In a Good Light

by Clare Chambers

  I couldn’t understand the appeal myself, but Mum explained that boys of his age had all this energy surging around inside them, and if they didn’t run it off regularly it would build up and up until eventually they’d explode. Not literally, of course, she reassured me: it was all more subtle than that. Boys like Christian were growing so fast they didn’t even fit their own bodies any more. That was why he was always fixing himself bowls of Weetabix when everyone else was ready for bed, and why he couldn’t even watch TV without fidgeting. We just had to be understanding.

  Having been alerted to the phenomenon I watched Christian with greater interest, hoping to witness one of these non-literal explosions, and sure enough a few weeks later my patience was rewarded. It was all just as Mum had said.

  Our nearest neighbour, Mrs Tapley, bearded widow, cat lover and rumoured practitioner of the Black Arts, was moving into sheltered accommodation and had offered Mum the pick of her leftover furniture and belongings for the charity shop. Thinking a van an extravagance for so short a distance, Mum had acquired a porter’s trolley for the purpose of transporting the heavier items along the lane to our house, and volunteered Christian’s services as removal man. She had mentioned this to him over breakfast on the appointed day and interpreted his answering grunt as a sign of assent – a mistake. I knew from experience that Christian grunted automatically at any mention of his name, and that it didn’t necessarily signify agreement, or even comprehension. Lately the only way to be sure he had heard you was to secure and maintain eye contact, something Mum had failed to take into account.

  She was therefore surprised and dismayed that evening to see Christian sitting on the doorstep in his jogging clothes, lacing up his plimsolls, five minutes before she was due at Mrs Tapley’s.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

  ‘Out for a run,’ he answered, straightening up and retying the cord of his shorts. He had just washed his hair, and it hung in wet tassels to his shoulders. That was another funny thing. Sometimes he had a bath before he went for a run.

  ‘No you’re not. You’re coming to help me,’ Mum said. ‘Had you forgotten?’

  Christian frowned. ‘How can I forget something I never knew?’ He bent one leg and caught his foot behind his back, flexing his thigh muscle.

  ‘I told you this morning. We’re clearing out Mrs Tapley’s.’ She pointed at the porter’s trolley, which had stood unremarked in the hallway for several days now. We were so used to having the house cluttered up with transient objects destined for the Less Fortunate that they no longer provoked any curiosity.

  ‘Well, I’ve got to go out for a run,’ Christian replied, continuing with his bending and stretching.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, you’ll get plenty of exercise at Mrs Tapley’s. That I promise you.’

  ‘It’s not the same. Can’t we do it later? Or tomorrow or something?’

  ‘No,’ said Mum, beginning to lose patience. ‘She’s expecting us now, and that generation doesn’t like to be kept waiting. Anyway, it’s got to be now: the house will be cleared out tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll only be an hour. Can’t I meet you there?’ Christian suggested. He was standing on one leg, bringing his knee up to his chest now, squeeze, release, other leg, squeeze, release.

  Mum clicked her tongue irritably. ‘No. I can’t shift furniture on my own, strong as I am. Esther and Grandpa can’t do it. Mrs Tapley certainly can’t. Your father’s at work. It’s got to be you. Now come on or we’ll be late. You seem to forget that she’s doing us the favour, and not the other way round.’

  ‘She’s not doing me any favour,’ Christian snapped. ‘You’ve no right to rope me into something without checking with me first. I might be busy. I am busy.’

  I’d never heard him speak to Mum like this before. I closed my eyes and red sparks danced behind my eyelids.

  ‘I think that school’s given you an inflated sense of your own importance, my boy,’ Mum said, in a dangerously quiet voice. ‘It’s about time you started thinking about other people instead of putting yourself first all the time.’

  ‘I am thinking about someone else,’ Christian retorted. ‘Just not you.’ And before Mum could stop him he was out of the door and off up the path at a run, without a backward glance.

  Mum sat down hard on the settle and stared up at the ceiling, exhaling slowly.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ I said, putting my arm round her shoulders. ‘He didn’t mean it. It’s just all that energy whooshing around, like you said.’

  When she smiled down at me her eyes were full of tears. ‘I know,’ she said, blinking hard. ‘You’re quite right.’ Then she stood up and squeezed my shoulders, as if measuring me up for something. ‘Could you manage some heavy lifting, do you think?’ she said.

  I nodded eagerly, glad to be the useful one for once. ‘I’m strong,’ I said. ‘I can lift up Lisa Chick, and she’s the fattest girl in the class.’

  For some reason this made Mum laugh. ‘It’s good to be a strong girl,’ she said, serious again. ‘Because there are plenty of people out there who’d like girls to be weak and silly and easy to control, and we need a few strong ones like you to stand up to them.’

  ‘Like that woman who ran in front of the King’s horse and died?’ I said. We’d had an assembly about it just that morning. There had been a gasp of sympathy for the horse, Anmer, who had turned a full somersault in the collision.

  ‘Well, yes, sort of,’ said Mum. ‘Though I wasn’t recommending martyrdom.’ She hefted the porter’s trolley over the threshold and down the front step. ‘That’s not for the likes of us.’

  ‘I’ve brought Esther with me instead of Christian,’ mum said to Mrs Tapley, without elucidating.

  ‘So I see,’ said Mrs Tapley, her jaws working as though at a piece of tough meat.

  I looked at her, as I always did, with a combination of fascination and disgust: how could she have so many coarse, dark hairs sprouting from her chin and do nothing about them? She couldn’t be entirely without vanity, because she went to the trouble of wearing a wig, a very obvious one of improbably regular, tight, brown curls. She wore it pulled down at the front, almost to her eyebrows, like a cap, exposing the white wisps at the nape of her neck. I knew she was immensely old, because just about every time we met she regaled us with the same story of how she and her parents had slept on the pavement overnight to secure a good position along the route of Queen Victoria’s funeral procession. And her own grandmother used to tell her that as a young girl she had met the poet Wordsworth, then in his seventies.

  ‘How interesting,’ Mum said when the story had its regular airing. ‘Did your grandmother say what he was like?’

  ‘Grey-haired and a trifle deaf,’ was Mrs Tapley’s scoop on the great man.

  I began to wonder what historical markers I would be able to call up to bore my grandchildren with, but nothing significant came to mind. I had witnessed no national spectacles, and met no famous people. Christian had had his photograph in the Advertiser when Turton’s won the South East Cricket Cup, and he, I felt, represented my best chance of brushing up against celebrity. Mr Spragg had also been in the local paper when his case came to court. Christian had shown me the cutting: Community Service for Sex Pest Vicar. I’d wanted to take it to school for show and tell but Mum said No with a capital N.

  The pieces we could take, Mrs Tapley was telling Mum, had been marked with a chalk cross. There were some ladder-back chairs and carvers, a gateleg table, an oak bureau and escritoire and numerous boxes of assorted junk. ‘I don’t know how you’ll manage, just the two of you,’ she said, shaking her head, so that the wig pitched to one side. ‘There’s more upstairs, but you’ll need a man for that.’

  ‘We’ll do our best,’ Mum replied, stacking two of the chairs, seat to seat, onto the porter’s trolley and strapping them into place with an old skipping rope. It was the thought of converting them into sacks of grain, vaccines, bandages, penicillin, that put the necessary streng
th in her arms.

  On our fifth return journey, by which time we had cleared the chairs and boxes, leaving only the heavy stuff, we were met on her doorstep by Mrs Tapley. She was holding a bunch of flowers, culled, by the look of it, from front gardens or the fresher graves in the churchyard. ‘Christian’s here,’ she said with a soppy smile. ‘He brought me these. Sweet boy.’

  Christian loitered in the shadows behind her, uneasy in his role as penitent, his hands thrust so deep into his pockets that they emerged beneath the hem of his shorts.

  What a masterstroke, I thought, as I saw Mum’s face bloom with pleasure. To think of bringing flowers, not for Mum herself, but for Mrs Tapley. That sort of subtle, sideways thinking was so unlike Christian, who came at everything head-on, that for an instant I hovered on the brink of enlightenment, as if a breeze blowing through my mind had lifted a curtain. Before I could understand what had been revealed, the moment passed, the curtain fell back, and the feeling of relief that the quarrel was over swept all other thoughts away.

  17

  NOT LONG AFTER the installation of the television I was found to have developed a species of squint. Whether the TV was the cause of the problem, or an innocent diagnostic tool, remained a matter of fierce debate. The undisputed fact was that Mum had come into the sitting room one day to find me watching The New Avengers with my hand over one eye. My untroubled explanation that I would otherwise be seeing two images led us directly to the opticians and from there to hospital for tests. It was feared that fluid on the brain might be an underlying cause. Torches were shone into my eyes, stinging drops made my pupils dilate so that even dull daylight was unbearable, blood was siphoned from my veins and my brain was scanned for deformities, but these investigations uncovered nothing significant. Expert opinion concluded that I was suffering from nothing more than a ‘lazy eye’ – a label that was unnecessarily judgemental, to my mind. I preferred to call it a squint. The doctor took the unusual step of recommending a patch for the unaffected eye – a treatment commonly reserved for younger children, in whom success was more likely. Still, it was felt that there was nothing to be lost by the attempt, which might prevent a lifetime of wearing corrective prismatic glasses. I was offered a choice of patches.

  ‘We do a flesh tint,’ the doctor explained. ‘It’s a bit less . . . piratical than black.’

  I tried it on. From a distance it looked as though one side of my face had melted. ‘I want black,’ I said.

  There is never a good time to wear an eyepatch, but it was especially unfortunate that this episode coincided with my first term at secondary school, when inconspicuousness would have served me better. Mum’s attempts at home tuition to prime me for grammar school or scholarships had not worked this time around. I didn’t have Christian’s head for figures. Talk of integers and denominators and percentages caused a hot metal bolt of incomprehension to tighten up behind my eyes.

  ‘She’s artistic,’ was Mum’s verdict.

  ‘She’s a dreamer,’ said Grandpa Percy.

  ‘She lacks concentration,’ said my school report.

  It was certainly true that I wasn’t destined for exam success. I couldn’t seem to get the answers out of my head, where they teemed, like shoals of slippery fish, and onto the page. I would think for too long about each question, my thoughts frequently taking off down byways of their own, which though interesting were not in the least pertinent. When some distraction would cause me to look down, half the allotted time would have elapsed and I would have produced nothing but a page of doodles.

  So it was that I ended up at Underwood, the nearest school that required no proofs of intelligence or wealth; where in fact intelligence or wealth would have been serious impediments to survival. The school’s motto was ‘The Whole Child’ – presumably to distinguish it from lesser establishments interested only in child portions. The phrase was printed on the headed notepaper, on the school gates, and on the embroidered crest, which had to be sewn onto our anoraks (held to be more practical and durable than blazers). This flexible approach to uniform was heartily approved by Mum, whose economies often fell foul of the more rigid regime at Turton’s. In any case, incidents like the affair of the Mighty Whities had caused her to look less kindly on that institution. She didn’t think it at all a bad thing for me to mix with ordinary, unpretentious people. ‘Besides, if you go somewhere mediocre there’s a better chance that you’ll shine,’ she said, by way of encouragement.

  ‘Fuckinell it’s captain Pugwash,’ said one of the ordinary, unpretentious people, whose influence Mum had so warmly recommended, on my first day at Underwood. At least, thanks to Grandpa Percy’s TV I now knew who Captain Pugwash was. ‘What’s wrong with your eye?’ she demanded, contacting my black patch with a fat finger.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said truthfully: it was the unpatched eye that was defective. Through it I examined my interrogator. She was above average height, and girth, with a barrel-shaped body and two flaps of fat where there would one day be proper breasts. Her hair had been scragged back into a stumpy ponytail with what seemed unnecessary severity, giving her the grim appearance of someone facing into a strong wind. Her cheeks were a sore shade of pink, and when she spoke I could see her teeth were imprisoned behind metal grilles. A group of her cronies gathered round us to see how the confrontation would develop.

  ‘Watcher wearing it for then?’ she wanted to know.

  ‘Because I like it,’ I said. ‘I think it makes me look nice.’ I’d learned this trick from Christian: if you’re ever faced with a stupid remark, just say the exact opposite of what’s expected and see what happens.

  ‘You must be mad then,’ she said. The onlookers laughed. ‘She’s mad.’

  ‘I am,’ I agreed. ‘I went mad when I was six, and I’ve been like it ever since.’

  ‘You’re getting on my nerves,’ the girl said. ‘You’d better bring me fifty pence tomorrow.’

  I looked at her, mystified. Did she need money to buy something that would calm her nerves? ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t get me angry,’ came the reply, which sounded fairly angry already. ‘Just bring it.’

  ‘I need to take fifty pence to school today,’ I said over breakfast the following morning.

  Christian had been for his run and was now trying to fit six Weetabix into a bowl that could comfortably accommodate two. I watched him stack them two by two to form a squat tower, and then trickle milk over them until they collapsed into a grey sludge, which he ate with great relish.

  ‘It’s not a good idea to take money to school,’ Mum said. ‘It might get taken.’ In view of the circumstances I could hardly dispute this prediction. ‘What do you need it for?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I’ll manage.’

  She tracked me down to the furthest corner of the playground at breaktime, where I was trying to blend into the fence. I wasn’t the only one engaged in this attempt, I noticed. A little leadership, a little organisation, and we could have formed a marauding band of our own.

  ‘Where’s my money?’ she said, arm out, palm uppermost.

  This use of the possessive rankled. ‘Wherever you keep it,’ I replied. ‘My money’s in the bank.’

  ‘Just give it. I’ve got other people to see after you,’ she said.

  ‘I haven’t got it,’ I said, shrugging. She looked from me to her two accomplices with an exaggerated expression of disbelief.

  ‘What have you got then?’ she demanded, removing my school bag from my shoulder and having a good rummage. She pocketed a foil pack of sandwiches and my banana before opening the lid of my thermos flask and tipping the contents out onto the floor. ‘Fuckinell,’ she said, as half a pint of Mum’s chunky vegetable soup hit the deck. ‘It looks like puke.’

  ‘That’s my lunch,’ I protested, my unpatched eye watering with rage. No one, except me and Christian, was allowed to insult Mum’s cooking, unappetising though it was.

  ‘What are you going to do about it?’ the girl wanted to
know.

  Do? I did what any right-thinking daughter of a Christian minister and a pacifist would do in the circumstances: I punched her in the mouth.

  She was too taken aback to retaliate, and was in any case fully occupied with the business of trying to staunch the outwash of blood: I had forgotten about that brace.

  ‘Sorry!’ I said, horrified, and yet strangely elated. My fist still throbbed from the impact. I wouldn’t be able to hold a pen steady for the rest of the day, an inconvenience I hadn’t foreseen. I offered her a wad of cleanish tissues from my pocket to mop up the blood, but she applied them instead to her eyes, a gesture that made me feel doubly guilty.

  ‘You didn’t have to do that!’ one of the cronies remonstrated. ‘It was only a joke.’ She put her arm round the victim and enquired tenderly, ‘Are you all right, Dawn? Do you want me to get Miss?’

  Dawn shook her head, fat-lipped. She would have a stupendous pout for the rest of the week.

  The bell rang for lessons. ‘I didn’t mean it,’ I said, still feeling that the defensive nature of my action was not being properly acknowledged. I tapped my head, remembering our conversation of the day before. ‘It was the madness coming out,’ I added, reclaiming my bag and flask, before making my way back to class. I didn’t bother about the sandwiches and banana: I thought that might be pushing my luck. Besides, the sight of all that blood had taken the edge off my appetite.

  I kept expecting to be hauled before the headmaster for the affray, and jumped every time there was a knock at the classroom door, expecting a summons. But none came. In school it was just as in Dad’s prison: there was no form of life lower than a grass.

  Outside school, of course, different rules applied. At seven o’clock that evening the doorbell rang. This wasn’t an uncommon occurrence – word had got about that the occupants of the Old Schoolhouse were a soft touch as far as donations were concerned, and we were regularly troubled by people collecting for charities, genuine or otherwise. The traffic of funds was by no means always one-way, as Mum kept her own collecting tin on the hall table and would occasionally jangle it under the astonished caller’s nose.