ever explained. What I knew, I overheard. One day, in the school holidays–I must have been eight or nine by then, but I still hid under the dining-table, playing house by myself–Mrs Owen was babysitting, while my dad was out at work. She had invited two of her friends round. They sat in the back room, with the french windows open to waft out the smell of their cigarettes. They didn’t know I was there.
Mrs Pegg must have spotted the photo of my mother on the mantelpiece. ‘Imagine that,’ she said, exhaling a whispery stream of smoke, ‘going off and leaving your kiddie.’
I sat Beau Bunny against the table leg, and lifted the edge of the cloth to hear better.
‘No grandparents?’ asked Mrs Joad.
‘All dead,’ confirmed Mrs Owen.
‘Poor lamb,’ said Mrs Joad.
‘Poor little petal,’ Mrs Owen agreed. That was what told me they were talking about me. She always called me her little petal.
‘Don’t she even write? Send birthday cards?’
‘She went off just like that. Wouldn’t think a mother could, would you? Cut off completely.’
‘Heartless.’
‘Cut his balls off, I’d say.’ Mrs Pegg sniggered. ‘You’d think a man’d go after her.’
I heard a rustle as Mrs Owen leaned forward on the settee. There was the smack of her lips on the cigarette. She lowered her voice. ‘She was in the family way when she went.’
‘Not his?’
‘Someone else’s, is my bet. She was seeing another man.’ She whispered something that sounded like ‘sojer’.
I wanted to hear more but must somehow have given myself away. The tablecloth whipped to one side. Three faces peered in at me, breathing tobacco breath, wondering how much I’d understood.
‘Poor man,’ I heard Mrs Joad say, as she pulled on her plastic mac on the doorstep. ‘Left to bring up a kiddie by hisself. Manages well, though, dunnee?’
Something inaudible from Mrs Owen–probably ‘Thanks to me.’ Her back was towards me so I sidled into the hallway.
‘Of course,’ Mrs Pegg said, bending her poisonous yellow curls towards Mrs Owen’s grey ones, ‘there’s always two sides, in’t there? Perhaps he druv her away.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Mrs Owen. ‘He’s a lovely man. Polite always. Ever so nice.’
Her loyalty was misplaced. Not long after that, my father decided he didn’t like Mrs Owen being in our house all the time. He told me she was nosy, and maybe he told her too, because she seemed rather pink about the eyes when she took me up the hill at the end of the holidays and said that this term I was big enough to walk by myself to and from school. A lesser woman would have taken umbrage, but it says a lot for her that she kept nipping up the road with casseroles.
‘I saw this recipe in my magazine,’ she’d say to my father, ‘and Keith won’t eat fancy food so I thought of you.’
The casseroles were delicious, but if my father came home from work angry, they went into the bin. Once, she gave me a Christmas present, a hairbrush set in blue marbled plastic that I thought was lovely, but my father marched down to her house on Christmas morning and made her take it back.
On my eleventh birthday, I was brave enough to raise the subject of my missing mother. ‘Do you think Mum’ll send a card, now I’m almost a teenager?’
‘No,’ my father said curtly, and I knew never to mention it again.
Suddenly he was there in the kitchen doorway, watching me. His short curly hair was dark and shiny with rain, and it made him look younger than he usually seemed, though his face was tired and there were lines beside his eyes. The shoulders of his jacket were covered with raindrops that sparkled under the kitchen light. He wore overalls to work but always put a sports jacket over the top to travel there and back.
I felt myself go red, and tensed, knowing I had been watched and not knowing for how long.
‘Sorry, Dad. I haven’t done anything about lunch.’
‘Don’t fuss.’ He waved me to sit down again. ‘I’ll make us a sandwich. There’ll be some of that ham.’
That was all right, then. It was a good day.
I sat back at the table as he opened the refrigerator door to get out the ham and tomatoes. There were silvery sprinkles in his black hair. It struck me that I didn’t even know what age my dad was. Maybe thirty-four or -five? Quite old when you thought about it. But I didn’t think about it. He was just my dad.
I wondered how it would have been if my mother had stayed. Would he have been less angry, more fun? I tried to imagine a Saturday when I would help my mother clean the oven and make us a cake for tea. She and I might go shopping in the afternoon, while my father watched Grandstand. But then, maybe, I wouldn’t get to do the things he and I did together now at weekends, like looking for ammonites, or going to the climbing wall in Bristol where he showed me how the quarrymen would go up the rockface. Three points of contact, Katie, that’s what keeps you steady …
‘Look in the hall,’ said my father, his back to me, slicing a loaf. His movements were always careful and exact, like the wiring diagrams he drew, or his plumbing schemes. He used to work as an electrician in the quarries, but he got nervous exhaustion and had to resign and go self-employed. He could do plumbing as well as electrics. He was clever at anything practical.
I went out into our hallway. The light through the lozenge in the front door fell on a pile of books on the table. Dad had stopped off at the library on his way back. He knew the kind of thing I liked. There was a John Wyndham, The Chrysalids, and a book called The Story of Britain, an old hardback in a polythene jacket to protect it, though it didn’t look as if too many people had taken this one out. ‘From the geological shaping of the land to the development of civilization,’ the cover said.
It had glossy black-and-white pictures. As I flipped through, there was something that looked like a fossilized tulip–a sea lily, according to the caption. I saw a trilobite like a huge stone woodlouse, and a whole page of ammonite marble, dozens of spirals in a sheet of polished black rock. There was a chapter devoted to the first humans in Britain. Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Neanderthal man, Homo sapiens. I muttered the names to myself like a rosary, tracing the row of skulls on the page.
‘What are you doing?’ called my father.
‘Looking at the book. The one with the ammonites.’
‘Not the book, nitwit. The bag.’
There was a brown-paper bag next to the books, so small I had overlooked it, folded in a neat square over something wrapped in cotton wool. I unwrapped it. ‘Brilliant,’ I said, walking back into the kitchen. ‘How did you find that?’
It was an ammonite, the size of an old penny. It had been split in half, so that one side was still rough brown stone, but the flat top surface had been polished to a gloss, tan and gold and grey, revealing the ammonite’s secret spiral chambers.
‘The book or the ammonite?’ He was smiling broadly. A very good day, then.
‘Both.’
‘I saw the ammonite in a shop window as I was walking down Walcot Street,’ said my father. ‘And the book was thanks to your favourite librarian.’ He put a plate with a doorstop sandwich in front of me. ‘Mayonnaise, no mustard, as the lady likes it.’
‘Which one’s that?’ I wasn’t sure I had a favourite librarian.
‘The young one.’
‘There aren’t any young ones.’
My father picked up his own doorstop–heavy on the mustard, it would be–and sat down opposite