by Fiona Gibson
The shower has dwindled to a splutter. It’s like standing under a leaky gutter. I don’t understand why the plumber couldn’t do anything to increase the water pressure—“your tank,” he said, “it’s the position of your tank”—and how Marcus has managed to exist for three days without mentioning the cupboard or missing tin.
He’s downstairs now, tapping away on his laptop in the kitchen. He’s being busy. Too busy to talk to his ill-humored wife. What I am planning to do is climb out of this shower and make some kind of scene. Stamping on our newly sanded floors, that would cause quite a ruckus, but I’d have to be wearing the right kind of shoes and my pink sandals have been missing since we moved our furniture for Sandy. All I can find are my fat country boots, and suede slippers. I will not attempt to stamp while wearing slippers.
If I start shouting, I’ll wake Tod. What I did, when my parents were rowing downstairs, was shut off my ears and get out my pens and my drawing books. It didn’t harm me one bit. Kids can do that, cut off everything beyond their immediate world. You just focus so hard on what you’re doing, wondering whether light brown or ginger is the right color for the boy’s hair in your drawing, that you’re barely aware of the crash of a solid but breakable thing—the phone, maybe—hitting a wall.
Children know how to be mad. They don’t consider which shoes to wear to create maximum impact when foot stomping. When I was pregnant with Tod, and witnessed a girl throwing herself onto the floor in Knickerbox because she wasn’t allowed to remove all the lace briefs from their hangers, I vowed that my own child would never exhibit such unsociable behavior. Motherhood, I figured, would consist mainly of pleasurable activities, like sponge painting and reading Where the Wild Things Are. I actually believed that, as my child’s incubator for forty weeks, I might have some control over how he or she would turn out.
Then I discovered that all children have tantrums. Tod had an outburst so wild and furious—worse, even, than the kite incident on Chetsley Common—that the salesgirl in the Early Learning Center let her boiled sweet fall out of her mouth. Marcus and I were trying to remove him from a push-along car. It took both of us to prize his grasp from the steering wheel. I worried that we had damaged his fingers and that the woman on her mobile—whose neatly plaited daughter was playing quietly with a doll’s house patio set—was actually calling the police.
In the shower, cold water is now dribbling on to my head. I pull on my dressing gown, still thick with wood dust despite being washed at ninety degrees, and use the milk-and-honey body lotion, which I filched from Millington Park, on my face.
Marcus has been dozing on the sofa. “I thought you hated that shower,” he murmurs.
My dressing gown feels clammy, and I’m shivering. What I had planned to say was: Could you tell me, please, when Sarah’s fourth birthday was? My inner toddler would rise in my throat. I would be as scary and beyond reason as Tod in the Early Learning Center.
Marcus opens his eyes and says, “You haven’t dried yourself properly. You’re making a puddle.”
What I do is snatch Tod’s school sweatshirt from the arm of the sofa and fling it at him. It flops against the side of his head, and drops silently onto his shoulder. Calmly, he picks it off and folds it neatly. Then he stands up, turns off the TV and leaves the room.
That showed him.
chapter 22
A Little Mistake
When I ran away to Blackpool, I lost Scooter Phil on the Pleasure Beach. He’d been looking after my money. I pushed between queues for the rides, and ran out of the fairground, past B and Bs with vases of sun-bleached plastic flowers on their windowsills. Most of the houses had cracked concrete forecourts instead of proper gardens. A boy of around my age was fixing a bike on a gravelled square in front of a pebble-dashed house called Seaview, which didn’t have a sea view at all.
“Are you lost?” the boy asked.
I dropped my bag at my feet and told him about Phil, my money and not knowing what to do.
“Come back later,” the boy said. “We’ve got a caravan in our back garden—I’ll make sure it’s unlocked. You can sleep in there if you promise not to mess anything up.”
His face was so kind, I wanted to cry.
“My dad’ll go mental if he finds out,” the boy added.
I came back when it was dark and my legs ached from walking. The inside of the caravan smelled of damp swimming things trapped in a plastic bag for several decades. I tried to sleep but was worried about being discovered by the boy’s dad. Just before six, I crept out and stood at the side of the road that runs along the seafront. A Mini pulled up beside me. The driver, a woman of around my mum’s age, said she was going to London. As she drove, she forked coleslaw into her mouth from a plastic tub wedged between her thighs.
The woman gave me money for the tube and a lecture about letting Phil look after my money. She said, “I hope, after this, you’ll learn to take responsibility yourself.”
“If it’s not a school day,” Tod protests, “so why do I have to get up?”
“We’re going on a day trip,” I announce. The baby fish flick lazily around the tank. Some are mainly black, like one of the adults; the others are silver, like the other parent, but don’t have its spots.
“Don’t want to go out,” Tod grumbles. “Want to stay home and draw.”
I have decided that we are taking a trip on a riverboat. It will be excellent fun, and may even encourage Tod to appreciate nature. We have lived in Chetsley for nine months. It’s about time he took an interest in wildlife—ducks, for instance.
I tell Marcus my plan in a robotic voice: “We-are-going-on-a-boat.”
“Aren’t you coming, Dad?” Tod asks at breakfast, with a pained look.
“I think your mum just wants to go with you.”
“Why?” Tod asks. He is still wearing pajamas and has failed to respond to my several thousand requests to get dressed. Each time I place his clothes beside him—thick, polo-necked sweater and jeans, suitable for a boat trip—he wanders out of the room. “I want Dad to come,” Tod insists.
“I’ll take you out another day,” Marcus says.
A small trough has appeared between his eyebrows. I wonder if it has been caused by the strain of acting normal or our colorless meals.
The boat leaves from Newton Meadows, a ten-minute drive from Lexley. It seats around thirty but, by the time we arrive, is only a quarter full. As the engine starts, Tod exhibits more interest in a bobbing Fanta can than a family of mallard ducks. “When does it speed up?” he asks.
“It doesn’t, sweetheart. It’s not a speedboat. We’re on a river cruise and you should be enjoying yourself.”
Everyone else seems content with the boat’s steady pace. I start to tell Tod how to distinguish the male mallard from the female, but he’s not listening. He hasn’t even brought his yellow binoculars. It appears that they are to be used for spying only on Joe, not on wildlife.
A harassed young couple keeps passing their baby to each other, in the hope that the partner will take responsibility for the child for more than two minutes. At each change of holder, the child’s cries grow louder and I begin to wish that we’d reach the wide bit of river where the boat will turn round and head back.
I want to offer to hold their child, to remind myself what a person so small and new feels like in your arms, but worry that they’ll think I’m some crackpot. I’d be so embarrassed if they refused. The other passengers would stare and we’d all become horribly aware of the engine’s low rumble.
“Are we nearly there yet?” Tod asks.
“There isn’t a there, Tod. We’ll just go back to where we started.” I realize now that this excursion has been a mistake. Don’t I know the first thing about children? They want to go somewhere. A destination, preferably with gift shop and café attached, should feature on any day trip. The young mother announces that baby’s nappy’s dirty, that’s why she’s upset, and totters past the small counter where hot drinks and cheese rolls a
re served, and into the toilet.
“What are boat toilets like?” Tod enquires.
“They’re usually very cramped and smelly from the chemicals.”
“What chemicals?”
“Formaldehyde, I think. It’s really stinky. You can use it to preserve things, like animals.”
“Why?” he asks.
“So they don’t go—you know—all rotten.”
Tod smiles at this. He watches the woman emerging from the loo with her now silent baby. “I want to see,” he demands.
“See what?”
“The toilet.”
“Tod, we didn’t come to look at the toilet. Why don’t you see which birds you can identify? Look, I think that’s a pigeon.”
He is still staring at the loo door, waiting for someone to go in so he can glimpse the wonders within. “I want to go,” he announces.
“We can’t go, Tod, the boat’s only just turned round. We’re stuck on here for at least another half hour.”
“I need to pee,” he insists.
I accompany him into the toilet where he nags me to demonstrate the pedal flusher several times and explain where the stuff goes and what happens when that tank thing is full up. Where does it go then? It’s only when someone raps firmly on the door that Tod will remove himself from the toilet zone.
He fires questions about formaldehyde all the way back to Newton Meadows. I can’t face going home yet, so we drive to the Coach and Horses, a pub with a beer garden and fenced-off play area to keep children away from their parents. The play area’s gate is too hefty for small children to open.
Tod shuns the play area, and the bright orange, sinister-looking pellets on his Bob the Builder plate—whom he regards as the antichrist—which were advertised on the children’s menu as chicken nuggets. He nudges the plate to the farthest edge of the table, as if fearing contamination from Bob in his yellow hard hat, and announces, “You’re cross with Dad.”
“What makes you think that?” A woman wearing a frightful wide-brimmed yellow hat, the kind that should be banned from areas in which small children are playing, gives me a sharp look.
“Why are you mad?” Tod asks.
“Everyone gets angry sometimes. It’s normal.”
He flicks a nugget off the table. It hits the stone flags with a clack. “It’s not right,” he mutters.
“It’s just life, Tod. No one can be happy all the time.”
“Why?” he asks.
The yellow-hatted woman glances at him pitifully. Who is she to be so judgmental? Her son, who’s been crying for at least twenty minutes to be liberated from the play area, has mooched away to pluck crisp packets from the litterbin.
“Why what?”
Tod jabs at his lower teeth. “Why’s it wobbly?”
I have blundered through sperm-meeting-egg scenarios and forgotten to tell him that his milk teeth will fall out. “It’s wobbly,” I say, pulling him on to my knee, “because you’re growing up.”
We must be back in Chetsley by three because Julia is holding a special event at the bookshop and needs me to help. Muriel Hope, a renowned children’s author and illustrator, will read from her new book. By the time we arrive, the shop is already milling with customers, and Julia is darting from group to group, flushed a delicate pink from the effort of mingling.
Muriel is a long, skinny woman with a mischievous face, perfectly designed for spying through gaps in fences. We have forty copies of her new book, plus her range for younger children, What’s Inside a Snail?, Where Does the Sun Go at Night? and the bestselling What Do Babies Keep in Their Pockets? Julia has set out juice for the children, wine for the adults, and pinned up posters depicting the covers of Muriel’s books.
When no more customers can fit into the shop, Julia dispenses thank-you-for-comings and says, “Could the children please sit at the front, as Muriel Hope, my favorite children’s author, will read from her delightful new book, Alfie’s Dream.”
Muriel tucks speckled hair behind her ears—her coloring reminds me of Bandit, the humbug man’s dog—and extracts rectangular-framed glasses from a crocodile case. She begins: “Alfie loved dreaming. He dreamt every night, and every day, when he wasn’t even asleep. This is how Alfie’s troubles began.”
Tod sits cross-legged on the floor, inches from Muriel’s pointed-toe boots. He seems to be enjoying this even more than the chemical toilet demonstration.
“Alfie’s dreams made grown-ups cross. Whenever Alfie’s mum told him to put his shoes on, or they would be late for school, Alfie would dream about being a bat. Imagine, he thought, having a furry mouse body and wings. Those wings were such a cool shape, Alfie thought.”
Tod’s eyes are fixed on Muriel’s hands. She has long, elegant fingers, like tapered candles, and wears several twisted-silver rings.
“At school, Miss Woods noticed that Alfie was not doing his work. He was watching a bird hopping along the tops of the railings. I wish I could do that, Alfie thought.”
I spot Joe, lurking at the back of the shop. I haven’t seen him since that afternoon in his tree house, when nothing happened. Why is he here? It’s all parents and children. I recognize most faces from the school gate. They are the women I greet with bright, hopeful smiles, willing them to ask Tod for tea. I can’t understand why Joe would be interested in a children’s author.
“Although Alfie was in trouble with his mum and his teacher, he didn’t get into bother at weekends because that’s when he was with his dad. Alfie’s dad took him out at night, on bat hunts. His dad explained that bats have high-pitched squeals for voices. People can’t hear them, Alfie’s dad said. But Alfie was different. He could hear bat noises.”
Muriel sets the book down, and a queue forms at the table where she is poised to sign copies. Harry shoves his way to the front, filches a Biro from the beehive-shaped pot at the till, and uses it to poke his rear end. “Itchy bum,” he mutters angrily.
I wonder if this is another symptom of the wheat allergy.
Lucille is here, and gives me an I-need-to-talk look, but I’m too busy at the till to speak to her now. When the books have been sold and most of the customers have gone, I find Joe and Tod discussing Alfie and whether he might actually turn into a bat—not like Batman, but a real animal with a mouse body, that hangs upside down as it sleeps.
“My son never went for Batman,” Joe says. “He preferred the Joker, the Riddler, Catwoman—the baddies. They were more exciting.”
“I didn’t know you had a son,” I say, which comes out sounding like, Why didn’t you tell me you have a son?
“He lives in Dorset, with his mother,” Joe says.
Lucille plonks a hand on my shoulder and smiles richly at Joe. “You’re the one with the garden,” she says. There is wine on her breath as she guides me away from Joe and Tod and hisses, “The phone mystery’s solved.”
“Who was it?”
“Leo, who spends all his time in his room with that bloody astronomy book, only that’s not what he does really.”
“What does he do?”
“I found a stash of girlie mags wrapped up in his basketball kit at the bottom of his wardrobe. That’s normal boy stuff, I can handle that. At the back of the mags are small ads for phonelines. I confronted him, knew he was lying when he insisted on washing up, drying and putting the dishes away. He’s so sorry—thought it would be the same price as a local call. The ad didn’t say that this woman, this Lisa-Ann, is in Chile.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Thrash him?” She shrugs. “We worked out that, if we cancel his pocket money for twenty weeks, that should just about cover the calls.” Lucille snorts. “No wonder he’s so tired all the time.”
As Joe and Lucille leave the shop, I hear her saying that it’s great, how he’s let his garden grow wild and doesn’t give a stuff what anyone thinks.
Muriel Hope thanks Julia for attracting such a crowd.
“Before you go, would you mind looking at Ro’s wo
rk?” Julia says. “She’s a wonderful illustrator. I’ve told her she shouldn’t be working here, but illustrating her own—”
“We’re in a hurry,” I say, snatching Tod’s hand.
“No, we’re not,” Tod says. “You’re not talking to Dad. You don’t want to go home.”
I wish now that Julia hadn’t badgered me into bringing my drawings. Muriel’s mouth has set firm, and she looks rather desperate around the eyebrows.
“Show her, Ro,” Julia says brightly.
I pull out my folder from under the counter and hand Muriel the drawings.
Muriel flips through so quickly she couldn’t possibly see anything, and thrusts them back into my hands. “Very good,” she says, ramming her glasses case into her bag.
“They’re meant to hang together, as a sort of story.”
Tod is grinning at Muriel. “I’ve got a wobbly tooth,” he announces, peeling back his lower gum to reveal the trembling incisor.
“That’s lovely,” Muriel says, “but I really have to dash.”
If you want to know something, just ask. Marcus is in bed, trapped beneath the new duvet I bought to reward us for enduring the sanding. I am blocking the bedroom door, so he can’t escape.
“Marcus,” I say, “I need to talk to you.”
He sits up and rests his chin on his hands. The walls look plum-colored in the streetlight that ekes into the room, but are really marshmallow pink. We haven’t painted it yet. It’s still Gordon and Betty’s bedroom.
“Ro,” he says, “please come here.”
I sit on the corner of the bed and wait.
“It happened a long time ago.”
“How long ago?”
“She was born just after Tod’s first birthday.”
I am incapable of performing basic mental arithmetic. Was she conceived when I was pregnant or after Tod’s birth? Tod was one. Add nine months. No, subtract nine months. “What I need to know is, when did she—when did you—” I need to know when it happened, precisely when, but feel like I’m biting on foam, the kind that’s inside the seats on buses. “You were having an affair,” I say finally, “when Tod was a baby. It’s gone on all these years.”