Lying In Bed

by Polly Samson

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction; Short Stories; Women's Fiction; Mystery; Suspense

Synopsis

Do you cover up or reveal it all; seek revenge or just reassurance; let the truth be naked as the day or cloaked in a night-time story? The men and women of Polly Samson's debut fiction all have stories to tell, pasts to forget, futures to forge. Manipulative or meek, used or using, all are aware of the power of truth, deception and little white lies to get what they want or sometimes what they deserve. Some are concerned with the economies of speech, those little 'kindnesses' which protect our loved ones but really ourselves; some investigate the warped logic which adults serve out to children to keep them 'innocent'; all are concerned with the beds we make and the lies we tell in them. . .

Release date: December 2, 2010

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 224

Sample

 

She had long since stopped looking into her father’s eyes for a twinkle. That was for kids. She knew precisely where babies came from, how they were made and even how they were prevented from being made. Her mother had fooled her when she was still a kid, wasted so much of her time, with the oft-repeated: ‘This all happened when you were just a twinkle in your father’s eye,’ when she reminisced about her glory days protesting outside the American Embassy or about the terror of the air raids in London, for example. The girl felt foolish whenever she remembered how she used to frame her father’s face in her stubby hands, searching his eyes, longing for that elusive twinkle and the baby brother or sister it would bring.

Her fury when all this twinkle stuff was revealed as nonsense had strengthened her mother’s resolve to be honest with her daughter, so she took her into her bed and explained the facts of life, peppering her account of conception with the word love:

‘When a mummy and daddy love each other they cuddle in bed at night.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Well, sometimes they love each other so much that they want to get even closer and, well …’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, then the daddy puts his willy inside the mummy’s special place. It’s called making love and sometimes it makes a baby.’

‘But how does that make a baby?’ asked the girl, enjoying the combination of her mother’s discomfort and the warmth of her body.

Not for the first time, the girl’s mother found herself wishing that the job of parenting were more equally shared with her husband. With a deep sigh she explained about sperm (‘love seeds’, she said) and eggs while her daughter looked doubtful. ‘That’s how a baby is made,’ she said, finally.

‘Honest truth?’ said the girl, and her mother held out her hands to show that her fingers were not crossed.

‘Honest truth,’ she said. ‘That is how you were made.’

The girl snuggled closer, savouring the familiar warm, carroty smell of her mother’s skin.

‘Do you and Daddy ever make love?’ she asked.

Her mother laughed, squeezed her tighter.

‘Oh yes, often,’ she said.

Now this was all very well, thought the girl, but if they made love often as her mother claimed, then why did she not have brothers and sisters. It was all highly suspicious, just like that ‘twinkle in your father’s eye’ stuff before. Resigned and embarrassed, her mother explained about condoms and then suggested that the girl should help her shell peas in the kitchen.

A few months later, the girl discovered her father’s condoms. She hadn’t been looking for them but was rifling through his bedside cupboard in search of the bitter chocolate German biscuits that he sometimes hid there. On previous raids, she had noticed the sky-blue conical tin but her panic about the biscuits had prevented her from looking inside. But on this day, she had time to survey all the contents of his cupboard while her parents were digging potatoes in the vegetable garden. She could see them there out of the window, backs bent, as she leafed through a stack of old sepia photographs (all very boring, mainly of children she didn’t recognise in starchy-looking overalls playing in a garden). There was a passport, some playing cards and some bottles of pills. Her parents were still digging. She unscrewed the top of the blue tin and found inside five identical foil wrappers of the same shade of blue. ‘Durex Elite Condoms’ was printed on each.

This discovery set the girl on an obsessive daily ritual. Without fail, when she returned from school, she would sneak into her parents’ bedroom and count the foil packages. She didn’t have a clue what ‘often’ meant but she knew that if the numbers decreased then her parents still loved each other and would not get divorced as she so often heard her mother threatening, her fiery rage not taking account of the terrified child in the next room. Once, about a year after the ritualistic stock control started, there had been six condoms there for sixteen days. She became morose and jumpy. She plagued her mother, asking her, again and again, ‘You do still love Daddy, don’t you?’ until one of the sky-blue packages was, at last, missing.

When the school Easter holidays started, the girl discovered that she could not get on with her day until she had found a moment’s peace to count her father’s condoms. She would linger over French toast, watching her mother reading the Guardian; turning the pages and sighing, as though the whole world were her family, and each piece of bad news a personal bereavement. She knew that as soon as her mother finished reading the news, she would take her coffee and settle with the crossword, a pencil and the dictionary in a fat black chair in the sitting room. She hated to be interrupted while she was working at this and the girl was happy to oblige, taking the opportunity to check up on her parents’ love life.

The house where they lived was a former vicarage built of thick grey granite slabs and nine miles from the nearest town. It was rare that other children would be invited to play – her mother disliked small talk and therefore most of her schoolfriends’ parents too, describing them to her husband as ‘petit bourgeois’. In any case she was too busy for children’s tea parties, what with the crossword and writing her book in the afternoons. The girl was busy too.

Each day, once she had counted the condoms, she had her market stall to attend to. Next to the vicarage was a small paddock, full of the sort of things that passers-by might need. The girl would take empty yoghurt pots, silver foil, old colour supplements, scraps of Christmas wrapping paper, sellotape, scissors and needle and thread into the paddock. She bound together elaborate arrangements of primroses, sorrel and laurel leaves, placing them into the pots, which she covered with silver foil. Then she would scout along the Cornish hedges looking for the elusive miniature violets that grew beyond the bushes of hawthorn and gorse. These she would sew neatly on to the yoghurt pots, alternating them with daisies when she couldn’t find enough violets. From gnarled rhododendron twigs she made frames for the pictures of horses, dogs and babies that she cut carefully from the magazines. She filled old shampoo bottles with water and added the coconut-scented yellow buds of gorse and tiny blue eyebrights.

These treasures she would take to the milk churn stand of the disused dairy along the lane. Each item would be neatly labelled with its price and she would arrange and rearrange them as she sat on the cold stone stand, waiting. It was the remoteness of the Old Vicarage that had attracted her parents to it in the first place; the closure of the tin mines in the previous century had more or less sounded the death knell for the entire village. There was no reason for anyone to pass by and the girl would soon move on to her next activity of the day. This was lying in the middle of the road with her eyes shut, imagining a car speeding along the tiny lane and the excitement of having to jump out of its way. Once she slept there for over two hours.

After her picnic lunch – usually peanut butter sandwiches and lemon barley water, which she prepared for herself as her mother didn’t eat in the daytime – she had her visiting to do.

Charles, Henry and Lucy lived next door. Actually they didn’t live. Next door was the Victorian churchyard. Only a churchyard, now disused and without a church since it had been burned down in unexplained circumstances after the congregation dwindled to such an extent that the church was deconsecrated. The last vicar committed suicide. When the police arrived, they found him in a pool of his own blood, both wrists cut from the heel of his hands to his elbows, his wife beside him, knitting. It was said that you could still hear the clack of her needles in the vicarage on the anniversary of his death; the girl marked the date on her wardrobe door.

Charles and Lucy were brother and sister. Their headstones were simple granite slabs, covered in moss. Lichen clung to the carved inscriptions of their names and dates. Charles Bolitho 1822–1828 (he was six) and Lucy Bolitho 1823–1831 (she was eight). All the graves were unattended; docks and nettles ran wild; many of the headstones were crumbling. The girl had been drawn to Charles and Lucy when she was chasing a Red Admiral butterfly the summer before. The grass was up to her knees and she almost tripped over Lucy’s headstone. Later the same day, she discovered Henry’s grave. He was often her favourite of the three children. Henry’s headstone was also of granite but was carved into a cross. It, too, was overgrown but she had picked away at the moss with the buckle of her sandal and discovered that Henry Worsfold was only four and had been born in 1819. She wished that she could move Henry closer to Charles and Lucy. She knew that he was lonely and wanted someone to play with.

As no one ever called by to buy her primroses and violets, the girl would share them, dividing them fairly between the three children. Henry was the only one who liked peanut butter, so she made honey sandwiches for Charles and Lucy. She wished that her father had more chocolate biscuits because then she could take some for them, too. But he would notice if she took four each time she raided the packet, so she brought them the plain digestives that her mother used for making lemon cheesecake and didn’t mention the chocolate biscuits for fear of making them jealous. Sometimes she brought a book and read to them, but mostly she sat quietly. When her parents had a particularly violent row, which was about once a month, she would find solace in telling Lucy and Charles about it; but she kept the details from Henry, who was too young to understand. One of the two nicest things that happened during the holiday was when she found a small, perfect blackbird’s egg on Charles’ grave. It was a delicate blue, speckled with dark brown.

The other thing that most pleased her that Easter happened just two days after the blackbird egg. A baby jackdaw, small as a budgerigar, had fallen from its nest in the beech tree that shadowed Henry’s grave. The girl found it, flapping one wing hopelessly in a tangle of grass, its black beak opening and shutting, its visible eye piercing her. She wrapped it in her cardigan and ran with it to her mother’s study. ‘You may keep it, if you must, but it won’t live,’ warned her mother. ‘The kindest thing you can do is put it out of its misery now.’

The girl would not countenance such a murder and felt sure that she could nurture the jackdaw. After all, it already had a name: Jackanory was what she decided on while still running from the churchyard.

She made a nest for the baby jackdaw with the broken wing in one of the kitchen drawers. She padded the nest with an old grey bath towel and put a saucer of water by its beak. She didn’t much like worms but she dug in the vegetable garden until she found some small enough to handle and tried to tempt the jackdaw, with a pair of chopsticks substituting for its mother’s beak. It neither ate nor drank. In fact it did very little except try to peck her whenever she lifted it up to inspect its wing or change its lying position. When her father returned from work, late and flustered, he agreed that it would be kinder to wring its neck.

Supper that night was an uncomfortable affair. Her mother slammed dishes on the table, her father left the casserole mostly untouched. The girl could feel a familiar, ominous blackness sweeping over her mother. She hoped it wasn’t her fault, she hoped it wasn’t because she had insisted on keeping the jackdaw. Most of all, she hoped that there wasn’t going to be an explosion. She hated that more than anything. She couldn’t bear seeing her mother lose control. It always felt so dangerous.

At bedtime, she tried to cheer herself up by drinking hot chocolate from the delicate porcelain cup that had contained her Easter egg. All the other mugs in the house were ancient stoneware, brown and chipped. This one was white and decorated with pink roses. She went to bed early and lay there, terrified, singing to herself from The Sound of Music.

The row started soon after, building from a low rumble in the kitchen to the predictable crescendo of her mother’s screams. It was one of the bad ones and soon the girl could hear the smashing of crockery. Involuntarily, her foot started beating a tattoo against the mattress, like a rabbit in terror. Pat pat pat pat pat. A steady beat as the shouting and destruction carried on below. Suddenly she remembered her Easter cup. She had left it on the table.

With her heart pounding, she crept to the bottom of the stairs and peered through the crack in the kitchen door. The crashes were regular now, filling the pauses between her mother’s venomous words:

‘I … crash … have … crash … had … crash … enough … of … you … crash … Do something … You … think … I should … crash … be … crash … happy … Never … crash … crash … crash …’

She was standing by the open cupboards where the crockery was stacked. The girl’s father was surrounded by broken shards, his arms raised around his head protectively, crouching by the washing machine and trying to make himself heard above the furore. The girl could see her treasured china cup on the kitchen table. Her mother was still screaming as she reached again inside the cupboard. Nothing. She knew what her mother would do. When it happened it was . . .