CURFEW - Lauren Collett
- 40 minutes ago
- 13 min read
The first time my grandfather was dying I prayed to God. Dear God, please don’t let my granddad die. I will do anything. Anything! I will be really, really good. Please God. Please. I thought these words very hard as my flustered mother packed her suitcase into the back of her maroon Ford Cortina. My grandparents lived in Oxford which was where my mother was from. We lived in Plymouth because my father was in the Navy; usually it was him going off for an unspecified amount of time. At sea was the expression. An odd construction; reductive and vague. We never watched him leave, as we – my father, my little brother and me – watched my mother leave now. My brother cried, but I was too busy for that, because of the praying, which was actually begging – please God, please. I didn’t really know what I was doing because we weren’t religious, a fact I hoped would pass God by.
The house felt borderless without my mother. Perhaps I had never been in it without her; this was possible because she didn’t work, although I sometimes wished she did, longing for my own key on a shoelace around my neck like some of the other children at school. Each room of our house stored a version of my mother I could see if I blinked very fast: curled up in her seat in the living room bay window; standing at the kitchen sink; soaking in the bath. My mother had a bath every weekend once my brother was in bed and while I watched Doctor Who. Sometimes, after brushing my teeth, I’d sit on the toilet and chat to her. Every now and again she’d top up the bath with hot water. She kept her necklace on in the bath; it was the only time I noticed it. My father occasionally had a bath but there was no question of going into the bathroom when he was in there. A couple of times I had accidentally glimpsed his penis dangling languidly from a black thatch of hair, and the sight of it induced a sort of useless panic; I was embarrassed, both for myself and for my father. But my mother – my mother’s body – was like furniture.
I felt older without my mother at home. Partly this had to do with my father’s tendency to consult me on daily matters of protocol – were we allowed chocolate bars in our packed lunch? Did a Club count as a chocolate bar? – but it was also because I was becoming friends with a new girl at school called Alice Casey, who had heavy eyebrows, a neat fringe and shoes with removable gems that I’d seen advertised on television on Saturday mornings. I had been charged with looking after Alice, because I was responsible and clever and – no doubt – conspicuously lacking in friends. I had a history of reporting tummy aches at the beginning of breaktimes, so I’d been given special dispensation to take a book from the small school library out onto the playground, escaping to Narnia beneath the young Cypress trees that lined the fence along the road.
Alice Casey had moved to Plymouth from Portsmouth because her father was also in the Navy, although a different kind of Navy: the Marines. The distinction wasn’t clear to me, but I had a feeling that my father was more important because when I told Alice’s mother the relevant words – lieutenant commander – she made an Oooh sound in a sarcastic way, as if I’d been showing off. I never saw Alice’s father but I often saw her mother because she began working at the school as a teaching assistant, which made Alice immediately famous, especially because Mrs Casey wore very nice outfits and did her hair in a style that Alice told me was called a French twist, made with something called bobby pins. When Alice taught me these words – French twist, bobby pins – she nodded her head to indicate their importance, as if she were a teacher hinting to a favourite student the contents of a forthcoming test. She was like a small, contained adult. Sophisticated. I imagined Portsmouth must have been a little like Paris and I pitied them coming here to Plymouth.
Alice was an only child. This distinguished her even more; no older siblings to belittle her, no younger siblings to drag her down. She was, for reasons unfathomable to me, enchanted by my little brother, and when she came to play at our house he was summoned to be our baby, or our dog, or our servant. In these games he was either treated very well or very badly; he didn’t seem to mind either way. Once she had him die and we had a funeral for him, laying him out on my parents’ bed. We collected daisies from the garden and scattered them over his skinny little body. We found my father at the kitchen table, watching the washing machine spin. Alice asked him for some candles, which he provided along with a box of Cook’s matches and a vague instruction to strike away from the body, gesturing an accomplished flick of his hand towards the washing machine.
Back in my parents’ bedroom, we drew the curtains and held the candles close to our faces, watching over my brother as he lay motionless, his eyebrows sympathetically raised, a slight curl of his lips. His arms were crossed over his chest like a vampire, his still-baby hands flexed and dimpled.
“I can still hear you breathing,” whispered Alice magnanimously. My brother parted his lips, slowed his breath. His eyes darted about beneath their thin lids.
“I can still see you breathing,” whispered Alice, more sternly. She turned to look at me. In the candlelight she lost some of her composure. Her heavy brows were thicker with shadow, and something adult danced over her face. Just as I understood that my brother’s failure to die convincingly was my responsibility, the bedroom door opened and my father came in with the laundry. He put the light on.
“A woman’s work!” he said, sorting through our socks and pants in an exaggerated, pantomimed way, whipping them down into piles. The daisies wafted off my brother like failed fireworks and I blew out my candle with relief.
It was much better when we went to Alice’s house to play, not only because she had better props for our games – her mother’s old makeup, glittery hair gel from a long-abandoned dance class – but because first we had to wait for Mrs Casey to finish her jobs at school. This meant sitting in the staff room, which was a thrill – one teacher always took off her shoes, revealing darkly-painted toenails beneath her apricot-coloured tights; another sold Avon products to the other teachers, stuffing money into a worn, brown envelope – but I quickly saw from Alice’s studied boredom that we weren’t to be roused by these perverse activities. We read our horoscopes in out-of-date newspapers. I glanced around the room sporadically, listened intently.
In the staff room the teachers had first names and used different voices, just as my mother did when she bumped into someone at the supermarket, or if one of her friends from her course phoned her up. My mother was following a programme at the Open University about French literature. Often when I came out of school, she’d be sitting on the side of the low wall along the path into the playground, reading Le Silence De La Mer, which she told me meant the silence of the sea. She rarely spoke to the other mothers, but now that my father was there every day to collect my brother and me, these women would bombard him with questions about how my grandfather was, how my mother was, how long she might be away, as if they were all good friends of hers. I could tell my father believed they were; he courted their attention energetically, like a presenter on television. The mothers wanted to know what my father’s name was – sorry, it’s gone out of my head, as if they ever knew it in the first place – and they wanted to know was he managing with the washing, did we have a dryer, what was he cooking us for dinner. My brother told the mothers that one time my father had burned baked beans onto the bottom of the pan, and they all howled. “That was very inappropriate,” I said to my brother when we were in the car, feeling like Mrs Casey as I spoke. She had a numb way of telling children off, as if she were wearing a mask. Her name was Janine; this I learnt in the staff room when the other teachers bid her goodbye. She always replied: Mmm-hmm.
My God-bothering worked; my grandfather lived. My mother returned in the maroon Cortina with her suitcase and a new French book, L’Étranger, which she told me meant The Stranger. She had been away for more than two weeks and wasn’t as happy as I’d expected her to be, given that my prayers had been answered and her father had survived. After Doctor Who I sat on the toilet whilst she lay in the bath reading L’Étranger and I told her about the staff room and Alice’s make-up; about Janine’s bobby pins and her French twist. (“A chignon,” corrected my mother, from behind her book.) My father evaporated, once again at sea, and when Alice came to play my mother did not let us have the candles or the matches, and we were not allowed my little brother for our games. We played more and more at Alice’s house, where we could have Soda Stream and Jaffa Cakes. Once we posted a blue airmail letter for Janine, addressed to Lance Corporal Casey. (“Your dad’s name is Lance,” I said to Alice; she laughed as if I’d made a joke.) The post box was at the end of the road, which was as far as Alice was allowed to go. Next to the post box was a telephone box, and Alice showed me the cards stuck inside the box with photos of ladies with big breasts straining low-cut tops. There were words: PHONE SEX.
“My father has one of these cards,” she told me, and then headed back towards her house, her face set closed, like her mother.
The second time my grandfather was dying, my mother was calmer as she packed her suitcase into the Cortina; this I mistook for optimism. Still, I followed the drill; I prayed to God, following the same old script: please God, please. This time around my father was less enthusiastic about his solo parenting duties. He made little effort with the interrogating mothers at the school gate, arriving late to collect us, often with sunglasses on so it was impossible to see where he was looking. The summer had arrived and the days were long; my brother and I watched all the children’s television available until the news came on at six o clock. We ate later each evening because my father kept forgetting how long it took for the oven to warm up. Dinners were stodgy and beige, unbothered by the idea of a vegetable. The laundry basket overflowed. Always, somewhere in the house, the radio was on; that was how I knew where to find my father. At night the phone would ring, and I knew from my father’s tone that it was my mother, even though all he’d really say was: alright, okay, I see.
Then, one Saturday afternoon, the doorbell rang. My father went to answer it and called me. Alice was standing on our doorstep, asking if I’d like to come out to play.
“My curfew is five,” said Alice casually, as if she’d always had a curfew. In her hands she fiddled with a key on a Garfield keyring. She had one of her mother’s bobby pins in her hair because she was growing her fringe out. Fringes were for young children, she’d told me. I had liked hers.
My father asked me what my curfew was, and I said it was the same, five o clock, although I had never once stepped out of the house alone on my mother’s watch. That word, curfew, was like a key on a shoelace around my neck. When my father shut the door and I was on the other side of it with Alice, I had the sense that I was standing in it, inside the curfew, like a magic fairy ring.
Perhaps this was why I told Alice about my praying as we wandered around the neighbourhood. Alice listened expressionlessly and then suggested we go up to the woods that lay on a hill between my house and hers; we could make an altar, with crucifixes made out of twigs, and perform a ceremony for my grandfather. She asked if we could go back for my brother, but I lied and said no, he wasn’t home. Alice shrugged, as if she didn’t care.
“We’ll make a fire with twigs,” said Alice. “Flames make God listen. That’s why they have candles in church. Do you go to church?”
“No,” I said. “Do you?”
Alice didn’t reply. She just grimaced, and after an awkward silence told me I mustn’t stop thinking of my grandfather, which panicked me as I hadn’t been doing that at all. When I prayed, I thought of clouds; of beams of golden light; of Aslan on the stone table, waiting to cheat death.
We settled in a small clearing halfway up the sloped wood. I sat on a tree stump and watched Alice rub twigs together, trying to make a fire. Her long fringe came loose from the bobby pin, and sweat beaded on her upper lip. Her hands became grubby and she complained they were sore; I offered to take over but she tutted and said no. The air smelt of earthworms and something else, tart and vinegary. Below us, a group of teenagers stalked along the path at the foot of the wood, smoking silently; one of them looked up and I ducked my head, noticing for the first time dozens of cigarette butts scattered over the dusted mud. I froze, listening out for slowly approaching steps, but all I could hear was Alice’s futile twig fumbling. When I glanced up the teenagers were retreating, and it was then I spotted some crumpled paper in a knotted bush a little way away. I asked Alice if we needed kindling, and she replied, “Yes. Of course we do.”
I fetched the paper, which was glossy, from a magazine. As I walked back to Alice I uncreased the page and saw a naked woman, with oiled breasts like balloons. I gasped.
“What?” asked Alice, red-cheeked now, brushing her fringe away and smudging her face.
I showed her. The woman’s body shone all over and her blonde hair had been sculpted into unlikely curls. She had no pubic hair; her genital area was smooth, pink and wet beneath her fingers; her nails were long and bright red. Her mouth was open, her tongue flat, as if she were waiting for medicine.
Alice looked up. “Where did you find this?” she asked, speaking as her mother did, low and unfeelingly.
I pointed to the undergrowth and we both saw at once the remains of a magazine not far from where I’d found the page. Alice stumbled over to it and we sat on our haunches and looked at every page of slick breasts, shining buttocks, pink slits spread open by manicured fingers. Some pages had two women together, their breasts pressing against each other, their hands at each other’s private parts. None of them had pubic hair; this alarmed me again and again.
“I don’t believe this,” Alice kept whispering.
There was a story in the magazine about a man who had twin teenage step-daughters. Their mother had to go out of town. Don’t let them try any funny business, she warned the step-father.
“I don’t think we should read this,” said Alice.
And then we read it.
It was almost six o clock by the time we got to Alice’s road. She stopped me by the telephone box, the one with the PHONE SEX cards. I thought of Alice’s father, Lance Corporal Casey.
“You ring the bell when we get there,” said Alice. She had readjusted her bobby pin so that her fringe was once again contained, but she was still smudge-faced, wild-eyed.
“But you have your Garfield key,” I said.
“She’ll be less angry,” said Alice, “if she sees you first.”
We hadn’t spoken since leaving the woods; since Alice had pushed the magazine back into the undergrowth and hissed: whores. I had never heard that word before but I immediately knew what it meant.
I did not get to ring the doorbell. Mrs Casey – Janine – had been waiting by the door, her face puce with anger. She pushed me aside, grabbed Alice by the arm and smacked her hard, three times, on the bottom, kicking the front door with her foot. It slammed in my face.
For a moment I stood frozen on the doorstep. Shock had numbed me; the slamming of the door left a ringing in my ears. Then, as I came to, I heard my own quivering breath and a warmth spread over my face; I felt – somehow – complicit in the violence, and I fled.
I took the long way home, avoiding the woods, which took another twenty minutes. I went around to the back of our house. The back door was open and I saw my father at the kitchen table, listening to a cricket match on the radio. My brother was lying on his side on a rug in the garden, his expression open and light, as it had been when we’d had the funeral for him. But he was really asleep this time; I could tell because of the slight unfurl of his hands, the shy fronds of his fingers. Some ancient resentment stirred within me.
Cheering on the radio then; someone was out, or else had hit a six. I locked eyes with my father.
“Alright, mush?” he said. He looked at the clock and yawned.
That night there was no phone call from my mother, because my grandfather was dying; that was to say, my mother was watching him die. Our father told us the next morning in the car on the way to school. I told Alice straight away. She seemed annoyed with me.
“When’s the funeral?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
She didn’t really speak to me much after that. My fake tummy aches returned at lunchbreak and I was permitted to choose a book from the school library to take outside again. Sometimes Mrs Casey would be in the library, sitting with some child who needed extra help with reading or sums. She never acknowledged me. Instead she would be extra kind to the child she was tutoring, calling them sweetie, darling, love, rubbing their back, petting them with exaggerated care.
My brother and I did not go to our grandfather’s funeral, which was on a Friday. We stayed, instead, with an elderly couple who lived across the road from us; they didn’t drive and collected us together from school on foot, which was embarrassing for reasons I couldn’t articulate to my parents when they arrived home late the next day. My mother put my brother to bed and ran herself a bath while I watched Doctor Who with my father. When it was over he said, “Teeth.” This had become our routine: TV, teeth, bed. No pratting around, my father said.
As soon as I opened the bathroom door I saw the dark mound of my mother’s sex beneath the thinning bubbles on the surface of the water, like an animal submerged. Curls protruded the foam like small roots, searching. The air was damp and warm and base.
I backed out of the room immediately. “Sorry,” I said, closing the door.
“It’s okay,” called my mother. “You can come in.”
I put my hand against the door. It was darkly varnished; russet and veined.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll wait.”
Lauren Collett writes fiction exploring relationships and resilience. Her work has been published in Mslexia, The Stinging Fly and various anthologies of both short and flash fiction. Lauren is part of the 2026-27 cohort for London Library Emerging Writers Programme, where she is working on her debut novel.
