Goggle-eyes

by Anne Fine

  That’s what he did. We didn’t hear a word – only the door as he pulled it closed behind him, and then, through the bedroom window, his footsteps ringing down our garden path.

  You can depend on Gerald. He just went.

  8

  In the gloom of the cupboard it was hard to see Helen’s face clearly, but it was pretty obvious the idea of Goggle-eyes striding out hopelessly into the storm like Captain Oates was not her idea of a fairytale ending.

  ‘Poor Kitty! How awful! You must have been horribly upset!’

  I told you back at the start that Helen is a softie. I couldn’t help teasing her a little bit.

  ‘Horribly upset?’ I repeated. ‘Is that how you’d feel if your mum and the grey-haired Whatsisname bust up?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘It’s not the same,’ she told me firmly. ‘Goggle-eyes sounds quite nice really, underneath, once you’ve got used to him a bit. Toad-shoes is quite different.’

  (So that was his name. I’d found out at last. Toad-shoes.)

  Helen leaned forward, confidentially, to explain.

  ‘You see,’ she said. ‘Toad-shoes is awful. I’ll tell you what he’s like. He’s –’

  A violent clattering on the door interrupted her. The knob rattled and the panels shook. Stray meteorites colliding with Lost Property Capsule? No, Liz. Her voice came through the panels loud and clear.

  ‘Hey, you guys! Have you any idea how long you’ve been in there? Loopy is definitely panicking. She says you must be running short of air. She’s sent me down with a message.’

  ‘What message?’ I yelled back.

  Long pause. Liz isn’t all that bright. She has to run a huge computer search in order to locate a four-word newsflash. Finally, amongst some rusty slow-functioning components of grey matter, she found it.

  ‘Be out by lunch!’

  Lunch? Helen stared at me, and clapped her hand over her mouth in horror.

  Lunch? Yes, come to think of it, I did feel peckish. And peering through the gloamin’ at the face of my watch, I saw that, sure enough, it was already after twelve.

  ‘Helly, we’ve been in here nearly three hours.’ Behind her hand, Helly just giggled. Meanwhile, Liz the Galactic Intercom was yelling through the door:

  ‘You’ve missed a huge row about making a mess in the art room. And a surprise chemistry test. And putting chairs out for the senior recital. And angles associated with parallel lines.’

  ‘Good,’ I yelled. ‘What are we missing now?’

  ‘Now?’ Liz ran through one of her laborious brain print-outs. ‘Now you are missing French – revision of irregular past participles.’

  ‘You’d better hop along, Liz,’ I suggested. ‘You of all people surely don’t want to miss that!’

  After the couple of seconds it took her to process this, Liz started beating on the door panels again.

  ‘Helly?’ she shouted. ‘Helly? Are you still in there?’

  I ask you! What a stupid question!

  Helly’s so sweet and patient. ‘Yes,’ she called back. ‘I’m still in here, Liz. Honestly.’

  Liz tapped again. You’d think we were two miners trapped hundreds of feet underground behind tons of fallen rock-face. You wouldn’t for a moment think that all Liz had to do was stop her demented rattling of the door knob for one single second, and pull it, for all to be revealed.

  I was just gathering breath to bellow, ‘Push off, Liz!’ when Helly called out:

  ‘Tell you what! Save me a seat at lunch, and we’ll sit together. I shall be out in a few minutes.’

  There’s tact for you. And it does work. Liz, when she answered, sounded really cheerful.

  ‘Right-ho!’ she called. ‘See you at lunch-time, Helly.’

  The mad rattling of the doorknob stopped at last. Suddenly it seemed very quiet in the cupboard.

  ‘Go on, then,’ Helly said (rather imperiously for her, I thought). ‘Quick. Get on with the story. What happened when Gerald turned up on the doorstep with armfuls of flowers? Did your mum forgive him, or did the poor old sausage get the Big Freeze?’

  In as much as it’s possible to stare at someone through dimly-lit murk, I stared at Helly Johnston. So Goggle-eyes had been transmuted into ‘Poor Old Sausage’ now, had he? Honestly! If her sweet nature could, in the space of a morning, turn Gerald Faulkner into an object of tender sympathy, it probably wouldn’t be more than a couple of weeks before Toad-shoes, creeping warily through the back door, found Helly’s arms wrapped round him in cheerful welcome. My mission, clearly, was all but accomplished. It had been easier than I thought.

  Well. No point in holding back close to the goal. So I finished the story.

  Big Freeze? Big Freeze? I tell you, what Gerald Faulkner would have met if he’d walked up our path was not so much the Big Freeze as the Original Permafrost. Good job he never risked it. There would have been icicles hanging from his silvery locks before he so much as stepped on our doormat (which might still say WELCOME in carefully woven and dyed two-tone sisal, but which definitely wouldn’t have meant it). I don’t think I’ve ever seen an expression as vinegary as the one on Mum’s face when she drew those miserable shrivelled chops and poor little blackened peas out from their overnight charring in the oven.

  ‘Take my advice, Kits,’ she said to me a shade incomprehensibly, but with unmistakable venom. ‘Never confuse a man’s concern for your physical welfare with his support for any of the rest of you!’

  ‘No, Mum,’ I said. (Best not to argue, I’ve always found, when you can see the bags under their eyes.) ‘Didn’t you sleep?’

  ‘Sleep?’ she snapped, pushing her tangled hair back from her pale face. ‘Of course I slept. Why shouldn’t I sleep, for heaven’s sake? Naturally I slept like a log, all night. What on earth makes you think I couldn’t sleep?’

  And that was that.

  What a cheek! I was so angry that I banged the door at her when I went off to school. Parents have such a nerve. If they decide it’s inconvenient for you to know things or have strong feelings about them, then you don’t know them and you don’t have feelings – simple as that! When she’s in love with Goggle-eyes, she doesn’t even notice that I hate his guts, he makes my flesh creep and I wish him dead. Then, over weeks and weeks, it becomes obvious to me that, if I don’t like him, I am going to have to lump him. And since I actually happen to live here, since this is my home if you’ve noticed, I’d rather not go on this way. It makes me miserable. So I make this jumbo-sized effort to come to terms with Gerald Faulkner, talk to him, see his good points, admit that he’s really important to Jude, and he tries hard.

  And then – poof! Just because he gets right up Mum’s nose one night, Gerald is banished for good. And, once again, Mum simply goes and blinds herself to everyone else’s feelings. That can’t be Jude, you know, sitting so glumly on the sofa with her thumb in her mouth and Floss curled in her lap. Oh, no. That woeful little person can’t be Jude because, if it were, that might mean Jude’s actually sitting there missing somebody she actually cares for, somebody precious to her. And Mum’s decided that person no longer exists.

  ‘Look, Mum!’ Jude charges into the kitchen every other morning. ‘Gerald’s sent me another postcard!’

  ‘Gerald?’ (You know the tone of voice: Gerald? Gerald Who? Do I know someone called Gerald?) Not the response to encourage someone as shy as Jude to talk a little about how she’s missing him.

  It makes me very angry. It’s very dishonest. After all, it’s not as if Gerald were just Mum’s, to keep or drop as she chooses. Jude had become close to him too, for better or worse. They spent a lot of time together. He helped her with her homework. She depended on him. You could say he was even getting to be a little bit like another father. I tell you, the day I wandered in the sitting room and caught Jude trying to read the stockmarket report to herself, moving her lips and using her finger to try and keep her place on the enormous page, I nearly burst into tears, honestly I did.

&
nbsp; And I missed him too, if I’m perfectly honest. At first I only missed all the little things that you’d expect: the bright fizzy drinks; the boxes of chocolates; getting the radiator in my room fixed as soon as it went on the blink – that sort of thing. But then, as weeks went by, I started missing all sorts of other things, like Mum sometimes being in those really good moods that came from having someone standing around admiring her for hours on end. Oh, she did invite poor old Standby Simon round quite a few times (especially the week Jude started on multiplication of decimals!) But it wasn’t the same. How could it be? Simon is really nice, but he isn’t Gerald.

  And I know Mum missed Gerald too. I could tell. Sometimes I caught her staring at the telephone. One day I even watched her sitting beside it for half an hour, wondering whether to pick it up and dial. But she never cracked. Even that Saturday morning when I told her I was going to the library, and I knew from the way her voice went all drab and flat as she answered that, like me, she was remembering the time she chased me round the kitchen table, laughing and trying to snatch my library card, and Gerald caught her in his arms.

  I’ll tell you what else I missed – his little acid drop remarks. Like when we walked past a man shouting ‘Equal pay for all!’ and Gerald whispered to me: ‘Mark my words, there speaks a poor man.’ And when it was my turn to take the gerbils at the end of the term, and by the time I finally staggered into the house with the cage, it turned out the two of them had chewed up my report, every last. word. Mum’s face went dark. I think she thought I’d fed the stiff brown envelope through the bars deliberately. I reckon she was just on the verge of ripping my ears off when Gerald somehow got in first, sarcastically suggesting we try to sell the cage to CND Head Office as a cheap, efficient and ecologically sound shredding machine. Mum fell about laughing, and I was saved.

  I wasn’t the only person he rescued, either. I’ve not forgotten that awful Sunday night Jude panicked utterly because she suddenly remembered she was supposed to learn a whole poem about ‘Winter’ for first thing Monday morning. The library was closed. Jude tore round the house half frantic, close to tears, begging us to stop whatever we were doing and just think, please! Somebody must remember a poem about winter – a really short one she could learn in time.

  So good old Gerald sighed and laid down his paper, and sat on the sofa, pondering. And then suddenly the light of memory flashed in his eye, and, standing up, he grasped the lapels of his jacket like a town councillor in a telly serial, and solemnly declaimed the shortest winter poem he could dredge from his cultured past:

  ‘Ladies and Gentlemen,

  Take my advice,

  Pull down your knickers,

  And slide on the ice.’

  Jude thought it was the funniest poem she’d ever heard. She laughed so hard she stopped her terrible worrying altogether, and managed to learn the whole of ‘When Icicles Hang by the Wall’ before morning. (It turned out good old Gerald knew that, too.)

  It wasn’t often Gerald could surprise you. But I was really surprised to find out how much I ended up missing having him around. So was Mrs Lupey. When I handed in my sonnet, ‘Gerald – A Lament’, she only raised her eyebrows a little. But when she gave me back my essay, ‘The Person I Miss Most’, she said she found it very moving indeed, and the sincerity of my feelings showed even through the rather tasteless jokes with which it was most unfortunately studded.

  Give Gerald his due, he did his best to keep in touch without annoying Mum. The postcards he sent Jude came regularly; but each had some special picture or joke on the front that let him off the hook, as if he were saying: ‘I happened to notice this card, and I couldn’t resist it.’ (One was a cat that looked exactly like our Floss, for example. Jude used it to make Floss a ‘real’ passport. And another was a blackboard covered all over in terrifying mathematical symbols. Jude went quite pale.) And, on the back, though he wrote something different every time, he always somehow managed to imply his fondness for Jude remained unchanged, while mere force of circumstance kept him regrettably stuck on his side of town.

  And I got something from him too, after a couple of weeks. It was a copy of a reply from the Commander of the submarine base, and pretty weaselly and apologetic it was too (though there was no mention of chipping in for the dry-cleaning of the suit). Mum said he only bothered to reply at all because Gerald made a point of sending copies of his complaint both to his Member of Parliament and to the First Sea Lord of the Admiralty. But that was just sour grapes. After all, if enough people took the time, like Gerald, to complain loudly and bitterly all round whenever they were splattered with mud by the police or the armed forces, some people’s desks would soon be armpit high in disgruntled taxpayers’ letters, and in the end the men in charge would probably find it less trouble to order their underlings to be more civil.

  Mum’s mouth set like a trap when I said this, but she was in a bad mood anyhow. Mind you, she had an excuse. Each day her court case crept a little nearer, and she was getting dead nervous. You see, she didn’t know whether to plead guilty or not. Pleading not guilty was a lot more bother, but it’s the only way to get to say your piece. And, apprehensive as she was, Mum felt she ought to stand up in Sheriff Court and defend her actions. So day after day round the house we’d come across her delivering impassioned speeches to herself like a mad bag-lady, insisting these weapons were ‘a potential crime against humanity as wrong as the gas chambers of Auschwitz’, or that ‘the citizen of a free country has both a right and a duty to act by his or her own conscience’, or ‘silence implies consent, so I won’t stay silent’. She should have been a lawyer, honestly. She was very convincing. You’d sneak up on her in the kitchen, and she’d be standing with her arms in the sink, telling the geranium on the window sill: ‘No! It can never be morally right to use these ghastly weapons at any time, whether first, or as unthinkable retaliation after we ourselves are doomed!’ Or, making the bed, she’d ask the pillows as she plumped them up: ‘Tell me – a child dies of hunger every few seconds while we spend a million a day on nuclear weapons. Do you think that’s right? Is that what you want?’

  After a couple of weeks of this, I reckoned our house plants and our pillows must, like those sheep round the submarine base, know more about nuclear issues than the average Scottish voter. But in the end all these imaginative rehearsals of her few glorious moments in court had quite the opposite effect. By the big morning, she was for chickening out.

  ‘Chickening out?’

  ‘That’s right.’ She slammed my breakfast down in front of me as if I’d been arguing, not just asking. ‘I’m going to go there, plead guilty, pay the fine, and come straight home. I’ve done my bit.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ (She’d been so ratty stamping round the house making political speeches that part of me was quite relieved. And it would be lovely to come home from school and find Mum her old self again, interested in my day at school, not too distracted to help Jude with her homework, happy to sit and watch the news without muttering darkly whenever some malefactor’s face flashed on the screen: ‘That’s who the police should be watching, you know – not upright citizens like me!’)

  I really enjoyed that day. It went so fast. Between lessons I kept thinking about Mum, imagining her case going through court like clockwork, thinking how glad she’d be that the whole business was over at last, how lovely it would be to charge through the front door yelling ‘Mum! Mum! Are you back?’ and see her poking her head round the kitchen door, grinning her head off.

  I couldn’t wait to get home. I even jumped off the bus at the stop by the roundabout and ran across the park, because it’s quicker. I belted up the path and flung myself against the front door, tugging at the catch.

  It was still locked. I was a bit surprised. It didn’t matter, since I could let myself in with my own key; but all the same it was unsettling. And though I still hoped that for some reason she’d gone all the way round the house and let herself in at the back door, really I knew however l
oudly I called through the echoing hall and up the stairs, she wasn’t going to be there to answer.

  It seemed a very long wait. It was lonely, too. Jude wasn’t coming home – she’d been sent to a friend’s house, just in case – and I couldn’t settle. I spread my homework books across the table, and stealing handful after handful of currants from the dried fruit jar, I watched the clock.

  Four-thirty. Five. No sign of her. No phone call. At five-fifteen I cracked, and rang Gerald’s workplace. The secretary would have let me speak to him, I know. But Gerald wasn’t there.

  ‘Hasn’t been in all day,’ he said cheerfully.

  ‘Do you know where he is?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’ And then he added: ‘All I can tell you is that Mr Faulkner said it was something special, and he was not sure when he would be back.’

  I put the phone down slowly. Something special… In the mirror when I looked up, I saw I was grinning. I knew where Gerald was. Gerald – so steady and reliable and, yes, predictable. Not at all the sort of person to stop caring for someone just because she is in a mega huff about some serious issue they disagree on, and extra jumpy waiting to go to court. No. Gerald’s the sort of person who can wait.

  I sat down in front of my books, and did my homework without so much as another sideways glance at the clock. I didn’t have to worry about Mum any longer. Even if she was still hopping mad at him (and, knowing her, she probably was) it didn’t matter. He would still be there, sitting at the back of the court, making quite sure that everything went as it should – checking no one told lies about what she did, or bullied her; lending her money to pay her fine if she’d forgotten her chequebook; making sure she got home safe…

  She didn’t get home till a quarter to seven. Her entrance was as immodest as usual.

  ‘Ta-ra! Enter the heroine! Crack open the champagne!’

  I pushed my books away, and ran to hug her.