A Short Affair

by Simon Oldfield

  I wanted to be able to tell them the skeleton didn’t share Trevor’s gap-toothed grin, but I couldn’t. I hadn’t seen it. And they wouldn’t listen to a 10-year-old even if I had. ‘Perhaps tomorrow we could make some paper chains for Trevor’s funeral,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll do no such thing,’ Grandma Small replied. ‘Put the idea out of your mind.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Don’t,’ Grandma Small warned.

  I watched in silence as she made a show of surveying her half-empty tea cup. I stayed silent when she stood to go to the kettle, and her slippered toes snagged in my chain of ships, and they set sail across the carpet torn in two. I wondered if Trevor’s bared skull shone as pale as Grandma Small’s skin did. I wondered what it would look like under the moon.

  The summer after they buried Trevor Mason’s skeleton, my mother and I kneeled on the damp cemetery grass and pushed roses stem by stem into the vase on Grandma Small’s polished gravestone. The day was daisy-white and we had on our best coats. Mine was too heavy. I wanted to change it for one of Grandma Small’s silky dresses.

  ‘What did Grandma Small die of?’ I asked.

  ‘A broken heart,’ my mother answered.

  I leaned forward and traced the indented inscription with my fingertip. It felt like frost on a pavement. Here lies Millicent Hopkins, it read. Reunited with her beloved Edmund.

  ‘Was that Grandpa Small’s name?’ I asked. ‘Edmund?’

  ‘No,’ my mother replied. ‘Edmund was the name of Grandma’s first baby.’

  ‘Then where’s Grandpa Small’s grave?’

  My mother frowned, and from the ruts surrounding her eyelashes, a sliver of Grandma Small looked out at me. ‘Grandpa Hopkins didn’t die,’ she said. ‘What made you think that?’

  ‘Grandma Small told me.’

  My mother sighed and put her hand to my back. I could feel its hard cold through my black wool coat. ‘Grandpa Hopkins went away,’ she said. ‘He had to go away. He did something so bad that he was never allowed to come back.’

  ‘What did he do?’ I asked, though I was sure I knew by then. I was eleven. I wasn’t a fool.

  ‘I’ll tell you when you’re older,’ my mother answered.

  I lifted my face to the wind and let it tug tears from the wrong corners of my eyes. ‘What happened to Trevor Mason reminded Grandma of Grandpa Hopkins and Edmund, didn’t it?’

  My mother cupped one of her hands around her knee and pushed herself to stand upright. She could not find her full height; she might as well have stayed slumped on the ground. ‘Yes. Yes, it did,’ she said. ‘Is there nothing you don’t understand, miss?’

  ‘Hundreds of things.’ I smiled, remembering the way Grandma Small’s bumpy eyebrows climbed her forehead when she asked me that same question. And when she wriggled her spectacles on; or took a too-hot sip of tea; and those times we played dress-up and Grandma Small paraded around, swinging her fur stole and tossing back her head and acting herself back to the person she was before she met Grandpa Hopkins.

  ‘She was fun, wasn’t she?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, she was,’ my mother agreed. ‘Fun and colourful.’

  ‘Yes. Fun and colourful and brave.’

  My mother’s lips twitched, brightening her cheeks for a tick. ‘So, what are you going to cut your paper chains into?’ she asked.

  I sat down and crossed my legs, ready to begin. ‘Lions,’ I said.

  ‘Lions?’

  ‘Yes. Lions. Because lions, I think, are almost as brave as Grandma Small.’

  BRAD’S ROOSTER FOOD

  Joanna Campbell

  Artwork by Jessy Jetpacks

  BRAD’S ROOSTER FOOD

  Joanna Campbell

  Even before Diane enters Brad’s driveway, before her shoes embed in his deep, shifting gravel, his rooster is crowing. She walks faster, drawn by the plaintive sound, by the tug connecting the lonely.

  In the back garden, inside an enclosure encircled by barbed wire, the rooster is throwing back his head. The nervous gesture vibrates the knobbly, scarlet wig he appears to wear, as if it is made of sun-warmed India rubber.

  His beak jabs at the empty water container.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Diane says, uncoiling the hose.

  The rooster stands erect, listening. He struts alongside the wire, watching.

  When Brad knocked on Diane’s door last week, he wore his open-necked sports shirt patterned with tropical leaves in bright greens and yellows. Parrots were peering at her, beaks protruding from the foliage. When the sun glinted on the medallion dangling from Brad’s neck, Diane could not help imagining the blue-white disc of skin beneath, where the sun could not venture.

  Brad, pink-faced and hearty, asked her to visit his rooster while he and Wendy were in Littlehampton, as though he and Diane exchanged favours all the time. But his words came stuttering out, rehearsed. Like her, he suffered the quiet pain of shyness.

  Diane never travels further than the parade of shops. She doesn’t need to make a cup of tea for anyone other than herself. If she were to take a holiday, nothing would require tending in her absence.

  But today she is wearing Brad’s shed key on a string around her neck.

  Brad and Wendy live in a pale-red house stuck to a primrose house, the builders having strived for a seaside-rock effect. Diane’s home, left from the long-ago air-raid that killed her parents, is decaying. Soon it will reach the top of the demolition list.

  She finds a plastic tub full of muesli with Brad’s Rooster Food written on the lid. The food is not, as Diane expected, dry or cheerless, but golden and glorious.

  Brad has toasted the cereals, adding fat Australian sultanas, apricot gems and slivers of coconut. Diane plunges her hands into fruits and grains, into pared almonds and crumbly hazelnuts, Brad’s mixture tumbling through her fingers.

  Pineapple nuggets catch the sunlight, reminiscent of the hundreds of sequins her mother sewed onto the plain muslin frock Diane used to wear to birthday parties when she was a child.

  ‘That old thing again?’ one girl used to scoff.

  The dress was specially made with inserts to accommodate Diane’s back-brace, a contraption of buckled straps for supporting weak muscles.

  When the scoffing girl issued her own invitations, a glint of anticipation in her eyes indicated the scorn she planned to mete out again. But once bejewelled with glittering spangles, Diane’s dress dazzled the birthday girl into silence.

  Twenty years ago, when she unfastened the brace for the last time, it was as if she were reaching inside her body and taking out an essential organ. The brace watched her, reproachful, from the corner of her bedroom. The advantages of discarding it ought to have outweighed the unexpected sense of loss, but the confidence she had hoped to acquire after shedding its bulk never arrived.

  Diane pushes the metal scoop through Brad’s oats and barley and bran, pours the soft rush of flakes into the metal feeding container and fits on the steel lid, a sort of Chinese hat which protects the food from rain.

  Brad chose her because the neighbours with cats or dogs or well-groomed herbaceous borders have voiced complaints about his rooster. Or perhaps because quiet people are gentle. She is trusted, a thought which releases a small shaft of light on twenty years of living alone.

  When Diane passed by one day on her way to the butcher, a deputation of neighbours from the pastel-washed houses were forming a semicircle, their heels drilling dents in Brad’s gravel.

  ‘Now you’ve sent your hens away, why keep it?’

  ‘You only needed it to protect them from foxes.’

  ‘Not as if it does anything. It can’t lay eggs, you know.’

  ‘It’s a brute,’ said Joy, the woman from the greying primrose house. ‘Damn thing jumped on our fence. Jogged across the patio. Puffing up its chest, preening itself. One of its massive great wings gashed my leg.’

  ‘It drew blood,’ her husband, Ray, added with pride. He was pigeon-chested and the soles of his s
hoes had metal taps nailed onto them. He wrapped an arm around his injured wife, but she shrugged it off.

  While the coterie surrounded her husband, Brad’s wife, Wendy, stayed inside the pale-red house, the smooth curve of her hair evident among the tasselled edging of the curtains.

  Diane frowned to express sympathy for Brad. She remained on the pavement to demonstrate her refusal to join the rooster eviction mission. After everyone else clumped out of the gravel and marched back to their own houses, the wind blew through her empty basket, a small, brittle sound. Brad looked across at her, red-faced and silent like a withered balloon, and gave her a grateful smile.

  She did not go to the butcher’s shop. She opted instead for an individual cheese pie from the supermarket, instead of the succulent chicken pieces she had planned to buy.

  She asks the rooster to calm down, her voice a surprise. Days can pass without hearing it.

  It startles the rooster too. He back-pedals his feet in a mound of straw.

  ‘Look at your sumptuous meal. You can have it once you are less excited.’

  Diane holds the container high and steels herself to stand close to him, accepting the risk of a pecked ankle. Any trace of her own fear might engender distrust. His nervy swagger suggests he is terrified too, and yet he is listening.

  ‘I’m celebrating an anniversary today,’ she tells him. ‘Twenty years without something, instead of twenty years with someone.’

  The rooster stands still, intrigued.

  ‘But let’s talk about you. You’re a magnificent fellow.’

  He steps towards her without aggression and she repeats the compliment, stretching out the syllables in the same way each time because he appears to enjoy the rhythm.

  When he understands that Diane is admiring his splendour, the rooster settles. He watches her lilac scarf fluttering, tilting his head to one side.

  In the next-door garden, Ray switches on his electric leaf-blower. Its raucous racket makes the rooster run wildly about, changing direction every second. With furious wing-beats he propels himself onto the top of his wire, drops to the lawn, hurdles over a wheelbarrow and flaps over the fence, disappearing into Ray’s delphiniums.

  Diane creates a trail of crumbs from the enclosure to the fence and flings a handful over, taken aback by the velocity and length of her throw, not to mention the speed and wisdom of her strategy.

  Ray switches off the tool with an irritated snap.

  ‘That ruddy cock,’ he shouts, standing aghast among the fallen blossoms waiting for his torrent of air to redistribute them into a pyre.

  ‘I’m afraid he’s tempted by your mauve rose bush. I think it’s his favourite colour,’ Diane says, her voice travelling further than it has for years. ‘I’m so sorry, but I’ve no guidelines on recapture. Perhaps it might be best if you could just rake up the rest.’

  Ray clenches his fists around his blower. The rooster’s beak pokes through the foliage, snatching at the crumbs. Then he struts along the trail to the fence and pecks at the wooden planks.

  Ray glares at Diane. ‘It’ll destroy my larch-lap. Can’t you come and pick it up?’

  ‘Hand him up to me first then,’ Diane says, shocked at her use of the imperative. ‘My arms won’t stretch over your fence.’

  ‘I’ll go nowhere near the blasted thing,’ Ray says. ‘It’ll draw blood. You’ll have to come over here.’

  The prospect of her footfall damaging his striped lawn is apparently distasteful because he picks up a rake as if aiming a harpoon.

  ‘Just flap a bit, sweetheart,’ Diane tells the rooster. ‘Jump! Here’s my scarf, look. You love that.’

  He responds, fluffing his feathers and pumping his wings. Diane has never called anyone sweetheart before. She repeats the endearment.

  Joy raps on the kitchen window, signalling that Ray should gee up the debris-collecting and sort out some cocktails. Quite miraculous, Diane thinks, how a wife communicates with such efficiency with a few curt gestures behind glass.

  ‘Expecting her bridge party,’ Ray mumbles. ‘She wants the garden tidy first.’

  ‘Look, I’ll do it,’ Diane tells him. ‘You go and pour the drinks for her guests.’

  Is this her voice, infused with authority, issuing instructions which people – albeit a sad little man and a renegade fowl – are about to obey?

  The rooster clambers up and thuds down beside her, his feathers brushing her leg. As he follows the trail to the wire, Diane shadows him, lifting him into his enclosure while taking care to avoid his primitive-looking feet catching on the barbs.

  ‘Hush, hush,’ she keeps saying.

  His plump body rests in her hands without a struggle, softer than old suede between her fingers. When she sets him down, he stays in the same spot, huddled on top of his own shadow.

  Next door, Diane rakes Ray’s leaves into a pyramid, working at a swift pace. She always tears through tasks with needless urgency, oddly expectant when the work comes to an end, although her telephone never rings with invitations to tea, or cocktails.

  When she props the rake against the fence, Ray and Joy are busy arguing in the kitchen, framed by their double-glazed window, Diane’s presence in the garden forgotten. Joy’s lips move without a sound, her face contorted. Ray lowers his head and folds his arms, already defeated, even before Joy raises her arm and hurls a cocktail shaker at him, their new glass silencing the moment of impact.

  Diane winces. When she opens her eyes, Ray is pacing back and forth, a packet of frozen broad beans clamped to his forehead.

  She goes back to the rooster, now striding through fresh straw, his red comb fully erect.

  ‘You must miss those speckled hens you once protected,’ she says.

  He tips his head to one side, alert and hopeful, as if she might know how to bring them back.

  ‘How do you think the holiday in Littlehampton is going?’

  In reply, he pecks at an empty snail shell.

  ‘Between you and me,’ she whispers, ‘I think it might be a difficult fortnight for Brad.’

  Some Saturdays, when Joy has driven off to one of her bridge parties, and if Ray is not at one of his clay-pigeon shoots, Brad’s Wendy can be spotted strutting next door. Ray opens his door before she has reached it and ushers her inside. If his hall window is open, the metallic crescents nailed to his shoe soles rap all the way up his oak-effect staircase, closely followed by the click-click of stiletto heels. The echoes resonate all around Diane’s garden.

  Wendy told the driver who loaded Brad’s hens into a van that she thanked God they were going. Apart from ruining her grass, their inexhaustible fertility had forced her to make daily Spanish omelettes and Floating Islands. She would rather sun herself on a Spanish island, thank you very much. Her next mission was to get rid of the puffed-up little Hitler still strutting about the garden, she said, and the van driver glanced at Brad.

  It was the day after the hens departed when Brad asked Diane to look after his rooster and, in apparent dispute with the flamboyance of his shirt, his eyes were the colour of sea in heavy rain.

  The sun is sinking as Diane says goodnight to the rooster and promises to return early in the morning. Although he hops into his coop and up to his perch without protest, his worried face presses against the slot of his window. His farewell squawk follows her all the way to the corner, through her front door and into every tall, echoing room.

  Later, when she is halfway up the stairs on her way to bed, an ear-splitting gunshot fires.

  Diane grips the banister.

  A second shot. A third.

  She must be practical. Stay calm. Switch off the lights. Hide under the stairs.

  A volley of furious banging roots her to the spot.

  There follows a prolonged, raucous crowing.

  She pelts downstairs, wrenches the front door open and flies to Brad’s house, stumbling in the shift of his gravel. At the back, Ray’s patio lantern is flooding his garden with light.

  Ray is ins
ide his house, beating his hands on the kitchen window.

  In their garden, a fur coat slung over her nightdress, stands Joy, grim-faced, clutching Ray’s shotgun.

  ‘Stand still, you cocky little bastard!’ she yells.

  Diane freezes, her heart drumming out of rhythm.

  The door of the coop has been shot open, the latch hanging loose. In the enclosure, the rooster is darting back and forth, Joy’s aim apparently skewed by a surfeit of cocktails.

  Diane takes a deep breath. Come on, she tells herself. You’re needed here.

  She breathes out hard.

  Another shot.

  Silence.

  She has always lived at close quarters to the lives of others, on the sidelines of their existence, and of her own. The shadow cast by Diane’s house spreads further than theirs. But now, her proficiency in solitude offers an advantage.

  She is hidden from view, rigid against Brad’s wall, beside his garden tap. She reaches down and twists it. The water fizzes inside. She gathers up his garden hose and takes aim.

  A posse of neighbours arrives, scattering gravel in all directions, as the blast of cold water reaches its target, soaking the glossy mink and penetrating to the ruffles of turquoise nylon beneath.

  The rescue party retrieves Ray’s keys from the grass and escorts Joy back inside while she shouts, ‘I told him. I said it’s not clay pigeons you should be shooting. Not when there’s a real live bird fouling up our lives.’

  Diane waits until the noise dies down, then walks across Brad’s cooling grass, aware for the first time that her feet are bare. She climbs over the wire into the enclosure.

  The rooster creeps towards her, his comb trembling. Some of the shot has damaged one wing. She holds out a handful of Brad’s Rooster Food and as he pecks at it, she pats him. His small heart is thumping beneath his glorious breast, the russet, gold and azure feathers reminiscent of the sun sinking into an ocean.

  Diane lies down in the straw, the breeze fanning her hair and fostering the perfume of Brad’s night-scented stocks. With the sheen of moonlight on the pinkish pebbledash, his house becomes a Turkish palace.