Lily Alone by Vivien Brown

Author:Vivien Brown [Vivien Brown]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2017-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Ruby

My mother has black hair. I think it’s black. Although she’s right here in the room with me, I can’t see her very clearly. She keeps turning her back, walking away from me and then, just when I think she’s gone, she comes back again, another day, with some dirty second-hand doll in her arms, or a bunch of over-ripe bananas.

Her name is Dorothy. I know that because Mrs Castle calls her that as she pours the tea, but I just call her Mummy. She smells of cheap soap, or maybe it’s talcum powder, and too many peppermints – and booze. I don’t know if I knew that then, but I know it now. I think it’s gin. Sweet, almost like perfume; on her breath, her clothes, her skin. The soapy smell wafts alongside it but doesn’t disguise it.

Mummy wears flat shoes with soft bendy soles. They are not always very clean, but they are always very quiet. I think that’s why I don’t hear her leave sometimes. I feel the silence, look round from playing with the doll, and she’s gone. The tea is still warm in the cup, and she’s hardly sipped it. I run to the window and climb onto a chair and I can see she’s already out of the gate, the top of her head showing over the tall hedge, bobbing up and down as she walks away, tipping back to face the sun as she swigs something from a bottle. I feel Mrs Castle’s arm behind me, steadying the chair, making sure I don’t fall. She does a lot of that. Steadying. She’s very good at it.

‘Shall we go and make some cakes, Ruby?’ she says. ‘Pink or white icing? You choose.’ In the kitchen, I pound the spoon around in the bowl, crushing the sugar into the marg, crash the eggs against the side, and try to get rid of the smell of her. But it’s there on the doll. When I pick her up, it’s in her dress, in her matted, nylon, second-hand hair.

I start to cry, right into the bowl, tiny trickly raindrops landing on a bed of flour, and I mix them in quickly so they disappear and I can pretend everything’s going to be all right, and wonder whether the cakes will taste of my tears.

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