I knew deep down that this was stealing.
But I wanted this book so badly.
Inside it were all the normal nursery rhymes that Julia and I knew off by heart and used to say so fast that the words blurred into each other when we were younger. ‘Humpty Dumpty’, ‘Little Bo Peep’, and ‘Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary’, which was another of my mother’s nicknames for me and drove me absolutely mad.
My favourite poem was called ‘The Pedlar’s Caravan’ by William Brighty Rands. The illustration showed trees and birds and caterpillars – and a Victorian caravan, made of wooden slats, yellow and red, with flowers painted in vertical plaited lines to the right and left at the front, and butterflies fluttering above them. It had tiny windows with geraniums in boxes, and ladder steps, and wooden wheels with cream-coloured spokes, and a smoking tin chimney, and it was passing under a huge tree, with a dark-looking woman and child at the window, and the pedlar man leading a dapple-grey horse to a dusky not quite see-able horizon.
When I was alone, I read it and I read it, and it made my heart beat and my soul soar, and I heard the noise of singing coming from deep down inside me, where he comes from nobody knows, and I was in the caravan, or where he goes to, but on he goes, and I was leading the dapple-grey horse, and my horizon was unknowable, and every time I climbed the ladder, I gave my own life story a different ending. And I never once ended up in Hedley Green.
Perhaps the reason I didn’t show Julia the book was that I couldn’t bear to admit to her that I wanted to leave.
Go anywhere but where I was.
The minute I could.
Of course, I knew that she would want to stay.
And, if I left and she stayed, we wouldn’t be Justa any more.
We’d be ripped apart like the ragdoll, with our stuffing falling out.
The stuffing was falling out of my mother.
When Douce came running out of the hut, shrieking, I knew.
I wasn’t brave enough to face what I knew.
Not again.
So I ran up to Víctor’s house, and we zoomed back down the hillside, with me on the back of his bike, my long legs sticking out either side. As I looked at Víctor’s strong back in front of me, his prominent shoulder blades, his thick white-skinned neck and his mop of grey hair, I felt that perhaps this time, this time, it was all going to be OK.
But by the time we got into the hut, the feeling started to dissolve. Because Gloria and Douce and Wilfred and Zion were all sitting in a semi-circle, and in front of them was my mother. It was, in some ways, my mother, but she looked like an empty sack.
Breathe, I thought, breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out.
I remembered the feel of her skin on my cheek.
The softness of her.
Zion got up.
‘She’ll be with Pa,’ he said, clenching his fingers, then stretching them out. ‘Isn’t that a good thing, that she’ll be with Pa? That they’ll be together.’
‘That’s right,’ I said, and I wiped away my own tears as fast as they fell because I was the oldest and I had to be brave.
‘Yes, Little Bro,’ I said, trying to find a smile from somewhere, ‘she’ll be right there where there’s a huge river, and trees with fruit every month – do you remember? – and leaves for the healing of the nations.’
‘Leaves don’t heal nations,’ said Pierre, coming in through the open door. ‘Leaves don’t do anything.’
‘Except photosynthesis,’ said Zion.
Zion remembered everything I taught him. He listened to me like I’d listened to my father, and this steadied me. He loved me much more than the others did, and this gave me purpose. If he was beside me, it was worth going on.
‘Yes, Zion,’ said Víctor. ‘Your mother’s crossed over to the eternal city.’
‘Like my name!’ said Zion.
‘Like your name!’ said Víctor. ‘And she’ll be dancing down its golden streets with your father.’
‘What do you think it was?’ Pierre said to Víctor, crossly, sounding as if he couldn’t stand hearing another thing about the golden streets. ‘The thing that killed her?’
‘It could have been cholera,’ said Víctor.
‘Could the doctor have saved her?’ I asked Víctor.
Víctor put his arm around my shoulder.
Pierre said, ‘Well, could he?’ in that voice he had that made me feel as if everything that happened in our lives was my fault.
‘Oh, cholera’s a tricky one,’ said Víctor.
Then, he dug a hole, and each one of us in turn thanked God for our little bird mother, Aurore, whose name meant dawn. We gathered around the hole where she lay, and as Víctor filled it up with red earth, he led us in singing, Freedom is coming, freedom is coming, freedom is coming, oh yes I know!
Except Pierre walked off in the middle.
I understood.
Freedom didn’t seem to be coming at all.
The more the years passed, the less free we felt.
I noticed that the older you got, the more careful you had to be about things you said. In Reception, you could let anything blurt out of your mouth. But by secondary school, you weighed things up before you spoke.
For example, we couldn’t say gardening aloud in Year 8, and for a few years after that. Robin Fox had introduced the class to double-entendre, and frankly one hardly dared open one’s mouth at school. Girls in our class were starting to grow hair in awkward places, and Robin Fox would take a look at our fuzzy legs and the hairs appearing in our armpits and say, ‘A bit of gardening at the weekend, maybe, for you?’
What could we do but use our pocket money on Bic razors or depilating cream or wax strips that didn’t work? And looking back, what power he wielded.
Robin Fox had four older brothers, and he knew how to turn ordinary sentences sexual by raising one eyebrow. For the whole of our lives, we’d been able to say, ‘Are you coming?’ without even thinking about it. But not now. Now we would have Robin Fox’s one raised eyebrow, and, if there was enough of an audience, we would have the full fake orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally, with Robin Fox thrashing about moaning and gasping at the dining table.
I remember a spring day when we were heading for thirteen. My father was mowing the lawn with not a hint of double entendre in his clean and ordered mind; my mother was cutting the edges into perfect curves (ditto); and Julia was weeding (relieved from the burden of Robin Fox’s raised eyebrow).
I wasn’t thinking of Robin Fox either. Part of the joy of the school holidays was getting away from him.
No, I was thinking of Lola Alvárez saying, ‘Your weeds are my flowers.’
The weeds, which looked exactly like flowers to me, were lying with their pretty blue petals, ready to be piled into thick green sacks where they would suffocate in polythene on their way to the dump to die in a yellow metal skip.
I was suffocating too, on purpose, hiding in my bedroom to avoid the tedium of