Behind the Scenes at the Museum Read Online Free Page A

Alice.
    Step-daughter to: Rachel.
    Sister to: Ada (dead), Lawrence (presumed dead), Tom, Albert (dead), Lillian (as good as dead).
    Wife to: Frank (dead).
    Grandmother to: Adrian, Daisy, Rose, Patricia, Gillian, Ewan, Hope, Tim and now . . . ME! Bunty’s stomach rumbles like thunder in my ear – it’s nearly lunch time, but she can’t face the idea of eating anything. My new grandmother gives Gillian a glass of bright orange Kia-ora and to us she gives arrowroot biscuits and Camp coffee which she boils up with sterilized milk in a pan. Bunty feels like throwing up. The smell of sawdust and rotting flesh seems to have been carried on her skin from the butcher’s shop.
    ‘All right, Mother?’ Bunty asks without waiting for an answer. Nell is small and sort of two-dimensional. For kith and kin, she’s not very impressive.
    Bunty notices a fly crawling towards the arrowroot biscuits. Very stealthily, Bunty picks up the fly swatter that my grandmother always has handy and skilfully bats the fly out of existence. A second ago that fly was alive and well, now it’s dead. Yesterday I didn’t exist, now I do. Isn’t life amazing?
    Bunty’s presence is getting on Nell’s nerves and she shifts restlessly in the depths of her armchair wondering when we’re going to go so she can listen to the wireless in peace. Bunty is experiencing a wave of nausea due to my unexpected arrival and Gillian has drunk up her Kia-ora and is taking her revenge on the world. She’s playing with her grandmother’s button box and chooses a button, a pink-glass, flower-shaped one (see Footnote ( i ) ) and, carefully and deliberately, swallows it. It’s the nearest thing she can get to the sweets our forgetful mother promised in the Museum Gardens.
    ‘Bloody Parrot!’ George holds his bitten finger up for inspection. Bunty tut-tuts indifferently. (Injury, as I said, is not really her forte.) She’s up to her elbows in suet and flour and her stomach is heaving again. She watches George in disgust as he picks up one of the fairy cakes we’ve spent half the afternoon making, and swallows it in one bite, without even looking at it.
    The afternoon has been a bit of a disappointment. We went shopping again but only for some dun-coloured wool from a shop kept by a timid old woman who made me appreciative of Walter’s shopkeeping-as-performance technique. I hoped we might visit a florist and celebrate my arrival with flowers, a garland or two, a bouquet of joy and roses, but no. I keep forgetting that noone knows about me.
    We went and picked up Patricia from school, but that wasn’t very interesting either and her day seemed rather boring, viz:
    ‘What did you do today?’
    ‘Nothing.’ (Said with a shrug of the shoulders.)
    ‘What did you have for dinner?’
    ‘Can’t remember.’ (Shrugs again.)
    ‘Did you play with any friends today?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Don’t shrug like that all the time, Patricia!’
    Bunty chops up the blood-glazed kidney, the idea of testicles never far from her mind. She hates cooking, it’s too much like being nice to people. Here she goes again – I spend my entire life cooking, I’m a slave to housework – chained to the cooker . . . all those meals, day after day, and what happens to them? They get eaten, that’s what, without a word of thanks! Sometimes when Bunty’s standing at the cooker her heart starts knocking inside her chest and she feels as if the top of her head’s going to come off and a cyclone is going to rip out of her brain and tear up everything around her. (Just as well she didn’t go to Kansas.) She doesn’t understand why she feels like this (Go ask Alice – see Footnote ( i ) again) but it’s beginning to happen now, which is why when George wanders back into the kitchen, takes another fairy cake, and announces that he has to go out and ‘see a man about a dog’ (even tapping his nose as he does so – more and more I’m beginning to feel that we’re all trapped in some dire