Human Croquet

by Kate Atkinson

  When the world has grown into eternal winter and the honeycombs are locked in ice and the sugar canes are withered, at least there will be Mrs Baxter’s jam to cheer us up.

  I set off back home again, carrying a jar of still-warm marmalade. (‘Jam, jam, jam,’ sour-toothed Vinny complains, ‘can’t she make anything else?’

  ‘Does she think I’m not perfectly capable of making jam?’ Debbie sniffs, on receipt of yet another jar, but nobody eats Debbie’s accursed jam because as soon as she’s made it, green spots, like lunar cheese, start dotting its surface.)

  I turn round to close Mrs Baxter’s gate and when I turn back round again – the most extraordinary thing imaginable – everything familiar has vanished – instead of standing on the pavement I’m standing in a field. The streets, the houses, the orderly lines of trees are all gone. Only the Lady Oak and the church – clustered around with a huddle of old cottages – remain. It’s the same place and yet it isn’t, how can that be?

  I know from Charles’ paranormal research that it’s quite a common thing to suddenly disappear while crossing a field. Perhaps it’s about to happen to me? I feel suddenly dizzy as if the planet’s started to spin faster and I have an overwhelming desire to lie down on the earth and cling to the grass to stop myself being flung off the planet. Or the other possibility, of course – that I’m going to be sucked down through the grass and into the soil and never be seen again for seven years.

  I’m relieved to see a figure advancing towards me – a man in a long astrakhan-trimmed overcoat and derby hat. He looks odd but harmless, he certainly doesn’t look like an alien about to abduct me, instead he tips his hat as he draws near and enquires politely after my well-being. In his hand he’s carrying sheaves of paper – maps and plans – and he waves them at me enthusiastically. ‘It’s going to be a wonderful year,’ he says. ‘An annus mirabilis as these so-called educated folk say. Right here,’ he booms, stamping his foot firmly on the muddy grass where Arden’s big hawthorn hedge was growing a moment ago, ‘right here I’m going to build an excellent house,’ and he laughs uproariously as if this was a great joke.

  I find my voice which has been lost for some minutes, ‘And what year is this exactly, please?’

  He looks startled. ‘Year? Why 1918, of course. What year do you think it is? And soon,’ he continues, ‘there are going to be houses. Everywhere you look, there will be houses, young lady,’ and he walks on, still laughing, marching on his way in the direction of Lythe Church, climbs over a wall and disappears.

  Then I find my feet are back on the pavement and the trees and houses are all back in place.

  I am mad, I think. I am mad therefore I think. I am mad therefore I think I am. Jings and help me Boab, as Mrs Baxter would say.

  ‘Amazing,’ Charles says enviously when I tell him, ‘you must have been in a time warp.’ He makes it sound like a normal occurrence, like a trip to the seaside. He proceeds to interrogate me for the rest of the evening about the minutiae of this otherworld. ‘Did you smell anything? Rotten eggs? Static? Ozone?’ None of these unpleasant things, I answer irritably, only the scent of green grass and the bittersweet smell of hawthorn.

  Perhaps it was some kind of cosmic April Fool’s joke? I’m only just sixteen and here I am already leaking madness like a sieve.

  How am I to celebrate my birthday? In a perfect world (the imagination) I would be on the wild moors above Glebelands, the wind whipping at my skirts and hair, locked in passionate congress with Malcolm Lovat, but sadly he doesn’t understand that we are destined for each other, that when the world was new we were one person, that now we are an apple cleft in two, that my sixteenth birthday would be the perfect occasion for us to reunite our flesh and indulge in violent delights. ‘Well, they do a nice high tea at Ye Olde Sunne Inne,’ Debbie suggests, ‘and they do a lovely knickerbocker glory.’ (The Oldest Pub in Glebelands – Weddings and Funerals a speciality. Try our Ham Teas!)

  Still in a state of surreal shock from my encounter with the master-builder, I opt instead for The Five Pennies and sit-in fish and chips with Audrey and the inevitable Eunice who has not, unfortunately, gone to Cleethorpes after all. And not forgetting my invisible friend, the scent of sadness.

  On the way home, even Eunice is silenced by the sight that greets us just as we turn into Hawthorn Close, for suddenly, without any preamble, the moon rises from behind the roof of Audrey’s house.

  Not any old moon, not the usual moon, but an enormous white disc like a big Pan Drop, a cartoon moon almost, its lunar geography – seas and mountains – a luminescent grey, its chaste rays illuminating the streets of trees with a much kinder light than the streetlamps. We’re stopped in our tracks, half enchanted, half horrified by this magic moonrise.

  What’s happened to the moon? Has its orbit moved closer to the earth overnight? I can feel the moon’s gravity pulling the tide of my blood. This must be a miracle of some kind, surely – a change in the very laws of physics? I’m relieved that someone else is sharing the lunacy with me – I can feel Audrey clinging on to my arm so hard that she’s pinching my skin through the fabric of my coat.

  A moment longer and we will be running for the woods, bows and arrows in our hands, hounds at our heels, converts to Diana, but then sensible Eunice pipes up, ‘We’re only experiencing the moon illusion – it’s an illustration of the way the brain is capable of misinterpreting the phenomenal world.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The moon illusion,’ she repeats patiently. ‘It’s because you’ve got all these points of reference –’ she waves her arms around like a mad scientist, ‘aerials, chimney pots, rooftops, trees – they give us the wrong ideas of size and proportion. Look,’ she says and turns round and suddenly bends over like a rag doll, ‘look at it between your legs.’

  ‘See!’ Eunice says triumphantly when we finally obey her ridiculous command. ‘It doesn’t look big any more, does it?’ No, we agree sadly, it doesn’t.

  ‘You lost those points of reference, you see,’ she carries on pedantically, and Audrey surprises me by saying, ‘Oh shut up, Eunice,’ and I point helpfully back down the street and say, ‘You live back there in case you’ve forgotten, Eunice,’ and we walk quickly on, leaving her to go home on her own. The moon carries on bowling up into the sky, growing smaller.

  The moon makes no sense to me. Eunice can spout lunar data all day long and it would still mean nothing. I can see no order in the moon’s journeys around the heavens – one day it’s popping out of a pocket of sky behind Sithean, the next it’s spinning above Boscrambe Woods, and the day after, there it is on my shoulder, following me down Hawthorn Close. It waxes and wanes with delirious abandon, one minute a thin paring of fingernail, the next a gibbous slice of lemon, the next a fat melon moon. So much for periodical regularity.

  I lie in bed and look at my window full of moon. I see the moon and the moon sees me. It’s high in the sky, shrunk back to its normal size, free and unfettered from the earth. A perfectly normal moon – not a blood moon, nor a blue moon – it isn’t an old moon with a new one in its arms, just a normal April moon. God bless the moon. And God bless me. Faraway, in the distance somewhere, a dog howls.

  WHAT’S WRONG?

  Summer has begun to take over the streets of trees, clothing everything in green again. ‘Wouldn’t it be funny,’ Charles says dreamily, ‘if one year the summer didn’t come? A world of eternal winter?’

  I awake from an unpleasant dream in which I found myself walking up a hill, a Jack-less Jill, to fill a bucket of water from a well at the top. As we know, trips to the well are fraught with the danger of alien kidnapping, so my dreaming self was quite relieved to find it still existed when it got to the top.

  I lowered the bucket into the well, heard it splash in the water and hauled it back up. There was something at the bottom of the bucket, I’d fished something up in the water. I gaped in horror at its pale lifeless appearance – I’d caught a head.

  The eyelids of the
head were closed, giving it a passing resemblance to Keats’ death-mask, but then the lids suddenly flew open and the head began to speak, its nerveless lips moving slowly – and I recognized the Roman nose, the dark curls, the long lashes – it was the head of Malcolm Lovat. It was more like the toppled head of a statue than a real severed head – the break was clean and even, no blood vessels or frayed sinews floating like tentacles in the bucket.

  The head emitted the most tremendous sigh and fixing me with its dead gaze beseeched, ‘Help me.’

  ‘Help you?’ I said. ‘How?’ but the rope slipped out of my hand and the bucket clattered back down the well. I peered down. I could still see the pale face glimmering through the water, eyes closed once more and the words ‘help me’ echoing like ripples on the water before fading away.

  What does the dream about Malcolm Lovat mean? And why his head only? Because he used to be head boy at Glebelands Grammar? (Are dreams that simple?) Because I was reading Isabella, or the Pot of Basil last night? It’s hard enough trying to keep a geranium alive in Arden, I can’t imagine trying to cultivate a head. Imagine the care and attention a head would need – warmth, light, conversation, combing and brushing – it would be an ideal hobby for Debbie. And basil would be even more difficult, given the malign environment of Arden.

  I am, I know, a seething cauldron of adolescent hormones and Malcolm Lovat is the cipher of my lust, but decapitation? ‘Freud would have a field-day with that stuff,’ analytic Eunice says, ‘heads, wells – all that suppressed lust and penis envy …’ It’s hard to believe that anyone could envy a penis. Not that I have seen many, in fact, apart from statues and an unfortunate glimpse of Mr Rice’s addenda, I have only the evidence of Charles’ anatomy to go on and it’s a long time since I’ve seen any of that in the flesh, as it were. ‘I’m speaking metaphorically,’ Eunice points out. Aren’t we all?

  Carmen, the only one of us to have studied the subject in any depth, reports that a plucked turkey and its giblets are the nearest she can get to describing it, but then Carmen’s attitude to sex is surrounded with such an air of ennui that trainspotting seems positively dangerous in comparison. ‘Well, it’s one way of spending time,’ she says indifferently. (If you spend time what do you buy? ‘Less time,’ Mrs Baxter says sadly.)

  ‘Orite?’ Debbie asks (her usual greeting) when I finally stumble down to the kitchen for a bowl of Frosties. She’s meditating on a kitchen table of meat like a preoccupied butcheress – serried ranks of pork chops, anaemic sausages, big steaks sliced from the limbs of large warm-blooded mammals – a table full of dead flesh the colour of sweet peas. ‘We’re having a barbecue tonight,’ she says by way of explanation.

  ‘A barbecue?’ It sounds like an invitation to disaster. Debbie’s home entertaining is regularly doomed to end in disappointment and, not infrequently, ritual humiliation and social embarrassment. We have witnessed any number of ‘little cocktail parties’, ‘wine and cheeses’ and ‘potluck suppers’ turn into disasters. But Debbie is heedless, thrilled at the idea that she is about to reintroduce cooking alfresco to the streets of trees where no-one has charred a steak over a flame for at least a thousand years.

  ‘For the neighbours,’ she says optimistically as she scrutinizes a tray of pale bloodless sausages. ‘I’m going to put them in buns with ketchup,’ she adds. ‘What do you think?’ She could turn them back into a pig for all I care but I mutter something encouraging because she has a wild kind of look in her eye as if someone’s overwound the key in her back and she’s going too fast. She starts wiping steaks tenderly with a cloth as if they were the butchered bloody cheeks of small children and says, ‘I think it’ll be nice. It’ll certainly be something.’ (Although you could say that about a lot of things.)

  She turns her attention back to the sausages and stares at them fixedly then looks at me and asks, in a suspicious voice, ‘Do you think they’ve moved?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Those sausages.’

  ‘Moved?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says more doubtfully now, ‘I thought they’d moved.’

  ‘Moved?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says quickly. No wonder Gordon’s worried about Debbie. He’s said as much to me on several occasions, ‘I’m a bit worried about Debs, she seems a bit … you know?’

  I think he means mad.

  I am saved from further discussion about the relocating sausages by a screech from the hallway that indicates Vinny wants attention.

  Vinny’s on her way out to the chiropodist. Vinny rarely leaves the house so when she does it’s an occasion of some importance to her. She spends a lot of time looking forward to a glimpse of the outside world and then, when she returns, even more time complaining about the state of it.

  ‘I’m a shadow of my former self,’ she announces, peering through the misty patina of the rust-spotted hall mirror that Debbie has long ago given up trying to clean. Vinny was a shadow to begin with, now she’s a shadow of a shadow. Her bones have turned to polished yellow ivory, her skin to shagreen. Shagreen enamelled with imperial-purple veins. Warts grow on the backs of her hands like lichen. Her breath is as full of sighs as a bagpipe.

  She takes a compact out of her ancient mausoleum of a handbag and rubs her cheeks vigorously with face-powder that looks like flour and, scrutinizing the result intently, says, ‘My chilblains are killing me,’ as if they’re to be found on her face rather than on her feet. She’s dressed for the outside world – a brown gabardine coat and a grey felt hat that’s a strange battered shape, like old dough that’s been punched. Vinny’s hat has an incongruous pheasant feather poking out of the top, expressing a jauntiness somehow at odds with the woman underneath. She takes her pearl-headed hatpin and sticks it into her hat, although from where I’m standing – loitering by the hallstand – it looks as if she’s just stuck it through her head.

  ‘Don’t smirk,’ Vinny says, catching sight of my face in the mirror. ‘If the wind changes you’ll stay like that.’ I loll my head on one side and make a face that Charles would be proud of. ‘You look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame,’ Vinny says, ‘only a lot taller,’ and deflates on to the hard little chair next to the telephone table. ‘My chilblains are killing me,’ she adds with feeling.

  ‘You said that already.’

  ‘Well, I’m saying it again.’ Vinny creaks forward and strokes one of her shoes consolingly. They’re new black lace-ups – witch’s shoes, that Mr Rice has presented to her with a flourish as a ‘token of his esteem’.

  ‘I’ll have to wear something more comfortable,’ Vinny says. ‘Go and get me my brown brogues, they’re under my bed. Go on – what are you waiting for?’

  Here be dragons. Vinny’s room smells of different things – school canteens, small museums and old cold crypts. You would never know that outside it’s a warm day in June. Vinny’s room has its own micro-climate. A thin film of nicotine covers every surface. I crunch my way through the crust of biscuit-crumbs and cigarette ash that coats the threadbare carpet. The old brass bedstead that once housed my sleeping grandmother (Charlotte Fairfax, or the Widow, as she grew to be known) is draped with Vinny’s clothes – decaying undergarments and thick darned stockings, as well as most of her skirts and dresses – despite the fact that the room contains a cavernous wardrobe big enough to house another country.

  Gingerly, I lift the hem of the faded satin coverlet, heaven only knows what has its home under Vinny’s bed. A stoury fluff – the slough of Vinny’s bad dreams – rises up in the draught of air. On the Day of Judgment, when the dead are resurrected, the dust which is legion under Vinny’s bed will rise up and reform into a multitude. Plenty of dead skin, but no shoes, only Vinny’s frayed slippers standing, oddly, in neat fifth ballet position.

  I poke around half-heartedly amongst the detritus and debris that composes Vinny’s soft furnishings. I swing open one of the heavy doors of the wardrobe, taking extra caution in case the whole contraption topples over and crushes me. Vinny
’s wardrobe, once the Widow’s, is a curious affair. ‘A Compendium’ it announces itself in a stylized script from some time before the First World War. A ‘Lady’s Compendium’ in fact, because there was once a matching ‘Gentleman’s Compendium’ that belonged to my long-forgotten grandfather – ‘my late father’ as Vinny says, her intonation suggesting unpunctuality rather than deadness.

  Vinny’s wardrobe displays its sex boldly – shelves labelled Lingerie, Scarves, Gloves, Sundries and racks designated Furs, Evening Wear, Day Dresses.

  Despite the amount of Vinny’s clothing hanging on the bedstead (or, indeed, the amount hanging on the floor), the wardrobe itself contains a forest of clothes, clothes that I’ve never even seen Vinny wear. Until now I’ve only had the most cursory of glimpses into the reeking camphor insides of Vinny’s wardrobe and I’m gripped by a strange fascination and can’t help but finger the ancient crêpe day dresses, hanging limp and lifeless, and stroke the musty wool costumes and coatees that are evidence of a more stylish Vinny than the one that now snails around the house in dusty print overall and fur-lined, zippered slippers. Was Vinny young once? It’s hard to imagine it.

  A long fur coat of uncertain animal insists on being fondled and a tippet brushes itself eagerly against my fingertips. The tippet’s made from a long-dead pair of foxes, unacquainted in life but now for ever joined as intimately as Siamese twins. Their little triangular faces peer out from the dark depths of the wardrobe, their black bead eyes staring hopefully at me while their sharp little snouts sniff the fusty air. (How do they spend their time? Dreaming of unspoilt forests?) I rescue them and place them around my shoulders where they nestle gratefully, protecting me from the draughts that whirl around the room like major weather fronts.

  Crammed into the bottom of the wardrobe is a stack of boxes – shoe-boxes like cat coffins, grey with dust, their ends labelled with black-and-white line drawings of shoes that have names (Claribel, Dulcie, Sonia) and hat-boxes, some leather, some cardboard. In the shoe-boxes are many different kinds of footwear – a pair of cream sandals, stout enough for an English summer, a pair of patent black T-straps, itching to dance a Charleston. But no sign of the errant brown brogues.