From Under the Overcoat (6 page)

‘
HOW’S YOUR MOTHER, KATIE?’
Mrs Button half-whispered, as she came through the back door on her second visit. She stopped to pick the mud off the heels of her stiletto sandals.

‘Fine,’ I replied. ‘I think, you know, normal.’

‘Oh good. Has she said much about it? Selling the house?’

‘Not a word, Mrs Button,’ I said.

‘You know, Katie, you can call me Claudia.’

‘I couldn’t, sorry. It’s impolite.’

‘I wouldn’t say anything to your mother. You must be the last kid on earth who still says Mrs.’

‘Doesn’t matter. I still couldn’t. Sorry.’

Mrs Button said that was fine. She started off down the hallway, towards the big lounge, and I followed behind. Halfway, she stopped to look at the old photos hanging on the wall.

There were two of them; they were my English grandparents, Mum’s parents — I’d never met them. Black and grey photos of black and grey people — serious people.

‘Mum says they talk to her,’ I told Mrs Button.

‘Pardon?’ Mrs Button turned to me, smiling.

‘The photos. She put them up after Dad left. She put them up one Sunday night, and the next morning, when she walked past them, one of them spoke to her. That’s what she said.’

‘Wow, cool,’ said Mrs Button. ‘I mean, creepy, but cool.’

I nodded.

‘So?’ said Mrs Button. ‘What did they say?’

‘
Told you so
… stuff like that. She says they never forgave her for running away with a no-hoper from New Zealand.’

‘Hmm,’ said Mrs Button. ‘Do you believe her? About the talking photos, I mean?’

‘No.’

‘Good.’

It was still unclear to me whether our house was actually officially for sale. Certainly, as far as I knew, nothing had been signed. Nor had I heard any talk of a price. Mum hadn’t told me anything. Then again, there was nothing unusual about that.

Mrs Button joined my mother in the big lounge, and I took my place on the stairs around the corner. They exchanged pleasantries, as Mum would say, then my mother got down to business.

‘Did you get many calls, Claudia? I was surprised not to hear from you this week.’

‘Not a single one, I’m afraid.’

‘I find that astounding. I thought heritage properties were always in demand.’

‘Hardly astounding, Martha, considering.’

‘Considering what?’

‘Considering there is no visible evidence, anywhere on this planet, that your house is for sale.’

Silence from my mother. I was enjoying this. Mrs Button knew her stuff, when it came to real estate. I leaned forward to concentrate.

‘So no one rang.’

‘No one rang. Did anyone wander in off the street with an offer, Martha?’

Mum, on the ropes again.

‘No.’

There was a pause in the conversation then; it was hard to say whether it was one of those so-called companionable silences, or an awkward one. But when Mrs Button next spoke, you could tell she meant business.

‘If you want the house to be sold, you have to let me sell it. That means signing an agreement, and putting a sign up on your front fence.’

This time, the silence seemed to go on forever. I would have liked to have seen my mother’s face as she thought about Mrs Button’s tough words. But by showing myself, I would never get away with earwigging again. So I sat quite still, and waited, and listened.

‘Martha, forgive me, I have to ask. Are you actually able to sign the papers? Do you
own
the house?’

Mum laughed. It sounded like a seagull hovering over
left-behind
fish and chips.

‘Oh yes. I’m it,’ she said. ‘One careful lady owner. Eric was the one who insisted we buy it, all those years ago, but a couple of years after he … he signed it over to me. Not that I had a choice … the papers arrived in the post, no return address for him.’

I listened to the slight scratching sound of Mum’s fountain pen — the one she used for all important paperwork — moving across paper. Across, it turned out, the page of the sale agreement.

The next day, a white van pulled up at the front of the house. A man got out, and nailed a large FOR SALE sign to the broken-down fence. I waited until he was gone, then I went out onto the street.

The sign was the most solid part of the entire property. It seemed to hold the whole place together. It was huge, and the features of our house were all listed. Heritage property! A rare opportunity! Original features! Reluctant vendor moving on! Underneath, there was a little photo of Mrs
Button, and her telephone number.

I went inside, looking for Mum. She was in the laundry, folding washing. I got to the point.

‘How come we’re selling the house?’ I asked her.

‘Why.’ She kept folding, flicking a towel
snap
into the air and wrestling it into sharp creases.

‘I want to know. I’ve got rights, you know.’

‘
Why
are we selling the house, not
how come
we are selling the house.’

‘Alright then. Why are we selling the house?’

‘Because we cannot afford to restore it, and we’re not allowed to modernise it. You know that as well as I do, Katie.’ Another towel, flicked into submission.

I started to cry. I hated crying in front of Mum and usually I didn’t. I had a strategy. Do you know that if you keep your head completely still, and your face looking straight ahead, and you look upwards moving only your eyeballs, you can stop the tears coming? You try it sometime, it’s true. However, this time I left it too late.

Mum didn’t cope with me crying, ever. The folding got faster. She said nothing. I decided that seeing she was already annoyed with me, I’d just say it.

‘If Dad comes back, he won’t know where we are.’

‘I’ve told you before, Katie, he won’t come back.’

‘How do you know that for sure?’

‘I just do.’ The folding never faltered, not for a second. ‘You have to take my word for that.’

I stopped crying. I had one more question to ask, so I got it out.

‘If we’re selling the house, how come you’re being so
awkward about it, with Mrs Button?’

‘Why.’

‘Why are you being so awkward?’

‘What makes you think I’m being awkward?’

I remembered just in time that I wasn’t supposed to have been listening on the stairs. ‘Making her park her real estate car two streets away and walk in her nice sandals through the mud.’

‘That’s not being awkward. It’s a nice walk through the park.’

‘Pathetic,’ I said. ‘Are you going to keep making her do that?’

‘Probably,’ said Mum. ‘I just don’t want the whole world knowing our business, that’s all. This is a special property, Katie. In cases like this, deals are done quietly, without a great fuss. That’s exactly the sort of deal I would like to do.’

‘Well, where will we live?’

‘We’ll worry about that when the house sells.’

That night, I lay awake until eleven. When I was sure Mum was asleep, I tiptoed downstairs and out the front gate. I crouched in front of the real estate sign. The clouds were covering the moon, making it hard to see. I waited until my eyes got used to the dark. Then I took the black permanent marker from my dressing-gown pocket.

I’d decided earlier which number to change, when the sign first went up. With two careful, fat, curved strokes, the 3 in the telephone number became an 8.

THE INSIDE OF OUR
house was not quite as much of a disaster as the outside, but not far off.

Downstairs was sort of okay. There was the big lounge,
where for some unknown reason the wallpaper had managed to stay stuck to the walls in most parts. Then there was the dining room and the kitchen, with its old coal range that we weren’t allowed to remove. My mother got around that by having a second stove put in next to it, and a microwave on the bench. The bathroom looked good — one of those old clawfoot baths, gold taps and stuff — but when you turned on any of the taps, there was a huge clatter in the pipes before the water came spurting out. Sometimes you got hot water, sometimes you didn’t.

Right throughout the house, except for the kitchen and bathroom, was blood-red carpet. Apparently it was the original carpet, which is why no one was allowed to replace it. In some places, like the big lounge, it had stayed red but elsewhere it faded to a dusty brown.

Upstairs were the two bedrooms. That’s where the wallpaper was the worst. Layers peeling away. I don’t know why it was so bad up there, maybe different people who lived in the house had decided to renovate, started taking wallpaper off, then got nailed by the Heritage Committee and had to abandon their projects.

One of the bedrooms was Mum’s. The other one was mine. If you walked into my room, all you saw was books. There’s a bookshelf that ran the whole way round the room, except for the doorway and windows of course.

WHICH BRINGS ME TO
my father, and what I think I remember.

Dad was a writer. He never went to work. He had stayed home with me when I was little. He wrote books, though I’m not sure that any of them got published. I’ve never seen one.

During the day, Mum would go off to work in her accountancy office and Dad would work at the table. He used to get me to draw the pictures for his stories.

We had parties — big gatherings of proper writers and musicians, Dad’s friends — and Mum glowed and laughed in the middle of things. Yes, you read that right. My mother glowing and laughing. I can hardly believe I’m describing the same person, but back then she liked associating with important people, so it makes sense. I’m pretty sure I’ve remembered that correctly. I have a picture of it in my mind, it must have come from somewhere.

It wasn’t all good times. There was fighting, usually about money. Mum screamed at Dad about bills and the bank, and Dad just smiled and hugged her and said things like
Don’t worry, it’ll all be alright, Martha.

Every night, I would choose a book, and Dad would read it to me in bed. All our favourite books — his and mine — were on the shelf in my bedroom. This is my main memory of him; I can remember going from picture books through to chapter books. The last book on the bookshelf was
Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
. It was dark blue, with gold lettering and lines on the cover. It was one of Dad’s books. His favourite story, he told me once, was ‘The Doll’s House’. He said the story had originally been called ‘At Karori’ and he made me promise I’d read it when I got older. Which I will do, although I’ll have to get another copy because when he went away, his books disappeared.

I was five, or four maybe, when he left. It happened one night, while he was reading to me. The usual rule with the big books was one chapter a night. But Mum had a lot of
pressure at work, and she had started going back to the office after dinner, so sometimes Dad would just read on.

That night, Mum came to the doorway. She was still in her work suit, but she had freshened up her lipstick and brushed her hair. I could smell her perfume, Chanel. I was surprised that she would waste it on work. Her most precious thing was her Chanel. So yes, I was surprised about the wastage of the Chanel, for sure.

‘I have to go back in,’ she said to Dad.

Dad acted as though he hadn’t heard her. Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was too caught up in the story.

‘Eric, I’m going. An hour or so.’

Dad read on. I sat up in bed — I’m pretty sure I would have — and reached out to Dad, to the book. ‘Dad, she has to go to work, okay?’

‘Don’t go in tonight, Martha. I’m asking you not to go.’ He definitely said that. I remember, because his voice sounded weird, tight, as though something had gone down the wrong way.

‘I have to,’ she said. ‘He wants me in there.’ And then she was gone.

Dad kept reading. He read to the end of the chapter, then he started on the next one. I fell asleep.

The next day, he was gone. Mum had dark circles under her eyes, and her actual eyes were puff y and red. I remember asking her where Dad had gone, and she said she wasn’t sure. I asked when he was coming back, and she said she didn’t know. I asked her why he had gone away, and she didn’t know that either.

That is what I believe to have happened. I am reasonably
sure that it went something like that. Sometimes, when I let the evening run through my head again, it turns out differently. It’s a little bit like the Santa and the chimney memory. Sometimes I’m not sure whether it ever happened at all.

The perfume smell is different. That, I remember for sure.

OF COURSE, I ASKED
Mum again, many times, about my father’s disappearance. She always had the same reply. She didn’t know. She wasn’t sure.

Some kids at school started saying he was in jail for theft. When I told Mum, she laughed.

‘Poppycock,’ she said. ‘Absolute rubbish. Tell them to mind their own business.’

The next rumour was that he had gone away to live with another woman. When I told Mum that one, she said nothing at all.

Of course, I asked again, many times. As I got older I tried to put the questions in other ways. I’d try to trick her, casually build them into other conversations.