“It’s probably too late for that,” Betty said as she tugged a jar of pickled onions out of her bag. She found herself repeating the words that Thomas had drummed into her. “I’ve not worked before. I don’t have any experience.”
Her fingers slipped on the jar and she could only watch as it fell from her hand, crashing to the floor. Vinegar blasted out, splashing her legs and seeping across the linoleum. “Damn it,” she said under her breath. She picked up a cloth and saw that Martha had moved away, towards the front door.
“I’m going out,” she said.
“Where to? Will you give me a hand to clean up this mess?”
Martha shook her head. “I’m going to see Nana. She’s the only one who listens to me around here. Dad treats us like puppets and you can’t see it.”
“He’s a good man...”
Martha shook her head. She opened the door, stormed outside and slammed it behind her.
Betty stared at the onions on the floor. They seemed to look up at her like eyeballs, and she felt her own eyes prick with tears.
Martha was right with a lot of what she said. But it was all too late to turn the clock back.
She threw down a cloth and stamped on it. She mopped the floor, then marched into the front room. To the sound of the ticking cuckoo clock, she dropped to her knees. Pulling Martha’s books towards her, she tried to make a pile. After scooping them together, she hid them behind the sofa, ready to tidy them away properly later on. A pen lay across Martha’s notepad. Her latest story lay freshly written.
Betty put the pad on her knee. A tear plopped onto the page and she wiped it away with the side of her hand. Then she read on.
The Puppet Maker
A puppet maker and his wife had been married for many years but couldn’t have the children they longed for. This made them very sad and each night, the wife cried and pulled at her own hair. “I love you but I want us to have a family,” she said. “I want to give you two daughters.”
One night, as the puppet maker’s wife slept, a bolt of lightning struck down a tree in the garden. The puppet maker decided he would carve the wood.
He shut himself away in his workshop and created the two largest puppets he’d ever made, in the shape of two girls. He attached strings to them and made crisscrosses of wood so he could manipulate their limbs. He added wool for their hair and painted their faces so they looked almost real. When he had finished, they were perfect.
When his wife saw the puppets, she cried tears of joy. “These are the daughters I’ve always longed for,” she said.
The puppets joined them at the dining table for each meal, and each night the puppet maker and his wife put them to bed. They talked to them and cared for them, and the puppet maker’s wife almost forgot they weren’t real.
One night another storm came. This time, the lightning struck the house and the puppet maker screwed his eyes shut. “I wish the puppets could be proper girls,” he said.
In the morning, when he and his wife went to the bedroom, two real girls lay in the beds. They peeped at them from over the covers.
“My daughters,” the puppet maker’s wife cried out and scooped them into her arms. “I shall call you Mary and Lola.”
At breakfast, Mary didn’t like the breakfast cereal and asked for fruit instead. Lola asked to wear a different color of skirt. The puppet maker’s wife was so happy that she didn’t care. However, the puppet maker wasn’t happy. He thought the girls were rude to question what he gave them.
The four of them shared some lovely times as a family, going for picnics and paddling in the sea. However, the girls didn’t need the puppet maker to operate them any longer. They acted how they wanted to.
One night, Mary and Lola didn’t go to bed when the puppet maker told them to. Their disobedience was increasing and it made him feel angry. So, when they had fallen asleep, he fastened strings around their wrists.
“Let them go,” his wife pleaded. “They are real children, not puppets.”
“They must learn to do things my way.”
“I don’t agree.”
The next night, while his wife slept, the puppet maker fastened strings to her wrists, too.
When she woke in the morning, she shook her wrists with dismay. “Fetch me some scissors,” she whispered to her daughters. “I will set you both free.”
“And you must join us,” Mary and Lola said.
But their mother shook her head. “I love your father, so I must stay here. It would break his heart if I freed myself, too.”
Mary and Lola pleaded with their father to let the three of them go, but he wouldn’t listen. So that night, whilst he slept, they asked their mother to cut their strings.
Lola left and never returned, but Mary stayed behind with her mother. “If you won’t leave then I must stay, too,” she said.
“No. You must go,” her mother begged.
But Mary refused.
And the puppet maker’s wife knew that even though Mary was free from her strings, staying at home was like being tied to her crisscross of wood, forever.
18
Boxes
Martha tried to keep busy, to keep her mind off Zelda until she next got in touch, but her nana had a way of invading her thoughts. She pictured the scar on her head and her gap-toothed smile as she laughed on the ghost train. She saw the two of them standing behind the café, as Zelda revealed her time was ticking away.
When she went into the library, she found herself almost blubbing during the children’s storytelling hour. She took out a couple of Nicholas Sparks tearjerkers on loan.
With each conversation Martha had, and with each discovery she made, she felt like she was staring into a child’s kaleidoscope. With each tiny twist, the picture moved and formed a different one.
She should be happy, ecstatic even, that her nana was alive. However, the reality came with a black cloud above it that wouldn’t drift away.
I’ve found something so precious, but I might not have it for long.
She kept thinking about organizing her mum and dad’s funerals.
Thomas died first, on a cold wintery morning. Martha made his breakfast and shouted him to come downstairs. When he didn’t arrive, she found her mum sitting on the edge of the bed. “I can’t wake him, Martha...”
Martha hoped that his passing might bring about a renaissance for her mother, a chance of freedom without the constraints Thomas set for their lives. However, Betty was lost. Her life and routine had been built around him. Everything she did catered for his likes and dislikes, his wants and needs.
Betty had fallen outside, just seven months later, and broken her hip. The doctor said her bones were brittle, from years of dieting. Martha visited her in the hospital twice a day, but her mother didn’t have the will to get better.
It was Martha who visited the undertakers and booked the cars and flowers. She sent out notes to neighbors and organized a buffet in a local pub after the service. Lilian contributed financial support rather than emotional. The two sisters’ worlds, so different, became even more so.
Martha wouldn’t say their parents’ lives were wasted, but they were severely restricted.
I want to support Zelda’s last months, to allow her to be free.
With these thoughts about her parents and Zelda ringing in her head, Martha decided it was time to finally tackle the Berlin Wall of boxes.
She counted them and reached fifty-three. There was an array of different sizes—cat food boxes, washing powder, plain ones from the post office, and she wondered how she had gathered so many together.
She remembered crying as she folded in her mum’s clothes and placed in perfume bottles and ornaments. There were things she should just throw in the bin but couldn’t bring herself to do so. Half-used jars of hand cream and her mother’s scent on handkerchiefs conjured up too many memories. So she had placed things in the boxes and closed up the flaps.
Out of sight, out of mind.