by Beth Moran
Erica wouldn’t give up. She kept slapping her hands against her thighs and calling Lucy’s name. This felt like a bigger issue than food hygiene. In the end, Reuben clicked his fingers, and Lucy ambled to the far corner of the room, where I saw a massive cushion tucked into an alcove. She curled up onto her bed, resting her head on her paws.
Erica paused for a tiny moment before straightening up and fixing a breezy smile on her face. “Right. Shall we get started?”
She ushered me up to the table and pulled out a stool to perch on, leaving me standing. I had dressed in my increasingly baggy jeans and a grey sweatshirt, fully anticipating the spills and splatters of my comprehensive ineptitude. Erica wore a Cath Kidston apron over a knee-length cream woollen dress.
“First things first! You’ve washed your hands?”
I nodded, hating myself for blushing. Hating myself more for stooping to answer the question.
“Right. Well, today I thought we would start with a simple tomato pasta dish, followed by crème brûlée. Okay?”
“Sounds good.” I hoped that dress wasn’t as expensive as it looked. Then I sort of hoped it was and that Erica slopped a load of sauce on it. Then I mentally slapped myself on the wrist for being a bitch.
“Have you ever cooked pasta before, Marion?”
“Um. Yes. But mostly I use a ready-made sauce, from a jar. By the time I get home from work…”
“Don’t worry, it’s pretty easy really. I brought my pasta machine so we can make the dough from scratch. You’re going to be amazed at what you can achieve when you try!”
For the first time in my life, I wanted to punch someone. By seven o’clock I was ready to grab her bouncy, glossy, naturally blonde hair and stuff it into the rollers of the pasta machine. Then a miracle happened. I stood slicing onions while Reuben chopped celery opposite me. Erica, who had been supervising, had a phone call. She disappeared into the pantry, returning five minutes later pale-faced.
“That was work. The ad campaign has just come back and it’s a disaster. The title font is cerise, when I specifically ordered raspberry. It’s riddled with mistakes. I’m going to have to go and fix this.”
She slipped off her apron. “I’m so sorry, Marion. I feel awful about having to leave you in the lurch. You were doing so well. Reuben, do you mind helping Marion finish her lesson? It would be such a shame for her to have to quit now and go back to tinned meat and fish-fingers.”
Reuben put down his knife. He looked up at Erica. “Don’t worry about us. Will your work be okay about this? You’ll be able to sort it out?”
Erica smiled, showing most of her perfect white teeth. “It’ll be fine.” Then, for the first time, I saw her smile waver. “Well, I hope it will.”
“Thanks anyway, for going to all this trouble,” I said, continuing to chop the onions. “Shall we save you something for later?”
“No.” Erica kissed Reuben goodbye. “It’ll take forever. But hopefully I’ll be done by Fire Night. See you then.”
Erica left, and facing Reuben across the table I almost wished she’d been able to finish the lesson. The first thing he did was turn the radio on. Nottingham Forest playing football. He stood and listened until the commentator announced the score. Forest were one-nil up. As if someone had thrown a switch his tension vanished.
“Okay. Let’s get on with it. Grab a pan and heat up some oil. No – not that much oil! Just enough to coat the onions…”
It was hard to tell if Reuben was any good as a teacher, because I was such a disaster as a student. He intimidated me. I still hadn’t forgotten the chicken incident, and he just seemed so big. Not so much physically, but he seemed to take up so much space with, I don’t know, his personality or something. Not the most graceful person at the best of times, I became clumsy, awkward and scatterbrained to the point where I felt ready to bash myself over the head with the antique copper frying pan.
Reuben grew increasingly impatient and frustrated, though to his credit he did try not to show it. At eight-thirty I finally tipped a plate of stuck-together spaghetti clothed in watery-yet-burned tomato sauce onto two plates.
We stared at the food for a few moments.
“Sorry. I’ve wasted your evening. And made a total mess of your kitchen. Maybe we should just throw this in the bin. I can make an edible cheese sandwich…”
“Sit down.” Reuben pulled out a chair for me to sit on. “It’s taken us two hours to make this dinner. I’ve been lugging vegetable boxes since half past six this morning, and I’m so hungry that this doesn’t actually look too bad. Stick some cheese on the top and it’ll be fine.”
We grated some cheese on the top. A lot of cheese. It was not fine. I managed to force down a few forkfuls.
Reuben had no such qualms, finishing his plate, and the rest of mine, before pushing himself back from the table and stretching his legs out. “There. You can tell Erica your first lesson was a success. We made a pretty good team, even without her supervision.” He winked at me. I grabbed my water glass and hid behind it.
Reuben smiled. “Erica means well; she just gets a bit carried away sometimes.”
“I can see she really loves being here – at the Hall.”
His smile disappeared. “Yes. Yes, she does. In small doses.”
We ate our sloppy crème brûlée without talking. It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence, just the quiet of people too exhausted to bother making conversation. I cleared away the remains of the meal and washed up while Reuben, who dried, suggested what I could do to improve things next time. Did I want there to be a next time? I wasn’t sure yet.
My visit to the home of Morris Middleton, aka the minstrel, aka the unpleasant man who had been rude to me at the festival, counted as just about the creepiest afternoon of my life. I had known the kind of terror that turns your spine to water, at the hands of my imaginative cousin, and grown accustomed to the drip drip of slow, steady, stomach-curdling dread that came as an inevitable side-effect of living with my mother. But this was just plain weird. Bad weird. Thank goodness for Ada.
I picked Ada up from the thatched cottage she shared with her sister, and we drove through increasingly narrow, potholed lanes through the forest until we reached a tiny, semi-derelict ruin hidden under the eerie shade of towering pine trees. If Ada and May lived in a fairy-tale house, this had to be the home of the evil villain. I pulled up on the patch of dirt standing in for a driveway and switched off the engine. In the murky light under the trees, the gloom heightened the impact of cracked, peeling walls and rotten frames surrounding windows so grimy no one could have seen inside, not even once they had crept right up to the front entrance.
As Ada lifted her hand to knock on the door, a sharp cacophony of barking burst through the flimsy wood, then a heavy thud on the other side as a large animal threw itself against the inside of the door. When the next crash threatened to break the door down, Ada had to grip hold of me to stop me sprinting back to the car. She peered in through one of the filthy windows and shouted through the glass.
“Morris! It’s Ada. Stop fooling about and open the door! And mind you get the wolves under control first. You don’t want a repeat of what happened with Mrs Grant!”
What happened with Mrs Grant? I might have said that out loud, but I think my voice had reached supersonic frequencies that only the wolves – wolves? – could hear.
After a few more knocks and yells from Ada, a lot more barking, growling, snarling and scratching from inside the house and some muffled swearing, Morris Middleton, aka the craziest man in the forest, opened the door.
He slipped through a gap just wide enough for his beer belly, slamming the door on the beasts trying to shove their way out after him, and gestured with his large, grimy head toward the back of the building. Without his medieval hat, I could see he had one of those heads with hair just about everywhere except on the top where hair ought to be. I didn’t blame him that the hair was stained yellow in places, and lank and scrawny. It was probably a
hard job to look after hair that long growing in all those places. His head must represent Ada’s worst nightmare.
At the other side of the house, in between piles of wood, junk metal and about a thousand empty beer cans, Morris Middleton led us inside a lean-to containing a bloodstained table on which lay three dead squirrels. One of the squirrels had its guts half pulled out. A bowl holding what looked like lots more guts stood on the floor beside it. A sink that may have once been white hung against the wall adjoining the main house. A high shelf ran along one wall, and a black three-legged stool stood next to the table. Oh yes, and a thick, buzzing crowd of fat, shiny flies swarmed on everything. I cannot even begin to describe the stink. Except it smelled of dead squirrels, blood, guts, filth, unwashed crazy forest man and a zillion flies.
I stepped as far back into the (thankfully wide) doorway as I could without being actually outside again. My skin crawled, imagining flies already burrowing beneath my clothes. I tried to keep my features neutral, fighting the stench. Ada had no such qualms. She stuck a lace-edged handkerchief in front of her nose and scowled at Morris Middleton.
“This is repulsive, Morris! We can’t talk in here.”
Morris squatted on the stool, tugging at the squirrel innards. I turned away, sucked in a lungful of relatively clean air and tried not to gag.
“I don’t want to talk. I didn’t ask you to come. If you don’t like it, you can – ”
“Mor-ris,” Ada sang, pulling a bottle of whisky out of her shoulder bag while still managing to keep the handkerchief pressed against her face. “Let’s not be too hasty, now. We know you are a busy man and your time is precious.”
He glanced at the whisky, then sighed. “Wait five minutes.”
We waited on the scrubby grass behind the house, carefully avoiding the piles of dung. Hoping they were animal in origin.
The minstrel emerged, as promised, five minutes later, wiping his hands on a grey rag.
“What?”
“Good afternoon, Morris. How are you? Are you keeping well? The wolves? All healthy, hale and hearty?”
Morris tucked the rag into the top of his woollen trousers. He folded his arms.
Ada smiled. “Oh, Morris. Drop the hard man act, please do. You know I’ve been interrogated by far worse.”
He sniffed. I waited, trusting Ada knew what she was doing.
“Marion here is looking for information about the Robin Hood Festival. From maybe the first or second year. She wants to know about this man.” With that, Ada offered Morris the photograph he had snubbed a month earlier. It was only a copy I’d made, but I still had to fight the urge to snatch it back out of his filthy, rank fingers.
“It’s in the cellar.” Morris curled up the corners of his mouth. “You’ll ’ave to look yerselves.”
Ada looked at me. Her eyes shone. “Well? What are we waiting for?”
I closed my eyes, which actually made no difference in the pitch-black cellar, thought about my warm, wonderful daddy, and edged forward down the slippery steps until I met the bare earth floor at the bottom. Ada, proving beyond any doubt to be indeed the fearless adventurer her stories suggested, followed behind me with a torch, the handkerchief now secured above each ear with a hairclip.
“Well, how interesting!” She whizzed the beam of the torch around the tiny room, revealing flashes of wooden crates stacked up against every wall. “A veritable treasure trove of secrets could be hidden inside these boxes!”
It felt like forever before we found the right box. Each container had been labelled with the year of its contents, but the writing – messy to begin with, and done in charcoal – had rubbed and blurred, becoming almost illegible. The boxes were stacked in no particular order, and we had to turn some of them around before we could find the date. The cold, dank cellar air, laden with mildew, was suffocating. I felt profoundly grateful for Ada’s cheerful chatter. Every time she paused for breath the sound of rustling, scuttling feet was enough to make me light-headed.
When we eventually found the box for 1981, the first year of the festival according to another internet search on Jake’s computer, it was too heavy and awkward for us to manoeuvre up the steps. We had to stay in the cellar while we rummaged through the mouldy contents, finding newspaper clippings, minutes of planning meetings and eventually what we had been looking for: an original programme from the Robin Hood Festival. A quick flick through in the torchlight revealed a photograph of my dad, again in Robin Hood costume, laughing with another young man dressed up as Little John. The musty cellar disappeared around me, momentarily lost in the dappled sunshine of the forest.
“Let’s get out of here, girl! Mission accomplished!” Ada waved the booklet in the torchlight, triumphantly.
I stole a glance up the stairs. “He said we aren’t allowed to take anything.”
“Hah! Poppycock! He knows there’s no chance of that.” She crammed the sheets down the back of her pedal pushers and kicked the box back toward the wall with her silver stiletto.
Stumbling back out into the hallway, we found Morris Middleton waiting at the front door, gripping the collar of a huge wolf-dog-thing in each hand.
“Found summat?”
“Yes, thank you, Morris. We found exactly what we were looking for, a very good stroke of luck.”
“Didn’t decide to take owt?”
“Of course not. Now, if you will excuse us, we wouldn’t dream of taking up any more of your time.”
Morris narrowed his eyes. He eased his grip on the animals, so they strained forwards eagerly, huge globs of saliva dripping onto the floor.
“Won’t mind lettin’ the girls check you over then.”
Ada rolled her eyes. I held my breath as the huge, soggy nose of the wolf-dog-thing probed about my person, leaving a trail of dog-meat-scented slime. I couldn’t see what was going on with Ada through my scrunched-up eyelids, but she somehow passed inspection and we hastily made our exit.
We drove in silence, without stopping, until I pulled up outside Ada’s cottage. She lifted up her backside and retrieved the stolen papers from her trousers. She then wriggled about for another minute, before removing a handful of garlic cloves. Where on earth had she hidden those?
Ada grinned, neatly placing the garlic inside a plastic sandwich bag.
“Never ignore the possibility of sniffer dogs, girl. I found that out smuggling illegal Bibles into China. That’s a mistake you don’t make twice!” She opened my car door and clambered out. “See you Friday then. That barnet won’t know what’s hit it!”
I set off in the direction of the Peace and Pigs, creeped out, covered in canine slobber, the clinging stench of Morris Middleton’s rancid house still pungent in my nostrils. But I felt my spirit flutter a good six inches off the floor – not quite soaring but a pretty good start, all things considered. I had been in one of Ada’s scary, strange stories. I felt a teensy bit proud of myself. Turning off the main road into the campsite, it hit me: for the first time in my life I no longer wanted to tell other people’s stories. I wanted to live my own. I thought about my old boss Harriet, living every day to the sound of her own tune, and spent the rest of the day humming “Who Let the Dogs Out?”
After Mrs Brown’s job offer, I went to visit Father Francis. We settled in our usual chairs, mugs of tea in hand.
“It’s been a while, Marion. Have you been doing all right, now?”
This would be the point in the conversation where I would nod, or shake my head, or more often shrug my shoulders. I took a deep breath.
“Aye.” A tiny, breathy whisper. Father Francis pretended not to notice, but a light glowed behind his eyes.
“That’s grand. Your mother has been out of the hospital for what, three weeks now?”
I nodded. He waited, hopefully. I sucked in another breath and fought past the screaming, angry, frightened girl squeezing the life out of my throat.
“Four.”
“Is she still looking after you? Are your aunties visiting of
ten?”
I shrugged. Father Francis waited. I stared at the floor. I was done.
“I heard Colleen Brown offered you a job. Sounds like a grand idea to me. Will you take it?”
I looked up to meet his eyes, my own now brimming with tears. A moment of understanding passed between us. He knew how much I needed that job. For the rest of our visit, Father Francis chatted about the town, who was getting married, which babies had been born. Never gossip, only good news. We sat in silence for a while, and I ate enough cake to make up for having no supper to eat back home.
He let me out at six, when Mrs Dunn served his supper every night on the dot. “Can you come back again tomorrow, Marion? After school? I have something to show you.”
I nodded my head, trying to hide my frustration and disappointment. Two words. Two more than last time. About two thousand fewer than I needed to manage if I was going to get that job and take my first step out of there.
I wandered round to the priest’s house after school the following day. Part of me wondered if Father Francis had something to show me to do with my da. Mostly I was too depressed to care.
The something turned out to be a someone: a boy, maybe two or three years old, dressed in faded clothes far too big for him, with a pale, scabby complexion I recognized as due to poverty and neglect. He could have been my brother.
“This is Stephen. He’s had a hard time of it lately, and really needs a friend. Someone who will understand how he’s feeling. Not ask too much of him. What do you think?”
I looked at the priest. Seriously, what did he expect me to do? Pass on some tips about how to be a freak? Demonstrate how not to pick yourself back up when life knocks you down?
“Grand. I’ve just got one or two phone calls to make. I’ll be back in a wee while.”
Stephen and I sat facing each other on our respective flowery armchairs. After a long stretch of nothing I offered him a piece of flapjack from Mrs Dunn’s tea tray. He ignored me, so I ate it myself. As the mahogany clock on the mantelpiece ticked round fifteen minutes, Stephen never moved or made a sound. My heart cracked – what was left of it. Two-year-old boys should be wriggling, giggling, racing, hollering, mini-elephant-warrior bouncy balls. What had happened to create this husky shell of a boy?