‘Chooka,’ he said. ‘Chooka.’
‘That’s good!’ I shouted. ‘Let me know if you change your mind.’
‘Dim barn blabba!’ he protested, rocking himself back and forth in frustration. ‘Me chooka!’
‘More magazines,’ Janet whispered.
‘How do you know?’
She shrugged and combed at her hair with her fingers. She looked lovely enough to bite. She was wearing her beauty counter make-up and a new pair of wine-dark highheeled shoes. Her eyes were shining. Her mouth was wet and swollen. She was radiant with love. ‘We just seem to understand each other,’ she blushed.
‘Hello!’ he said, and grinned at me as if he’d seen me for the first time. He beckoned me forward, glanced quickly around the room and then pressed a plastic spoon in my hand.
‘Hello!’ I said.
‘Hello!’ he said.
‘He says he wants Hello! magazine,’ Janet said patiently. ‘He seems to like looking at pictures of film stars.’
‘I’ll bring some the next time I visit,’ I promised, slipping the spoon in my jacket pocket.
‘Bigga job-job!’ he burbled. He grew very excited, trampled the pillows with his fists and bounced up and down on the mattress. ‘Bugga whiddle! Jim-jam bugga whiddle.’
‘You bet!’ I said, grinning. ‘What did he say?’ I whispered to Janet.
‘He says he wants to come home.’
44
We stripped his rooms and carefully moved his effects down to China for fear that he’d fall on the attic staircase. He was still very weak and his legs weren’t working. China was crowded with towers of books and bundles of papers but Franklin was happy with the confinement. It gave him a sense of security. When we brought him back from the hospital and introduced him to his new quarters he laughed in delight and clapped his hands. He wrapped mother in his arms and covered her face in drooling kisses until she spluttered and pushed him away.
‘Oh, lubberly!’ he snuffled, wiping his nose in his hand. ‘Lubberly lubberly!’
‘He likes it,’ Janet translated.
‘Welcome home!’ father shouted at him. ‘Do you think he wants a rubber sheet?’ he whispered.
‘He’s perfectly safe,’ Janet said, reaching out and squeezing his hand. Franklin beamed and slobbered.
That first night, while he slept secure in his bed, we spent hours in the kitchen, discussing his fate. We didn’t know what to do with him. We couldn’t cast him into the street but we knew that we couldn’t support him.
‘It’s hopeless,’ mother concluded, after reviewing the household budget. She slapped shut the battered exercise book and threw down her pencil in despair. ‘We can’t afford to feed him.’
‘I could look for work,’ I volunteered.
‘You can’t do anything!’ father protested. ‘You’re useless. You big lace hankie. You can’t even rewire a radial circuit!’
‘I’m a qualified skivvy!’ I said indignantly. ‘There’s always work for a skivvy!’ I could cook, clean, wash and wipe, I could scrub, scour and polish. They were fine skills. I was proud of them. There were captains of giant corporations who couldn’t tie their own shoelaces. There were stars of stage and screen who couldn’t wash their own underwear. Without its army of skivvies the world would quickly be buried beneath a deep crust of dirty laundry.
But we need not have worried. Despite his disability Franklin continued to pay his share of expenses because, as we should have guessed, he had never earned a penny from writing but depended on a generous monthly allowance provided by his absent mother. He now gave his entire allowance to Janet who bought everything he required, paid his rent and kept him supplied with a little regular pocket money that he squandered on biscuits and raspberry sherbet.
Janet became his nurse and companion. She would feed him and wash him and take him for walks. He remained entirely at her mercy. He was alone. His literary friends had deserted him. His enemies had forgotten him. For a long time she was the only person who could understand his bubbling stream of gibberish.
They grew devoted. She would help him to dress in the morning, feed him breakfast, kiss him goodbye and leave him to sit and wait patiently for her return and the pleasure of the evening when, after supper, she would guide him to the best armchair in the front parlour and read aloud from her Katie Pphart romance library. How he loved Katie Pphart! He couldn’t get enough of it. He wept at The Cornflower Chronicle, whimpered at Secret Throb of Desire and became so upset at The Sultan’s Embrace that Janet never finished the story.
‘Estelle staggered and fell against the glass doors of the fine French bookcase,’ Janet read to him. ‘Her intricate white, silk gown had been roughly torn from her perfect shoulders, revealing her pert and trembling breasts. “I would rather die!” she gasped, her delicate rose-pink nips catching fire, as she watched Faroulz the perfumed Arab unbutton his riding breeches. “That can be arranged,” he said with a throaty chuckle, while he fondled his haughty engorgement… ’
And when he heard these words, Franklin shouted with terror and became so agitated that he had to be taken up to his room and steeped in hot milk and brandy from his favourite pink, plastic, piglet mug.
‘Poogle,’ he sobbed. ‘Nobbly bah-da.’
‘It’s just a story,’ Janet told him, pulling a Kleenex from her sleeve and tenderly wiping the tears from his face.
But Franklin proved too delicate for this mixture of romance and high adventure. He preferred the sentimental tales of true-love lost and love denied. So Janet returned to the more tranquil world where princes fall for waitresses and blind girls marry gifted mutants.
For a time I tried to teach him to read for himself with a pile of Photo Romance comics. ‘I missed you, Brad darling! What a fool I was to stay with Kent!’ But he stubbornly refused to learn, ignored the captions and speech balloons and started to colour the pictures with crayons.
He developed a passion for biscuits, ice cream and sugar in all its disguises. Pineapple poppers, strawberry bloomers and soft, sticky, liquorice laces.
He lost interest in wearing his dead father’s clothes and chose instead to shuffle around the house in yellow pyjamas, red sweaters, green woollen gloves and a knitted hat in a jolly pattern of contrasting stripes. He looked like an orphan from Little Nemo. He didn’t care. He was happy to remain a child for the pleasures he found in Janet’s arms.
45
When Marvel finally heard of Franklin’s encounter with the Stuffed Owl he wrote a letter of apology to father and sent mother a brand new three-seater sofa in two-tone fake leather. It was delivered by men in uniform from a big department store. The sofa was sealed in a polythene wrapper to protect against damage in transit, and mother never unwrapped it.
‘It’s brand new!’ she declared proudly, whenever she passed through the front parlour. ‘It’s brand spanking new!’ And she’d pause to fondle its heavy flanks. Here was something far beyond her experience. An article in showroom condition, so fresh and clean that it still had attached its printed fire-hazard warning label. It dominated the room like some queer sarcophagus, a gift from a distant galaxy.
‘Should we sit on it?’ Janet inquired nervously, when the novelty wore thin. We were tired of treating it as a large and delicate obstacle.
‘I don’t know,’ mother said.
‘Perhaps we should stay with our chairs,’ Janet said quickly, blushing at her own audacity.
‘I suppose you can sit if you’re careful,’ mother announced. ‘But try not to wriggle or spoil the cushions.’
‘And don’t let Franklin piddle on it!’ father warned me, convinced that I could control his plumbing in some maleficent manner.
So we sat squirming on the polythene as we tried to make ourselves comfortable. It chilled the backs of our legs in winter and made our buttocks burn in the summer. It gave little farting sounds whenever we left its sticky embrace. But we endured the discomforts because the wrapper was vital evidence that the sofa was new
and although the polythene envelope grew brittle and yellow with age, the sofa beneath retained its promise of eternal youth.
A little later mother found heavy plastic runners, which we laid from room to room to protect the carpets from footprints. This worked well enough for the first two or three months but then she noticed that the plastic runners themselves had grown soiled by the work of our shoes. She overcame this difficulty by sewing pairs of soft felt slippers and making us wear them whenever we returned from walking the streets. And so we became skaters, gliding through the house as if the floors had been cut from ice, spinning and turning in loops and circles.
Franklin went skidding from room to room, shrieking and laughing and bruising himself. He never grew tired of this knockabout game. It was wonderful to watch him bouncing from furniture.
Father surprised everyone by proving himself a champion and learning to speedskate from the front door to the back of the kitchen with his arms loaded with groceries. But life was easier for him. When he grew tired of the exercise he could always abandon his slippers and creep downstairs to the filth of the cellar.
Mother, her Reeboks wrapped up in dusters, found her feet grown so huge and heavy that she couldn’t lift them from the floor and had to be content to push herself around the room in a sort of soft shoe shuffle.
Janet took the changes in her stride. At the earliest opportunity she enrolled for Dancing at night class and soon perfected her pirouettes on the ice sheet that once had been Wilton.
Tradesmen and neighbours, unfamiliar with the slippery nature of felt slippers, were prone to hair-raising accidents and refused to enter the house. But mother had no regrets — visitors were an unwelcome source of dirt and disease. They raised the dust. They shed hair and skin on the furnishings. They were dangerous. They were held in quarantine at the front door where I was made to interview them through a transparent plastic curtain.
And so we continued.
Mother retired to the back parlour where she settled each day to watch the wrestling tournaments. Once the house had been sealed there were fewer and fewer excuses for housework. She seemed content. I began to notice, for the first time, how quickly she was growing old. Her dark eyes were cloudy and faded. She was shrinking beneath her cardigans. But she could still summon the energy to bellow at referees. Wrestling retained its magic by constantly renewing itself. Old favourites were replaced by fresh champions. Heroes were disgraced and villains turned into deities with comforting regularity.
Father returned to the cellar where, after many experiments, he found himself on the brink of inventing the all-purpose household cleaner, disinfectant and stain digester. Another revolution in modern home comforts. It was a long and difficult task. The fluid he brewed proved so virulent that it melted his plastic mixing bowls and, even diluted one part to a thousand, retained the strength to damage brickwork and kill small animals with its fumes.
Janet grew fat with confidence. She was swelling softly into a matron. A plump and freckled beauty with framed qualifications in the art of make up and pedicures. Franklin remained in her perfumed arms and seemed to enjoy being mauled. He grew to resemble a large rag doll. He finally learned to dress himself, despite having trouble with hooks and buttons, and even mastered a spoon and fork. But Janet alone understands his language.
I’ve managed a few rudimentary phrases. When Janet goes to work in the mornings, Franklin will trail me around the house with his chin shiny with slobber and his slippers slapping against his heels. I do nothing to encourage him but he seems to enjoy my company.
‘Lubberly ouja!’ he says, pointing at his mouth. ‘Lubberly ouja!’
And I know enough to feed him chocolate milk and biscuits.
The year after the sofa, Marvel wrote to announce his marriage to Dorothy. He sent back the bible. We were astounded. No one believed that he had the power to shake her faith and yet his corrupting influence had proved so strong that she’d lost her interest in marching for Jesus. She’d also lost the power to levitate with her sudden fall from grace and one night had asked Marvel to toss her Glad Tidings catalogue into the sea. They’d stood holding hands on the harbour wall to watch the catalogue tossed on the tide and her guilt was washed away with its pages. Here finally was something to celebrate. God, in His mercy, had set her free.
I’ve given a lot of thought to my time in her bible classes. And looking back at those events, I’ve come to believe I was badly treated. It’s not my guilt that I question but, rather, her protests of innocence. We were equally matched in our passion and, in the bold quest for martyrdom, the saint is required to choose a tormentor. Saint and sinner. There’s nothing between them.
She loved Mr Marvel. No doubt about it. She loved his simple, blunt honesty. Whatever faith she felt she had lost, it was more than returned by the faith that Marvel had found in himself. And I think he loved Dorothy for her energy and enthusiasm. Whatever she had given to the New York Bible Tract Company, she now gave to the pleasures of life. They had plans to open a seaside restaurant. Boiled crabs and lobsters. Shrimps, whelks and winkles. Everything served with brown bread and butter. Good, plain food and plenty of it.
Their wedding photographs show Marvel grinning in a rented suit with his bride, bashful in taffeta, standing tall beside him. Dorothy wears her most ravishing smile as the sunlight sparks on her spectacles. They are standing in a little country churchyard on a bright, cold, winter’s day.
They are holding hands. Behind their heads the sun hangs like a halo in the branches of the empty trees. They look so pleased with themselves. They look foolish with happiness.
And what became of Mr Romance?
He became Sophie Appleyard, aka Patricia Pavan. In the solitude of his room he began tapping out romantic novels on the abandoned mischief-maker. It was difficult in the beginning but the long, slow-burning years of smothered desires, fumbling advance and tumbling retreat, have proved the perfect apprenticeship for writing tales of true love lost and love denied. The agony of fascination, anticipation and swift rejection have seasoned me for the task of weaving a world of sweet deceit. A world where nothing exists but the struggle to love and be loved. A comforting world where women are wonderful, warm and wise and all the men are strong but stupid.
The books have been a great success. They are sold in stations and supermarkets, hospitals, hotels and distant airports. You’ll find them everywhere. They are regular Cupid Book Club specials, recommended for holidays, short excursions and wet weekends. The names may be unfamiliar but you’d recognise the lurid covers of brave and struggling beauties trapped in the arms of dangerous men. The Appleyard books are lit by gaslight, packed with bustles and powdered bosoms. Women swoon in royal ballrooms, men ride to hound in high boots and ribbons, and gypsies gather to copulate in all the surrounding barns and orchards. The heroines are easily named Emma, Jane and Elizabeth. They have wonderfully clear complexions, dancing smiles and bright, intelligent eyes. They play the piano beautifully and make clever conversation.
Patricia Pavan takes the modern approach, preferring to write the big, brawling bra-busters. Her women are high-flown executives haunted by terrible family secrets, childhood sweethearts and pinhead fathers. They have names like Cordie, Monsoon and Mercedes. They wear lavish amounts of jewellery and French silk underwear and make love to men with unlikely names in ridiculous situations. Bank vaults, pyramids and nuclear submarines. Novelty is everything. And it’s as Patricia Pavan that my true identity has been most jealously guarded, since if it were known that these ‘highly polished erotic tales for the modern, independent woman’ were written by a brute of a man they’d be seized and condemned as pornography.
It’s a peculiar occupation. A solitary life. Sophie Appleyard and Patricia Pavan will never be nominated for the Stanley Butler Prize for Fiction. They are never invited to festivals, writers’ suppers or literary lunches. They’re never seen at Grouchers. Their books escape the attention of the mighty Polenta Hartebeest. But we’re happy
enough. We have no complaints. I’m not ashamed of our work.
Mother collects the books without bothering to read them. I think she likes the bright foil jackets. Father, for reasons I’ve never entirely fathomed, is convinced that I write adventure yarns and brags about me constantly to his cronies at the back of North Street Market.
Janet reads my work for the thrill of knowing that she shares the house with their authors. She seems to enjoy in particular the stories of Sophie Appleyard. I suppose she likes her passions stirred beneath the shelter of petticoats. She reads the books to Franklin who listens to them with something approaching his Katie Pphart rapture.
‘Bimberly poojah!’ he burbles. ‘Dubberly pinjam!’
I confess that I’ve grown to dislike Katie Pphart in the way that Franklin despised the Dwarf, but I won’t let myself feel smothered by hatred. I try to ignore her photograph twinkling from posters in bookshop windows. The powder-puff hair and ridiculous earrings. I do my best to forget that she never fails to win the annual Crystal Rose for services to women’s fiction. I am not daunted by her reputation. I will not be dismayed that her prose must now be endured in thirty different languages, including Pacific Pidgin and Hebrew. Whenever vanity threatens to strike, I take care to remember Marvel’s crusade against humbug and bumfoolery.
My books are romantic entertainments. They provide the money we need to take care of our security. It’s not a fortune but more than enough to keep the roof above our heads and grant me some small indulgences. A new silk blouse. A cashmere skirt. A pair of fancy, red, satin shoes. And sometimes, when the afternoons are dark and the house is quiet and rain comes down to lash at the windows, I sit in my room with my elbows propped on the polythene-covered writing desk and try to imagine what might have happened if our lives had been different.
But that’s another story.
First published in the United Kingdom in 2002 by The Do-Not Press Limited
Mr Romance Page 21