The Queen of Bloody Everything Read online

  ‘Oh, we can manage fancy dress, can’t we, Di?’ You don’t even look at me when I offer an emphatic yes.

  ‘Three o’clock, then. And sorry about the noise.’

  ‘De nada.’ You dismiss the inconvenience as if you are waving off a fly.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  You smile again. ‘Spanish. It means “any time”.’

  By three o’clock I am dressed in a hastily assembled hotchpotch of your old yoga leotard stapled with crêpe paper leaves then safety-pinned to size, topped with a tiara plucked from a silk-lined case. And I am delighted, though unsure as to who or what I am supposed to be.

  ‘Gaia,’ you explain for at least the third time. ‘Mother Earth. The queen of bloody everything.’

  I like being the Queen of Bloody Everything, even in an itchy leotard and a crown that pokes my left ear uncomfortably, and I march regally around the downstairs and then along the path to the door where, behind the wall, things are happening.

  From my bedroom observatory, I’ve already watched a trestle table being laid with a red paper tablecloth and white paper plates, seen the quoits and beanbags set out, noticed the hired-in umbrellas raised for shade. But there has been no sign of Tom or Harry, only their nameless mother and David arguing over the Wendy house, which is, apparently, the wrong sort of pink. But now I can hear squeals and scattergun laughter, the slaps and monotone of a clapping game: I went to a Chinese restaurant to buy a loaf of bread-bread-bread, he wrapped it up in a five-pound note and this is what he said-said-said.

  ‘Come on,’ I plead, my legs jiggling with want.

  ‘Coming,’ you claim. But it will be another four minutes and ten interminable seconds before you appear at the back door in your bikini and a black wig from Great-Aunt Nina’s costume box.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Cleopatra,’ you say, lighting a cigarette from the packet stuck into your bottoms. ‘On holiday.’ You slip the lighter back into your bra top, and turn the handle of the now permanently unlocked gate.

  ‘Shall we?’

  I have seen moments in films, on television, where a person walks into a room and everything goes pin-drop quiet, either because their beauty requires that degree of reverence, or their dastardly deed silent fury. This moment, I think, falls into the latter category.

  I close the gate behind us, thinking that’s what they’re all waiting for – the children with quoits poised in their hands, the mothers by the trestle table with cups of tea. It takes me a moment, after I’ve spotted an Indian, two cowboys, and four princesses, to notice that not one of the grown-ups is in a bikini. Not one of them is in fancy dress at all.

  ‘Bollocks,’ you hiss under your breath and give my hand a squeeze. But I, in my first act of defiance – and disloyalty – do not squeeze back. Instead, sensing the enormity of your mistake, I let go.

  ‘Edie,’ a voice says eventually. ‘And Dido. Glad you could make it.’

  It’s David – Mr Trevelyan – emerging from the kitchen with a plate of sausages on sticks.

  ‘Interesting outfit,’ he says, raising his eyebrows and pulling his lips in to stifle amusement. And in that instant I have a vision of Tom: the same eyes, the same smile, and search frantically and fruitlessly for him in the crowd.

  ‘Sorry,’ he adds, ‘I should have said it was just the kids. But you look great, really.’ He looks at the mother. ‘Doesn’t she, Angela?’

  ‘Angela,’ I say to myself. The word is golden, a precious treasure in my mouth. Because she is – an angel.

  Angela – Mrs Trevelyan – doesn’t answer, just makes the thin-lipped face again. So you, of course you, stride up to her and offer her your hand.

  ‘Edie,’ you say. ‘I think you’ve met my daughter.’

  She takes your hand briefly before dropping it as if it is hot, or dirty. ‘Yes,’ she says. Then, ‘She has my key still. Clearly.’

  ‘She tried to give it back,’ you say. ‘But you were away.’ You take a drag on the cigarette, blow out a lungful of smoke. ‘So where is the birthday girl, anyway?’

  ‘Oh.’ She shakes her head, irritably. ‘In the Wendy house with Tom. She doesn’t like her costume. Says it’s too hot.’

  ‘It’s Gretel,’ David says. ‘You know, German thing. Pinafore.’

  ‘Tom is perfectly fine as Hansel,’ Angela continues, ‘so why she’s making such a fuss about it I don’t know.’

  ‘Tea?’ offers David. ‘Or something stronger?’

  The voices have recovered from the shock of us and rebuilt to a steady hum and tinkle, and I have no idea what you say in reply, or even if you do, because all I can focus on now is the wooden house. I very badly want to see inside, see them. And I, I think to myself, am the Queen of Bloody Everything, so I can do what I bloody well like. And I slip quickly across the neat, beige grass to do just that.

  The house has a real plastic window with red gingham curtains, and smells of paint and newness. Inside I can see Harry sitting cross-legged and crossly on the floor, and can see, too, the end of Tom’s legs sitting opposite her.

  ‘Hello,’ I say, stepping inside. Then add, pointlessly, ‘It’s me.’

  ‘Hello, Dido,’ Tom says.

  Harry says nothing and I notice her face is red and puffed from crying.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I say. ‘If it’s too hot you could take off your knickers. Edie always says that helps.’

  ‘It’s not because it’s hot,’ Tom says knowledgeably. ‘It’s because of it being Gretel and I’m Hansel and it’s her birthday party not ours.’

  ‘Well, it is,’ says Harry. ‘And I never picked the costumes, she just went to the shop and got them.’

  ‘They cost five pounds for three days,’ Tom says. ‘Which is a lot. That’s why Mummy’s cross. And anyway there isn’t a choice because she hasn’t got another.’

  And then I have an idea so brilliant in its simplicity that for a second I really do feel invincible and all-knowing.

  ‘We could swap,’ I say. ‘Me and you.’

  Harry stops sniffing and looks harshly at me, and, like Tom with his father, I see her mother’s thin lips in hers. ‘Who are you even meant to be?’ she says.

  ‘Gaia,’ I say. ‘She’s a queen. Of everything.’ I do not say bloody because I know now from saying it to the man in the corner shop who smells of dog that this is a mind-your-language word and for in-my-head-only.

  ‘You look weird,’ she says eventually.

  ‘But it’s not hot,’ I say. ‘And the leaves rustle.’ I wiggle my hips to prove it.

  And that, plus the crown and the title, are enough, it seems. Because within less than a minute, Harry and I have wriggled out of our outfits, exchanged them, and emerged from the Wendy house, thrilled with our new incarnations, however ill-fitting.

  You are at the trestle table still, but with a glass in your hand now with what could be wine in it, or wee. I have seen both before, from when our water got cut off and the toilet blocked, but, as you are drinking this, not pouring it down the sink, I assume it is wine.

  ‘Oh!’ you exclaim. ‘You’ve swapped. How clever.’

  But not everyone sees the genius in this plan.

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, Harriet,’ Angela snaps. ‘That’s not yours.’

  ‘It’s Dido’s,’ she says. ‘I liked it more.’

  ‘I don’t even know what you’re supposed to be.’

  ‘Mother Earth,’ you say, one eyebrow arched in daring.

  ‘Of course,’ Angela says. ‘Who else? Honestly, Harriet. I’ve got the camera ready so we can have you and Tom and the playhouse. It was all planned.’

  ‘So Dido can be me,’ says Harry, still sing-song happy with her paper leaves and paste diamonds. ‘I don’t care.’

  And that is how the six-year-old me comes to be stuck to our fridge, standing proudly in front of a flamingo-pink Wendy house and flanked by two prouder red-faced parents, not even my own. But do I care that I’m just a stand-in for another girl?
A surrogate for Harry? No, I do not. Because now my hand is in Tom’s; now, you see, I am in the picture, their picture. And you? You are nowhere.

  I will spend the next twenty-seven years trying to recreate the perfection of that Kodak moment, that camera-ready version of my vision of family. I will squander days, weeks, months trying to pull it, rabbit-like, out of a hat; tracking it, trying to follow the trail of breadcrumbs I believe must have been laid for me, if only I look hard enough.

  God, what must you have thought, Edie?

  And yet now, here we are.

  The Princess and the Pea

  June 1977

  It’s June 1977, and the Jubilee. We’re not celebrating because you don’t believe in the Queen or any of the royal family. ‘She’s a bloody sponger,’ you tell me, ‘a drain on society, her and all her inbred offspring.’ And so I slip the sheaf of red-white-and-blue-themed drawings I have painstakingly traced out into the wastepaper basket. But the commemorative coin I queued for – holding out my clammy hand for Mrs Bonnett, and expressing my awe in solemn turn – this I pluck from its plastic case and drop into the dark-glassed Marmite jar with my marble and the various buttons and bits of broken china I have dug up in the hard mud of our now-wilderness.

  I still have these treasures, and more. All squirrelled away in a suitcase under my bed. Found objects, and kept objects; postcards from far-flung places and notes passed under desks in the tick-tock tedium of double physics. And evidence, always evidence. A box of delights, and of danger too, like the Ark of the Covenant it sits, two rusted clasps all there are to keep it from releasing its unfathomable power. But we know where I learned that trick, don’t we? Though your secrets were less conveniently corralled. Instead you scattered them about like so much ephemera, pushed them into crevices, between cracks in the floorboards, or locked them, skeleton-like, in your cupboard.

  But I’ve lost the thread again, strayed from the path, and there was a point to this story.

  The Jubilee summer. Do you remember?

  By June I have never been more in love with the world – with our world. Of course, there is a list of things I would alter, were I in charge: the dust that clings to curtains and coats every flat surface, choking me when it billows from pillows, gathering in a clod on my finger when I draw a ladybird on the mantelpiece; the dirty laundry that piles inelegantly in the corners of our bedrooms, until, exasperated, you finally pull out the terrifying twin tub and spend a day sweating over suds with a pair of wooden tongs as long as my arm; the persistence with which you demolish my book fort and filing system, knocking over ramparts, dropping unread copies of Crompton carelessly on my ‘finished’ pile, pushing Blyton back on a shelf between Dahl and Dickens.

  But, while I covet the Lodge, with its sharp lines and neat piles and air fresheners in every room, where the beds are always made, the toilet always lemon-clean, and the overall effect one of walking onto the set of a television sitcom, I am happy with our house. Because it is just that: ours. There are no strangers asleep on sofas or, worse, in our bed when I wake up; no kitchen thieves to ‘borrow’ my bananas, or make my Milky Bar disappear in a foolish lapse of concentration. We are lords of all we survey, Queens of Bloody Everything, and my future, it feels, is assured.

  Until one Saturday in Jubilee June.

  Because while I revel in the peace, you have been going quietly spare. You wander restlessly, an unsettled cat, so that I am almost scared to let you out in case you don’t come home; I remember a story in a comic about buttered paws, and wonder idly if it might work on you.

  ‘I miss London,’ you announce at breakfast.

  ‘I don’t,’ I say quickly. ‘It smelled weird and I saw a man do a poo in the road.’

  To my relief you laugh. ‘Oh God, I’d forgotten that,’ you say. ‘But still, you’ll be the one begging to go back when you’re sixteen and climbing the walls.’

  The image is compelling as I see a supersized sixteen-year-old me scaling the ceiling like a spider girl. ‘No, I won’t,’ I snap. ‘And anyway we’re not going because we live here now, so there.’

  ‘Christ, Dido, I only said I missed it, not that we’re getting the next bloody train.’

  But despite your reassurance, so scared am I of losing it all – the house, the Lodge, this life – that I lock myself in the bathroom and refuse to come out until you agree to my demands.

  ‘What are they?’ you ask, half amused, half weary.

  ‘To always live here forever,’ I say. ‘Unless we move into the Lodge.’

  ‘Well, that’s never going to happen,’ you tell me. ‘And I can’t promise we’ll always live here either. Not forever. What about when you go to university?’

  ‘I shan’t go,’ I reply.

  ‘Your call,’ you say, a frequent mantra and one that Harry revels in with its offer of free choice, but one I secretly resent, preferring rules and boundaries so that I know where I stand.

  ‘Then I’m not coming out.’

  ‘You’ll starve,’ you try.

  ‘I’ve got garibaldi biscuits,’ I snap. ‘And I can drink water from the tap so I won’t die of thirst either, if that’s what you’re hoping.’

  ‘I’m really not, Di,’ you say. ‘In fact, I think this is marvellous. Your first protest. Wait until I tell Toni.’

  At these words, I know I have lost. But I still manage an entire morning until the pull of the Pipkins theme tune being played loudly from the living room becomes too much to bear and I unlatch the door and stomp down to the sofa, refusing your arm around me, but accepting the cheese on toast you offer as a peace treaty of sorts.

  ‘What if I asked them here instead?’ you ask after a while. ‘Toni and . . . the others.’

  I try to focus on Hartley and Topov, try not to let the butterflies in my stomach flap their frantic wings again. ‘What others?’ I say.

  ‘I don’t know, Denzil? Chinese Clive maybe?’

  ‘He won’t want to come,’ I say. ‘There’s no pork balls.’

  ‘Probably not,’ you assure me. ‘But I’ll ask anyway.’

  So it is in this precarious landscape that I find myself in Jubilee week: a world and future I had assumed was assured now ever so slightly in the balance. Because, despite the lack of readily available takeaway, Chinese Clive has agreed to come, and so have Toni and Denzil and, to my serious concern, Maudsley Mick.

  ‘We can have an alternative Jubilee,’ you say. ‘Without the Queen.’

  I sigh in exaggerated disappointment, because what, I think, is the point of a Queenless Jubilee? But by Saturday afternoon, my sulking has slipped into a frenzy of anticipation. Not for our party, which I am still studiously ignoring, but because they are late, and you are weakening.

  While you skulk inside in the half-cool of the house, I hang over the gate, mouth gaping at our neighbours as they troop round the corner in their paper crowns and fake ermine, waving plastic flags and bearing paper plates of fresh-from-the-oven sausage rolls and neat, shiny halves of devilled eggs. It is not so much the festival I feel I am missing out on, as the food. At home you are in a determined grow-your-own phase and every meal is accompanied by a mound of bitter, stringy mung beans from the cultivator on the counter, and a dollop of home-made hummus. But out there are Wagon Wheels and Majestic wafers, packets of Salt ’n’ Shake crisps, and bottles of Corona cream soda or, even better, Sodastream. Harry’s father brought one home and let us all have a go, making cola and Irn-Bru and cherryade until the six ridged bottles were filled and capped and lined up in the door of their enormous fridge. In ours sits a pint of silver top, a carton of orange juice and a half-empty bottle of vodka, the last of which you are drinking right now.

  ‘I wish they’d all bloody shut up,’ you snap from the sofa. ‘God, I can hear Mrs Lovejoy from a mile off, she’s like Foghorn flaming Leghorn.’

  But I ignore you, as well as your demands to stop staring and come inside, and shut the bloody door at least, and carry on swinging backwards and forwards,
feet firmly wedged between the wooden struts as I watch the world go by without me.

  By three o’clock you can bear it no more and tell me to ‘Just bugger off there, then, but don’t expect me to join in. If anyone needs me, I’ll be here. Plotting a bloody republic.’

  And bugger off I do.

  The seats at the tables are all taken so I squeeze between Harry and Tom, nudging my bum onto a quarter of her wooden chair, a sum that does not quite add up, however hard I try.

  ‘I thought you couldn’t come,’ says Tom.

  ‘Edie said,’ affirms Harry. ‘Because of the Queen being horrible.’

  Two seats down, Mrs Payne, mother of Brian and owner of a gravity-defying hairdo, glares pointedly at me. I didn’t say it, I think. Harry did. But it is never Harry’s fault, I am beginning to discover.

  ‘She’s not horrible,’ I say quietly. ‘Just why should she be in charge and have loads of money instead of me or you?’

  ‘We do have quite a lot of money,’ says Harry. ‘Daddy said we’re getting a new car next month. A Cortina.’

  ‘What about the Capri?’ I ask, thinking of its sleek pleather seats and the satisfying clunk-click of seat belts into slots; its smell of tobacco and newness and success.

  ‘Someone poorer will get it,’ says Harry matter-of-factly. ‘Maybe you could have it?’

  ‘Harry!’ protests Tom.

  ‘What?’ she asks, genuinely baffled.

  ‘I’ll ask Edie,’ I say. ‘When I get back. She can’t come because she’s waiting for Toni.’

  ‘Who’s Toni?’ Tom asks.

  ‘Duh. Her mum’s best friend,’ answers Harry. ‘The lesbian.’

  Mrs Payne’s face flushes from pale blancmange to raspberry jelly and she casts a glance for Mrs Trevelyan to intervene. But Angela is conveniently serving pineapple on sticks to the Lawson twins and is blissfully unaware of the X-rated conversation at our end of the trestle table.

  ‘What’s a lesbian?’ asks Tom.

  ‘They kiss other women,’ I say. ‘But they can’t marry them or have babies.’

  ‘Because no sperm,’ hisses Harry.