There wasn’t any room for me to sit down at our table, and before I knew it, I was yanked up onto Trotsky John’s lap like I was a three-year-old, which was very embarrassing. I’m ten years’ old for heaven’s sake! I picked up some of the pamphlets and started to read them so I didn’t once have to talk to him. They were all about solidarity with the people in Prague and Vietnam, the students who have been rioting in Paris, and the editors of the newspapers in Athens who have been put in prison by the colonels who rule that country. Trotsky John was talking loudly which meant that he was blowing smoky breath and beer fumes over me because he was drinking some cans of that instead of the tea in the café; then he was calling out to people he knew and introducing them all to Mummy, but no one seemed to be very interested because they were all talking about the demonstration and couldn’t hear anything anyway.
After a bit, Mummy whispered in my ear, ‘Time to go, Only One. Dad will be waiting for his dinner.’ I was ever so pleased. I was glad that we went to shout at the embassy, but I also wanted to go home to get far away from Trotsky John.
‘You’re not leaving us already!’ he said, looking all surprised.
‘We’ve got to, John. Adrian’s expecting us back,’ she said while I was getting off his knee and she was finding her bag under his chair.
‘I see. Going back to your bourgeois little existence with your bourgeois little bank manager then.’
‘He’s not a bank manager, John.’
‘I feel sorry for you, Pammo—really sorry for you,’ he called out to us as we were going towards the door through all the people. It was lovely to get outside away from the crush and the noise and the smoke. We started walking along the pavement to the tube station and after just a few steps, Mummy suddenly stopped. When I looked up at her she was just staring at me with her head on one side.
‘Gosh, Ben. Look at you standing there! As tall as me now.’ She stared again and very slowly smiled as though she hadn’t seen me for a long time. Then she bent her head down and gave me a kiss on the cheek.
Q
The next Saturday, Mummy and my dad and me went to Bognor Regis for the day in the car. It was sunny and windy and rainy all at the same time, so there weren’t very many people on the beach. Mummy and I went paddling and were running backwards and forwards away from the sea, screaming and pretending to be frightened of the huge waves that the wind was making. My dad skimmed stones and laughed at our game. Then we had tea and scones with strawberry jam and cream at a place with pink tablecloths and cups and saucers with roses on. I was laughing because Mummy had told me before we went into the café that a wave had wet her knickers, and she wanted to take them off. When she sat down she was making funny faces and crossing her eyes, and I got the giggles so badly I couldn’t stop. The waitress joined in the laughter, though she didn’t know the reason, and later she brought another huge extra dollop of cream as a special treat. Mummy was holding her cup up to her face with both hands like she does when she’s really enjoying her tea. The day at the park in Saxham when the sherry bottle got smashed seemed as though it could have been ages and ages ago.
Afterwards, we paddled in the sea again while we walked back to the car at the other end of the beach. I smiled when I looked at Mummy and my dad away in the distance in front of me. He had his trousers wet up to his knees, and she had her dress all tucked up in her belt. They were holding hands tightly and every now and again they leant towards each other, and I bet they must have been thinking that now things had gone back to being as nice as the days when we lived in Beirut.
Q
Just a few days after that I went back to school. This time when Mummy took me to the station I wasn’t having to remember any of those things like I had to before, like the keys, the money, and checking for her half-finished mints. There wasn’t the slightest sign of the sherry bottle in her bag, and she didn’t cry when the train came. Instead she smiled at me and held my face in her hands and kissed me on both cheeks through the window of the train and said, ‘I love you, Only One,’ with just a slight shakiness in her voice. I think she was on some sort of best behaviour so that I’d know that everything was going to be alright from now on. ‘I’ll see you at half term,’ she said.
I dreaded getting back to school even more than usual, and I was also a bit upset that my long trousers hadn’t arrived from the school shop. But most of all I was worried that everyone was bound to be talking about what happened to me last term and why I’d done it, so I was having to plot like mad what I was going to say.
But no one was talking about it. I began to think that it must have been a rule that everyone had been told about ‘not to say anything to Teasdale about being on the roof.’ Only Theo properly mentioned it, and when he did he was whispering and looking around as though he was breaking the rules and might get into trouble for it. That was typical of course, knowing him. Nosey old cretin. I think they’ve made sure not to put him in the same dorm as me again, which is a jolly good thing if you ask me.
‘Why d-did yh-yh-you do it?’ he whispered to me when we were all going up the stairs to our new dorms on the first night.
‘What?’
‘C-climb onto the roof.’
‘I don’t know…’
‘Oh c-c-come on, ’course y-yh-you do.’
‘I wanted to see the view.’ A bit of me wanted to say it was because he was so nasty and pulled down my pajama bottoms, but I never did say that in the end.
But it might have been because of Mr. England that no one was really talking very much about the roof. I think people were already getting a bit used to the idea of what I’d done, and it was quite a long time ago so they were forgetting it a bit. But the Mr. England news had happened during the holidays so everyone wanted to catch up about it.
Mummy told me the afternoon after our day in Bognor Regis. I was sitting on the steps outside the front door with her, and when Women’s Hour finished on the radio, she moved up close to me and put her arm around me.
‘Darling, there’s something I’ve got to tell you.’ She was stubbing her cigarette out on the step and taking a long time about it and flicking her hair away from her face which is a thing she does when she’s a bit worried.
‘It’s horrid news, and I want you to be brave about it.’ She was holding me very tight, and I started to get quite frightened during the pause. I knew I didn’t want to hear what she was going to say.
‘What, Mummy? What is it?’
‘It’s about Mr. England…’
‘What about him, Mummy? What’s happened?’
And then she told me he was dead.
She told me he’d been swimming in the sea and had got caught in a really strong current that had taken him right out to sea.
‘When, Mummy? When did it happen?’
‘At the beginning of the summer holidays, Darling. While you and I weren’t very well. Daddy and I’ve not wanted to tell you about it till you were feeling a bit stronger.’
After she’d told me, I went upstairs to my room and lay in the quiet. Mummy came up to see me after a while and sat on the side of the bed. She never said anything but stroked my hair and my face with the tips of her fingers. Then when my dad came in from the office I heard them tiptoeing and whispering about it outside my bedroom door as though I might not be very well again.
‘Have you told him?’
‘Yes,’ Mummy said.
‘How did he take it?’
‘He’s okay. He’s okay.’
When I went down for supper, no one talked about it. Mummy kept smiling at me and stroking my face, knowing that there was no point in mentioning it all, and my dad was just silent about it so that it would soon be something that could be all forgotten about.
Q
Actually, after a bit, I liked it—everybody at school knowing about the roof business but not daring to ask me any question
s. Perhaps they thought that I was a bit of a mad person and the next time I got upset I might throw myself into the river or take too many headache pills like Marilyn Monroe or something. Sometimes I felt as though I might be a bit of a mysterious person, like somebody who’s been sneaked over from an orphanage in Puerto Rico or Albania, or a prince who’s mum and dad had been killed in a revolution, and if anyone was daring to ask me any questions about anything that I didn’t like, I would just have to turn away looking sad and lost and far away as if I was someone a bit special with a tragic sort of a history.
In the first lesson of the term, when we were learning about the Tudors—we were just getting up to the dissolution of the monasteries and Henry VIII and the beheaded wives and everything—I looked up suddenly to see Mrs. Marston staring at me. She turned away very quickly, but I knew she was having a good old look and thinking about me. And at first, she’d been using a sort of slightly different voice when she was talking to me. She’s probably been telling her friends outside of the school all about what I did. Actually, I’d probably become quite famous with it all—probably the most famous person in the school, in fact.
But that was only at the beginning of term. After a few weeks, Mrs. Marston one day asked us in class who we thought had given the Statue of Liberty to the people in the United States. I put my hand up and said ‘The Anglo-Saxons, Mrs. Marston,’ and she said in a not very nice sort of voice ‘…and when do you imagine that would have been?’ and I said ‘Just a little bit before the time of the Battle of Hastings,’ and then she looked at the ceiling for a bit and said ‘Lord grant me the strength to carry on,’ and I knew everything was back to normal then. My adventure was forgotten about. I wasn’t famous anymore, not even for wetting the bed, thank God, on account of Miss Carson still waking me up every night for a wee.
Q
‘Mummy will not be here when you come home for the Christmas holidays. Instead, we have a nice girl from Sweden called Lena staying with us who will be helping around the house during the Christmas break.’
That’s what my dad’s letter said. That’s not how it started, because he began it like he usually does, going on about hoping I was working hard and enjoying a good game of rugby—in other words forgetting all over again that it’s football we play in the winter term and not rugby till the Easter one.
I knew there was something wrong even before that though, because suddenly there was not a single letter from Mummy, and he was writing every week instead, which is a thing that had never happened before. Usually it was just a small note he’d put at the end of Mummy’s letter, after her hugs and kisses. So actually, when the one came about Swedish Lena, I wasn’t completely surprised, but just very, very upset to think everything had gone wrong again. Then at half term, instead of going home like Mummy had absolutely promised at the station, I had to go to stay with Granny, which was worse than just staying at the school by myself, because Granny is quite forgetful about things now and keeps saying all the same stuff over and over again. She takes ages putting her blooming hat and coat on if we’re going out, and always there’s so much time that has to be spent looking for her purse and car keys and checking the back door’s locked, and then when we’re in the car, it’s really quite frightening. When she was driving us to church, my side of the car went right up onto the pavement for quite a long time as we were going along, and I don’t think she even noticed, even when an old man banged the car with his walking stick and shouted out ‘Silly old biddy—you’re a bloody menace, you are!’
‘Damned cheek!’ she said as though she hadn’t done anything wrong. I didn’t say anything, of course.
There wasn’t so much talking that weekend, actually. Certainly not about Mummy. Not one bit about her, in fact—just like it was before she came back from that place where she’d been to get better from the sherry and stuff. I knew I wasn’t meant to ask about it.
Q
It’s been a really horrible Christmas, the worst one ever. Nearly as bad as the ones when Mummy had too much sherry. We didn’t have a tree or any decorations, and my dad didn’t put a single card on top of the mantelpiece or on the bookshelves. He just opened them up when we were having dinner, had a quick look at them and then put them in a big pile, all still closed up. When the fire in the sitting room was just about to go out the day before yesterday, he threw the whole lot of them onto it and then put some coal on top of them and said, ‘There we are!’ and that was the very end of this Christmas. I’ve just been locked away in my room everyday all by myself waiting for Children’s Hour to start and trying to arrange my stamps and reading some history books. Lena was here for a few days at the beginning, then she went back to Sweden for her own Christmas, and I suppose she thinks this is how all Christmases are if you come to England. I bet she was really pleased to get away. She’s come back now, but I don’t know what she’ll be doing after I’ve gone back to school. Probably she’s going to iron some of my dad’s shirts and things like that. I wonder if she’ll still be here when I come back for the Easter holidays?
Granny came to stay again just as Lena was going to Heathrow Airport. She drove up when there was a huge hail storm going on and when I went down the front door steps to help her with her bag, I saw that there was a big dent at the front side of her car. She hadn’t even noticed, so that just proves how bad her driving is now. When I asked her about it later she said that perhaps she did remember a bit of a bang when she was round about Cirencester.
When we ate the Christmas dinner after we’d opened our presents, the potatoes were all burned, the turkey was pink inside and far too chewy, the peas were still a bit icy, and Granny even completely forgot about the gravy, so that means that she can’t really cook anymore. At least we had the telly on after, before the mince pies, so Granny was a bit quieter and not saying the same things over and over again which is very annoying and worrying at the same time, because I always think my dad is just about to say ‘Oh for heaven’s sake!’ or something rude and upsetting. It was me who put the mince pies in the oven to heat up, just in case of a Granny burning accident. I made the tea, too, because I’m an expert at that, cut the Christmas cake up into sensible portions, and put it all on the trolley for the sitting room to have while Moira Anderson and Jimmy Steward were on with their Scottish singing and dancing. The only good thing about this Christmas was that at long, long last my long trousers came as one of the presents—thank God! Also, my dad did get me the Stanley Gibbons stamp catalogue which is a very good thing.
Q
It was ever such a big surprise when my dad asked me on Boxing Day if I wanted to go and stay with Mummy in London for the New Year. No one had said the slightest thing about her so I didn’t even know where she was until he said it. It was such a relief thinking that Mummy wasn’t ill again, and perhaps in fact they were just going to be having a divorce. There are lots of those happening all the time, after all, even with boys at school, and that’s not really so bad. I’m sure I could begin to get used to it, and then I might live in two different houses at the same time.
My dad was sad and worried about it, though. When he asked me if I wanted to go, he started it with a little cough, went a bit red, and wasn’t looking at me. I knew it was just best to say yes and then not talk about it anymore. But inside I was so happy—I just absolutely couldn’t wait to see Mummy again.
My dad drove me to the station and took me onto the platform. It was very strange because usually when we’re at stations he’s talking about school and stuff. It’s very difficult to think of the right things to say, especially when he’s not saying anything himself. I was ever so pleased when the train came quite quickly.
At first I couldn’t see that it was Mummy waiting for me under the same clock at Waterloo where my dad usually meets me. She looked so different. She wasn’t wearing a coat, just a very big thin jacket made from jeans material. She had her arms wrapped round herself and was shaking like a
leaf in the cold. Her eyes were black with makeup, and her hair was pulled back in a very tight ponytail so you could see the veins on her temples. When I put my arms around her, she didn’t put hers round me. I think she was a bit too cold to let go of herself.
It was a horrible house that we went to, in a place called Finsbury Park. Really, really horrible. It was cold and damp and smelly and under a noisy old railway bridge that made the whole house shudder like mad when a train went by. There was hardly any furniture in there, just mattresses on the floors, hard old armchairs, and a sofa covered with a smelly blanket in the sitting room that went right down in the middle when you sat on it. There was a nailed up sheet instead of curtains on the landing, old wallpaper that was peeling off, a rickety banister with a part of it missing, bulbs with no lampshades and light switches hanging out of the walls ready to give you an electric shock. The loo was black inside with newspaper instead of toilet roll, a tap dripped all day in the kitchen with old dirty dishes stacked up and no one doing the washing up, and everywhere there were full-up ashtrays and mugs with bits of old coffee and wine at the bottom. There was only a bit of hot water in the taps now and again, and it was freezing, freezing cold with a fire in the sitting room that didn’t make any difference but blew out black smoke that went up the stairs leaving the smell of burning. There was a very skinny cat with no tail and a stuck together eye, a dead pigeon on an outside windowsill, and in the kitchen a tail of something disappearing underneath the fridge, which I’m really sure was a big mouse.
It was the worst house I was ever in. It was called a squat. That’s what Trotsky John said. He said it had been ‘requisitioned on behalf of the working people.’ But I don’t think that any of the people living in that house had jobs.
The House Martin Page 26