“I’m an orphan,” he told me and I realised then that he was younger than I thought. There was a spring in his step on the last bit of our journey. He was heartened by the thought of going home to our real family.
“You have to understand, though,” I said, “about our mam being ill. She’ll be in bed, or she’ll be under a duvet on the settee and she probably won’t be bothered with visitors.”
“I’ll creep in like a mouse and be very polite,” he said. “I’m quite respectable, you know.” He plucked at his T shirt, sniffing. “But I smell of fish and chips.”
Soon as we got in I knew something was different. The telly was on, but there were no voices to complement it. Our mother had recently got herself a video and she would sit up into the early hours of most mornings and watch old monster movies. Whenever she was watching you’d hear her own ribald commentary. She was working her way through the lifework of Godzilla and, as I came down the passageway with Timon, I could hear Tokyo being once more ripped apart and stomped on. But I couldn’t hear Mam’s derisory cackles. At once I felt scared, thinking she’d been taken bad. There was a strange black coat on the rack in the hall and I thought it might be the doctor’s.
We pushed into the living room and it was full of silent faces. They were bathed blue from the Godzilla movie and, for want of anything better to do, they had fixed their gazes on the screen.
My mother was sitting up on the orange settee, with the blue patterned duvet pulled over her legs. She sat stiffly and painfully and she was flanked either side by Mandy and Linda. How normal they looked, each with a best cup and saucer on their knees, staring at the visitors. The best tea service was laid out on the coffee table, even the elaborate, fragile pot. “These are the oldest and best possessions I have,” Mam had said, time and again, fingering their gold trim, their crimson flowers. “Break a single piece and you’ll never be forgiven.”
Timon looked at me. This wasn’t the free and easy, chatty, raucous, smokily aromatic suppertime he’d been led to expect from us. I was too busy staring at Mam’s visitors to help Timon out. He stood beside me as I stared and stared at the neatly-dressed couple on the dining room chairs, which had been pulled out especially for them.
It was dad, in a dark suit and tie, with a young wife who had her hair cut in a black bob. You could tell she was a severe-looking person, but here she wasn’t so sure of herself. They had two very small babies in yellow hanging around their feet. Dad’s new family.
Then I realised that everyone was staring at Timon and me. I burst out to Dad, “Well, we don’t want you back now.”
“Wendy!” Mam said, and the strange woman and Dad—how much like newly-weds they looked, all dolled up—squirmed on their wooden chairs.
“I’ve not really come back, Wendy love,” he said, hardly looking at me properly. “Look how you’ve grown up!” he said, with a feckless sigh.
Timon spoke up then, telling me he’d just go on home if it would be easier. “No,” I said. “Everyone, this is my best friend. He’s called Timon.”
In that full, still living room, he really did smell of fish and chips.
I asked Dad, “Why did you never want to see us? Why didn’t you want anything to do with us?”
“Wendy, I did...” he said, and then he stopped himself.
“Are these your new babies?” I asked. They were roaming around the carpet like little creatures. He nodded.
That was when Mandy’s patience went and she stormed out of the room and into the kitchen.
I followed her in.
She decided to fry sausages. Clang went the pan on the gas ring. Poor Timon, I left him in the living room. Later he said it was all right, because they all fell quiet again. They went back to watching Destroy All Monsters and first one, then the other yellow-suited baby climbed into his lap. Kids loved Timon.
“I don’t want Dad here,” Mandy growled. She couldn’t find Linda’s pinking shears and she tried to pull the sausages apart instead. I fetched her a knife. “What makes him think he can swan back in, years later, with his lovely new wife and kids?”
“Did you think his wife was lovely?” I asked.
“She’s stuck-up looking,” Mandy snapped, furiously lighting the glass with the unreliable clicky thing. The small kitchen filled up with pungent, unlit gas. Then it lit. “Dad would think stuck-up was lovely. He always wanted to better himself. Mam and us weren’t good enough for him.”
“Don’t say that!”
“It’s true. Weasly little bastard.” She sniffed as the pan began to hiss. “He’s only come back because somehow he’s found out that she’s dying.”
I froze. Someone had said it at last. I might have known it would be Mandy. Mandy with no respect for silences, convention, other people’s hesitances. I took in a sigh of, I suppose, relief. “He knows she’s going to die,” I repeated, to get the taste of his knowledge and her death in my mouth. The taste of burning sausage was there too as Mandy angrily swished them about in the pan, unsticking their undersides. “Cheap meat,” she cursed.
“It’s cancer-cancer-cancer,” she sang. “That’s what we’ve all not been saying.”
I knew my face was white. I asked her and kept my voice straight, “How did he find out?”
“This whole country’s smaller than you think, Wendy. Word travels. There are so many connections. If you
