by Fiona Gibson
I phone Suzie, who says, “Just buy an outfit. What’s this country thing about making stuff?” I can’t explain why that’s all wrong.
I call Lucille. As creator of outlandish majorette outfits, she will surely know where I might purchase suitably bull-colored fabric.
“Meet me tomorrow,” she says. “My break’s at two. Don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll find some…what are Minotaurs made of again?”
I tell her that some kind of fur will be involved.
Jackson & Peel is a haberdashery shop. Being a non-sewer, I have never been in such an establishment before. As well as fabric rolls, the tiny shop also boasts a small selection of ornamental coal scuttles. The elderly lady who works here regards my unkempt hair with interest, as if the growing-out crop might benefit from harsh scissoring.
Lucille hums to herself, and examines fabrics. She is wearing her white Fab-U-Look tunic, which makes her appear infinitely hygienic and capable. “Do you have any fur, Mrs. Jackson?” Lucille asks. That sounds terribly personal. Any superfluous hair, Mrs. Jackson? Scars? Piercings? Tattoos?
“What color, Lucille?” the woman asks. She is drinking tea from a fluted-edged china cup, which she sets down on its saucer.
Lucille shrugs. “Brown? Gray? What color are bulls, Ro?”
She should know this, being a country person. “Gray, I think. The Minotaur’s a kind of dirty gray in Tod’s book.”
Mrs. Jackson disappears into a mysterious room where, I suspect, more sinister goods are stored: illegal knives or DVDs where everyone wears shiny black rubber and there’s no plot or dialogue. Surely Jackson & Peel cannot exist solely on sales of fabric, zip fasteners and coal scuttles.
Mrs. Jackson returns with a hefty roll of gray fur, which she lobs onto the cutting table. “Two meters, Ro?” Lucille suggests.
“That should be enough,” I bluff. The fur is vaguely bull colored and textured, but not bull shaped. Not even Lucille can help me with that bit.
We stop off in the café the back of the baker’s where they appear to make coffee with three granules of Nescafé.
“Is Marcus around this evening?” Lucille asks.
“Yes, why?”
“Carl was hoping to catch up with him. He’s got a bee in his bonnet about that garden opposite you.”
I’m developing an allergic reaction to Carl. I suspect that he’s the kind of man who says, “Shall I be mum?” before pouring tea. Worryingly, he appears to have taken a shine to Marcus, and has started to ask him for the occasional beer at the Poacher’s Retreat. Marcus is noncommittal about Carl, but said, “We’re new here. We should make an effort, be friendly. Try to be open-minded.”
Lucille dips a plain biscuit into her coffee and sucks its melting edge.
“What’s wrong with Joe’s garden?” I ask.
“I’d leave it. It’s none of our business. But Carl likes to get involved, can’t help himself—”
“What does Carl plan to do?” My coffee is having a soporific effect. I thought that it was supposed to contain caffeine and jolt your system—isn’t that the whole point?
“He wants to have a word, wonders if Marcus might back him up.”
“Why Marcus?”
“Well, you live opposite. You’re the ones most affected by—”
“Honestly, I don’t think he’ll want to get involved.”
“Have you noticed that thing he’s building?” she continues. “Bits of old wood, flung all over the lawn?”
“I think it’s a shed.” Skin crinkles the surface of my coffee. I scoop it off with a spoon and dump it in my saucer.
“What does he want that for? It’s not like he does any gardening.”
“His garden’s not that bad. It’s only May—it hasn’t had time to get bad.” In fact, the first thing that struck me after our Isle of Wight trip was how quickly the grass and weeds had sprung up, as if doused with some kind of growth hormone. You could virtually see it growing, hear the sprouting of grasses and leaves.
Lucille posts the last fragment of biscuit into her mouth, and pulls a compact mirror and mascara from her bag. She brushes on the mascara, stretching her mouth wide, like Mum and Perry’s koi carp. “Carl’s planning to pop over and offer to help. Nothing nasty.” She snaps the compact mirror shut.
“Can I borrow that?” I ask. Lucille hands me her mirror. I look sickly, the color of anemic coffee, possibly due to the prospect of Marcus being cajoled into harassing Joe, but more likely, the horror of my impending needlework challenge.
I lay out gray fake fur on the living room floor and wonder what to do first. What use is school, really? Did I learn anything useful? Tod often declares, “I don’t understand why I have to know sums.” I explain that he’s clever and that learning even more will help him to have a wonderful life. He always says that he doesn’t want a wonderful life; he’ll live with Marcus and me forever. Sometimes I add that school is useful for stuff other than learning—making friends, for instance—but he never looks convinced.
And he’s right to question the school system. What can I remember now? My big sister winning gymnastics trophies and pretending not to notice the adoring boys who watched her displays.
This library book, Easy Sew Fancy Dress Outfits, includes instructions to construct a clown mask from a paper plate with pan scourers for hair. There are tigers and spacemen and rabbits with bendable ears, but no bulls.
Marcus has gone to meet Carl at the Poacher’s. I’m glad that he’s out. He would suggest that I abandon the Minotaur and persuade Tod to squeeze into his age-three-to-four skeleton outfit, which is still in its original packet.
Tod creeps into the living room, stares at the fur and says, “New rug.”
“It’s not a rug, Tod, it’s your Minotaur. Lie down on that newspaper. I’m going to draw round your legs to make a pattern.” He gives me a worried look, as if I am on the brink of attempting a task way beyond my capabilities, involving gas and naked flames.
“How?” he asks.
“You know how to lie down. You’re really good at it. Do you want this costume or not?” Obediently, he lies on his back. I draw around his lower half, allowing extra space for…seamage, I think you call it. “Off to bed now. I can’t have you hanging around me, putting me off.”
“I’m not doing anything,” Tod protests.
“Yes, you are. You’re breathing.”
I have cut out enormous, furry trousers. How will they stay up? He’ll be standing in front of important judges and the Lexley Gazette photographer and they’ll flump to the floor, showing his milk-lolly thighs. He’ll have to wear one of Marcus’s belts, also too big. I’ll stab in an extra hole. Marcus won’t notice.
“Is it finished yet?” Tod shouts from the bathroom.
At what point does a child acquire patience? They want everything now. They want it before they’ve even thought about wanting it.
“Get dry and put your pajamas on,” I yell back. “I can’t read to you tonight. I’ll come up and tuck you in a minute.”
Hand-stitching the fur takes ages and I wonder if my sewing will hold, whether Tod will have to move in slow motion to avoid putting seams under pressure. Now for the head. I have figured out how to do this: two ovals for sides, and a thick strip for the middle. I’m picturing a kind of furry bonnet.
Ears. How to make ears? I’ll come back to that bit. The nose ring is easy. I bought curtain rings at Jackson & Peel. There’s a pot of gold enamel paint in the kit for Anne Boleyn, which Tod needed in order to carry on living but never got around to making.
I creep into his bedroom to fetch it.
“Can I see it yet?” he demands, throwing off his duvet in a dramatic swoop.
“Not until it’s ready.”
“Are you going to make Anne Boleyn? Can I help?”
“Go to sleep.”
Mazes and Labyrinths lies open on the floor. “Keep one hand on the wall. You might hit dead ends but you will, eventually, solve the puzzle.”
&n
bsp; “You didn’t tuck me in,” he shouts after me.
I make ears from two leaf shapes of fur. One is bigger than the other. Now they’re too small, and might have belonged to a guinea pig. I spike my finger, and daub the crimson bead on to my jeans.
Sarah, he said, as if he was waking up next to her: Sarah.
Sarah doesn’t spend her evenings fretting about the dimensions of ears. She’s never stabbed herself with a needle. Sometimes I cheer myself up by imagining her as a bull, with thick neck folds and gigantic damp nostrils. Mostly, though, I picture her with an airbrushed bottom, like those impossibly perfect models in adverts for thongs.
Upstairs, Tod is chundering on about being unable to sleep because he has been denied his milk, a kiss, and I haven’t read to him. I think about Sarah’s buoyant breasts and hack out horns from a cardboard box. As I paint them white, I imagine she and Marcus on one of their regular nights out, in a restaurant with candles and waitresses in black dresses and heels, not headdresses. No one sings “Happy Birthday” in that sort of restaurant.
The Minotaur has no teeth. What kind of teeth should it have? Forget teeth. It’s past midnight. Tail! How could I have forgotten a tail? I need a furry draught excluder. Would Lucille have one? Or Joe? He doesn’t look like a draught-excluder owner. Mum and Perry have one, but it’s a brown sausage dog. Wrong color.
The door opens as I’m stitching on pan scourers for the bull’s curly fringe. “Hello, love,” Marcus says.
I can detect mild drunkenness without looking at him. “Have fun?” I ask.
“Carl was all for going to see that guy who’s moved in, you know the one—but he’d had a few and I said it might turn ugly.”
“Really,” I say, remembering that bulls do have curly bits, but not fringes.
“What’s all this fur?” Marcus asks.
I hold up the bull head and make him examine my sore thumb.
“Great horse,” he says.
Spring Fair day. Merry-go-rounds and sideshows have already been set up on the common, awaiting the main event. It’s the rain that wakes me, splatting our bedroom window as if being hosed on to the glass. Since I was fifteen, wet fair-grounds have made me sense that something awful is about to happen.
I ran away then. I mean ran away properly. Not to the end of the garden, knowing that I’d hurry back as soon as I got hungry or it started raining, but to Blackpool on the back of a 90cc scooter with a raccoon tail tied to the back, belonging to a boy called Phil.
Phil wasn’t even my boyfriend. He was just a boy I had met at a disco, who thrilled me with his spooky gray eyes and obsession with running away. He wanted to go to Brighton, but I insisted on Blackpool because Dad had spent all his childhood holidays there. He had told me about the Pleasure Beach and illuminations and a nightclub called Diamond Lil’s. If there was a place where everything was built for fun, it had to be Blackpool.
I had twenty-five pounds, my prize for passing my mock exams, and a skewed belief that running away with Phil was one of my cleverer ideas. Blackpool was shrouded in fog, and smelled of onions and wetness. Rain slapped the phone box as I told my mother where I was. “Get back here this minute,” she said. She added something else, in a strangled voice, and I banged the phone down.
Phil stood outside the phone box, holding a wicker basket containing seaside rock shaped like a fried breakfast: egg, bacon and something that was supposed to look like a tomato, but was pink. The raccoon tail was sodden, and hung limply.
Why had I done this? Back home, the air had grown heavy with tension and my mother’s overuse of pine-scented furniture polish. Dad had taken to preparing his own doleful meals—usually crackers and pale, milky cheese—which he ate in the garage. I assumed that this was a permanent arrangement as I had spotted a collection of cling-film-wrapped cheeses on a shelf in the garage, next to the varnish and Nitromorse stripper. I worried about him, eating his meals surrounded by inedibles. I was scared that he’d start varnishing his food.
Phil crunched the rock egg. Fairground music rattled along in its tinny way. We tried to sleep on the beach, covered by damp coats, and stared up at the pier’s underside.
The next day, I lost Phil at the Pleasure Beach. It rained and rained and he had all my money. Feeling sorry for me, the ghost train boy said, “Cheer up, have a free ride if you like.” As I stepped out of the train, I realized I’d been sitting in someone else’s wee.
I never felt the same about fairgrounds after that.
“Can I havamumumum?” Tod asks.
“What?”
“Amumalull.”
“Can’t hear you,” I say. “Take your head off.” He removes the bull headgear to reveal an overcooked face. “God, you’re really sweating. I should have made nose holes. Sure you’re not going to suffocate?”
He shakes his head and marches toward the bouncy castle. It has already acquired a thin layer of gray water. Tod’s not my favorite person right now, not since he failed to greet the Minotaur costume with appropriate enthusiasm, considering the toil that went into its production. He just said, “Is that it?” and complained that Marcus’s belt pinched his stomach.
He was more impressed with the chocolate nests we made for the PTA cakes and candies stall—bashed Shredded Wheat bound with melted Dairy Milk—which I now carry on an uncovered plate, despite the rain, so the entire village can see what a fine, dedicated mother I am. We filled the nests with speckled sugar eggs left over from Easter.
The bouncy castle is manned by a vexed-looking man whose hair sticks flatly to his forehead. Marcus stands a few feet away from us, presumably to disassociate himself from a small, damp bull. For the man bit of Tod’s costume, I gave him an old orange fleece of mine that’s been washed so many times it’s turned peach. Peach makes me look like a dead person.
Adele, Lucille’s daughter, is catapulting herself across the bouncy castle. She’s supposed to be Tod’s school buddy but regards him like she would a woodlouse she’s found under a flowerpot. She is wearing a silver and turquoise majorette’s outfit, which flips up as she bounces, showing baggy white knickers.
I spot Tina with Harry, whose chain-mail ensemble appears to be unmarred by the rain. Clever Tina, she must have used shower-proof wool. Children are dressed as fairies, queens, dragons, mermaids; intricate costumes bearing up well against unfavorable climatic conditions. Tod’s bull head is now sodden. I wish that I had picked a less absorbent fabric.
“These look lovely,” says Carl, chair of the PTA and powerhouse behind the cakes and candies stall. He examines our Shredded Wheat nests, each now containing a puddle as well as the eggs, and sips lager from a plastic tumbler.
“I’m cold and wet,” Tod informs me.
“We’ll just stay for the fancy dress judging, then go home.”
We buy one of our Shredded Wheat nests, and huddle under the awning at the Any Odd Number Wins a Prize stall. I’d like to know precisely how many odd numbers are in that box.
“You might win,” says the stall woman. She has prominent nose veins and is sucking a colossal sweet, which forms a ball in her cheek. Tod rummages in the box. “Look at all these lovely soft toys,” the woman says. “Dig deep down, right to the bottom.”
Where there still aren’t any odd numbers, you little twerp.
We have seven goes. Tod outgrew Winnie-the-Pooh years ago but desperately wants a counterfeit Piglet that isn’t even wearing the right color jacket. We shell out double the cost of a shop-bought Piglet and still don’t win.
“Better luck next time,” growls the woman, rolling the ball to her opposite cheek.
Nearly everyone has hurried to the marquee now, although Adele is still on the bouncy castle, slithering in a small lake. At the marquee’s entrance, on a rickety looking platform, Mr. Tickles is fashioning swans from sausage balloons. He hands them to children who mistake them for presents, then demands five pounds. I suspect that he is trying to raise funds to pay for the chip shop window.
A girl dres
sed as a witch with a raffia wig is grumbling about not being allowed an eleventh go on the odd-numbers stall.
“Let’s find Dad,” I suggest, dragging Tod around the muddy common. The merry-go-round man looks far from merry. He is wearing a carrier bag as a rain hat and waggles a finger when Tod leans against the rumbling generator.
Still hunting for Marcus, we dive into a smaller tent with a soggy paper sign announcing: Tea Tray Contest. The most spectacular trays are marked Winner, Second, Third and Highly Commended. Each component—cake, sandwich, additional item—is marked out of ten. I’m not sure that I approve of Tod seeing these trays. He might expect similar endeavors with his lunchbox.
Sandwiches have been formed by Swiss-rolling the bread and carving off dainty slivers. When Natalie made sandwiches like these for Mum’s Boxing Day buffet, I seriously wondered whether I could carry on being her sister. I am staring at a pyramid of tiny pink cakes, which have somehow been piled up without any of their icing being dented, when I hear Tod behind me, at the tent’s entrance, shouting, “Joe, Joe, come here, look at me.”
Joe strides into the tent and takes a step back from Tod, appraising his costume. “You look fantastic,” he says.
“Guess what I am.”
“You’re a Minotaur. The monster in the maze.”
“How did you know?” I ask, astounded.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Joe says, laughing. “Furry legs, soggy sweatshirt, terrifying-looking ears—think you’ve lost one, Tod, not that it—”
“Will I win?” Tod asks. “Am I the best out of everyone?”
“I bet you’re the most original. I haven’t seen any other Minotaurs around here.” Joe is wearing an enormous, baggy sweater, which looks as sodden as Tod’s bull head. Even his eyelashes are wet.
“You’re building something in your garden,” Tod announces.
“That’s right. It’s a tree house.”