The Storyteller's Daughter Read online

  “It’s by some guy who used to be in the SAS. It’s all about interrogation techniques.”

  Mark plonks the book on top of the stack that I am already struggling to hold.

  “Parts of that one might be a little extreme for domestic purposes though, and I wouldn’t recommend reading it right before going to bed.”

  I gaze at the scary looking military man on the front cover and wonder what on earth Mark is expecting me to do. Wire my mother’s extremities to the microwave? Threaten her with an electric mixer? I know exactly what has brought this on, and in a way it’s my own fault. I may have slightly deceived Mark by suggesting that, as agreed, I contacted Camden Council (when I didn’t) and said I wanted to speak to someone about a Chinese takeway (which doesn’t exist) and that I quoted the law that Mark told me to quote (which I can’t even remember) and that after many, many attempts I hadn’t got anywhere and was forced to give up. This resulted in much indignation on Mark’s part about the state of local government offices, and an adamant decision that if one method for obtaining the truth doesn’t work, rather than wasting time you simply find an alternative. I am assuming that donning a balaclava and threatening my mother into submission is the alternative.

  He smiles at me, awaiting my response.

  “What can I say?” I smile. “Thanks.”

  “I knew you’d be pleased. I thought long and hard about the kind of books that would be both practical, and keep your spirits up.”

  He leans his face toward me and I kiss him quickly on the lips, whilst struggling under the weight of the books.

  “It’s a good job you know me so well,” I say, gratefully.

  “Shall we take our dessert outside?” I ask, after Mark and I have eaten a rather poor example of a vegetable lasagne, prepared all by myself in my mother’s absence. Having been in rather good spirits all morning, she suddenly seemed to take a turn for the worse as soon as Mark arrived and immediately took to her bed, leaving me to put four weeks of intensive cookery lessons into practice. I have to admit, I may not be a natural. Fortunately, when it came to transferring ice-cream into two bowls I fared much better.

  “It’s a little chilly outside,” says Mark.

  He’s right. Today is the first of October. The long, hot days have gone, the evenings are drawing in, but I refuse to believe the Summer has ended. I am determined that I will not let it go.

  “No, look, it’s still warm,” I insist flinging open the back door, a chill breeze immediately bringing me out in goose bumps. “We could snuggle up under a blanket on a sun lounger. It will be romantic.”

  “It’s not good for the digestion, eating like that.”

  “Ok, we’ll sit on the bench then.”

  “You know I’m not keen on eating outside. All those little flies... ”

  “It’s too late in the Summer for flies.”

  “It looks like it might be starting to spit rain.”

  “What harm will that do?” I ask, suddenly feeling strangely impulsive. “It’s just a little water. It will dry.”

  Mark looks at me as if I have gone mad, and for a moment I wonder if I have. I feel desperate to eat outside, just like my mother and I have done almost every day during the Summer. French toast in the bright morning sunlight, bacon and avocado sandwiches in the midday heat, linguine with seafood watching the sunset…

  “Let’s make the most of the Summer,” I plead.

  “The Summer’s over,” says Mark, tucking into his ice-cream at the kitchen table. “It’s nearly dark.”

  I gaze outside and realise that I can’t see the end of the garden. The apple trees are no more than murky silhouettes in the fading light. I pull my cardigan closer around me, shivering. My heart sinks. Suddenly, I feel overwhelmed by a foreboding sense of change. I cannot recall having ever felt so powerless. I have always prided myself on being capable and strong and in control. But what good are these things to me now? I cannot stop the light from fading, nor the breeze from cooling; I cannot stop the flowers wilting nor the leaves from falling from the trees. Autumn will come, followed by Winter and Spring, and when Summer finally comes round again I won’t recognise it. There will be no scent of baking wafting out of the open windows of this house, no tubs of homemade ice-cream stacking up the freezer trays. There will be no berry-picking as my mother and I chatter about our lives, no lazing in the garden side by side. There will be no nonsense stories about Summers gone by, how July of ’85 was so hot we baked a steak and Guiness pie on the windowsill and all the houseplants started sprouting pineapples and mangoes. There will be no-one to ask me again and again Have you got enough sun lotion on? or Don’t you think you should be wearing a hat? Without all this, how will I even know it is Summer at all?

  “It’s not that dark yet,” I tell Mark, hopefully, staring out into the garden. “There’s still some light left.”

  Behind me, Mark noisily scrapes his spoon around his ice-cream bowl. “Not for long.”

  Defeated, I close the kitchen door. “No, not for long.”

  Chapter 12

  Fuelled by a mouthful of my mother’s mint cake, I crawled all the way from Tottenham high street to Enfield Chase. Or so she says. Crawled in the sense that I was on all fours. In terms of my speed, I pretty much rocketed there.

  For anyone who doesn’t know, mint cake is comprised of boiled sugar with peppermint essence, formed into squares and dipped in melted chocolate. It should never be left within the reach of greedy little babies who will grab and consume anything they can lay their chubby hands on, and this was my mother’s mistake.

  ‘I was just so exhausted,’ she says, ‘being a single mother can sometimes be extremely hard work, you know? So I made a batch of mint cake, like I often did in those days, to give me that extra boost of sugary energy I needed to get me through the day. I only let you out of my sight for a second, and the next thing I knew the police were on the phone telling me that after a high-speed chase they had caught up with you in Enfield.’

  From piecing together reports from the police, local witnesses, the driver of the 192 bus and an RSPCA officer, my mother ascertained that I had undergone quite an adventure for a one-year-old.

  It seems that after helping myself to a square of mint cake, I must have acquired the energy and strength that it took to propel myself up to the front door handle and let myself out of the flat. I then rolled at high speed down three flights of stairs, tumbling past Mr Ginsberg who later said I was such a blur he had mistaken me for a football and shouted up the stairs at those ‘bloody kids from flat 26’ that the next time he caught them kicking a football around he would confiscate it and never give it back. I had then crawled at what was later calculated to be approximately twenty miles per hour along the pavement of the busy high street, causing pedestrians to leap out of the way and a street sweeper to tumble into the gutter, before joining the traffic on the B154. At the Church Street junction, I paid no attention to the traffic lights and cut straight across in front of the oncoming 192 bus, causing the driver to slam on his brakes and radio back to the bus station to say he had just narrowly avoided an accident with a high-speed baby, and could someone possibly come and relieve him of his duty as he was feeling shaken and unfit to drive. By the time he put the radio down I was already long gone and somewhere in Enfield town centre, where an RSPCA officer on patrol had spotted me and was after me in his van, leaning out the window and trying to catch me in a net. Meanwhile, the angry street sweeper had called the police, who came screeching round the corner in two patrol cars just as I eventually ran out of energy outside Enfield Chase railway station and skidded to a halt with steam coming out of my ears. As soon as one of the policemen gathered me up in his arms I fell asleep, and I didn’t wake up for three days.

  ‘I was so embarrassed,’ my mother says, ‘when the officers turned up on my doorstep with you. I hadn’t even noticed you were gone! You were absolutely filthy, and had squashed bugs stuck to your forehead. You smelled funny, as if someth
ing was burning, and the officer said you had obviously over-heated so I put you in the fridge while I made the nice policemen a cup of tea. At first they seemed quite angry with me, but when I explained about the mint cake and gave them a square to try, I could see they were impressed. They both said they got terribly tired on the job, especially doing the night shifts, and that if they had something like my mint cake to keep them going they could catch twice as many criminals. So that’s how I started providing mint cake to the Metropolitan Police force.’

  Ewan takes another bite of his hard mint cake and smiles at my mother.

  “And did it work?” he asks. “Did they catch more criminals?”

  “Oh, yes. There was a dramatic fall in crime that year, but of course nobody ever admitted it was down to the policemen having more energy.”

  “It was down to the major reforms that took place in the police force that year,” I tell Ewan, dryly. “They introduced new legislation – ”

  “That’s just a cover story, Darling,” interrupts my mother, waving her hand dismissively, “you mustn’t believe everything people tell you. It was all down to my mint cake, you mark my word.”

  I shake me head and sigh. “If you say so, Mother.”

  “Well, it’s definitely worked for me,” says Ewan, finishing his mouthful and brushing his sticky hands down on his scruffy jeans. “I’m ready to go again.”

  In a united effort, we three have spent the last two hours gathering all the fruit in the garden in order to cook it, preserve it, freeze it or give it away before the change of season. There is so much that the kitchen work surfaces are already covered with strawberries, apples, plums, raspberries, lettuces, onions, peas, tomatoes… We have used every bit of equipment we can find to gather them in, from bowls and saucepans to plastic washing-up basins and even an old sunhat. The sky is grey with dark clouds hanging overhead, and my back aches from all the crouching and carrying, but mainly I am just worried about my mother. She has persistently brushed aside Ewan’s claims that he can manage alone, and that it is, after all, his job. She insists that she wants to help, that she is perfectly capable of helping, and that although she has been a little under the weather lately, with her chest a little wheezy and her limbs a little achy, she is feeling absolutely fine now and wants to be of use. I know there is no point arguing with her.

  “Let’s go, then” I say, popping the last of my mint cake in my mouth.

  My mother, who has been sitting on the bench beneath the kitchen window, tries to push herself up from her seat, but she is frail and weak, like an old lady instead of a woman who has yet to see her fortieth birthday. She has overdone it this morning and has no strength left. Her miraculous mint cake may well have energised an entire police force, but it has had little effect on her. She struggles and wheezes, looking embarrassed.

  “Mother, look,” I say. I am about to tell her how ridiculous this is, that she is far too ill to be doing physical work and should surely be resting in bed, but Ewan interrupts.

  “You know what might be a really good idea?” he says, hurriedly, placing his hand on my mother’s shoulder to stop her standing. “If you sort out the stuff we’ve already picked. We’re running out of bowls and pans, and there’s hardly any space left in the kitchen.”

  My mother smiles up at him, looking rather relieved at this suggestion.

  “Well, I suppose there’s no point picking more if we haven’t anywhere to put it, is there? Are you sure you can do without me though? I’m quite ready to keep going if you need me.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” says Ewan, cheerfully, “you can out-pick me any day. You’ve already put me to shame this morning.”

  This, of course, is rubbish. My mother has, despite her best efforts, picked very little, and has spent most of the morning wandering wearily in and out of bushes chatting about all kinds of nonsense to which ever one of us happened to be nearest. Ewan’s praise, however, makes her smile proudly.

  “You might want a coat,” Ewan calls to me as he heads off down the garden, “it’s going to start raining in four minutes.”

  I look up at the sky, which actually seems a little brighter than it has done all morning.

  “I don’t think so,” I call.

  He shrugs his shoulders without turning round. “Suit yourself.”

  There are cracks between the clouds, where grey-blue sky showing through.

  “Four minutes!” I scoff. “How on earth can he say it’s going to rain in four minutes?”

  I turn to my mother for her response, but she has already fallen asleep on the bench, dozing peacefully with her mouth hanging slightly open. I go inside and fetch a blanket.

  “I told you not to over do it,” I chastise her gently, as I tuck the blanket snugly around her, “but you are just so stubborn.”

  She moans softly in her sleep and mumbles something about cabbages.

  “Why can’t you ever listen to anyone else?” I whisper.

  I tuck her cold, bony hands beneath the blanket, pick up my plastic bowl and head off down the garden, just as it starts to rain.

  Ewan and I work silently for a while, me crouching down in amongst the wet strawberry plants, and Ewan picking plums from the trees near by, placing them into a Tesco carrier bag. The best of the strawberries are gone, and the ones that I can salvage will be pureed to make jam, ice-cream, strawberry sauce… or at least they will if my mother is well enough. She is still cooking, but not with the same frenzy as before, and my lessons seem to have fallen by the wayside. Instead, she lies on the couch and flicks through books on French cuisine, or watches Delia or Ainsley or Jamie, talking to them as if they can hear her through the TV screen, thanking them for their little tips or telling them off for leaving their hot oil unsupervised. The chance of her making use of all this fruit seems negligible, and I imagine opening the freezer a year from now and seeing it all still there, like a strange frozen shrine to her. The idea of it makes my stomach lurch, and suddenly I wonder what the point is in any of this. I am kneeling on cold, wet ground, fiddling around amongst stodgy strawberries with the rain soaking through my jumper and what the hell for? So that all this fruit can go to waste inside the house rather than out here in the garden?

  “Why are we doing this?” I suddenly shout, flinging a mouldy strawberry across the garden. Digger, who has been lying obediently by Ewan’s feet, leaps up and runs after it excitedly.

  “What do you mean?” asks Ewan, examining a plum for maggot holes.

  “What’s going to happen to all this fruit? My mother hasn’t got the energy to make use of all this. What are we freezing it for? She’s not going to defrost it in a few months time like she keeps saying she will. She’s not even going to be here, for God’s sake!”

  Ewan looks at me, raindrops dripping from his hair. “Do you want to go and tell her that?”

  “Well, someone should! This is madness. There’s no point in it.”

  He gently places the plum in his carrier bag. “There you go again,” he sighs, “always needing everything to have a point.”

  “I just don’t understand what she can be thinking. She’s not going to be making strawberry ice-cream with these strawberries next Summer, or using those plums in the Christmas stuffing, or any of the other things she’s been wittering on about all morning. Why is she pretending she is? And you’re not helping, making out like she’s champion fruit picker. I saw you earlier, adding blackberries to her basket when she wasn’t looking.”

  “She’s not pretending. Pretending means you’re doing something on purpose. I don’t think that’s what your mother’s doing. It’s not a conscious decision. She’s not deliberately lying to you. I think she honestly believes she’ll still be around to do all these things. She’s convinced herself of it. Her mind is just trying to find a way of making her illness manageable.”

  “Thank you, Dr Freud,” I mutter, hurling another rotten strawberry across the garden for Digger to chase. “And since when do gardeners have degree
s in psychology?”

  “It’s not rocket science,” says Ewan, pulling the hood of his jumper up over his head as the rain begins to beat down harder, “people have been telling themselves stories ever since time began in order to make some sort of sense of the world they live in. Like those myths you think are so stupid. They’re just another way of understanding the world. Remember your friend Prometheus who gave fire to man and then was punished by having his liver eaten every night?”

  “Both impossible and ridiculous.”

  “To you maybe, but to people of the time it explained the existence of fire. Other myths explain death, the seasons, how we came to be here… ”

  “Oh, don’t tell me,” I sigh, irritably, “we’re here because of something to do with a dragon and an apple.”

  Ewan smiles and shakes his head. “No, but why not? It could be anything that makes sense to you. In Egyptian mythology man was fashioned out of clay. In Chinese mythology, Pangu grew out of an egg.”

  “Pang who?”

  “Pangu.”

  Ewan gazes up at the sky, letting the rain fall against his face. He is the only person I have ever met who could possibly look so content picking plums in the rain on a grey, miserable day. I am cold and fed up and want to go indoors.

  “In the beginning,” he says, “there was nothing but darkness and chaos. But in the darkness formed an egg, and inside the egg grew the giant, Pangu. For millions of years Pangu grew and slept, until one day he stretched and his huge limbs broke out of the egg. The lighter parts of the egg floated upwards to make the heavens, and the denser parts sank downwards to make the earth. Pangu liked this new arrangement, but he was worried the earth and the sky might meld together again, so he placed himself between them with his feet on the earth and his head holding up the sky. When Pangu died, his breath formed the wind and the clouds, and his voice formed the thunder and lightening. His eyes became the sun and the moon, and his arms and legs became the four directions of the compass. His flesh became the soil and his blood became the rivers, while stones and minerals were formed from his bones.” Ewan takes a bite from one of the plums. “Creation myths are just another way of trying to make sense of our world. Really, they’re just trying to do the same thing science does, but in a different way.”