Interpreters by Sue Eckstein Page A

hairdresser’s, my mother bought clothes. Her wardrobes made Imelda Marcos’s seem like doll’s house furniture. The V&A could have filled a complete floor with her clothes – a history of fashion over the second half of the twentieth century. A history too, I suppose, of her state of mind. A conscientious curator would note the racks and racks of clothes from the 1960s and ’70s and rather fewer from the years after that. The collection wouldn’t be totally complete. There would be, perhaps, a single glass cabinet for a couple of years during the late ’60s. There would be little from the ’50s and nothing at all from the decades before that.
    I put down the mug, and walk up to the big picture window. There is not much left of the beautiful garden that my mother created out of the building site that surrounded the house when we first moved here. The flowerbeds, with their pink and purple lupins, their sky-blue delphiniums and orange Californian poppies whose pale green conical hats Max and I loved to pull off, have been grassed over. The rockery, whose every piece of stone my mother carried from the car, has been dismantled. The willow tree that she planted is still there, its trunk grown thick and gnarled. The wooden climbing frame with its splintered platform from which we’d jump, or drop parachutes of handkerchiefs and little green plastic soldiers, has been replaced by some kind of aluminium structure with an integral plastic tent in primary colours. The shed we called the Little Wooden House has gone and in its place there is a massive blue trampoline enclosed in a safety net. We kept our mice in that shed, in rows of rustingblue metal cages. Sweet little brown and beige creatures, with shiny fur and beady black eyes. A few weeks after the first batch of mouse-babies were born, and before we mastered the art of mouse-husbandry, they all escaped through the bars. I remember my mother spending a whole afternoon lying on the floor of the shed with a broom, a shoebox and a packet of chocolate buttons, trying to tempt them back into captivity. Max and I helped for a little while, before going off to watch The Golden Shot and leaving her to it. ‘Bernie the bolt!’ We loved it. I think it was Belle and Sebastian we were watching that time she carried bucketload after bucketload of damp sand from the drive where it had been unloaded to the sandpit she was building for us at the far end of the garden. She never asked for help and we never offered it. I wish now that we had.
    The door to what had been my father’s study is shut. My hand hovers over the door handle.
     
    The room is thick with smoke. On his desk are papers, journals, slides, a tumbler of neat whisky. I know those slides well. I like to take them out of their plastic folders when my father is at work and look at them through his little grey and white slide-viewer. There is something faintly pleasurable about the ripples of nausea that spread through me as I gaze at the images of bloody organs and surgical instruments surrounded by green cotton sheets. In some of the pictures, I see my father’s gloved hand, spattered with blood, holding a scalpel or a suture, and I feel a rush of pride.
    ‘What now?’ he sighs.
    ‘I still can’t do this stupid maths.’
    I am wearing purple – my colour of choice at thirteen. My haircut is modelled on David Cassidy’s. My complexion, sadly, isn’t.
    ‘I’ve just explained it to you,’ he says wearily, and rests his smouldering cigarette on a heavy onyx ashtray.
    ‘I know. But can’t you just do it for me?’
    ‘What would be the point of that?’
    ‘It would be right then, instead of all wrong.’
    ‘But you still wouldn’t know how to do it.’
    ‘Who cares? What’s the point of maths anyway? It’s so boring. You shouldn’t smoke,’ I say conversationally, as, defeated by my mathematical incompetence and grinding insistence, he picks up a pencil and looks at the exercise book I’ve slapped down