Michael, Michael

by Wendy Perriam

  ‘Pass the spuds,’ said Frank.

  ‘They’re not spuds, they’re chips.’ Eric picked one up in his fingers, bit off its greasy head.

  ‘They was spuds once, wasn’t they?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tessa. ‘This morning. And filthy dirty spuds. It took me half an hour to scrub the grime off.’

  ‘Well, I usually buy frozen,’ April flurried. ‘But …’

  They cost more, Tessa filled in for her silently, feeling still more guilty that she’d just used her mother’s money to buy wine. Yet she had to do something to mark this day as special. She refilled all four glasses before telling them her news.

  ‘I’ve got a job,’ she announced.

  Frank’s and Eric’s voices clashed, as they chimed in simultaneously: what, where, congratulations, and how much was the pay?

  ‘Well, it’s only babysitting, but it may lead to something else.’

  ‘Babysitting?’ April frowned, stressing the first syllable. ‘Do you think that’s a good idea, pet, when …?’

  ‘Yes, I do – don’t worry, Mum.’ She’d need to convince not just her anxious mother, but Dr Edwards too. He hadn’t given her the job yet, and she hadn’t even suggested it. The idea had only come to her when she was walking back from the surgery. She had to find some means of meeting his wife and child, gaining access to his house, and babysitting seemed the perfect way. The only problem was that he might consider her unstable, too disturbed to look after his small son. If only she hadn’t cried like that, hadn’t mentioned babies. But then he wouldn’t have held her hand, kept it clasped within his own for nearly two astounding minutes – a hundred seconds by the clock, but six wild months if she reckoned by her own time – as long as she’d known Michael. And even when he’d let it go, he’d still stayed close, moved his chair in nearer hers, his whole face concerned and softened.

  ‘Well, good idea or not,’ said April, forking in her last few peas, ‘how come you found a job at all, when you said you’d only gone out for a walk?’

  Tessa forced herself to release his hand, which had crept towards her own again; the fingers easing down between her knuckles, one sensuous thumb feathering her palm. ‘It was just a stroke of luck,’ she said. ‘I was wandering down Beechwood Avenue, going nowhere in particular, when I bumped into Mrs Hughes and we stopped to have a chat. I told her I was looking for some work – something simple to tide me over until I’m feeling a bit better. She said she knew this local doctor …’ The lies slipped out so easily, Tessa knew they were dictated to her, and that by repeating them in public, she’d make them true, make the job materialize. She explained the doctor’s problem to her mother – how his usual trusted babysitter was moving to the other side of London, so he was desperate to replace her. ‘Mrs H rang him up the minute she got home, said she’d known me years …’

  ‘Well, I hope it won’t mean missing evening meals. You’re losing weight as it is.’

  Tessa didn’t answer, just glanced around the table. How could this be a family? Frank and Eric were too old for brothers, and completely wrong as fathers. Frank was wearing a red sweatshirt which said FIT, FUN AND FORTY, AND ENJOYING BEING NAUGHTY. He was fifty-one, in fact, and totally unfit; carried his substantial paunch with an air of almost pride, often patting it, or talking to it, as if someone lived inside, squeezed between the kippers and the chips. The hair on his head had mostly disappeared, but hairs sprouted from his ears and nostrils in vigorous compensation, and his eyebrows were 3-D, jutting above blue but bloodshot eyes.

  She watched him roll a cigarette, his podgy fingers surprisingly deft; tongue flicking out to moisten the frail paper. Nice to have a real family – brothers who resembled you, and could discuss the things you cared about; a father who was there; whose toothbrush nudged your own in the cracked mug in the bathroom, and whose books were on the shelves – books you’d bought together, strolling down to Dillons, arm in arm. Did Dr Edwards have brothers – brown-haired, blue-eyed brothers with broad and well-groomed hands? Was his father cultured – a professor, a headmaster? Did he …?

  ‘Hell! I’m missing ‘‘Star-Gazer’’.’ April kicked her chair back, tuned in the kitchen radio. ‘She’s a marvel, that Astrid! You should have heard her last week. There was this chappie who rang in, and she told him she was picking up that he’d had a dreadful shock. She didn’t know him from Adam, but she could feel the vibes, you see – I mean, before he’d had a chance to say a word about his life. He was flabbergasted, I can tell you – practically in tears – said yes, his wife had had a heart attack two months ago.’

  Tessa cleared the plates away, dumped them in the sink. ‘Oh, Mum, you’re so gullible! You could say that to almost anyone and they’d be bound to find some truth in it – come up with a ‘‘shock’’ to fit the bill.’

  ‘Dead right!’ said Frank. ‘I’ve had three big shocks this week alone. The horse I backed last Saturday came in second-last, my ex-wife’s found another bloke, and …’

  ‘Ssh!’ said April. ‘She’s talking about Fate. Oh, heck! It’s that man who phoned in last time, the one with AIDS, whose mother booted him out. Fancy doing that to your own flesh and blood!’

  Frank exhaled a curl of smoke. ‘You can’t say ‘‘ssh’’ and talk yourself.’

  ‘Want to bet?’ said Eric.

  Tessa fetched the pudding and started doling it out – apple crumble and custard. She had failed to get the lumps out of the custard, and the crumble had burnt black along the sides.

  ‘You’ve got to be more assertive, Wayne, refuse to take that shit.’ Astrid’s voice was breathy – transatlantic drawl overlaying Jewish cockney chutzpah. ‘Anyway, your luck’s about to change, dear. I can see a break in the clouds. Do the initials FRB mean anything?’

  MPE, Tessa repeated to herself. Could Dr Edwards’ second name be Peter, and had he been to Oxford, or trained at the John Radcliffe? She longed to know, to fill in all the blanks. It seemed strange – and quite miraculous – that he was living a mere mile away; probably sitting down at this moment at a polished antique table, about to eat his own meal. Were there other children, older ones, perhaps a nanny or au pair? That would put the kibosh on her plan. Except even a nanny would need days off, and holidays. She must meet whoever worked for him, become friendly with them, trusted by them, so she could suggest herself as substitute. She could easily get references from the babysitting job she’d had at Oxford; even a brief note from her tutor or the Dean, vouching for her character. It might take a little time, but time she had, in unlimited supply.

  ‘Kids need time and patience! Kids need healthy food! But what kids don’t need is caffeine. New Taste-Rite Cola gets its kicks naturally – kicks without the risks!’

  April retuned; spent half her radio-listening life avoiding the commercials.

  ‘Hold on!’ protested Eric. ‘I was gettin’ really interested in that bit about the poltergeist. Is Astrid a psychic, or …?’

  ‘She’s a bit of everything. And she says she’s been re-in-thingummy-re-incar … – you know, had previous lives. One of them, she was Astrologer Royal at the court of Cleopatra. But the programme’s nearly over now, and I must catch Radio Two. They’re giving out the winners of last week’s competition, and I’ve got this hunch I’ve won.’

  ‘I suppose you can feel it in the vibes,’ quipped Frank, removing a shred of loose tobacco from his lip. ‘What’s the prize, anyway? A hundred grand, or a silver-plated Porsche?’

  ‘No,’ said April. ‘Four tickets for ‘‘Come Dancing’’.’

  ‘Count me out,’ Eric muttered with a grimace. ‘I can’t stand those poncy types who spend their whole lives prancin’ round in sequins, practisin’ the cha-cha.’

  Dr Edwards didn’t dance. Tessa knew that in her bones. His hobbies would be sedentary, refined – chess, perhaps, or bridge, or the more demanding type of crossword puzzles. He would preserve his vital energies for work – healing, saving, the laying on of hands.

  ‘I went to an as
trologer once,’ Frank chipped in, stubbing out his cigarette, and making a foray into his crumble. ‘The real kosher kind with a black cat and matching wig. She told me everything would fall apart in 1987. I sweated blood, lost a stone, couldn’t sleep for worrying – and all that happened was our sodding garden shed collapsed in the great hurricane.’ He spat out half a clove, which he’d bitten inadvertently, removed a further fragment from his tooth. ‘’Course, they say it weren’t a hurricane, though it beats me how a common or garden storm could fuck up fifty million trees and …’

  ‘Fifteen million,’ Eric interrupted.

  ‘Fifty million, fifteen million – what’s the difference? Once it’s millions I lose count.’

  ‘You wouldn’t if it was pound notes on the table.’

  ‘How d’you count trees anyway?’ Frank prodded his pudding more warily, as if it were a minefield strewn with clove-explosives. ‘I can’t imagine some busy civil-service bloke traipsing round every piddling patch of backyard and adding up the trunks.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ snapped Eric. ‘They …’

  Tessa got up to make the coffee, ignoring their yak-yak. She’d just had a new idea. She could embark on a different sort of study-course, a degree in Michaelology – researching everything she could about the second Dr Edwards: his background, education, interests, hobbies, tastes; what family he had – siblings, children, in-laws. She peered through the dark window-pane, which looked out on the blank brick wall of the Hardwicks’ house next door, and a stretch of their own battered wooden fence. It would still be history in a way, and easier to handle than her history course at Oxford. Now that she was distanced from it, she felt increasingly pissed off with the way that course was taught. You had to tackle far too many subjects, and race through them so fast, the whole thing seemed disjointed – a skim across the surface with no depth or continuity. Yet, despite the range of topics, there were huge areas you never touched at all. The earliest period you could study began in AD 285, but what about BC, and what about world history? Oxford was so insular, it could blithely turn its back on entire continents and dynasties, to examine in the minutest detail one single session of the British House of Commons, or one minor skirmish in the English Civil War.

  But more dodgy than that was the whole vexed question of historical truth. Recent history was so bogged down with documents you could hardly fight your way through the morass, whereas in early medieval times the problem was the opposite – such scarce or scrappy sources, you were often reduced to guesswork. And those who’d written the accounts were bound to be subjective, peddling their own pet beliefs, or driven by some personal obsession. And because they were exceptional types – members of a small, cultured elite – their views would be a world away from those of Mr Nobody, who’d just got on with living his life, rather than recording it. She’d probably have learned a whole lot more about the turbulent twelfth century from Joe Bloggs, peasant, than from Abelard, philosopher. Sometimes, when she’d struggled through his dazzling dialectic, she’d been amazed at how he’d sweated blood over subjects like the Trinity, which later generations would dismiss as mere abstractions. He’d stated categorically that a belief in the Trinity was natural to all men, but such a notion would be laughed out of court in the agnostic twentieth century. Yet for him it had been truth, which only went to show how ‘truth’ was …

  ‘What on earth are you up to, Toots? You don’t have to pick the coffee beans, you know. Maxwell House do that. All you need is a teaspoon and four mugs.’

  She started at her mother’s voice, only now aware that she hadn’t even filled the kettle, and was still standing at the sink with the cold tap idly running. ‘Sorry, I was thinking.’

  ‘Thinking’s bad for the brain,’ Frank warned. ‘Which is why my own grey matter is in such A-I condition.’

  ‘One of my clients told me you lose loads and loads of brain cells every single day – billions in a week, she reckoned, just flaking off like dandruff.’ April spattered cigarette ash on to her debris of burnt crumble. ‘So it’s a flipping miracle I’m still compost mental at the age of thirty-eight, ’cause I can’t have had that many in the first place.’

  ‘It beats me how they count,’ mused Frank. ‘It’s like them trees again. I mean, d’you wire up everybody’s heads, or rake through all the clippings at the barbers’?’

  Tessa burst out laughing, startled at the sound.

  ‘What’s the joke?’ asked Eric.

  She shook her head, spooned coffee into mugs. There wasn’t any joke, but she suddenly felt better. She had narrowed down her own research, given herself a project, a Special Subject more significant and relevant than the ones on offer at Oxford. No more need to mooch about the streets, or kill time watching ‘Neighbours’. She could start tomorrow: planning her new project, deciding how she’d structure it, what sources she would use – local papers, other patients, babysitting agencies, the medical Who’s Who.

  April got up from the table, squeezed her daughter’s hand. ‘I’m so glad you’re feeling better, love. It’s the first time you’ve laughed in weeks.’

  Tessa slid her hand away, pretending she was busy making coffee. It wasn’t that she balked at April’s blisters – though her mother’s skin had already reacted badly to the chemicals and hair-dyes – she was simply intent on preserving Dr Edwards’ traces. He had held that hand, made it sacrosanct, and she didn’t want his fingerprints overlaid with April’s; their potency diluted. She had decided not to wash the hand till morning, and was even trying not to use it, though it had proved extremely difficult to eat breadcrumbed chicken legs with just a fork.

  She kissed her mother’s cheek instead, to prevent her feeling hurt. ‘Look, you make the coffee, Mum. I want to go upstairs.’

  ‘What for?’ The anxious look returned to April’s face. ‘I don’t like you sitting moping on your own. That’s why we’re having meals together.’

  ‘I loved the meal, Mum, honestly, and I haven’t time to mope. I’ve got work to do – important work – and it needs my total concentration.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  Tessa paced up and down Tregunter Road, always stopping short of Dr Edwards’ house. It was too dark to see it anyway, but she’d patrolled this street so often she knew exactly what it looked like – a detached mock-Georgian house built about five years ago, with pretentious columns flanking the front porch, a double garage painted blue, and a driveway made of blue-grey patterned bricks. All the houses were identical – all prosperous, all spruce, all carbuncled with burglar-alarms and screened by lofty evergreens to maintain their privacy. She had never been inside, and was finding it impossible even to open the front gate, let alone go up and ring the bell. Somehow, though, she would have to rouse her courage in the nineteen minutes left to her – Mrs Michael Edwards was expecting her at seven.

  It had taken her a month – a frustrating, often hopeless month, in which she’d been told ad nauseam that most GPs maintained a firm divide between their patients and their private lives, and were unlikely to employ someone to work for them at home who might turn up in their consulting-room next day. Once she realized that, she had deliberately kept away from Dr Edwards’ surgery, hoping he would forget her – temporarily at least – forget her name, her face. Instead, she’d focused on the wife, discovered that she didn’t work; had just one child – a baby of nine months; attended an evening class on Wednesdays called ‘Our Island Heritage’, and belonged to a babysitting circle composed of other local mothers, who used a voucher system. That last had really crushed her. How could she offer herself as child-minder, when she wasn’t married and had no children of her own? She’d be totally excluded from such a narrow circle on grounds of age and circumstance alone. She had refused to admit defeat, however. Eventually she’d find a way to penetrate his house – or Fate would help her do so. She was aware that there were forces she barely understood, regulating everything, steering her, however indirectly, towards her goal – and Michael. And time
had proved her right. By researching all the members of the babysitting circle, she’d found one she knew already – Mrs Alice Webb, who’d taught her French at school, and had always been both friendly and supportive. She had gone to see her teacher and given her a carefully edited version of the truth – playing down the trauma of her pregnancy, and stressing the fact that she was now fully recovered and in urgent need of work. Mrs Webb had promised help; spoken to her closest friends in the babysitting circle, two of whom had employed her straight away. She had poured her heart and soul into those jobs; knowing that the word would spread that she was punctual to the dot, capable, adaptable, and someone they could trust. Soon she was being called upon several nights each week, and always doing more than was expected. Every time she washed the sheets when a baby had been sick, or worked through piles of washing-up once her charges were in bed, she was doing it for Mrs Michael Edwards – doing it with passion and commitment, because she knew if she was patient, the longed-for summons would come.

  And yesterday, it had come – relayed through Mrs Webb. Was Tessa free on Wednesday? A lady called Joyce Edwards had an evening class that night, and her doctor-husband was going out as well. Alice couldn’t do the job herself, but she’d given her ex-pupil a glowing testimonial.

  ‘Thank you,’ she had stammered, pretending to be looking for a pencil, to jot down the address. She knew it perfectly well, of course – even the post-code engraved into her skull.

  ‘What’s she like?’ she’d asked, in a studiously casual tone, trying to make it sound an afterthought.

  ‘I barely know her, Tessa, though she seems a decent sort. I’ve only been there once, and that was way back in the summer. It’s a really lovely house, though, and the garden was a picture. Roses by the cartload!’