Felix had already trained the camera on the main entrance in anticipation. Mrs Woodhouse, nee Tummings, tall and elegant with her black hair screwed above her head and skewered with two small sticks, walked confidently across the yard and shook hands with Mr Fellows. Her two-piece pastel-green suit gave her the look of an air hostess with one of the better airlines. And there was something about the way she took her seat in the first empty chair - facing forwards, legs crossed, one hand on each thigh - that confirmed the impression.
‘From 1973, Jeanette Tripp.’
This time, a smaller, rounder woman in a denim jacket and a white T-shirt printed with a big black question mark jogged into view. The bum of her jeans had been patched with a Carlsberg beer-towel, which Felix homed in on. And given the slur of words that poured from her mouth as she grabbed the microphone from a surprised Mr Fellows, his camerawork wasn’t entirely inappropriate.
‘Go for it, Jeannie,’ shouted a boozy voice in the crowd, but when Jeannie did go for it with a throaty and drunken, ‘Oggie, oggie, oggie,’ there was little or no response. As she hopped up to the platform with a little hitch-kick in mid-air, then dropped into her chair, Felix would have liked to capture the expression of the immaculate Mrs Woodhouse sitting next to her. But to be pointing the camcorder at the wrong woman, at that precise moment, would have been more than his life was worth.
‘And from 1974, now Abbie Fenton, but to us Abbie Lawrence,’ boomed Mr Fellows, beckoning the next guest with his open hand. And as his wife pushed open the glass door, Felix was already rolling, his elbows and spine locked in a tripod, tracking Abbie as she walked smartly to the centre of the playground, removed her new lilac hat, allowed her old headmaster to peck her once on the left cheek, then climbed the two wooden stairs to the stage to take her seat. Got it. Only later, when Abbie was in the can, did Felix dare try a few tricks with his new toy. He scrolled through the function menu. Julie Hardacre, of 1979 vintage, was recorded using the time-lapse feature, and Paula Dewdeney, from 1983, in monochrome. The perfectly bald Kay Simmister, 1985, and 1986’s Maureen Simmister, in a rather obvious wig, looked very weird in either half of the split screen. Fading up from black, he tried out the macro-zoom on Karine Moon, 1987, and the soft focus on 1989’s Joyelle Bright, who was heavily pregnant and by Felix’s calculation not a day older than fifteen. By the time ten-year-old Eliza Hardison had been lifted into her throne, arrayed with the purple robe, the gold sash and the glittering tiara, there wasn’t a feature he hadn’t tried and barely a minute’s worth of power left in the battery. When the hem of Eliza’s dress became trapped under the heel of her shoe, she was attended to by her mother, a woman of about Abbie’s age, who ran to the stage and unhooked the dress before dabbing down a few stray locks of her daughter’s hair with a wet finger. For his final shot, Felix tracked across the podium in sepia tone, capturing twenty-odd faces in various states of innocence, happiness, health, wisdom, maturity, failure and decay. Then the camera went dead. He waved at Abbie. She waved back and pointed him out to Mr Fellows, who was now surrounded by women and girls, and carried beautiful young Eliza, crowned and adored, in his arms. Felix made his way down the hot metal slide, tentatively at first, holding on to the side. Then halfway to the bottom he let go, and instantly saw the big Norfolk sky go flying backwards over his head, followed closely by the spotless, manmade uppers of his new trainers at the end of his upside-down legs. Followed by not much less than a thousand pounds’ worth of digital camera, floating in mid-air.
2
She had forgotten her hat - the new one, bought specially for the occasion. But they’d gone too far now to turn back. The radio wasn’t working, except for Holy Communion on long wave and even that kept going astray. In the passenger seat, Abbie had kicked off her shoes and curled up with her knees under her chin. The foetal position. Either she was staring out of the side window or she was asleep. At least that’s what Felix had been happy to assume for the last hour and a half. But by fiddling with a button on his door, he tilted the near-side wing mirror to look back in the car, and when the image of Abbie’s face finally swung into view he saw that she was crying. Meeting his eyes in the polished glass, she looked away. Another seven or eight fields went past, and a row of poplars, then a boarded-up petrol station with the pumps removed and two massive cubes of concrete blocking the entrance and exit. Then more fields.
‘Someone told me that wherever you stand in Norfolk, you can see at least one church. Is that true?’
‘No,’ said Abbie, after a long pause.
‘Maybe it was Suffolk,’ he said.
‘Is that what you do with them at work? Ask them about the distribution of places of worship in East Anglia?’ said Abbie, sniffing and pulling the seat belt over her shoulder, as if it were something to comfort her, like a blanket or a shawl.
‘Is that what I do with who?’ asked Felix.
‘The people who cry. The people like me.’
Felix gripped the steering wheel with both hands as a huge articulated lorry went past in the other direction. Sucked into its slipstream, the car swayed towards the centre line, and a dozen or so cat’s-eyes thumped beneath the wheels before he brought it back to the left. The road was narrow and fast, and the grass verges to each side were ploughed with tyre tracks, some of which appeared to go right off the edge and didn’t come back. Felix was a safe driver, his 60 per cent no-claims bonus said as much, although his mind did tend to wander. Only last week he had set off for work but ended up in the queue for the car wash. He’d been following a van with a big, oily tow bracket poking out from beneath the back bumper and had started daydreaming about a caravanning holiday with his parents in the Lakes. Who knows how far he would have followed it if there hadn’t been a knock on the window and a man in a pair of blue nylon overalls asking if he wanted the foam wash or the turtle-wax finish. Too embarrassed to turn around and with three or four other cars behind him, he’d scooped a handful of loose change out of the ashtray, inched towards the entrance, then watched as the world disappeared in a white-out of jetted water and bubbling soap.
‘Since you’re asking, I keep a box of tissues in the drawer, and since you mention it, you’re nothing like the people who come to cry in my office,’ he said.
‘Really? I thought I’d be a pretty good case, in the circumstances.’
‘What circumstances?’
‘Oh, well, off the top of my head, let’s think. Like I’m totally screwed up because I want a baby and there is no baby, and I’m running out of time and fast. Like I haven’t got a single relative in the world.’
‘So your husband doesn’t come into that category, right?’
‘No, he doesn’t,’ she blurted out. ‘Not when he doesn’t care, not when he pretends everything’s all right when it fucking well isn’t.’
Abbie never swore, so now it was serious. Felix took his hand off the gear stick and put it on her thigh, but she swatted it away, catching the face of his watch with the bangle on her wrist. Solid Argentinian silver versus the miracle of sapphire glass. The watch had been a gift and he treasured it. The sapphire glass, so the guarantee promised, would shine for eternity and could be scratched only by diamond. Next time he lifted his hand to the wheel he saw there was no damage.
‘Like the fact that I haven’t a clue who my parents are.’
Felix said, ‘We’ve been through this a thousand times already, Abbie,’ but she was sobbing now, and he offered the comment to her as something she could dismiss, an invitation to get it out of her system, go on with her list.
‘Like the fact that I’m a prostitute.’
‘What?’ he screamed. ‘You’re a market researcher!’
‘I stand in the precinct propositioning men. What’s the difference?’
They’d been gaining speed all the time and were now behind a white van with the usual comments written in the dust on the back doors, including, ‘I wish my bird was as dirty as this.’ Felix indicated and moved out to overtake, but
there was a steady line of oncoming traffic. Rather than stare at the van for another ten miles, he pushed at the brake pedal, eased back and let the graffiti move gradually away. More of the sky opened up to the windscreen. More horizon as well and more light. Slowing down also seemed to make things calmer between them, as if they were hooked up to the engine.
‘I’m ready for that tissue now,’ said Abbie, after a few more miles.
‘I’ve never been with a prostitute, but for fifty quid I’d expect more than a few questions about which aftershave I use or how often I cut my toenails,’ said Felix.
‘So how do you know it costs fifty?’
He put his hand on her leg and this time she let him, and put her hand on his, and curled her finger around his thumb. ‘So with all those problems, would I qualify as one of your customers, then?’ she asked.
‘Clients.’
‘Whatever.’
‘Fraid not. You’d need to be stealing baby clothes or having a nervous breakdown outside Mothercare or hanging around outside the infant school before you landed on my desk.’
Abbie pulled down the sun visor and looked at her bloodshot eyes in the vanity mirror. Then she leaned back in the seat and put her feet on the dashboard.
‘It’s not work, it’s the other stuff. Seeing all those women and their children today, all those families. It stirs it up.’
‘I know. I’m sorry.’
‘Not to mention being at the far end in that line-up. You know, I’ve always thought of myself as young. As being younger than most people. But today really brought it home. I’ve crossed the line.’
‘Well, you weren’t the oldest,’ Felix pointed out.
‘No, although Jeanerte Tripp can’t have long for this world, and that ice maiden Christine Tummings looks like she’s practising for cold storage.’
‘Well, I’m glad you said that and not me. Was she like that at school?’
‘Tummings? No,’ said Abbie. And, giving the impression that having crossed one line she might as well cross another, added, ‘She was a right little scrubber.’
They talked about the parade. Abbie told him how it was every girl’s dream to be Queen of the May. The winner was chosen by vote - every pupil at the school wrote down the name of their favourite girl, then Mr Fellows made a tour of the classrooms collecting the slips of paper in a biscuit barrel with a slot in the lid. Next morning in assembly he announced the result. On the day that Abbie triumphed she was off sick with chickenpox, and when the headmaster called round to the house that night to give her the news in person, she wept for hours, distraught at missing her moment of glory in front of her friends and enemies and mortified at the prospect of appearing with a big blotchy face under the bejewelled tiara and with two pimply arms dangling from either side of the purple robe. She also remembered going into Mr Fellows’s office later in the year and seeing the outfit stuffed away in a cardboard box on top of a bookshelf. It took away some of the magic, she said, ‘Like finding out about Father Christmas.’ And then, a moment later, ‘Or God.’ She was also astonished that the May Queen thing still happened in this day and age, being thoroughly sexist, ultra-competitive and not exactly part of the national curriculum.
Felix shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, it’s not as if there was a catwalk and a swimwear section. And anyway, I kept going back to the little girl’s face with the camera. What was she called?’
‘Eliza Hardison.’
‘Yes, her, and she was totally spellbound, and as for as I could tell so was every other child in the playground, not to mention the mums and dads. So what harm can it do?’
‘Anything like it at your school?’ Abbie asked.
‘Not really. They held a Mastermind competition one year, with the music and the lights and the chair and everything, but the boy who won it got his head stoved in for being a clever dick They didn’t bother doing it again.’
‘It was you, was it?’
‘It was.’
‘Intelligence wasn’t to be encouraged at your school, was it, sweetheart?’ said Abbie, patting his hand.
‘No, it was frowned upon. And if you were good-looking as well, you were dead.’
Abbie talked about growing up in Norfolk, and what it was like to live without hills, and how the wind made everyone deaf or mad or both, although she pointed out that small trees shaken by storms and gales grow up strong and true, whereas trees which are propped or tied as striplings become weak and sickly things. She’d read it in a magazine. She didn’t miss the flatlands because, being adopted, she’d never really thought of it as home, just the place where she once lived. In fact she didn’t think of anywhere as home. Like Maxine, their next-door neighbour, whose father had been in the air force. Not long after Abbie and Felix had moved house, in one of those conversations over the garden fence, she’d asked Maxine where she was from and Maxine had said, ‘How do you mean?’ That’s why they got on so well. Because they didn’t have roots. They were like tumbleweed. Felix felt obliged to say that not more than thirty seconds ago she had been a tree in a storm. Ignoring him, she went on to conclude that women were more adaptable in any case. Women didn’t need to support the nearest football team, or go drinking in a ‘local’, or get into fights with people from other parts of the country because they spoke differently, or have the name of their home town tattooed across their hearts. Men thought about their place of birth in the same way they thought about their mothers - with unquestioning affection. They were tied down and they were trapped. But women had grown out of all that crap. They were unattached to any pan of the planet, which meant they were independent, both in body and in mind, which meant they were free.
They drove on. Past water towers on stilts. Past mounds of winter fodder left to sprout and rot. Past occasional road kill -patches of feather and fur outlined in dry blood. Past place names like characters from nursery rhymes and fairy tales. Over level crossings. Across quaint wooden bridges. Further north the roads got faster and wider. The tractors and harvesters had turned off into the fields, along with other assorted picking and planting machines and abnormal loads with their strange buckets and scoops and prongs, most of them taking the full width of both carriageways, many of them driven by nine- or ten-year-old boys. Blue motorway signs appeared, then the name of their town. They were making good time, until an amber light in the shape of a petrol pump flashed on the console, and Felix swung across two lanes and a set of chevrons before gearing down on the slip road and coasting into the service station. Abbie went to buy sandwiches and crisps and hot coffee in the mini-market while Felix filled up and paid for the fuel. She was gone a while, long enough for him to waste a couple of quid in the space-invader machine by the toilets and check for any traffic problems on the road-watch screen. In fact by the time she returned he’d also been on the weighing scales and tested his heart rate and his blood pressure, and, having been pronounced fit and healthy, had extracted a chocolate egg from the vending machine and eaten it. He was just contemplating the design-your-own-business-card gizmo when she came around the corner, balancing one polystyrene cup on top of another, and a minute later they were back in the outside lane.
‘What did you get me?’ asked Felix, having slotted the steaming coffee into the cup holder between the seats.
Abbie reached down into the blue carrier bag between her feet and passed him what felt like a glass or little pot of some kind. He was concentrating on the road ahead, keeping an eye on a car transporter on the inside. But when he did manage to look, he saw that the item he had been given was nothing less than a jar of pork-and-apple-flavoured baby-food. A toddler in a canary-yellow romper suit beamed at him from the label. And Abbie hadn’t finished. From the bag she pulled out five more jars of the same food, followed by two towelling bibs, one in the shape of a horse’s head, the other a cow, followed by a Noddy cassette, followed by four or five pocket-sized books featuring assorted cartoon characters. Lined up across the dashboard they looked like mascots or offerings at a s
hrine. Finally, she hooked out a tiny pair of baby’s shoes - red satin slippers, no more than three inches long - and hung them by their laces from the rear-view mirror. They danced and jogged to the motion of the car. Felix stared hard at the surface of the road, and felt himself dipping the clutch and fishing for another gear, a sixth gear, an extra cog somewhere beyond the confines of the gearbox and the engine block, a gear that did not exist.
‘I want something to happen and I want it to happen NOW,’ said Abbie, and after a mile or so, even though it wasn’t a question, Felix nodded his head and said, ‘Yes.’
‘And no more time-wasting, and no more sticking your head in the sand.’
‘No.’
Abbie scooped the jars of food and other bric-à-brac into the bag, but left the shoes where they were, swinging and bouncing just a few inches in front of Felix’s eyes.
∗
The following Tuesday was her birthday. From the box of photographs in the back bedroom, Felix dug out the black and white snap of Abbie, ten years old, wearing the sash and tiara of the May Queen. Seated regally on the makeshift throne, in her right hand she held a posy of flowers. And with her head turned slightly to the left, sunlight revealed the pattern of tiny wrinkles - almost a sneer - which thirty years later still rippled around the corner of her lip when anyone pointed a camera in her direction. The photograph wasn’t much of a gift, even in a silver frame, but for these past few years Abbie’s birthdays were things to be overcome rather than celebrated, and not just because she was getting older, but because they were milestones on the road to childlessness. Especially this birthday, her fortieth.
3
Social work is not a joke. Social work is not inherently funny, unlike the work of doctors and nurses, for instance, which is full of comic possibilities. And social work has none of the humour, say, of the building site, or the police force, which is, by definition, hilarious. Nevertheless, every Monday morning as Felix took his seat at the team meeting and looked around the room, it did occur to him that he was among a group of people not appointed by the Department of Social Services and its various subcommittees and panels, but put together by a writer of sitcoms and gags. There were six other staff in the office, and while individually they were ordinary human beings, regular members of society and entirely plausible employees of the local authority, brought together in one room they were a sketch. Unlike Felix, of course, who was normal. A relative concept, admittedly. But normal in the sense that he did not suffer from multiple-hypersensitive syndrome, unlike Thelma, whose current and expanding list of allergies included nuts, bread, coffee, smoke, pollen, gold (but not platinum), denim (but not cotton), direct sunlight, most animals, furniture polish and dust (a particularly cruel combination), ink- especially the fumes given off by whiteboard markers and felt tips - and loud bangs. And that was just this week. Next week it would be something harder to avoid, like paper or air, and the office was bracing itself for the day when abstract concepts came on to the blacklist, such as time or love.
The White Stuff Page 2