by Fiona Gibson
Joe puts his hand over mine. “What I like about you is—” he begins.
Tod has found something—I hope it’s not a something that bites—which he holds in cupped hands.
What he likes about me is the way I let Tod be himself. “You think that’s good?” I cut in. “His teacher said he’s not all there, like he’s got some disorder. Marcus calls him Wonderboy because he lives in Tod World.”
Joe’s hand is still covering mine. I must not feel bad, because the grass didn’t die, and we’re just talking: isn’t that what you do with neighbors in places like Chetsley? You pass the time of day. Whenever I ask Marcus how he can bear to be around Carl so much, he says, “I’m just being neighborly.” We’ll never settle in if we don’t make friends.
“Joe,” I say, “I’m pregnant.”
“Well, that’s wonderful.”
“It should be, but we’re not right, me and Marcus. Having a baby is the last thing we should be doing.”
He pushes my straggly, growing-out hair from my face and says, “It’s going to be fine, Ro, whatever happens.”
“Mum!” Tod yells from below.
I spring away from Joe as he scrambles up the ladder and onto the platform. Tod has mud up one nostril and a trembling beast, not unlike a nit magnified two thousand times, in his palm.
An entire bottle of agnus castus could not rescue Lucille’s day. She showed up with her hair not secured in an elegant coil or French plait, but flapping about her shoulders, not knowing how to behave without fine silver clips or the tortoiseshell gripper.
I invited her in, and she stomped into our kitchen, but refused to take off her jacket.
“We’re going for a walk,” she announced. “I have to talk to someone, Ro, or my head will explode.”
Now we are pounding across Chetsley Common in the drizzle, on our day off. Tod is at Harry’s birthday party, a football party, at the Leisure Centre in Lexley. He didn’t want to go. I tried to explain that it’s rude not to show up at a party unless you’re very, very sick. “My throat hurts,” he whined unconvincingly.
Lucille is dressed for a serious walk, probably involving paths that aren’t properly tarmacked, judging by her boots. We set off and arrive at a gap in the fence that looks as if it leads to someone’s garden, but turns out to be the start of a proper footpath.
“This came this morning,” Lucille announces. From her jacket pocket she pulls out what looks like a bill. “Twenty-one calls,” she retorts, “to Chile. Who the hell do we know in Chile?” She stops dead and jabs a finger at the amount.
“That’s a lot,” I agree. “Do the children have penpals or something?”
“Of course not. No one has penpals anymore. It’s all chat rooms.” She stomps on, brushing past brambles.
I wonder if this path leads to somewhere interesting, like a café, serving warm brownies.
“And that couple,” she rants on, “it wasn’t his fault. Carl knows how to cover a wedding. There’s your bride and groom shots, bride with her parents, groom with his parents—all together if they prefer, that works out cheaper—and no one stood where they were supposed to. The best man told Carl to leave, said they could have done a better job themselves.”
She pulls a mangled page of the Lexley Gazette from the pocket where the bill came from. I wonder why she is showing me these things. We stop, and I read:
Photographer Wrecked Our Wedding
When they booked a local photographer to capture their dream day, Adam and Jennifer Richards, of Cedar Manor, Newton Meadows, had no idea that their celebrations would end in tears. “Adam and I hoped that the pictures would reflect our informal wedding and give a feeling of fun and happiness,” Jennifer, 29, told the Gazette. “The photographer tried to force everyone into groups, and shouted at my seven-year-old niece for getting grass stains on her dress, then disappeared to the bar until he was, quite clearly, under the influence.”
Nothing could have prepared Adam and Jennifer for the shock of seeing their prints. “It was a beautiful, sunny day, but everything looked so bleak. My niece’s eyes were red from crying and my mother wasn’t in any of the pictures. The tragic thing is, we can’t do a rerun, and will have to rely on memories of our special day.”
The Richards are seeking compensation. Carl Gilbert, of Gilbert Wedding and Portrait Photography, Black Street, Lexley, declined to comment.
“The trouble with weddings,” Lucille says, “is they plan them for years and spend thousands, then complain that the pictures aren’t sunny enough, like Carl can control the weather.”
“Can they actually sue?”
“They can refuse to pay. Then Carl’s only option is to take them to Small Claims, which isn’t worth the hassle. Come on,” she sighs. “Let’s find raspberries.”
Lucille has brought a Tupperware carton to transport the fruit. The raspberries taste ridiculously intense, not like shop fruit at all. I must bring Tod here and show him real food, bursting from nature’s larder. He should grow a little less fond of jam doughnuts and learn to appreciate fresh produce. He still insists that fish is made in a factory, shrink-wrapped and bar coded, bearing no relation to real creatures with gills, like the Dalmatians in his bedroom. When I cooked trout, he glowered at its mouth, which hung slightly ajar, and said, “I don’t eat that sort of fish.”
Lucille drops berries into the carton. As I stuff my face, she says, “What should I do about this bill? I’ve called to check. It’s definitely ours.”
“Have you tried phoning the Chile number?”
“I’d feel stupid, like I was checking up on him.”
“You think Carl’s been calling Chile?”
“Who else could it be? Someone’s done it. But I’m not a snoop, Ro. I wouldn’t stoop so low.”
The path takes us up and away from Chetsley and eventually—miraculously—back to the end of Lucille’s road and pleasingly close to her coffee machine and chocolate shaker. In the show home, damp laundry is draped over every radiator and even the peach-colored leather suite.
“Why don’t you phone that number?” I suggest.
She glares at the phone and then, consulting the bill, taps out the number. She takes the phone to the hall, the walls of which are festooned with photos of Adele in so much hobby-related attire—ballet, tap, majorettes—that I wonder whether the child ever wears ordinary clothes.
Lucille stalks back into the living room.
“Who was it?” I ask.
“It wasn’t a person, Ro. Just a recorded message.” She is wincing, as if her tongue is coated with oil.
“What sort of message?”
Lucille pops a raspberry into her mouth. “Oh, baby,” she breathes, “you’ve got me so horny tonight…”
“What, like a sex line thing?”
She nods, and spits the raspberry out on her hand.
“It must be a mistake,” I say firmly. “They can’t be based in Chile. I’ve always imagined them being recorded by some woman in Croydon, in a rancid old dressing gown, sawing at her toenails with an emery board and—”
Lucille is blinking rapidly. She hands me the carton of fruit. “Actually,” she says, “I don’t like raspberries.”
“They’ll only get sawdusty in our house.”
“I suppose,” she mutters, “I could make raspberry fucking muffins.”
I wonder how such delicacies might go down at Carl’s next PTA cakes and candies stall.
By the time I’m home, Sandy is loading his equipment into his van. Despite the dust that coats every surface—the roof of my mouth and, I suspect, all of our internal organs—I’m sorry to see him go. It’s been quite novel, coming home from work to find a responsive adult to talk to.
He slams the van door shut and says, “You’re the first person who’s had their whole house sanded at once and not moaned. Most places, the owners are off on holiday.”
“I’ll remember that for next time.”
“I hope you don’t mind me breaking that lock o
n the cupboard in your son’s room,” he adds. “The boards go right to the wall and I wanted to treat them properly, in case you want open space under the window.”
“That’s fine. We’ve never had a key for that cupboard.”
“I can fix another lock if you want one.”
“No, just leave it.”
I fish out my checkbook from my bag and write his check.
“I found an old tin in that cupboard,” he adds. “Maybe the other owners left it. I put it on the windowsill in your son’s room.”
I thank him, and watch his van rattle away, then call Marcus to inform him that our home is now a vision of loveliness.
His voice is drowned out by an announcement over the tannoy at Charing Cross. “Train’s cancelled,” he says irritably.
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“I’m not in charge of trains, Ro, just stayed late to finish some—”
I bang the phone down.
Tod’s floor is still sticky so I put him to bed in our room. At nine-thirty, Marcus still hasn’t shown up. I can see that tin on Tod’s windowsill, and could tiptoe ever so quickly across the floor, but don’t want to wreck Sandy’s varnish. I could borrow Carl’s extendable ladder, open Tod’s window and access the tin from the outside, but that sort of behavior really would warrant a front-page story in the Gazette.
Ten-seventeen. Tod is mumbling, dreaming. I hear him say, “Jipshuns.” I creep to his doorway and test the vanish with a finger. It’s not quite dry, but I step quickly to the windowsill and snatch the tin. Its tarnished, slightly rusting lid depicts a thatched cottage smothered thickly with roses.
I sit on the stairs, aware of Tod’s faint murmurings, and open the tin. There are photographs, still in their paper wallet from the developers. They are all of the same girl. Her fair hair falls in chaotic waves, which someone has tried to tame with a rainbow clasp. She is wearing a purple T-shirt with a hippo on the front, and gazing at the candles on a birthday cake.
There’s a woman behind the girl. You can only see her mouth and chin. Her gray top looks stained, and she’s not wearing makeup. Her hands rest on the child’s shoulders, as if prompting her: go on, blow. Maybe the girl has too many wishes to choose just one or doesn’t want to extinguish the flames. Her lips have formed a soft, expectant shape, not a pursed, about-to-blow shape.
I wonder if the candles are the re-lighting kind, giving other children the chance to blow and make wishes, but when I flip through the rest of the photos it doesn’t look as if there were any other children at the party. Just the girl, with a smear of cake on her cheek and a stuffed rabbit in her hand.
The cake has yolk-yellow icing, and four candles. It’s been decorated with one of those icing pens, the kind I once let Tod use to draw on biscuits. He sucked on the tubes and went crazy, punching my leg and slamming doors with such force that the upstairs girl banged on our ceiling. As the icing wore off, he retreated to his room, crying because I’d confiscated Mazes and Labyrinths for hitting me.
I wonder if this girl ended up like Tod after the icing pens, in tears because it was all too much. After our night at Millington Park, Marcus’s parents reported that Tod had hardly spoken in the Leeds Castle maze. “He seemed overwhelmed,” Maureen said.
In one photo, if the woman had turned slightly to the camera, you’d be able to see her face, in profile at least. I don’t know her, but I do know the girl. She has a chin dimple just like her dad’s. She has his full mouth and nearly black, mischievous eyes.
Sarah is the name on the cake.
chapter 21
Acting Normal
“We could move back to London,” Marcus says.
“What, move again after all the work we’ve had done? We can’t do that.” I stare at him, wondering if he’s joking, testing my reaction.
“If it would make things better—” he begins.
“I thought you liked Chetsley.”
“I do like it. I’m just not sure that you do.”
We are occupying a circular table beneath a blackboard listing the Poacher’s award-winning fare. It’s Monday night. There’s only Marcus, me, the humbug man and Bandit, the humbug man’s dog, in the lounge. The man is clutching his half pint and brown paper bag of sweets. Lucille bullied us into going out, after I let slip that today is our wedding anniversary. I think she wanted to get out of the house and avoid conversations about Chile.
We have been married for eight years. In early photos of us together, like in Paris, there’s always a bit of touching going on—hand holding or my arm pressed around his waist. We stood on Pont Neuf, and in Jardins de Luxembourg, and handed our camera to strangers. The camera was our first jointly owned purchase; we didn’t own a microwave then. These passersby always took the trouble to size up the picture properly, and wish us a wonderful holiday.
“I’m just fine,” I tell Marcus. “And we’re not moving.” He looks at me, knowing, of course, that anyone who insists that they’re fine is extremely un-fine.
In fact, I am having trouble speaking. My voice is too high, like I’ve gulped helium. In my trouser pocket I have a photograph. Its sharp corner pricks my thumb. My horribly childish intention is to quietly place it in front of him on the table, and walk out of the pub.
“I just think we should be open-minded,” he says.
“That’s what you said when we looked at the house. Tod’s not changing schools again. There’s been no bullying here. He’s doing okay.”
“That’s it,” Marcus snaps. “You bring everything back to Tod and what Tod needs, not what’s good for us.”
From the bar, the humbug man is tuning in to our conversation with rapt interest. This is what happens when couples don’t go out enough: we store up gripes, like the small change that weighs down our pockets. At the first sip of alcohol, they tumble out and scatter noisily onto pub floors.
The landlord throws a handful of crisps over the bar, which Bandit snaps at eagerly. Marcus nudges my hand away from a blob of wax on the table, which I’ve been madly picking at.
“I shouldn’t be away so much,” Marcus says. “Tod needs me around.”
Now who’s bringing everything back to Tod.
I sip my lager. I’ll only have one, and I’ll drink it slowly; that can’t cause any damage. “Actually,” I tell him, “Miss Glass says he’s doing really well. She’s pleased with the way he joins in with class discussions.”
“Who’s Miss Glass?”
“His new teacher. She’s lovely, just in her first year of—”
“He’s only been back for a week, Ro.”
“It’s been a good week. We haven’t even been late.”
Marcus asks for more beers at the bar, clearly forgetting that I shouldn’t be drinking at all. “Terrible shame about the Best-Kept Village award,” the man mutters. “Losing to Newton Meadows, of all places. Shouldn’t have happened, wouldn’t have happened if certain individuals—we know who we’re talking about, Mr. Skews—had done their bit.”
“Such a pity,” Marcus agrees.
I wish that we hadn’t come to the Poacher’s tonight. All weekend, I have managed to act normally. It’s easier to be normal at home than in a pub with only three customers, one landlord and a dog. I painted the hallway and even let Tod help, to ensure that the procedure was chaotic enough to avoid anything else being discussed. Marcus didn’t ask why the permanently locked cupboard in Tod’s room was now open and empty.
During our normal weekend, I even produced meals to coincide with mealtimes, as if operated by remote control. These offerings were devoid of color: fish, rice, mashed potato. Food for ill people. At the second white meal, Marcus laughed and said, “It’s like living in a hospital.” I stared at my anemic dinner, and would have welcomed Dad’s stew from a tin, if I’d had no involvement in its preparation.
Marcus returns now from the bar with our drinks. “I asked for water,” I remind him. “I shouldn’t be drinking.”
“Sorry, I’ll—�
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“Why won’t you talk about the baby? You’re acting like it’s not happening.”
“That’s not true,” Marcus insists.
“You don’t want it.”
“How can you say that? It’s happened, and we’ll manage. Now please stop shouting.”
The humbug man nods from his bar stool. He picks up his drink, and Bandit’s lead, and walks unsteadily to our table. The dog rests its wet mouth on my thigh. “Poor Bandit had an accident,” the humbug man says. “Jumped into the stream on the common, cut his leg.” He makes us examine the blackened wound where the vet mended him with nine stitches.
I run my fingers over the photo in my pocket: its shiny surface, then the blank side, the matte side. I want to slam it on the table, but the man’s staring at me, blinking moistly, and his dog’s still resting its chin on my leg. There’s a small patch of drool on my trousers.
“Let’s go home,” I say under my breath.
“Oh, don’t be so down, folks,” the man says. “Chetsley will win again next year, you’ll see.”
Lucille is surprised to see us home so early. I want her to leave immediately, and yawn dramatically.
“Isn’t it amazing,” she says, “how your fish have bred?”
“Bread? They’re only supposed to have fish food. Has Tod been dropping crumbs in the tank?”
“I mean babies,” she says. “Tod hadn’t even noticed. There are at least seven little ones, though it’s hard to be sure, because they won’t stay still and be counted. Anyway, you have a whole family in there. Isn’t that wonderful?”
Our shower is housed in a freestanding plastic box, the kind of construction which, minus its creepy plastic curtain patterned with crustaceans, might have featured in a 1960s sci-fi TV program. You would step in as your normal self. Some noises would happen, the box would judder and you would emerge, swathed in tinfoil, with superpowers.
I usually avoid our shower and I am only enduring its lukewarm trickle before bed in the hope that I might step out not as Ro Skews, assembler of lunchboxes and obliging sales assistant at Coffee & Books, but a woman capable of removing Marcus’s hair from his scalp with one swipe.