The Year of the Rat Read online

  ‘It’s my funeral, Pearl. Of course I’m here.’

  My head is spinning. I put my hand on the pew to steady myself. Mum’s here. I can see her.

  ‘But you’re . . .’

  I can’t say it.

  ‘Dead?’ She grimaces comically. ‘Well, yes. That is the downside of attending one’s own funeral.’

  I stare at her, outraged.

  ‘Don’t you joke about it,’ I shout. ‘Don’t you dare.’

  My anger echoes round the dark hollows above us.

  She doesn’t say anything, just reaches out and cups my face in her hands and watches me silently till her fingers are wet with my tears. Then she pulls me to her and hugs me tight, kisses my hair.

  I can’t speak. Great sobs rise from deep inside me, shaking my whole body. Even when the tears stop, I keep my face pressed into her. I know it can’t be real, but I don’t care. Somehow she’s here. I breathe her in, the warm, familiar smell of her.

  ‘How?’ I try to say, but she doesn’t answer. I don’t ask again. Asking might break the spell. And anyway perhaps I don’t want to know. I must be mad. Or perhaps I’m dreaming and if I think about it too hard I’ll wake up.

  I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. She’s here.

  Then I push her away.

  ‘Why did you miss that midwife appointment? They said if you’d gone they’d have known something was wrong. They’d have done tests. Why didn’t you tell someone you were feeling ill?’

  She shrugs impatiently. ‘It was just a headache for God’s sake. I didn’t know it was serious.’

  I look at her and more tears slide down my cheeks. ‘You didn’t even say goodbye.’

  ‘I know.’

  She says it quietly and I’m suddenly scared.

  ‘Is that why you’re here? To say goodbye?’

  She doesn’t say anything, just smiles a little. But the smile makes her look sad. Then she sits down, deflated.

  ‘Oh, Pearl, I’m sorry. What a fucking mess.’

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We’re in church.’

  ‘Yes, about that,’ says Mum, ‘whose idea was it to give me a full bloody requiem mass? It went on for hours. By the end of it, I bet everyone was wishing it was them in the coffin.’

  ‘Well, Granny suggested it actually—’

  Mum rolls her eyes. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Oh well. Yes. I might have known. Interfering as usual. You know what she’s like.’

  I shrug. I haven’t seen Granny since I was a little kid. I can’t even really remember her. Mum and her didn’t exactly Get Along. Dad would phone her every now and then when Mum was out. She’d pretend not to know he kept in touch. ‘Dad says she’s really upset—’

  ‘Oh, she is, is she? I notice she couldn’t actually be bothered to turn up. I suppose she had something more important to do. One of her Pilates classes, was it? Her weekly manicure? Or was my funeral not worth forking out the train fare down from Scotland for?’

  I stare at her in wonder. She’s dead. She’s here. And she’s still having a go at Granny.

  ‘Mum—’ I’ve heard the rant she’s about to launch into a million times before, but there’s no stopping her.

  ‘She never liked me, Pearl. Never thought I was good enough for her precious son. Horrible single mother turning up with a mewling, snotty baby—’

  ‘Excuse me, that’s me you’re talking about.’

  ‘Stealing her darling boy away. She’s probably breaking open the champagne as we speak.’

  ‘Actually, Dad told her he thought it would be best if she didn’t come, what with everything that’s gone on. He said he wasn’t sure you’d want her there. She did send some flowers.’

  ‘Oh. Well.’ Mum looks taken aback and sits down again, unsure what to say for once.

  ‘Anyway, you can’t just blame Granny. Dad agreed it was for the best. Having it in church I mean. I told him you wouldn’t like it, but he said just in case. You know. Doesn’t do any harm, does it?’ I looked at her, wondering suddenly. ‘Or does it?’

  Mum sighs. ‘It’s always so bloody cold in church.’ She shivers and reaches absently into a pocket, bringing out a packet of cigarettes.

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘What? Oh right. Yes. Church.’ She shrugs. ‘It’s my funeral.’

  She smirks at her joke and looks hopefully at me to see if I’m laughing too.

  I’m not.

  ‘You’ve given up, remember?’

  She gives me a look.

  ‘Pearl, give me a break. One of the few advantages of being dead is that you can finally stop giving things up.’

  And of course she’s not pregnant any more. I push the thought away. I don’t want to think about The Rat. I certainly don’t want to talk about her. I want Mum to myself.

  She takes a long drag and blows a smoke ring. We watch it together as it floats upwards, expanding, growing fainter and fainter until it’s gone.

  How can she be here? The question still echoes round my head; but there’s something more important that I need to know.

  ‘How long can you stay?’ I whisper it, hardly daring to say the words out loud.

  She’s about to speak when the church door slams, echoing loudly. The sound makes me jump and I spin round to see Dad.

  ‘Come on, we’ve got to go,’ he says impatiently. ‘We can’t keep everyone waiting.’

  I whirl back to where Mum was standing, but I know already that she’s gone.

  ‘What are you doing in here anyway?’ Dad asks.

  ‘What?’ I stare at him blankly, hardly hearing him. She’s gone. It’s all I can think of. There were so many things I needed to ask her. And now I might never see her again. ‘Why did you come back?’ he says, his voice gentler.

  ‘I left something behind,’ I say, fighting back tears.

  ‘Did you find it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, following him out of the church. ‘I found it.’

  As I step through the door, I look back to the space where Mum had been.

  A shaft of light streams suddenly through a stained-glass window above me, making a pool of rainbow colour on the stone floor.

  The sun has come out.

  ‘Right. I’m off to the hospital.’ Dad has a last swig of coffee and takes his toast with him in his hurry to leave. ‘And I’ll be going there straight after work too, so I won’t be back till late. Rose had a good night last night apparently.’

  He’s trying to make his voice all bright and breezy, like he can fool us both that everything’s OK. But his face is lined and pale. Sometimes I wake up in the night and I hear him crying quietly. I lie in the dark, feeling like I’m eavesdropping, wishing I knew what to do about it. Once I’ve heard it, I can’t get back to sleep. Those nights stretch on and on until I’m not properly awake or properly asleep. Sometimes I think it will never get light, and I’ll be stuck on my own in those in-between, shadowy hours forever.

  ‘Are you sure you won’t come with me?’ He asks the same thing every day, just as he gets to the door, like he’s trying not to, but at the last minute he just can’t help himself. He wants it to sound like he doesn’t mind one way or the other. I can’t look at his face because I know it won’t match his voice, and seeing how much he wants me to care about The Rat makes my insides squirm. Instead, I poke at the soggy cornflakes in my bowl with my spoon.

  ‘Are you going to eat those?’ he asks. But he already knows the answer.

  ‘You have to eat, Pearl.’ He can’t keep the frustration out of his voice. ‘I’ve got enough to worry about without you—’ He stops himself, but his words hang between us in the chilly air.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry, love. I just meant . . .’

  He searches for a way to finish the sentence, but he needn’t bother. I know what he meant.

  ‘Pearl,’ he pleads. ‘Look at me.’

  But instead I look at four small rainbow squares painted on the flaking grey kitchen wall behind
him. Mum painted them months ago when we first moved in, trying out different colours from tiny sample paint pots. She’d had great plans for redecorating when we first looked round the house. She was always coming back from the shops with curtain swatches and wallpaper. But like always with her projects she lost interest after a while. The move dragged on for so long, with things going wrong down the chain and Mum shouting at solicitors and mortgage people on the phone, that by the time we moved in her energy and enthusiasm quickly vanished. As she grew more pregnant, she just got tetchy and tearful about the state of the house: the grubby old wallpaper, the draughty, rattling windows, the leaking roof.

  I wrap my dressing gown a bit tighter round me.

  ‘I thought you were going,’ I say.

  ‘OK,’ Dad sighs, too tired to push it. ‘Try and get some revision done then. I know it’s hard, Pearl, but you’ll be back at school next week. Your exams will be here before you know it.’

  I don’t reply. It’s almost a month since I was at school. With the Easter holidays coming straight after Mum’s funeral I haven’t been back since she died. While I’ve been here, hidden away on my own, everything has stopped. I hate the thought of being out in the real world again, of life carrying on without Mum. And I know exactly how it will be at school: everyone knowing, watching but pretending not to, whispering when they think I’m out of earshot, like when Katie Hammond’s dad went to prison or when we first found out Zoe Greenwood was pregnant. The thought of going back makes me feel sick.

  ‘Don’t look like that,’ he says. ‘Molly’ll look after you, won’t she?’

  Molly always has. Before this.

  ‘I’ll stop at the supermarket on the way home tonight,’ Dad says. ‘Get us something nice for tea if you don’t mind eating late. Or I could get us a takeaway?’

  I get up and scrape the cornflake mush into the bin. ‘Don’t bother,’ I say.

  ‘I’m trying to help,’ he says wearily, and for a second I’m so breathless with anger that I have to turn my back on him. I grip the side of the sink and look out of the window at the grey-green wilderness of the back garden.

  ‘How can you possibly help? How can anyone?’ The words stick painfully in my throat. Of all people he should know, he must know what an empty, pointless thing that is to say.

  But when I turn round he’s already gone.

  I try to feel pleased that I’m on my own, but instead I just feel small. The silence and emptiness of the house weigh down on me, room after dingy room of it. And now I’m alone I can’t ignore the tense, sick feeling in my stomach. I switch on the radio. I boil the kettle and make a cup of tea that I don’t drink. I force myself to take a shower, turning my face against the hot spikes of water. I pull on yesterday’s clothes. But none of it works: I try not to, but all the time I’m waiting for her.

  Almost three weeks have passed since the funeral and there’s no trace of her: not a glimpse or a whisper or a sign that she might have been there while I wasn’t looking. I leave the patio doors open sometimes, half hoping she’ll close them. She always had a thing about draughts. But Dad just gets annoyed. For heaven’s sake, Pearl, what are you playing at? This house is cold enough without any help from you.

  One night, when Dad had to stay over in the hospital, I found her perfume in the cupboard under the sink and I sat on my bed and sprayed it into the air in the hope of conjuring her up. I closed my eyes. And for a moment, breathing in the scent of her, I thought she was really there. I thought that when I opened my eyes she’d be standing there watching me, saying, Don’t waste that, it was bloody expensive I’ll have you know. But she wasn’t, and the smell of the perfume made me ache inside so that I could hardly breathe and I had to close my eyes again to stop the tears escaping. So I’ve put it away now, back in the cupboard under the sink.

  I even went back to the church. I thought that if I knelt in the same place and bowed my head and closed my eyes she’d have to come back. But the church was all locked up. A woman in a headscarf turned up with the key saying she was there to do the flowers for a wedding tomorrow. Did I want to come in? I just shook my head. Why had I come here? It was stupid. Of course she wasn’t here. What was I thinking of? But still, as the woman pushed the door open with a woolly-gloved hand, I peered in, half expecting to see a movement in the shadows, or a telltale trace of cigarette smoke. I can’t help it. It doesn’t matter how many times I tell myself she won’t come back or I imagined it or I’m mad. All the time, I’m waiting for her.

  As I walk down the stairs, taking care not to catch my feet on the bare carpet tacks, I hear a rustling sound from the small room next to my bedroom. I stop dead. It’s the room that Mum had planned to turn into her study. For a moment I stand completely still, palms prickling, listening to the silence. There it is again! I run back up the stairs, my heart thudding.

  ‘Mum?’

  I reach out, my hand shaking. But when I push the door open the room is empty apart from Mum’s desk and chair and several removal company boxes, still unopened, marked STELLA’S STUDY in Mum’s brash handwriting.

  Soot appears from behind one of them, purring loudly.

  ‘You,’ I say. She saunters over and winds herself round my legs and, despite my disappointment, I sit down on the chair and settle her on my lap.

  We’ve been here more than four months now, but it still feels like someone else’s house. There are packing boxes everywhere, left where the impatient removal men dumped them on the icy day we moved in, a couple of weeks before Christmas. We’ve taken out the essentials: pots and pans, duvets, alarm clocks. But Mum said it wasn’t worth unpacking everything until we’d sorted the house out a bit, redecorated. So the rest of our old life is still in the boxes, safely packed away out of sight. The bareness of the rooms just emphasizes how shabby and depressing they are. The whole house looks like it was last redecorated when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

  ‘You don’t half exaggerate,’ Mum had said when I voiced this opinion the first time we looked round the house, late last summer. ‘It just needs a bit of TLC.’

  ‘And about twenty grand thrown at it,’ Dad had muttered. ‘There’s no way . . .’

  But Mum just laughed and kissed him on the cheek and said, ‘You’ll see.’ And as we traipsed from room to gloomy room she transformed them, imagining jewel-coloured walls and velvet cushions, polished floorboards and oriental rugs and roaring log fires with Soot stretched warm in front of them, dreaming of mice.

  ‘Dreaming of them?’ Dad said. ‘I bet this place is infested with them.’

  But the estate agent stared at Mum, impressed. ‘Blimey,’ he said. ‘You should do my job. Don’t fancy coming to my next viewing with me, do you?’

  In the end the only room she got round to redecorating was the baby’s. She was determined it would be perfect. She sanded and varnished the floorboards. She cleaned the dusty paintwork and painted it glossy white. She stripped the mildewed wallpaper, Dad lurking anxiously by the door as she teetered on top of the step-ladder. ‘Let me do that,’ he pleaded, but she wouldn’t. There was a lot of crashing about and swearing, but she got it all done. Then she pasted up smooth, pale lining paper and painted it the colour of bluebells. She hung mobiles and fairy lights and even made curtains on Nanna Pam’s old sewing machine.

  ‘I didn’t know you could sew!’ I said.

  ‘Course I can sew,’ she replied. ‘I used to make all my own clothes when I was at art school.’ I stared at her, as amazed as if it had suddenly turned out she could levitate. She just smiled and said, ‘There’s more to me than meets the eye, Pearl.’

  It’s like it belongs in a different house, that room, or perhaps this house in a parallel universe where everything turned out different. Going in there feels like that bit in The Wizard of Oz when everything changes from black and white to colour.

  Not that we ever do go in now. The door – painted shiny white – stays shut.

  My phone buzzes. I know before I look at it that it’s
Molly. She phones and texts every day to see how I am, desperate to meet up. But every time she phones I just let it ring. I don’t know why. I thought I’d want to see her. She’s always been there for me, ever since we were little kids first starting school together.

  I look at her text: Can u meet tomorrow? Hope u r OK xxx

  She’ll want to talk, about Mum and the baby. I can’t tell her about Mum. She’ll think I’m mad. And I know she won’t understand about The Rat. Molly loves babies. All that time we spent looking at baby clothes and thinking up names . . .

  I don’t want to talk. Not to Molly. Not to anyone. Except Mum. But I know she’ll be hurt if I don’t get back to her, and school starts next week. I can’t hide away in here forever. OK, I type, but then my thumb hovers over the send key. Perhaps later. I put the phone back in my pocket.

  Soot jumps off my lap, giving me a reproachful look, then leaps up on to a box marked STELLA’S STUDY (PERSONAL) and settles down into a cat-shaped hollow she’s made there. PERSONAL. What’s in there? I wonder. But I think of the perfume and how it made me feel and I know I can’t open it.

  I walk over to the window. The greyish net curtains left by the old couple who used to live here are still hanging there. Mum hated them, but I like the way everything looks soft and blurred through them, no sharp edges. I pull them back for a moment and everything comes glaringly into focus: the pale pink blossom unfurling on the cherry trees that line our road, the buses thundering past, graffiti etched on their windows. The old dear next door is out in her front garden, tending to the flower beds. As I watch, she stands up, grimacing with pain as she straightens her back, and catches sight of me at the window. She smiles and cheerfully waves a pair of secateurs at me. I let the net curtain drop down again.

  Dad will be at the hospital by now. I imagine him, rushing through those awful green corridors that I remember so well, eager to get to her. What does he do there, all day every day? Just sit staring at The Rat? Does he talk to her, tell her things?

  ‘Mum?’ I say one last time. ‘Are you there?’ But all I hear is the cat purring and a car alarm going off down the road.