‘I’m sorry to be a burden,’ she said, as Mum led her upstairs to the guest room we had hastily prepared for Donovan, with clean bedding and a hot waterbottle to take the chill off the sheets.
‘We’re very glad to have you,’ Mum said firmly, then glared at Christian and me as we stood there gawping.
‘Don’t just stand there, help your father with the cases. And put the kettle on,’ she ordered.
Then Donovan appeared, duffel bag in hand, and there was an awkward moment of mutual reappraisal while we said our hellos and fidgeted from foot to foot.
‘You never wrote,’ he accused me.
‘Neither did you,’ I retorted, and he laughed, showing two rows of even white teeth, now fully grown. I kept my lips tightly together: my teeth were still at different stages of development, some loose, some missing, some crooked, giving me a smile like a mouthful of broken biscuits.
‘Where’s Chewy?’ I asked, making subconscious connections.
‘He got mossy foot and died,’ Donovan explained. ‘I buried him in the garden but a fox dug him up. I’ve got two fish now. Starsky and Hutch.’
Christian and I looked blank.
‘Off the telly.’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘Don’t you two know anything?’
In the early hours of Christmas morning a noise woke me. I thought it might be Santa Claus but it was just Aunty Barbara having a panic attack in the bathroom. Of course I had known for some while that he didn’t exist, but the discovery had come as a relief rather than a disappointment. At last the fact that other children got Princess Pippa or Girlsworld while I got a shoe-cleaning kit made sense. Dad had taken me and Donovan to midnight communion at the parish church, while Mum stayed behind with Aunty Barbara to prepare the vegetables for the next day.
‘That’s what you need – simple, repetitive tasks,’ Mum said cheerily, slitting open a net of sprouts.
‘I don’t know if I trust myself with a sharp knife,’ came the mournful reply. We left them at the kitchen table, a growing pile of sprout peelings on Mum’s side and a growing pile of cigarette butts on Aunty Barbara’s. She had only been with us a few hours and already the whole house smelled of her smoke.
Donovan had never been in a church before and didn’t know the drill. He couldn’t follow the responses and kept sitting when he should be kneeling and standing when he should be sitting. His face fell when he flicked through the green order-of-service booklet. ‘Do we have to read it right to the end?’ he hissed as we took our places in the pew. I nodded and he pulled a tortured, cross-eyed face that had me snorting into my hymnbook. He cheered up when, inexplicably and without warning, we missed out the bits in square brackets, or skipped four or five pages, and he gave me an ostentatious thumbs-up each time. And he got quite carried away exchanging a sign of the Peace – which he interpreted as a Red Indian salute – with the complete strangers in the pew behind, and eventually had to be tapped on the shoulder by Dad and told to turn round. ‘That’s enough Peace,’ Dad whispered, and they grinned at each other.
Mum had given us fifty pence each for the collection, but when the sidesman brought the velvet bag round during ‘The First Nowell’ I noticed that Donovan put his hand in and withdrew it still clenched. Through the gaps in his fingers I could see silver. I gave him my sternest glare but he just winked at me and sang louder. We said prayers for the parish and the Queen and the whole world, remembering the Less Fortunate everywhere who wouldn’t be having turkey and presents tomorrow, and then it was ‘Hark the Herald’ and out into the freezing night as the church clock struck twelve.
There was a small, icy moon and a scatter of stardust above us. Beneath our heels the cold pavement rang like metal. I said, as I did every year, ‘It’s Christmas already. Can we open our presents now?’
Dad replied, ‘Oh, didn’t we tell you? We’re not doing presents this year,’ and I laughed, but with an edge of fear, because although this had never yet proved true, it was the sort of thing that one day might.
‘I’m getting a skateboard from my dad,’ Donovan said. ‘He’s bringing me one back from America.’
Christian kicked a loose stone across the road and it hit the lamp post with a clang. He would have liked a skateboard.
Mum and Aunty Barbara were in bed when we arrived home, and the house was dark. On the kitchen stove peeled potatoes and sprouts floated palely in pans of cold water. The turkey sat on a roasting tin in its tent of foil. Mum was careful to keep it covered up ever since the time she’d found a mouse had crept into the body cavity overnight and died. Dad stealthily hunted through the larder until he found the tin of mince pies. He gave us one each and rearranged the others to disguise the gap. ‘If anyone notices, blame Father Christmas,’ he said, through a mouthful of gritty mincemeat. He always said that, of the seven deadly sins, gluttony was the most likely to claim him. But then gluttony had a powerful adversary in the form of Mother’s cooking, so he would probably be all right.
When I was woken by footsteps on the landing below I naturally thought of Father Christmas, but then there came the faint sound of groaning, and I remembered we had real visitors instead. I crept down the attic stairs, carrying my stump of a candle in its saucer of water. A draught from the broken skylight above made the flame wobble, and I drew it a little closer to my highly inflammable brushed nylon pyjamas.
The bathroom door stood half-open, flooding the landing with yellowish light. Aunty Barbara was standing over the sink, flicking water up at herself. She turned round to reach the towel rail and there was a look of terror on her face even before she saw me standing there. ‘Can you get someone?’ she said, sinking down onto the side of the bath. ‘I’m feeling awful.’ The front of her satin dressing gown was soaked and transparent from all the splashing.
I scuttled back along the landing, my candle flame guttering and bending, and knocked on Mum and Dad’s door before opening it far enough to poke my head round.
‘Aunty Barbara’s feeling awful in the bathroom,’ I said, and Mum erupted from the bed as though driven by the force of a small explosion, and flew across the room towards me, ballooning white cotton from neck to ankle. ‘She’s feeling funny,’ I said again, sensing myself an important player in this drama. ‘She said to get you.’
‘All right,’ said Mum, patting my arm. ‘You go back to bed. I’ll see to it. And keep that candle at arm’s length.’
I ignored the first part of this advice, and hovered unthanked in the doorway while Mum took charge. I needed the loo now, in any case, after having been vertical for some minutes.
‘What’s wrong?’ Mum asked, kneeling beside Aunty Barbara, who had now sunk to the floor. As she squatted down I could see she was wearing a pair of Grandpa Percy’s old long-johns under her nightdress. ‘Have you been sick?’
‘No. It’s the pills. I keep having these panic attacks, one after the other. They come over me in waves. It’s like dying, again and again.’ Aunty Barbara shuddered in her peach satin.
‘You’re freezing,’ Mum said. ‘Come back to bed and I’ll stay with you until you feel better.’
Aunty Barbara managed a mirthless laugh. ‘God. How long have you got?’
Mum helped her up and supported her shaky progress along the corridor. ‘I could refill your hot waterbottle?’ Mum said, but not too persuasively. She was thinking of the kettle, whose shriek would raise the whole house.
‘No, it just makes me perspire.’ They had reached the bedroom now and the door swung closed, blocking me out and creating a gust that extinguished my precious flame.
We opened our presents after breakfast on Christmas morning before Dad went off to the prison to take Holy Communion.
There was a snake belt and some clay for me, a slide rule and swimming goggles for Christian, a wastepaper basket and some hand cream for Mum, and a watch strap for Dad.
‘Goodness, how extravagant,’ Mum said, squeezing a pearl of cream onto her rough, red hands, filling the room with the soapy scent of l
ilies. ‘I shall feel pampered.’
Donovan was toying with the few parcels Dad had had the foresight to collect from his house the day before. They were mostly from family friends like us, or distant relatives; there was nothing from either of his parents. ‘I am actually getting a skateboard,’ he kept saying, as each freshly opened gift proved to be something less welcome.
‘Poor Donovan,’ said Aunty Barbara, who was lying on the couch, still in her dressing gown, her angular shoulders and collar bone jutting out like furniture under a dust sheet. ‘Christmas got away from me this year. Perhaps I’ll get you something in the sales.’ Her own gift from us – a pair of sheepskin gloves – lay discarded, half-unwrapped, beside her. I don’t think she really had the hang of presents. When I asked her what she wanted for Christmas, she said, ‘Peace on earth, good will to men and a new agent.’
From Grandpa Percy there was a card with robins on the front and inside a perfect, unused, twenty-pound note. I had it in my hand – unimaginable wealth – for just a few seconds before Mum pounced. ‘Twenty pounds!’ she exclaimed, swiping it. ‘That can’t be right. His eyesight must be going. I’ll have to send it back.’ My cries of protest fell unheard and futile, mere snowflakes on the sea.
When the last of the presents had been opened and admired, and the serviceable paper salvaged for next year, Dad prepared to depart. We hated the fact that he had to go to work on this of all days, but he said it was the only time he got a decent-sized congregation, and he wouldn’t miss it for the world. For some of the prisoners it might be the first time they ever set foot in a church, he explained. It was up to him to make sure they felt God’s welcome.
‘I think church would be better if it was a bit warmer, and a bit shorter,’ said Donovan, who remained unconverted by last night’s experience.
‘You’ve got no stamina, Donovan,’ sighed Aunty Barbara, supine on the couch. ‘Just like your father.’
After lunch, hard potatoes, squeaky sprouts, and those outermost slices of turkey furthest from the uncooked pink centre, we went for a walk on the common, leaving Aunty Barbara eating dates and listening to a play on the radio. It was a cold day with blank, grey skies and a bitter wind, whose sting made your eardrums burn. I was glad of my hand-knitted balaclava, even if it did make me look like a garden gnome on a bank raid, as Christian was the first to point out. Donovan had brought along a boomerang – a gift from a friend in Tasmania – and we took turns throwing and fetching, throwing and fetching, since despite our best efforts it never showed any inclination to return.
‘There must be a knack to it,’ said Dad, as the boomerang described the gentlest of curves and fell to earth a hundred and fifty feet away. ‘Next time I meet an aborigine I’ll make a point of asking.’
The experiment came to an abrupt end when Donovan, whose turn it was, spun round like a discus thrower so that the boomerang flew out of his hand at an unplanned angle and struck the trunk of a beech tree, shattering into half a dozen pieces and sending up a cloud of startled magpies.
‘Whoopsie,’ said Mum. ‘That’s that, then.’
‘Can it be glued?’ Donovan said in a forlorn voice, when the fragments had been retrieved and reassembled.
‘I expect so,’ said Dad, who was always more of an optimist than Mum, and felt it just as unchristian to despair of things as of people. ‘We’ll do our best.’
No one felt inclined to prolong the outing any longer, so we turned back towards home, heads down and arms folded against the wind. We arrived at the Old Schoolhouse to find Aunty Barbara in the front garden, gathering sticks. She was still in her silky dressing gown and barefoot, apparently oblivious to the cold.
‘What are you doing, Barbara?’ Mum said, aghast.
‘The fire was getting a bit low,’ Aunty Barbara said reproachfully. ‘I didn’t want it to go out, so I thought I’d get some twigs.’ She was already holding quite a sizeable bundle.
‘But we’ve got a cellar full of coal,’ said Mum, taking her arm. Even her notions of thrift didn’t run to these extremes. ‘Come in. You’ll get pneumonia.’
Aunty Barbara shook her off. ‘It’s crazy to waste coal when there’s all this wood lying around out here,’ she said, continuing to forage. ‘Come on Donovan, Esther, give me a hand.’
We both hesitated and then stooped down to reach the sticks at our feet, bowed down by the force of her will.
‘Masses of stuff here. Save yourselves a fortune,’ she muttered. In her satin robe with her long hair flying in the wind, and her bare feet, blue-tinged with cold she resembled some species of fairy – not necessarily benign.
Dad took charge. ‘Let’s take them in shall we?’ he said, relieving Donovan and me of our modest collection, ‘before the fire goes out altogether. And we’ll have a nice cup of tea and some of those mince pies, and thaw out. And then I’ll fix that boomerang.’ He made for the front door with a decisive stride.
Aunty Barbara cast her eyes quickly around the garden, as if assessing how much wood she was being required to abandon, before giving a shrug and following Dad indoors. She had the springy, graceful walk of a dancer – back straight, feet turned out. Her other walk was an old lady’s shuffle: there was nothing in between.
‘Go and fill the coal scuttle,’ Mum instructed Christian, who was the last in. She shut the front door and then her hand hovered for a moment over the key, which she turned quietly and put in her pocket.
In the living room the fire had collapsed into a pile of glowing ash.
‘I’ve got a feeling that wood might be a bit damp to use right away,’ Dad was saying. Not loudly enough, it seemed, since Aunty Barbara marched over to the fireplace and flung an armful of wet sticks into the grate, knocking the last gleam of life from the embers, which expired with a hiss, filling the room with acrid smoke.
12
AUNTY BARBARA MUST have caught a chill out in the garden with no slippers, because she spent most of the next five days in bed. Sometimes Mum or I would take her turkey soup and toast on a tray. Once or twice she came down to eat with us. ‘I’ve got no appetite,’ she kept saying. ‘I’m having to force this down.’
‘That’s all right,’ Mum replied. ‘It’s not the first time that’s been said of my cooking.’
There was one occasion when I came into the kitchen looking for scissors and found her leaning over the fish tank, adding pinch after pinch of fish food to the water and gazing in fascination as Starsky and Hutch gulped at the coloured flakes. She was dressed, for once, in outdoor clothes.
‘I’ve already fed them today,’ I said. Donovan was very strict about times, dosages, etc.
‘They looked hungry,’ she replied, tossing in another helping. ‘Poor prisoners.’
Then Mum came in, buttoning her horse-blanket coat, and said they’d be late for the appointment if they didn’t get a move on, and the surgery had been very good about fitting them in between Christmas and New Year, and they went off together in the car.
I went straight to Donovan and reported the offence. He swept down from the attic four stairs at a time, eyes blazing with fury. He scooped Starsky and Hutch and their shred of pondweed into Mum’s measuring jug and then tipped the murky water and most of the gravel down the sink, spraying the crockery on the draining board in the process. I wondered at the time if anyone would notice that the cups tasted fishy, but nobody mentioned it. He refilled the tank with clean tap water and flopped the fish back in, and then took the much depleted tub of food back upstairs and hid it in his suitcase. ‘She’s just so . . . stupid,’ he hissed, his teeth, fists, everything clenched.
The next morning there was the speckled one belly-up on the surface while the other still flickered to and fro in the shadow of his dead companion. Aunty Barbara wasn’t to be disturbed, so Donovan wrote YOU’VE KILLED STARSKY! in furious capitals on a piece of paper and shoved it under her door.
She found the note when she emerged later that afternoon to empty her ashtray. ‘I didn’t kill him,’ s
he said, tragically. ‘I was just trying to jolly them up.’ A thought struck her. ‘In fact it was probably the change of water that killed him,’ she said. ‘Everyone knows you shouldn’t put them in cold water straight from the tap.’ She seemed greatly cheered by this hypothesis. Not so Donovan, who gave a sort of bellow, and rushed from the room. I found him on the stairs being comforted by Dad.
‘She killed my fish, and now she says I did it by putting him in cold water, but I only did that to get rid of all the Guppy Flakes that she’d put in there,’ he raved.
‘Of course you didn’t kill whatshisname. Spasski,’ said Dad soothingly. ‘And I’m sure Mummy didn’t either. He probably just died of old age. In his sleep.’
‘He wasn’t old. We’ve only had him a year and a bit,’ protested Donovan, who was not to be so easily appeased.
‘Ah, but in fish years that’s a long, long time. He may have been old, and ill and ready to die. Now he’s probably in fish heaven,’ Dad said. ‘Whatever that may be,’ he added, sensing himself on tricky theological terrain.
‘Mum’s always saying she wants to die,’ said Donovan. ‘But she never does.’
Christian and Donovan were big buddies this time around and didn’t want me in the way. They spent their time lighting fires down in the spinney, cycling over to Biggin Hill to look at aeroplanes, or knocking on doors to see if people wanted their cars cleaned for cash. There wasn’t much uptake for their services. As Mum pointed out, their general appearance was unlikely to inspire confidence that they had ever had successful dealings with soap and water. I noticed that the two of them seemed to have built up this friendship without resorting to speech. Whenever I came across them they were either silently absorbed in some complex task – building a squirrel-proof bird-feeder, perhaps – or wrestling violently on the floor. According to Christian, conversation gave him a big fuzzy headache, and was ‘mostly for girls’.
In a Good Light Page 10