Another Kind of Cinderella and Other Stories Read online

  I had three miscarriages before Meriel. The nine months of pregnancy with her I found hard to believe – hard to believe she wasn’t one more life snuffed out before it had a chance. We had always wanted two children, but once Meriel was born, a perfect baby, we decided not to try our luck again. We felt it wouldn’t be possible to love another child so much, and all desire to put the matter to the test dissolved. Meriel was enough for us.

  ‘But we must be sure not to suffocate her with love,’ I remember Doug saying. We tried very hard to be sensible parents – balanced, understanding but not spoiling, disciplining but not regimenting. We tried to inculcate in her from an early age a curiosity and love of simple things . . .

  She’ll barge into the house, drinking beer straight from the can and when she’s finished it she’ll crumple the can up in one hand as if it was so much tissue paper. She has big, manly hands, sinews tough as chains under the hard skin, flat fingers that pry over our things with distaste. Recently she’s had her hair shaved round the back and a new earring at the top of her ear. Some years ago, she dyed her hair pink and had it standing up in points, like a clown. I managed not to say anything, and over this new shaved look I’m doing my best not to make any comment. But, I mean: Meriel’s twenty-three now. She’s no teenager. She’s grown up.

  By the age of five she knew the names of dozens of wild flowers and was an endearing, rewarding child. Not pretty, exactly: nose a little too prominent, like her father’s – eyes a shade too close together, perhaps, but the bright blue that comes from my mother’s side of the family. Everyone said she had lovely hair, and she was always turned out neatly – hand-smocked dresses and well-polished shoes. She was a bright little thing: happy, gregarious, loving. She would fling her arms around Doug’s neck and ask him for an icecream or a story, knowing he would be unlikely to refuse her. From an early age, she would dedicate all her artwork to me, bright pictures of birds, and flowers bigger than the flat houses, I love you Mum written in the corner. One of her teachers assured us her draftsmanship was exceptional and she might well be an artist. I was inclined to agree.

  At the age of nine, I think it was, Meriel began to show the first small signs of revolt. It was then we noticed that order, so much the norm in our house, seemed to frustrate her. No matter how much I tidied up her room, or persuaded her to do so, it was only a matter of hours before neatness had given way to havoc. She seemed to get a charge from flinging things off shelves on to the floor, rummaging through the neat piles of clothes in her drawers until they looked like a jumble sale, pulling her mattress on to the floor where, she said, she preferred to sleep. Her untidy ways weren’t confined to her own room, either. In the kitchen, she spilt things so often it seemed clear it was on purpose. She threw her clothes all over the place, rumpled the cushions, left books and papers on the floor. I think we both felt she was deliberately trying to annoy us, and took some pleasure in our discomfort and unease. Douglas and I hate things out of place: a sense of meticulous order has always been the staff we lean on.

  By the time she was twelve, Meriel had given up at school. She was in constant trouble with her teachers and, apparently, no longer interested in any subject, even art. No more paintings for me. Her father could no longer persuade her to read a book, any book. Her short attention span could accommodate no more than a teenage or music magazine. She spent most of her pocket money on these publications, then flung them down wherever she happened to be.

  ‘Do pick up your magazine, Meriel.’

  ‘Cool it, Mum.’

  ‘Do as your mother says, Meriel.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, stop nagging.’

  ‘Don’t adopt that tone with your mother, Meriel, or I shall stop your pocket money.’

  ‘Go ahead and stop it. See if I care.’

  ‘Meriel! Don’t be so rude to your father.’

  ‘Oh, piss off, both of you.’

  Such language, at twelve. There were variations on this ritual exchange, then Meriel would clump out of the room, stomping the pages of the offending magazines to a mush on the floor in her utter scorn.

  In the end, I would always be the one to clear them away.

  It was about this time – just before Christmas, I remember – that Meriel chose to rebel against her name.

  ‘What on earth was up with you, giving me such a daft middle-class name? You can imagine how that goes down at school.’ Surely not too badly, I thought. The school was full of Virginias and Camillas and Emilys, a nice bunch of middle-class girls. ‘You can’t blame them for sneering,’ she added, sloshing her tea aggressively over the side of her mug – a hideous mug, incidentally, orange decorated with black lettering:*** k You, mate. When it was on the shelf, I always hid it behind another mug, turning the lettering away. Time and again I would find it placed back right in the front, its message staring my visitors in the face. It was one of our unspoken battles. Sometimes the mug so enraged me that I vowed I would throw it out, or break it on purpose. But I never went quite that far for fear of Meriel’s revenge taking some even more drastic turn . . .

  Douglas was concentrating on his Daily Telegraph, in one of his best-to-ignore-her moods.

  ‘So anyway, from now on I’m not Meriel, I’m Mog.’

  ‘Meg?’ asked Doug, despite himself.

  ‘Not Meg, no thanks. Mog.’

  ‘Mog? But Meriel’s a lovely name,’ I ventured. We had agreed on it within moments of her birth. The small scrunched-up pink face looked like a Meriel, I remember saying to Douglas.

  ‘Mog it is. I’m telling you – anyone who doesn’t call me Mog won’t get an answer. Meriel is dead.’ She banged down her fist so hard that the Formica table skittered on its thin legs.

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ said her father, in his most authoritative voice, which sometimes had effect.

  ‘We will,’ I agreed. ‘Meriel. Mog, indeed!’

  She won in the end, of course. Weeks went by when she responded to any question with persistent silence if we called her Meriel. Mog, eventually we said, in desperation. We were rewarded with a pleased smile. The triumph of a victory made her more agreeable for a while. And naturally we only called her Mog when we had to. If sometimes we slipped up and said Meriel by mistake, we were regaled with the old fury and rudeness. Our daughter hadn’t an ounce of forgiveness in her.

  We were prepared for a difficult time during Meriel’s teens – that was to be expected. But we never imagined she would push our tolerance quite so far: pierced nose, shaven head, a tattoo on her shoulder – all done without our permission. As for her clothes – in a word, revolting. Why did she always want to make the worst of herself? That’s what we couldn’t understand. Our pretty daughter, at fifteen, was replaced by a brutish, alien creature we scarcely recognised. Drugs were our greatest fear, of course. They seemed the obvious next step. She was in with a bad lot. But when we ventured to have a conversation about the dangers – well, she just laughed, full of scorn. She’d never been into drugs, she said. Demos were more her thing.

  Indeed, this seemed to be the case, as we discovered to our horror. Most weekends she’d go off with some renta-crowd – anti-students’ cuts, anti-blood sports – it didn’t seem to matter what it was, if there was a chance of joining a rowdy mob and throwing bricks at the police, Meriel would be there. You’ll get arrested, we said. Who cares? she said. You must pay for what you believe in. We despaired. But there was nothing we could do.

  Then came the day she walked in with a nasty cut above her eye. Didn’t say a word. Dashed up to her room before I could offer to bathe it for her. Shut herself in her room. She wouldn’t come down for supper, though she did ask for aspirin. When I asked if I could help, I was told to mind my own business.

  After that, as far as we could tell, she went to no more demonstrations. But we noticed other changes. She began to grow her hair back. The fridge was no longer full of cans of beer. She seemed to go out less with her friends. She was working, she said, in her room: and
we believed her. So in some ways she became a little easier, though her aggressive feminism and vegetarianism seemed more deeply entrenched than ever. As for her political correctness! We could hardly open our mouths without making some faux pas in her eyes. When Douglas complained that an Indian plumber had done a useless job, she threatened to report him for racism. When I said something about the Chairman of the WI, I was blasted with a ten-minute lecture on the necessity of addressing such a figure as a Chairperson, even though the grey-haired old lady I had referred to had been happy as Chairman for the last twenty years. As for the food problem: while I tried my best to cook her things with vegetables and pulses, she sneered at us for our love of the Sunday joint which she, too, once used to enjoy, and our mid-week cottage pie. She managed to make us feel very uncomfortable at meals: always on about the cruelty of killing animals, the dangers of animal fat, and so on. Sometimes I could see Douglas was near to exploding, so goaded by her thoughts. But he managed to keep control, not to shout. It was hard for him just to let her have her say, unchallenged: but easier than the screaming row that would ensue if he tried to reason with her. Reasoning was the least of Meriel’s abilities.

  She did surprisingly well in her exams – no cause for celebration, she said when I baked her a cake she refused to eat because there was ‘dangerous’ colouring in the icing. Nothing very fancy about getting a few good marks, she said. Just meant it made her way into university that much easier.

  Psychology was her subject. Psychology! Douglas raised his eyebrows, signalling only a fraction of the pain he felt. Couldn’t she have chosen something better than a trendy, soft-option subject, he asked? With her brains – and he was proud of her brains – history: why not history? She’d done so well in that. Foolish man! He should have learned by then to keep his opinions to himself. Meriel went berserk, screaming at him, banging doors. ‘What do you know about what motivates me? When have you ever cared about me as a person, not just as your daughter?’ Then she slammed out of the house, leaving those cliché questions of modern jargon heavy between us, saying she was going to her friend for the night. (Boy or girl? We did not know). Douglas did not bring up the subject of psychology again.

  Once Meriel had gone to university, the house became very quiet. Easier. We were aware of the luxury of peace, of no fear of tantrums or accusations. Surprisingly, she wrote to us several times – ordinary, newsy letters, telling us how she was doing, how she was enjoying university life. She had found a lot of people there who thought like her, she said. Like-minded, was the way she put it. (God forbid, said Douglas.) Once or twice, she even rang us – non-commital, but quite friendly. Then, her third term, we discovered Douglas had cancer.

  For some time, he had been complaining about a painful shoulder. He thought it was rheumatism, or arthritis, perhaps. But as it did not improve over the weeks, he agreed to go to the doctor. He was X-rayed. A tumour was found. There were tests. Malignant, it was. A course of immediate chemotherapy was prescribed. I wrote to Meriel, breaking the news as gently as I could.

  Twelve hours after receiving my letter she was home. Douglas and I were sitting by the fire with our hot drinks before going to bed, trying to make decisions calmly, in the way that people strive to in a crisis – what would happen about the business, and so on . . . Anyhow, Meriel comes barging in, giving us the fright of our lives. She’s red-eyed, shouting, hysterical. Then she’s all over her father, hugging him, crying. He has to push her away because, inadvertently, she hurts his shoulder. Then she sits on the floor, hugging her knees (which are poking out of torn jeans) and begins to spew out all this stuff against conventional medicine. The reason she has rushed home so fast, she says, is because she had to stop us deciding in favour of the treatment. Chemotherapy was crap, she said. Had we considered the side effects? Did we know how rarely it was successful? Conventional medicine was for the most part crap. The only way to certain recovery was alternative.

  There was a long silence. Meriel was staring at her father’s doubting face. She shuffled over to him, put an arm around his neck, more gently this time, leant her cheeks against his, just as she used to when she was a small child.

  ‘Believe me, Dad,’ she said. ‘I’ve been studying all this sort of thing. It’s all to do with positive attitude, freeing the body and soul from all the aggro that’s been storing up so many years. Why do you think you’ve got cancer? Stress, that’s why. You’re stressed out, Dad.’ She glanced at me.

  I could see Douglas inwardly wincing at all those jargon words he hates so much, but at the same time he was touched by Meriel’s unusual concern. This strange turn of events caught him off-balance. It was a moment, I could see him thinking, which he had to play carefully. If he said the wrong word, off she would stomp again, offended by the spurning of her advice and concern. If he agreed . . . what would we say to our doctor?

  ‘For a start, you’ve got to get all the anger out of you,’ Meriel went on after a while. ‘It’s got to be released.’

  ‘But I’m not angry,’ Douglas said.

  ‘That’s what you think. Listen, I know about these things, Dad. Honest, I’m a member of the Healing Society. I’m a Healer. I admit I haven’t much experience, hands on, like. But I understand the principles. I believe in it one hundred per cent. When Mum wrote to me with the news, I couldn’t help thinking here was a God-given chance to do something worthwhile at last. Make up for my – er, in the past.’

  She put her hand on her father’s knee, something she hadn’t done for more years than I could remember. She looked very young, a child. Douglas seemed to be thinking the same thing. There was a brightness in his eye. He was close to tears.

  ‘You’re a good girl,’ he said at last. ‘I appreciate your concern. I’m not out of sympathy with all the alternative medicine bit myself, as a matter of fact. I’ve read quite a bit about it – I’ve been reading everything I can about ruddy cancer in the last few weeks, as you can imagine. But the fact is, this business—’ he freed his hand from Meriel’s, briefly touched his shoulder—‘could gather speed. I can’t afford to hang about. I’d be a fool not to take the experts’ advice, start the treatment. We’re in very good hands, you know.’

  Meriel moved a few feet away from her father. She looked at him with the hard eyes we were used to when she was not immediately able to get her way.

  ‘Do this forme, Dad,’ she said. ‘Give me a chance. Just a few weeks. It’s all a matter of diet, massage, positive thinking. Attitude is everything. Like: there are only another two weeks of term. I won’t go back. I’ll stay here, organising a programme for you. Starting tomorrow. I’ll prepare your food, prepare your soul, Dad. Honest. In fact, not tomorrow – now. No time like the . . . We’ll start with a massage, relax you, build up your confidence. . .’

  Douglas’s eyes moved about, alarmed. Again, he touched his shoulder.

  ‘I’d rather not, a massage,’ he said.

  ‘I won’t hurt you, stupid. It’ll just be temples and toes. You’ve no idea how much good work on the toes can do.’ She gave a confident smile. ‘I’ll explain it as I go. Now, you lie on the floor, Dad, nice and comfortable, cushion under your head. I’ll just get my oils. Let’s give it a go. All right?’

  Douglas nodded, very weary.

  ‘Very well,’ he said.

  Half an hour later, I could scarcely believe my own eyes. There was Douglas stretched out on our fluffy carpet, eyes shut, socks off. Meriel, kneeling beside him, was kneading at the furrows on his poor dear brow with her big flat thumbs. She would work them right up into his temples, where once the hair was thick and handsome, and was now so thin. There was an overpowering, claustrophobic smell of lavender oil in the room – a smell, I was later to learn, you can never quite extinguish from a room. A smell I came to associate with the terrible weeks of Meriel’s ‘cure’. Nothing like the summer smell of lavender bushes, or dried lavender in a muslin bag. In its concentrated form, it is menacing, sickening. I could see Douglas’s nostrils twit
ch, affronted. But he said nothing. He kept his eyes shut, allowing his head to roll with her hands as she kept up a perpetual stream of theories. ‘Trouble with you, Dad, is you’re suffering from a crisis of identities.’

  ‘I don’t think your father is doing any such thing,’ I heard myself saying.

  ‘You don’t know anything, Mum. That’s been one of Dad’s problems.’

  She moved down to his feet. Watching her at work on them was even more upsetting. The private nature of feet came home to me: no wonder people don’t want them exposed. They are not the most attractive part of anyone’s body. Douglas’s were long and thin, sinewy. The white ridges of bone that stuck up put me in mind of a plucked chicken’s wings. As for the nails, well, even the most loving wife would have to admit they were not a pretty sight. Wide, flat, lobster-coloured nails, Douglas had, each one topped with an arc of dense yellow that curved cruelly into the hard flesh of the toes. Sometimes they caused him pain and he would have to go to the chiropodist, who said he had a problem. All this I was familiar with – part of my husband, for better, for worse – a huge blessing he wasn’t one of those men who liked to wear open sandals. But it didn’t seem right to me, a daughter on familiar terms with her father’s feet. There she was, pulling at each toe, prying into the secret places between them, all the time droning on about how each toe sent signals up to wherever. Sounded like a lot of stuff and nonsense to me, but I knew I had to go along with Douglas, do whatever he wanted.

  When at last she had finished, Douglas sat up very fast, giving the sudden appearance of a fit man. But he looked dizzied, confused. Meriel sat back on her heels, very pleased with herself. She stretched out her hand, held it a few inches from her father’s chest.

  ‘There: I can, like, feel the energy coming off you already, Dad,’ she said. ‘The anger – can’t you feel? It’s beginning to make its way out.’