by Heide Goody
“Being an adult is all about image,” said Cookie. “It’s roleplay.”
“Like doctors and nurses?”
“Not the way you play, no. All you need are a few simple rules to establish your position when you get there, show them who’s in charge.”
“Rules? Great. Tell me,” I said, as I looked for shoes and a coat.
Cookie mused noisily. “Kids love ritual. If you can get them to read or recite a long, complicated song or a poem then they won’t be any hassle at all.”
“I don’t know any poems,” I said. “I wonder if I could teach him some McFly lyrics or something?”
“That’s the spirit,” said Cookie. “Another thing is physical exercise. Works well with boys, especially. If they want sweets or to stay up after their bedtime or whatever, make them pay in star jumps or press-ups. It’ll help tire them out, and burn off some of the sugar or aspartame or whatever.”
“Cool. Where did you learn this stuff? Did you read it?”
“I read the universe, Baby Belkin. It whispers its truths to me.”
“Riiight…”
“Also, I got some of it from the Supernanny programme.”
I jogged down to street level, almost left without checking if I’d brought my keys with me. I checked. I had.
“Now the final thing you need to know is the power of the Child Catcher,” said Cookie.
“The what?”
“Child Catcher.”
“Child Catcher?”
“Child Catcher. It doesn’t have to the Child Catcher specifically. It can be anything out of the darkest place in your head. Doesn’t matter. Put the fear of God in them.”
“Fear of God. Check.”
I looked along the road. There was a car with a sign on its roof that, bizarrely, said ‘DRIVEL’ in big red letters.
“Mention the Child Catcher now and again to remind them,” said Cookie, “so that if they get out of line you can pretend to call them. Put the number in your phone now, so you’re always prepared.”
Cookie always had an answer. I did as she suggested, listing her number as The Child Catcher and then noted down the address for my babysitting job. I came off the phone buoyed with my ability to conquer pretty well any field and walked towards my driving instructor.
Chapter 15
“Miss Belkin?”
My driving instructor, Terence, unfolded himself from the driver’s seat and got out to shake my hand. The car was very small and he was very tall, and I wondered why he hadn’t just bought a bigger car. He patted the roof affectionately. “Meet Arabella, your new best friend. She’s a good girl, nice and steady, which is what you want when you’re learning.”
I tried not to pull a face and hoped that he’d start behaving like a normal person.
“You see, a car has a personality all of its very own, as you’re about to discover, as you embark on this journey of yours. I’ve made quite a study of it, you see. Each car has a personality, and the person who buys each type of car is drawn to it because of their own personality. You can tell everything you need to know about a person from their choice of car.”
“What about people who just buy what they can afford after their old car’s been declared a death trap?” I asked, fairly certain that my parents had bought all of their cars that way.
“Oh no, there’s always a choice,” he said firmly.
“And why do you have a car with ‘drivel’ written on the roof?”
He looked. “It says ‘Drive,’ Miss Belkin. “And that’s an L-plate on the end.”
“Which spells ‘drivel’.”
“It does not. Now, let’s get you comfortable.”
He guided me into the driver’s seat. I wouldn’t have called it comfortable with all of the things there. It was pretty distracting to have those pedals and the steering wheel getting in the way. He spent some time showing me how to adjust the seat and how to hold the steering wheel. I could see the minutes ticking away on my lesson and we were wasting time talking about how to hold a steering wheel! I nearly said something, but then he told me we were going to start the engine. There were yet more things to check. I thought driving was about getting from A to B more quickly, but quite honestly, wherever we were going, I could have walked there by now.
When the engine was going, I had to work both my hands and my feet at the same time to make the car move forwards. Terence kept talking about the clutch and waiting for the engine to ‘bite’ and I didn’t have a clue what that meant.
It took a few attempts to coordinate two feet and two arms to do at least three things, because people are not designed to work that way. This is why people don’t make sandwiches when they are tap dancing or whatever. Our attention needs to be on one or the other. And I don’t know why this man thought I could do two things at once because men certainly can’t. That’s why men never die while they’re sleeping.
Anyway, eventually I got the car to pull away and we began to roll along the road. No sooner had I got the hang of that, he wanted me to do something else. Something inside me snapped.
“What’s wrong with carrying on like this?” I yelled. I had to yell quite loudly as the car was making quite a high-pitched noise by now.
“We need to change gear to go faster,” he said, “otherwise we’ll damage the engine. Hear that noise? That’s the engine talking to you.”
“I thought you said that Arabella was a nice steady girl?” I said.
“She is!”
“She’s starting to sound downright needy if you ask me!”
Evidently, I am not the first person to panic when asked to perform so many bizarre actions at the same time. The next stage of evolution for humans will surely be to have extra arms and legs, like an octopus. On second thoughts, I can imagine the difficulties it would bring if I had even more limbs to think about. Twenty minutes later I was changing gears and turning around bends and everything, so Terence, the driving instructor, had gone back to his weird theories about drivers and cars.
“See him? In the Prius? Never trust a man in a Prius.”
“Why?”
“Do-gooders and dreamers, the lot of them. He’ll be too busy snacking on hummus or thinking about his compost heap to pay attention to the road.”
“So, what do I do if I don’t trust another driver?” I asked, confused as to how I was supposed to use Terence’s bizarre insights.
“Give them plenty of room, that’s what. Never hurts to give another driver lots of room, does it?”
We were on the dual carriageway now, and there were roadworks up ahead. I was already in the inside lane, so I slowed down as the two lanes became one, leaving plenty of room.
“No! Go faster, don’t let that git in!” yelled Terence, as a car came hurtling along beside us to cut in at the last moment.
I hit the accelerator, the car lurched forward and then I saw how fast we were approaching the car in front so I hit the brake extra hard.
“Well done!” said Terence.
“What happened to leaving lots of room?” I asked.
“It’s different if someone’s trying to cut in your lane. You have to watch out for the sociopaths. They have to be taught the hard way.”
“And how do I spot sociopaths?”
“BMW drivers mostly. Mercedes too. Big German saloon equals sociopathic git. Remember that.”
I checked the time. I’d booked a two-hour lesson and it was only halfway through. I wondered if my nerves could take much more of this. No wonder drivers swore all the time.
We pulled up at some traffic lights. I knew this one, wait until my light turns green and then I can go. Terence was off again.
“Think of traffic lights as being a bit like horoscopes,” he said. “We all pay attention to them, even though they don’t really help.”
“Surely they stop crashes?” I said, moving forward again. “If everyone here all went forward together it would be a big mess.”
“Don’t be so sure about that. A good
deal of what we see on the roads is not what it seems.” He tapped the side of his nose. “Turn left here. You see these speed bumps?” We were on a side street with huge speed bumps all the way down it. I’d have to be blind not to see them, they stretched ahead like a range of very small mountains. “Slow right down for these. The car industry sponsors these.”
“Do they?”
“Nobody will ever admit to it of course, but they do. Reduces the lifespan of your average car no end, so they sell more.”
I crept over the car-wrecking speed bumps with the feeling that Terence had only brought us down this road so that he could moan about the speed bumps.
By the time we got back to Adam’s, I was glad to get out of the car, but I was jubilant that I’d nailed the driving thing, more or less.
“How many more lessons before I can take a test?” I asked. “One or two?”
“About forty is normal,” said Terence.
I slammed the door. I might have to find another driving instructor. Even if I could afford forty lessons, I probably couldn’t listen to Terence for that length of time.
Chapter 16
Terence had irritated me, put my delicate sense of balance all out of whack – messed with my chakras, Cookie would have said. Creativity was a good way of finding your balance and calming yourself the hell down. So, I decided, now was the right time to start redecorating Adam’s flat. Having looked at some of the match pots, I knew that I had a good range of colours to use. The Jackson Pollock approach looked like a winner all round. I went down to the recycling area and found a load of old newspapers to cover everything up. I needed to make sure that I kept Adam’s flat from any more damage. I covered the floor and the furniture with newspaper and lined up the match pots. I did a little bit of experimenting to see what method would be best to splatter the paint where I needed it. I flicked it with a paint brush, which was nice for getting an arc across the wall. I found a thing in the kitchen that might have been a turkey baster, which worked well for getting a massive sploosh of colour, but Ashbert came up trumps.
“That’s a bicycle pump,” I said.
“It is,” he replied.
I didn’t ask him where he got it from, but we found that it would spray a gorgeous mist of fine droplets, and we could even get it onto the ceiling if we held it over our heads. The artwork was coming on a treat when the doorbell rang. I went over, making a pathway out of newspaper so that I kept the floor clean. It was Bernadette Brampton, head of the residents’ association.
“I’m speaking to all of the residents,” she said, her face stony. “I’m afraid we’ve been victims of larceny.”
“Someone’s set fire to something?”
“Someone has taken the pump from my Pashley Princess Classic. That’s my bicycle. Have you, by any chance, seen anyone acting suspiciously?”
I made sure that the door shielded my other arm from view as it currently held a bicycle pump that was dripping with paint.
“No,” I said, pretending to think about it for a moment. “We’ve had a quiet day, not seen anything much.”
“I cycle to work every day,” she said, as though that was my fault.
“Good for you.”
“And what will happen now if I get a puncture between here and the university.”
“Oh, you work at the uni too? Cool.”
She gave me a suspicious glare. It’s the only expression I’ve seen her use, so I think she uses it on everyone. “You?”
“The museum and gallery,” I nodded. “I’m a mover and shaker.” Which was true. I moved my trolley and shook my duster here and there.
She humphed as though whatever I did was clearly beneath her and left. When I went back and surveyed our handiwork I had a thought.
“You know what it looks like, going up the chimney breast like that? It looks like a tree. I think I might build on that.”
I used my fingers to stipple a bark effect into the trunk and then found all the different shades of green to use for the foliage. I was pleased with the effect, and the parts where it crossed the ceiling looked like a jungle canopy. I enhanced that by throwing a few whole match pots above my head to get some thick coverage. Then I had a brainwave. I fetched a box of condoms from the spare room and poured paint into the bottom of one. I then inflated it, tied it in a knot and slooshed it all around inside. I held it against the wall and popped it with a drawing pin. A lovely explosion of paint surrounded the blast zone, and I cast aside the ruined condom, eager to try it again in a different spot. The effect was something like a vibrant chrysanthemum. Solid paint at the epicentre, with petals peeling away on every side. I filled more condoms with paint and pinned them to the wall, all over.
“Ashbert! Come and help me make art!”
He came through from the kitchen where he was preparing sausages again and I gave him a drawing pin.
“Look! Just burst the condoms and watch the magic happen!”
Together we popped the wall full of condoms and watched the glorious riot of colour enhance the tree. I should perhaps have been a little bit more selective in my colour choices, as it was now looking less like a tree and more like an exploded piñata, but that could be remedied with some basic touching-up, I decided. When it was dry I would hand paint some birds over the top.
I checked the time and decided to finish for the day. As I gathered up the newspaper, I realised with some dismay that paint had soaked through and stained the rug underneath. I took the rug to the bathroom and tried to wash it in the bath but the colour wouldn’t budge, and now it was also wet through.
In the end, I got some bin liners and bundled everything up: the newspaper, the rug, even that useless vest of Adam’s after I used it to soak up some of the water. I double bagged the lot and tied it round the middle.
“Which recycling bin should this go into?” I asked Ashbert.
“I don’t think it can go into any of them. It’s not recyclable, so it goes to landfill, but no bag larger than a standard pedal bin is permitted in that bin.”
I looked at him.
“I read the handbook,” he said.
I grimaced at the crazy rules and wondered whether Bernadette could trace the rubbish back to us. The answer was sure to be yes.
“We’ll just have to keep it until I’ve learned to drive,” I said finally. “Then I can get a car and take it to the tip.”
“Will that be anytime soon?” asked Ashbert and dragged the bags into the spare room.
“My driving instructor says I might need forty lessons.”
“Might be a while then.”
“Nah, he just underestimates me,” I said and went to get showered.
Chapter 17
I didn’t need to be in work on Tuesday morning so, despite me having a babysitting job that night, it felt like a day off. We spent the day curled up on the sofa together, surrounded by the still-present rubbish of yesterday’s decorating, eating biscuits, drinking tea and watching movie after movie on Adam’s giant TV. We’d watched National Lampoon’s Vacation, Con Air, The Cannonball Run, Shrek and were now starting on Casino Royale.
I kind of liked James Bond movies. Pierce Brosnan was the Bond of my childhood. There was a certain sexist, sixties charm to the ones starring Indiana Jones’ dad and there was an amusing campness in the ones with the guy who did all of his acting with one eyebrow (amusing even though he was old enough to be his leading ladies’ granddad!) but Pierce Brosnan was actually James Bond as he should be: handsome, unruffled and super-suave.
Daniel Craig was a good Bond. He didn’t have the style or cool or looks of the others but he had a brutal masculinity. On screen, he was chasing a mad bomb maker across the rooftops of some African city, leaping from a high-rise crane to a building site, sliding across table tops, free-running down stairs and off window ledges.
As I polished off a packet of bourbons, I glanced from Ashbert to Daniel Craig and back again. Obviously, I hadn’t used anyone as old as Daniel Craig in my scrapbook p
icture, but I wondered which parts I’d take if I did it again? Not his ears, obviously and definitely not that daft pout that he sometimes wears. Perhaps the eyes that can go from predatory killer to twinkly and blue in a snap? It set me thinking that Bond’s appeal isn’t so much about his looks (although that coming-out-of-the-sea-in-Speedos scene is one we can all appreciate) but it’s more about his confidence and his ability to master manly skills.
“There should be an academy where you can learn to be like Bond,” I said to Ashbert, shifting to face him. I wanted to be sure that he properly appreciated the genius of my idea. Bond Academy!
“Isn’t that MI6?” asked Ashbert.
“No, no. Not the spy stuff, the other stuff. Like knowing about wine and fighting and being an expert at poker,” I said.
His face lit up and I knew I had struck a chord. “I’d love to learn that.”
“You ever been a poker person?” I asked.
“No. But I’d give it a go. It would be great to learn.”
“I’m sure you’re a quick learner,” I said with a nod of approval. Ashbert had a lot of boyish charm, but a dash of maturity was something he really needed. If I was going to make the effort to master adulting then it seemed only right that he should haul himself out of permanent adolescence too. A smidgeon of Bondness would do that.
James Bond shot the bomb maker, blew up the embassy compound and was getting a right ticking off by wrinkly old Mrs M when I realised I had indeed eaten the last bourbon.
“I need biscuits,” I said.
“We’re out,” said Ashbert. “I could bake you some.”
Then I had my second stroke of genius, because I remembered that I’d scooped up an unopened mini pack of Jaffa cakes from a tray that I’d cleared in the cafe at work. They were in the pocket of my coat. I went to look for them.
“Back in a mo.”
I went through the coats that hung near the front door. Mine was underneath, and as I moved things aside a flash of green caught my eye. I pulled out a bright green hoodie and stared at it. Bright green. Pea green. I’d seen this before, peering over the gate at the back of the museum, loitering in the streets here and there. I carried it through and showed it to Ashbert.