‘Tell me about Mrs Cranbourne,’ Mira said, adjusting the folded towel behind her head.
She liked his stories about his clients. It was vicarious curtain-twitching. Not that he was a natural raconteur. He would drone on and on sometimes, adding too much detail. She would dip in and out, piqued by certain facts: like Mr Ingham’s habit of clipping his toenails into his wife’s flowerpots when the sun was shining, and young Danny Clark’s progress on the motorbike dirt-track that he was building for his five-year-old in his back garden, or Mrs Bloom’s naked swimming.
A high-pitched, sustained wail rang out from the Bradleys’ bathroom next door. ‘You’ve hurt me, Mummy!’
On and on she screamed.
Barry, usually impervious to the noises of next door, stopped speaking for a second and glanced at Mira nervously.
To Mira, the screaming sounded like fingernails down a blackboard. She put her hands over her ears. She could still hear her, as though it were her own scream. Her own scream. And then a splash and a race through the waves at Climping beach. Ten years old again. Exhilarated, terrified, chasing through the seaweed, squishy and slimy under her feet. A flash of sunlight bleached her memory.
Or was it the streetlight. Barry had flicked open the blind to peer out.
The split screen of Barry, here and now, and the other half, her past.
Mira spoke over her past, as it romped through one half of her mind.
‘Should we be worried?’ Mira said, releasing her hands.
The screaming continued, even louder now, as though the window had been opened. Mira’s head throbbed. A pebble hard into her back. Her knees buckling into the brown stinking mush. Another pebble into her head. Her mother’s laughter. Or was it her sister’s?
‘We’ve been through this, Mira love. It’s just family life, that’s all.’ Barry let go of the blind.
‘The poor little pet, she’s in real distress. Do you think I should go round there?’
‘Barbara’s kids used to scream like that when they had their hair brushed. Don’t you remember on that holiday in Cornwall?’
‘But they were only little ’uns and Rosie next door must be at least eleven now, no?’
‘Maybe so, but when Barbara...’
There was another rattling cry. And then a string of unintelligible admonishments from, she could only assume, Gemma Bradley. It was certainly a female adult shouting back. The tone of her voice was certainly nasty.
‘Maybe we should sell up and move,’ Mira said, meaning it this time.
‘You can’t escape families. They’re everywhere.’ He pushed his glasses up and rubbed his face under them. It made him look like he had no eyes.
‘I’m sure some are quieter.’
Mum would turn in her grave if we sold this house, Mira thought, pre-empting Barry.
‘Mum would turn in her grave if we sold this house,’ Barry said.
‘If we downsized, we’d have a few spare pennies. We could do that cruise around the fjords,’ she said, believing she could really do it. Downsizing and holidays abroad had, in the past, seemed like an exhausting prospect, but maybe she could do it if she changed gear a little.
‘Maybe when I retire,’ Barry said.
‘Yes,’ she sighed, knowing they would never sell up and cruise in Norway. Barry’s mother didn’t haunt the house, but she certainly haunted Barry. The meddling old bag, Mira thought. However hard Mira had tried to live up to her expectations, Mrs Entwistle had never forgiven her for marrying her one and only son.
‘And as for Barbara. Gee whizz, she would have a...’ he began.
Mira wanted his talking to drown out Rosie’s screaming, but it didn’t. The noise entered Mira’s bones. She slipped down into the bath until her head was covered. The water pressing on her eardrums, deadening the sound of Barry’s monologue. She was surprised she could hear his words so clearly. Then she heard the bathroom door opening or shutting. She jumped, sitting up straight, feeling the cold air flare goose-bumps across her arms. Barry had left her. She patted her hair. It was bone dry, as was the skin on her cheeks. She could have sworn she had been under the water. The water was suddenly cold and she leapt out of the bath towards her warmed towel on the heated rail, knocking over the champagne glass.
Still dripping, unnerved, she padded downstairs, leaving wet footprints in the pink carpet.
She could hear Barry in the kitchen, clearing things away.
In Barry’s study, or ‘music room’ as he called it, she stepped over his dusty guitar and his exercise bike and knelt on the floor in front of the chest of drawers. Quietly, so as not to alert Barry, she pulled open the drawer to find the large photograph album. The pink material covering the bindings was watermarked like ribbon. It was smooth under her fingertips.
The tissue paper separating the stiff pages rustled as she turned them. A few of the tiny plastic stickers that her sister had painstakingly fixed to the corners of the square instant snaps had come away from the paper. The photos dangled limply like her memories. She flicked through them, knowing exactly which photograph she wanted to look at.
Climping Beach, 1976, Me, Mira and Mum was written underneath it in her sister’s spidery fountain pen writing. For some reason, when she looked at this faded photograph, her mouth felt dry and her heart beat faster.
It had been a happy day, hadn’t it? Their smiles were in their eyes. Their skin brushed by sunlight. She could almost see her chest heaving after a swim in the sparkling sea that lapped at their feet. A flawless summer’s day. The colour of her mother’s jumper looked yellow in the photograph, but it had been orange back then, back in 1976. Bright orange and scratchy on Mira’s face. The smell of the damp, hot wool on a summer’s day came rushing back to her. Her mother was always cold. And that dress. Mira’s only dress. She put her face closer to the photograph and squinted at the little dots over the white cotton, which she remembered as tiny, brown flowers. One of the thin straps would always fall off her shoulder, as it had in the photograph. She had forgotten about that dress.
The screaming was getting louder, like a siren in her ears, it never stopped. She ripped her towel from her body and buried her head in it.
Barry was behind her. She must have cried out.
‘No, no, shush-shush, not this again, Mira, shush-shush,’ Barry said, kneeling beside her.
Mira felt her nakedness keenly as though she was in front of a stranger. Perhaps she was the stranger. For twenty-five years, they had learned each other’s rhythms and habits and moods, intimately, but there were times when Mira felt like a fraud. He saw her one way; she knew different. He had pigeonholed her as a good person, someone worth loving; she knew different.
Barry untangled the towel from her head, wrapped it around her, and held her.
For a moment, she was comforted, slumped into him, allowing his gentle rocking to soothe her. But he continued talking. ‘Rosie’s not yours to worry about. She’s safe,’ he said. ‘You’re safe, with me, here.’
His words irritated her, made her itch under his touch. She wriggled free of him and wiped her wet cheeks with the towel.
‘This isn’t about me, Barry. I have to go over there to check she’s all right. Just to check.’
Barry scratched at the curly grey hairs sticking out of his shirt and sighed.
‘Okay, love, if it’ll make you feel any better,’ Barry said, letting her go.
Chapter Three