A Thousand Tiny Truths Read online

  I grabbed the paper from her hands, squinting for a second before I understood that Oliver had written backwards, in his best da Vinci scrawl. What a time to be playful, I thought, as the words slowly formed through my tears.

  tseraed, lecraM

  desimorp i rebmemer

  em tsurt

  revilO evol

  That was it? I turned the paper over, then once more. No explanation? How could this be?

  I could feel heat building in my body, my arms flailing, objects crashing to the floor. African soapstones, wall hangings, ceramic trinkets Oliver had carted back from his travels. I ran around pulling down all the words he had taped up for me. There were no words to express how I felt. I did not stop when Pippa tried to block me or when she held my arm or even when she cried quietly, “Please, no.”

  It took me days to settle down. My mind kept replaying my final week with Oliver. But gradually, I slipped back into my life. At school I memorized pi to nine decimal places, the science behind rainbows, the order of the planets.

  By mid-month there had been several apologetic phone calls and postcards from Oliver. When I finally agreed to speak to him on the phone, the distance felt horrible and far greater than the actual miles.

  At school, I learned Linnaean classification and the countries of South America from north to south (“I already know this!” I announced to the class). As a result, I also learned the meaning of swot: a smarty-arse, a know-it-all who thought he was cleverer than the others.

  Then, at the end of the month, just as I began to feel less upset, Pippa was fired from her job at Marks & Spencer. She spent two days in bed in such an extreme state of exhaustion, I don’t think she even lifted her head. Then, on the third day, she got up and said, “I’m going to take a little stroll around town.”

  After that, the strolling happened at all hours, and without notice. It was worse than ever before. I’d leave a room with her in it and I’d come back a minute later to discover her gone. When she reappeared, she often had male company, friends she claimed to have encountered near Waterloo Station or Holborne or wherever she happened to have found herself. Stasha was working nights at a hotel so I was left alone to watch Pippa sashay around the flat, or giggle like a girl while she fried up my supper and poured drinks for her guest. Once I watched her do a circle dance around a strange man named George, while wearing a feather boa and nightie. She moved her shoulders back and forth in this snakelike way that made even George look uncomfortable.

  More and more I began to fend for myself. One day she forgot to pick me up at school or send anyone else in her place, so I made my way home alone on the bus. When no one answered the door, I found the hidden key and let myself into the flat. I busied myself doing homework, exploring Pippa’s vanity, and setting the table. By six o’clock I realized that I was on my own, so I made toast for supper, feeling momentary pride in my self-sufficiency. By nine o’clock, I did not have the slightest idea what to do. My stomach was growling. I missed Oliver horribly. I thought about breaking something, but the flat was such a mess of clothes and dishes, I didn’t see the point.

  An hour later, I was so distraught I went to the bathroom and sliced my forearm on the medicine cabinet. At first I felt no pain but then the throbbing started, much worse than the last time. I had never seen so much blood come out of me. It dripped down my arm, through my fingertips onto the bathroom tile. It made me feel weirdly calm. For days I had felt nothing but a vague and mounting uneasiness, but the cut felt sharp and simple. I turned on the tap and watched the blood braid the water and run down the plughole. I turned off the tap and grabbed a towel and made my way to the living room, where I picked up the phone.

  After several rings, I heard Mrs. Bowne’s sleepy voice say, “Hello?”

  Just that one word was all it took. When she said it again, I started pouring out my heart.

  Stasha came home at midnight and immediately saw my cut. I was standing shirtless at the kitchen sink, tackling the dirty dishes that had piled up.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said.

  I stopped lathering. The bubbles in the sink made soft popcorn noises.

  “It was an accident. It doesn’t hurt” was all I could think to say.

  Stasha pulled me towards her and gave me a long hug. Then she took me to the bathroom and dressed my wound with a long strip of gauze, even though the blood had dried. She wrapped and wrapped until I looked like a soldier at the Battle of the Somme. “Marcel,” she said. “Please don’t tell Pippa how you got this. Promise me.”

  I had no idea, of course, that Mrs. Bowne, even after being reassured by Stasha that the cut wasn’t serious enough to need a doctor, would call Child Services to arrange for me to be sent to Beckenham. But the next night I heard Pippa screaming at Stasha in her bedroom.

  “What’s wrong with my goddamn lifestyle? I won’t let that meddling bitch put him in a children’s home or pack him off to Australia. I know what those bloody people at Child Services do with their castoffs.” I heard a thump and pictured her falling to the floor. But the screaming continued, “What do you mean he needs a fucking break? From what? From me? Why is everyone always judging me?”

  I put my hands over my ears. Why did she carry on like that? I thought my head was going to rip open.

  An hour later, Stasha came into my room and closed the door. She put her head in her hands. Then she looked up, staring at me hopelessly. “I spoke to Mrs. Bowne last night, Marcel. You called her, didn’t you.”

  I turned away.

  “Well, she wants you to go live with her for a while. She wants to take care of you.”

  “I don’t—want to—go to—Australia,” I said, beginning to cry.

  “Of course not. You’re going to Beckenham and we’ll visit you as much as we can. Please, Marcel, don’t worry,” she said. Then, she squeezed my hand and whispered, “Listen, I can fight for you to stay here if you want.”

  I closed my eyes and shook my head. I had no time for heroic adults any more; their efforts just made me tired.

  When I woke up the next morning, the social worker was standing in our kitchen patting her curly grey hair. The kitchen was clean and there was a glass of Ribena and a slice of buttered toast waiting for me on the table. Stasha was boiling water for coffee. There was no sign of Pippa.

  “Hello, Marcel. My name is Dorothy,” the social worker said. She told me to have a seat and asked how I was feeling.

  When I said I felt perfectly fine, she looked over at Stasha, then reached out her hand and gently touched my bandaged arm. Stasha gave a nod.

  Suddenly, Dorothy was asking about my cut. She wanted to know what I had “hoped to achieve” by injuring myself. Achieve? I couldn’t really explain it. I didn’t know if I did it so that Oliver would come back or so the inside hurt would find its way to the surface and, then, disappear. My words came out in fits and starts but Dorothy nodded encouragingly. She was a big warm radiator of patience. When she asked me if I had any future intentions to harm myself, I told her no, that sharp implements had lost their interest, which was true. And this seemed to satisfy her.

  “Well, Marcel, I think it’s time to have a proper home, isn’t it, love? Everything is going to be all right but you need to trust me.”

  I watched her pull a notepad and pencil out of her briefcase. “I hear you like art. Do you have a favourite painter? Would you like to draw something today?”

  I looked at the pad and pencil she had pushed towards me and shook my head.

  “I’m quite fond of Frank Paton’s work. Have you seen his kitten paintings?” she asked.

  I shook my head again. I watched how her pinky stuck out when she took a sip of tea.

  “Is Oliver coming back?” I asked. “I want to live with him.”

  “I understand,” she said, lightly tapping the notebook with her fingers. “And the long-term plan is to get you two back together. But in the short term, you’ll have a warm bed with Mrs. Bowne. You look like a patient boy.
Do you think you can wait?”

  I didn’t want to wait. I had already spent so much time waiting. I nodded.

  Dorothy arranged to get me the next day. Stasha and Pippa, asserting their love, encouraged me to leave most of my belongings with them. In the end, I packed lightly: a toothbrush, warm winter clothes, The Disasters of War, a few sketchbooks, a pencil case, and my Qantas koala. I didn’t own a suitcase so I used two carrier bags from Tesco. No matter how straight I stood, I knew I looked pathetic with my bags and my bandaged arm.

  When I went to say goodbye to Pippa, I found her sitting on her bed, paging through the telephone book. With one hand still turning pages, she smiled a stupid fake cheerful smile and told me that “through determination and diligence” she was going to help me find out what had happened to my mother. I didn’t know what to say. I had the sense that she was making up words on the spot, bluffing in the way that children sometimes do when they’re trying to make themselves look better or stop a guilty feeling. And that smile. She had probably taken too many pills. I knew she wanted me to greet her offer with enthusiasm, but all I could do was sigh loudly, thinking of her chronic inability to follow through.

  CHAPTER 4

  A Thousand Tiny Exiles

  ON THE DAY I LEFT FOR BECKENHAM, I awoke taller, my voice deeper. When I lifted my Tesco bags, and they sprang up effortlessly, I saw that my arms were longer, stronger. When I stepped onto the street, I was sure my shoes were too tight; I had outgrown them. By the time Dorothy and I arrived at Charing Cross Station, I was as big as a man.

  I had decided to be brave. Wherever she was, I would make my mother proud. I would not cry.

  On the train, I leaned against the window and stared out at the blurred scenery. Dorothy spent the journey filling in answers to a crossword puzzle, single words in small caps scattered about the grid.

  “One more stop,” I said finally, without looking at her.

  She nodded, without looking up.

  I had spent enough time with Mrs. Bowne to know she was very kind, but it felt different to be in the position of having to depend on such kindness. The moment I stepped onto the platform at Beckenham Junction, my stomach began to knot.

  I could feel my hands pulsing around the handles of my carrier bags as we made our way to Copers Cope Road. I took every opportunity to dawdle along the tree-lined streets. Every time I spotted a chestnut on the ground, I would stop, place my bags on the ground, pick up the chestnut and break open the spiky shell, throw the shell into the closest leaf pile, and place the prize in my pocket. Dorothy took many deep breaths waiting for me, but did not complain.

  When we finally arrived at the house, Dorothy rang the doorbell and stood back, holding her briefcase and adjusting her wool cape. After a few seconds we heard footsteps. A hand appeared and lifted the striped canvas blind decorating the door.

  “Marcel,” Mrs. Bowne said, opening the door. Her hair was arranged on top of her head. She wore a saggy brown cardigan over a beige dress. Her legs and feet were bare.

  “Well, don’t just stand there gaping,” she said, breaking into a wide smile.

  Dorothy introduced herself while I stepped inside. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust but when they did I noticed Mr. Bowne skulking by the shadowy parlour entrance in a bulky olive-grey cardigan and knee-high Wellingtons. The outfit, plus the flushed appearance of his skin, the soil on his hands, the way he lurked, gave him the aura of an unhappy gardener. I wondered if the Bownes had made a secret pact to dress only in drab earthen shades.

  “Orange Pekoe?” said Mrs. Bowne, and she led the way down the narrow hall, leaving Mr. Bowne grasping the domed banister.

  We had just poured the tea when a door slammed upstairs. Mrs. Bowne looked at the ceiling. Then she picked up a cookie and began to chew it thoughtfully. I glanced at Dorothy, who smiled supportively. She reached over with a finger and stilled my right thigh, which was hopping up and down.

  The house on Copers Cope, which had been requisitioned during the war from a wealthy family, still had a web of bells for the maids and servants. The heavy wood doors seemed to slam without warning and the endless stairs let loose creaky sobs as I made my way to and from Oliver’s old attic room.

  Yet despite these house noises, I got up the first morning already feeling I had entered a quiet, new existence. The floors were not littered with magazines, old coats, brassieres or strange lists from Stasha’s artist friends that said: crying machine, disappearing machine, danger box, eternal time clock.

  I soon came to realize that unlike Pippa, Mrs. Bowne did not run her house like a European-style hostel. She did not make extra sets of keys and hand them around. I did not have to worry, for instance, about walking into the kitchen and encountering two semi-nude strangers hunched over a plate of spaghetti someone had cooked the night before.

  Life with Mrs. Bowne was a wonky television set (the picture revolving and disappearing without warning during Emergency Ward 10), endless clean towels in the lavatory, fresh bars of soap (no lumpy ends hardening on the bath rim), Union Jack tea towels and christening mugs, large sugared doughnuts stuffed with hot strawberry jam from the corner bakery. And Sunday family dinners.

  As the days passed, I gained perspective. It was as if the strangeness of my former life could not fully reveal itself to me until I stepped out of it.

  For as long as I could remember Mrs. Bowne had paid monthly visits to London. She would spend the afternoon at the flat on New King’s Road, then travel back to Beckenham by evening. Often we would sit around the table and play Scrabble. At some point she would serve lemon sponge cake she had brought and tea and begin telling me stories. Oliver would never talk about himself but sometimes, when it was just the two of us, Mrs. Bowne would offer me snippets.

  “Tell me about Oliver’s parents,” I asked one afternoon. I was eight years old. We were sitting outside in the small back garden. The wind was nudging the last dry leaves from the trees. I could almost hear the soft crackle of them reaching the ground. “There aren’t any pictures,” I said.

  “No. There wouldn’t be.”

  “Where did they go?”

  “The pictures?”

  “No, the parents.”

  She turned back to her Scrabble tiles, rearranging them. “Well. Oliver’s father died at Dunkirk.”

  “And his mother?”

  She sucked in her breath.

  It’s a sad, grim story and no wonder he didn’t want to rake over it all. It goes like this: Long ago, before I was born, Oliver lost his mother in the war. It happened in Penge on the outskirts of London in 1941. Oliver’s mother had been leading a visitor on a tour of their council house. There was an air-raid siren, Oliver hid, a bomb fell, a ceiling collapsed, the house burned. I’ll be right back, his mother had promised, minutes before she died.

  Oliver was ten when he arrived, a war orphan, at Mrs. Bowne’s house, wrapped in a paramedic blanket and carrying the book he had been reading when the bomb fell. When Mrs. Bowne stepped forward to hug him, he let the book fall to the floor. When she picked it up and tried to place it in his hand again, he shook his head. He no longer wanted the book. Even though the pages were intact, it was useless. It could no longer tell him anything but the story of how it was interrupted.

  In time, she told him, everything will get easier in time. In time he would learn to read a book again, sleep through the night, walk across open spaces, look at an open blue sky, play with boys his age. In time he would be happy.

  As he settled in, he would sometimes stop whatever he was doing—holding a fork, touching a doorknob, washing his hands—and get a faraway look in his eyes. “Where are you, Oliver?” Mrs. Bowne would ask. But he would just shake his head and continue—holding a fork, touching a doorknob, washing his hands.

  “How much time?” Oliver asked.

  Somewhere deep down I knew that Oliver’s Blitz story was my story too. My memory in a way. It was the reason Oliver did not believe in childhood. He had lost his
own childhood to war and then to work. What made the story especially tragic was that Oliver never once told it himself. The saddest stories are the ones people tell about others’ tragedies.

  What made the story at all bearable was Mrs. Bowne’s obvious love for Oliver. Of the four war orphans Mrs. Bowne had billeted during the Blitz years, it was clear that Oliver was her favourite. He was the one who came to her a sad lump of putty, forty-five pounds of human clay. He was the one she shaped like a patient sculptor.

  In addition to raising four war orphans, Mrs. Bowne had three children of her own. All of them—Zena, Ramon and Vilma—were named after silent-era movie stars. Zena had married and moved to Mallorca. Ramon worked at a pharmacy on Beckenham High Street but was also an amateur chef. And Vilma was a bus conductress on a London double-decker.

  It didn’t take me long, after arriving at Copers Cope Road, to fall in love with most of the Bownes. Mrs. Bowne, for the way she entertained my big questions such as Does God exist? (“It depends on what you mean by exist. I doubt you’ll smell him, for instance; or hear him cough; or see his shadow . . .”) For her optimistic common sense (the way she still kept a kettle of clean water so there would always be a cup of tea if a bomb fell on the water main). Ramon, who arrived on Sundays with home chemistry demonstrations, like baking soda and vinegar volcanoes. Zena, who sent ceramic cats for her mother’s collection. Even Vilma, who grumbled but still let me click her ticket puncher like a castanet.

  But Mr. Bowne I loved not at all. At every meal, he sat across the table, glowering every time I lifted a forkful of food to my mouth. No matter how much the others treated me as part of the household, he did his best to make me feel unwelcome.

  “He just sits there and stares,” I said one morning to Mrs. Bowne.

  “Who does?” she asked.

  “Mr. Bowne. I don’t think he likes the sight of me.”

  “Oh, don’t you worry. He’ll warm to you soon enough.”