by Fiona Gibson
Colette and Jamie looked round the flat on a mellow autumn afternoon. I envied Colette because she was French, rather than resorting to having her hair violently chopped in order to look French, and pregnant. She also had the good fortune to be with a man who caressed her neck in front of strangers, and might soon be living in my flat.
Jamie was handsome in a stubble-jawed way and enthused over the rooms’ generous proportions. Colette nibbled a ginger biscuit she had fished from her pocket. “I’m in property myself,” Marcus said. “This area’s going to boom.”
I prayed that the upstairs girl would start yelling or let her bath overflow and destroy our ceiling again, but all that trickled down to our flat was polite applause from her TV.
“You’re so lucky, overlooking the park,” Colette said.
“Park?” I scoffed. “I’d hardly call it that. Full of crazies and vicious dogs. You can’t move for broken glass. Last weekend someone spat at you, didn’t they, Marcus?”
“Not badly,” he said.
“We’re leaving London,” I rattled on, “mainly for Tod, our son. He had a bad time at school last year. The schools,” I added, eyeing her belly, “are the worst in the country.”
I was acting like a salesperson in reverse. Jamie glanced out of the window, possibly looking for evidence of vicious dogs and spitting, or even vicious dogs spitting. Marcus looked as if he could have gladly stamped on my foot.
“For a baby, though, it’s ideal,” he said. “Huge living room for playing in. You could leave the pram in the hall. It’s safe around here, and everyone’s friendly.”
Colette stroked her bump. “The baby’s kicking so much,” she announced. “He’s excited. He wants this to be his home.”
Marcus has left me a list of people to call: builder (to assess risky-looking back wall), plumber (to rectify foul laundry situation), electrician (quote for rewiring and replacement of circuit board), damp-proof specialist (builder to give quote also) and oil man. We still have no heating. We do have hot water, due to an antiquated instant heater, but you can’t spend all your time flat out in the bath. Already, it has become apparent that my city attire is inappropriate for life in an outsize, stone-built fridge. Anna was right about the country dictating one’s wardrobe. I must invest in more knitwear, heavy-duty socks, and possibly a balaclava.
To put off all that phoning, I mooch in the garden that skirts all sides of the cottage. As I know nothing about gardening, I’m not sure if everything’s dead or just sleeping. All I can identify are standard roses jutting defiantly from frost-hardened soil.
Round the back is an expanse of pink gravel, the oil tank and a damp wooden shed. We could convert it into a den for Tod, or maybe Marcus will use it, turn into a shed man. From the front garden I watch the woman who tidies her lawn. She is clipping a bush, despite this being January and, presumably, little growth going on. I know that much about plants. The woman stops pruning and stares, blatantly, the way children do just before they say something awful like “That man’s fat.” I give her a friendly wave. I’m expecting a little wave back—maybe she’ll show up later with some of those old-fashioned cakes, the kind with millions of currants hiding beneath a pastry roof—but she turns away and violently scissors the bush.
Lunchtime, and I’m back at school. Not at it exactly, not in the building, but resting gently against a privet hedge, a vantage point from which I can view most of the playground and hopefully merge with the greenery in Marcus’s mossy sweater.
In the playground, children mill around in sweatshirted clumps. I try to relax and look casual, but everything about me feels shifty. My fingers are coiled. My toes feel moist in my new lace-up boots. I am gripping a village store carrier bag, to create the impression that I have just popped out for bread, apples, bicarbonate of soda (a Marcus tip for cleaning the fridge), jam doughnuts (Tod’s favorite), and bottled water because the stuff from our taps tastes of metal. I’ve just happened to stop by the school. However, I am aware that this kind of behavior alerts the attention of vigilant parents and even the police. In fact I probably have the sinister air of someone planning to offer one of those children a drugged toffee, and my actions are being noted in a lined jotter by the school secretary.
“Suspicious-looking adult spotted lurking outside primary school.” It wouldn’t look good in the Lexley Gazette.
What’s worse is that I can’t see Tod anywhere. A cluster of boys is tackling a ball, but there’s no shoving or shouting. They are playing tidy football. A skinny figure is huddled in a far corner of the playground, trying to wedge his foot between the railings, and for a moment I think it’s Tod. It’s the kind of thing he might do, trap his foot deliberately. Attention seeking. Requiring careful maneuvering to free the foot, or a screeching power tool to slice through the railing. But when the boy swings round, a wide mouth gyrating all over his face, I see he’s not Tod.
Maybe he’s hiding somewhere, eating his shameful egg sandwiches in a toilet cubicle with the door bolted shut. What if he’s tried to come home and was unable to remember the simple layout of the village? Is he lost, blundering around the common, or even trying to make his way back to London? The Gazette reported that a boy of Tod’s age had become separated from his mother outside Finesse Bathrooms in Lexley High Street. A guard at Charing Cross spotted the lost boy. The kid had boarded the train at Lexley and wound up in central London without anyone wondering who he belonged to. He and his mother were pictured on the front page of the Gazette. She blamed modern life. “It comes to something,” she said, “when a little boy is left to fend for himself.”
I gaze at the playground where none of the kids look like my son. The carrier-bag handles are digging into my palm. These boots are too big; the woman in the outdoor shop in Lexley assured me that I needed this gigantic size, as I’d be wearing them with thick socks. Tod laughed and said, “They look like coal miners’ boots.”
“Waiting for someone?” asks the voice at my ear. It’s Lucille, the woman who popped in yesterday and suggested that I join clubs. She is job-interview groomed. Her makeup is the natural kind that doesn’t look like much but involves an extensive lineup of beige cosmetics and takes several hours to apply.
“Just shopping,” I say. To prove it, I give the carrier bag a little shake.
She smiles prettily. Each tip of her fingernails is white. I wonder why anyone would bother to do that.
“It’s natural to worry,” she says, kindly.
“I’m not worried at all. He’ll be fine.”
There’s so much of her perfume that I suspect she buys the soap, body lotion, all the toiletries in a matching scent. It’s called layering your fragrance. My mother does it, but with Yardley’s Blue Grass.
“Of course he will,” she says. “It’s a lovely, friendly school.”
Then I see Tod. He is sitting on the ground, at the school’s back entrance, even though it’s been raining. Tod never liked playtimes; that’s when stuff happened to him. He prefers being at a desk, with Dog stashed in the schoolbag at his feet.
He’s waiting to be let back in. He’ll have a wet patch on the seat of his trousers and Miss Cruickshank might think he’s had an accident.
“Is that Tod,” Lucille asks, “over there, in the corner?”
I nod. “It’s difficult for him. He’s—”
I wonder what to tell her. Before we moved, I made an appointment for Tod with our GP, and forced Marcus to accompany us. After Dr. Cohen confirmed that our son had an ear infection, I asked for a private chat. Marcus took Tod to the waiting room. “I’m worried about Tod,” I told Dr. Cohen. “There’s something…different about him.”
“What sort of different, Mrs. Skews?”
I stared down at my black leather boots. “I’m scared that he might be autistic.”
Dr. Cohen smiled and shook his head. “From what I’ve seen, he’s a very bright, articulate boy with an excellent vocabulary and a keen interest in—”
“But he’s obs
essive. You know what he’s into? Mazes. Is that normal for a five-year-old boy?”
“Children are obsessive. They fixate on one thing, then eventually move on to something else.”
“And he won’t make friends. Apart from his cousins, he’s not interested in other children.”
“I’d say,” Dr. Cohen said gently, “that your son is just very selective.”
I look at Lucille now, then over at Tod, who’s still hunched at the back entrance. “He’s very shy,” I murmur.
“Leo, my boy, was a loner, too,” Lucille says. “They grow out of it. He’s ever so popular now, thank goodness.”
I drop the carrier bag and march across the road, toward the blue railing, and yell, “Tod!” I’m waving madly but he doesn’t look up. The football boys swing round and gaze at me.
Lucille’s heels click toward me. “Come on,” she says, patting my arm. “You’ll make it worse for yourself.”
“I just want to talk to him.”
“I’ll make you a coffee,” she insists. “Can’t have you going back to that miserable house.”
Carl and Lucille bought the show house with all of its furnishings. “Curtains, dining suite, sofas,” she says, showing me into a peach and cream living room. It smells freshly polished. The shaggy off-white circular rug is so smooth, its pile all lying in one direction, that I suspect she grooms it. I pull off my boots and hope that my socks don’t create foul marks on the carpet.
“It saved touring endless showrooms,” Lucille continues. “That’s when the kids were younger, more of a handful.” She places two coasters depicting Constable landscapes on the polished coffee table. “Adele’s ten now, Leo’s nearly fifteen. Do their own thing. Adele, she’s in the top majorette troupe in the county. What kind of sports does Tod like?”
I want to say football, but on the one occasion that Marcus took him to a match, Tod kept asking why men were waving flags and didn’t watch the game at all. “Tod’s not really sporty,” I tell her. “He’s more indoorsy. Likes being in his bedroom, at least he did, in our old—”
“I’m sure he’ll grow into it,” she cuts in. “There’s a football club in Lexley—and karate, gymnastics, swimming club…plenty for young, active boys.”
“I’ll see what he thinks, when he’s had the chance to settle in.”
There’s a boy on Lucille’s mantelpiece, gilt-framed with extremely large teeth, like he has borrowed a set from an older person. This must be Leo, who is, no doubt, good at football, as well as being immensely popular. Beside him, Adele is tightly packed into a maroon and silver majorette’s outfit. There’s a picture of a teenage couple perching uncomfortably on a dry stone wall. The girl’s pale hair is so tightly permed it looks knitted. The boy’s looks like it’s been subjected to an ill-advised lemon-juice-blonding experiment.
“Who’s that?” I ask.
Lucille sets down mugs bearing mottos—“boss of the house,” “world’s best mum”—on the coasters. “That’s me and Carl. Childhood sweethearts. I’d just started training at his mum’s beauty salon.”
I am always amazed when a couple has stuck together after witnessing each other’s most unappealing phases: overenthusiastic sebaceous glands and a fondness for door slamming. At that age, mid-teens, I was still practicing kissing on my forearm and wearing an extra pair of knickers to hold up my tights. I didn’t even have a proper boyfriend, let alone a future husband. Yet, as a way of conducting one’s love life, the Lucille/Carl tactic is pretty low maintenance. No harrowing breakups or mistaking one-night stands for the beginnings of proper relationships. Maybe I should have tried it myself, persisted with Kevin O’Driscoll, the sarky individual who wrote dirty things about me on the school corridor wall.
Lucille sinks into the peach leather sofa. “I’m off on Monday and Friday mornings,” she says. “You’re always welcome to pop round for coffee.” Even through her layered perfume, she can sense my settling-in difficulties.
As I leave, Lucille scribbles a list of useful numbers: doctor, dentist, taxis, plus the best restaurants in Lexley. “I’m happy to babysit,” she adds.
“That would be wonderful, thank you.”
Perhaps a night out might help me to recover from a lack of spousal Christmas present. Marcus said, “I thought we’d agreed, being so frantic with moving. We said we’d just buy something for the house.” Did Gorby Cottage deserve its very own present?
Back home, I pin Lucille’s list next to Marcus’s list on the kitchen wall. I notice that she put the doctor’s number first, with double underlines. On top of feeling too new, I must look really ill.
Conversation one, on the way home from school: “How was school, Tod?” Silence. “Were the other children friendly?” Silence. “What’s Miss Cruickshank like—did she look after you?” Sniff, scratch of the groin. “Want a doughnut? I’ve bought you some. Tod, will you answer me, please?”
“What?”
“I’m asking you about—”
“A doughnut,” he repeats, jabbing our door buzzer even though nobody’s home. “What kind?”
“Jam.” I once made the mistake of buying him a ring one that he rejected because there was nothing inside it, just a hole.
“How do they get the jam in?” he asks.
“With an injection thing. A kind of syringe, I suppose.”
“Who does it?”
I let us into the house. “I don’t know. A jam injector?”
Tod flings down his bag. I unpack his barely touched lunchbox and wonder why I don’t just cut out the middleman: prepare sandwiches, and lob them straight into the bin. Tod plonks himself at the table, receives his doughnut.
“It’s fine,” he says, sinking teeth into the sinister combination of refined sugar and saturated fat.
“What, school?”
“No. Doughnut. Good.”
Conversation two: “How was your journey?”
Marcus says fine, drops his briefcase in the hall, and nods at Tod who is watching an educational program about dinosaurs. I have postponed his bath because he wanted to see an entire triceratops skeleton being reconstructed from one genuine rib.
“Not too tiring?” I ask.
“No, why—do I look tired?”
“No, you look fine. You look great.”
He gives me a quick smile, and a kiss on the cheek, an afterthought kiss. “What are you up to tonight?” he asks.
“More unpacking.”
“Me, too.” Marcus checks how much longer the dinosaur thing will be on because there’s a program about Second World War code breakers at seven-thirty. “School okay, Tod?” he asks over the dinosaur commentary.
“Yuh.”
Clearly, country life is enhancing our ability to communicate as a family.
That night, at around two-ish, I hear a voice and think it’s Marcus sleep talking, which he does sometimes, although rarely in any identifiable language. Then I realize it’s coming from Tod’s room where something awful is happening. I land on the bed beside him. He’s bolt upright, his eyes two gobstopper balls, gleaming with tears and real fear.
“It’s coming,” he shouts. “Get over, over the wall. Help me.”
I hold him tightly to my chest and say, “Nothing’s coming, Tod. It’s just you, me and Dad, in our new house.”
“Cows,” he pants.
I lift him out of bed. His pajamas are damp with sweat. He has also had a small accident, so I pull off his pj bottoms and carry him into our bed. His hair is soft against my chin, his arm featherlight around my waist.
“They were coming,” he mumbles.
“Just a nightmare, darling.”
Not any old nightmare, a livestock nightmare. My son is allergic to the country.
chapter 5
The Trouble with Tod’s Hair
After being abandoned by Dad, my mother was approached by a man with an oblong moustache and powerful upper arms in an electrical appliance shop. The shop was having a closing-down sale. Mum was hoping to b
uy a cut-price washing machine as her old one had expired, choked with the contents of pockets—coins, keys—and the underwires from bras. At first she suspected that this man was being friendly through sheer desperation, and was trying to flog the last of his stock. But when he offered to plumb in the new machine himself, at no extra cost, she detected a glimmer of something.
Perry Spencer plumbed in the machine, accepted Mum’s offer of a sandwich made with tongue from a tin, and started taking her to dances. Before long, he had brought round his extensive collection of board games, and moved in. My mother had her hair lightened to beige and bought black dresses shot through with metallic thread. They swapped the end-of-terrace she’d shared with Dad since before my birth for a grand, pink-roofed bungalow with an en suite bathroom and kidney-shaped pond in which koi carp meandered dolefully.
Mum and Perry had a small wedding ceremony in a huddled gray church in Barnet and a buffet afterward in a restaurant called Expressions, done out in jarring blues and tangerines. Marcus entertained Mum’s friends from her flower-arranging group with tales about the property letting business. “Such a charming man,” gushed a lady with a pewter-colored bob, patting his wrist. Women couldn’t help touching Marcus. He had a knack for knowing when to wind up an anecdote and let the other person speak.
My mother introduced him to fierce Aunt Isa, saying, “And here is Ro’s brand-new husband, Marcus. Isn’t he super?”
The way she said it, it sounded like I’d had several, inferior husbands before him.