The Pre-War House and Other Stories

Sleeping Under the Stars

From the spare room window, I can see into the back gardens, as far as number twenty, where men are laying new turf.

We, at number two, sometimes used to get number twenty’s letters and it was my job to take them round. Mr Batten’s house was pretty much the same as ours. If you looked, you could see the differences, but when I stood on the doorstep and knocked, it felt like knocking at my own back door, and when Mr Batten answered, it was like there was a strange man standing in our kitchen while I stood outside looking in.

Mr Batten lived alone. He had rabbits, and a grown-up daughter who no longer visited.

At the far end of the street, there is a corner shop, to which my mother sends me for the ingredients she finds she is missing in the middle of baking. I started stopping off at Mr Batten’s to see his rabbits. He always had sweets — fat coils of black liquorice, and chocolate limes with hard, sour shells and softly oozing insides.

He was always there. And then, one day, he wasn’t.

It was the kind of autumn day when the day before had seemed like summer but suddenly you could feel winter coming — there was condensation on the windows — and I, still in a T-shirt, was unprepared.

In the shop, two women stood near the fridge, talking in low voices while I browsed the dairy products. Seeing me, they went quiet, and they looked like the words trapped behind their sealed lips were something horrid and squirmy, like worms wriggling on their tongues. The fridge hummed and my bare arms goosepimpled.

I walked home past number twenty but on the other side of the road. I gave my mother the shopping and she made pastry. I watched her rolling it flat and laying it smoothly over the top of her pie dish and removing the untidy edges with a knife.

I never saw Mr Batten again.

I once took my best friend Donna into the spare room to watch television, forgetting about the unmade sofa bed and the pyjamas on the floor.

‘Who’s sleeping in here?’ she asked.

‘My dad,’ I said.

The spare room is where visitors sleep, but sometimes my dad does too. His pillows and a blanket appear on the sofa bed and stay there for a few days, and then they disappear, and sometimes my dad does too.

‘Why is he sleeping in here?’ asked Donna.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, switching on the television, a portable on top of a desk.

‘Have you got any DVDs?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t think so.’

‘What’s in here?’ She was trying to open the desk drawer. ‘Why’s it locked?’

‘I don’t know.’

Taking a kirby grip out of her hair, she said, ‘I can pick a lock.’

‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘That’s my dad’s stuff.’

But she already had the grip in the drawer’s tiny keyhole. She was poking it around, saying, ‘Let’s see what he’s got,’ and then the drawer opened. She rifled through the contents, clearly disappointed. ‘It’s just birthday cards,’ she said, ‘and Father’s Day cards. There’s a photo of you.’ She held it out, a picture of a little girl wearing a paper hat on her head and sitting on her dad’s lap.

‘Put it back,’ I said.

Donna put the photo away again and closed the drawer. She fixed the kirby grip into her hair and we watched something on the television, I forget what.

My mother kept our photos in albums. I liked to sit and look at them, especially the ones of me when I was small — me and my dad at Christmas, me and my dad on my birthday. I looked at the photos so often it was as if I could remember these things happening, as if I knew how it felt to sit on his lap that Christmas when I was just a baby — my fingers exploring his watch and his wrist, his ring and his knuckles, his valuables and his bones — even though I couldn’t possibly have done.

My mother is downstairs making Stargazy pie, and I have a bag of liquorice laces from the shop. I have one in my mouth; it curls wetly on my tongue while I watch the men at work at number twenty. I wish I had bought sherbet flying saucers instead.

That autumn, soon after the day when I heard the women talking by the fridge, I was sent to Grandma’s even though it was term time. Before I left, a tent the colour of uncooked pastry appeared behind Mr Batten’s house. People went into the tent, and things came out.

I once slept in a tent in our back garden. The tent was a present for my birthday which is in September, and even though it wasn’t summer any more I was allowed to spend the night camping on the lawn with Donna. The air was fresh, as if we were lying out in the open, except that we couldn’t see the stars. ‘Sleeping under the stars,’ my dad called it, but all we could see was the roof of the tent.

We lay on our backs, looking up, and Donna said, ‘Did you know there are thousands of worms in your garden? They surface at night.’ And she said, ‘Did you know there are a million bits of man-made junk orbiting the Earth?’ It was zooming around, she said, at twenty-five thousand miles per hour, disintegrating silently in space or dropping into Earth’s atmosphere and bulleting towards the ground.

Donna wanted to be able to see the night sky, to see the abandoned satellites and bits of jettisoned spacecraft hurtling towards us, but I preferred to sleep beneath the polyester roof of my little tent, where I couldn’t see the sky falling. I pulled my sleeping bag up to my neck and closed my eyes. I lay in the dark with autumn’s musty smells — damp leaves rotting and cold earth — in my nostrils, and the chill of the ground against my body, trying not to think about all the worms squirming up beneath me, trying not to think about the space graveyard.

It was the same cold — autumn cold, outdoor cold, damp cold — at Grandma’s. She did not believe in central heating, she believed in jumpers and hot drinks. Sleeping in my mother’s old bedroom, I imagined her, in childhood, lying between these same cold sheets, in this same darkness and silence, and it felt almost as if we were one and the same child who had been lying there since the 1970s.

We had bran for breakfast. It sat brown and heavy in my stomach while Grandma and I finished her crossword and played Scrabble and did wordsearches, and she said, ‘I’m a bit of a word worm, my dear.’

We looked at her photo albums. She had a copy of a picture we had at home, of that Christmas when I was a baby, sitting on my dad’s knee.

‘That’s not your dad,’ said Grandma. ‘That’s your Uncle John.’

They were twins, my dad and Uncle John. They were so alike — you had to look closely to spot the difference. I stared at the picture of the man who held me on his lap, looking at the style of his hair and the easiness of his smile, seeing the silver signet ring on his right hand and the bare ring finger on his left.

Grandma made Stargazy pie. But where my mother’s had a smooth lid of pastry, Grandma’s had a dozen fish heads poking out, their bodies buried beneath the crust — pilchards with gaping mouths and glazed eyes staring up at the ceiling.

‘What your mother makes,’ she said, ‘is not Stargazy pie. This is Stargazy pie. What your mother makes is just fish pie.’

I sat down, trying not to look at it.

‘I made this for you when you were little,’ she said, ‘when I came to stay.’ She cut into the crust and shovelled a piece of this alarming meal onto my plate, fish heads and all. ‘You can’t eat the heads,’ she said. ‘Leave them on the side.’ She put some pie in her mouth and when she had chewed and swallowed it she added, ‘When your father left.’

I removed my fish heads and pushed them to the side of my plate, trying to see only the fish pie remaining, like my mother made.

‘Your mother never liked looking at the heads,’ she said. ‘Or didn’t like them looking at her.’ She filled her mouth again and when she was ready she said, ‘There was another woman, you see. Your first Christmas, he was with her.’ She glared at the fish heads sitting in her pie, as if she too, after all, found them distasteful. The mouths of the disembodied fish heads on my plate hung silently open. ‘They weren’t married, your father and this woman, but they had a child; he had another family. He came back, and then left again when you were two or three. That’s when I came to stay with you. I made you my Stargazy pie and you liked it.’ In the dimming kitchen, Grandma’s voice bored softly through me. ‘You have a half-sister,’ she said. ‘Your mother won’t tell you that, and nor will your father, but I think you should know.’

When I looked at the fish heads I could almost feel their slithery skin on my tongue. Grandma watched me until I took a forkful of pie and put it in my mouth.

‘Of course you don’t remember,’ she said. ‘You were too little. And of course she took him back again.’

She carved out her fish heads and put them aside and ate what was left.

Chewing, I felt a milk tooth shift, and the sickening looseness in my jaw was like subsidence in my mouth.

My liquorice laces taste nasty, but even so I can’t stop eating them. There is a slimy mass of them in my mouth, waiting to slide down into my queasy stomach.

When I went to stay with Grandma, my summer clothes were still to hand. When I returned, it was the middle of winter. The leaves had fallen from the trees, exposing the bare, bony branches. The houses looked dingy in the winter light, like greyed teeth.

Mr Batten’s house was pulled down. They used a digger which made the whole street shudder. Strangers came wanting bits of the rubble, bits of that broken house to keep as souvenirs, trophy hunting. When I asked my mother why, she said, ‘People do strange things.’

There are pillows and a blanket on the sofa bed. I know the desk drawer will be locked, although I haven’t tried it. I know how to pick the lock now, but I don’t do it. There is a photograph in there which I don’t want to see — the picture Donna found of a little girl sitting on my dad’s lap, a paper hat on her head; a little girl who could have been me, but wasn’t.

At number twenty, in the space where Mr Batten used to live, the turf is being unrolled like a new carpet over the dirt. It will be a garden and people will be quiet there.

I go down to the kitchen and watch my mother draping pastry over her pie, trimming the surplus, her knife scraping around the rim of the dish, and my tongue keeps straying to the strange gaps where my milk teeth used to be.