The Scrapbook by Carly Holmes Page A

between bed and dressing table, wary of the beige carpets so soft my footprints left dents. The bedside drawers were a treasure trove of old diaries and exotic looking ointments, tins with tiny teeth inside and little pots of hand creams. My mum’s bedside drawer never held anything more exciting than a bottle of gin and her sleeping pills.
    Photographs in silver frames marched up the walls of the staircase and clustered on the half-landing. Faces, smiling or solemn, gazed at me and at each other. Arms grasped shoulders and hands clasped waists. Mother and father, mother and son, father and son. This unabashed flaunting of the bonds of love and family made me feel queasy and hollow, but nevertheless compelled me to return to stare again and again.
    I took one of the photographs home, a group one of the whole family together, grandparents as bookends, all sitting in a line on a beach and juggling ice creams and sun hats. My poet, grinning and gritty with sand, teetering on toddler legs, held up a dead crab triumphantly. I eased it from its hook and pulled the hook from the wall, licking my finger to smooth out the puncture hole left behind. Once home, I wrapped the photo in a pillowcase and slid it into the oak tree: the keeper of my secrets since I was old enough to have any. I nestled the bundle into the head-height cavity carved between two branches, imagining it settling deep inside that wooden heart, flavouring the sap and gilding the leaves. My oak, now a literal family tree.
    I saw my love one weekend, in the newsagents with his mother, and I watched them together for a while before he turned and spotted me. The rage I felt then, the grief, left me breathless and tearful. In those moments before he registered my presence he belonged utterly to her. It was as if I didn’t exist. Was he thinking about me? When she picked up a music magazine and tapped him on the wrist, and he glanced down at it, shook his head and plucked it from her hands, was he calculating the hours until he could see me again? He didn’t look as if he was. He didn’t even look like him. Boredom and embarrassment at being out with his mum had hardened the angles of his beautiful boy’s face and his eyes flicked constantly from place to place. When he laughed it was grudgingly, unwillingly.
    I’d been in the chemist’s for the last hour, glazing myself with different scents until my head ached and I smelt like a bowl of potpourri. I wanted to march up to them and reclaim him, make him mine again, but I also wanted to run away and change my clothes, shower and brush my hair, and then return as clean and untainted as their home. I stood and stared.
    And then he turned his head and saw me. He jumped as if I’d reached over and prodded him, but then he smiled and started to walk towards where I was huddled by the comics. He said something to his mother and she looked straight at me, her face creased with pleasure. She followed after him and they reached me together, standing shoulder to shoulder, closer to each other than to me. My poet said my name, said hers, and she smiled and offered a laughing comment, her hand on his arm and then on the nape of his neck. They were the same height.
    I don’t remember what I said, or if I said anything at all. I couldn’t take my eyes from her hand as it moved against the skin of his neck, cupping the knob of bone at the top of his spine. He grimaced and wriggled, bringing his shoulders up to his ears, and shrugged the hand away. There was an expectant silence.
    She was dressed in a pretty cream skirt and blouse, this mother, and her hair was the same dark colour as his. Her eyes were different, though, lighter and wider, or maybe they just looked that way because of her use of shadow and mascara. Her fingernails were painted coral.
    Fern?
    My poet finally moved to touch me but she moved at the same time, her face a frown of concern.
    Are you okay, honey?
    And they touched me