Cat Step, page 2
Then Emily lifted a hot hand and touched my chin.
‘You’re awake. Hello.’
‘My throat is sore.’
‘Poor Emily. Can you eat anything?’
She shook her head. I helped her sit so her body was curled into my side and her head was on my shoulder. We stayed that way, watching the near-silent television. I stroked her thin arm and she rested her hand against my chest. Her cuddles were soft when she was sick and I felt a little guilty at preferring them. Usually, she fidgeted or elbowed me accidentally or pulled at my ear lobes. For a shy child she was demanding.
The doctor had told me to keep her hydrated even if she wouldn’t eat anything, so I helped her sip from a cup of water. It wasn’t nice to see her grimace. Her fingers touched her throat and I felt bad for her.
‘Shall I put you in my bed on my cold sheets?’ I said.
‘Will you lie with me?’
If I lay down I’d fall asleep. ‘I will for a bit,’ I said.
I carried her to my bed in Audrey’s room and lay close to her. Not so close that I would heat her up but close enough to cradle her head in the crook of my arm.
Then I remembered. She might wet the bed.
‘Do you need a wee?’
‘No, Mummy.’
‘Can you try?’
‘I don’t need to.’
‘Please. Please. I’ll carry you.’ All the rooms in Audrey’s flat led off the one corridor so nothing was far.
‘No.’ She curled her body into a ball and because she was in the middle of the bed she was hard to move. I tugged on her arm and she yanked it away.
‘Please, Emily, just get up now and then that’s it, you can sleep.’
‘I’m tired.’
‘I know, but come on, Emily.’
You mustn’t tell them they’ll wet the bed, you mustn’t mention bed-wetting ever, but she would have, she would have. I got my hands around her body, under her legs and her back and pulled her to the edge of the bed. I don’t think I was rough. I was firm. She kicked me and tried to wriggle out of my arms but I managed to pick her up and carry her to the toilet. She cried and pushed against my chest. ‘I don’t want to do this either,’ I said. Ludicrous, to fight with an ill child. Finally, I got her on the toilet seat.
‘What a lot of fuss.’
We waited. I kneeled on Audrey’s pink bath mat and noticed the dirt at the back of the cistern.
‘I miss my old bedroom.’ Emily’s chin dipped to her chest.
I don’t know why I was surprised. ‘Why?’ I said.
‘I miss my toys.’
‘They’ll be there when we get back.’
‘And I miss my granny.’
She missed my mum. Of course she did. She cried the sad tears of an ill girl and I told her everything I could conjure about why we were better in Lennoxtown. ‘This is a holiday. There’s a road called Crow Road; we’ll see what’s at the top. There might be crows. Mummy and Emily are having a break.’ I didn’t tell her that I knew my mum needed a break from us. She blew her nose on the toilet paper I gave her then she closed her eyes and rested her head on my shoulder. Perhaps I should never have put her on the toilet. I should have let her fall asleep on my bed and lifted her like I did when she was a toddler.
‘Nothing coming.’
‘We’re here now. Can you have another try?’
‘I don’t need one.’
‘Count to twenty.’
While she was counting and I was kneeling with my hands on her knees the doorbell rang. Nobody had rung the doorbell before.
‘Who’s that?’ I said.
‘Is it Granny?’
‘No, it won’t be Granny.’
‘Is it a tiger?’
‘Probably not.’
The doorbell rang again and I heard the letter box open.
I put my finger to my lips. ‘Shush, Emily.’
There was a woman’s voice. ‘Is anybody home? I’m looking for Liz Morley.’
‘Can I get off the toilet?’ Emily whispered.
‘Wait. Shush.’
‘Why aren’t we answering the door?’
Her eyes were excited. I pretended it was a game. I couldn’t explain why we weren’t answering the door. I heard my mobile phone ringing and hoped the woman at the door didn’t hear it too. There were three hard raps, then there was silence. The trickle of Emily’s wee came soon after.
‘Good girl! Good girl!’ I passed her some toilet paper and we washed her hands.
I carried her into my bed and pulled the duvet to her waist.
‘Mummy, can you cuddle me?’
‘Wait a second.’ I’m selfish, I know. I picked up my phone.
There was a message from a social worker called Sara. ‘I came round to talk about the incident in the car park this morning. The police have passed me your details. I just need a wee check-in with you and your daughter.’ She left a number. I turned my phone off. Fuck. A social worker. My first phone call, my first knock at the door, from a social worker.
‘You’ll feel better tomorrow,’ I told Emily and kissed her forehead.
I’m angry at the social worker even now for spoiling that sleep of Emily’s, for getting in the way of me and her on what was a peaceful, docile afternoon, because the whole time I was patting Emily’s shoulder and singing her a lullaby I wasn’t really concentrating on her or the words I sang. I was thinking about the police and the bystanders and the social worker and I was frightened. Emily fell asleep with her mummy hardly aware of her, and I can’t say that was the first time either.
3.
Within days she was better and hurling herself onto the sofa or bumping down the stairs to Audrey’s front door. She rolled herself up in the living room rug then yelled to be let out. I found it funny the first time. She made a mess in the rooms, trying on shoes and scarves, attempting to help while not helping at all, you know what children are like.
Our time in Lennoxtown was always supposed to have been brief: two months, no more. We should have cleared the flat and got it ready to sell and we should have done other things too. Spotted daffodils. Hunted for tadpoles. Explored the forests and fells. But it was still howling winter when we got there and I was worried about all the time I would spend on my own with Emily. She wasn’t an easy girl. We were in a dead lady’s house with three built-in wardrobes and a floor-to-ceiling cupboard full of possessions to clear. Each day I looked at her jumble of stuff and didn’t know where to start. Honestly, I couldn’t think straight with Emily around me all the time. So that’s why I did what I did. I cut her fringe, enrolled her in the local nursery and began to look for work. Robbie would have called me an eejit. Robbie was Audrey Watt’s grandson and Emily’s dad. He’s the real reason we came to Lennoxtown.
Emily didn’t want to go to nursery despite the trays of sand and water and the play-dough that the children made fresh each morning. She didn’t like the noise. My mum said nursery would be good for Emily’s shyness and I agreed, although she wasn’t shy in the house, that’s for sure. I didn’t tell my mum about the police and the social worker’s knock at the door.
The nursery staff told me they’d had girls like Emily before and picked her up and walked away with her. Go, they told me. I waited in the parents’ room, listening for her cries, wondering if it was worth it – I could have cleared a kitchen cupboard in the time I spent waiting. So I made calls about my benefits, calls to the Salvation Army to offer them Audrey’s furniture and calls to dancing schools and care homes to see if they wanted a temporary dance teacher.
When I came into the playroom at the end of each morning’s settling in, Emily clung to my legs and cried. The women told me she cried frequently if they moved away from her to wipe a spill or fix another child’s apron. ‘She’s a sensitive wee soul,’ they said. ‘She has a wee voice that’s hard to hear.’ I didn’t recognise this child. ‘She watched some children playing in the house corner. She didn’t join in but observing other children is a good start.’ I should have taken her out there and then, not only because she hated it but because as well as observing Emily, they were observing me.
I didn’t take her out of the nursery. She stayed in the playroom for longer periods. I went home for an hour, emptied a set of drawers, loaded black sacks into the car and sorted through Audrey’s stuff for relics to keep or sell. During one of those hours I let the estate agent in to knock his knuckles on the walls and assess the decor. He took the stairs two at a time and ignored the piles of magazines and cardboard boxes I’d put on each step.
‘Campsie view,’ he said with his head out of Audrey’s bedroom window. ‘That will help.’ He closed the window and told me there were things I could do to make the flat sell quickly or at a higher price, like clear the front garden, paint the walls, perhaps even re-plaster if I was inclined. ‘Put a bed in here or get a table and show it off as a dining room,’ he said of Audrey’s spare room. The Salvation Army had lifted her table and chairs only the day before. ‘Spend a couple of hundred to make a couple of thousand,’ he said. I saw the flat as he saw it: forlorn and dated with worn-down floors and cracks in the walls. The living room was nice, he told us. We liked that room too. And the kitchen. It had a view of the neighbouring gardens and the fenced-off fellside.
I could clean cupboards but I had no money to spend on redecorating. Audrey’s grandson and Robbie’s brother Aidan lived in Australia. He told me to go ahead with the work – the plastering and painting.
‘How do I to pay for it?’ I asked.
‘Get bank details and I’ll pay them from here. I’ll try and find someone who can do the lot.’
I forgot Aidan was still connected in Lennoxtown, that there were people he’d been to school with living in the village still, who knew them all, the whole family.
‘I’ll put some extra money into your account too,’ he said. ‘You’re doing me a favour.’
I was cheaper than an air fare, he’d said, right in the first phone call, when he’d told me their granny had died and he didn’t want to come back. He would rather it happened without him stepping foot in Scotland.
‘Only if you can handle it, mind,’ he’d said to me.
‘We’ll be fine.’
I sorted Audrey’s belongings into piles for the charity shop and piles for Gumtree. I kept her jewellery and some photographs to send to Australia. Any cash I made from the Gumtree sales I put in a vase and used for expenses. I told Aidan I would give him what was left. The Salvation Army returned to pick up two chests of drawers and a cabinet.
My mum phoned. ‘Have you got anything to sit on? Tell me you kept some furniture back?’
I told her we had a small sofa and a matching armchair.
‘What’s her house like?’
‘It’s cold, Mum. I keep the heating on.’ I looked around me at the rectangles of clean wallpaper I’d exposed when I took her picture frames down. Emily had a few toys and I’d stuck some of her nursery drawings to the walls, but it didn’t feel like our home, because nothing was ours and the bulky things of the house, the big units that stopped the echoes, were gone.
‘How long will you be?’
‘A few more weeks.’
‘I could take some holiday?’
‘No. Don’t waste your leave.’
She said no more. I knew she wanted to go to Spain to stay in her partner’s timeshare.
‘How is Alan?’
‘He’s well, thank you.’
‘I’ve been trying to get some classes,’ I said.
‘Teaching? I thought you weren’t staying long.’
‘I’m not. But it’s something I can do so I might as well do it.’
‘Does it pay well?’
‘Probably not.’
‘Make sure you eat. Tell me if you get unstuck.’ I heard her breathe. ‘This is bold, what you’re doing, Liz. And brave.’
‘It is.’
‘But you’ve made it difficult for yourself.’
‘I had nothing to lose.’ I think I offended her. I think I was wrong.
She asked about Audrey. ‘Did anyone go to her funeral?’
‘Friends from her luncheon club, I think. Aidan didn’t go. I should visit her grave.’
‘Only if it won’t upset you. How’s Emily? Where’s Emily?’
I looked at Emily’s pyjamas on the floor and her scattered crayons.
‘At nursery. She misses you.’
‘Of course she misses me.’
‘Do you miss us?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘There’s nothing of him, Mum, no pictures, nothing.’
‘Some people are like that,’ my mum said.
She was at work. She had to get off the phone because her boss wanted a word.
Twice I avoided the doorbell and heard the social worker’s calm voice calling me through the letter box. I convinced myself it would end soon; denial is a trait of mine. I didn’t need a social worker. If I ignored her for long enough she would move to a more pressing case; there were plenty of them. So I kept the curtains closed. One sunny afternoon, in the way a cat would, Emily stuck her head and then her whole body behind the curtains and sat on the window sill looking down at the street. I called her back. That’s how we lived.
After a week, I chanced it. I asked the nursery staff how long I had. ‘We’ll try the full morning this time,’ they said and although Emily cried when I kissed her goodbye and her keyworker had to lift her up and carry her away to the play-dough table with her arms stretched towards me, I left her. I ignored the shooting stars in my head. They would pass, like everything.
4.
The sheltered housing was a five-minute drive from Lennoxtown past farmland and a Lidl. I told myself I could do my shopping before the class so I would achieve something even if the dancing didn’t go well. The Campsie Fells were in sight the whole time, or at least they were at the back of me, which felt promising because they were the only thing I liked about Lennoxtown.
‘Let’s see if there are any tenants around,’ the manager said. Her name was Ruth. She worked in an office with her back to the window and looked after the upkeep of the concrete blocks and the letting of the one and two-bedroom flats. She took me along a plain corridor to the lounge. I’ve never seen so many sideboards in one room. There were framed photographs on the walls and vases of fabric flowers on the tables. A radio played a song I knew Emily liked. The room was okay – better than the corridor. In a kitchenette off the lounge two women unloaded a dishwasher.
‘Your timing is perfect. They were talking about setting up some kind of exercise class,’ Ruth said. ‘Zumba. Although I think that’s a bit energetic.’ She looked over at the two women in the kitchenette who passed the sunlit doorway holding crockery and tea towels.
‘My class would be ballet-based,’ I said. ‘And I’d drop in a bit of contemporary too.’ They didn’t need to know my body was the wrong shape and my technique not quite sharp enough for ballet. I could teach a class.
‘It’ll come down to how we sell it to them. Don’t say contemporary, they won’t understand.’
I looked around and worked out that I would need to move the tables to the sides of the room and make a line of chairs to form a barre.
Ruth called the women over to us. They came with their tea towels in their hands and I noticed that one of the women walked with turned out feet.
‘June, Eve,’ the manager said. ‘This is Liz. She’s a dancer. If I book her in, will you come to her class?’
‘Not me,’ one of the women said. ‘I don’t do dancing.’ She folded her tea towel.
The other one, the one with turned out feet said, ‘I never took to dancing.’
‘Are you sure?’ I said and I pointed at her feet. ‘Because your toes are turned out, look, and your posture is good.’
She stared at me as if I’d told her a lie.
Ruth shook her head. ‘I have a note on my desk to book an exercise class and here we are with a real-life dancer in front of us.’
I smiled.
The woman with the folded tea towel said, ‘It wasn’t me. I wanted to do painting.’
‘I can’t paint,’ I said. ‘So it’s dancing or nothing.’
‘Nothing then.’
Ruth said, ‘Okay, Eve,’ and then she turned to the other woman and said, ‘June, can you remember who it was who wanted an exercise class?’
‘It might have been Senga.’ June looked straight at me. ‘What kind of dancing?’
‘Ballet, mostly.’
‘Is that what you are, a ballerina?’ Her chin tilted up when she spoke.
I shook my head. ‘I used to work on cruise ships. Show dances. Tap and jazz, that kind of thing.’
That interested them. They asked questions about where I’d been so I told them some places: Miami, Dominica, Barbados. The woman, Eve, had a daughter in Toronto. ‘Have you been there?’ she asked and seemed disappointed when I told her I hadn’t.
‘But I’ve been to New York,’ I said.
‘What are you doing here then?’ June surprised me with her forthrightness. I looked at Ruth, unsure of what to say.
‘I could do with the money,’ I said. ‘And I like dancing.’
‘Why don’t you audition for the pantos and that?’
‘It’s March. The panto season is over.’
June nodded and I stood there, waiting for someone to speak.
‘I have a daughter,’ I said. ‘So I can’t travel far or do evening jobs like pantos.’
That softened their mouths. We shared details of our children. ‘I have two children and four grandchildren, two girls and two boys,’ Eve said, ‘and not one lives in Scotland.’
‘I have two grandchildren, a girl and a boy,’ June said and blinked.
There were footsteps from outside in the corridor. Ruth beckoned some people into the lounge and introduced me. They stared, all of them, two men and a woman, studying me. I stood straighter. I was taller than most of them, even the men.
