Fossils, page 13
*
A couple of times while waiting for Bob to come home, she’d imagined the conversations they would have together. All the thises and thats they would talk about. And sometimes, while they were having an actual conversation, she would try to say something to trigger the exact same conversation that she’d imagined them having. Only it never worked out like she’d imagined, and the real conversations would seem disappointing in comparison. She thought too that it was somehow Bob’s fault for not playing his part in the conversation. Then she felt bad for thinking that. Disloyal. When he’d only ever been kind to her. Often she found conversations were hard work. She nearly always had to do most of the work to keep them going or make them more interesting. Most of the time she didn’t mind. It was good practise. She practised her storytelling voice too. Especially since the time she had heard her own voice on a tape recorder at school, when everyone had to record pretend interviews of each other. It was a high-pitched, thin sounding voice. An insubstantial child’s voice. It wasn’t like she imagined it sounded. It wasn’t how she heard it when she spoke. And it wasn’t the tape recorder making it sound bad because everybody else’s voice sounded like them and when she’d asked the teacher why her voice sounded like that on the recording machine, the teacher had laughed. She practised making it sound deeper and slower so the consonants sounded less clackety. The kind of voice people would want to listen to. It was no good having great stories to tell if the voice was no good. If the voice was squawking away like a parrot, putting everyone off. She thought of that old musical she had seen with the man dancing in the rain. When they learned how to put sound with film, some of the actors had such terrible voices that people didn’t want to watch their films anymore and who could blame them? Voices could be very off-putting.
From her drawstring bag she pulled out her nan’s photographs. She shuffled back on the sofa to sit up straight and placed them on her lap. She liked to spend time looking at each of them, savouring all the details, the memories, the way that she had done each time her nan showed them to her. She liked the ones of her nan as a young lady, in her smart plaid coat. Her hair all neat and waved. The photo of her in her wedding dress. The lace of her dress, the big bunch of roses that looked dark grey in the photo but which she knew to be red, because her nan had always talked of her bouquet of red roses. And the photo of the whole wedding party. The granddad whom she had never met. How her nan had said that he was the most handsome man on the whole street and that everyone wanted him. Though it was hard to see that from the photo. People must have had a different idea of handsome back then. Everybody looked so serious in the photo. Nobody was smiling. That’s how you had your photo taken back then, her nan would tell her. You dressed up smart and you didn’t smile.
There was one with serrated edges. Nan sitting on a back step, older but still with her dark hair, with her head thrown back against the door frame, her eyes closed. Sunbathing. Framed by the shadow of a rose bush arched over the wall next to her. There was a photo of Sherrie-Lee’s mother and her aunt and uncle as kids, sitting on some grass with some other kids, dressed in dungarees, tank tops, flowery dresses. The colours all tarnished and faded. In the background, another child leaned against the ropes of a gala tent. There was one of her nan pushing a pram. And one with nan’s brother on a motorbike in a back yard, wearing gloves and a flat cap, with the bottoms of his trousers gathered by a clip. Photos of people sitting on sofas. Another photo showed a child in a hat standing in a photographer’s studio. The studio stamp indented into the bottom right-hand corner, Crossthwaite and Heap’s, 14 New Briggate. The writing slanted to the right with fancy lettering. The bottom of the P in Heap’s extended and stretched back to underline Crossthwaite and Heap. Even before her nan was losing her memory she couldn’t remember all the people in the photos. No one knew who the child was. The photo seemed to be from before Nan was born. A nameless child from a nameless time. Sometimes Sherrie-Lee made up names and stories for the ones that had no names attached to them. The photographs were slowly fading. Like memories, Sherrie-Lee thought, taking away all the small histories of families and people. The front door clicked open. She jumped up, putting her photographs back into the cotton bag and grabbed the notepad she had been jotting in earlier.
Look, she said, walking to the front door as Bob was closing it, holding the notepad above her head. I’ve been keeping watch of all the comings and goings. She began to read from it. 10.32: man walks dog along the road, 11.17: man walks dog in the other direction. Only this time he’s wearing a hat. That’s weird, isn’t it?
You probably didn’t notice the hat before.
Maybe. But I doubt it.
You’re gonna have to be getting off home, Zadie. Gina is coming to stay for a week, Bob said as he entered the front room.
Why?
Her sister is going to stay with her mam so that she can have a break.
No. I mean why do I have to go? She had her hands on her hips in protest.
She’s not gonna like that I’ve got some weird kid staying here. He smiled apologetically.
I’m not weird. We’ll get along. I’ll help her with the cooking and cleaning.
You haven’t done any cooking or cleaning so far, he laughed. Anyway, you can’t stay here forever.
Why not?
He just looked at her, shaking his head. He let out a short, tired kind of laugh.
Why is she coming anyway?
She’s my girlfriend.
Why doesn’t she live round here then?
I already told you. She had to go stay with her mam because she’s sick. Are you hungry?
No.
We had a laugh at the call centre today.
Sherrie-Lee had moved to the sofa and wrapped herself in the blanket.
Don’t you want to hear about it? He turned his head towards her as he put his bag of shopping on the table.
Sherrie-Lee shrugged.
Someone called this bloke and he got mad, shouting for being interrupted with nonsense.
Heard that one before. She yawned a theatrical yawn and switched on the TV.
No. This time we all took down the number and called it. The man went ape-shit, the first few times anyway. Then he stopped answering. It was funny though.
Hilarious, she said, pulling a half-hearted mock-laughter face.
Daft, really. Anything to relieve the monotony.
Sherrie-Lee didn’t respond.
Oh, come on sulky-britches. What’s up?
I’m not sulking.
He came and sat next to her. Let’s have a look at your spy notes then.
He picked up the notepad and read the notes. What does that say? Woan walls past. Kid on skitbod. Your writing is terrible.
It’s not. She grabbed the notepad from him.
He stood up and walked to the window and peered through the curtains to have a look for himself.
Maybe we should open the curtains. It’s like someone died in here. Gina’s not gonna like that the curtains are closed all the time. She’ll wonder why.
Gina’s not gonna like… she mocked in a whiny voice.
He went into the kitchen and Sherrie-Lee could hear him opening and closing cupboards. Usually, she hovered about watching to see what shopping he had brought, commenting on this and that. But when he looked back, he saw that she had not moved from the sofa.
18
Sherrie-Lee had been dreaming that she had been driving a car. Inside the car was her nan and Joshy; they were on their way to Whitby for a holiday. Her nan was singing and she was joining in and so was Joshy, but they needed to stop because Joshy had to go to the toilet. She wished she could still be dreaming it, going away on a trip together, and felt annoyed at being woken up by the hoover coming into the room.
Quick sticks, she was out of the flat and headed in the direction of the library, trying to put some purpose into her walk. She’d show Bob. An ice-cream van drove past her, its mechanical music loud and fast and over-jaunty, like an oversized wind-up toy. It was the tune of Teddy Bear’s Picnic, over-loud and intermittently sped up, then slowed down to a distorted version of itself. It took her a few moments to work out what song it was, it was so mutated. The music stopped abruptly when the van came to a halt. A woman with two kids walked up to the little window and bought two cones. Sherrie-Lee paused and waited, pretending to tie her laces. She didn’t want the ice-cream seller to think she was a potential customer. The van even looked like an over-sized toy, garishly decorated and improbable. The van took off again. The music began as soon as it started up, until the van and music grew distant, then disappeared altogether.
When she arrived at the library, she wanted to go inside, but didn’t want to be seen by Claire, whom she had grown to know quite well over the years. Looking through the window, she saw her behind the main desk. It was easy to recognise her because of her blue hair. She was sitting at a desk doing something on a computer. Claire knew what kind of books Sherrie-Lee might like and she always had one or two to recommend to her. Even when Sherrie-Lee had mislaid her library card, she said that it didn’t matter and still let her take the books out. At school, when they had drawn their ‘Happy Places’ and everyone had drawn play stations, or Pokemon cards or the park, or their holidays or favourite food, she had drawn herself with a book in the library. Then she’d felt embarrassed when the teacher had asked what it was. She wasn’t as good at drawing as she was at other things and she often had to explain what her drawings were, which was more than annoying. She had thought a few times already about going in in disguise and just borrowing a few without taking them out in the usual way, but always in the end she had decided against it. It had been two weeks since she had read anything proper.
There were a couple of winos on the bench outside the library in the little garden area, and further down, on the bit that sloped around towards the back, there were two teenage boys. One of them had a skateboard. He stopped skating because the other one said something. He stepped off the skateboard, picked it up and placed it under his arm. The other boy said something else, and then the skateboard one started pushing him, and then the one who had said something started pushing back. He pushed hard, and the boy dropped his skateboard and fell over on his backside. The boy without the skateboard went red in the face, straightening himself up. He folded his arms. His Adam’s apple stuck out and kept bobbing up and down. He didn’t look like he wanted to fight, but kept saying things to the skateboarding one, provoking him, until they started pushing each other again. Sherrie-Lee wanted to shout over to them. Stop. This is a library. She felt so angry that she imagined herself grabbing hold of each of them and bashing their heads together. Then she wondered why she wanted to do that and thought that it was because she’d heard her nan say so many times – They want their heads bashing together – whenever she saw or heard of people behaving badly. She wondered if it was the same on the other planet, universes along. The one that, by the rules of infinity, was just like ours. If people there had the same problems. If they too needed their heads bashing together.
Walking away she thought something must have got to the one who kept saying things even though he didn’t seem to want to fight. Something must have upset him so much that he just had to let it come out. She’d seen a lot of fights in her time. She’d become an expert watching them spark up out of nothing and flare up. Emotions building up inside people until they were just under the surface. People trying to let them come out gradually, or keep them inside, but this only having a knock-on effect on what showed itself above the surface. Brushing up against it like some invisible energy was at work. Fights were always starting up over nothing. Over misunderstandings. Like the time they’d been allowed to bring games in at school, as a reward for collecting all that money for Children in Need. Jimmy and Kane had been playing a game where you rolled two dice and Jimmy had said that he didn’t know that you could split the dice and move two counters in the same roll. And Kane had said that he didn’t know that he didn’t know and that was it for the game, probably forever, although Jimmy was usually the reasonable sort. And she’d once seen a fight between two men, in broad daylight, on the pavement near her house. One of them knocked the other one down and the man just lay there, not moving. One of the people who’d come to watch said he was dead. The fight was all over a kid’s bike. He wasn’t dead, though. He got up eventually, but he was in a bad way.
She thought about the self-help section of the library. There were books in there that could cure anything. If only people knew. There were books to help you stop over-eating, quit smoking, lower blood pressure, give up drinking or gambling. Books to help you become a success, grow your confidence. Use the power of your mind. Everything from thinking yourself thin to winning love and influence and making better use of your time. There were no limits to the things books could help you with.
That’s why people need stories, just like they need dreams. She thought of the storyteller man, about what he had told her about India. How the Hindus use fairy stories to calm a deranged mind. It made a truck-load of sense, that. In fairy stories you always had to help yourself, bring yourself to safety. There was a kind of wisdom in them that applied to the world beyond themselves. A deep kind of wisdom that you felt would keep on resonating into the future. She had seen too many people cave in from the lack of these wisdoms, even though she was only twelve. Look at her older brother. Then all that trouble with the police, with drugs, and now look at where he was. Though, somewhere along the line, telling stories must have meant something good for people. People must have known how good and important they were, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many of them knocking about.
From the town hall clock, Sherrie-Lee saw that it was just past six. The IDAW meeting was not until seven, but that was okay. She liked walking round town when everything was closed or closing up. It gave the city a behind the scenes feel to it that felt good to be a part of.
People sat on rows of plastic chairs in the hall. She looked around at them and saw a few faces she recognised from the other meetings. There was the man with blonde dreadlocks who she’d seen a few times. He was stood near the front, putting up a poster with the IDAW symbol of the badger’s face inside a yellow circle onto the noticeboard. A woman who she hadn’t seen before was standing on a little wooden platform. Sherrie-Lee sat behind a couple she had seen on a demonstration outside the Town Hall and nodded at them when they turned to see who was shifting into the seats behind them. They smelled of some kind of musty scent, like spices. She looked around for the woman with the Tintin hair, but she wasn’t there. Someone dropped a coin onto the wooden floor, she heard it roll about before it fell flat. Someone else coughed. The woman on the platform introduced herself and talked about the new agenda. She had a gruff voice like she smoked a lot of cigarettes. She did a lot of gesturing with her hands. She kept repeating the lines The time is now and The time for action is now. She wasn’t as good to listen to as the Tintin lady. Sherrie-Lee wouldn’t be learning any tricks for her storytelling listening to this one. She was trying to pay attention, but she found her mind wandering. The woman in front of her had long faded pink hair, with darkened roots. It was kinked and wavy like she had just taken it out of plaits. The man nearest to where she was sitting wore a pale denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up showing a tattoo and Sherrie-Lee leaned forward to see what it was. Some kind of animal baring its teeth, but she couldn’t see if it was a bear or a wolf or something else. The notice-board above the poster was strung with triangular fabric flags. She sat there on the hard plastic chair, trying to sit upright. Her thoughts lifted idly as her mind detached from registering what the speaker was saying. She wondered what other people were thinking, whether their minds were drifting like hers was. She imagined all their thoughts drifting above them. She imagined these thoughts as little thought clouds floating above them. Did I leave the oven on? The dog needs walking when we get back. Random thoughts. I need to be a better person. I need to try to be kinder. I don’t like any of my friends. She looked vaguely around the room, from person to person, trying to match each of these imagined thoughts to the person they might belong to. The smelling-of-spices couple were the ones thinking of the dog waiting for its walk when they got home. Only when she heard the line, The time is now, did she get caught back with the speaker. It sounded good and even though she didn’t understand exactly what it meant, it made her feel a small line of excitement running inside her body. The same excitement she’d felt on the demonstration she’d been to. She could even imagine herself saying it. The time is now. Repeating it to others. The woman was shaking her head when she spoke. There was a ceiling light that pinged and went out just in front of her. She looked up at it to acknowledge its passing. She held for a moment a kind of smile that humanised its going out as though it had made some kind of comment. A quiet murmured laughter rose briefly in the room. You could only partially see the smile, because although she was only four rows away from her, the light bulb had provided half the light in that part of the room. When the man with the dreadlocks came to stand on the platform next to her, you could hardly make out his features. He looked out at the audience before speaking. Only his hair seemed to stand out. The outline of it was lit up from the shadows. The blonde contours showing up bright in the light. It was the first time she’d heard him speak. He repeated the words new agenda and said he would be handing out leaflets with a list of companies that would be targeted first. We start with boycotts and then move on. The time for direct action is now, he said. Companies that continue to do violence to the natural world in the name of profit. Nature is not for sale. They make it sound like the agenda of slash and burn and pollute is inevitable. Part of the progress of mankind. It’s a lie they continue to prop up to push their own agenda for the profit of the few. Nature has no voice. We must speak out for it and be a voice for the voiceless. He looked out at them after he had finished speaking, like he was making eye contact with every one of them, but only an occasional glint in his right eye was reflected. Sherrie-Lee looked down at the legs of the chairs when his gaze was moving towards her. And then he stepped off the platform and went to stand at the side of the hall as the other woman spoke to close the meeting. She thanked everyone for coming and said without everyone’s support the planet was done for. She said there was a mug coming round for donations to be made. Every penny counts, she said.
