Sophie trained as an actor at RADA and also teaches acting internationally. She is an outdoor swimmer. Her writing interests lie in non-fiction and life writing, with mostly rural/provincial subjects. She has an allotment. 

Email: sophiejames927@gmail.com

Mobile: 07716396496.

Substitutes

The thing that happens when your parents divorce is that they talk constantly about ‘needing a break’. Your dad spends most of his Custody Weekend re-varnishing his boat.

It is 1975 and you are seven. You are rural, provincial or ‘just fucking stuck out here’ depending on how exhausted or resentful your mum is, and how much she misses London now that you live in a tiny place in Devon with goats. It’s a time of thumb sucking, Wagon Wheels and endless questions. It’s a time of flexible knowledge; there is the Encyclopaedia Britannica or people just make things up. 

How do you have a baby? You just have to think about it a lot. How does a person stop being drunk? It comes out in their wee. To your brother’s headmaster: Why is your hair all greased back off your face like this? (Demonstrates). Silence. None the wiser.

The only people who still seem to be interested in you are granny and grandpa. Possibly three weeks is too much for them, but anyway, the train ticket to Derby is booked. You are going alone. Toby is going to Beaford Residential Centre to develop photographs with his best friend Mervin Marlow, who you have squished naked with. He said, “take your knickers off” and you did, in the sandpit.

You are with your mum at Exeter St. David’s station. The train has pulled in, and your mum scans the carriages for signs of a family. A family with young kids is best. No one else you know of your age has done these long journeys, except you.

You walk home from school most days on your own, occasionally stopping off at the newsagent’s, who let you take something to keep you going. A Freddo is the perfect size for the long walk up North Hill. Past Edith’s house, your ancient babysitter. She is balding and has a table covered in chocolate but only lets you have Rich Tea biscuits, so you steal things from her and dance around the room with her Johnny Mathis album and pretend you are married to him.

You don’t knock at her door. You’re not her friend, and she’s barely capable of looking after you, but you did have to share her bed once. The weird see-through hair and the shiny sheets that were damp and smelled of her pants.

Sometimes, when you get home there’s no one there and you have to let yourself in through the garden gate and get in the back way. One time, Toby came back from school and Caramel one of the goats charged past him into the road and a car hit her and now she lies by the Aga wearing a beret because she is brain damaged and will never bear children.

                                             *

A lady sits alone in the carriage. A mac, permed hair, reading a magazine. She looks old. She seems to be in mourning. Dark hair, a helmet of curls. You somehow think she is Irish. She might have an Irish accent. Traces.

She agrees to it, the handover. You clamber on board with a small case and a bag of sandwiches: hand-carved wedges of granary bread, filled with something unspeakable, like celery and cream cheese. Not even butter! Your suitcase is filled with all tops and no bottoms. You can’t wait to get to granny’s (your dad’s mum) so you can bond with her about your mum’s ‘complete lack of domesticity’ (dad can’t get over mum needing Mrs Donohue, when cleaning should come naturally). Granny will sift through the collection of allsorts in the case and decide you will need some new outfits, and by the end of the stay you will smell of her: Bronnley soap and wholemeal toast. And also look a bit like her, and have a demi-wave. 

You know you are a worry to her, this lady, you can sense it. She is so neat and old, but not like granny, something sadder. This lady is not very good at talking to children. She says things like, “Do you not have something to read?” and “Don’t clog up the floor space in case people want to get on.”

You must have got to Paddington and then got off the train, and perhaps you missed the connecting train or there was no connecting train because suddenly you are together in London and everything feels different. She holds your hand and says, “Now you will have to be brave and come home with me because there are no trains today to Derby, there’s nothing that can be done about it.” You inhale the dark wind that rushes at you on the underground. It smells like someone’s left the iron on. 

You are going home with her to a block of flats where she lives. When you arrive, it is like one of the blocks you passed on the train. It makes you have to go ‘over the bridge’ with your breathing when you look up at it. The idea of being separate from the ground but not in a tree. Other things you notice: black spikes on gates and railings. Also, that it is illegal to speak on the tube. And a man is knocked over on the street and an ambulance is there already, as if it knew ahead of time.

You both climb the loud steps to the flat and you carry your own case, which you have got used to doing. Inside there is a hallway, and the lady removes her scarf and it’s only then that you realise she has blue eyes and her hair is not permed but done up in little sausages all over her head. Her fingernails remind you of your dad’s just after he has cleaned them with a matchstick: still grubby but better than they were.

The living room in the lady’s flat is so neat and so quiet it has a feeling that no children have ever been here. There’s a dark glass table in front of a sofa and off this room is a small kitchen, which is like a corridor or a waiting room. The windows show only other flats and the sky.

She says to sit down, and then says, “you are going to have to put up with an old lady,” meaning her. She talks quietly into the phone in the hallway. She then waves you over and you speak to granny for approximately ten seconds but the whole time you are willing yourself not to cry. It makes her feel better. All you say is everything is fine, but what you really want to say is please come and get me. The lady takes the receiver and rearranges the curly wire.

 “How long am I going to stay here for?”

“Hopefully only a night, maybe two at the most. Your grandmother knows you’re safe and that’s the main thing. It’s just as well your mother gave me her number isn’t it.” The idea of staying more than one night makes you want to cry so you take a deep breath, as if you are looking into a ravine.

“Shoes off now.”

You are standing on a wooden floor, which is actually small blocks of wood set at angles, and they ripple with light. You can feel the varnish under your feet, which reminds you of your dad’s boat and the smell like aniseed balls and cough mixture.

The lady talks so quietly underneath you, that you don’t realise she is talking when you are talking. She says things like “what kinds of things do you like to eat?” And while you are saying, “fish fingers and chips and beans with a knickerbocker glory and also my favourite chocolate is etc.” (basically, the Pirate’s Platter at the Golden Egg when you’re with dad) she is talking quietly underneath you which is like talking to a ghost or a moth and it makes you stop talking in order to listen. What you were going to say next is your favourite chocolate is the Cadbury’s Mini Rolls you steal out of other children’s lunch boxes at school when you pretend you need the loo but go to the cloakroom instead. But underneath she is saying something about opening a tin of soup and “how do you feel about bananas.”

You can feel the warm wood snag your socks as you move around, actually tights because the pants bit has come right down to your knees because your mum has forgotten yet again to go to Pinder and Tuckwell and get you this year’s tights and these are like wearing an itchy hammock. Note to granny: when I am getting my demi-wave can we go afterwards and buy some pop socks. Your mum’s favourite phrase is: I’m going through something myself right now.

The lady makes you beans on toast that taste of metal. In the corner of the living room, you notice a living, breathing cat. It has stripes like a tiger. It turns so its belly is showing. It is lying in a rectangle of sunlight (you can’t get a suntan through glass, you learnt this at school). You put your hand on its tummy and the purr is like a rumble and your hand disappears inside the body and the breathing rises and falls.

“How does your cat get out?”

“Moggy’s an indoor cat. She doesn’t go anywhere.”

This cat smells of the inside: dark wood and handkerchiefs. Your cat Smudge smells of the outside: smoke and chimneys.

The lady must have wondered what to do with you, because next she is asking you to address some envelopes with cards already in them, sealed. You sit at the glass table in the living room and kneel on the floor. There are a few to get through. Perhaps she is thanking people for coming to her husband’s funeral? 

When you have finished, she looks at the envelopes for a long time in silence and then says, “I can’t send these now.”  Something quick and dark runs through you. You look at one of the cards she is holding up and do the thing you do with the nuns at school, when they question something you’ve written which they don’t like or understand – you lean right down to the writing so your nose is touching it as if you are studying it very closely. You can smell it, the fibres of the paper. The letters are all capitals and they run down a steep slope and crash together at the bottom right hand corner, in a way that looks quite fun if it didn’t matter.  

Your role is to be of use and you have failed. You need your Christy’s lotion, which will calm down your red face, but because you need a surface to knock the bottle onto – normally your mum’s palm – you give your cheeks a few licks instead, which helps. 

“Is there anything else I can do?” you say.

“You’ve done enough,” she says.

She flaps about the room with her slippers on. 

“Would you like a biscuit?” she asks.

They’re garibaldis, the most disappointing biscuit ever made.

You sleep on the pull-out sofa and wake very early. You’ve done this ever since you can remember because Toby pulls your duvet off you very slowly in the morning, or else he falls off the top bunk while still asleep and lies on the floor at your feet. 

There is a foreign smell here. Because you have the other times to compare this to, you’ve developed a category of smells and feelings that sum up ‘home/not home’. People who are ‘not home’ give off a weird odour. There was the plumber who came to the house to fix something and for some reason agreed to take you both when your mum went on holiday to France. Every day he had a room full of snogging teenagers; they lay everywhere, their mouths opening and closing on each other, like dying fish. And then combine that with the smell of fried eggs at breakfast, which is all he ever made, so that’s a snogging-and-fried-egg smell. Mum said the family were ‘common’, but this didn’t seem to matter when she was on the back of her boyfriend’s motorbike in Normandy. 

Home is the River Otter, the sound of it nearby and the colour, which is clear water over brown stones and reddish earth. Mrs Donohue’s son drowned in it. William (4) drowned too, but in a silage pit. Your dad said it was because he ‘behaved so abominably’ which was supposed to make you feel better about him dying.

It is normal to be called ‘gypsy’ if you are not from the Butts Road Estate, and if you eat brown bread or have brown sugar. It is normal to be called ‘son’ even if you are a girl, and for no one to know where you are.

Everyone is small and poor in Ottery – except the big house with all the steps opposite the church in town where the family are friendly to everyone because they can afford to be – and people love clothes with bright nylon colours and sell things door to door, like crochet blankets, and turn their eyelids inside out for a joke.

Home is your mum’s mole on the side of her nose and Smudge the cat, who was tipped out of a plastic bag one day onto the carpet by a man selling cats and he (Smudge not the man) immediately fell asleep in front of the fire. 

Your house is like the outside is inside, because the walls are cold and lumpy, and this is to do with being an old convent. The chapel is where your dad went during the divorce settlement, and occasionally you brought him a cup of tea there: strong and white, no sugar. He typed his newspaper stories with his square index fingers and teethed his pipe. There is a stone silence inside. Like being in a cave, and sometimes it is a cold silence if there is no fire in the grate. The chapel is where Toby read about himself in a letter: I wish I had never borne him, your mum wrote to your dad. When he told this to you, Toby had to explain the word borne.

You like fried lamb’s brains, which are soft as clouds with a crunchy exterior, and chocolate yoghurts. You sometimes eat earth, and bubble gum peeled off the pavement still with its echo of strawberry.

                                                         *

You don’t yet leave. On the second day she gives you a Girls’ World Annual and helps your finger read your star sign, Scorpio: You like hiking holidays, ravioli, trouser suits. You don’t like serial stories, porridge, drooping hemlines. Suitable careers: police work, explorer, doctor. Lucky colour: crimson.

You have baked beans again, but this time with extra slices of white toast and masses of butter and a glass of hot orange squash.

“You can help do the washing up”, she says. She fetches some wooden steps, puts them in front of the sink and watches you climb them. You are now towering over the taps, and this gives you backache. But you are glad of a job. Your chores at home are: sweeping down the stairs with a dustpan and brush and buying a single cigarette for your mum from the lady behind the stable door up the road.

Your mum has a phrase, ‘just pack and stack’, which means leaving all the dirty dishes in the sink until no one has anything to eat out of. Then she shakes all the dirty knives and forks under the tap for a second, which to her is cleaning them. The mini-market washing up liquid is so weak you have to use the whole bottle to get any lather. You use carpet shampoo (for everything).

Here you are replacing your mum with each movement. For a start, your hands are in hot frothy water. Glasses first. You are both holding the glass in case it breaks, her hand over yours. Then the plates, rainbowed with Fairy Liquid. The lady wipes everything slowly with a tea towel, which you can smell is clean. You are standing in her small kitchen with the black window.

At granny’s, there is her red Roberts radio and Terry Wogan. Also, you have never done anything chores-wise in the evening. Would granny like this lady? She would approve of her quiet methods, and her sadness if she knew what it was about.

The main thing you have learned is how to rinse. At home this is never explained. After the froth each thing is held under the tap until it is shining and beautiful. Water runs over it, and the glasses in particular are clear and glowing. Like when you have a bath at granny’s, but imagine a hose of warm water rinses you off first before you step into the towel.

Before bed, you slide your finger around the rim of the Christy’s bottle, which gives you enough emulsion for your cheeks. You lie on the pull-out sofa underneath the eiderdown and look at the lady’s mantelpiece. There is a red rose beside a photo of a smiling boy. The rose isn’t real. Beside you there is a lamp and your Milly Molly Mandy face down. You could get used to this. All it takes is two nights.

The lady brings in the cat. The cat stands up on the bed, pushes its paws around a bit (like Smudge, except without wetting everything) and then curls onto your feet. The lady strokes your hair back from your head which she didn’t do the first night. It’s one sweep back from your forehead, which is enough. “Not in public!” you always say to your mum if she does this in a crowd or on the escalators.  

The quiet is smooth.

“Who’s the smiling boy?”

“That’s my son, John.”

“Where is he now?”

“He died.”

“Do you want another one?”

“I’m a bit old now. I’m sixty six this year.”

“You could look after someone else’s child. I could stay here if you like. I don’t have to go to granny’s.”

As you are saying this, you realise you are over-committing and if she says yes, you would be stuck here which is not exactly what you are wanting.

“I don’t want another one,” she says, and looks away.

“Is this becoming sad?” you ask.

“No” she says, but she’s lying because her hands shake. You remember Mrs Donohue on the anniversary of when her son died: her hand shook as she held a glass of sherry in the pub and your mum did the thing she is really good at, which is pity. She held onto Mrs Donohue’s other hand and they sat together like that for ages not saying anything.

The lady folds the sheet over the eiderdown like a nurse and smooths it down. Which you know means goodnight. Because adults have a way of ending things. It’s like they have an internal clock ticking: time to get up, time to go to work, time for bed, time for you to die.

Karen Sharp’s mum came to the door wearing bright red lipstick and said to you, “Karen can’t come out to play today because her brother drowned in the weir yesterday.” She said it in a breezy way, and her hair looked really nice. You walked off down the path afterwards thinking about her breezy manner, and about Phillip Sharp who died and why anyone would want to put on lipstick after that.

                                                         *

When it is morning you go with the lady to Paddington station. All the trains are up and running. The lady holds your hand very hard and doesn’t speak. It’s not like it is with your mum, who wears bright yellow bell-bottoms and forgets you are even there if she is deep in conversation or starts running down the street for no reason. This lady is silent and hard in the body. Another lady in a uniform is standing next to her and the conversation is limited.

You can’t wait to see granny after this, because she shares your sense of outrage, and has already told you what she thinks of your mum. What granny doesn’t know is that your mum is actually very good at holding hands, it’s one of her special skills (she strokes the skin on your thumb with her thumb in a secret way), and she wraps you in sheets hot from the immersion heater then lowers you into bed like a Mummy at night, and there are also her looks which are exotic and Australian. According to David Poulton who is in your class at school, “your mum gets more beautiful every time I see her.”

You have noticed couples who are in love and can’t keep their hands off each other, like Sarah-Jane Hardy’s mum and dad who own the newsagent and he always has his hand up her jumper and you can tell she likes it.

What you remember of the goodbye with the lady is her arm closing the train door, and how heavy the sound is. She must have called out your name because something makes you look up. She blows you a kiss. Her cheeks are red as if the whole thing has been a big effort. Soot, she smells of soot. The train shunts off.

David Poulton, Derek Griffiths, Brian Cant, Worzel Gummidge, Johnny Mathis. They are all good people who you could either marry at a later date, or be adopted by now. You are often on the lookout for substitutes.

The family you sit with on the way to Derby are kind. They listen to you with their necks bent like swans. Some of the things they say: “Oh, I wish I’d brought my banjo along! This is wonderful” (the man) and “That jumper you’re wearing is so colourful, it brightens up the whole carriage,” (the woman) and later she says to you, “I can tell you’re very sensitive to the immediate environment.” The children are interested in your vanity case. Everything you say makes them laugh.

Something inside you sings.

                                                         *