2004

SHORT STORY COMPETITION

Local Winner

Home Sweet Home

By Rachelle Claret

The smell in our house was so sweet I had a permanent childhood squint. So sweet I wanted to sit with my head outside the window all night breathing gallons of odourless air but Grandma wouldn’t let me, said the cold was bad for her twisted old knees. She hobbled about the place fat and wheezing, a clutch of humbugs forever squeezed in one of her sweaty palms, coagulating, deforming as they melted and stuck together. She loved to have sticky hands; liked to lick them; smiled like a baby at the taste. It made me wince to see her blackened teeth coated with yet more sugar; her belly fed more and more sweets. The belly that grew slowly rounder and rounder, pink and taut as a bubble-gum bubble.

It was only ever me and Grandma. My parents ran away when I was born, after an horrifically drunken argument involving kitchen utensils and Grandma’s mangle. They never returned. I do not know their faces - all the pictures were burnt that night in the yard, apparently. I used to hope I would find a forgotten paper corner with a glimpse of my mother’s face on it but the yard mercilessly offered no remnants. In the end I invented my own mental image of her, based on my own pale complexion and blue-grey eyes.

We lived at the back of a sweetshop. Grandma’s sweetshop, passed down to her by her father, in her eyes, a saint. Grandma spoke to him daily - it was though he lived with us, an invisible, omniscient ghost. When she spoke to him, as matter-of-factly as if he were sat at the table reading the paper, I would search the room for a hint of his presence, and although I could never sense him I had a feeling he could see me. And I believed, from a very early age, that if his spirit lived anywhere, it lived in the swirly-glass jar that Grandma kept by her bed, with all her favourite sweets in, colourful as a funfair and the first thing she saw when she woke up. Her hand would glide in grabbing, unwrapping quick as a cat. I have never managed to disassociate the sound of crunching sweet wrappers with waking up.

Grandma fed me sweets from the minute I was born and said it would give me colour and a sweet nature. She told me I would inherit great riches. She told me every single day. She had a treacherous voice fierce as thunder and a slap that stung like a tossed wet towel but when she talked I listened; she made it impossible to believe she was not telling the truth.

‘Don’t drop them,’ she’d say, whenever she decided to show me my inheritance, her eyes shining happy. Only top-quality fudge and David Cassidy made Grandma’s eyes shine so bright.

First I’d have to wait while she unwrapped the treasures from their tissue paper parcels, set tightly, squarely stuffed in a row in a black-velvet lined case. Six beautiful rubies as clean as water, rich red rubies that felt heavier each time I held them. ‘That’s enough,’ she’d say, and I’d watch her re-wrap them; watch her place the box in the hole in the wall of the kitchen then fill it with three loose bricks, cover them with a picture of a rainy seascape. ‘Your grandfather was a brave man. He risked his life to save a young girl from a raging fire. The girl was royalty and this was his reward. It will be yours, if you are a good girl,’ went her words. They never changed, those words; it was as if she could never accept that I knew the story of the rubies - I had to be told every day, lest I should forget. And her insistence on my being good never lessened. She was obsessed with my being good and yet I had no time to be naughty in.

Her idea of a good girl was not mine but I did as I was told. I did it her way. I was a good girl. I cleaned the shop every evening on my hands and knees and cooked, scrubbed, washed and ironed for us both. At weekends Grandma would need rest so I served in the shop, weighing toffee and aniseed balls, being polite to customers. It was a solitary life but she was adamant. ‘I’m not having your friends back there so close to the storeroom,’ she’d boom, or sometimes, ‘you don’t have time to play, young lady. I’m an old woman. I need your help. I’m an old woman, an old woman, an old woman…’ How could I forget? I did not care at all for her domineering bossiness; her rules and her special ways; the fact that I was nothing less than her mute servant. But I was a good girl.

I was thirteen when my grandmother began having problems with her eyes. She sent me out for endless eyedrops and ointments but none of them worked and I suggested she see a doctor.

‘I WILL NOT SEE NO DOCTOR!’ The walls in our small kitchen shook at the power of her screams. I feared for the rubies, snug though they were in their box. She was incensed, nearly toppling over, overexcited on her thick, hairy legs. I saw madness in her eyes and did not raise the matter again.

As puberty began to play havoc with the excessive sugar count in my diet, giving me spots the size of teacakes and gooier than a fresh doughnut, my tolerance levels altered drastically and I grew very tired of Grandma’s constant moaning; of her often senseless and mostly unnecessary orders that kept me from increasing amounts of homework. Grandma was overpowering me, stifling me. I was itching to be old enough to leave (although how could I?); ashamed to be sleeping next to her on that old bed that sagged into a lumpy, grumpy well; resentful of her candy-scented hold over me. The smell of her breath in the morning was unbearable.

She began to tell me I was not such a good girl anymore and that I was disappointing her. I guess I was at the sod-you stage, couldn’t help myself from answering back, expressing myself, trying to take control. I screamed at her often; sometimes it all got a bit much.

‘You don’t want me to learn!’ I would just let rip, and dodge her blows. I was getting stronger. ‘You’re worried I’ll want to go to University, that I’ll leave. Well you know I might just do that.’

I tormented her, but only out of frustration. The trouble was that I was all she had - it was just us. And the oversweet sickly sugar smell.

She didn’t like it. Began threatening to throw the jewels into the Thames, saying, ‘I’ll go with them. I can’t stand it when you break my heart like this. You’ll drive me to my death with your spiteful words.’ She really knew how to lay it on thick and in my confused state I felt that it would be something like murder so I did try hard to hold my tongue and be a good girl; find other, less cruel ways to vent my anger. And then occasionally I lost control of my mouth and shattered her with words that cut like a blade. It was wrong.

It was a few months later that I realised she had hidden the rubies elsewhere. Her threats to kill herself, taking the inheritance with her, were ever louder and dotted erratically about the day. Even if I had done nothing at all she spat venomous threats at me and I began to fear her raised hand. Ill as she was she was still much stronger than me and her slaps were not stinging any less.

The black velvet box was no longer in the hole behind the sea and I could not find it anywhere in that nauseating house. I found things I would have preferred not to, and would never have imagined a box of chocolates could fossilise so beautifully, so perfectly, but I didn’t find the rubies. I thought perhaps she had dropped them in the river, but then dismissed the idea - her eyesight was slowly blinding her and I doubt she could waddle as far as the bridge, she could barely see the cash customers handed her, let alone her feet. It was fortunate for her that she ate by feel. Her hands knew food by its shape, its weight in her crinkly, sticky hand, its smell as she raised it to her readily licked lips.

The business was losing money and the stocks depleting fast. I realised she could not run the shop any more, at least not alone. One day after school I plucked up the courage to ask her what she thought we should do, ducking as she raised her hand to answer. She sneezed as she went to hit me, snot falling onto her dress sleeve and meeting with the icing sugar patterns there.

‘There’s nothing wrong with me! Just dust from those boxes you brought up from the store. Outdated now those gobstoppers, I’ll have to sell them at half-price. No wonder we’re losing money, you should’ve cleaned out the cellar weeks ago!’

‘It’s not my fault,’ I said. ‘That’s not why we’re losing money. You need help Grandma. You’re going blind. It’s bad for business.’ She scowled, her hand twitching. Perhaps I was a tad harsh but she needed help and I didn’t want it to be me who had to help her. I didn’t want to have to leave school.

‘I can’t afford to pay anyone else.’

‘Then we’ll have to sell up. Or sell a ruby.’ I willed her to say yes, let’s sell a ruby, lets get ourselves out of this boring existence, but her faced screwed itself up into a scowl, and her voice deafened.

‘NO! NOT THE RUBIES! They were your grandfather’s, he was a brave man, he saved a life for them…’ and on and on and on and on.

She would not sell.

So I stopped going to school. I stayed in the shop with her, letting her rest her eyes under cool wet flannels while the customers bounced in searching for sweet satisfaction. I stayed with her so that she would tell me where the rubies were hidden. I had to know. It was consuming me. Grandma had brought me up to believe that they were my future. I had never cared to doubt her until then.

In a few weeks the takings were up again and Grandma paid me with rice puddings and apple pies with crusts crispy golden, laden with demerera. I picked at them to be kind then scoffed hot chips and greasy fish when she was sleeping in our sweetened home, so cosy, so haunted and reeking of fizzy, fruity flavours.

Business was better but my workload had doubled and Grandma needed constant attention. One day in May, when the sun was shining in a beautiful sky, I nipped outside to take in some warm air and neutral smells. I wanted to be totally cleansed of sugar. Lifting my head high I sucked in the pureness. It was at that moment that I knew I needed a different life.

When I went back in a riot was forming between three tall, elegant ladies wearing assorted dead animals on their heads and Grandma, panicking at the till with her hands shaking, shedding dented humbugs. She was red-faced livid, screaming for me, telling me I had abandoned her and that I wished her dead.

‘I needed air…’

‘You need a good hiding, that’s what you need!’ The three women gasped in unison and I slid past them to the till. Grandma was angrier than I had ever seen her, uncontrollable, lashing out and weeping, her nose dribbling into her mouth as words exploded out. If Grandma’s words could have colours hers were reddest when they were loudest. They vibrated shocking pink and reverberated. The straight-backed women looked on aghast, mouths open, make-up creasing at the edges. ‘You will never have the rubies. NEVER!’ she screamed, over and over and over.

I managed to sneak a sleeping pill into her tea; she slept until the following morning, by which time I had found the rubies.

They were unwrapped, surrounded by floury pink bon bons. I had found them by accident, whilst serving a young boy with a lisp. He wanted the thtrawberry ones. And I’d found the rubies.

I knew then that my grandmother was going mad, as well as blind. I took the rubies and hid them under my bed, behind a box of books that Grandma would never be able to shift.

The following day she died. Heart attack the doctor said. She was found collapsed on the shop floor, a jar of pink bon bons smashed quite picturesquely all over her; some bloodied, some decorated with tiny shards of slithery glass, some still sherbet pink; dusty and chewable.

The old sweetshop still has my Grandmother’s name on its striped awning. But Ruby’s is now a jeweller’s, selling sparkling jewels and precious gems from every country in the world and goods so luxurious only the well heeled dare pass through the door. The only boiled sweet for sale is the one on an embarrassingly expensive charm bracelet kept on a cushion in the window.