Lying in Wait(30)
Her eyes brightened and warmth returned to her face, and I began to hope that she might soon be back to her old self.
One day, I returned from school to find that my grandmother had bought me a whole new set of casual clothing. Her choices were surprisingly fashionable: proper jeans, jackets, Tshirts, sweatshirts, pullovers. I was used to elasticated waists and plus-size jumpers.
‘Don’t you ever look in the mirror?’ she said.
The answer was no. Usually I avoided the mirror, or else only took in isolated parts – the recurring spot on my chin, the bruise on my knee where I’d been pushed against the wall at school, the tuft of hair behind my left ear that refused to be flattened by Brylcreem or comb.
‘Go up and try them on,’ she said. ‘I can return anything that doesn’t fit.’
I went up to Mum’s room because there was a full-length mirror in there. Even as I passed the mirror to lay the clothes on the bench, I got quite a surprise. The person looking back at me was unfamiliar. I won’t exaggerate, I was still fat, but I had certainly lost some chins and a few rolls of flab around my stomach. My face had structure and I could see the rounded top of my cheekbones. With the increased physical activity and tiny portions, I should have expected to be losing weight. I had noticed that my collars had loosened up, but the elasticated waistbands had obviously adjusted by themselves. Helen had said something about how she was glad that I was making an effort for her, but I hadn’t understood until now what she meant. Most of the new clothes fitted well. I looked, for the first time in over two years, merely chubby, as opposed to obese. Maybe my Star Wars T-shirt would fit now.
I stood back and did a twirl, and when I turned again to face the mirror, Granny Fitz was standing in the doorway, looking at me with pride and satisfaction.
‘You’re almost there. That’s what you’re supposed to look like. I know I’ve been hard on you, but I needed you to see what you could be, without making you self-conscious about it.’
I was tongue-tied. If this had been a film, I would have run over and hugged her, but it wasn’t. My grandmother was not the tactile type. We had never exchanged hugs or kisses. We stood smiling awkwardly at each other.
‘Your mother is coming home on Tuesday. She is better than she has been since Andrew’s death,’ she sniffed. ‘I’m sure she cares about you, but you mustn’t allow yourself to get into that condition again. You could be a very handsome young man. Look!’ She indicated the mirror.
I looked hard and saw the man and not the boy. But the boy in me was excited. Mum was better! I couldn’t wait for things to get back to normal, whatever the new normal was going to be, without Dad. I beamed at Granny, and for a moment there was a truce. And then she ruined everything by turning me to face the mirror and saying, ‘See? You are just the image of your father.’
The Saturday morning before my mother’s homecoming, we were in the kitchen and Granny pointed to the flower bed beyond the window. ‘That’s still a mess. Would you go out and fix it up? When was it planted?’
I couldn’t remember exactly, but I knew it hadn’t been there for that long before Dad died. I grumbled and delayed, but Granny insisted. ‘I can’t believe Andrew left it like that with random plants just dumped into the earth. Go on out and dig the whole thing up. There’s some dahlia tubers ready to go in the potting shed. It all needs to be replanted. Go on now, it will be a nice surprise for your mother. You can do it on your study breaks.’
It was April now, almost Easter, and it was still whip cold outside, though there had been no frost that week. I wrapped up in a woolly hat and cardigan and Dad’s wellington boots, and fetched the shovel and rake from the shed. As I began to dig at the edge of the raised bed, I discovered a granite border about six inches below the surface. I remembered old black-and-white photographs of an ornamental pond at this spot with a bird bath at its centre, and it occurred to me that maybe it would cheer up Mum if I could restore the pond to its former glory.
I consulted with Granny and she was fully encouraging. I didn’t have the first clue how to go about it though, so before I dug any further, I took myself off to the library and borrowed A Complete Guide to Garden Ponds. Granny and I pored over the right way to approach it, and I had to go back into town to buy some rubber sheeting with which to line the pond.
On Sunday, having spent the morning pretending to study, I started digging again in earnest. I was excited by how pleased Mum would be. Reinstating the pond would take a few weeks, but it was a project that she might take an interest in. She would be proud of my efforts and see that she didn’t need Dad to do everything around the house. My mother always liked to have Avalon perfectly preserved, exactly how it was in her childhood. A few modern conveniences had been acquired over the years, like a dishwasher and washing machine, but Mum would have nothing to do with them until the cleaners had to be let go after Paddy Bloody Carey had done his worst. I thought that the restored pond would delight her. The stone bird bath had lain wrapped in hessian in the corner of the shed since long before I was born. I didn’t want to get too ambitious, but I thought that later, in the summer, with a bit of expert advice, I could re-install that too.
The instructions in the pond manual suggested that I needed to dig down quite deep, about four feet, because a brick layer had to go under the rubber sheeting, to allow for earth shifting and ground stability. But then my spade hit something odd, and I could see some kind of fabric under a half-torn piece of black plastic, peeking through the soil. I brushed the earth back with my father’s boot, curious and irritated at the same time. I didn’t immediately recognize the herringbone pattern. I bent down to pick it up. And then the stench hit me.