I didn’t tell Mum for ages. I didn’t want to worry her. She’d been so busy since the move, what with unpacking all the boxes, and trying to put up curtain poles with the scary drill now Dad had gone to Jesus. I couldn’t wait until she’d had time to find the rolling pin, so I could stand on the stool in our new kitchen and make Peppermint Creams with her again. There was always Underbite—my orange lion—to talk to in the meantime, but even he seemed to be sulking.
So, I’d been in Mrs Dean’s class for three whole weeks before I broached the subject with Mum. I watched her tugging my hair into a hard, fast and painful plait in the mirror behind me.
‘Mum?’
‘Yes, Ginny?’
‘Can we go to the swings after school?’
She snapped a red Alice band up over my chin onto my hairline.
‘Yes, Ginny. Just for a bit.’
‘And, Mum?’
‘Yes, Ginny?’
‘Can we walk a different way to school today?’
She thought for a moment. ‘I don’t think there is one. Why?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said, all casual, ‘I just…I feel like a change today.’
Until then, I’d got round the Scary Walk to School by holding Mum’s hand until the very last possible moment, then letting go of it just long enough to skip as fast as I could, past the rusty gate of the bungalow next door to the school. That way I wouldn’t ever again have time to see the aproned figure in the peeling turquoise porch, or notice the red clotted velvet curtains parting around that slow smile of sweetcorn dentures; the chicken fingers rippling a slow wave; the American Tan knees wide apart like open sesame.
‘What are you on about, Ginny-the-Pooh?’
‘At the verdigris cottage. By school.’
‘The verdigris…? Honestly, where do you learn these words?’
I could see I was going to have to come clean.
‘I’m scared of The Smiling Lady, Mum.’
‘What smiling lady?’ She was putting a tin of Alphabetti Spaghetti in my PE bag for the Harvest Table.
‘The Smiling Lady. In the verdigris cottage.’
‘Do you mean the old caretaker’s bungalow? Ginny, that’s nice Mrs Cole. She used to be the Lollypop Lady.’
Sheesh.
I wasn’t stupid. I knew what lollypops meant: I’d seen Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
‘But, Mum, she’s got blood on her teeth…’
‘Blood? She hasn’t got blood on her teeth.’ She licked her thumb and rubbed it across my mouth. ‘I bet she has strawberry jam on toast for breakfast, just like you.’
‘No, Mum – honestly, I think it’s definitely blood.’
‘Ginny, your imagination! It’s probably lipstick. What, do you think she eats little children for breakfast instead?’
Jiminy Cricket.
‘Does she, Mum?’
She squeezed my red anorak shut, and tucked Underbite into the pocket.
‘No, Ginny-the-Pooh. Nice old Mrs Cole at Chickadee Cottage doesn’t eat little children for breakfast. Now, get your mittens, we’re late.’
‘Shall we walk on the other side just in case, though?’
‘Absolutely not. She’s a sweet old lady. She’s ninety-four, and all the other children love her. She’s probably lonely, and it’s important that we’re kind. And anyway, you’re supposed to be a big girl now, Virginia.’
So that’s where it all started. Me and The Smiling Lady.
***
‘What’s your name, Little Miss New Girl?’
It was even worse up close: like the clown in my Misfits card game. Same dead, triangular eyes stretched into crepe-paper lines by brows dark enough to have been drawn on by a black jumbo crayon. And, as she spoke, I’d caught a horrified glimpse of what she was keeping inside that red cave mouth, and it was something like the raw spleens Dad used to get from the butcher to give to Buster.
I probed some moss on the pavement with my Start-Rite shoe.
‘Ginny,’ Mum said, ‘don’t be silly now…’
‘Ginny, is it?’
‘Well, it’s Virginia – and she’s not normally shy…’
‘Well, Miss Virginia-Ginny. I am Persephone Cole, but you may call me Mrs Cole. Would you like a Parma Violet?’
‘No. Taste like perfume.’
‘Ginny!’
‘No thank you, Mrs Cole.’
‘Well, now! Aren’t you the good little girl for your Mummy? I bet you’d like a pink Sugar Mouse instead.’
A pink Sugar Mouse?
She waggled it from a crab finger and thumb, smiling like a hunter’s trap.
***
After Christmas, Mum got a job in the High Street, so on her first day, I decided to seize my chance.
‘Brenda?’
I was experimenting with first names to show how grown up I was.
‘Yes, Ginny?’
‘I’ve been thinking,’ I said. ‘Now I’m a Big Girl, I can walk by myself from the corner. I’m very sensible for nearly seven, you know.’
She paused the comb for a moment in the mirror. ‘It could save me some time, I suppose – I could carry on to the paper shop once I’ve seen you go in. And Mrs Dean is always there checking everyone in…’
Eventually it was agreed: I’d take my red Triang scooter, and Mum would watch me from the corner as I sped the one hundred yards into the Crayola and Play-dough perfumed sanctum of Mrs Dean’s classroom. Excellent.
‘Where’s your mummy, Virginia-Ginny?’
My cheeks jiggled with the speed of the Triang’s wheels on the uneven pavement and The Smiling Lady’s magpie voice rattled in my ears as I swept past Chickadee Cottage that morning. I figured I could be as unkind as I liked with Mum not there: I was only a little girl after all, and it wasn’t my problem if The Smiling Lady was lonely. A few days later, I was sure I felt a pink sugar mouse hit me hard on the back, but I didn’t even care about that, because Mum had taken to bringing me home a quarter of Coconut Mushrooms from the paper shop instead. Sometimes even an Animal Bar.
And then—even more exciting—after a few weeks, Janice Patterson said we could ride our scooters into school together. Janice Patterson had shiny blonde pigtails pinned back by circular gingham slides, a green apple in her lunchbox, and long skinny legs like a flamingo. Even more fascinatingly, Janice Patterson had been adopted as a baby, so I made sure I was so busy agreeing with her about how she probably was, actually, a secret long lost princess that The Smiling Lady became pretty much invisible.
***
It was the day after the Easter coach trip to the Farm Park that everything changed.
Janice Patterson had been bitten on the arm by a donkey in Pets’ Corner which meant she needed actual stitches at the big hospital, so I had to scoot into school the next day by myself. And I must have been really distracted by the trauma of Janice Patterson being bitten on the arm by a donkey, because it was only when I dropped Underbite, went back to pick him up and came eye-to-eye with a support bandage wrinkling over a pair of orange and brown half-cuff furry slippers that I realised where I was.
‘Where’s your mummy, Virginia-Ginny?’
My eyes were dragged magnetically up the slats of the peeling turquoise gate.
‘Gone to work.’
‘Work, is it? Spending all her wages on Coconut Mushrooms for you, I suppose.’
‘I…I don’t know.’
‘Don’t know much, do you, Virginia-Ginny?’
‘I do! I know all my seven times ta—’
She bent closer. ‘Ever thought about why she calls you Ginny-The-Pooh?’
Just as I was still wondering how she could possibly have known about Mum’s private nickname for me, or about the Coconut Mushrooms, The Smiling Lady darted at me like a viper, and I could smell face powder and fish.
‘Because you’re a greedy little fat fucking pig.’
***
I often wonder now why I didn’t say anything. Did I not want to worry Mum so soon after Dad’s death? Maybe I just thought she wouldn’t have believed me, what with all the fuss I made. Or was it just what you got for not being kind to lonely old ladies? Either way, every morning that term, as the summer pinged into position around me, I stood rigid and transfixed to take my punishment; and the things she hissed in my ear would churn inside my head from Assembly through to Golden Time.
Was I really ‘a pasty piss-arsed little porker’?
What even was a ‘shit-licking lard-arsed scrubber’? It wasn’t in my Picture Dictionary.
Was I really going to grow up to be a ‘dildo-loving pot-bellied whore’?
Did nice Mrs Cole try and drag anyone else over the gate of Chickadee Cottage to sit on her face?
***
‘Can you come in here, please, Virginia?’
Virginia. Uh-oh.
Mum put the receiver of the avocado Trim-Phone back on its cradle.
‘Whatever have you been saying to Janice Patterson?’
‘Nothing.’
I remembered Janice Patterson’s face of the day before and held Underbite a little bit closer.
‘Well, I just rang to see if she wanted to come and play today, and Denise Patterson said Janice won’t be coming round anymore because she doesn’t appreciate the kind of language you brought into their house yesterday.’
‘I didn’t say anything. Honestly, Mum.’
‘Not according to Denise Patterson, Virginia. She told me exactly what you said.’
***
I had to go to a new school after that. Mum said I could only have picked up that kind of behaviour in the playground, and if I wouldn’t tell her who had taught me all about that kind of thing, well, she couldn’t risk me growing up around that.
I was sad: I missed Janice Patterson, and the other school was a whole bus ride away, which meant Mum had to find a job in an office instead where they didn’t even have Coconut Mushrooms.
I tried to make the best of it: I passed my Eleven-plus four years later, and got a place at the grammar school, eventually passing enough ‘O’ Levels to get into Catering College. I had to defer my place for a year, though, so I could go into the clinic in Exeter and be convinced by therapists that nothing bad was going to happen to me or to Mum if I started eating anything other than green apples again.
And that’s where I met Jamie, who tended the gardens. He was very patient with me. I got better, and by the time we were married three years later, I’d put on just enough weight that I looked pretty normal in the photos.
Almost, anyway.
***
It’s weird being back though, I think, as I rip parcel tape with my teeth to seal the last box of Mum’s belongings. Isobel rides into the kitchen on my Triang scooter, which she’s found in the shed at the bottom of Mum’s garden—I’m amazed it still works—and helps herself to a doughnut from the Greggs bag on the table.
‘I still don’t get why we have to sell Nanna Brenda’s house,’ she says, biting into it and instantly getting jam on her chin.
‘Because she has to live in the big house on the hill now with the other old ladies, and that costs lots of money, so selling her house is going to pay for it.’
She looked around at all the boxes.
‘But whatever are we going to do with all her things?’
‘Well, this lot is going to charity—’
‘What about these ones?’
She’s yanking at something in the pile of boxes I’ve marked ‘Loft’.
‘I’ll get Dad to help me with those when we get home tonight.’
‘Can I keep this funny old lion?’
Underbite is looking grumpier than ever: he always was claustrophobic.
‘Yes, Izzy. You can keep the funny old lion.’
‘Excellent. Are there any swings round here, Virginia?’
***
Probably the only good thing about Mum’s misty descent into Alzheimer’s, I think, watching Izzy’s chubby leg paddle the scooter ahead of me along the High Street twenty minutes later, is that the whole bizarre story of The Smiling Lady could disappear now—along with everything else—like a letter in a fire. I’m not even sure I believe it myself anymore: I’d always been a child with a sky-scraping imagination, and Mrs Cole probably was just a lonely old lady. Looking back, perhaps she had some form of dementia too. Anyway, it was all over thirty years ago now, and at least I learned that it was important to be kind.
As I turn the corner towards where the school used to be, betting with myself that the whole area must have been turned into flats by now, I catch sight of Izzy, and my heart clamps its hands to its face.
‘Izz! No! Don’t—’
But she’s already dropping the red Triang, wheels spinning, in front of the peeling turquoise gate of Chickadee Cottage, Underbite appears to have fainted, and I can hear that magpie throat re-opening, like a rusty door.
‘Well, Isobellie-The-Pooh! Aren’t you the good girl for your Mummy?’
My Izzy reaches up on her tiptoes for the dangling pink Sugar Mouse.