The Cornflake House Read online

  Bring me an object, Matthew, a token of friendship. I’m a companionable soul, I wasn’t designed to be this empty and alone.

  Four

  Too late, Matthew. Even if you are walking my way as you read this, it is too late. I have had my visitor. Need I say how my heart lifted when I was told that somebody wanted to see me? I assumed it would be you, preened myself in readiness, swallowed the lump in my throat so that this time I might be able to speak to you. I was so intent on looking for your compact, delightful form, that at first I didn’t notice my own son waiting for me. Mind you, my son was the last person I expected to see – and besides, he had changed beyond all recognition. His hair, which should be as golden as mine, now looks like the aftermath of a failed chemistry experiment.

  Did I already mention my great big, baby boy? If not let me say now that I’m blessed with one son, aged eighteen, who likes to be known as Bing. Maybe I should add that I’ve been a rather average mother and consequently my son has managed, in his comparatively short life, to get himself into a great deal of trouble. Whatever; he’s a sweet boy. Not about to win any prizes for conversation or deportment, but basically sound.

  We were shy as strangers with each other. Then he said what I was thinking:

  ‘This is weird, Mum. Wrong way round, you inside, me visiting.’

  It was a long speech for him.

  I was suddenly overjoyed to see him and deeply moved by the effort he’d made to get all this way from wherever he’d been hiding. I muttered words to this effect and he mumbled that, as luck would have it, he hadn’t been that far from his dear old mum. He was living about twenty miles away, down a hole, under a stretch of land that will inevitably become part of a bypass. So that was why he smelt, amongst other things, of damp clay. His fingernails, when I focused on them, were the colour of weather-beaten flower pots. I wondered how deep his hole might be and does he feel safe there, being separated from the world? Safe as I felt when I first came here? Or does he expect the world to fall on his head any minute? Then I thought this; the point of protest by burrowing was surely to stay underground until the last minute, so as to make headlines, drawing attention to your cause by being dragged out triumphantly in front of flashlights and reporters. By surfacing prematurely, he had made a heart-rending sacrifice on my behalf.

  ‘You came up … just for me,’ I said, almost overwhelmed by motherly love. ‘Oh, Ble…’ but he stopped me there. And we were back at loggerheads, where we are actually more comfortable with each other than on the cosy but foreign ground of caring and showing it. I’d been about to call him by his full, his proper name. He hates that.

  ‘It seems I’m in deep shit,’ I smiled at myself for using his vocabulary.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Have you seen any of them?’ Meaning his aunts, uncles and cousins.

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘No, well, I guess not, living in a hole.’

  My son grinned and I noticed that he has chipped yet another of his teeth.

  ‘Do you eat enough?’

  He laid his hands on his stomach, resting his case: not a strong argument since his figure resembles an army-booted bean-pole. I didn’t need to ask if he was able to wash himself underground. The answer had been wafting my way each time I inhaled. Still, he looked great to me, blinded as I was by emotion, and I could have held my breath and hugged him, had we been on hugging terms. It occurred to me that I looked like the ‘before’ in one of those magazine articles anyway; we deserved each other. I still couldn’t get over the fact that he’d come, clay, hair, smells and all, to visit me. Appreciation and wonder made me dumb. He played the edge of the table that divided us, fingers hitting an imaginary keyboard as our eyes tried to avoid the sting of meeting. In that silence I felt as if every emotion had chosen my heart in which to settle. And amongst this rabble of emotions, was a newcomer; pride. I was proud of him, of his protest and his essential goodness, even of the way he looked. He hides a well-shaped face behind the stubble, fine bones and a neat nose. His eyes are dark green and, in spite of all his efforts to be laid back, full of intensity. Of course I’ve always loved him, it’s just that I wasn’t always there for him, to borrow a phrase from the Yanks. Yet he was being there for me; and his physical presence meant more than any letter, Matthew, no matter how pretty or expensive the paper.

  As I looked at Bing, I remembered how I used to fret over him when he was a child. I always knew when he was in trouble or in danger but I wasn’t always able to do anything about it. And I thought of other mothers, because I’d heard, in schools and playgroups, mention of premonitions concerning children. It seems women often know when their offspring are threatened. They know, without the phone call or the knock on the door, that something is wrong. I’ve heard of many cases personally. Women who stayed home, putting off the weekly shop because they’d be needed sooner rather than later. Mothers who took themselves to Casualty without being told, knowing their child was also on the way, in the back of an ambulance. I saw a woman double up with pain one morning and discovered next day that her daughter had developed appendicitis. We accept warnings like these, we may mull over them, perhaps even marvel at them, but we don’t raise our arms in disbelief or horror. Now can you see why I found it easy to accept my magic? If you believe in one drop of water, and if you have no problem coming to terms with streams and brooks, then rivers shouldn’t give you that much trouble.

  ‘I can’t believe you came…’ I said to Bing because it was true and I could think of nothing else to say. I remembered having used the same phrase to Oliver, my son’s father, nearly nineteen years ago. Oliver had appeared on the doorstep of The Cornflake House on the very day I was preparing to go to a clinic and have an abortion. My son was literally saved by the bell, the ghastly ‘Avon calling’ chimes which heralded the arrival of the man responsible for my pregnant state. Oliver had a hare-lip, or he had been born with one. An operation to free the lip had left him with a twist to his mouth and a lisp to his speech which I found impossibly arousing. I was so in love, I remember confusion and sickness, the joy of touching, the pain of parting. We did more parting than touching, a sure sign that our love affair was doomed. But on that day Oliver came to see me.

  ‘I can’t believe you came…’ I gasped. Then we talked; and he convinced me to keep the baby by promising that I would have his manly support – not only throughout my pregnancy but for ever and always.

  To be fair to the man, he did reappear occasionally to pat my pod of a stomach and offer words of encouragement. I knew he was dating a thinner, less encumbered blonde by the time I gave birth, but he made an effort and turned up to see me while I was in the maternity ward.

  ‘Well done, Sweetie,’ he lisped, as if I’d won a horse race. I grinned. I’ve always had a thing about men’s voices; some, like yours Matthew, are smooth plain chocolate to the hungry senses. Oliver could have talked me into anything – well, I suppose that was how I came to be there, between maternity ward sheets, in the first place. He told me he thought I should call the tiny new being Trevor, an idea that made me laugh out loud until I realized he’d said, ‘I think you should call him Trevor,’ rather than ‘I think we should.’ He clearly had no intention of being part of any decision making team. I said I’d already decided on a name and when I told him my choice, it was Oliver’s turn to laugh loudly. A reaction that’s been echoed by many equally small-minded people since.

  ‘It’s quite common in Africa,’ I sulked, but this only made Oliver scoff some more.

  The last time I saw Oliver was by accident. In fact it almost caused an accident. I was being given a lift by a friend and when we stopped at a junction, I looked to my side and there he was, in a parallel car, tanned, handsome, carefree as ever. I gasped and my companion’s foot slipped off the clutch, making us shoot forward until we almost hit a lorry. Oliver didn’t see me, he was busy talking into a mobile phone.

  I’ve often wondered why Oliver bothered to stop me from having an abort
ion. Did he want a child simply so that he could boast of having fathered ‘some kid somewhere’? Or was he spurred by the basic instinct to procreate the species? Maybe he was just proud of being fertile. Or possibly, and this only occurred to me recently, my mother took control of his shoes too, so that, like Ben Davidson, he was forced to confront me.

  I was still gazing fondly at the silent piano player’s fingernails.

  ‘You were a love child,’ I said softly, ‘did I ever tell you that before?’

  ‘Yeah,’ but he looked glad to hear it again.

  A fresh thought occurred to me, ‘How did you hear about me? About all of it?’

  He hadn’t seen any of his relations and he could hardly have been watching television in his cave.

  ‘Papers,’ he explained, ‘big spread and a picture in the locals, little para in a national.’ Yes, of course he’d be getting the newspapers, or having them delivered. I found myself whimsically wondering if his hole had an address. It must have been a shock, searching for articles about himself and his fellow protesters but finding a ‘big spread’ about his errant mother. As if he’d read my thoughts, he said, ‘We were in together, one day, you and me.’

  ‘Ah,’ I thought this was rather touching, two lawbreakers united by the snipe and snap of the press.

  The look on my face must have prompted him, in this strange about-turn situation, to ask what any responsible prison visitor should.

  ‘Why? Why did you do it?’

  I was tempted to answer, flippantly, that it had seemed a good idea at the time, because this had been his response when I’d once asked him the same question. He’s always been anti motor cars and when he was asked ‘Why did you do it?’, he’d just punctured every tyre in our neighbourhood. Not only that, but he’d been caught doing so. Still, this was a whole lot more serious and he deserved a decent answer, ‘I did it for her, for your Grandma Victory.’ I found it impossible to say more, my throat itched, my eyes prickled and I so badly wanted to avoid tears.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he said. I loved him the most then, more than I knew I could.

  Our time was up. We were standing, smiling gently at each other.

  ‘Do you hug?’ I asked.

  He responded as if I’d invited him to dance.

  ‘You asking?’

  ‘I’m asking.’

  ‘Well, I’m hugging.’

  I expect, I hope, that I still smell of him, of his earthy hideout and his unwashed hair, of his roll-ups and his age-old combat trousers. No perfume could have been sweeter to me. Back in my cell, holding him again and again in my memory, I find it impossible to think of him as Bing. It just doesn’t suit him. He chose it because it consists of four of the letters of his whole name. Other possibilities were Les, Sin or Sing and, one which had us rolling with mirth, Bess. I can’t say I blame him for discarding the name I chose for him. I suppose I was hoping to follow in my mother’s footsteps, give my child a head start in being extraordinary, but now I can see that I went too far. Mind you, my boy didn’t shrink from me as I whispered his name in his ear while enjoying that long, lovely hug:

  ‘Thank you, Blessing,’ I dared to offer. ‘Thank you for this show of strength.’

  Eighteen years ago, when Oliver had disappeared through the swing doors of the maternity ward and the echo of his scorn had died away, I lay with Blessing in my arms and wept. Of course I felt abandoned, heavy with the tragedy of unrequited love; but now I understand that those were probably just the usual post-natal tears, brought about by dancing hormones. I don’t cry easily or frequently. Only birth and death seem to affect my tear ducts. And before long I felt a gratifying grain of grit mixed with the salt on my cheeks. I knew I’d get by without a man – but I was no fool, I understood that it wouldn’t be easy. I’d watched my mother struggle the same way. I looked down at baby Blessing’s fuzzy head. ‘Son,’ I told him, ‘you’d better live up to that name of yours.’

  Today, at last, my Blessing has proved that he was listening to me all that time ago.

  Five

  Thank you, Matthew, for your visit and for my frog. I can honestly say I like nothing better than this tiny creature. I love his polished colours, shades of damp forest floors, moss, ivy and periwinkle. Being made of stone, being the colour of plants and shaped in the image of a living thing, he brings all aspects of the outside world into my cell. What a clever man you are. You knew, before I knew myself, that a smooth, stone frog was exactly what I most wanted. He sits in my palm, happy as any of his living brothers and sisters on their lily pads.

  See, I was right about you all along. You’ve proved that you have a heart. Please don’t panic when you read this. I understand that the frog is only a token of your sympathy. I heard what you said; it’s impossible for you to see me at any time other than on your official visits. And you must stick to only a professional relationship with an inmate. Understood. Honestly. You can relax in the certain knowledge that I’m not about to leap up and ravish you – much as the idea appeals. I’ll practise restraint. But things change; all things change all the time. I won’t always be here, on the wrong side of the law, gazing longingly at you, on the right side. When they hear my full story, they’ll throw my case out of court. If I hadn’t been incoherent with grief, I should have explained myself on the night of my arrest, and most likely I’d have been freed on the spot. You see, although my action was dramatic, in a place where drama is abhorred, I hardly think of it as a crime at all.

  I had a visit from my solicitor, my brief as they say. She’s not quite the forceful character a person in prison would chose. Dress wise, she reminded me of Perdita, my smart, businesslike younger sister, the same neat blouse and tight black skirt. My sister. Sometimes I think Perdita must have been a foundling, she’s so unlike the rest of us. Apart from the clothes, my solicitor is softer than my sister, I can’t imagine her standing up for me in court. Not that she doesn’t have my interest at heart, but she waffles. I did my best to reassure her, explaining that all I need is the chance to tell my tale but she gave me the impression she wasn’t quite listening. Her name is Valerie and she has dark, frizzy hair and very white skin which is flecked with moles. Because her voice is so monotonous, my mind kept wandering.

  I thought it was a shame Mum hadn’t met her. My mother had a way with moles. She had to find some excuse to touch them, which caused problems when they were in awkward places, but once she’d laid her hands on those brown growths, they faded away. Spots and warts also succumbed to her touch. We children had the clearest skins in the county.

  I once saw my mum grab a teenage boy in the street. A risky business because he was with a gang of his leather-clad mates at the time. She held his face in her hands. ‘Sorry,’ she told him, moving her fingers over to the screaming patch of acne near his nose, ‘I thought you were one of my brood,’ and she patted him as old people pat toddlers, ‘but I expect you’ve got a perfectly good mother of your own at home.’

  His companions hardly had time to be derisive as she walked away. Within seconds they were gawping at the magical vanishing of their friend’s pimples, craters and humps.

  Valerie droned on, being despondent, but I couldn’t concentrate. I gave her my most reassuring smile as I thought about moles and frogs. I’m so proud of myself because, in spite of everything, I saw, and fell for, the frog-giver in you.

  Scottie dogs and frogs. What else do you like, Matthew? Possibly, hopefully, snogs? Oh God, if I could only sit by you in a pub, drinking beer, giggling, teasing, watching you as you got to know me. I’d be so damn proud to be out with you. I should glow like a lump of plutonium. Still, we did it, eh? We met. We talked; and I didn’t die of embarrassment. Not quite. You can have no idea how tantalizing it was, seeing you again, or how nerve-racking. It was almost impossible to make the journey from cell to Visitors’ Room, my legs became rubber tubes, my heart a dinner gong. Didn’t you hear its reverberations? How polite and wonderfully understated you are. That’s a large part of y
our appeal for me.

  How to explain this attraction? It’s you, Matthew, the whole you, I’ve fallen for. That cleanliness, that care, attention to detail, I find it simply melts me. Maybe you’ll never fully understand, you’d need not only to stand back from your own self, to look with my eyes at the neat, appealing man opposite me, but also to go backwards, to step inside my old life in an impossible way. Imagine being one of seven children, one of whom was seriously deranged, for a start. Think of the noise, the constant cries, discordant music, slamming doors, calls for help, barking dogs, telephone bells. I used to sing to myself as a child, any old song, the jollier the better, to drown the others out.

  ‘We’re off to see the wizard…’

  ‘Muuummm!’

  ‘Wahhhh!’

  ‘… the wonderful wizard of Oz…’

  ‘Brrring, brrring!’

  ‘Woof, woof, woof!’

  ‘… if ever a wiz of a wiz there was…’

  I was pink with indignation when it was me, tuneful, cheerful me, they told to shut up. Then along comes this quiet, gentle man with a name that sounds like pure relief; Maff-phew. So soft after the cacophony of such a childhood.

  Now try inhaling the smells. Tea-towels boiling, fish frying, nappies stinking. Bend close to the floor if you dare, get a whiff of that carpet, soaked in years of animal and human excrement. Sorry, but my brother Merry never did get the hang of toilets. Upstairs there’s a heady mixture of perfumes, teenage boys’ aftershaves, nail polish, cheap violet scent, talcum powder and that unmistakable smell you get from gerbils kept in small bedrooms. No wonder I’m thrilled by the fragrance of a manly bar of cream soap, which is all I detect about your person.