We hadn’t always bought things when we were there. Sometimes the fun was just in going.
But that was when I’d found records.
Vinyls.
I got pocket money from Mum. One pound a week. And I had money from my grannie, too, that she sent every year by post, because she still lived out in Wales, and Mum never got enough time off to go back for Christmas.
So I’d had a total of £11 one weekend.
I’d bought my first five records at 50p each.
They didn’t all work.
Like the one I now jammed onto the record player—it was scratched along the edge, so it only played a few songs without skipping.
Fleetwood Mac.
Mum liked that one.
First time I put it on, she liked it enough to drink wine in the kitchen and sway along toEdge of Seventeen.
I liked to play it for her, because it was the only time I really saw her like that…
Free.
For five minutes and twenty-eight seconds, she was free.
My favourite was Billy Joel’sPiano Man.
I didn’t feel free when I listened to it.
I felt trapped.
There was a Bee Gees single too, but I only kept that one because of the cover photo—their hair looked like a family of squirrels had migrated to their heads.
I put on Mum’s favourite.
She couldn’t hear it, not with the broken speaker, and the headphones weren’t loud enough to overthrow her argument with Dad.
So I listened to it.
Curled up on my bed, the crackle started before the music did—that soft static that felt like rain on a tent.
Across from me, on the wall, were my insects.
Framed bugs from the museum. Each pane of glass had a crack splintering over the perfect image of my bugs.
The best ones I had were from the museum—and so were the worst. Butterflies, moths, a beetle, a cricket, and two spiders.
No more than that.
Mum had stopped working at the museum a couple of years back. Now, she had a better-paying gig at the hospital.
But I could start adding more to my collection now that I’d gotten a library card. The week before, I’d borrowed The Science of Preservation from the library.
I was halfway through it.
It was a hefty book, all about entomology, and it smelled like the back corner of a chemical lab. The pages were thick and a bit oily.
