How can I reconcile the ordinary everyday grumpy man, living an ordinary everyday life, with the man in the diary? I did not know that man. I did not know that he’d had malaria and dysentery and maybe even cholera: that he’d had huge ulcers on his legs; that he’d been beaten; or that his closest friend had died, when he sat at the table with his newspaper, when he hammered the Tabasco bottle with his fist till the fiery droplets splattered his food. I did not know that about him. It is too difficult to assimilate.
Ah, but the dreams.
I look at the pages again. I’ve grown used to the scale of the writing now, can read a few scraps more. Often there is that name: Vince. Who is, was, this bloody Vince? A friend who was injured and died and for whom Daddy felt responsible? I don’t know what to do now with what I know. I feel I have gulped down a great uncomfortable meal, full of hard corners and edges, a meal I cannot throw up but will never digest.
I settle back on the futon, wishing I had never opened the envelope, wishing I had thrown it in the bin.
10
One Saturday, after a riding lesson with Elaine, I came home to find Puddle-duck sitting drawing at the kitchen table. My mother was leaning over the manuscript of a story she was working on, crossing out and squiggling with a red Biro. They looked very companionable and I felt that I was intruding, barging in on their busyness, all sweaty and smelling of horses.
‘What’s he doing here?’
‘Griselda, don’t be so rude. Do you think “The Custodian of Pleasure” is a good title? Or too … highbrow?’
‘Don’t ask me.’ I threw my riding-hat on a chair and got myself a drink of orange squash. ‘Hello,’ I said to Puddle-duck who was smiling at me.
‘Vassily’s mother’s had to go out,’ Mummy explained, ‘and I said that of course we’d be glad to have him here. He’s staying the night.’
I choked on my squash. ‘Mummy! Where will he sleep?’
‘Well, Hazel’s staying at Bridget’s and …’
‘She’s always staying at Bridget’s!’ I slammed my glass down on the table. ‘Hazel would die if he slept in her bed. And anyway I’m not …’
‘All right, but it means clearing out the spare room.’
‘I’ll help.’
‘It needs doing anyway – Hazel’s having it after her birthday.’
‘Oh.’
‘High time you had your own rooms.’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s not as if we’re short of rooms … it’s just …’
I knew what she meant. There were two rooms that were unused except to store junk, as well as a long dim attic room, but in them all the plaster was falling off the walls and the wiring was ancient. It would take some work to make them comfortable and Mummy was always too busy with Huw and her writing to get round to it. Hazel had bought her an ugly pink blob of plastic for her birthday with A Round Tooit written on it for a joke.
It should have been what I wanted, to have my own room. None of my school-friends had to share with their sisters but … but in the night I liked to hear her breathing; I liked to feel the bunks shift as she turned over – even if it did make her furious when I did the same. It was too babyish to admit, but I didn’t want to sleep alone.
‘What’s for tea?’
‘Daddy’s bringing fish and chips home after golf. What have you drawn, Vassily?’ Mummy leant over his shoulder. ‘Oh! That’s beautiful. Look Grizzle.’ He had sketched a tree with a swing. It was much better than anything I could ever have done. It looked like our apple tree and our swing only seen from above. As I watched, with a deft little flick, he put a bird in the tree.
‘Is it our swing?’ Mummy touched him on the shoulder, pointed to her chest and then to the garden. She was catching on fast to a way of speaking in signs. Puddle-duck nodded and beamed. ‘Can I keep it?’ Mummy asked. He nodded again. I had never seen him look so happy. At school he was bad at everything and shrunken into himself, but in our kitchen, watching my mother Sellotape his drawing to a cupboard door, I could almost see him swell with pride. And something stirred inside me, something like wet dark wings unfurling in my chest, something I didn’t want to know.
Huw started to wail from his bedroom and Mummy tutted, paper-clipped her pages together and went to get him up. I took a biscuit from the tin and wandered out into the garden. Puddle-duck followed me.
‘Where’s your mum?’ I asked.
He pointed down the garden to the windows of their flat.
‘At home?’
He nodded.
‘So why are you here?’ But he just beamed at me. I went down the garden and sat on the swing. The sun was warm and shone on the wasp-eaten windfalls in the long grass. I sniffed my hands that smelt gorgeously of pony and leather. I took hold of the greasy, fibrous ropes. At least Hazel wasn’t there to be angry that Puddle-duck was there. Not my fault but she would still have blamed me. I swung for a bit, the branch squeaking above me. ‘One day that branch’ll give,’ Mummy was always warning, ‘don’t go too high, just in case.’ An apple thudded into the grass.
Puddle-duck went to the bottom of the tree-house ladder and looked hopefully up. I pretended not to see. I didn’t want to be in the tree-house with him again and I certainly didn’t want him in it alone. He put one foot on the bottom rung of the ladder, and looked for my reaction. His legs were very thin and his grey socks wrinkled round his ankles. One plimsoll had a little hole in the toe.
‘Would you like a swing?’ I got off and offered it to him. He settled himself on the seat. I waited but he just sat there, dangling. ‘Go on,’ I shouted. He gripped the rope tightly as if he thought he might fall off and swayed his body about. I realised he didn’t know how to swing. I could not believe it. Ten and he couldn’t swing! Behind him I pushed. I pushed his thin ribby back and then, as he went higher, the edge of the wooden seat. The branch shrieked and bounced as the swing flew through the air, leaves, twigs and apples pattered and thumped all around him. I closed my eyes and saw him flying off the swing and through the air, flying, flying away. He was making strange high sounds I couldn’t understand, a sort of rhythmic yelping. I couldn’t tell if it was joy or fear or what. I kept pushing and he kept yelping until my arms grew tired and then I got fed up and stopped. As the motion grew gradually gentler, Puddle-duck lay right back on the swing, his hair falling away from his face, his legs stuck straight out in front. His face had gone dreamy as if he was in a trance.
Mummy came down the garden carrying a crumpled red-faced Huw. ‘That’s right,’ she said, with an approving smile. ‘You play with Vassily. Only do go easy on that swing.’
‘Vassily says his mum’s there,’ I said. But Mummy only shook her head. She squatted down and chose an apple for Huw to gnaw on.
‘When’s tea?’
‘Well Daddy said six, but my guess is it’ll be nearer seven.’
‘Can we go for a walk?’
She frowned. ‘Don’t see why not. But don’t go far – and don’t be long.’
We went out by the side gate. Puddle-duck followed behind me like a little dog. I led him round the corner to the big house, part of which was his flat. I pointed to the door. ‘Can we go in?’ I asked. I thought that if Wanda was there I could leave Vassily behind, tell Mummy it was a mistake, then I could go home by myself, spend the afternoon reading my Bunty in the tree-house alone and enjoy the luxury of shop fish and chips without him spoiling it.
Puddle-duck looked nervous, but he nodded and we went up the path. The front door was enormous, twice as wide as our front door. The floor inside was covered in lino, orange flowers inside brown squares. I’d never seen lino on stairs before. There was a smell of not especially nice cooking. On the window-sill was a dead spider-plant in a pot and a pile of unopened mail overflowed the bottom step. We went up the stairs, Vassily in front now, his plimsolls smack, smacking on the lino. The landing was carpeted and cleaner. There were two doors. Puddle-duck approached the farthest one, outside which was a doormat on wh
ich the word WELCOME was picked out in red bristles. I’d never been to a flat before. Everyone else I knew lived in a whole house. To my surprise, Puddle-duck took a key out of his pocket and fitted it into the lock. I didn’t have a key of my own, it had never occurred to me that I might need one.
The flat smelled of Wanda’s weird perfume and incense and bacon. The carpet in the hall was deep and white. I’d never seen a white carpet. On the walls were pictures made of silver and gold string wound round nails: a bridge, a church, a windmill. We went into the kitchen. A mobile with brass bells hung over the table – the cloth was an Indian bedspread, covered in crumbs and blobs of jam that blended in with the pattern. Three white wormy bacon rinds lay on the draining-board amongst the cups and plates.
Puddle-duck opened a cupboard and produced a packet of chocolate finger biscuits, the sort of thing we only had at parties, an unopened packet, and he ripped it open, as if it was nothing, and offered me one. I put it in my mouth like a cigar, sucking the chocolate off the end. I thought he must be showing off, that he would get into trouble for opening a new packet without permission.
We walked past a closed door. I got the sense that Wanda was there, behind that door having a rest probably. Puddle-duck led me into the sitting-room. It seemed strange to have a sitting-room upstairs with the tops of trees outside the window and the telephone wires wobbling with birds, so close. The room was messy but not dirty. There were ornamental frogs everywhere, funny ones and life-like ones in every shade of green – wood and china, plastic and stone. There was a long-haired white cat asleep on a cushion on the white plastic sofa. I stroked it and it opened one gooseberry green eye and purred. In front of the fire was an orange sheepskin rug. It was a surprisingly nice room because of the light and the waving leaves outside, and because everything was new. I don’t know why I was surprised. I must have expected squalor. On the walls were some of Vassily’s drawings, trees and swings, horses in a field, lots of pictures of houses – our tree-house. None of the pictures had any figures in them and I was relieved that at least he couldn’t draw people. I could hear a bit of noise from Wanda’s bedroom. She must be getting up. I thought we should go.
‘Will she be cross?’ I asked Puddle-duck pointing to the door of Wanda’s room as we stepped out of the sitting-room. I felt quite scared, like a burglar or a snoop – although I don’t know why, it was Puddle-duck’s home, after all.
He didn’t answer. He led me into his room instead and stood looking proudly around. It was a tiny room, a room cut in half, with a very big window. It was like a toy-shop. The shelves were piled high with toys, new things still in their boxes: an Etcha-Sketch which is something I wanted, a Spirograph, puzzles and painting-by-numbers sets, carpentry tools, a chemistry set, board-games, Meccano, binoculars, racing cars, Dinky toys and hundreds of soft toys: teddy-bears, lions, seals, bunny-rabbits and a gigantic white polar bear that slumped in a corner, big as an arm-chair.
I couldn’t believe Puddle-duck had all these things. I had thought of him as poor, with his scruffy clothes and plimsolls. Hazel and I had nothing compared with all this; But I noticed there were no books, that’s another thing that made this flat so different from our house where there were shelves of books everywhere. Except that on the floor by his bed was a baby’s board book, the sort of thing that Huw chewed on. It was very old, the corners all soft, bits of the paper pictures worn off the grey board. It was open at the picture of a swing in a tree, very different from ours. I went and looked out of the window, straight down through the branches and into the tree-house. Twigs from our tree scrabbled against his window. I could see the branch on which we sat, the glint from the glass of my formicary, even one of Hazel’s ballet pictures on the wall. And I could see the whole of our garden too, the tree with the swing that looked, from here, exactly like Puddle-duck’s drawing, the kitchen door, and Mummy standing outside. As I watched she reached her hands up over her head and bent down to touch her toes. I turned away. It wasn’t right that he should be able to see down on our garden so well, to see even into our tree-house. A private place.
He pulled at my sleeve and picked up the book. He started again making the noises he’d been making on the swing and now I recognised them as the words of the poem in the book. It was Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem, ‘The Swing’. How do you like to go up in a swing, up in the air so blue? Oh, I do think it’s the pleasantest thing, ever a child can do! He said it quite well. If you knew what he was saying you could recognise it. I had A Child’s Garden of Verses at home. Once it was my favourite book. I felt a tiny sensation inside, like a finger nudging my heart. I made my lips curve into a smile.
Then I heard a man’s voice and jumped. For a moment I’d forgotten we were sneaking and should have been quiet. I flinched and put my finger to my lips. Puddle-duck pushed his door to just as Wanda and the man who belonged to the voice came out into the hall. They were laughing in a silly way. The man called her Hotpants and then he left. I was glad Puddle-duck couldn’t hear, or couldn’t know I heard. I’d have died if anyone heard anyone call my mother that. I stood still, my hands screwed into fists, flinching, waiting for her to come and discover us – but she did not come in. Instead she went into the bathroom – that was made out of the other half of Puddle-duck’s room – and started running a bath. She couldn’t have heard us then, she couldn’t know we were there, even though Puddle-duck had said his poem quite loudly. I wondered if she was a bit deaf too. She went out and back into her bedroom and then the bathroom door shut and I relaxed. Through the heavy fall of water I could hear her singing as she took of her clothes. She had a sweet little-girly voice. I looked at Puddle-duck but his face was bland. So strange that he couldn’t hear what I was hearing. I wanted to go.
I pointed to the door. He nodded. The taps were turned off and I heard Wanda climbing into the bath, a shifting of water, a luxurious sigh, the squeak of her bottom on the bottom of the bath. She resumed her singing as we crept through the hall and out. Puddle-duck locked the door and then tried it, like an adult, to make sure it was locked. Why Wanda would want to be locked inside her own flat, I couldn’t imagine. We never locked our house if anyone was in.
After tea, which was spoiled for me by the sight of Puddle-duck’s hearing-aids on the side-board and all the tortuous attempts at conversation, we played Cluedo. It was not like Daddy to play games. He usually went off into his study and smoked, or sat in front of the television glowering at anyone who spoke. He liked watching news programmes and anything with Nana Mouskouri in it – also Morecambe and Wise at which he laughed and thumped the arms of his chair. Mummy preferred natural history programmes, but Daddy left the room or retreated behind a shuddering newspaper at the first sign of any mating.
Mummy and Daddy sat on the sofa and Puddle-duck and I on cushions on the floor, the Cluedo board on the coffee table between us. Everything looked shabby after the brightness of Wanda’s flat. It would have been cosy if the fourth person had been anyone but Puddle-duck. He didn’t know how to play it, of course, although he had a set in his room. Why have it since he’d obviously never played it? I didn’t feel like playing. Normally when I play a game I couldn’t care less who wins – but I wanted to be sure Puddle-duck didn’t. My heart was actually thudding with anticipation when I thought I knew the identity of the murderer. But I was wrong. Mummy won, so that was all right. Miss Brown did it with the candlestick in the library. When he left the room to go to the toilet, I told Mummy that Wanda had been at home all afternoon.
‘How do you know?’
‘Pud – Vassily said, and anyway, I just know.’
‘It’s no concern of yours, Griselda,’ Daddy said. I folded the board and slid all the pieces, the cards, dice and all the deadly little weapons into the box. My bottom lip fattened and tried to curl out like it did when I wanted to cry. I hated the way Daddy’s voice went all thin and tinny when he was cross with me, his mouth crinkling as if someone had pulled tight a drawstring in his lips. He looked
at me as if I was stupid, or as if I’d done something really wrong when all I was doing was telling the truth.
The only good thing about having Puddle-duck to stay rather than anyone else was that he wouldn’t hear if Daddy had a dream. I never had a friend to stay because of that, because I couldn’t bear the thought that anyone else might hear his scream or know about the dark paddings about, the water running, the horrible soothingness of my mother’s voice in the night. Secret noises that nobody else should have to hear.
Hazel risked it. Bridget had slept on a camp-bed in our room more than once – or she supposedly slept on the camp-bed. Actually she and Hazel squeezed into Hazel’s bed together. I hated it when Bridget stayed the night because they didn’t want me there. ‘You have to include Griselda,’ Mummy told them but naturally they didn’t. They snuggled under the covers, giggling and whispering, ignoring every single word I said.
‘She’s like a baby,’ Hazel told Bridget. ‘She has to get up for a wee-wee twice a night.’
‘Jeez,’ Bridget said. ‘You have to learn to control your bladder.’
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