Queenie Malone’s Paradise Hotel Page 2
Beyond the lawn was a small vegetable patch with a couple of rows of peas, some lines of crisp lettuce, four tomato plants in pots, and her daddy’s precious raspberry canes. Tilly used to steal the pods of peas and eat them when they were still tiny and juicy sweet. Her daddy used to pretend to be cross, and then laugh and say it would be a miracle if any of them were allowed to grow big enough to end up on a dinner plate. Tilly liked it when he laughed, because he laughed with his whole face and not just his mouth. His cheeks would go red, and the skin around his eyes would wrinkle like an over-ripe apple; and his eyes, as dark as treacle, would shine with what he called ‘happy tears’. Tilly’s mother always said that the raspberry canes were a waste of time because the birds would eat them, but each year the canes were laden with the velvet-soft, deep pink berries, luscious with nearly sweet juice that trickled down her chin as she crammed the fruit into her mouth whilst hiding in the garden shed with her daddy. The fruit tasted all the more delicious because it was eaten like this – greedily, messily and in secret. For Tilly, the smell of creosote would always be inextricably linked with raspberries, and years later, as an adult, the slightest whiff of it would make her mouth water. Her daddy would eat his share of the fruit, and then later, when he brought a meagre half-bowlful into the kitchen, he would wink theatrically at Tilly as he handed the bowl to her mother, who would be wearing her best ‘I told you so’ face. The raspberries were just one of the many little secrets and jokes Tilly shared with her daddy that brightened the rather dark and troubled palette that coloured their daily lives.
Tilly stood up and tested her knee with a few tentative steps to see if the bleeding had stopped. The daisies were fully opened in the glare of the midday sun, and their technicolour petals shimmered in the heat. Tilly bent down and picked a snapdragon head. Just as she was squeezing its ‘cheeks’ to make it bite her finger, her mother came to the doorstep. She was wearing a light blue cotton dress and a single strand of pearls. As she was standing there, she pushed a powder compact and a clean hanky into her handbag and snapped it shut with a loud click. She should have looked pretty, but her face was tense, and her expression strained.
‘Come on, Tilly, we’ll miss the bus. And pull that sock up.’
She turned and went back into the house. Tilly dropped her snapdragon onto the path and tugged ineffectually at her sock. As she dawdled back past the flowers to follow her mother, she wondered who would look after them now that her daddy had gone.
3
Tilly
Tilly sat next to her mother, wriggling uncomfortably as the stiff, velvet pile of the bus seat prickled against the back of her bare legs. It was hot and stuffy on the bus, despite the breeze from the open door.
‘Tilly, do sit still,’ her mother muttered as she rummaged in her handbag to find her purse.
‘She’s got ants in her pants, that one.’
The lady bus conductor grinned broadly at Tilly whilst waiting patiently for her mother to fish the coins out of her purse to pay for their tickets. Tilly giggled. She longed to be a bus conductor with a shiny leather money pouch and a magical, whirring ticket machine, and to be able to say ‘pants’ on a bus full of people without getting into trouble. Tilly’s mother handed over the money for their fares and the bus conductor turned the handle on the side of her box of tricks and pulled out two orange printed tickets from the slot on the front.
‘Here you are, love. Do you want to hold them?’
She passed them to Tilly with a wink, and made her way down the aisle, swaying gently with the jolting movement of the bus. Tilly definitely wanted to be a bus conductor. Not only was there a nice blue uniform, a pouch full of money and the marvellous ticket machine, but you also got to be in charge of the whole bus. Tilly and her mother were sitting on one of the two long seats, just inside the door, that faced each other across the aisle of the bus. Opposite them sat an old couple and a young woman with a baby. The young woman was very pretty, with yellow hair pulled into a high ponytail and shiny pink lipstick. She was wearing a pale pink skirt with white flowers that was tight at the waist and then stuck out like a lampshade, and a close-fitting, short-sleeved sweater that was knitted in a white, fluffy wool that Tilly thought would be nice to stroke. The old woman had a rather cross face, and very stiff grey hair arranged in fat curls that were puffed up on top of her head like a pile of sausage rolls. Her dress was navy blue with tiny white spots, and stretched over the huge shelf of her bosom before disappearing into the deep crease between the shelf and her large tummy. Her feet were squashed into shiny navy shoes from which her podgy ankles spilled out like over-stuffed haggises. She looked hot, cross and uncomfortable. Tilly wondered if she was having a baby too. Her tummy certainly looked big enough to be holding one, and it would also explain why her dress was too small for her. Tilly was just about to ask her when the woman shot her such a stern look that she thought better of it. As Tilly looked at the young woman and the old woman sitting next to one another, she wondered when it was that bosoms changed from being two separate things into one big one. The young woman definitely had two, and you could see the shape of them very clearly under her sweater, but the old woman just had one big, rather solid-looking bosom shelf. Tilly puzzled over it for a bit, and decided that she didn’t particularly want either.
She turned her attention to the old man, who Tilly thought must be about a hundred. He had tanned skin as wrinkled as a pickled walnut, great tufts of white hair sprouting out of his ears, and blue eyes that twinkled with mischief. He was wearing a tweed cap and a blue checked shirt, and Tilly was sure that he would smell like a granddad. His gnarled, bony hands gripped the handle of a walking stick that he had planted firmly in front of him between his widely spread legs. He looked as though he had anchored himself ready for the jolting stops and starts and gentle swaying of the voyage ahead on the number 37. Tilly looked at him with unconcealed curiosity, and he stuck his tongue out at her. It was done in a second, like a toad catching a fly. Tilly wasn’t altogether sure that she hadn’t imagined it. She looked at her mother to see if she had noticed anything. Her mother was in a world of her own, staring out of the window. Tilly looked at him again. He stuck his tongue out – again. But this time Tilly understood. She quickly glanced at her mother again before pressing the end of her nose up with her finger and sticking out her tongue. A flicker of a smile crossed the old man’s face before he pulled both ears forward, pressed the end of his nose up with the tip of his little finger, and once again poked out his tongue in reply. Tilly thought for a moment and was just about to respond in kind, when the bus conductor sashayed back down the aisle. She looked at them both like a teacher who knows that her pupils are misbehaving behind her back, but hasn’t yet managed to catch them in the act.
‘I’ve got my eye on you,’ she said in a stern voice to the old man, and then squeezed his knee as she passed him and climbed the stairs to the top deck. The old man’s wife didn’t look very pleased as she folded her arms firmly under her large bosom and jolted it crossly as if to wake it up. Tilly hesitated and the old man raised his eyebrows slightly as if to encourage her. Tilly readied herself; this was her best face and it took some concentration. She pulled her ears forward with her forefingers, hooked her little fingers into the corners of her mouth and dragged her lips into a wide grimace, rolled back her eyes so that only the whites were visible, and poked out her tongue as far as it would go. Beat that! The old man looked suitably impressed, and Tilly settled smugly back into her seat. But her claim to victory was premature. With breathtaking nonchalance and a flick of his tongue, the old man dislodged and partially ejected both his upper and lower dentures before sucking them back into place, keeping his eyes firmly crossed throughout the manoeuvre. Game, set and match. Tilly was completed captivated, and more than a little envious of his false teeth – they clearly gave him an unfair advantage. She was also then suddenly consumed with the giggles. She could feel them fizzing up inside her like the Alka-Seltzer tablets her m
other gave her when she had a sicky tummy. She struggled to keep them inside her, but she was already shaking with both the effort and the failure to do so. Her eyes were brimming with happy tears and her face was as pink as a raspberry. The final straw came when she looked across at the old man and saw tears of laughter streaming down his face, his whole body rattling with mirth. Tilly was worried that his teeth might be shaken out of his mouth completely this time and skitter across the floor and bite her mother on the ankle. The thought of it finished her off. She exploded like a shaken bottle of pop. Her laughter bubbled through the bus, rising and falling like jam boiling in a saucepan as she tried to pull herself together. But it was hopeless. The more her mother told her to stop being silly and sit quietly like a good girl, the worse it got. She knew she was, in her mother’s words, ‘making a show of herself’, but the show had to go on because she couldn’t stop it. And the old man wasn’t helping. He was thumping his walking stick on the floor of the bus as though he were drumming the beat of the rising crescendo of hilarity that had gripped them both so firmly. Eventually the laughter subsided long enough for Tilly to batten down the hatches and display a reasonably sensible face. But her composure was precarious; too recent to be relied upon in the face of even the slightest provocation. As the old man’s wife turned herself and her bosom away from him in disapproval, the bus jolted sharply and the baby sitting next to her was sick all over her bosom and her handbag. Tilly was lost again.
The next stop was theirs, and Tilly was glad to get off the bus. The smell of baby sick wasn’t very nice, and the more the old woman tried to clean it up, the further she seemed to spread it. She even managed to flick some of it onto the bus conductor, who had hurried downstairs to see what all the commotion was about. The old man was laughing so hard by this point that his anchor had come adrift and he almost fell off his seat. Tilly reckoned that he’d definitely be going straight to bed with no supper that night. As for Tilly, her sides ached from laughing so much, but she wasn’t so sure that she wanted to be a bus conductor any more.
She didn’t want to be a doctor’s receptionist either. Ten minutes after they stepped off the bus, they were sitting on hard, wooden chairs in the cool and gloomy waiting room of their family doctor, Dr Bentley, and Tilly was having a staring contest with his receptionist, who was seated behind a desk at one end of the room. She was a thin woman, with dark hair so tightly scraped back into a bun that it made the skin on her face seem a size too small. She had a long, pointy nose which she had looked down at them, over the top of her glasses, when they had walked in. She behaved as though her job was to protect the doctor from patients, who were usually just making a fuss about nothing. Tilly didn’t like the way she seemed to think that her mother wasn’t good enough. Good enough for what, she was too young to fully understand, but she felt it nonetheless, and she knew it wasn’t nice. Tilly also thought that her face looked as though she had been sucking lemons. She smiled to herself as she thought about sharing the joke with her daddy, but the smile quickly melted like an ice cream dropped on the pavement as she remembered that he had gone away, and with the memory came the feeling that her tummy was full of mud. The receptionist was watching Tilly intently as though she might, at any moment, run amok and mess up the perfect piles of glossy magazines on the shiny table, or dishevel the box of leaflets proclaiming the benefits of Sanatogen and cod liver oil and malt. Tilly’s mother made her eat a generous spoonful of the evil-smelling, brown, sticky gloop every day, because it was ‘good for her’. Tilly didn’t see how it could be. The very sight of the fat brown jar made her gag, and its contents coated the inside of her mouth for at least half an hour after she had been ‘dosed’. It tasted like fish-flavoured toffee, and made her burps smell like the bin round the back of the chip shop. The phone on the receptionist’s desk rang, and she lifted the receiver to her ear without taking her eyes off Tilly.
‘Doctor will see you now,’ she said to Tilly’s mother in a clipped voice.
Her mother stood up a little too quickly, clutching her handbag, and said to Tilly, ‘Now wait here, and be a good girl.’
She was almost at the door when she turned and added, ‘Don’t touch anything.’
Tilly scowled. ‘Be a good girl’ was open to interpretation. It had possibilities. She could have looked through the magazines, or just moved them around, disturbing their perfect arrangement. She could have pushed her fingertips, one by one, onto the polished surface of the table, leaving a trail of smudge marks. She could have waved her hands through the heavy folds of the velvet curtains that hung at the window. All of this could be excused as the behaviour of an essentially good but bored child trying to entertain herself whilst waiting for her mother. Tilly’s instincts told her, however, that they would be guaranteed to annoy the receptionist more than spiders in her knickers. But she was scuppered by her mother’s final words: ‘Don’t touch anything.’ Tilly sat very still and thought very hard. After a moment, she jumped up from her seat. The receptionist was immediately on red alert. Tilly first went to the magazines. She placed both hands over the piles and moved them back and forth, leaving only the smallest space between her skin and the glossy magazine covers. Then, with one finger, she drew patterns in the air, sometimes only a hair’s breadth above the polished surface of the table. Her finger moved steadily at first, tracing dramatic swirls and flourishes, but then suddenly swooped and dipped seemingly even closer to the table, like a swallow sipping water from the surface of a lake. The receptionist was getting crosser and crosser, in the way that grown-ups do when they are so thoroughly outwitted by a child. Tilly moved on towards the curtains, trailing the back of her hand perilously close to the rather miserable-looking rubber plant that squatted sullenly in a dull brown pot against one wall.
‘Little girl,’ the receptionist finally snapped, ‘what exactly do you think you’re doing?’
Tilly turned very deliberately to face her and smiled sweetly.
‘I’m being a good girl and not touching anything,’ she replied.
Tilly spent the next couple of minutes pretending to stroke the curtains whilst the receptionist looked on in infuriated frustration. Tilly wouldn’t have been in the least bit surprised if steam had started blowing out of her ears. Eventually, there was the sound of footsteps outside the door, and Tilly returned unhurriedly to her seat and sat down. She even remembered to cross her ankles and dropped her hands neatly into her lap to complete the perfect picture of innocence. The first thing her mother said as she came into the room was, ‘I hope you’ve been a good girl, Tilly?’
A question neatly fielded by Tilly’s reply of ‘I didn’t touch anything.’
Outside, blinking in the bright sunshine after the gloom of the doctor’s surgery, her mother took her hand. She seemed pleased with Tilly for once and even bought her an ice cream from the shop next to the bus stop. She immediately wished she hadn’t, however, when the bus came sooner than they had expected, and Tilly had to negotiate getting on and finding a seat with one hand clutching her ice-cream cone, both eyes fixed on the pink ice cream that crowned it, and her tongue in constant motion attempting to finish her treat before it melted in the heat. As Tilly licked the last drips of ice cream off her fingers, she wondered vaguely what the medicine was that her mother had swapped her prescription for at the chemist. The only medicine she had ever had after a visit to the doctor, on account of a nasty cough, had been the same colour as her ice cream and was called penny ceiling. On their way back to the bus stop, they had also stopped at the flower shop. Her mother had bought a lovely big bunch of roses, carnations and some other flowers that Tilly didn’t recognise but thought looked and smelled very pretty. They were for Auntie Wendy because it was her birthday. Auntie Wendy was her mother’s best friend, which Tilly thought was quite strange because they weren’t alike at all. Auntie Wendy was a noisy, friendly sort of lady, who said ‘hello’ on the street to people she didn’t even know, and thought nothing of answering the door in her dress
ing gown and curlers. She had two children and one husband. The husband was called Uncle Bill, and the children were called Karen and Kevin. Kevin was a boy and twelve years old, so Tilly didn’t have much to do with him. But Karen was only two years older than Tilly, and friendly and lively like Auntie Wendy, so Tilly liked playing ‘shopping’ and ‘hairdressers’ with her. Auntie Wendy lived just two streets away from them and always had red fizzy pop, which was another reason why Tilly liked going to see her. They got off the bus at their usual stop, and Tilly noticed that she had two small splodges of pink ice cream on the front of her dress. She tried to lick them off, but her mother stopped her.
‘Leave it, Tilly. You’ll only make it worse.’
Tilly wasn’t really worried about the state of her dress; she just didn’t want to waste any ice cream. The houses in Auntie Wendy’s street all had boxy front gardens bordered by red brick walls. Most of them had a square of lawn in the middle, edged on all four sides by a thin strip of earth planted with brightly coloured flowers. Tilly thought that the houses and gardens looked like they were made of Lego. Except for Auntie Wendy’s. Auntie Wendy’s front garden was covered with crazy paving with the occasional hole for a plant or shrub, and was home to about twenty assorted garden gnomes. There was also a large plastic windmill, a small wooden wheelbarrow full of begonias, a stone statue of a naked lady, and a wishing well. One of the gnomes sat on the edge of the well dangling a fishing rod into it. He was Tilly’s favourite.