LITMIR.BIZ

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the metal racks. My hands were raw pink from the hot water, my fingertips grooved with wrinkles like raisins. My father was out at work: I never saw him on Saturday mornings.

      ‘Water!’ came a muffled roar from inside the oven. I scrambled to obey. My other task was to keep the plastic washing-up bowl full of fresh water so Mrs Owen could rinse her cloth. ‘I think your father imagines it’s the fairies do this.’ Her head was still inside the oven. ‘This bit’s a tough ol’ bugger. Is that water clean?’ I squatted beside her, the water slopping over the sides of the bowl. The strong, sharp smell of oven-cleaner made my eyes water. Mrs Owen shuffled backwards on her knees and her stiff grey curls emerged from the oven. She looked like a human Brillo pad.

      ‘You ought to be out with your friends, petal,’ she grumbled, plunging her cloth vigorously into my bowl. More water slopped out on to the newspaper. ‘Bleedin’ Jesus, now look at my dress.’ She laughed, a big child cheerfully splashing in puddles. ‘One more go.’ Her wire-wool head disappeared again.

      I settled back on my haunches and sat cross-legged on the floor, balancing the bowl on my lap, always the handmaiden to Mrs Owen’s domestic priestess. My dad didn’t think it was the fairies who cleaned and dusted and washed the sheets; he thought it was me.

      The radio was on in the front room, and I could hear crackles of laughter and applause. We always turned it on when Mrs Owen came round because the clock in the kitchen didn’t work, and I had to keep listening out for the pips at the beginning of the lunch-time news, because then it was time for Mrs Owen to wash her hands, shake her soggy dress and vanish as utterly as an elf before my father came home.

      With a final grunt, she emerged, holding aloft her greasy cloth. I proffered the bowl. She plunged and wrung. I put the bowl down and we both plucked at our sopping chests.

      ‘I don’t know what your dad cooks in there but it’s always filthy.’

      Mrs Owen didn’t believe my father could cook, so she supplemented our diet with homemade casseroles and slightly leaden Victoria sponges. She blamed my lack of height on poor nutrition, which was not true. My mother was petite. There was a photograph of her on honeymoon in Cromer. My dad, arm round her shoulders to protect her from the cold Norfolk winds, towered above her, though he was not especially tall.

      Mrs Owen crumpled the newspaper and tossed it into the bin. She peeled off her rubber gloves, and fumbled in her pocket for cigarettes. She wouldn’t smoke one: she just liked to remind herself they were there. ‘You’ve made a good job of those,’ she said, eyeing the racks. They gleamed. ‘Stick ’em back in the oven, and we’ll have a nice cup of coffee.’

      A drink and a chat were Mrs Owen’s only reward for her labours, and I never had the heart to refuse. I filled the kettle.

      ‘Not too strong, petal,’ Mrs Owen warned. ‘Gives me palpitations.’ She settled herself at the table. I knew she would have liked that cigarette, but my father didn’t smoke, and the scent of tobacco mixed with the cleaning smells would get us both into trouble.

      The kitchen in our house was small, and hadn’t been altered since my father and mother had moved in after I was born in 1962. There was just room for the red Formica-topped table and two red plastic chairs. The cream paint on the units was chipped, and the plywood cupboards on the walls had sliding doors that had warped and sometimes got stuck half open. I hadn’t been able to close the one from which I’d taken the coffee jar, and I saw Mrs Owen staring thoughtfully at it. ‘Time your dad redecorated,’ she said, as I put the coffee in front of her.

      I imagined the smouldering Gary Bennett, on a ladder slapping paint on the ceiling while I watched his overalls tightening over his muscular bum every time he lifted his arm. I knew it wouldn’t happen. My dad wouldn’t pay someone else to decorate; he’d be up the ladder himself. Or, more likely, he wouldn’t do it at all.

      ‘He always says he’s too busy,’ I said, hoping this would prompt Mrs Owen to talk about Gary, who had recently done her kitchen. But she wasn’t so easily led.

      ‘And them cupboards ought to go,’ she said. ‘Don’t cost much to buy a whole new kitchen from MFI. Wouldn’t take a practical man like him long.’

      Poppy’s mother had ordered a German-made kitchen that had cost more than a thousand pounds. It had little violet and green sprigs of flowers on the doors, and a lovely marbled worktop. But Poppy’s kitchen was three times the size of ours, and there was a swimming-pool in their garden. Her dad drove a big grey Daimler, and her mum had a sky-blue estate as a runaround.

      ‘You are quiet,’ said Mrs Owen. ‘What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?’

      ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Tired. Didn’t sleep too good.’

      ‘Your father should never have sent you to that school.’ Mrs Owen’s brow corrugated like her curls. ‘It’s wicked how hard they work you. And you always with your nose in a book. I don’t know, mine were never like you.’ Mrs Owen’s two daughters had both married sensible milkmen. They’d met them together at a dance in the church hall, and had moved into neighbouring streets to raise fat, milky babies. Their idea of serious reading was the knitting pattern in Woman’s Weekly. ‘What I say is, what’s the point of teaching girls about science?’

      My fingers traced an ammonite’s spiral on the tabletop. I was keeping an ear open for the pips.

      Mrs Owen took the hint and lumbered to her feet, her coffee only half finished.

      ‘Better be off. Keith’ll be on his way.’ She always pretended she was going because her husband would be home soon, rather than my father. ‘My goodness, it’s gone black over Bill’s mother’s.’ She peered out of the kitchen window at the gathering rainclouds. ‘Switch the light on, Katie, let the dog see the rabbit.’

      She was always coming out with these weird phrases, invocations to appease the everyday gods of women’s things and weather. I peeled myself from the plastic chair and got up to find a clean tea-towel while she rinsed the mugs.

      ‘Your dad’ll be soaked. Give him my best, won’t you?’ She knew full well I never told him she’d been there.

      As she put the mugs away, I had a sudden urge to give her a hug, yearning for the feeling of her big soggy bosom against my cheek. But that wasn’t something I ever did. She ruffled the top of my head when she went past me on her way to the door, and like a cat I pushed up against her hand. That was the closest we came to physical affection. When I heard the front door close behind her, I sat down again at the table and thought about my mother.

      My last memory of my mother isn’t even a memory. It’s more a feeling of being warm and enclosed, the details so sharp yet at the same time insubstantial that I may have made the whole thing up. It’s Christmas, or near it, I think–there are lots of glittery things around, and I can see firelight on shining spheres. A rack of clothes is drying in front of the fire, wet mittens, socks and my little blue coat, giving off a damp woollen smell. I’ve been playing out in the snow, but now it’s dark and time for bed, and I’ve eaten a bowlful of something sloppy and sweet and comforting that’s a bright orange-yellow. I’m wearing my pyjamas, and I’m sleepy, curled up on the wing backed sofa, and my mother is reading to me, a story about Wynken, Blynken and Nod, three fishermen who are being rocked to sleep in the arms of a crescent moon sailing through the sky like a boat. Or was it a wooden

      shoe? I am drifting too, wrapped in the wet, warm smell of the steaming clothes.

      Whether that was the last time I had seen my mother I wasn’t sure, but it was what I remembered as the last. Before the New Year she was gone. Every December after that my father brought out the packets of tinsel, the lantern-shaped Christmas-tree lights that always seemed to fuse and that he patiently fixed, year after year. But it was never the same. The unearthly boat in which Wynken, Blynken and Nod sailed the skies had taken away my mother too.

      My father never talked about how she had left, or why.

      ‘She’s gone away,’ he said vaguely, if I cried

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