As I turn around, Susie stands so abruptly that it is as if a line has been cut and she has bobbed to the surface. Her walk, though, is purposeful. I am not sure that I have ever seen her like this, and certainly not this week, when her only freely-chosen movement has been her stumble down the corridor to the phone. Now she selects a big book, the weight of which seems to surprise her, but to which she rises. She carries this book in a firm fold of arms which is further clamped by a frown of concentration. On the other side of the room, she swaps the book for another, which she swaps for yet another to cover her tracks.
With Trina, it is different. She stands with a slap of the table, skips to the wall to snatch a slimmer book which she moves to the shelf below, and runs with the newly-displaced volume to other shelves where she shuffles books. Whenever she pushes a book into place, she delivers an extra slap to the spine. Rachel has been watching us, levered high on her arms: her gaze scans us and in a few seconds she has seen the implications. Suddenly she is up, and busy with books. She zigzags the room more than we do, seems to cut deeper into the order of the shelves. Avril moves one pamphlet, but when she returns to her chair, her face is transformed, full and vivid with a smile. Lawrence pauses to decide where to put his book but in the end fails to manage anything worse than a clean swap, which is better than nothing.
After a minute or two, we clunk back into our chairs, on to our table. The library is no longer fully functional, but looks no different from before, remains beautiful. The damage is invisible, and beyond repair. There are too few misplaced books to raise suspicion: if a book is missing from its place on the shelf, then it is on loan, or it is a unique loss; if a book is found in an inappropriate place, then this is a simple mistake, a small carelessness. No one will ever know what we have done. The return of books to their proper places will be haphazard and piecemeal. Eventually some books will wash up, but never all of them; some will stay sunk on these shelves forever.
I kick open the kitchen door, my hands full of my colouring book and pens.
Inside, Mum is telling Dad, ‘She should have a proper meal.’
I slide onto a chair, sit up at the table.
Mum says to me, ‘Can’t you go in there?’ and her head jerks towards the door, the living-room.
‘I need a surface.’
Noisily clearing too much space for my book and pens, she continues, ‘I don’t want her to go back again without having had some proper food.’
She means Alison.
‘Well,’ Dad says cheerily to his newspaper, ‘she said she’d have salad.’
‘But when she says salad, she means salad cream. She pushes the salad around her plate then mops up the salad cream with bread; haven’t you seen her do that?’
‘Her grandmother is a greengrocer, remember; I’m sure that she has plenty of greens.’
‘Her grandmother works too hard, her grandmother is too old and tired to play mum. I wouldn’t be surprised if the last thing that she wants to see at the end of the day is a green; I wouldn’t blame her if she nips two doors down to Giuseppe for chips.’
Whenever Mum takes us into the shop, Alison’s grandma gives each of us an apple: this means three apples now that Michaela has teeth. Eliza and I say Thanks-Mrs-Mortimer, Michaela’s version is Ta-Mi-Moma. None of us are keen on apples, but we pretend. Mum tells Dad that the apples are embarrassing, that they make us look like scroungers; but when he says that she can always go somewhere else, her answer is I’ve shopped there since the day I was married and I suppose I’ll shop there until the day I drop.
Dad says, ‘I think that Mrs Mortimer and Tim are coping very well.’
Mum’s hands are propped on her hips, they look like claws. ‘Coping. They’ll need to do more than cope. You think she’s coming back, don’t you. You’re a fool, like Tim.’
Uncle Tim, Alison’s dad, has a gold tooth in the corner of his smile. I love that tooth, it must have a story to it, like a locket or a scar. Mum says, That tooth always surprises me, you’d never think that he was the type. I could try a gold tooth for the face I am drawing in my book; but of the pens that I have, the closest to gold is yellow. And yellow is not quite the same. A yellow tooth would be quite different.
Across the table from me, Dad warns, ‘Shhh,’ and cocks his head towards the door.
‘Oh, she knows,’ Mum says. ‘It’s you men who won’t believe that her mother has abandoned you.’
Another, ‘Shhh,’ but this nod is for me.
‘Oh, Madam’s oblivious when she’s drawing.’
I hardly even remember what Alison’s mum looked like; she went away so long ago. She was not around for Christmas last year, or even the summer holidays. Of course I remember her hair, the colour of her hair: close to the colour of Uncle Tim’s tooth. One of the tricks of the trade, was Mum’s joke, because Auntie Anne had been a hairdresser. Perhaps she is a hairdresser, in her new life – Mum told me that she has a new life. She was supposed to have given up when she married Uncle Tim but she never quite did, because sometimes we were put on a high stool in the middle of her kitchen so that she could trim our hair. When she was trimming my hair, I could smell her perfume, handcream, and washing powder, I would close my eyes and listen to her special scissors, her sleeve on her arm, her high heels whenever she took one of her definite steps to one side or the other. Sometimes a cold blade would brush my forehead, the tip of my ear. Feathers of hair would fall and settle on my shoulders, then eventually topple and fall onto the tiles in a circle around me. My fallen hair was darker than Eliza’s: we dropped trails of hair that did not mix. And then, not wanting to leave her out, Auntie Anne would graze Michaela’s baby fluff with her blades.
Dad leans harder over his newspaper but says sideways to Mum, ‘You worry too much, Alison’s hardly tubby.’
‘Oh, I know that; that’s my point: she’s a scrap, she’s looking poorly.’ Mum has come to the table and picked up my black pen, she is tapping the tabletop with the white lidded tip.
Dad says, ‘She’s missing her mum.’
‘Aren’t we all, but we have to keep going.’ The pen returns to the others, is slotted into line.
‘Her brother seems better.’
‘Oh, that bruiser. I’m glad we never had a boy.’
‘But, he’s older, he has friends.’
And today he is with those friends, playing football somewhere, leaving us in peace. The boy in my picture is wearing shorts which are too long to be football shorts. His knees are chubby, like the girl’s cheeks; I am going to have to use a lot of pink.
When Mum went to have Michaela in hospital, Eliza and I had to stay with Auntie Anne whenever Dad was at work. Just like Alison and Jason, now, staying sometimes with Mrs Mortimer. Mum had problems with Michaela, she was in hospital for weeks before Michaela was born. So for weeks I stayed in Auntie Anne’s kitchen while she cooked, washed up, tidied, ironed. And this was what I wanted: I did not want her to worry over me, I wanted to colour in the pictures in my books while she hummed and turned between the sink, the cooker, the cupboards. I wondered about Mum: where she was, what she was doing, and what if she never came back. While I was colouring, I liked to listen to Eliza playing with Jason and Alison in the garden, their laughs sliding into the kitchen on the sunshine, over the blue and white tiles. I liked to hear Auntie Anne’s laugh, too, when she was on the phone in the hallway: there was something in this laugh