In a Good Light

by Clare Chambers

  ‘I’d rather have my dad at home and not have the money,’ Donovan pointed out.

  ‘Yeah, well,’ Christian said. We didn’t know what else to say.

  We installed Chewy’s cage on top of my chest of drawers. He gave off a sweet, musty smell and made scrabbling noises during the night, which woke me up. In the morning, the cage was surrounded by wood shavings and pellets of food that he had kicked through the bars. Donovan made a miniature obstacle course for him on my bedroom floor, using empty toilet rolls and Lego bricks. Chewy proved quite proficient at show-jumping over pencils, but his career as an entertainer was cut short when he escaped from the arena and did a wee on my eiderdown. Dad built him a run in the back garden using four planks from a dismantled cold-frame and the gooseberry netting that had once served us briefly on the badminton court. Unfortunately Chewy lived up to his name and nibbled through the mesh one afternoon while unsupervised. After a frantic search, during which Donovan and I combed the garden on hands and knees, while Christian patrolled the gap-toothed perimeter fence, the runaway was finally discovered asleep in a pile of dried grass cuttings at the base of the compost heap. Further experiments in free-range hamster care were subsequently abandoned and Chewy was confined to his cage.

  I was the one who had found him, and as a token of his gratitude Donovan gave me one of his five-pound notes and the book of matches from Biarritz. They seemed to me a symbol of everything exciting and forbidden: fire, foreignness, hotels.

  ‘You’re my best friend for ever,’ he promised. He really loved that hamster.

  ‘I can’t really keep it, can I?’ I said, feeling uneasy about the money.

  ‘Yeah. You need it more than I do,’ Donovan replied. Although impressed by the size of the house and garden, he had noticed a certain deficiency in its contents. There wasn’t much among our collection of home-made toys to tempt him. It had already emerged in the course of conversation that he had a colour television in his bedroom at home, as well as one downstairs. He laughed scornfully at my set of wooden farm animals – the only inhabitants of an unfurnished Victorian dolls’ house – and the warped bagatelle board with its rusty nails, but pounced on the James Bond car. ‘Oh cool, I’ve got one of these.’ He frowned. ‘I did have.’

  He couldn’t believe that we didn’t have and had never heard of Mousetrap, Twister, Battling Tops, Ker-plunk, Haunted House or Ricochet Racers, and then admitted that he hardly ever played them because there was no one to play with except his mum, who was seldom in the mood.

  ‘She gets these sad feelings,’ he explained. ‘And she can’t play Mousetrap or stuff like that when she’s got sad feelings. She has to lie down.’

  ‘Our mum has sad feelings too,’ I said.

  ‘No she never,’ Christian retorted. ‘You’re just saying that.’

  ‘She cries when there’s been an earthquake or something on the radio,’ I protested. ‘And when Grandma Percy died.’

  She did her crying standing up, though. That was the difference. She would never lie down during the day.

  Donovan may have been the All-England ker-plunk champion, but he was something of a disappointment when it came to more traditional games like chess and draughts. Christian, who occasionally found his invincibility a burden, was hoping he might at last have found a worthy opponent, but Donovan appeared not to know even the general principles. Dad gave him a cribbage board and he looked at it, mystified, turning it over and over to see where the batteries went. ‘Thank you,’ he said at last. ‘What does it do?’

  Christian took it upon himself to put right this deficiency in Donovan’s education and taught him a few essential games like pontoon and five-card brag, with the aim of fleecing him of that last fiver. However Donovan proved too much of a card-sharp to fall victim to this scheme, and moreover refused to accept Christian’s marker, sensing instinctively that he was a man of straw. His real talent, though, was for bizarre party tricks: he could play the recorder through his nose and juggle with three lightbulbs, skills only achievable through the sort of dedicated practice born of chronic boredom.

  If the weather was fine we were encouraged to spend as little time as possible indoors. You only had to walk from one room to another without a sufficiently purposeful stride to be accused of ‘mooching’ by Mum and turfed out again. Most days were spent riding round the spinney, the wooded end of the common that abutted our back garden.

  ‘I wish I’d brought my Raleigh Chopper,’ Donovan said, looking at our rusty bikes, which Mum had acquired third or fourth hand from the charity shop. He said the same thing every time my gears slipped or the chain fell off, making him skin his ankle. I thought his complaints showed an annoying lack of gratitude, given that I was having to make do with balancing on Christian’s crossbar or running alongside the wheels like a dog.

  It was down at the spinney that Donovan instructed us in the art of smoking, using a single Embassy that he’d pinched from his mum’s handbag, and kept hidden inside the casing of a defunct biro. We were allowed one drag each before it was extinguished and put away for another day. Then he showed us how to make our own by collecting shreds of tobacco from discarded butts and rolling them up in the rectangular pieces of tissue paper that came from a tiny packet in his wallet. In truth the foulness of that first burning breath had been enough to put us off cigarettes for good, but we were nevertheless pleased to have learned a new skill. Trying to make something out of nothing was in our blood.

  Sometimes, when we didn’t feel inclined to wander, we concentrated on various home-based projects. Christian had heard on the radio that a man called Percy Grainger had been able to throw a cricket ball right over his roof from the front garden, and run through the house in time to catch it in the back. He and Donovan spent many hours practising this, imperilling the upstairs windows and dislodging several roof tiles in the process, and finally came to the conclusion that the Graingers must have had a smaller house, or at least a less cluttered hallway. It was dodging round all the bags and boxes that mother had offered to store for the Girl Guides’ jumble sale, which was costing them valuable seconds. The game ended when a ball thrown by Donovan failed to clear the roof, bounced down the tiles and lodged in the guttering, one storey above the flat roof of the kitchen, making it inaccessible by ladder. Attempts to free it by poking it with a rake from the attic window above also failed. It still lay a yard or so out of reach. Christian was desolate: how were the days to be filled without his precious cricket ball?

  ‘That was your lousy throw, you spastic,’ he accused Donovan.

  ‘Well, it was your stupid idea in the first place,’ Donovan retorted, and pretty soon the two of them were rolling around my bedroom floor, fists flying, while I jumped up and down yelling at them to stop. Christian, who had the advantage in bulk, soon had Donovan pinned to the floor. ‘Repeat after me: “I, Donovan Fry, am a useless spaz,”’ Christian instructed, from his superior position astride Donovan’s chest.

  ‘Get off me,’ the victim replied, through clenched teeth.

  ‘Only when you’ve said it.’

  Donovan stopped thrashing and slumped back, defeated. Christian smiled a victor’s smile and slackened his grip a fraction, at which point Donovan raised his head and spat in Christian’s face: a perfect shot which caught him open-eyed and open-mouthed and left him gasping with shock. Christian’s loss of grip was only momentary, but it was enough for Donovan to push him off and scramble to his feet, running down the stairs, three, four at a time and away into the garden out of sight.

  ‘I’ll kill you,’ Christian shouted over the banisters after him, then shut up smartly as Dad peered up the stairs and raised an enquiring eyebrow. ‘He gobbed at me,’ Christian explained. Dad pulled a face to indicate his disapproval of spitting in general, and the word ‘gobbed’ in particular.

  ‘You were sitting on him,’ I protested, my loyalties uncomfortably tested by this incident.

  ‘No doubt you were both behaving in a thoroughly discr
editable manner,’ Dad said, in the mock-solemn voice he used when he wanted to tell us off without seeming to. ‘If it happens again you’ll be on a three-man lock up.’ Threats were often couched in the language of the prison: a three-man lock up was reserved for the most dangerous and violent inmates, who required a minimum of three warders to supervise the opening of the cell. ‘Come on,’ he finished. ‘Let’s go into town and get you a new cricket ball.’

  Donovan was nowhere to be found and didn’t respond to our calls, so had to be left behind. By tea time he still hadn’t returned. Mum saved him a slice of pork pie and some salad on a plate and said not to worry: he’d be out somewhere cooling off and would come back in his own good time. Dad was more anxious: there were some funny people out there, he said.

  At nine o’clock, as dusk was falling, Dad and Christian – who was now feeling guilty and uncomfortable – volunteered to search the spinney and surrounding lanes. ‘He may be lost,’ said Dad. ‘If there’s no sign of him we’ll have to call the police.’

  ‘You don’t think he’ll have tried to go home?’ Mum suggested. ‘Perhaps I’ll just give Barbara a ring.’

  ‘He wouldn’t leave Chewy,’ I said.

  ‘No, I don’t suppose he would,’ Mum agreed. ‘But I think I’d better tell Barbara. Just something else for her to fret about,’ she said to Dad as she went out to the phone in the hallway, closing the door behind her.

  ‘What if the funny people have got him?’ I asked.

  ‘No, no, don’t say that,’ said Dad, tugging at one eyebrow – something he often did when abstracted.

  ‘He’s probably up a tree somewhere, sulking,’ said Christian. ‘Or hiding out, watching us all and laughing.’

  Mum returned a moment later and we turned to face her expectantly. ‘Barbara says not to call the police. He does this disappearing act quite regularly apparently. He has been known to stay out all night. I didn’t enquire into the circumstances. She said he won’t have gone far: he just does it for effect. I told her I couldn’t promise not to call the police once it gets dark.’

  Dad nodded. ‘Come on, Christian. Get your shoes on.’ He rummaged in the kitchen drawer for the torch, which gave out the feeblest yellow glow with its dying batteries.

  I stood in the garden to watch their departure. The ground had given up the last of its heat and the grass felt cold beneath my bare feet. Somewhere an owl hooted, and I had a powerful sense of being watched. It made my skin tighten and the hairs on my arms stand out like cats’ fur, but when I looked around there was no one.

  ‘I know you’re there,’ I said loudly.

  A spray of gravel hit me on the back and I spun round. Donovan was sitting on the flat roof of the kitchen, swinging his legs. He laughed at my surprise, and then lowered himself over the edge and dropped to the ground beside me.

  ‘You’re for it, Donovan,’ I said, indignant on behalf of Dad and Christian, who had gone out in the dark to rescue him from the funny people for nothing. ‘Mum’s really cross with you.’

  Donovan’s smug expression melted away: he had never seen my parents tell anyone off. ‘Why?’ he said. ‘I haven’t done anything bad.’

  The sound of our voices brought Mum to the kitchen window. ‘Ah, good, you’re back, Donovan. Can I have a little word?’

  I went to follow them but Mum held out a hand to let me know I wasn’t included in the invitation.

  Twenty minutes later the rescue party returned to find me curled up on the settle outside the dining room. Mum and Donovan were still in conference. My attempts at eavesdropping had been thwarted: their voices were low and the door was solid.

  ‘Donovan’s back. He was hiding on the kitchen roof,’ I explained, enjoying my role as newsbreaker. ‘They’ve been in there ages.’ Christian and I exchanged significant looks: we knew from experience that one of Mum’s ‘little words’ could run on to many paragraphs.

  ‘I almost feel sorry for him,’ Christian said, kicking off his shoes.

  The oddest thing was that when the pair of them did finally reappear it was Mum and not Donovan whose eyes were wet.

  ‘Didn’t she have a go at you at all?’ I demanded later when we were in our beds. ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Nothing much,’ Donovan admitted. ‘She told me not to stay out after dark while I’m here and she’s in charge of me. Then she was just asking me questions about Mum, and home and stuff. She wasn’t cross.’

  ‘Why did she come out crying?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t say anything to make her sad. I actually kept saying I liked it here better than home. You’d think she’d be pleased.’

  8

  ONE FRIDAY AT teatime we came back from the spinney to find Dad in the sitting room adjusting the dial of a small television set. A new acquisition perhaps? Christian and I traded hopeful glances.

  ‘Gather round,’ Dad said, tweaking the piece of bent wire that sprouted from the back of the set. In spite or perhaps because of his fiddling, the picture kept scrolling up to the top of the screen and then reappearing again at the bottom, the two moving images divided by a broad black strip. ‘We’re going to see something interesting in a minute.’

  ‘Is that ours?’ Christian asked, pointing at the set. ‘Did you buy it?’

  Dad shook his head. ‘No. I borrowed it from Mrs Tapley. Just for tonight.’

  Christian’s face fell, his hopes of becoming a regular television viewer extinguished. Mrs Tapley lived in the village. She was immemorially widowed and had wiry black and white hairs on her chin and a houseful of cats. Christian always said it was well known that she dabbled in the black arts.

  After making more adjustments to the dial and dealing a slap to the top of the box, Dad managed to bring the picture to a halt. We crowded closer and the screen began to flicker and disintegrate. ‘Step back,’ he commanded. ‘It must be the floorboards.’

  Eventually, when we had managed to dispose ourselves around the room in positions that didn’t threaten the television’s fragile equilibrium, the grey and white fuzz resolved itself into a picture of women in bell-shaped dresses, whirling around a vast ballroom.

  ‘In a moment,’ said Dad, sitting between me and Donovan on the couch and putting his arms around us, ‘we’re going to see Donovan’s mummy.’

  ‘On telly?’ I said.

  ‘Is she an actress?’ Christian asked, turning to Donovan. ‘You never said.’

  ‘You never asked,’ he replied. ‘Anyway, she’s not famous or anything.’

  ‘She must be if she’s on telly,’ I said.

  The door opened and Mum came in, bringing a plate of malt loaf, lightly greased with margarine.

  ‘Aunty Barbara’s going to be on telly,’ Christian told her.

  ‘She’s an actress,’ I explained.

  ‘I know.’ Mum smiled at Donovan. ‘And a very good one too. We used to go and see her on the stage in London when we were first married.’

  ‘You must be filthy rich,’ Christian accused Donovan. ‘Actors and actresses earn billions.’

  ‘No we’re not,’ Donovan replied in some indignation. ‘Mum says if it wasn’t for the alimony we wouldn’t have a pot to piss in.’

  This remark, and our parents’ astonished expressions, sent Christian into convulsions.

  ‘What’s alley money?’ I asked, feeling sure that this must contain the germ of the joke.

  ‘Quiet now everyone, or we’ll miss her,’ Dad said, leaning forward to turn up the volume. Five pairs of eyes swivelled back to the screen. The minutes passed. Scenes changed and characters came and went with no sign of Aunty Barbara. When the appearance of any female between the ages of eight and eighty had prompted the question ‘Is that her?’ once too often, Dad plucked the newspaper from the jaws of the magazine rack. ‘Are we watching the right programme, do you suppose?’

  ‘Well, I don’t think it was a major part,’ Mum reminded him, reaching down beside her for the knitting bag. ‘She was only twenty at the time. Dono
van,’ she went on. ‘Mummy rang last night. She’s feeling much better and she’s coming to pick you up tomorrow.’

  Donovan’s face darkened. ‘Do I have to go?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, dear. Though we’ve loved having you. School starts on Monday. And besides, your mummy’s been missing you and wants you back.’

  ‘Did she say that?’ he asked, brightening.

  There was a second’s hesitation before Mum said, ‘Yes’, then Dad said, ‘Oh there she is!’ and we all leaned towards the screen with one movement. A young woman in a maid’s costume of black dress and white pinafore had entered a large drawing room where some sort of concert party was in progress. She minced across the room with that double-quick way of walking that women did before comfortable shoes were invented and said to one of the men standing at the wall, ‘There’s a gentleman to see you, sir, name of Jessup,’ and then tip-tapped out again.

  ‘She looks so young,’ said Dad.

  ‘That was before I was even born,’ Donovan said.

  ‘She’s got a look of Audrey Hepburn about her,’ said Mum. ‘I’ve never noticed it before.’

  ‘This is exciting isn’t it?’ said Dad, trying to stir up a show of enthusiasm for Donovan’s benefit. ‘It’s not every day we see one of our friends on the television.’

  ‘It’s not every day we see a television,’ Christian pointed out.

  We watched on, waiting in vain for Aunty Barbara’s reappearance, until finally Christian, who wasn’t finding the film much to his liking, said, ‘Is that all?’ and Mum and Dad conceded that it probably was.

  ‘Good,’ said Donovan, checking his watch. ‘Can we have BBC One now? It’s Crackerjack.’

  9

  THE AUNTY BARBARA who arrived the next day to claim Donovan looked quite different from the one with the bird’s nest hair and stained dressing gown, who had forgotten to make us lunch and didn’t have a pot to piss in. Different again from the lady’s maid with a look of Audrey Hepburn, who had flitted briefly across the TV screen the day before. This time she was washed and brushed, with her dark hair twisted into a rope over one ear, and she was wearing a long fur coat even though it was just September and the rest of us were still in T-shirts. It wasn’t one of those plush black coats that go with diamonds and Rolls Royces, but a brown patchy thing that looked as if it might have been made from hundreds of Chewy’s relations stitched together. Mum hung it up in the downstairs cloakroom with our anoraks and the weight of it brought the rail off the wall so that the whole lot collapsed in a heap on top of our muddy wellingtons.