The Travelling Hornplayer

by Barbara Trapido

  We spin and spin. Aggie sits on my knee, rotating the drum. I continue to gawp, even though the pictures start to disturb my eyes.

  ‘One more, one more,’ Aggie says. She slots more and more paper hatbands into the drum, each with its own row of beautiful little pictures. The hatbands go on and on forever and I have had a hard day – too long outdoors in the sun with Ambrose; too long indoors, moping over a urine sample. Then Aggie jiggles unexpectedly and her head crashes into my jaw. Something happens inside my head that hasn’t happened for years – a strange, zigzag electric current begins to suffuse my head; a charged, spacey feeling that in childhood I described as ‘bizzy’. I have loud vibrations and shell noises right inside my ears. For an instant the visual effects are marvellous and extraordinary. Catherine wheels swirl before my eyes; Van Gogh skies with citric ammonite stars. The garden chairs bloom vivid abalone and orange behind my eyes. Then I fall to the floor, sending Aggie and the toy drum sprawling.

  When I come round, someone has placed a cushion under my head, and the medical sibling is queening it over me as if she has just acquired the lead part in Doctor Finlay’s Casebook. I have the strong impression that there has been a modicum of interference with my person.

  ‘She ought to be on phenobarb,’ Julia is saying, ‘but the sticky bit—’ she stops. ‘On second thoughts I’ll pass on the sticky bit,’ she says.

  Aggie is standing beside me, biting her lip and staring into my face. In her hand she is holding Heinrich’s wooden drum, which must have been propelled from its spindle with my fall. It looks like a broken coconut shell. The thing is cracked open all along the line of one of its arrow slits and right down through the base.

  Once I am tucked up in bed, Aggie brings the albino golliwog and clambers in alongside me. At my pleading, she is allowed to stay.

  ‘Sorry, Stella,’ she says in her little, slightly Geordie voice, as I drink a cup of weak tea. I can tell that she’s been crying and I start crying too. ‘Sorry I made you fall over.’

  ‘It wasn’t you. It was me,’ I say. Dafty Stella. Dafty brain. ‘Silly us. We banged heads. I’m really sorry about Heinrich’s toy.’

  ‘I think you look like a princess,’ Aggie says. ‘Because you’ve got lovely hair. Does Pen think you look like a princess?’

  ‘I think you look like a fairy,’ I say. ‘You look like a fairy with a missing front tooth.’

  ‘If I was the tooth fairy,’ Aggie says, ‘then I’d have to bring my own money.’ Then she says, ‘I’ve got another wobbly one. Look.’

  She is dispatched when the doctor arrives. He and I are left alone. The door is closed behind us. The doctor is a dark rotund man with devil eyebrows at angles of forty-five degrees. He has a small black villain’s beard and a black moustache. He is the Inquisitor, the genuflecting doctor himself.

  ‘Evening, Stella,’ he says. I endure his long and thorough examination, thinking it will never end. He takes my pulse. He takes my body temperature. He checks my blood pressure. He feels my armpits. He draws down my eyelids. He taps my knees and the soles of my feet. He makes me stand up and pick up a dropped fountain pen from the floor, first to left and then to right. He makes me follow his finger with my eyes. He puts a lolly stick in my mouth and looks down my throat. He takes a steel torch from what looks like a piccolo case and stares down both of my ears. He invades my crotch with a gloved right hand, while rotating the flesh of my abdomen with his left. He ties a rubber rope around my upper arm and takes a blood sample from the vein in the inner hinge of my elbow. He asks me my height, my age, my weight. He questions me at length about my medical history. He asks me about my family. He asks me what I do with myself.

  I tell him what he wants to know. I tell him I play the cello and sing, and that I’m a music student at Edinburgh University, which is where I met Pen. I answer his questions mechanically, like a person condemned to death. Then I turn aside to sneeze.

  On the bedside table the Inquisitor has left the piccolo case open and, on the velvety insides of its lid, there is an ivory nameplate with his name. Dr Joel Sachs. I almost pass out all over again with relief. Suddenly the beard and the eyebrows are no longer demonic. He is not a man of the Inquisition. Portly Dr Sachs is a Jew. I want to hug him and cry tears into his cushiony paunch.

  ‘I want a termination,’ I blurt out. ‘Please. I’ve got to. Please. Say I can.’

  Dr Sachs is evidently making a calculation in his head. ‘You’ve left it a little bit late,’ he says. ‘Are you here for any length of time?’

  ‘Oh, for ages,’ I say promptly. ‘All summer, anyway.’

  He is cautious. ‘Naturally, if I treat you,’ he says, ‘I will need to get your notes. This is really something for your GP.’ Then he takes my GP’s name and address.

  ‘Leave it with me,’ he says. ‘I’ll get back to you. Take it easy now, Stella, all right? No tennis and horse-riding.’

  ‘No,’ I say, grinning smugly.

  Then he pats my thigh through the quilt. ‘And if you really are here to stay a while,’ he says, ‘the wife and I could do with a decent cellist.’

  He and the wife are amateur violinists and their daughter Lorraine plays the viola. Any evening I feel disposed to join them in their little house in Jesmond, he says, we could make up a string quartet. Dr Sachs, my wonderman; Dr Sachs, my hero.

  Next morning I wake to brilliant sunshine and manic bird chatter. While I have always imagined that birds are engaging in a fine nuance of conversation in a language sadly unknown to me, Benedict, just before my humiliating collapse, has assured me that what the birds are really saying is, ‘I’d like to be your stud and I’ve got the biggest perch in the area.’

  On the bedside table I see that Pen has thoughtfully left me a small battery-operated twenty-band radio, that comes the size of a family bar of Bourneville, and a mobile phone. He has also left me a note: ‘S,’ it says. ‘Schubt is Comp of Wk. + plus Hdn cello 11:15. Call if you like – P.’ Then it gives his number and extension. I don’t phone Pen, but three times I dial the number to my parents’ house, and three times I change my mind before it starts to ring. I will phone, I decide, but only when I’m strong; only once I’ve heard from Dr Sachs. That will be my turning point.

  At nine, Mrs Ball enters with a tray of breakfast. She calls me ‘a little old-fashioned ‘un’ for reasons I can’t fathom. The house is really quiet. ‘The youngsters’, she tells me, are all off horseriding and ‘Mrs M’ is seeing to ‘her prisoners’. For a moment, I stupidly assume these to be the youngsters, but then Mrs Ball elucidates.

  ‘She always goes up the prison Fridays,’ she says. She adds, ‘Homeless Wednesdays, hospital Thursdays.’ Then she goes away.

  I eat some breakfast, after which I use up half the ivory watermark writing paper in my desk drawer, composing hopeless letters to Izzy which I screw up and scatter round the floor. Then I get up, wash, dress and sally forth, feeling a rush of freedom in having the house so much to myself. I fancy that it’s a bit like being mistress of Balmoral.

  I emerge on the front lawn and take the verdant archway through to the stable courtyard, where I observe that, along with one of the shiny black cars, the Samurai warrior is at home but not the little snub-nosed brown car, which must be the Old Thing’s prison-visiting receptacle. And the builders’ truck is there too. So is the sound of sawing and hammering, which is coming from the far end of the stables. I take these as signs that Pen’s workmen are busy on his apartment and I decide to pass the time snooping.

  The door opens directly onto a huge, light room on two levels, something like twenty foot high. The lower level is floored with pale hardwood, and the higher with nobbly oatmeal carpeting. There is no ceiling. Light streams from a row of roof-windows and from large glass doors at the far end that give onto a slightly sunken paved garden with old stone retaining walls. Beyond these walls are miles of open moorland.

  There is a balustraded upper floor like a gallery, approachable via an open spiral staircas
e made of wood. This has been fitted out like a home office with a large desk and ranks of wall cupboards with panelled bookcases above them. Two doors lead from this gallery. One reveals a small bathroom with a white enamel hip-bath and the other leads into a bedroom under the roof. The whole place is fitted with translucent, fan-shaped wall lights.

  I make my way back down the spiral staircase, staring into the great empty well of space and light below, and, as I do so, I try to beat down the fantasy that this is a wonderful new studio I have just uncovered for Izzy. I place myself and my cello against the tallest stretch of white wall and I envisage Izzy at the empty centre with his easel, grinding his paints into the beautiful, unmarked floor. Across the floor are another two doors. One leads to a downstairs bedroom with a little lavatory and shower and its own door onto the paved garden. The other leads into the kitchen, where three workmen are taking a break.

  The kitchen has the same bleached hardwood floor and lots of industrial-looking stainless steel – steel hobs, steel oven, steel cooker hood, steel work surfaces. A steel-fronted fridge and dishwasher are standing out of position on runners with polystyrene packaging around their edges. But, mainly, I notice the men. I find it quite a relief, amidst this breathtaking evidence of Pen’s wealth and good taste, that the cast of Auf Wiedersehen Pet should be lolling about in the kitchen with roll-your-own ciggies and mugs of instant coffee – and that their coffee mugs should have Batchelor’s soup logos on them. Also that they should be listening to advertising jingles that are distorting from a dusty-looking tranny on the floor.

  The builders seem pleased enough to see me. They make up a fourth mug of Kenco Instant and offer me one of their cigarettes. They invite me to take a seat with them on the floor, which I do, planting myself cautiously beside a pile of wood shavings topped with an electric drill. Talking above the tranny, they tell me about their package holidays in Spain and about each other’s love lives.

  ‘Jim here’s getting engaged to a Gateshead virgin next week,’ one of them says.

  ‘Isn’t any such thing,’ says another. One of them wears a T-shirt that says ‘Go on, admit it, you’re after my body’. When I admire it, he offers to give it to me, while his mates make bullish noises. I demur, but he strips it off anyway and hands it to me pronto, all rolled up, sweaty armpits and all.

  ‘Wear it and think of me, pet,’ he says. ‘Go on. Take it.’

  I take it, but I feel myself compromised, as if he will now demand my hand in marriage. I stare at the black hair round his nipples and listen to the builders’ banter, which is interspersed with an occasional, sneery undertone intended to belittle Pen.

  One of them pushes up his nose with an index finger, in a gesture commonly used to indicate snootiness. ‘I say, this is awfully what-ho not-so?’ he says, making a Geordie effort at posh-speak. They stop quickly and look at me looking embarrassed. ‘Mind, you’re a proper little old-fashioned ‘un,’ the T-shirt says, rather to my surprise. ‘You’re a bit of all right, then, aren’t you?’

  ‘Ah, well,’ says one of the others, ‘back to the old grindstone, eh?’ He pitches his cigarette butt out of the window into the courtyard and turns to invert the dregs of his coffee down the pristine sink.

  ‘Ay,’ say the others, ‘back to the old grindstone.’

  I return to my bedroom to find the phone is ringing. It’s Pen, to ask how I am. I tell him that I’m much better. I don’t tell him this is because I’ve been flirting with his builders who have given me a saucy T-shirt impregnated with bodily fluids which I have stashed under my bed.

  Then, at lunchtime, the Old Thing returns and tells me about her prisoners. They are maximum security prisoners in Durham jail to whom she refers as ‘all my lovely men’.

  ‘All so handsome, so tall,’ she says. She sounds like Mrs Bennet assessing Mr Darcy. ‘They’re great big gorgeous chaps. Very charming and very bright. You’d be proud to walk out with any one of them, Stella.’

  I’m charmed by the idea of ‘walking out’ with anybody. I wonder whether she thinks that I’m currently ‘walking out’ with Pen. I ask her what crimes her gorgeous chaps have committed and she answers rather casually while searching for a saucepan.

  ‘Oh, murdering police informers,’ she says. ‘Armed robbery, extortion, serious fraud. That sort of thing. The odd terrorist. Charming Palestinian fellow. And the drug people are terribly nice, you know. Especially the Caribbeans. Lovely smiles. There’s one young man who simply won’t stop murdering people. Can’t control his temper. He’s managed to murder two while he’s been inside. Stabs people to death over which TV channel to watch. Such a pity, Stella. Such a waste.’

  I blink at her, feeling the limitations of my own puny life experience, with a girlish self-consciousness.

  ‘For big crime, you need to think big, on the whole,’ the Old Thing says. ‘You need ambition. You need brains. You need panache. These men are not run-of-the-mill, Stella dear.’

  I wonder, for a moment, what the hunky extortionists and armed robbers make of her in her little dirndl skirts and cardigans. I decide that they probably love her. I begin to think of her as quite amazing.

  Meanwhile, she’s holding up two tins of Campbell’s soup and she’s asking me to choose which one we should share for lunch. Cream of Tomato or Cream of Chicken? I choose Cream of Tomato, so she opens it with a wall can-opener and chucks it into a saucepan which she slaps down on the Aga. Then we take our bowls and chunks of bread into the garden. The Old Thing has made the bread herself. Edward ‘prefers’ it, she says.

  She makes me begin to wonder about what it could have been that my mother was doing all those years while Pen’s mother was having nine children and making bread and visiting prisoners Fridays and the homeless Wednesdays. She was giving me her quality time, I suppose; practising a form of domestic monotheism; playing the omnipresent Ideal Mother and pretending not to notice that my dad was off in London messing around.

  The Old Thing talks about her husband a lot – far more so than she talks about her children. Edward this, Edward that; Edward’s dedication to a certain brand of petrol-operated lawnmower, Edward’s passion for kedgeree, etcetera. It is as if the Opus Dei is her major project. She appears to have no idea that the man is an overweight creep with soap opera hair and roll-on roll-off opinions. Or perhaps she does? Perhaps she sees it and forgives?

  ‘We are all of us sinners, Stella,’ as she observes to me with reference to her prisoners. And, as she says it, I’m thinking quietly to myself, but we don’t all bury our wives in concrete and blow the heads off security guards, do we? Please can I be allowed just a few small Brownie points for that?

  When the little girls come home from school, Aggie once again attaches herself to me. I am fast becoming her adopted older sister and role model. And, that evening, when Pen takes me to see his new apartment, Aggie comes too on her roller-blades, which require her to clutch at my hand across the cobbles. She has her hair in minuscule bunches like two tiny paintbrushes, with most of the hair hanging out in a fringe at the nape of her neck.

  ‘I’m growing my hair to be long like yours,’ she says.

  In the courtyard, the builders’ truck has gone, but the two shiny black cars are now standing side by side. I do not tell Pen that I have already seen his place. He gets Aggie to remove the roller-blades before she enters, though I am allowed to keep on my sneakers. He talks through his plans for the garden and shows me little books of fabric samples for the soft furnishings. They are all of them natural fibres in twelve shades of sand.

  ‘I think you should have pink,’ Aggie says. ‘Pink, pink, pink. Pink is my favourite colour.’

  ‘Mine too,’ I say, merely for reasons of solidarity. ‘Aggie and I think you should have pink.’ I tell them about the pink flouncy B and B in Edinburgh where I stayed with my dad and where he left a silly message in the visitors’ book.

  ‘You’re fond of him, Stella,’ is all Pen says, which plunges us into a silence.

  All
the while I’m thinking what a weirdo Pen is, to be giving his mind to questions of gardening and loose covers just as if we were proper grown-ups. Why doesn’t he think about dope and socialism and sex and fighting with his parents, like normal people?

  ‘So, why do you drive a car that is exactly like your dad’s?’ I say.

  ‘It’s not the same at all,’ Pen says. ‘Mine’s a Rover. My father’s car is a Jaguar.’

  ‘Well, they’re both black,’ I say, pathetically.

  ‘I like pink motorcars,’ Aggie says.

  ‘Me too,’ I say. ‘We like pink motorcars.’

  ‘Pink, pink, pink,’ Aggie says.

  ‘You are a strange girl, Stella,’ Pen says.

  ‘I’m not strange,’ I say.

  ‘She’s not strange,’ Aggie says. ‘She’s got lovely hair.’

  My big advantage is that I can now play fragile Stella, unwell Stella, and lurk in my bedroom whenever I want, especially at supper time and breakfast. I much prefer it this way, with visits from Aggie and Pen, and Mrs Ball, who brings me things on trays.

  On Sunday morning the family leaves for mass without me. I watch them go from my window – the boys shaved and spruce in sports jackets and ties and polished shoes; the girls with freshly washed hair and summer frocks, laundered and pressed. Some of them are clutching missals. The Opus Dei wears one of his nasty suits. You can tell that he doesn’t always wear the same suit, because the distance between the pinstripes varies by a few millimetres from one day to another, as does the slight shift in shade of navy. The Old Thing wears one of her skirts with a jaunty green blazer to dress it up. She has her hair out of the headscarf and instead has a small army of hairgrips running down each side and a girlish scrunchy band at the nape.

  Just before Ambrose takes his turn to drive them off in the Samurai warrior, I reflect upon them with grudging amazement, thinking two pews’ worth of well-scrubbed children, and among them not one with dreadlocks; not one a druggie or a drop-out; not one, as far as I know, who has ever been rusticated for swiping booze from the off-licence, or knocking off CDs from HMV. Not one who refuses to get out of bed on Sunday mornings and run a comb through his or her hair. I shrink back into bed and wish these vices upon the Old Thing’s unborn embryo, before, with a shudder, I reflect that I have one of my own.