips jar and a basket of paper napkins. Behind the counter is the serving hatch to the kitchen, and above that, our menu, with pictures of the meal options, in case someone hasn’t had a Full English Breakfast before, and wants to know what it is.

  The walls are dirty off-white, with a green tile frieze running around them. The floor is lino, made to look like parquet. I don’t know who thought that would be a good idea. As soon as I get in, my boss puts me on mopping duties with one of the other waitresses. It’s nine a.m, so I’ve got about fifteen minutes before the second shift of regulars start to traipse in. I grip the handle harder than usual as I’m mopping, trying to concentrate on what’s in front of me now, forget the last few days. I’m good at clearing my mind. I have these little tricks I developed after my mother died, trying to escape the strangeness that remained long after that day.

  “Stop dawdling,” my boss says.

  He’s leaning against the counter, inspecting me. He’s got a big mole on his chin that he sometimes covers with a plaster, and hair sprouting out of his ears. He wears the same colour scheme every day: off-white wife-beater, dark trousers, brown shoes. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were actually the same clothes; he’s the tightest person I know.

  I finish mopping and collect my notepad. The café gets busy soon, and I’m on my feet all day except for a half-hour break at two, where I drink a carton of orange juice in the alley running alongside the building and smoke a couple of cigarettes. I take the second one slower, gradually building a haze around my head. Through it I watch a teenage boy run for the bus; he drops his minidisc player and I’m about to go pick it up for him when Sean, one of the chefs, comes out and sneaks a few puffs of my cigarette while I’m distracted.

  “I’m giving up,” he says.

  “So
give up.”

  “Get out of bed the wrong side this morning?” He passes it back. “Not that there’s a right side in that dump you live in, Maggie.” He started calling me that after Princess Margaret died earlier this year and I cried at her obituary. I was mostly crying because I felt like her life had been wasted, but he said, “I didn’t know you were such a monarchist,” and brought me a packet of tissues when the Queen Mother died seven weeks later.

  He reaches over and wraps his hand around one of my shoulders now, digging his fingers in to massage me. I’ve slept with him a few times, nothing too emotional; he’s a fun person to have around, but he’s no Toby. I let him knead me for a moment or two then shrug him off. “My dump’s fine,” I say.

  “It’s uninhabitable.”

  “You’ve got health and safety on the brain.”

  He grins at me. “Good,” he says. He pulls me in towards him and kisses my neck. I stand there, enjoying being blank for a while, then I reach up and bite his earlobe, gently.

  “Crazy,” he says, laughing down at me.

  “Break’s over,” my boss calls to me. “Get your arse back in here now – they’re waiting for you on table four.”

  “See you around,” I say to Sean. I go back to waiting tables, wiping surfaces, yawning, blocking out my thoughts.

  I clock off at five p.m, and check the rota on the wall: in again tomorrow.

  “Shit,” one of the other waitresses grumbles, “always work.”

  I pull a sympathetic face. Right now, though, I’d rather be at work than back at the hospital.

  Another two waitresses arrive to take our place, and for a moment there’s a babble of other languages, gossip exchanged - tongues clicking and shocked exclamations as jackets are taken off or shrugged on. Five of the waitresses live together in a freezing cold flat by Old Street roundabout. I went back there once after a late-night shift; all I remember is a bottle of vodka and a lot of empty takeaway cartons. The next morning I woke up with a killer hangover and near frostbite.

  “Bye,” I say to the knot of voices and shiny, dark hair.

  “Tomorrow,” someone says back, and I leave through the kitchen.

  Back at home, I shower and take an aspirin. My fridge is cold and empty – like the flat – except for some coffee, milk, a few cans of beer, half a tin of baked beans, some squashed clementines and a Peperami stick. I pick at the cold beans and wash them down with milk.

  I turn on the TV and watch the news for a while. The average price for a property in England and Wales has topped a hundred grand, a blonde reporter is saying, although properties in London are expected to cost double the national figure soon.

  In the bedroom, my phone starts ringing; it’s shrill and impatient. I let it go to voicemail. The news moves on to a grim forecast about pensions. I switch off the TV and wash up, taking my time over it, until there’re no more distractions left. I might as well get this over with, I tell myself, and go to the bedroom to listen to the answer-machine message.

  It’s Aunt Gillian.

  “Tallulah,” she says. “I just wondered what happened to you yesterday. Vivienne said she came back from the bathroom and you’d disappeared. And I didn’t see you at the hospital today, so thought I should give you a call. Let me know, dear.”

  I delete the message.

  I turn the radio on for some background noise. Maybe the heart attack will change him, I think, reveal a softer side.

  I run my finger along an invisible line in the air in front of me and recite out loud, “The prognosis post myocardial infarction will be influenced by a number of factors. If a mechanical complication such as papillary muscle or myocardial free wall rupture occurs, prognosis is considerably worsened.”

  Maybe my father will die, after all.

  The phone rings again, shocking me into banging my elbow against the wall. I see Aunt Gillian’s number flickering on and off the screen in luminescent green. Seven-thirty. I try to work out what time of day it is in the hospital schedule – end of daytime visiting hours, probably.

  She doesn’t leave another message. Nothing’s happened, then. I rub my eyes, and my throbbing elbow. If only everything could stay exactly the same, in stasis. I know it can’t though. I pull on some clean socks and shoes; if my past is catching up with me, I might as well find the one person from it I really want to see.

  We left the next morning. Uncle Jack hadn’t been at breakfast, and I’d heard murmurs that his bed hadn’t been slept in. Aunt Vivienne said loudly that he’d earned the right to have a little fun and my mother went pale. I clattered my spoon against my cereal bowl, saying I wanted to leave right away, hoping home would feel safer.

  As we reached the gate at the end of the drive I saw a flash of dark. I turned around to look properly, straining against the seatbelt. Uncle Jack was standing just off the road, hands clasped behind his head, watching our car disappear.

  The weather was still hot when we returned home from my grandmother’s; tempers were even hotter. My parents barely spoke to each other, although my father must have said something to my mother about my appearance, because she started to sit me down after breakfast with a brush in her hand and a determined look on her face, but, however smooth and knot-free she got it, the next morning it would always be as matted as a bird’s nest. She was gentle with me, but the tangles pulled at my scalp like burning little needles. Most of the time I would give in to the ordeal, but once I jerked my head away and stamped my foot, yelling in pure frustration, until she smacked my thigh with the back of the brush, something she’d never done before.

  The smack stung for a few seconds; a red mark appeared then slowly faded. I stopped yelling and looked at the floor, playing with my sleeve. I could see my mother out of the corner of my eye, she looked exhausted. I went to her and laid my head on the cool of her shoulder; she wrapped her arms around me and kissed my face. I felt tears building behind my eyelids. “Do you have to brush it?” I asked. “It hurts.”

  “No, sweetheart,” my mother said into my hair. “We don’t have to brush it. We’ll braid it before bed, then it shouldn’t be so bad.”

  She gave me another kiss, then a pat on the bottom. “Go and play now, while I clear up the breakfast things.”

  “Can I go see Kathy?”

  “Kathy’s on holiday in France, remember?”

  “Do you want to play cards then?”

  “Not right now, Tallie.”

  I went outside. Mr Tickles wouldn’t join me so I tramped up and down the lawn for hours, trying not to think too much about what I’d heard at my grandmother’s and dragging a stick behind me to make little channels in the grass. When my father came home and caught me I thought he would tell me off, but he just asked where my mother was.

  “In bed.”

  “How long has she been in there?”

  “Since she cleared up the breakfast things.”

  “Is that true, Tallulah?”

  “Yes – I’ve been bored all day.”

  “Well, another few hours won’t kill you,” my father said, and went indoors.

  He came back downstairs before dinner and told me I had to be less of a nuisance for my mother from now until the end of the holidays.

  “I’m not a nuisance,” I said.

  I went to find my mother. She was making the beds – something she normally did in the morning.

  “Am I really a nuisance?”

  I had to repeat myself, louder, before she looked over at me.

  “Of course not,” she said. “But I’ve been having headaches for a few days now, Tallie. I might have to lie down from time to time and you’ll have to entertain yourself.”

  “Can I watch TV?”

  “Ask your father,” she said, not really looking at me. She still seemed tired, even after her lie-down.

  “Was that you bellowing upstairs?” my father asked when I went down.

  “I was trying to get Mummy’s attention.”

  My father opened his mout
h like he was going to say something, then closed it again. I played with my fingernails, trying to scrape out the dirt from the garden. “What’s wrong with Mummy?”

  “Nothing,” my father said, but he didn’t look at me either.

  “Where’s your bag?” I asked. “Maybe we could take her temperature.”

  “The bag isn’t a toy, Tallulah.”

  “But… ”

  “There’s nothing in the bag for your mother, and I don’t want you messing around with it.”

  He went into his study and banged the door shut. I wanted to shout after him that I wouldn’t mess around but he wouldn’t believe me. Recently my father seemed to have forgotten that I’d stopped being an annoying baby. He’d always been away lots with work, but now he didn’t want to spend time with me even when he was around.

  Georgia came over to play the next afternoon and we built a den at the back of the garden, in the pine tree. We draped blankets over branches until there was a small, enclosed section at the foot of the trunk, just high enough for us to sit upright, and long enough for us to lie down. I dragged up the stack of shelves that were in the cellar, waiting for my mother to make them into a bookcase, and we laid them down as a floor.

  “How shall we decorate it?” I asked Georgia, because she was the guest.

  “With flowers,” she said. “And ribbons.”

  We went around the garden pulling up daisies and buttercups and some of the more withered-looking roses and spent an hour or so winding them around the trunk and branches.

  “Shall I make us a fire?” I suggested.

  “How would you do that?”

  “I don’t really know,” I said. “But the Famous Five managed it, and they seem kind of stupid.”

  “I’m not cold anyway,” Georgia said. “Let’s play shopping – I’ll be the shopkeeper.”

  She got really into it and hunted out some tins from our cellar to stack in the corner of the den.

  “These peaches are really good, madam,” she said.

  “Can I have two?”

  “That’s twenty pence.”

  By the time she left I’d bought tins of kidney beans, tomato soup, alphabetti-spaghetti, macaroni cheese and pineapple chunks.