The Confusion of Karen Carpenter Read online

  ‘How was your Christmas?’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘How’re you getting on?’

  The last thing I want to do is get emotional by the photocopier. Everyone knows what’s going on. Not everyone will care, mind you, but enough people will feel they have to say something, see how I am. Which of course on one level is lovely, but on another I find cringeworthily mortifying. Everyone knows because I took a week off before we broke up for the Christmas holidays and bad news travels fast. The morning after getting the Letter, I phoned in sick and pretended to have flu, but word soon got round after I told Meredith from PE in Tesco. Well, she asked how I was and I burst out crying in the Home Baking aisle and before I knew it, I had the head Skyping me and telling me to take as much time off as I needed. Our head, Ethleen, is very into technology. In fact, she says technology is her ‘thang’. I hate it when she says ‘thang’, but she’s OK once you chip away at the psychobabble and her insistence that the kids aren’t pupils or students but ‘learners’. If you ignore all that, she’s a bit of a laugh and her heart’s in the right place.

  I have a little panic.

  The first thing that will happen in the staffroom tomorrow will be that we have our Monday-morning briefing. Basically this means that Ethleen comes in, claps her hands to get our attention and then fills us in on anything we need to know.

  I am worried.

  I am worried that she’ll say, ‘OK, guys, it’s a welcome back to Karen Carpenter. Sadly Karen’s partner, Michael, left her a few weeks ago. No idea why – I’ve not gone into details – but obviously what she’d really like is if each and every one of you could go up to her, hug her inappropriately and ask her lots of questions about it. Is she rubbish in the sack? for example. That kind of thing. She’s doing OK to good-ish, I’d say, as her newfound misery has clearly not stopped her eating. The fat moose.’

  I snap myself out of this reverie. There’s no way Ethleen would say something like that in a staff briefing. Although when Kirsty in humanities had that miscarriage, Ethleen did say something like, ‘It’s lovely to have you back, Kirsty. Hope everything goes smoothly for you.’ Kirsty went beetroot and picked imaginary fluff off her imaginary cardy (she was wearing a puffa jacket) and didn’t know where to put herself, while all the blokes shuffled from foot to foot, and the women all looked at Kirsty and smiled sympathetically and slightly patronizingly. Apart from Gina from science. Basically, if you’ve got a headache, she’s got a brain tumour, so she sucked her teeth, gave an ironic laugh and nodded in the direction of Kirsty as if to say, ‘I have had twenty-three miscarriages, babe. Do not get me started on mass mourning.’

  I am just toying with the idea of missing out on the Monday-morning briefing altogether and hiding in my office with two Fruit Pastilles in my ears when there is a noise downstairs. A key in the door. I hear the front door open. Footsteps. What sounds like a bag being dropped onto carpet. And I just know. I do, I just know.

  Oh my God.

  Michael has come home.

  TWO

  The salmon-pink swing coat I see slung over the banister as I run down the stairs and the casually discarded Ugg boots in the hall tell me that maybe it’s not Michael who’s just let himself in. And when I hear a croakily contraltoed ‘Fly Me to the Moon coming from the kitchen, I realize with a crashing blow that it is of course my mum.

  How? How have I forgotten that she is staying? Am I going mad?

  Mum appears in the kitchen doorway with a box of Findus Crispy Pancakes in one hand and some broccoli in the other and looks confused. (Huh. She’s confused? I’m the one who’s forgotten she’s even staying.)

  ‘I think you’ve got rats in your loft. I can hear a real scritch-scratching tonight,’ she says, perturbed.

  Oh well. Beats bats in the belfry, I suppose.

  ‘You all right, love?’

  I nod, smiling, as if to say, ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

  She looks me up and down curiously, as if to say, ‘Well, you’re the one stood in a fluffy pink dressing gown, fresh from the bath, no towel, dripping water on your parquet-effect flooring that you got for a knock-down price in the Ikea sale, if you please.’

  I hurry back to the bath.

  Mum came to stay last week, convinced that since the split I’d be wasting away to nothing and would only get through this with the aid of her good old-fashioned home cooking, which in her book is a vast array of frozen produce mixed up with fresh green veg. Yes, Mum really has been to Iceland. It was the day before Christmas Eve, and she breezed in laden down with three matching fake-Gucci travel bags and a two-thirds-sized artificial Christmas tree. She likes things that are two-thirds their normal size. My dad is known as Pint-Sized Vern down the Legion, they live in a house called Val’s Cottage (it’s not a cottage – it’s just a two-up, two-down terraced house with antwacky latticed windows, but the ceilings are so low a dwarf would be claustrophobic), and her favourite Disney song is ‘It’s a Small World (After All)’.

  She claimed she’d arrived because she couldn’t bear to think of me being on my own over the festive period, but I was all too aware of the real reason. She’d clearly had a row with Dad and wanted some space, as well as some time to explore one of her favourite cities. Mum has long had a habit of suddenly texting to say she’s just got off a train at Euston and would be arriving at the house in half an hour. She will then appear, bedraggled, on the doorstep, in a cloud of excuses and Tweed by Lentheric, claiming she’s had another ‘fight’ with Dad and had to come to London or else she’d be ‘serving an eighteen’ in Holloway My mum is prone to exaggeration. Dad has never laid a finger on her in his life; in fact, she’s more likely to clobber him. The thing about my mum is, she has to have drama wherever she goes. She likes to be the eye of the storm. As my dad succinctly and precisely puts it, ‘She could start a fight in an empty room, that one.’

  I think part of the reason I’m quite shy and retiring – on the surface at least – is because my mum is so loud and ‘out there’. Everything about her has volume: her hair, her voice, her clothes, her stature. As a child, I wondered if she was the lady upon a white horse that they rode to Banbury Cross to see in that nursery rhyme, as my mum did always appear to have rings on her fingers and bells on her toes – she wore that many bangles, anklets and so on that she only had to take one step across a room and she sounded like an epileptic wind chime.

  When I was a kid, she sold Marks & Spencer’s seconds on a stall in Garston Market, so was used to and comfortable with the sound of her own booming voice. When I was about eight, she got bored on her market stall and decided to mix it up by introducing a little ‘friend’ to help her sell the misshapen duvets and pillowcases. Her little friend was a cuddly teddy bear that she had customized into a ventriloquist’s puppet, and sometimes she would speak to the customers through him. Or Cheeky, as he became known.

  Let me get one thing straight: Mum was no Roger De Courcey. She made no attempt to disguise the fact that her mouth was moving when Cheeky was speaking; nor did she alter her voice when doing the voice of Cheeky. Cheeky, in fact, sounded just like Mum. What she did to hide her moving mouth was hold Cheeky up in front of her face whenever he ‘spoke’. It is not the best technique in the world, you have to admit.

  However. This didn’t stop a lot of people at Garston Market telling Mum what a character Cheeky was. How funny he was. What sparkling repartee he had. Crowds used to gather to wonder at the hilarious stand-up act of performance art that went on at the Marks’s seconds stall three times a week. I say crowds, but I never saw them, though Mum described them as ten deep on occasion. (As I said, prone to exaggeration.)

  Anyway, the upshot of all this attention was that Mum decided it was high time to pack in the market stall and pursue a career as a ventriloquist. Which was a great idea, except that:

  1. She couldn’t speak without moving her lips, and

  2. She couldn’t speak without moving her lips.

  That cert
ainly didn’t stop her having her van resprayed with ‘Val Carpenter and Cheeky the Liverpool Bear!’ on the side. She took an advert in both the Stage and the local paper, the Echo, announcing that ‘due to popular demand’ she and Cheeky were now ‘available for bookings!!!’

  And yes, she did put three exclamation marks. And she had professional photographs taken at a studio on Allerton Road. For months afterwards her huge portrait adorned their shop window, Mum smiling so hard she looked like she was trying to expel something, and holding Cheeky up as if to say, ‘Look – I’ve found the elixir of life, and he is a foot-high teddy bear in a shell suit top. Share with me my discovery, my joy!’ A bright orange star had been cut out of cardboard and attached to the corner of the portrait. On it, in marker pen, someone had written:

  Local celebrity Val Collins

  and Peeky the Bear

  Which got Mum’s blood boiling and she went in to complain, insisting they change it to ‘Local celebrity Val Carpenter and Cheeky the Liverpool Bear.’ Although she knew it would be a challenge to get that on a small bit of cardboard, she was sure they could if they really tried.

  She must have rubbed them up the wrong way, though, because instead of altering the star, they removed the photo from the window altogether, claiming it had ‘made them a laughing stock’. Mum just wasn’t as famous as she liked to think she was. Or, as they put it, ‘You’re no Edwina Currie.’

  In order to ‘up her profile’ – as she explained she was doing one night to Dad over a high tea of fish fingers and mashed potato, easy on the peas – she decided she was going to ‘crack the schools market’. Dad looked slightly alarmed, but I thought no more of it.

  Until a few weeks later during assembly at school when our headmistress, Mrs Girvan (who had a gold tooth), announced we were going to learn all about road safety. Nothing amazing there, but then she added, ‘With none other than Cheeky the Liverpool Bear.’ I froze. What fresh hell was this? The doors at the back of the assembly hall swung open, a tape of a piano started to play, and Mum walked in wearing a pillar-box-red safari suit and carrying Cheeky, singing a song that went along the lines of:

  Look left, look right.

  Only cross if it’s all right.

  Look back, look ahead

  If you wanna make sure you’re not dead.

  Find a zebra or a pelican

  If you don’t wanna be a skeleton.

  Do not dawdle. Do not bop.

  Do not hit the lollipop

  Lady . . .

  Anyway, this room full of approximately two hundred under-elevens knew this song was complete rubbish. A few kids looked round to gauge my reaction.

  One boy leaned in and said, ‘Isn’t that your mum?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘It is, Karen. That’s your mum.’ Another voice, more insistent.

  ‘How can it be my mum?’ I blustered as Mum carried on singing her way to the front of the hall. ‘My mum’s . . . dead!’

  Whoops. No one was going to believe me, were they?

  ‘Liar!’

  ‘Yeah, you lying bitch!’

  I blushed. They were on to me. Something, possibly, to do with my mum singing into a head mic at the front of the assembly hall right now, a teddy covering her face, as our headmistress was tapping her foot in time to the ‘beat’. But then I heard a girl whisper behind me, ‘It might be true. My mam said someone else is working on the Marks’s stall now.’

  I saw various mouths drop open in shock and eyes watering in sympathy. I didn’t care that I had lied, because when I looked ahead and saw Mum jigging about with the shell-suited teddy, I wanted to kill her.

  I know I shouldn’t have said it. I know it was really bad of me. Lying’s always bad, and this was one lie that would be pretty hard to keep going, right?

  Wrong.

  I kept it up for almost a month. It was amazingly easy to do. I suppose because, looking back, children will believe anything. Or they did in those dim and distant days, even if the obvious was staring them in the face. A bit like if I now said to some (admittedly young) kids at school, ‘See this wall? Although it looks white to the naked eye, it is in fact blue. It’s an amazing new blue that appears white but is in fact blue.’

  After a while you might say to those children, ‘What colour is this wall?’

  They would look at this white, white wall and answer, ‘That wall is blue.’

  So as long as I had the odd pretend cry at school and said things during the dinner break like, ‘God, this chicken à la king with mash really reminds me of my mum. I wish she wasn’t dead,’ and as long as I didn’t take them back to the house, then no one would really know the difference.

  But of course Bryony Cathcart had to go and spoil everything in class one day. Mrs Tipping was asking us to bring in photos of our families for a project, so Bryony put up her hand and said, ‘Miss? What should Karen do, Miss? ’Cos her mum’s, like, dead.’

  Mrs Tipping frowned, glanced at me, then shook her head at Bryony. ‘That’s not very grown-up, Bryony. And not very nice. Get on with your work.’

  ‘No, it’s true, Miss.’ Debbie Fontaine was backing her up.

  Mrs Tipping glanced at me. This didn’t look good.

  ‘She died in a freak tornado at Rhyl Sun Centre while she was there on a Dooleys tribute weekend.’

  Why? Why had I said that? Why couldn’t I have just said she died peacefully in her sleep like a normal person? Why had I had to have her blowing away in a cyclone at a North Wales holiday destination?

  ‘She’s not dead, Debbie,’ Mrs Tipping said calmly.

  ‘She is, Miss. Her funeral was at the Protestant Cathedral,’ Debbie argued.

  ‘Well, she had half of it there,’ added Bryony, ‘and the other half at the Catholic Cathedral.’

  Now Mrs Tipping was looking quite scared.

  ‘’Cos she was halfy-halfy,’ explained Debbie.

  Again, why? Why had I said that? Why had I described such an elaborate funeral? What was I thinking?

  I screwed up my face in a ‘what the frig are they on about?’ look.

  ‘Then they went on to a really nice synagogue, Miss,’ added Jamie-Lee Morton, ‘’cos she was really into Jews.’

  Oh. God.

  Mrs Tipping was not happy. When she gave Jamie-Lee, Debbie and Bryony detention, I knew my days were numbered. You see, it’s one thing lying to other kids – they’ll swallow anything – but grown-ups are a different matter entirely. I was quite convinced that grown-ups were part of a club and they all knew each other’s doings. So if my mum and dad had a row on a Tuesday night about a colour scheme for scatter cushions to go with the three-piece suite, I quite expected Mrs Tipping to have an opinion on the decision the next day. So it completely stood to reason that Mrs Tipping knew full well my mother was alive and parading herself round as a ventriloquist of dubious repute in the schools of south Liverpool, and of course if she had died in a freak act of God, then surely she would know.

  My assumptions were right.

  ‘Why did you tell everyone Mum was dead, Karen?’ asked Dad that night, following a very long pause as we ate a tea of chicken Kievs and green beans.

  I shrugged. I couldn’t tell the truth, could I?

  ‘Well, isn’t it obvious?’ asked Mum, who was taking this far better than I thought she would. She even had a chuckle in her voice. Dad looked at her.

  Oh God, she was going to say it: The child is embarrassed that I am such a dreadful ventriloquist. I hang my head in shame and hang my fistable teddy on the back of the bedroom door, never to be seen in public again.

  No such luck. Instead she said, ‘You’ve let her watch too many Hammer House of Horror films, so she’s got a morbid fascination with death.’

  She said it almost proudly, like it was something to brag about, something that made me different and interesting. Beguiling, bewitching. I was almost won over.

  ‘Ergo . . .’ she continued – I had no idea what or who Ergo was – ‘. .
. she has chosen me, the most important person in her life, and wondered what it would be like if I was . . . a goner.’

  Dad rolled his eyes, and I wasn’t surprised. I’d watched about two movies and hated them both. Mum just hated him watching them. That’s what this was really about.

  ‘Don’t roll your eyes at me, Vernon.’

  ‘Nothing to do with Cheeky, then,’ Dad muttered under his breath.

  ‘Vernon!’ snapped Mum, as if he was the one being cheeky.

  We continued to eat in silence.

  To maintain the pretence that I was indeed obsessed with death, I took to watching more horror movies, reading the death announcements in the Echo and mysteriously circling some of them with red pen. I also claimed to want to be an embalmer when I grew up. Mum loved my new fascination and actively encouraged it. This culminated in her taking me to look round the local undertaker’s and chapel of rest.

  As we gazed on our fourth corpse, Mum leaned in and said, ‘This one’s been garrotted. I think it’s drugs-related,’ and I realized I was starting to feel faint.

  I looked up at her and said, ‘I think I’m over my obsession with death.’

  She looked down at me, rather disappointed.

  And then I really did faint.

  The other kids at school were slightly more tricky to shake off. After word spread that I was a liar, liar, pants on fire, because I’d claimed my mum was dead when she wasn’t, I did a counterattack with, ‘Well, you’ll never guess what. The police came to our house and said they’d made a terrible mistake. It wasn’t my mum who was blown away by the tornado. It was just someone who had the same snood as her.’

  It was the 1980s.

  ‘And now she’s home and it’s amazing. I’ve got my mum back again.’

  ‘Where’s she been?’

  ‘I can’t tell you. It’s top secret. Well, I could tell you, but then the secret police would come round and kill you.’

  ‘Which secret police?’

  ‘I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.’