Making Marion Read online

  The rain was familiar to me, yet different. Rain is rain, and we get all types in Ballydown, but I was unused to the mud coating my boots – and therefore any floor I stepped on – with dark, gritty sludge. The air reeked of it: a rich combination of sodden sky and earth. The forest seemed wild and harsh without the warmth of sunlight to lift it. When Grace stepped out from between the trees, it was as if she had summoned the wind and water to herald her return. A perfect manifestation of the storm that lived within her soul.

  She disappeared inside her mobile home with Scarlett, emerging hours later to feed the pigs as if she had never been away. Her face was set in an expressionless mask, but the black streaks of make-up on her cheeks betrayed something of what had gone on behind the blue door.

  Valerie found me scrubbing a caravan vacated that morning. Thankful for an excuse to put down the muddy cloth, I helped myself to the teabags left behind in one of the cupboards and put the kettle on.

  “Grace is back, Marion. I can’t believe it!”

  “I know. Scarlett must be so relieved.”

  “Relieved? She’s hopping mad. Instead of shouting, she’s whispering in this calm, creepy voice like a crazy bad guy. Grace is pretending not to be scared, but she is totally freaked out. She expected to be grounded or something, but this is way worse. She won’t crack though. Won’t say where she’s been, or why she went. Or who she was with, or anything. Just sits there. Scarlett tried being nice and Grace still won’t say. Then she cried, and Grace got angry and screamed that she was sorry but if people just told her the truth she wouldn’t have to go looking for it. Scarlett went dead white then. I thought she was going to faint, but she asked me to give them some time, so I came to find you.

  “What does Grace mean, about having to look for the truth? Scarlett doesn’t lie, not ever. It’s one of her lessons. When Grace lied about meeting Gregory Fisher in the woods, Scarlett taught her that lesson. And when the exchange student lied about the money in the till, Scarlett said he had to go back to France.” Valerie shook her head, cradling her tea in both hands. “I don’t understand why anyone would want to leave the Peace and Pigs. That’s why all those visitors keep coming back every year, because it’s so good here. They pay money to come and stay, and can only come for maybe a week, or two weeks. Grace gets to live here for free, all the time. Why would she want to run away?”

  “I don’t know, Valerie. I think, maybe, when people expect you to stay somewhere – especially if it’s the place you’ve always been – it can make you want to run away. Even just to see what somewhere else is like.”

  “Did you do that? Did you run away?”

  “I didn’t run away, because I told my ma I was going. And I’m a lot older than Grace, so nobody will worry about me.”

  “Will you go back, then? Back to Ireland?” Valerie looked at me, eyebrows lowered. Daring me to say yes.

  “I don’t know. But if I do, it won’t be for a while yet.” I handed her a pair of rubber gloves. “Come on. While you’re keeping out of the way, you can give me a hand.”

  It had been two days since the party. I had dragged that diamond ring about as if it weighed a thousand carats. My new fiancé had been in Belfast, packing up his student life and preparing to move back to Ballydown. Here he would lodge with his parents to save money, commuting to his new position at the local community hospital. He had texted me twice. The first text said: “CAN U RING HOTEL AND SEE IF THEY FOUND MY JACKET.”

  The second text was even more romantic than the first: “MA SAID COME 4 TEA ON SAT. DID YOU GET JACKET?”

  I rang the hotel and used up my lunch break retrieving the coat. I took a good long look at my new sparkly, shiny, caraty ring and decided to skip tea that Saturday. In fact, I decided to skip not just my future mother-in-law’s house, but the whole of Ballydown. I packed a bag on Friday morning before I could change my mind, and phoned the library manager, Harriet. Despite being my boss, Harriet was also my best friend. I even loved her enough to put up with her humming. All day, from the moment she opened the doors until she locked up in the evening, Harriet produced a continual tuneless drone without even realizing it.

  Harriet cheered when I told her I was handing in my notice. She hummed out a mini-symphony of joy. She is the only person I have told about the photograph. After showing it to her last Christmas, Harriet kept depositing different books on my desk: Sherwood Forest: A Visitor’s Guide; Walks in the Forest; The Legend of Robin Hood; Robin Hood and the Battle of Nottingham; Where to stay in Nottinghamshire. None of these books arrived at Ballydown Public Library by chance. When I returned them to Harriet I pretended I hadn’t read them. She pretended to believe me.

  Harriet loves me enough to keep kicking me up the behind. She did not offer her congratulations at the party, but she did give me a present: a one-way, one-passenger ferry ticket from Dublin to Liverpool.

  The ticket bought a place on the overnight ferry setting sail that evening. At one o’clock I just got up and walked out the door. As I loaded my bag into the car boot, Ma walked up behind me.

  “Going somewhere?”

  I slammed the boot shut. I deserved this.

  “Yes.”

  “Coming back?”

  “I don’t know. If I do, it won’t be to here.” I nodded my head at the house.

  “Well. That’s a load of stew I’ve got cooking in the oven wasted.”

  “Bye, Ma.” I pulled open the car door, then turned to say something else – anything. She already had her back to me, walking away. I drove off, more angry than sad; wondering how I could pretend to myself I had done something courageous for the first time in my life, when I knew that tucked inside the zip pocket of my wash bag was a billion carat ring, and saved in the outbox of my phone a message not yet sent to the rightful owner of that ring.

  However thoughtless and self-centred a man may be, he doesn’t deserve to be told his fiancée has done a runner by her mother.

  I drove the three and a half hours to Dublin without stopping. Despite the clear signs, I managed to get lost twice trying to find the port, adding another forty-five minutes to my journey. I grabbed a flabby sandwich from the café and ate it staring at my phone sitting on the passenger seat beside me. Four times I went through the buttons until I was one click away from sending the message. In the end, so fed up with myself I could have screamed, I pressed “send”. Heart racing, I turned the phone off, darted over to the nearest bin and chucked it in.

  A text message. I am not pretending this was in any way the right or decent thing to do. I was hot with shame as I huddled in my car, waiting for the port official to wave me up the ramp onto the boat. Harriet would tell me that it was exactly what he deserved. What would cause her to bristle with annoyance is not that I used such a cowardly means of communication, but that the message itself was a total cop out. After twenty-three drafts, my spineless message said: “NEED A BREAK.” (A break from what? Our relationship? My job? Ballydown?) “WILL CALL WHEN SORTED.” Which could be, let’s face it, never.

  I cried as I drove up onto the ferry. I was still crying when I ate my complimentary jacket potato at my table for one in the restaurant. I sobbed through brushing my teeth and putting on my pyjamas. I snivelled and blubbered as I crawled under the covers of the bunk bed. Not because my mother didn’t say goodbye. Nor because I had walked out on the man who had been my boyfriend since I was seventeen. Or because I may never see my hometown again. I cried because I was finally here. And the shame and fear, the guilt, the pain and the great big giant piles of broken mess had come too. Because they were me. This was when I started to pray. Oh God, do not let me be this person any more.

  I stopped crying, wiped my nose and went to sleep.

  Friday afternoon I was sitting in reception when a lavender Volkswagen camper van pulled into the car park, completed a three-point turn at breakneck speed and reversed under a large chestnut tree at the back of the park. It was Ada and May. They came every Friday to sweeten, style and
spruce up the women (and men) of the Peace and Pigs. Valerie told me they had both celebrated their seventy-ninth birthday earlier that year. (Did I know that the Kray twins were born the very same year?) In expecting blue rinses and tightly curled perms, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  A queue formed while Ada set up the simple chalkboard sign next to the van: “Hair £10 Hands £8”.

  Women of all ages brought folding camp chairs and settled down to wait. Ada slid open the front of the van so that she could work in the sunshine. May set up her manicure and nail bar under the shade of the chestnut. I took a bottle of water and positioned myself on the bench outside reception. Technically, I was still manning the desk but this way I could see the action. A fifty-something woman came first. She lowered herself into the lavender leather chair, took off her sunhat and shook out her long, thick, deep bronze tresses. She spread them carefully around her shoulders, gently patting her scalp.

  “Just a trim please, Ada, to tidy up the loose ends.”

  “Yes, dear.” Ada, whose own soft white hair was cut in a snazzy layered bob, moved behind her customer. I could see no mirrors on show in the van at all.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Catherine.”

  “Catherine. Did you know it means ‘pure’? I knew a Catherine once. She was anything but! We skated together on the canals in Amsterdam…” As Ada began to spin a spellbinding tale of New Year’s Eve in Europe, filled with fireworks and appelflappen, all-night dances and dodging randy dukes, she took a lustrous handful of Catherine’s hair, her crowning glory, and chopped it off. About three inches were left still attached to Catherine’s head. Ada expertly flicked the severed lock behind her, out of sight, and carried on, snipping and chattering while her customer, totally unaware of the growing mound of cuttings, closed her eyes blissfully and sank deeper into the chair.

  Less than fifteen minutes later, Ada finished the story and put down her scissors. The women in the queue held their breath as she picked up a gilt-edged mirror and handed it to her customer. Catherine gasped, turning her head this way and that. She said a word that was not at all pure. A tear ran down the side of her nose, which now appeared a good inch smaller thanks to the way her stylish new cut framed her face. The woman who handed over a ten-pound note in stunned silence had been transformed into someone who looked ten years younger and twice as gorgeous. Were they magic scissors?

  The next person in the queue leapt up into the chair.

  “Good morning, Beatrice.” Ada started snipping immediately. “Where’s that lovely man of yours today? Not having a cut?”

  “Oh, he’s fine. But the test match is on; he’s glued to the radio.”

  “Well, he does love his cricket. Did I ever tell you about the time I toured Australia with the women’s England cricket team? Oh, they were marvellous days…”

  And off she went. Twelve customers took their place in Ada’s chair that afternoon with windswept, tatty, tired hairstyles. Each of them left looking and feeling like a different woman. They strutted back down the path swinging their hips and glancing from side to side, just dying to be ogled. Ada accompanied each cut with a story more fantastical than the one before. We rescued tigers in India, intercepted enemy signals in the Cold War, kissed a rock star in the Vatican and delivered a baby in an igloo. I had no idea if any of the stories were true, but how I hoped they were. And how I longed for a tiny speck of Ada’s spirit, and the magic touch of those scissors.

  When the last customer, a teenage girl who sat down in the chair a wallflower and got up a calla lily, had left, Ada pointed her finger at me. She called out: “You haven’t had your hair cut in – hmm – two years at least?”

  I had my hair, as always, scraped back in a ponytail. I said nothing, but nodded my head. Two years. Try doubling that and adding on a bit more.

  “And even then you cut it yourself, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.” She couldn’t hear my feeble squeak, but didn’t need to.

  “Well, come on then!” She beckoned me over. I really wanted to sit in the lavender chair and have my hair cut. I longed to be able to stride across the campsite swishing my fabulous new hairdo, seeing the look of approval in Scarlett’s eyes. But I shook my head as I got up off the bench and opened the reception door.

  “Sorry, but I have to get back to work. Maybe another time?”

  Ada squinted at me across the car park. “All right, then. Scarlett will have you ready for me soon enough.”

  I slunk behind the reception counter, trying not to watch as Ada and May tidied their things back inside the van. May had seen just as many customers as her sister, and each had left the Lavender Mobile Beauty Parlour glowing, but she had said nothing for the entire afternoon. Worse than that, her pursed sour-lemon lips and furrowed brow spoke disapproval and discontent just as loudly as Ada’s stories shouted life and love. Now, packed away, she walked across to reception.

  Looking me up and down, May almost stepped back, as if my frumpiness was contagious. She was rail thin, with severe short hair that I imagined suited her personality as well as it did her bony, jutting cheekbones. She was probably once identical to her sister, but while Ada’s laughter lines were the story-map of a life lived with joy and wonder, May’s scrunched-up, wrinkly face testified to years of bitter resentment. Like Ada, she wore a 1950s-style purple spotty dress, but on her it seemed stiff and old fashioned. I tucked my ragged, soil-encrusted nails under the countertop.

  “Usually we are provided with iced water.” May could have dipped that cold tongue into a boiling hot kettle and the water would have frozen solid.

  “Oh. I didn’t know.” I rushed over to the fridge, banging my shin on the door as I wrenched it open.

  “My sister and I are nearly eighty years old. Eighty! We have been toiling in this heat for over two hours. You didn’t have to know anything! Have you no common sense? Or are you just cruel? Or selfish and thoughtless?”

  “Sorry.” I blinked back the tears that sprang up, hot behind my eyes. I took two large bottles from the shelf and held them out to May. “Do you need anything else? I mean, um, is that enough? Would you like an ice-cream, or a cake?”

  May sneered at me. She didn’t take the drinks. “I shall be reporting you to your employer at the first opportunity. And if either my sister or I should suffer from any effects of dehydration, I shall be contacting my lawyer.” She pulled open the door. “I partly blame myself for expecting anything from such a shambles of a girl. Your bra is a joke. And surely Scarlett pays you enough to be able to afford a better moisturizer? If by some miracle you haven’t been fired by next week, I expect both situations to have been rectified.”

  Slamming the door shut, May marched back to where Ada waited by the side of the van, swigging from a can of ginger beer, a frozen ice-lolly in her other hand.

  Valerie had made me promise to come along to Fire Night that Sunday, the last one having been cancelled due to the sudden disappearance of Grace, who still denied any connection with my broken window. Rather than trying to make up my mind whether to believe her or not, I chose to cram it to the back of my brain behind all the other unresolved junk. Nothing else happened, and the coil of dread began to uncurl in my stomach as the days went by. However, I was nervous enough thinking about the evening ahead to drop the chocolate cake I had bought as I tried to tip it out onto a plate so I could pretend it was homemade.

  Having wasted ten minutes trying to squash the broken pieces back together, even though it had been on the floor, I dumped the cake in the bin. Dashing outside, I filled a large bowl with raspberries from the vegetable patch next to my caravan, making sure I carefully closed the vegetable patch gate behind me. But I forgot to close my own front door. Leaving the bowl on the side, I jumped straight in the shower. Only when I turned the water off did I hear the clicking, scraping sounds coming from outside the bathroom. Wrapped firmly in the towel, I held my breath, listening for a few seconds. Something had definitely come into my kitchen.r />
  The something clucked.

  The chickens and I had not been best buddies in my time at the Peace and Pigs. The very sight of me irritated them. Feeding or cleaning them out involved me dodging about whimpering in fear while chickens ran at me aggressively, jabbing their beaks at my ankles. During the day, the hens roamed loose in the campsite, led as a pack by Denver the freakishly huge cockerel, lord of all he surveyed. He swaggered from tent to tent, stealing bread out of babies’ hands, ripping up unattended cereal boxes, eating a few pecks of the contents until he got bored and wandered off, leaving his wives to form a frantic cloud of flapping feathers as they fought and jostled each other for the remaining cornflakes.

  I had imagined hens to be gentle, docile birds. These were like a gang of feral teenagers out on a Friday night looking for trouble. I had assumed the role of victim, and the chickens became my bullies. If I saw the mob making their way anywhere close, I would turn and hurry in the opposite direction. I found myself ducking behind trees and even scrambling up the slide in the play park in my attempts to avoid them. This doubly complicated my efforts to steer clear of Jake where possible. The previous Thursday, finding the pack of chickens approaching menacingly from one side and Jake from the other, I had actually hidden in somebody’s tent, knowing the family had gone out on the lake in their dinghy.

  I slowly opened the bathroom door. Just a tiny chink. A red eye, level with my own, leered at me from two inches away. I slammed the door shut and stood leaning on it while I caught my breath. I cracked open the door again. Denver, who stood at least three feet tall with both his scratchy, gnarly feet planted on the ground, craned his neck to look me right in the eye from his perch on the top of my fridge. How he got there I don’t know, but I suspect this particular cockerel is actually an escapee from a secret government experiment, possessing powers beyond those of an ordinary bird. He opened his beak to three times the width of his head, and released a war cry that would have made William Wallace proud. I stepped back, out of the range of his foul-smelling breath, but kept the door open, impressing myself but not Denver. He wiggled his comb at me and spread his wings. Seven of his ladies had crammed into the narrow galley kitchen, all huddled around the upturned bowl, gobbling raspberries. When their master crowed, they snapped to attention, waddling around to find me, their least favourite human, standing in the doorway, brandishing a bottle of shampoo.