Strange Sally Diamond(2)

When he was well, Dad would help unpack the shopping. We ate three meals every day. We cooked for each other. So, I prepared two meals and he prepared one, but the division of labour was even between us. We swapped duties as age took its toll on him. I did the hoovering and he unloaded the dishwasher. I did the ironing and the bins and he cleaned the shower.

And then he stopped coming out of his room, and he wrote his prescriptions with a shakier hand, and he only picked at food. Towards the end, it was ice cream. I fed it to him sometimes when his hands shook too much and I changed his bed linen on the days when he could no longer control himself and didn’t make it to the chamber pot under his bed, which I emptied every morning and rinsed out with bleach. He had a bell beside his bed, but I couldn’t hear it from the back kitchen, and in the last days, he was too feeble to lift it.

‘You’re a good girl,’ he said weakly.

‘You’re the best dad,’ I’d say, though I knew that wasn’t exactly true. But it made him smile when I said it. Mum had taught me to say that. The best dad was the dad in Little House on the Prairie. And he was handsome.

My mum used to ask me to play this game in my head. To imagine what other people were thinking. It was a curious thing. Isn’t it easier to ask them what they think? And is it any of my business? I know what I think. And I can use my imagination to pretend things that I could do, like the people on television, solving crimes and having passionate love affairs. But sometimes I try to think what the villagers see when they look at me. According to a magazine I read one time in Angela’s waiting room, I am half a stone overweight for my height, five foot eight inches. Angela laughed when I showed her the magazine, but she did encourage me to eat more fruit and vegetables and fewer carbs. My hair is long and auburn, but I keep it in a loose bun, slightly below the crown of my head. I wash it once a week in the bath. The rest of the week, I wear a shower cap and have a quick shower.

I wear one of my four skirts. I have two for winter and two for summer. I have seven blouses, three sweaters and a cardigan, and I still have a lot of Mum’s old clothes, dresses and jackets, all good quality, even though they are old. Mum liked to go shopping with her sister, Aunt Christine, in Dublin two or three times a year ‘for the sales’. Dad didn’t approve but she said she would spend her money how she liked.

I don’t wear bras. They are uncomfortable and I don’t understand why so many women insist on them. When the clothes wore out, Dad bought me second-hand ones on the internet, except for the underwear. That was always new. ‘You hate shopping and there’s no point in wasting money,’ he would say.

My skin is clear and clean. I have some lines on my forehead and around my eyes. I don’t wear make-up. Dad bought me some once and suggested that I should try it out. My old friend television and the advertisements meant that I knew what to do with it, but I didn’t look like me, with blackened eyes and pink lipstick. Dad agreed. He offered to get different types but he sensed my lack of enthusiasm and we didn’t mention it again.

I think the villagers see a forty-two-year-old ‘deaf’ woman walking in and out of the village and occasionally driving an ancient Fiat. They must assume I can’t work because of the deafness and that’s why I get benefits. I get benefits because Dad said I am socially deficient.





2





Thomas Diamond wasn’t my real dad. I was nine years old when he first told me. I didn’t even know what my real name was, but he and my mum, who was also not my mum, told me that they had found me in a forest when I was a baby.

At first, I was upset. In the stories I had read, babies found in forests were changelings who wreaked havoc on the families they invaded. I do have an imagination, despite what Dad often said. But Mum took me on to her knee and assured me that those stories were made-up fairy tales. I hated sitting on Mum’s knee, or on Dad’s knee, so I wrestled myself away from her and asked for a biscuit. I got two. I believed in Santa Claus right up until I was twelve years old and Dad sat me down and told me the sorry truth.

‘But why would you make up such a thing?’ I asked.

‘It’s a fun thing for children to believe, but you’re not a little girl any more.’

And that was true. I had begun to bleed. The pain of the periods replaced the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, and Mum and Dad began to explain other things. ‘If Santa Claus doesn’t exist, does God, or the devil?’ Mum looked to Dad and he said, ‘Nobody knows.’ I found that concept difficult. If they knew for a fact that Santa Claus didn’t exist, why didn’t they know for sure about God?

My childhood was replaced by duller, less colourful teenage years. Mum explained that boys might take an interest in me, that they might try to kiss me. They never did, except one time when I was fourteen and an old man tried to force his mouth on to mine and crept his hand up my skirt at a bus shelter. I punched him in the face, kicked him to the ground and stamped on his head. Then the bus came and I got on, and was annoyed by the delay as the bus driver got off to help the old man. I watched him rise slowly to his feet, blood trickling from his head. The driver asked me what had happened, but I stayed silent and pretended that I couldn’t hear him. I got home twenty minutes late and missed the start of Blue Peter.

When I was fifteen, I heard a girl in my class telling two others that I had been a feral child, found on the side of a mountain and then adopted by the Diamonds. She said this in the toilets. I was sitting on the cistern, my feet on the lid of the toilet in a cubicle, eating my lunch. ‘You can’t tell anyone,’ she said. ‘My ma heard it through a friend of hers who used to work for Dr Diamond when it happened. That’s why she’s so weird.’