She shrugged. We held the same low opinion of ring officials. It was her sincere belief that the principal requirements for a referee were (1) the possession of a bow tie and (2) the total inability to grasp the fundamental rules of the sport. Any medical condition, such as fleeting blindness, random deafness or memory loss, might be considered an advantage. A referee should be slow moving, easily distracted and given to fainting at critical moments. Randy and the Turk had been the legal fighters and the match should have ended with a simple count out. A true championship match can only be won on a pinfall or submission. The Buffalo Brothers had been robbed of their belts but remained the champions.
I brushed crumbs from the tablecloth, picked up the tray and followed my mother into the kitchen. It was my favourite time of day. The house was warm and still sweet with the fragrant smoke of breakfast. There was sunlight at the windows and music on the radio.
Father had disappeared on some urgent errand, hunting down cabbages, meat or potatoes, and might be gone for the rest of the morning, returning with his pockets full of peanuts or a turkey under his arm. He never seemed to come home with anything on the shopping lists that mother patiently printed for him on little scraps of paper.
Janet, fortified with nothing more than a bowl of Shreddies and a cup of strong coffee, had already gone to work at the big department store where she stood at a glass counter in a hall of mirrors, surrounded by lotions and costly perfumes. She was wearing the burnished grey stilettos.
Senior Franklin, having finished two fried eggs, several rashers and a string of sausages, had retired to the front parlour to shout at the newspapers. He always took The Trumpet, The Rumour and Charger, disembowelling them in search of the arts pages, which he studied with fantastic indignation.
Mother, despite her complaints about Boris the Butcher, remained in a buoyant mood, for she knew that justice would be done at some future tournament. The Buffalo Brothers would have their revenge. The Desert Assassins would be defeated. Wrestling is a beautiful sport. Skill and judgement, strength and cunning, count for nothing when set against the higher purposes of the game. There is destiny to be served. Poetic justice to be considered. Plot, structure and happy endings. The laws of wrestling demand that the big, bad and downright ugly shall bully and humiliate the weak until vanquished by the great and the good. Here, in the wrestling ring, order and truth are constantly threatened, attacked, overwhelmed and restored again. Mother understood these things and took comfort in them. She seemed content. She’d even received the news of Marvel occupying China with unlikely good humour.
‘Why didn’t he come down for breakfast?’ she said, squelching across the kitchen floor. Her legs were planted in a pair of pneumatic Reeboks, making her feet look enormous.
‘I didn’t tell him,’ I said. ‘We didn’t discuss the arrangements.’
‘Shame! The poor man must be hungry. Make him a tray.’
‘Perhaps he’s asleep,’ I said hopefully. ‘It was late when he arrived. It seems a pity to disturb him.’
‘Don’t disturb him. Take him a tray,’ mother said. ‘He’ll want to have breakfast in bed.’
‘It’s too late,’ I argued, looking around at the smoking wreckage. A blue haze of bacon fat hung in the air. There was coffee still boiling, as black as charcoal, on the top of the shimmering stove. Mother’s cooking caused a lot of damage.
‘I’m sure we can find him something,’ she insisted, beginning to search the leftovers for something to salvage.
I donated a sausage from my own remains, gave it a rinse and rolled it dry in a paper towel. Mother provided a couple of bacon rashers and recovered a fried egg with a crispy brown lace petticoat found floating in the frying pan. We took a sliced tomato sprinkled with pepper, a wedge of fried potato, a grilled mushroom, and arranged these oddments on a clean plate with a pile of cold, buttered toast.
‘And don’t forget to ask him if he wants coffee!’ she shouted as I staggered towards the stairs. ‘But don’t mention fruit juice — the orange is green and the grapefruit smells like lavatory cleaner.’
I crept along the corridor and nervously tapped on the door to his room.
‘Who is it?’ he cried out, in a voice still blurred with sleep.
‘Skipper!’ I shouted back at him.
I heard him creak across the floor and turn the key in the lock. He appeared in a pair of striped cotton pyjamas, buttoned to the throat, with a big blue handkerchief in the pocket. The hair stood from his scalp like feathers and his eyes seemed to bulge from their sockets.
‘We thought you might like to try some breakfast,’ I said, smiling, stretching out my arms to offer him the tray.
Marvel flinched as if he’d been punched in the jaw and made a strange gurgling noise in his throat. He stared down at the breakfast tray, plucked the handkerchief from his pocket and stuffed it against his nose and mouth.
‘No!’ he croaked feebly, wagging his head. ‘No!’ He staggered and clutched his stomach. He whimpered. He moaned. He toppled back into the room and the door slammed shut in my face.
I was mortified. It was the second time that he’d taken fright at the sight of me. The man was a lunatic. He was probably dangerous. I trudged downstairs to confront my mother.
‘What happened?’
‘He doesn’t want anything!’ I said, banging down the tray on the table.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ she demanded, sniffing the plate and prodding the egg with a finger.
‘I don’t know. He went crazy as soon as he saw the tray. You’d have thought we were trying to poison him…’
She frowned and pulled on her apron strings.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m going upstairs to talk to him,’ she said, casting the apron over the back of a chair. She pulled at her dress and closed the cardigan over her bosom as if it were battle armour.
‘I think we should wait until he calms down…’
‘Nonsense!’ she said and disappeared.
She was gone for some time. I tried to listen out for her safety but all I could hear was Senior Franklin, honking and hissing to himself in the front parlour as he mauled the morning papers.
I ran hot water and filled the kitchen with steam. The windows turned white. The walls broke into a sweat. I had already scalded the cutlery and scoured the frying pan before mother came squelching downstairs.
‘What happened?’ I asked anxiously.
It was very peculiar. She wouldn’t look me in the eye but made a little performance of fiddling with her hair, stroking it with her fingers and tucking loose strands behind her ears. ‘He’s such a gentleman!’ she chuckled and blushed.
I was scandalised! The devil had charmed her like an old fox flirting with a corn-fed hen. Oh, but he was devious! ‘Didn’t you think he was…’
‘What?’
‘Queer!’ I shouted, plunging both fists in the water and sloshing soapsuds over my sleeves.
‘What sort of queer?’
‘Strange!’ I raged indignantly. Deranged. Demented. Mad as a mooncalf. Mother frowned and clucked at me in disapproval. ‘He doesn’t eat breakfast. That’s not strange. He says he has a weak stomach.’
‘So why didn’t he tell me?’
‘You probably didn’t wait to listen,’ she said, with a toss of her head. ‘You’re always so impatient.’
I watched her pull a delicate china teapot from the cupboard and blow dust from its spout. ‘What are you doing?’ I said.
‘He says he quite fancies a small pot of tea.’
So there was an end to the affair. Mother had taken a fancy to the mysterious Mr Marvel and that had raised him above suspicion. Nothing I said was going to change her opinion. It was time to stifle my instincts.
I finished washing the dishes and set to work in the front parlour. Wandsworth the Chemist had built this room to impress his guests and although it wasn’t especially large, it was very ornate with a high, decorated ceiling and a wealth of stained glass to the windo
ws. The stained glass took the form of an extravagant advertisement for his infamous gland tonic, depicting men transformed into gods and gambolling with fairies. The fairies were, frankly, voluptuous and gazed down from their private paradise into a room littered with balding armchairs, a small table and a sagging sofa. Senior Franklin was sprawled in the sofa, surrounded by shredded newsprint. He clutched a scrap of paper in a brittle hand, which he waved like a flag to greet me.
‘Come, my callow catamite,’ he honked, ‘and allow me to squander my light upon your Cimmerian darkness.’ He spoke his own form of baboo English and rarely made himself understood. But he seemed to think it most amusing, threw back his head and laughed. He had teeth like an undertaker’s horse.
I walked among the armchairs, slapping cushions into shape and hoping to avoid becoming entangled in conversation.
‘We are told that Katie Pphart has dropped another brick into the bottomless well of exoteric literature,’ he announced, wagging the scrap of paper between his finger and thumb.
I tried to assume an expression of mild surprise and interest, enough to satisfy him that I was listening, without suggesting that I cared to know more. It didn’t work.
‘It’s called The Cornflower Chronicle,’ Franklin continued. He held the torn paper at arm’s length and squinted as he struggled to read it. He was a young man but did his best to look like an elder statesman. He was tall and gaunt and favoured old tweed jackets and hairy waistcoats with green brass buttons.
‘“Satin-shouldered Harriet Harper has recently moved to the old manor house”,’ he bellowed at me, ‘“where her employer, fresh-faced Hugo Hudson, the notorious collector of priceless Chinese porcelain, and Laurel, his crippled but strangely seductive half-sister, trick her into an evening of ritual abuse with Buttocks the butcher. A powerful tale of one woman’s journey of self-discovery”!’
I began to circle the sofa, collecting newspapers from the floor and folding them into a parcel. I knew that Katie Pphart was Janet’s favourite novelist and Franklin enjoyed making mischief. He despised the work of Katie Pphart. She produced an endless stream of romantic blockbusters with embossed and bejewelled covers. Her last great success, The Sultan’s Embrace, had been Janet’s bedside companion for months.
‘Well, should we toss our scented bouquets or shall we lapidate the lamia?’ he demanded. ‘What sayeth thou, my sallow saveloy?’
‘I suppose it’s a romance,’ I said simply, hoping that this observation was a suitable reply to his question. I nursed the bundle of wastepaper and waited for my chance to escape. The ink had turned my fingers black.
‘It’s ridiculous!’ Franklin honked.
I shrugged. ‘Romance is always ridiculous,’ I said. ‘Think of Shelley and Byron and Keats.’
‘Sycophants and sodomites!’ he shouted. ‘Pedlars of high-pitched doggerel. Half-grown men who took their revenge by chewing the necks of mincing matrons in middle-class drawing rooms!’
‘It couldn’t be worse than Katie Pphart.’
He flared his nostrils at me, screwed the scrap of paper into a pellet and swallowed it. ‘I shall need some time to digest that remark,’ he said and settled down to sleep.
I worked in the house for the rest of the day, hoping to catch another glimpse of Marvel. But he stayed securely locked in his room.
Franklin went to the library in the afternoon and took supper at the Grouchers Club where he liked to preen in the company of his chums.
Father returned towards nightfall, windswept and grinning, with a box of unexplained groceries. There were lemons and household candles, biscuits and bundles of wilting spinach. Mother scolded him for failing to find the shopping list she had placed in his overcoat pocket.
Janet came home at the usual hour, brilliant and chattering, joined us for a supper of boiled ham and then went to bed with a well-thumbed Katie Pphart paperback. I thought of her curled asleep, so warm and innocent, her spangled dreams filled by cruel young men with sad and fascinating eyes. Marvel remained invisible. No one mentioned him. He might have been nothing more than a flight of my own imagination.
But that night, as I locked the house, I passed his room and heard him pacing the carpet, his movements betrayed by the creaking floorboards. I held my breath and listened. I tiptoed forward and pressed my ear to the door. He was talking to himself as he walked in circles, his voice so faint that I had to strain to catch the words.
‘They must not find me!’ he whispered. ‘Dear God, they must not find me!’
3
The wind fell, exhausted, leaving a silence over the city. It was Sunday morning. After an unusually dangerous time in the kitchen, during which mother had set fire to the frying pan and tossed blazing sausages over the floor, I retreated to the front parlour with my new copy of Grappler. I sat in an armchair beneath the window and flicked through a special report on Pamela Motown, the sensational, sun-kissed manager of several famous wrestling freaks, including the Cannibal and the Toad. Pamela was also the undisputed TV Cat Fight champion. Janet was curled in the sofa with The Best of Katie Pphart. She was wearing a plaid shirt and a short, grey skirt. She had neatly folded one leg beneath the pleats of the skirt but a generous length of the other leg remained on public exhibition, framed by the sofa cushions. Whenever she turned a page of her book she would pause to fondle this outstretched leg, stroking it, tracing its shape with her fingernails, flaunting its pale beauty and making it quite impossible for me to concentrate on the cat-fight goddess. I snatched glances whenever I dared, hot and tormented by love. She was absurdly pretty with her speckled green eyes and that mane of coarse blonde hair. Her nose was small and freckled, her mouth was deliciously plump and her skin was so smooth it shone, it was luminous in the sunlight.
I think it was her prettiness and her slightly startled expression that excited Franklin to cruelty. He seemed uncomfortable in the company of women. His mother was a scholar whose specialist subject was the influence of the Chinese fleet upon the women of Madagascar, 1405–1433. She had also published an important paper on the impact of ear spools in the lives of African lake village women. But she no longer spoke to Franklin. It seemed likely that she’d forgotten him. He tried to keep track of her movements but it wasn’t easy. The last he’d heard she was helping her second husband collect pollen cores from the shores of Lake Chad. Her photograph, set in a silver frame, stood on Franklin’s attic writing desk. A big, untidy woman in a bleached safari jacket. Crow’s-nest hair and blue eyes shrunk by a tropical sun. The picture had been taken shortly after she had buried Franklin’s father in a pauper’s grave near Mombasa.
His father had been an academic, a poet and an authority on the life and writings of Harriet Elizabeth Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), and it must have been love that had taken him as far as the Indian Ocean to die from dysentery in the back of a crumbling two-star hotel. Franklin had already been sent to university when the tragedy happened but he never seemed to get over the shock. His father’s books and papers littered the attic, including a rare first edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and autographed copies of Old-Town Folks and The Minister’s Wooing. He’d also inherited a mourning brooch containing a lock of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s hair and her own tear-stained copy of Byron’s poems. Franklin was surrounded by his dead father’s effects. I think he sometimes wore his father’s clothes. He blamed his mother for everything.
A few minutes later, when he found us together in the parlour, he lost no time in destroying our separate reveries but strode to the sofa and snatched Katie Pphart from Janet’s hand. Janet gasped and snapped to attention, withdrew her lovely leg from view and tucked it beneath her skirt.
‘Ah, my callipygous beauty!’ he barked. ‘Alas, we are spellbound yet by Pphart’s azoic prose!’ And he fanned the pages as if he had half-expected rose petals or a glitter of silver confetti to fall, fluttering to the floor.
‘Yes, it’s very sad,’ Janet said, blushing and beaming at him. She adored Senior Franklin. She worshippe
d him. It was horrible. She understood almost nothing he said but she seemed bewitched by the sound of the words in his mouth, the way he rolled and polished them, as if each wellturned phrase that slipped from his lips were a secret declaration of love.
Franklin drew back his shoulders and held the book at arm’s length, squinting along his nose. ‘“Whimsy Longhorn trembles and shuts her fluttering tear-stained eyes as handsome, fuIl-throated Otis Spunkmeyer begins to unbutton her ball gown…”’ He snapped shut the book in a pantomime of alarm and allowed it to fall through his fingers.
‘They’re supposed to be royalty,’ Janet explained, very flustered. She managed to catch the book in flight and quickly buried it under the cushions.
‘I stand transfixed! I am captivated! Pray give me account of every small, precious moment. Ignore my sensibilities. Spare you no morsel!’
‘Well, Whimsy Longhorn is really a princess,’ Janet chattered bravely, ‘but lost her memory because she was stolen by strolling players when she was only a babe in arms and then she was sold into slavery and lived with some Arab conjurers until she was captured by pirates and forced to sail the seven seas to become a gift to the Sultan of Togo who held her for ransom because of her secret royal birthmark and then she was smuggled to Austria and please don’t ask me to tell you what happens next because it would spoil the ending… ’
‘Shocking!’ Franklin sneered, pausing to peer down the front of her shirt. ‘A torrent of sorry scandals! Take care, my pubescent pixie, lest it melt the glue that bindeth your mossy merkin!’
‘He’s teasing you!’ I called out indignantly. I rattled the Grappler in my fist, but Janet wasn’t listening.
‘Ah, Mr Romance bridles!’ Franklin said, glancing in my direction. He knew how I felt about Janet and calling me Mr Romance never failed to amuse him.
‘Have you finished your own book yet, Mr Franklin?’ Janet asked him, hoping to steer the conversation away from the perils of Katie Pphart.
‘Awake, the Jabberwocky!’ Franklin cried. This was the title of his great, unwritten novel. The book had already been hailed as a masterpiece by his old friend, Polenta Hartebeest, the literary editor of The Trumpet, and several glowing reviews had been prepared, anticipating its publication. The world waited with mounting impatience. ‘I am scarce embarked upon the voyage,’ Franklin confessed, shaking his noble head. ‘Ah, morbid melancholy!’
Mr Romance Page 2