Becky Tipper

one long holiday

It’s a long way to have moved on the strength of one holiday, but here they are.

Before they came, her dad said it would be like being on holiday all the time, although it isn’t really. They don’t go to the beach very often, and it’s nothing like a holiday when you have to do normal things like go to school. The girl’s new school is much like her old school — brick-built and drafty — and even the uniform is the same colour, so that she could almost forget she’s somewhere new, until the teachers call dinner ‘lunch’ or she says something without thinking, something ordinary, that the other kids pick up on. For instance, if she says she hasn’t had owt to eat since breakfast, they’ll titter and say ‘I haven’t had in to eat,’ collapsing in giggles as if it’s the most hilarious thing ever. Once, she told some girls that on New Year’s Eve her parents had let her stay up while twelve. ‘While twelve what?’ they screeched. Then they took turns to fill in the imagined blank: ‘While twelve monkeys tickled her! While twelve boys kissed her!’ Even teachers and other parents do it sometimes, smile to themselves when she’s speaking, as if they’re not even listening to what she’s trying to say and only thinking about how funny she sounds.

It also doesn’t feel like a holiday when so many other things are just the same as ever. The week here has the same rhythm it always had — the murkiness of school followed by the bright focus of the weekend. And she still watches all the same things on TV as she did before they moved, in the same half-an-hour blocks. On Fridays, there are the children’s programmes with their frenetic games which always seem to end in someone being plunged into a pit of goo or having a bucket of slime poured on them, laughing and screaming as it plasters their face and clothes. It’s excruciating how they have to sit there, waiting, knowing it’s coming — the big bucket hanging right over their heads. And then on Saturday there are the sugary morning shows, and later the Saturday night programmes, which often are almost the same as the children’s ones, except it’s grown-ups playing games and being dunked into slime or getting drenched with goo. Everyone in hysterics.

On Sundays, they phone her nan who usually ends up crying and says she misses them something rotten. Sometimes, aunty Pam rings up and the girl’s mum talks to her in a funny quiet voice, saying no, he’s not found work yet and that it seems the grass isn’t greener after all. The Sunday programmes are always about castles and antiques — sad, long-gone things that would taste like dust. Or about people at church services, singing hymns enthusiastically. The girl recognises some of the hymns from school, but her mum sings along and knows all the words, which always surprises the girl since her family has never even been to church together, and both her mum and dad give the impression that they think anything religious is a bit daft.

Although there was this one time, soon after they moved, when she’d walked into her parents’ room looking for her mum, and found her dad there instead, kneeling at the side of the bed. It was strange enough that he was in the bedroom in the middle of the day, let alone down on his knees. She couldn’t understand what he was doing at first, and she thought for a second that he might even be playing a game — hiding, or pretending to be a child — and she almost laughed out loud. Then she saw that his hands were clasped together in front of his chest, his forehead resting on the bed, and she realised that he was praying. Please Lord, he said in a sort of whisper. Hold us in your arms. She remembered the words afterwards, because they were so particular and embarrassing. Hold us in your arms — her own dad saying those words aloud, on his knees like that. And how dizzying it felt to see him there, a bit like the jolt you get when you’ve been bouncing on a trampoline and jump onto the real ground again, half-expecting it to give way too, but it doesn’t.

Tonight, though, it’s Saturday, so the silly adult programme is on. People are racing through an obstacle course and the audience is screaming. The girl is sitting on the floor, her brother is in his bouncy chair, and their mother is doing the ironing. Her mum is often ironing. If someone, like aunty Pam, phones in the evening, the girl’s mum will answer and will always tell whoever has called that that she was just battling the ironing and that she feels like King Canute fighting the tide. The girl’s dad is in the kitchen getting a can of beer. It cracks and hisses and slowly glugs as he pours it into a pint glass.

Her mother is walking into the kitchen just as her dad comes back in with his beer, so her parents meet in the doorway.

‘All right, pet?’ says her mum.

The girl’s dad doesn’t say anything for a long moment. It’s the kind of silence that makes you look at someone, as if they’re waiting for your attention. The sort of gap that people leave before saying something funny.

The girl looks up at him to see if he is going to tell a joke.

‘No, I ’int bloody all right,’ he says, and the girl sees that his face is twisted into an angry scowl.

Then he slowly pours the whole drink onto her mother’s head.

What’s strange is that he does it very carefully — not in a rush, not haphazardly — but as if he is trying to get it just right, trying to make sure none is wasted. Then he walks out of the room, through the kitchen to the back door and into the garden.

Her mother’s hair is plastered to her head. Her face slick and shiny, her fringe in thick strands over her dripping glasses.

The girl feels as if there is a balloon filling up inside her, leaving just enough room for her to peep out, but barely enough space to have any thoughts beyond right now. Perhaps that’s why she can’t remember whether this has ever happened before. It feels almost familiar, but that might be because it’s like the dunking and the buckets of slime, although of course her mother is not laughing.

The girl’s mother pulls a tea towel from the ironing basket and rubs it over her head and quickly cleans her glasses. She runs her hands through her hair then picks up the baby in one arm, and when she leads the girl to the door, the girl can feel that her mother’s hand is still damp and sticky. At the front door, the girl’s mother lets go of the girl’s hand and picks up the pushchair, shakes it open and straps the baby in.

‘Come on,’ she says, not looking at the girl, and they all go outside.

They rarely go out anywhere in the evenings, and it feels unreal to be leaving the house like this — something between a bad dream and a special occasion. They walk through the empty streets to the beach, where a steep path leads down to the shore. The girl’s mother starts along the path, but it’s narrow and the pushchair snags on a branch. ‘I can’t be messing with this,’ her mother says and takes the baby out and leans the pushchair against a hedge. She carries the baby and the girl follows behind.

They pick their way down through the little patch of trees to the pebbly shore. The tide is out and there’s the eggy stink of seaweed. You can’t see much from here, but the girl knows all the different types that must be spread out on the beach — the black, crispy piles that attract flies; the slippery bubbles that you try to pop between your fingers; the bright green strands that cover the big rocks, slick under your bare feet.

Her mother looks around, almost as if she’s lost. ‘If we was at home, we could have gone up aunty Pam’s or my mother’s,’ she says.

The girl doesn’t say that this is home. What else could it be? If the girl went somewhere new, or if she was on the telly and they asked her to say her name and where she was from, then she’d say she was from here, wouldn’t she? Although, then again, perhaps it’s not that simple, because you don’t exactly live in a place, like a town or a village — you only ever live in your actual house. So if you were in your village but suddenly didn’t have your own house to go back to, maybe you couldn’t really say you lived in that place anymore. If that happened, you’d be no different to a person who was just there on holiday.

The girl used to sleep over at aunty Pam’s and her nan’s quite often, but since they moved here, the only other place she’s stayed overnight is her friend Katie’s house. She’d been so excited beforehand, although in the end it was strange and almost boring. The girl had slept in a put-you-up squashed next to Katie’s bed, so that if Katie needed the loo she had to climb right onto the girl’s bed. And Katie had insisted they have a midnight feast because that was what you did when you spent the night. It had to be exactly at midnight, Katie said. Not before. So they sat and fiddled with Katie’s grimy dolls until eventually Katie pulled two packets of biscuits from under her pillow, and then they ate all the biscuits solemnly. The biscuits were greasy custard creams and the girl hadn’t even wanted any. Afterwards, Katie turned out the light and immediately went to sleep, although the girl lay awake for a long time feeling that she might be sick.

There’s a crunch of footsteps on the pebbles, and the girl sees a man striding towards them. He’s waving and calling out — ‘Hallo, hallo!’

The man is wearing a billowy, pale pink shirt, which makes the girl think of her nan’s blouses. When he gets close, he speaks as if he’s picking up some previous conversation with the girl’s mother that has been interrupted. ‘Oh, there you are. Yes, there you are!’

‘Can I help you?’ says the girl’s mum. Her mother’s voice sounds thin and clipped, like it does when she talks to teachers or doctors, that ‘h’ in ‘help’ which is never there otherwise.

‘Yes, yes. I wondered if something was amiss. Spotted the pram up on the cliff, you see. Worried that something untoward had happened, perhaps.’ The man pauses, then gestures at the baby. ‘But, ah, now I see, yes, it must be yours.’

Her mother nods and says quietly, ‘Yes, it’s ours.’

‘I see.’

‘I couldn’t get it down the path.’

‘Yes, yes,’ says the man. ‘Quite.’

The man coughs and frowns. The girl’s mother looks out towards the sea and adjusts the baby on her hip.

The man seems to be waiting for the girl’s mother to say something else, but when she doesn’t, eventually he says, ‘Well, good evening.’ Then he begins to walk back the way he came.

The girl watches him growing smaller in the distance. When he reaches the path, he glances back at them before he disappears into the mass of dark trees on the cliffside.

‘I bet he thinks I’ve been drinking,’ the girl’s mother says. She touches her hair with her free hand. ‘Smelled it on me, I bet.’

On the water, a ship sounds its horn, but it’s too far away to see.

*

They are never out and about this late. It’s not quite dark yet, but the light has dimmed, and the sky and the sea have the same deep silver sheen so you can’t tell where one begins and the other ends. The girl wonders if they are going to walk along the beach all night. She imagines how the sea would grow black and shiny and the rockpools would writhe with creatures too shy to emerge in daylight.

‘If we was home, we could have gone up Pam’s,’ her mother says again. But she’s not really talking to the girl.

It occurs to the girl, suddenly, that they could just go to Katie’s house and ask to stay the night — the girl and her mum and the baby. She almost laughs at how obvious it is. She would sleep in Katie’s room, and her mum and the baby could sleep in Katie’s mum’s room, since Katie’s dad doesn’t live with them. She imagines Katie’s mum also insisting on a sombre midnight feast, pulling a crumpled packet of biscuits from under her pillow and forcing the girl’s mum to eat them.

‘Mum,’ she says — and she’s almost about to actually suggest it, to say to her mum We could go to Katie’s, but before the idea can quite reach her mouth, she stops.

She remembers, when she and Katie were waiting for midnight, how Katie talked about her parents splitting up. Katie told the girl how sometimes, after her dad first left, he would phone their house, but when Katie’s mum answered he would just shout at her for a while and then leave his own phone off the hook — the receiver sitting on the table or dangling on its curly wire. Of course that meant Katie and her mum couldn’t ring anyone else, and their line sounded engaged if anyone tried to ring them. It would go on for hours, Katie said. Sometimes she’d even pick up the receiver and call out to her dad, ‘Dad, hang up!’ although you never knew if he was still there listening, or if he’d walked away entirely.

And the girl told Katie, then, about her own dad and the time she’d found him praying. She tried to explain the way she’d almost laughed, and how he’d said those embarrassing words. But perhaps she didn’t say it right, because Katie didn’t seem very interested and when the girl finished, Katie just said ‘Weird’ in a way that might have meant the girl’s dad was weird, or that the story was weird. Or that the girl herself was weird for even trying to tell it.

She sees now exactly how it would be if they turned up — everyone crowded in Katie’s kitchen and the girl trying to explain that they all wanted to spend the night, Katie’s mum smirking at the girl’s accent and looking at them as if they were daft. It would be like speaking a dream out loud. She can’t believe she was ever going to suggest it to her mum, can’t believe how close she came. She tucks the idea away silently, the way she might slip a shell into her pocket.

‘What?’ says her mum.

The girl looks up, confused.

‘You said “mum”?’

‘Nowt,’ the girl says. ‘It were nowt.’

Her mother looks at her watch. ‘I suppose we’d best get back, then.’

When her mother doesn’t move, the girl takes her mother’s hand and leads the way.

They retrace their steps along the dark beach and up through the woods, along the quiet streets to their house, which is just the same as they left it, with the TV and all the lights still on. Only when you come to see it from outside like that, it won’t seem familiar anymore — more like you’re looking in at someone else’s house, or at a photograph you don’t even remember posing for, so that for a split second you don’t recognise yourself in it.

Becky Tipper's stories and essays have appeared in magazines including Prole, The Honest Ulsterman, Slightly Foxed, Literary Mama and FlashBack Fiction, and her short fiction has won the Bridport Prize and a Tom-Gallon Award. 

Becky wrote the following about her story:

As I was writing this story, I found myself recalling various classic children’s books, lodged deep in my consciousness, where going outside at night is associated with a magical transformation of some sort (from ‘Tom’s Midnight Garden’ to the ending of ‘The Tiger Who Came to Tea’). In my story, of course, the girl’s night-time excursion is not a magical storybook adventure, but it does herald the kind of transformation that short fiction often explores — those moments where a character realises the world is infinitely more messy and unstable than it seemed, after which things will never be quite the same again.