“Yes.” Nan didn’t look up as she spoke. “That kind of thing. He was very lucky.” She blew across her tea, rippling the brown surface, pushing back the tide. “Goodness, I’m so tired.”
Sometimes Nan surprised Flora: when she moved her head a certain way, or if soft lamplight caught her, she could be beautiful for a moment, like sunlight on the peak of a wave, there and gone. But more often, Nan was out of proportion with her surroundings—broad shoulders, with hands large and muscular enough to catch a slippery newborn. She was wearing her uniform, dark-blue patches showing under her armpits, the fabric tight across her large chest.
Nan started to say something but changed it to “Aren’t you going to put some pyjamas on?”
“Probably not.”
“You must be cold.”
“Not really.” Flora sniffed the bottle of milk, put it down, and stirred her tea with the end of the pen that had been lying on the table.
“Please use a teaspoon. For my sake,” Nan said wearily.
Flora stood and the towel, which had come loose from under her arms, remained on the chair. She strode naked to the cutlery drawer and yanked it open, Nan huffing behind her.
“What?” Flora said. “I got the spoon, didn’t I?”
“Flora,” Nan said, and put her head in her hands in exaggerated distress. Flora opened the cupboard under the sink to hunt for her father’s whiskey. She opened several more cupboards. The fourth, in the corner above the toaster, was packed with tins of dog food, all of them lined up with their labels facing outwards. Flora stared for a moment, then closed the door and sat at the table. She wrapped the towel around herself again as a concession to modesty. She tried to think of a way to shift the subject around to who their father had seen in Hadleigh but couldn’t work out how to do it without Nan dismissing it as nonsense.
Her sister yawned. “I’ve got to go to bed. It’s been a long day. The ferry had stopped running when I got there because of the weather. I had to drive all the way round.”
“Oh my God!” Flora interrupted, rapping her forehead with the bowl of the teaspoon. “I forgot to tell you. It rained fish when I was driving along Ferry Road.”
“Driving?” Nan put her tea on the table.
“They fell out of the sky. Dead fish all over the tarmac.”
“Flora, you haven’t bought a car, have you? You’re an art student. You can’t afford a car.”
“I would have taken a picture if I’d had a camera, or drawn them if it hadn’t been raining.”
“The insurance must be astronomical.”
“It’s not my car,” Flora said. “It’s Richard’s.”
“Who’s Richard?”
“Shit! Richard’s car.” Flora jumped up. “It broke down and I just left it there.” She rushed from the kitchen into their bedroom and pulled on her knickers and a sock.
“Where?” Nan said, following. She sat on her bed.
“I told you, Ferry Road. Can we get someone to tow it?”
“Now? It’s nearly one. We’ll sort it out tomorrow.” Nan was speaking in that voice, not the sister or the mother one, but the calm sensible one, which Flora sometimes found herself listening to.
She pulled her sock off by the end of its toe. “OK,” she said, and saw that she had forgotten to wash her feet and ingrained dirt still crusted her toes.
“What do you think Gabriel’s doing right now?” Flora said into the dark of the bedroom. “What do you think he looks like? Maybe he has a moustache.”
“Not now,” Nan said, rolling over in her bed.
They were silent until Flora said, “Do you remember when I found a life-size plastic whale’s head washed up on the beach?”
Nan gave a small laugh. “You insisted we drag it home.”
“You would only help me some of the way and then you dropped your end.”
“There was a bad smell about it. It was slimy and full of water. It must have been in the sea for ages. It was disgusting.”
“I carried on pulling it, though.”
“You could have only been about six. You got it all the way around the point to our beach. I think it was the rocks at the bottom of the chine that defeated you.”
“I remember asking Daddy to hang it on the wall of the sitting room like a big game trophy. He said we could borrow Martin’s wheelbarrow and go back the next day.”
“That was Mum,” Nan said.
“No, it was Daddy. I remember.”
“Dad wasn’t even there.”
“Yes, he was.”
Nan sighed. “He wasn’t, Flora.”
“Where was he, then?”
A few seconds passed before Nan said, “He was just away.”
“Well, whoever it was, the next day the whale’s head had gone,” Flora said bitterly. She still wanted it, still wanted someone to blame for its loss.
They were both silent, and when Nan’s breathing slowed and deepened, Flora whispered, “Do you ever think you see Mum walking along the street?”
Nan didn’t reply.
Chapter 12
THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 8TH JUNE 1992, 7:05 AM
Dear Gil,