Swimming Lessons(61)

Richard handed her the open book.

“Nicely drawn,” she said. “Good technique.”

She picked another, Thrilling Stories for Girls. On the flyleaf someone had sketched a small barren island surrounded by water. In the style of a textbook diagram the cross-section of the island had been labelled with an “escape shoot” running down through the middle, hidden by a hinged hatch disguised as the island’s peak. Under the water, a “secret submersible” waited for passengers.

“After Mum went, I was embarrassed about how we lived,” Flora said, closing the cover. “The garden like a jungle, the number of books in the house, that I had a sister who behaved like a mother, a father old enough to be my grandfather, who locked himself away with his typewriter but never wrote a word.”

Richard pushed his glasses up his nose and waited.

“I never invited anyone home.” Flora put her heels up on the edge of the sofa, wrapped her arms around her knees. “I didn’t have many friends, but there was one girl, Kathy. I made friends with her so I could go to her house after school rather than come back here.” Flora picked at a scab on her knee. “The first time, when we stood on Kathy’s doorstep, she shuffled her feet and said, ‘There’s something I need to tell you about my mum.’ I remember thinking, Shit, she’s going to say her mother’s disappeared. But she said, ‘My mum’s really fat.’

“She was right; her mum was enormous. She overflowed the sides of her armchair and wore flowery dresses which rode up when she sat down and showed her meaty legs. If someone had pricked them with a fork they would have spat grease. Kathy was apologetic, but I loved her mum. That term I went home with Kathy after school at least twice a week and ate dinner on my lap with her family in front of the telly. I liked to pretend that her car-mechanic brother was my brother, too; that her father, who commuted to a normal job in an office, was my father; that her semidetached estate house was my house. I’m sure now that her mum felt sorry for me, for what had happened, but I didn’t know it at the time. She would give me a hug before I left, and it was like I was sinking into her flesh, as if she could take me into her body and I could become her child. I would lie in bed on the nights I had been to Kathy’s and remember the smell of her mother’s bosom, the whiff of cooked food coming off her clothes and the sweat rising up from her cleavage. Mixed together I thought they made the smell of a mother: carmine pink.”

“Pink?” Richard said, but Flora carried on talking.

“It was Kathy that I first read A Man of Pleasure with, under the bedcovers, shining a torch on the rude bits. I think one of her uncles owned a copy. Most of it went over our heads, of course. It was later I realised the significance of those words at the beginning, and even then I didn’t fully understand.”

Richard began to say something, but Flora interrupted. “Wait. I have to tell you all of it now I’ve started.

“After a few months Kathy hinted that she wanted an invitation to my house in return. She’d say stuff like, ‘Your dad’s famous. I’ve never met anyone famous before,’ or ‘Is it true you live in some swimming changing rooms?’ And I considered what I’d have to tell her on the doorstep about my mum, but I didn’t know how to say it—There’s something I need to tell you: my dad’s a writer who doesn’t write but collects other people’s books, and this is my sister-mother, and by the way my mum’s disappeared, but don’t you dare say she’s dead. She would have known about that, though. Everybody did.

“The last time I visited Kathy’s house one of their neighbours was round. Her mum and this woman were sitting in the kitchen having a cup of tea. Kathy and I were playing at being spies or something; we were listening outside the door, pretending we were riveted by knitting patterns or recipes. Then their conversation changed.

“‘I see Flora’s round again,’ the neighbour said. ‘That poor girl.’”

“‘She comes round nearly every day after school,’ Kathy’s mum said. ‘Can you imagine? It doesn’t bear thinking about. And her father, hiding away in that shack of his, or gadding about goodness knows where.’”

“‘I worry about the older sister,’ we heard the neighbour say. ‘Having to be a mother to a ten-year-old at, what? Fifteen?’”

“‘Oh, but what about that poor little Flora? Losing her mother when she’s still so young.”’

Flora paused in her story, looked across at Richard. His face was blank, still waiting. “Losing her mother,” Flora repeated. “They thought I lost her.”

“It’s just a turn of phrase. They didn’t really think you were responsible . . .” Richard started, but Flora shook her head.

“I stared at Kathy and I was sure she thought that too: my mother disappeared when I should have been watching.

“And I was watching—I was hiding in the gorse, outside the house.” Flora nodded towards the window. “Nan had made sure I caught the school bus that morning, but I got off at the next stop and walked home. I couldn’t wait for Mum to leave the house so I could sneak indoors to get my costume and go for a swim. I watched her go and I didn’t stop her.

“I ran out of Kathy’s house,” Flora continued, talking over Richard. “She called for me to come back, but no one came looking. Perhaps Kathy told them I’d gone home.”