Madeleine Dunnigan is co-founder of Ladybeard magazine. She curates The Libreria Room, a series of writer and artist-led discussions and often hosts the Libreria Podcast. She worked at Rogers, Coleridge & White Literary Agency before leaving to study the MA at Goldsmiths, for which she has been awarded the Isaac Arthur Green Fellowship. She is working on a novel about Jean, a teenager coming of age in punk-era London, and his fractious relationship with his mother, Katharina, a German-Jewish refugee turned artist. This is an extract. 

Contact details: madeleinedunnigan@hotmail.com

 

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When she couldn’t work, Katharina cooked.

She chopped the fennel in half, cut it into thin slices and put it in a bowl with olive oil, lemon juice and salt.

She had tried to work, but following her fight with Jean, it was impossible.

After he left, slamming the door so the glass in it tinkled, she sat in front of her canvas, fizzing.

She looked at the peach, lemon and jug on soft blue cotton before her but was unable to transform the image into paint on canvas; to break the thing down and rebuild it. Fucking Jean. Discarding her paintbrushes, she went to the telephone. Drilling filtered through from outside. They were building behind the house, churning up the bombed out toy factory. She listened to the dialing tone then the sharp burst of ringing. Dina picked up and said she’d come straight over. Katharina replaced the receiver and watched as a digger scooped up debris from the building site.

In the kitchen Katharina topped and tailed the green beans quickly – no matter if they weren’t perfect – and put them on to steam. While these softened she added eggs to boiling water, turning over her egg timer. She could braise a rabbit blindfolded but she couldn’t boil an egg without a timer. She took the leftover salmon out of the fridge and arranged it on the table. While the eggs cooked she took another and separated the yolk. Slowly she poured in oil, whisking, watching the sunshine-yellow expand and lighten, loosen then thicken. Amazing how much oil one yolk could hold. Amazing how, with just two ingredients and a little movement one thing transformed into another. Salt and vinegar and crushed garlic. She put the mayonnaise on the table. Dina arrived with a bottle in hand – crisp, pale.

‘He’s been kicked out of school.’ Katharina told her friend through a mouthful of fennel.

‘What for?’

The noise from the works outside was incessant. Katharina waited for a high-pitched wine to subside.

‘Smoking dope, apparently.’

Dina groaned. Katharina sat back and fanned herself with her napkin. It was warm under the glass roof. Summer was Katharina’s least favourite season. The world separated, loosening from its foundations so its composite parts floated upward. Impossible to keep hold. Nothing but bad news and headaches.

‘When will the building be done?’ Dina asked

‘God knows.’

‘Have you spoken to the Headmaster?’

Katharina shook her head as if to end the conversation, suddenly unable to say more.

Whether Katharina herself didn’t want to know the truth or she was too embarrassed to tell her friend, Dina wasn’t sure. She took off her cardigan, feeling hot.  The kitchen extended along the length of the house, from street to garden, ending in the conservatory where they were eating. In one corner stood a cabinet, filled with enamel jugs and large Dutch china plates scoured from brocantes around Europe. Above the two women, hanging from the ceiling, was a dark blue glass globe. Dina wondered where it came from as it spun on its axis, casting a line of brilliant blue across the table, the salmon, Katharina’s chewing mouth. Katharina swallowed.

‘Are you teaching next Wednesday?’ she asked.

‘I think so.’

‘Could you cover my class? I need to take Jean somewhere.’

‘Of course.’

This meant that Dina would be teaching back to back on Wednesday: she had a first year illustration class in the morning and now Katharina’s final year class in the afternoon.

‘Ghastly exam is coming up. They’re in a tizz about it. I keep telling them it doesn’t matter.’ Katharina said.

‘Will you get the keys from the janitor?’ Dina asked.

‘I don’t believe in examining illustration students, morally or practically. While the school continues to insist on the bizarre tradition, I shall continue to get the keys to the exam hall and give the students a helping hand.’

‘What was the pass rate last year?’

‘One hundred per cent.’ Katharina smiled and poured more wine. ‘I don’t know what to do. I’m at my wit’s end.’

‘The class will be fine, just don’t fiddle with all the drawings – ninety per cent is more believable.’

‘I mean Jean. That school was his last chance. I don’t know what will happen now.’

Dina was silent. The blue globe spun above them. ‘Do you remember the time with the glass?’ she asked.

‘I was just thinking about that too. What is this thing he has inside him?’

Dina thought back to Jean then, when he was little. Before school, before all the schools he had been kicked out of, before this last one, Rotherfield Hall, which had seemed so promising. Back to when he was eight, in his mother’s wellies, surrounded by glass.

 

*

 

‘I can’t be there,’ Katharina said over the phone. ‘Jean he’s. All the glass in the house. He’s smashed every bit. I can’t be there with him.’

Dina had found a broom, dustpan and brush, two pairs of rubber gloves and a bucket.

The day was overcast and she had a light sweat by the time she reached Katharina’s. A quarrel of starlings appeared above the rooftops, dipping and weaving, now a black mass, now almost nothing.  She rang the bell.

‘Who is it?’ A small voice asked.

‘           Just me!’ Dina called.

The door opened slowly. Jean leaned against the frame, strands of blond hair stuck to his face. His eyes were red, his skin blotchy.

‘Hello Jean. I was just passing.’ He looked at the bucket and broom and back at her. ‘Mind if I come in? ‘

She stifled a gasp as she stepped inside. Jagged lumps of glass bottles and smaller, more delicate fragments, crushed almost to a powder, covered the floor from the hallway through to Katharina’s studio.

‘Hmm.’ She managed.

Jean pressed into the coats that hung by the door and fiddled with a toggle.

‘Shall we clear this up, do you think?’

He touched the toggle to his lips, his eye, his nose. Dina resisted scooping him up.

‘I tell you what, I’m going to leave a pair of gloves here for you, and if you feel like it, you can put them on and help.’

She looked at his feet, tiny in their soft plimsolls.

‘And maybe put on some wellies too.’

 

She started where she stood, clearing swathes. She was so absorbed that she didn’t notice Jean. He crouched in a corner, swamped in Katharina’s wellington’s. His face had cooled and returned to its smooth, passive state. He hummed. A tuneless melody. Katharina was right, he’d smashed everything: glass bottles, jugs, water glasses, wine glasses, ramekins, candle holders. The room sparkled.

Dina sang and Jean joined in on the chorus.

Blacks and bays, dapples and grays, coach and six little horses.

Their grew, layering on top of one another.

Hush a bye, don’t you cry, go to sleep my little baby, you and me and the devil makes three, coach and six little horses.

 

When she was done, three huge bin bags full, remarkably without a scratch on either of them, Dina made hot chocolate and ran Jean a bath. He stood on the steps outside the bathroom jumping down and hopping up again, singing.

Blacks and bays, dapples and grays, coach and six little horses.

He paused at the bathroom door.

‘Dina?’

‘Yes Jean.’

‘Dina?’

‘Yes.’

‘Dina we had hot chocolate.’

‘Yes Jean.’

‘Is it Saturday?’

‘No it’s Thursday.’

‘But we only have hot chocolate on Saturday.’

‘I think we can make an exception today.’

‘Exception,’ he whispered, ‘Dina says we can make an exception.’ Then after a few moments, ‘Dina, what’s exception?’

 

While the bath was running Katharina rang.

‘How is he? Is he hurt? Oh God. I’ve half died with worry.’

‘It’s OK. You can come back now. Just. Don’t say anything.’

‘Yes, yes, yes.’

She was there in less than ten minutes, opening the door with a loud, ‘Hello!’ Jean was at the top of the stairs, about to jump down. They stood facing each other – he positioned above, her below.

‘Hello darling. Look what I’ve picked, Daffodils, we can put them in your room.’

Jean’s face reddened and he started to hiccup.

‘Oh darling.’

She rushed up the stairs and folded him in her arms. He cried silently, his small body shaking.

After Jean had been put to bed Dina and Katharina sat in the kitchen, a bottle of Rioja between them. Katharina melted into the shadow. Edward Hopper, Dina thought and tipped her glass back.

‘It was like nothing I’d ever seen,’ Katharina explained, ‘so completely full of rage.’

Dina should be getting home but she lingered.

‘Something about broken glass,’ Katharina continued, ‘I couldn’t be there. One minute he was playing in the sand pit, and the next he’s screaming blue murder. I couldn’t get it out of him, I became desperate, I, I walloped him, then he started the smashing.’

Whales stay with their calves for a year, lions with their cubs for up to two years but elephants, elephants can stay with their calves for up to sixteen years, sometimes even life. Dina learned this from a nature programme on the telly. It showed footage of an elephant parade wandering parched plains. One of the calves was too weak to go any further, and the mother stayed with it, helpless, until the calf died. She lost her herd.

‘I don’t know what I would have done without you,’ Katharina said. ‘What I would do without you.’

*

 

Eight years later, sitting in Katharina’s kitchen once more, Dina found herself repeating the same words of comfort to her friend, as she had said then: ‘I’m always here, I’ll always be here.’

‘But what can we do?’ Katharina’s lips were thin with worry, her eyes searching. How familiar that lost look was Dina realised. Just like Jean.

Dina was shocked when she had seen him walking down Fulham Broadway the other day. The tall young man, with hunched shoulders and stern gaze, was not the Jean she knew or remembered. He’d seen her across the road but kept walking, head down.

She brought a piece of salmon to her mouth and it slipped down, soft and cool.

‘I suppose we just keep on loving him. Helping him. He is still only sixteen.’

Katharina pursed her lips. Keep on loving him? She was grateful to Dina: grateful for all the times she had stepped in, for the extra classes she covered and the holidays she had come on. She was grateful for her practical help but not, it had to be said, for her psychological insight. Hadn’t Katharina been loving Jean for the last sixteen years. Intensely, ferociously? And where were they now? Broken. Barely able to be in the same room.

‘Sometimes, Dina, love is not enough.’