The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales Read online

  From the boot I pull out bin bags and a shovel. I wrap the bundle in plastic and put it in the boot. I spend five minutes rubbing my hands on the towel from my seat.

  We say nothing for the rest of the drive.

  I pull up in front of the grocery store and switch off the engine.

  I’ll put it in the big bins behind the shop, I say.

  No. Shelly’s voice is too loud in the suffocating car. I want to bury her.

  Shelly, we –

  In the garden.

  We buy bread, milk, toilet paper. We buy paintbrushes and a trowel. We buy a small metal box.

  Back home, I bury the rabbit while Shelly is in the shower. I don’t want her to see it.

  We fall asleep as close as ears of wheat: chest to back, fingers entwined. I kiss the skin at the nape of her neck, soft like rabbit fur. I dream of nothing.

  When I wake my hands are empty and I can hear the crunch of a trowel. I stumble across to the window. In the black night all I can see is Shelly’s white back as she crouches over.

  I feel my way downstairs and run my hand over the kitchen wall. I find the light switch, but my finger won’t move. The crunch of metal against soil seems deafening. I close my eyes and switch on the light. I only open them when the crunch stops.

  Peter. Shelly stands in the open doorway, the metal box in her hands. I know without looking that it is empty. I step back, scraping my heels against the wall.

  Why? It comes out as a croak.

  The plants needed it.

  I lie in bed, listening to the metronome of Shelly’s trowel.

  I lift the pillow off my face. Come to bed! I shout.

  Her voice floats up through the night. Yeah. It’s barely a word, more of a grunt.

  She’s been in the garden since dawn. She doesn’t even bother dressing any more, just kneels in the dirt until it coats her skin. Her palms are so rough that the calluses form ridges like the cracks in the earth. She doesn’t wash, so our bed is full of the grit of ochre dirt, tiny dried-up leaves, flakes of skin from her sunburned back.

  I clench my fists under the sheet. Shelly! Now!

  She doesn’t grunt, doesn’t break her rhythm.

  In the months we’ve been here, nothing has grown. Shelly has planted every seed we could afford, and they sit motionless under the topsoil, sleeping or dead. The nursery is finished, pristine and smelling of paint.

  Last week Shelly threw away her maternity clothes. They swamp her, so heavy with fabric that she can hardly lift her arms. I haven’t looked at her body in days. When I go into the garden, I keep my eyes fixed firmly on the top of her head. I can’t even look at her eyes, can’t bear to see the bones and shadows around them.

  I think I shout for her again, but it might only be in my dream.

  I wake to a tapping above my head, and think: that’s not the trowel. The taps grow louder, banging on the tin roof like an out-of-tune orchestra. I look at the window, at the sky’s odd motion, and realise. Rain.

  I rub my dreams out of my eyes, cough up the words I tried to shout. Shelly’s side of the bed is unwrinkled. Her pillow sits on the floor where I threw it. I know what I should do: look out of the window, then leap down the stairs three at a time while screaming her name. I stand up, neaten the sheets, step carefully on the edges of the stairs so I don’t get splinters. I walk into the kitchen with my eyes on the torn linoleum. I go to the sink, turn on the tap, drink a glass of water. The rain deafens me against the windows. I take a deep breath and open the back door.

  The world outside is green.

  Grass carpets the earth, pea-pods shiver as raindrops hit, courgettes sit heavily like sleeping animals. The air smells like greenhouses and wet dirt. Everything is so clean. I walk through the garden, the grass spotting my feet with mud, leaves wiping my bare arms. The rain wets my hair and cools the night-sweat on my back. I raise my hands to feel the falling water, the rubbery leaves, the bright firm fruit.

  Shelly lies among the tomato plants. Each tomato is as fat and red as an overfed belly. Her cheeks are concave, her collarbones so sharp they seem about to pierce her chest. Her belly is famine-swollen, tight and round in the cup of her hip bones. The rain falls into her eyes.

  I pull a handful of grapes from the vine and jam them into my mouth, the juice running down my chin. I tip my head to the sky and let the fat raindrops wash everything away.

  Momma Grows a Diamond

  TEN

  Momma was with the pony last night. Lily and me have him in the mornings, and we give him a wash with the shammy cloths and a soapy bucket so he’s ready for Jade to look after him the next night. I think Momma must ride him too rough because he’s always sweating and white-eyed when we get him, pulling tight at his rope and spreading his wide beige lips. He won’t settle forever and ever, he just turns circles around the stake. Me and Lily get nervy watching him paw scoops out of the backyard soil.

  Maybe a carrot, says Lily, he’ll calm for a carrot.

  She runs through the field and across the courtyard and into the house, and the whole way the sun leans bright on her shoulders and her dress blows out at the sides in a candystriped triangle. Even out here with my hands pressed to the pony’s brush-rough mane I can hear Lily crashing around the pantry.

  She won’t find a carrot. I heard Opal say she was chopping them all up for a stew, but I let Lily go because I want it to be just me and the pony. I’d have Lily run clean across town and into Lake Pontchartrain if it meant I got more time with the pony.

  He’s stopped circling but his hooves still stamp, and I have to keep my feet back while I lean in so he doesn’t squash them. The air smells of sun and dirt and pony hair. My throat itches with pollen.

  The men pay to see the pony and Momma is there too, and Lily says she knows why. I do know but I don’t know too. I don’t think about it because it hurts my brain and Opal says that makes your hair go white. Like those old scientists, she says. I like that my hair is dark and shiny like a beetle’s shell, and I don’t want it white.

  When Lily comes swooping back out across the yard she doesn’t have a carrot but she does have three lumps of sugar, and I think the pony likes that more anyway.

  It’s dinnertime and Opal’s chopping a stack of vegetables nearly as high as her hair, which is pretty high, higher than angels, Opal always says, but I don’t think that can be true. Opal says a lot of things that aren’t true. My last birthday I was about to blow out my ten candles and just when I took my breath Opal said, there’s a black moon tonight, but when I ran to the window it was as white as ever, penny-shined, winking down at me. So I know not to listen to everything she says, but I still check the moon sometimes just to be sure.

  Opal’s singing that she’s wild about someone called Harry, the heavenly blisses of his kisses, waving the chopping knife round like she’s conducting a bunch of musicians, and it doesn’t seem to match up at all with the sound of the piano from the front of the house but that’s okay because I like Opal’s version better. I hear Momma coming before I see her because she’s singing the song too, wailing it along the hallway and jangling her bracelets in time. They’re singing so loud that they even drown out the ring-dinging of the streetcars passing by outside.

  Momma joins Opal at the counter, scooping up the chopped bits and dropping them into the pot. The kitchen is hot already, so hot that sweat itches along my top lip, but Momma stands right by the fire so she can stir.

  Momma. I sidle up to her and tuck my hands into the waist of her skirt – she always tries to shake me off when I do that, says I don’t need to be hanging on her all the time now I’m big. Momma, you wanna play tonight? Dolls, maybe?

  I don’t really like playing dolls any more, but I think Momma liked to dress them up and brush out their hair. She’s too big for dolls, but then so am I, so maybe that doesn’t matter.

  I can’t to
night, my precious one, she says, wiggling her hips so I have to take my hands away.

  Please, Momma?

  I tuck my hands back in.

  My angel, you know I can’t. I’m working. Now you go help Auntie Opal with them vegetables.

  Can’t I help you work, Momma? Later, I mean? Can’t I?

  She stops stirring and turns around and stands there with the spoon in her hand dripping pale brown water onto the hearth. She looks at me for a long time and I want to run away because she’s never looked at me for so long without smiling. No, she says. You can’t help yet. Now go and play.

  Opal isn’t singing now and neither is Momma, and they’re not looking at me and they can’t see the way I’m wobbling my lip, so I make a little sob noise to see if that makes them look at me but it doesn’t.

  I stamp my foot but that just makes it worse because Momma sucks at her teeth and it makes a tutting sound, and I know what that means.

  The pony will listen. He will understand. I don’t dare slam the door behind me but I do drag my feet so Momma can see I’m mad.

  Outside I jerk my legs from the knee so that my shoes fly off across the yard. The pony isn’t there and I forgot that he’s with Jade, and that makes me sad instead of mad so I just walk to the edge of the yard and tip my head back to stop the tears falling out.

  Above me the sky is purple-black and as wide as the ocean must be, all the stars flicking like fish underwater. The courtyard is ridged like turtle’s shells and I sit on the wall and rub the soles of my feet up and down, bending my toes against the ridges until the bones crack. I stay there until the night air has dried all my tears up, and then I run inside to help Momma make dinner.

  ELEVEN

  Everyone starts out as a flower. There’s Lily, and Rosa, and Orchid, but that’s hard to say so we just say Orchard but that’s flowers too. Rosa is real little, only three or four and so shy she barely even talks. I’m 11 years and 2 months and 3 days so I’m the oldest and that means I’m in charge, which is a good thing too because Lily isn’t so smart and if she wasn’t born a whole week after me then she’d be in charge and everything would go to hell in a handbasket. Opal says that sometimes and I don’t know what a handbasket is, but I like the way it sounds.

  When girls get older they turn into women, and women are jewels. There’s Amber and Opal and Emerald, and then Momma is Ruby. That’s the best of all the names, Ruby.

  I’ve never seen a real ruby but Momma has a fake one set in a ring that one of the soldiers gave to her. That was before he was properly a soldier, before he’d gone away to the Great War and then come back with bits missing and his teeth always pressed tight together. I don’t know what happened when he came back because Momma never mentioned him again, but she still kept the ruby in a carved wood box on her dressing table and she’d take it out sometimes just to look. She mostly did that when a noisy man just left and then she’d call me into her room too, which is a thing she almost never does when it’s night-time, only sometimes when she needs to tell me about what a man is made of, which is okay for me to know now because I’m nearly a woman. Momma says I’ll always be safe from men because I know them now. I didn’t know them last year because I was only little but being 11 is different so it’s good for me to see them. They can never break me or use me now. I know how to use them so I’ll get there first and that’s how it works. Someone will always be used but it won’t be me.

  But Momma says not yet, not yet, not until I’m older and I like that because I want to help out Momma. Maybe one day I’ll get a ruby too. The war was the biggest ever and everyone says there’ll never be another one like it so there won’t be any soldiers coming back missing bits again. So I don’t know how I’ll get a ruby but I’ll try.

  Aren’t you tired of being a flower, Violet? Momma says to me one morning from the depths of her bed. Flowers crush so easy, baby, but nothing breaks a jewel.

  I like being a flower and I only came in here to get my books to do school with Lily, but I don’t know how to tell Momma that I want to help but I want to be a flower too so I just nod yes.

  Diamond, says Momma, no one could ever break a diamond cos it’s harder than bones.

  I just nod at Momma and go out of the room with my books digging lines into my hands, and she must forget because she doesn’t call me Diamond again.

  Me and Lily are doing school at the kitchen table. The cats are yowling and someone is shouting in the next street but it’s pretty quiet. It’s meant to be Math today but we hate Math and Opal isn’t watching us so we do Art instead. Sometimes we’re meant to look at pictures in books and then write what we think about them, but that’s boring so we’re copying the pictures with coloured pencils instead. That’s almost like saying what we think about them.

  Lily is drawing a picture of the face powder lady from a page in a magazine, using lots of pink for her cheeks. I’m copying from the same picture but I don’t like the lady because her eyes look as flat as her hair. So I draw the bird from the face powder box. It’s got a red head and blue wings and a long green tail that curls around like the bottom part of the letter y. Lily is using the red for the lady’s lips now so I have to wait.

  The kitchen table has got all these little grooves and dents in it, and I press my fingers against them in case they’re secret messages from the other girls who have done school here. If I lean forward I think maybe I’ll be able to see the pony through the window, but the sun is too bright and I can’t see anything because it bounces off the glass in white dots that make me squint my eyes. I rest my chin on my hands and my fingers smell of pencils.

  I look over at Lily’s paper and she’s printing words under the picture of the lady: J-A-Y-D she’s printing and I know what she means so I say, That’s not how you spell it, Lily, it’s J-A-D-E like blade.

  Before I even finish talking Lily tumbles off her chair and throws the red pencil at me and drops her picture on the floor and runs out of the room and You can’t say! she shouts back from the hallway, it’s my name and it’s mine and not yours and so you can’t say!

  And then I feel bad for Lily because the most she will ever be is jade and that’s not valuable at all, it doesn’t even sparkle, not like a diamond which is the hardest and prettiest of them all, and I know then that’s why Momma chose it for me. It makes me want to stand up tall.

  I pick up Lily’s picture and smooth out the creases. She’s still in the hallway and I know that because I can hear her crying, but when I go round the corner I see her sitting on the bottom step and her face isn’t wet at all. When she sees me she lets out a big sob like she’s trying to suck up a sneeze. I hold out the picture to her. She’s real pretty and you will be too, I say, and you can spell Jade however you want.

  Lily does a smile like she really doesn’t want to, but then it spreads wider so her teeth show, and she jumps off the bottom step and grabs my hand and we go back into the kitchen together.

  TWELVE

  Momma said the coins are for milk and beignets, just milk and beignets, she said, and in double bags too, and I meant to get them, I truly did, but the comics were so pretty, every colour on every page, and so it made me not feel hungry any more just to look at them. I thought if I had one that was mine to take home I’d never be hungry again because I could look at it any time I wanted. Even if Momma was with the pony or Opal or one of the soldiers I could be full up on colours.

  The man in the store has one eye covered with a black circle with a string that goes around his head. Lily says there’s nothing behind that circle, just a sewed-up hole with no eye in it. She says it’s from the war, but I don’t think that can be true because he’s never been by to see Momma. Momma says I can call her Ruby now I’m 12 and a woman but it sounds wrong so I stick with Momma. I think that maybe Lily is just trying to scare me, and I don’t like that because the man in the store is nice. Sometimes he sneaks a hard candy into
the bag and doesn’t charge me for it.

  On the counter in the store there is a glass jar of pickled eggs and I try not to think about how they look like eyeballs. Sometimes I wonder if the man keeps the jar there to remind him what he’s lost. But people do buy the eggs, so maybe not.

  Lily and I are over by the rack with all the comics, because by then I’ve already decided that they’re more important to buy than milk and beignets. But there’s a problem: we have to decide which one. It has to be the perfect one, one that will make the spanked tushes we will get not hurt any more, because although we accept the consequences that doesn’t mean that we will like them. I like that word, consequence. It’s something that Opal says but I’m not sure that she knows what it means. I’ve never seen her open the dictionary and she never helps me and Lily with doing school.

  Lily points at one comic that has a bright blue cover and shows a little girl in a red dress sitting on a man’s knee, and I don’t like that at all but then I see that the man’s hand is resting on the head of a shaggy brown dog with its tongue hanging out pink and fat as ham, so I guess the guy must be okay after all. I go to pick the comic up but a shadow falls over it so I stop. The man who owns the store has come out from behind the counter and he’s squatted down between me and Lily with his one eye swivelling from one to the other.

  Poor lambs he says poor lost lambs so far from glory.

  We’re just picking out a comic, I say because I don’t like him being so close, he smells of lavender hair-oil and sweat and it makes the hairs in my nose burn, we weren’t going to take them, I swear.

  Lily’s not saying anything at all, just standing with her fists full of comics and staring up at the one with the little girl on the man’s knee, and it makes me mad that I have to do everything just because I’m the oldest.

  I’ll take you to glory, he says, oh my lambs, my little lambs, and then he opens his arms wide like he’s going to scoop us up and Lily throws the comics at his face and grabs my hand and we run run run out of the store and into the street, past the shouting soldiers with their empty sleeves and past the writer-men grumping over glasses of gin and the air that smells of rotting bananas and the sounds of a dozen pianos clashing around us and we’re spinning around balcony poles and we’re almost home before we even stop to breathe, and Lily’s half-laughing and half-crying and I am too because I know we just got away from something but I don’t know what.