When the morning came, my dad would always come to get me out of bed, and he’d pick me up even though I was far too old to be carried, and I’d smell the aftershave on his neck and let him carry me down the stairs.
The table was always the same, starting with the white tablecloth, then moving up to the plates, which always matched, and what was on them: ham and cheese, folded like fans; fruit in all shapes, arranged in colour groups; bacon, browned and crispy and laid in straight rows in the casserole dish; white sliced bread cut into hearts. The omelette was always whole, its thick topping only just revealing a peek of the bright colours of the peppers and onions within. Then there was a large serving bowl full of porridge set next to three stacked, striped bowls. In jugs at the top of the table were the coffee and juice, and on either side of the table our names written on place cards in black calligraphy.
Then my father and I, he in his smart suit and me in my pyjamas, would take our seats.
My father would make his choice – a slice of omelette, a handful of grapes, on rarer occasions the cold, crispy bacon followed by a bowl of porridge and perhaps a slice of the thin cheese on the heart-shaped bread. Whatever he chose I would copy, even if he’d chosen it every day that week, even if I didn’t like it very much. I needed a guide and he was mine. He knew it, and so he’d always choose juice instead of coffee so I could copy.
She never joined us, not once. She would stay in the kitchen. In the summer, she could stare out of the window over the sink to our small garden. In the winter, she’d stare out into the darkness, at her own face reflected back in the glass. I remember trying to get her to join us a few times and not recognizing the look in her eye as she gazed out of the window. A teacher once told me that I had very dark bags under my eyes and I was convinced it meant that I had the same disease as my mother, whose dark circles were green at the edges in certain lights. They haunted her pretty eyes. I was sure that one day I’d be downstairs with her, well before the sunrise and catering for an unknown event for people who were growing steadily more afraid of me.
Sometimes, when he thought I wasn’t looking, my father would watch her, with that same expression he had on that very first morning. As though he wanted to pull her drowning soul to safety, but she was too far out. It made him grey.
Eventually, she must have seen a doctor. Perhaps by choice, or perhaps someone – maybe her parents, maybe my dad – made her go. Probably not my dad. He was never very good at that kind of thing. One morning when I was almost six, we came downstairs and the table was naked – no tablecloth, no buffet of breakfast. Bare except for my mother who was slumped at the table, her head resting on her arms. Her dark hair blended with the wood of the tabletop. I thought she was dead and started to cry, but my father told me that she was only sleeping. I knew from the sound of his voice that this was a good thing. ‘Come on, short one,’ he said, and he found me some cereal and a bowl and, with me sitting on the kitchen counter and him standing by the window, we had our first normal breakfast. ‘You have to forgive your mamma,’ he said.
I didn’t know how to reply, so I said, ‘Okay.’
‘She was poorly,’ he said.
‘Is she better now?’ I asked.
‘She might be.’ He dunked his spoon into his bran flakes. ‘She loves you, pickle.’
The First Kiss of Margot Macrae
PAUL THE PORTER and I thought it would be funny to pay another visit to the furious Take a Break lady on our way to see Margot. But when we got there, Paul drew back the curtain and the bed was empty.
And it wasn’t funny.
Paul pulled the curtain closed, and we couldn’t look each other in the eye for the rest of our walk to see Margot.
What if she’s gone too? I thought on a loop, as we chicaned around the corridors to the Newton Ward.
I could see, without seeing, her empty bed. Her name smeared off the whiteboard, her old books piled and bagged up to be given to charity. Her purple pyjamas folded neatly and her slippers having no more journeys to make.
Paul’s staff badge added a certain amount of ease to getting about the hospital. We didn’t have to be interviewed on the intercom to get in anywhere. We could just stroll right into any ward we wanted. I made a mental note to try and procure one of my own. He gave a friendly, unreturned wave to one of the porters sitting at the nurses’ desk and then we turned right into her little alcove of beds.
‘No,’ I said under my breath to nobody in particular, bracing myself for the impact of her absence.
But she was there, sketching in biro on the back of a piece of paper torn from a crossword book. She was drawing a door. So I sat beside her and waited.
Cromdale Street, Glasgow, 1949
Margot Macrae is Eighteen Years Old
The slim man on the train who had offered me his love like a cough drop was much younger than he looked. He was only twenty where at first sight I thought he was twenty-five or twenty-six. Perhaps it was the suit. He’d been travelling to his apprenticeship interview at a glassworks in
