by Anne Fine
He’d seen his mother curl her fingers. He’d even heard the little crack! But only as he saw the patterned shell scattering across the carpet had he truly believed it. And when, standing all those years later in front of the display case, the recollection had flooded back and, on impulse, he’d pushed through the crush to find his sister and check (‘Can what I remember be true? Can that really have happened?’), he’d found her beached in the corner with a crowd of Tor acolytes, unwittingly capping his story: ‘So I spent weeks on a painting to win this little Minnie Mouse camera. Weeks and weeks and weeks. It was practically a Brueghel by the time that I’d finished it. And when I finally carried it through to show her, before I sent it in, guess what she said!’
Only one’s own humiliations are burned in memory. So Colin had had to stand, glass in hand, with the rest of them, waiting, until she’d finally come out with it.
‘She said’ – and Dilys could still catch it perfectly, that overloaded, almost-too-busy-even-to-say-this tone that had echoed down their childhood – ‘“That’s very nice, dear. Have you just done that while Mummy’s been having to rush around all by herself, setting the table?”’
Small wonder neither of the two of them ever picked up a paintbrush again! Still shuddering, Colin came back to present torments to find the crush around himself and Perdita had been shunting a very much younger and better-looking man close to their elbows, and Perdita’s smile had accordingly switched up to full beam. ‘I certainly hope you missed my last telly appearance, Colin. I was terrible. Terrible!’ The silvered nails on the thin fingers flashed and the startling eyes rolled in humorous self-deprecation. ‘Well, did you happen to catch it?’
‘No,’ he said, happy to lose her attention to the stranger. But no one could stop him continuing to stand pretending to be part of a contented trio instead of the gooseberry he soon proved. In the end, Perdita and her new acquaintance moved off on the excuse of getting drinks, and he was left with the unenviable choice of either feigning further interest in the dispiriting grey growths on the wall or seeking other company. His sister was very close now. From her expression of rapt interest and frequent nods, he took her to be talking to someone much higher up in the bank than herself. And then he realized this was Marjorie. How odd it was to watch someone he knew so well deploying her charm on a stranger. With him, her technique was the simple splat! – that, and the pick-and-mix Colin, whereby every now and again she chose another sort of brother who suited her better, and he was supposed to be that. And it had always been risky – not to say downright dangerous – to fail to pick up the signs that a metamorphosis would be timely and advisable. It hadn’t been an issue back in nursery, where Dilys had treated him as if he were as much of a stranger as all the other children. But by the time the two of them reached primary school, she’d realized his birthday acted as the best possible early-warning system for hers, and would whip up great storms of attention around him for two weeks every year, while ignoring him the rest of it. Through teenage she had made him so invisible, you would have thought that she’d been at his spell book. But in their twenties she had brought him back to life as Colin Dogsbody, to help her sudden fancies with their removals – in and out. (And he’d put up with it, till one of her neighbours leaned over the hedge one day to ask him about his prices, somehow furnishing him with the impetus he’d been needing to claim he was busy each time in the future.) Once in their thirties, he’d been transmogrified again. Was it to do with his hair loss? In any event, the lag of twenty minutes between his birth and hers had somehow magically become extended until, in front of men friends in particular, he’d even heard her say, without a blush, things like, ‘Shall we chat to Old Colin?’ or, ‘Meet my Big Brother’.
She wouldn’t thank him for stepping in to play even this part while she was busy with new prey. She was dressed in her hunting gear. One of the things he’d realized ages ago about his sister was that she had outfits, not just for things like cycling or decorating, but for deep inner purposes. At that last lunch with Perdita, she’d been in the funereal Wronged Woman gown he’d seen so often. Today she wore Fringes of Art, but along with the velvet breeks and buckled shoes came the intriguing ask-me-where-I-got-it waistcoat – her moderate little touch of Vamp. This Marjorie, on the other hand, could not have looked more dowdy. Stompy shoes. Corduroy skirt. And a sensible woollen top with the obligatory toss-around bright scarf to signal the distinction between work-time and leisure. A baffling choice of new friend, unless you took contrast with Perdita to be part of the attraction. It pricked his interest, certainly; but still it was purely by accident that, as the group to his left pushed out to let in yet another braying member, he was shunted so close that Marjorie’s attention shifted to him for a moment over his sister’s shoulder.
Curious, Dilys turned. Her face fell. ‘Oh, it’s you.’ There was the longest pause, in which Colin’s inability to think of anything sensible to say made him feel like an idiot. In the end, Dilys cracked. ‘Well, let me introduce you.’ Another good long pause. ‘Colin, this is Marjorie, one of Tor Grand Insurance’s most experienced actuaries. And Marjorie, this is Colin. He’s in Environmental Health.’
He’d been demoted, then. He wasn’t even a brother now. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he mumbled, secure in the knowledge that, even without his sister’s ferocious warning glare, he was unlikely to have managed to come out with his surname.
Another grisly silence gripped the three of them, till Dilys said meaningfully, ‘Colin, didn’t you mention you wanted a chat with Perdita? She’s over there.’ ‘Oh, right,’ he said, as if a thing like ‘chatting’ sat quite as high in his basket of social skills as in that of the next man. Obediently, he scuttled off, then edged round the clumps of people the other way, reckoning he’d done his bit to bump up the numbers for her bank, and was free to go home and watch telly. That comedy his mother recommended began at nine, and if he walked briskly and left his shower till morning, he could—
‘Colin!’
She’d trapped him again. ‘Hello, Perdita.’ Her new acquaintance had vanished, so clearly, till she found a substitute, he was to be her social stooge. ‘Well,’ she said, eyes tracking busily round the room. ‘And what have you been up to since last we met?’
‘Talking to Dilys.’
She looked at him as if he were an imbecile.
‘Visiting Mother,’ he tried again hastily. (It was all he could think of, except for pursuing Chisholm Farmholdings about their runaway slurry.)
‘And how is the dear old lady?’
She said it with such warmth, sincerity almost, that he assumed she must have spotted yet another freewheeling male appraising her over his shoulder. Cheered by the prospect of rescue, he offered, ‘She’s doing very well.’
‘Not finding that big house a bit too much for her?’
Oh, ho! he thought. What had his sister said? ‘A glorified estate agent’? Well, Perdita wouldn’t have much luck winkling her way into Holly House. Or Mother out of it. She’d made that clear enough: ‘No, I’d sooner be fat in the fire than sit in a circle with a pack of old biddies.’ Any suggestion that four airy double bedrooms might now be one or two too many always met with short shrift. Why, only last week when, staggering across the hall under the weight of Flossie’s bag of dogmeal, poor Mr Stastny had been ill-advised enough to offer conversationally, ‘You could fit a good few homeless into this house, Mrs Riley,’ she’d given him the most crushing look and batted back, ‘Yes, and so I will, Mr Stastny, the day I see them spilling out of your front door . . .’
And she’d not tipped him.
If she could stick up for herself, he could support her. ‘I think Mum’s happy where she is.’
‘Your mother? Happy?’ The laugh that followed came out practically as a snort. Deeply resenting Perdita’s careless venting of intimacies gleaned at a time that was now firmly over, he came as close as he dared to being rude back: ‘And that, of course, will save us from having to deal with one or tw
o grasping and unpleasant characters.’
He was amazed that someone with curls could look so menacing. Instantly, he tried to pretend estate agents were the last people on his mind. ‘You see, if she went into a home, we would have to have tenants.’
It was obvious how very keen she was from how casually she offered it. ‘But you could always sell . . .’
He shook his head, having, as usual, a good deal less trouble inventing the excuse than getting the words out. ‘No, no. Some special Trust thing, I’m afraid. Holly House has to stay in the family.’
‘Really? I don’t remember Dilys ever mentioning it. And, I must say, I’ve never heard of anything like that with—’
People like you, she meant, though, still in client-seeking mode, she knew better than to say so.
‘I know. Daft, isn’t it?’
‘So who is going to get it?’
‘What?’
‘The house.’
‘Oh.’ Tiresome woman. When would she ever let up? He gazed round, stumped, before he realized that it didn’t matter what he said. The only thing that was important was stopping her going round, off her own greedy commission-grubbing bat, to try to charm Norah. He knew exactly what would happen then. She’d get her foot in the door. ‘Mrs Riley, I think you know my mother from Canasta Club. Yes, that’s right. Dolly. Indeed, I believe that she recently sent you my photo.’ Inside, the temptation to believe that she’d gain ground by spilling little Dilys beans would overwhelm her. And Norah would listen. Oh, yes. Norah would listen. She’d take the chance to gather all the ammunition she could, and have him in the trench for months on end. ‘You never mentioned that your sister said—’ ‘You could have told me that—’ ‘I’m very hurt that you’ve let Dilys go round telling everyone—’ It would be grim, each predatory onslaught lasting for hours and only ending with the obligatory tragic sigh: ‘I might be old and feeble, but who’d have thought I’d ever reach the stage when my own daughter sent a perfect stranger round to try to prise me out of house and home!’
No. Better for Perdita to drop the whole idea of seeing any For Sale signs at Holly House.
‘Who’s going to get it? I am.’
‘The whole caboodle?’
The envy in her eyes confirmed how very valuable his mother’s home must have become. He spread his hands. ‘Who else? What with things between Mother and Dilys being as they are . . .’
‘So it’ll still be sold, then, in the end. Trust or no Trust.’ (He could tell from her tone that she hadn’t bought that one.)
Flustered, he asked, ‘How’s that?’
‘Because you’ll be the end of the line, that’s for certain.’
If she’d not said it so offensively – as if he were some mutant slobbering in her face – he would have let the whole thing go. But her disparagement maddened him. He tried his own limp version of one of his mother’s Mr Stastny-crushing looks; but not only did it fail – really, those eyes were quite extraordinary, it was like trying to stare down a snake – but his own colour rose, and with it the ghosts of a million similar petty humiliations. And only a fury fuelled with all of these, he realized later, could so have sprung him out of his true timid self that, just for once, he managed to toss, not just his caution, but his inarticulacy to the winds, along with the lie he threw over his shoulder.
‘Well, that’s just where you’re wrong, Perdita! You see, I already have one child. And her mother and I are still very much in love and about to have another.’
5
HIS FLAT SEEMED doubly empty for the lack of them. He gazed around at every dull surface, each silent appliance. ‘Wife, eh?’ he practically heard his oven muttering. ‘Perhaps now at last we’ll get into some interesting cooking.’ ‘Child?’ yearned the table. ‘Excellent! Clear off these boring old papers and bring on the plasticine and poster paints.’
Wife and child . . .
Can household goods conspire? The phone that stayed silent all evening. The over-hot water steaming from his showerhead (more than enough for two). The extra pillow on the far side of the bed he only changed to keep his patterned laundry in step. Even the gift that fell from his breakfast cereal seemed to rebuke him. ‘So where’s this child, then? Go on. Tell me that.’
Putting the car in gear, he tried to shove the whole thing out of mind. Still, best to warn his mother before the little rumours began to seep back. After all, Priding was tiny. It would be easy enough, next time she started carping on about someone in Canasta Club, for him simply to leap in, ‘Oh, people can be impossible! Do you know, last week I met a woman at a private view who was so pushy, I all but ended up telling her I was married with children.’
Then it would be a toss-up. He might get pilloried for the private view. ‘Hob-nobbing now, are we? I hope that our cat can still run up your alley.’ Or it might turn personal. ‘I’d like to meet the beanbrain who’d marry you.’ But chances were he’d be lucky. ‘That’s right,’ she’d tell him. ‘Fend the trollops off. Stay as you are, then you can walk in your own front door Lord, and out the back Master.’
Or he could simply put things straight by marrying Melanie. Go round and lay his cards directly on the table. ‘Someone’s about to tell my mother I have a family. Would you and Tammy oblige me? If we got cracking, we could have another child by early spring.’
And he was off again. The files before him vanished, and he was on his knees on her disgusting carpet. ‘Mel,’ he was saying, ‘Please, Mel—’
She’d look down, baffled. He’d take her hand in his and point to Tammy. ‘I could take you both out of here. I know I’m no great catch, but I am clean and sane, and drab as it is, my flat is nicer than this place. You could do worse.’
Except he didn’t love her. Not at all. He found her rather strange indifference, her willowy passivity – really, if he were honest, her ability simply to take and take – rather off-putting. No, it was Tammy he adored. Tammy, whose life he’d saved. Who, but for him—
A call across the office fetched him back. ‘That’s Cleansing again, Mr Riley. Still wanting to know if you’re going to be able to fit in that landfill.’
He’d better. Forty thousand suffocated chickens. And as he ground the last available council vehicle out from behind the egregiously poorly parked Mice’n’Maggots van, he had to admit to himself that it was becoming a problem, this business of living in a dream world. Not that it hadn’t started as far back as the sandpit and the swings with Stol, who lived behind the rain tub, and, inasmuch as he had any physical characteristics at all, preferred to stay standing. Stol had no family. But he did have his story, and for a long time was the most important person in Colin’s life. Indeed, looking back, Colin realized he must have felt the same way about Stol as Christians feel about Christ – that he was close and vivid and utterly real, a strong and gentle presence who knew his feelings and his thoughts, with whom there were no barriers. Stol was so real, in fact, that when Miss Dassanayake showed up in school one morning with the slides of a recent class outing, for a moment Colin had been disappointed, he remembered, that his friend didn’t happen to be in any of the photos.
But, he thought, braking for yet another set of Highways’ homicidally ill-timed lights, his Tammy wasn’t like that. She was real. How sad it was that, just to get a toddler, you had to have a wife. He didn’t want one. The whole idea of anyone ever again spreading her tentacles over every part of him – the place he lived, his routines, his emotions – filled him with dread. And it was not the dread of the unknown. Back then when they were in the other building, he’d been as close to Helen Letherington as people seemed to think you needed to be before you got married. He’d been as astonished as anyone the day she’d told him she wasn’t going to see him any more. More so, in fact, since everyone else had probably assumed it was some incompatibility that caused the relationship to founder, and only Colin knew that there was none. The two of them had met. She’d managed his shyness skilfully enough for them to get on reasonably well in pu
blic and even better in private. He’d dared to think his future was assured. And then, in one baffling evening – ‘Colin, I am so sorry. But it’s like living with some shell you’ve left behind to pretend to be a person’ – kaput! It was over.
He never wanted that again. No. Better to stick with the daydreams. Then all that happened when the bubble burst was that he had to risk the council van’s suspension along a half a mile of rutted track and pick his way past hosts of scavengers, to see what some anti-social chicken dumper had left to fester in a rancid pit.
The stench was awful, but it hadn’t deterred the real professionals, two of whom seemed to be making a valiant job of lifting a full-sized wardrobe out of the stinking heaps of feathered corpses. He couldn’t bring himself to offer help, although he knew that, in his virulent yellow plastic safety jacket and tough rubber boots, he was far better equipped than either of them to paddle in drifts of rotting carrion. But guilt, as ever, told on him, to the extent that, on his way back up the dirt track, he stopped to purchase a rather fine brass umbrella holder from a man with a heap of trouvailles at the entrance.
He might have known his mother wouldn’t like it. ‘Why should I want that?’
‘It’s just like yours. But better.’
She stepped back smartly. ‘I like mine.’
He twisted the patterned brass cylinder full circle, to show her. ‘But, look. Rust-free!’
She played the old card. ‘No, thanks. It was your father who bought me mine.’