Happy Birthday and All That

by Rebecca Smith

  During the ads she muted the TV. The noises of her home at rest, the boiler flaming and relaxing, water in the pipes, the sighs of the fridge, the rattles of the sashes when a train went past, all served to comfort her as she sat on the floor and ate the chocolates one by one. She created a Rolo-shaped mass from the gold papers, scrunching and destroying the evidence of how many she had eaten, even though there was nobody but herself to deceive, and nobody who might censure her pigginess.

  Meanwhile at the pub Frank was making his second pint last as long as possible. It was his turn to drive Melody home, so unfortunately he couldn’t get wasted. But The Wild Years had been red hot that night.

  It was often the way: he went out with no expectations and everything just clicked. It was some sort of special electricity, something in the air, in their blood temperatures. It was all perfect, complex and beautiful. As he played he thought of the Indian brass wire ball that Father Christmas had given to James. It was called a mandala, something like that. It had beads on the wire and could be made into different shapes, but it always came back to being a sphere.

  Last orders came and went. Eventually they were loading up the equipment. Melody remained aloof to this bit. She had an impressive policy of never, ever helping. She would sit at the bar and smoke and sip her last drink. Or lounge around making comments as they staggered past her with the PA. From the way her T-shirts clung Frank speculated that she must wear the sort of bras that he only ever got to see on billboards. She blew smoke in great clouds as he passed her. He inhaled deeply. How sweet it was. She had pale, slender wrists, and wore silver and aquamarine bangles that jangled each time she moved. She would never ask for a lift home. It was her divine right. One of the Wild Years would take her home. She always hoped that it would be Frank.

  She could have had any of the others, and they had all tried their luck at some time or other, but Frank, the one who wasn’t available, was the only one that she would have had. It wasn’t that she was desperate or anything. She just thought he was pretty good-looking, and funny, and kind, and talented. And married. Actually she quite liked the idea that he was married. His wife obviously didn’t know how lucky she was. Melody remembered seeing them all together in town. Posy had been wearing a hippy skirt that was bunched up around her waist and made her hips look enormous. Posy hadn’t taken much notice of Melody when Frank introduced them. She seemed to be hunting in her bag for something. When James piped up, ‘Daddy, is this the lady you were throwing flowers to in Asda?’ Frank had quickly ushered them all away. It looked as though Posy hadn’t heard anyway. Pity. Melody would have liked to see him get out of that one.

  ‘Ready, Melody?’ Frank said. She drained her glass and nodded. ‘Haven’t you got a coat?’

  ‘You are such a dad!’ she said.

  ‘I’m not,’ he said. ‘Really I’m not.’ But she was lighting another cigarette, not listening.

  He drove slowly because there were so many students about. You never knew when one of them was going to come lurching into the road in front of you. The lights were all for them, and soon they were through the city and heading over the Itchen Bridge. The warm, salty air streamed through the open windows.

  When they were almost at Weston he heard that tune again.

  ‘Do da der du doo da da …’

  ‘What is that?’ he said. It had been bugging him all day.

  ‘When you wish upon a star …’ sang Melody.

  Of course, of course. It was playing again and again, getting louder. Jiminy Cricket was sending him a message from across the Solent.

  ‘Mind if we go and see where it’s coming from?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  Instead of turning inland towards the estate he took the coast road, down past The Seaweed Pub, and soon they were parked on Weston Shore.

  ‘When you wish upon a star …’ The tune came again, louder.

  ‘When you park on Weston Shore …’ Frank sang.

  ‘Look! There it is!’ said Melody. ‘I’d love to go on that.’

  Suspended in the darkness in front of them, strung with pink and yellow beads of light, was a ship.

  ‘Off to Neverland,’ said Frank.

  It was the Disney cruise liner.

  ‘When you wish upon a star …’

  ‘I don’t suppose I’ll ever get to go on that ship,’ Melody said. She sounded so mournful and little and sad. He leant over and kissed her.

  There was something oblong digging into his leg. He pulled it out of his pocket and chucked it out of the window.

  ‘When you wish upon a star …’

  It was like being young, doing it uncomfortably, desperately, with half your clothes still on.

  Posy had no passion any more. He wondered if she had ever had any. He suspected that it had become a wifely duty for her, listed somewhere between unloading the washing machine and making the packed lunches. He almost started to tell Melody ‘My wife doesn’t understand me’.

  ‘Undo your hair,’ he said. She shook it out of its ponytail and it fell across her shoulders and her pale little breasts. They were like shells. He had a mermaid in the van with him.

  ‘You are so, so beautiful,’ he said. When Melody took off her jeans he found that her stomach was smooth and taut. He couldn’t help notice the contrast with Posy’s, which had become, as she put it, like a used teabag, and as stripy as a tiger from stretch marks. Dear God, he was lost, lost.

  Melody was making all these little noises that were driving him crazy. Posy (oh why was he thinking of Posy?) seemed to have taken a Vow of Silence in bed soon after Jimmy arrived.

  He couldn’t stop himself now. This was what his life was meant to be like. The pink and yellow lights and the notes were all around them.

  Afterwards they smoked (oh the intense pleasure of being with someone who smoked afterwards) and watched as the Disney ship disappeared into the night.

  ‘Melody,’ he said. ‘Melody.’ The name was music to him. ‘I should never have done that. You know my situation. It was beautiful. You are beautiful. The most beautiful thing to happen to me in a long time. But I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry.’ It was a lie. He was not sorry, not yet anyway. He wanted to kiss her again.

  ‘Hey Frank,’ she said. ‘No big deal.’

  He dropped her off and drove home very slowly. Back home, seeing the children’s shoes lined up in the hall, ready for the morning, he realised what that thing digging into him had been. Shit. The Stardust card. He knew without a doubt that one of them would ask him for it in the morning.

  October

  Tom’s was the next birthday. It involved a Batman theme party with black, grey and yellow balloons, bats in the party boxes, and a bat symbol cake with four candles, made by Flora. There were six small batmen, a Spiderman, Bob the Builder, two princesses who were ostracised, and two children whose mummies or daddies hadn’t realised that it was fancy dress. The present from Aunty Flora was swimming lessons, not just for Tom, but for James and Poppy too. She had gone ahead and booked them at a pool within walking distance and on an afternoon that she knew would suit Posy. She said that she would take the children herself when she could.

  ‘Wow!’ said all of the Parousellis. Frank tried to appear suitably grateful too. ‘If I wanted my kids to have swimming lessons, don’t you think I’d arrange and pay for them myself?’ was what he felt like saying.

  Amongst Posy’s favourite sounds was the squeak and rustle of balloons tied to the gate, and, even better, the sound it made if it rained on them the night after the party.

  She had always wanted to live in Paris, in an attic apartment, to be a Françoise Sagan character, and see the Parisian sky ‘cut into pathetic triangles’ by the rooftops, to lie on her bed reading a new novel whilst the rain drummed on the sky light. Hearing rain on the balloons in the dark was the next best thing.

  She’d bought a one-way ticket and no returns were issued on the Eurostar that had taken her from aspiring Sagan heroine to Mum
my. It made her think of her own mother listening to a Dr Hook record, ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’. Now Posy, like her mother and the woman in the song, realised that she’d never ride to Paris, in a sports car, with the warm wind in her hair.

  She listened to the rain on the balloons and finished the last of the supper dishes.

  ‘Want some help?’ Frank appeared in the kitchen just as she took off her rubber gloves.

  ‘No thanks. I’m all washed up already.’

  She would untie the balloons from the gate the next day and throw them away when the children weren’t looking. She hated it if they started to look deflated and sad. Rather than noisily burst them she made little snips at their necks so that they would silently perish. She knew from experience that this could only be done to balloons that had already started to wither.

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ Frank said, ‘I might just go out for a bit, if everything is done …’

  ‘I thought you’d be staying in seeing as it is Tom’s birthday. But if you want to …’

  She had imagined them sitting in companionable silence, exhausted but happy. After all it was a special day. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘OK then. See you later.’ He kissed the top of her head and was gone. It seemed to Posy that Frank could only take so much of the happy family stuff. When they’d had a lovely day he seemed to need to do something to neutralise it, obliterate it from his mind. He seemed to have two separate existences. She wondered which was his real life.

  Frank thought that Posy looked a bit miffed but that she wouldn’t really mind. She could probably do with a bit of time to herself; he certainly could. Soon he was sitting in the pub with The Wild Years.

  ‘Here’s to a kid-free zone!’ he said. Then Melody arrived with one of her friends. She plonked herself down on the bench beside Al, even though Frank had moved up to make room for her.

  ‘What would you like?’ Frank asked.

  ‘My round,’ said Al.

  ‘I can give you a lift home,’ Frank said, as soon as Al disappeared to the bar.

  ‘No thanks,’ said Melody, and she shook her head.

  Posy was in bed when he got in, but she heard the TV and smelt his kebab. There was bound to be something unmissable on. Frank was more tired than he realised. It had been a very long day. He fell asleep with the kebab half-eaten on his knees. When he woke, just after four, he was freezing. The heating had gone off hours ago. He had a sort of cramp (or could it possibly be gout?) in one of his feet. He tried a few more of the chips, but they had become floppy and sour, the remains of the kebab were stone cold too. He realised with pleasure that he had eaten the two big green chillies. Their hats and stalks were on the side of his plate. He was impressed. He couldn’t have been that drunk if he’d bothered to get a plate. The bin was too full for him to cram it all into, so he left it beside the sink. It could be dealt with in the morning.

  When Posy came down the next day she thought that he had deliberately left it for her to clear up. It looked obscene. The vile, green, bitten-off chilli tops were the final insult. She scraped it all into the overflowing liner, tied up the sack, and hefted it out to the wheelie bin. All this before she’d even had a cup of tea.

  A few hours and many cups of tea later she was outside dealing with the shrivelling balloons. Flora arrived.

  ‘I’m just on my way to a storage solution. I thought you’d like these. I’ve already picked over them. They aren’t wormy.’

  It was a bag of apples from what Posy and Flora still thought of as Aunt Is’s apple tree. The tree had been Flora’s for years now, but they couldn’t forget how much they had enjoyed picking the apples, and how much they had hated cutting up the windfalls. Their aunt had a very thrifty attitude towards them. (‘There’s plenty of good in that one. Mustn’t let them go to waste,’ she’d say even though there were hundreds of perfect ones still to be gathered in.) The tree had once been espaliered but Aunt Is had eventually let it do what it liked. Flora now kept it well-pruned. Aunt Bea had told her that a pigeon should be able to fly through the branches.

  Posy took the bag of apples and picked up her scissors.

  ‘Thanks.’ Now she would have to do something with them. Unfortunately they weren’t eaters. ‘I was just deflating these balloons.’

  ‘Well thank goodness you’re doing that outside!’

  Posy looked blankly back at her.

  ‘Haven’t you ever thought about the germs inside balloons? That warm exhaled air kept enclosed. Everything allowed to grow, to breed, and then people just blithely pop them or let them down in the house, in enclosed spaces. I suppose after a day it wouldn’t be too bad, but you’ve had balloons lasting in centrally heated conditions for weeks before, haven’t you?’

  ‘I hadn’t really thought about it. I don’t think many people have ever suffered from balloon-bred diseases.’

  ‘How can you be sure? There probably just isn’t the research yet. Don’t your children always seem to get ill after a birthday?’

  ‘They always seem to get ill, full stop,’ said Posy. ‘I really don’t think I can start worrying about balloon germs.’

  They went inside. Tom was lounging on the sofa watching Teletubbies, Isobel was strapped into her car seat with an activity frame in front of her. Posy slumped down beside Tom. Flora thought it odd that she made no move to switch the Teletubbies off, or even turn them down. They seemed to be having some terrible misunderstanding which involved Tinky Winky endlessly saying ‘pardon?’.

  ‘Oh, how utterly like the Teletubbies to say “pardon”,’ said Flora.

  ‘Pardon?’ said Po, joining the fun.

  ‘Oh Posy, how on earth do you stand it?’ Flora asked.

  ‘I just don’t hear or see it any more,’ Posy said. ‘Sorry. I really should switch it off,’ but she didn’t, not wanting to have to amuse Tom.

  ‘I’ve just become immune to it. It all washes over you. You operate above or below the din. It really is possible to think of two things at the same time, to have two separate trains of thought running together. I try not to look at the Teletubbies anyway … their fat, padded, bottoms … they always look as though their nappies need changing … oh great, it’s the tapdancing teddy. I love this one.’

  Flora sighed.

  ‘Do you know, the day before yesterday,’ she said, changing the subject, ‘I was doing a clear out for a woman who had a box with several hundred old rubber gloves in it. The ones at the bottom were perished and stuck together, but she still didn’t want to throw them away. She said that when one of her current pair got a hole in it she didn’t want to waste the other one, so she started a new pair but kept the old survivor. I have no idea what for.’

  ‘Cat sick?’ suggested Posy. ‘Cleaning the loo?’ She had a lot of sympathy for Flora’s clients.

  ‘But she never actually used any of them, just added to the heap.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I advised her that she had to think of rubber gloves as disposable, like kitchen paper, that she should never have more than one pair out and a spare pair in the cupboard.’

  ‘Or she could buy a box of those transparent throw-away gloves.’

  ‘Well …’ said Flora. ‘I don’t think she would actually use them.’

  ‘But she’d know they were there,’ said Posy.

  Flora gave a muffled howl of exasperation.

  ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘there was something I wanted to run by you, as a stressed parent.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘I had an idea in the night, a way of expanding the business. “Model Role Models”. What do you think?’

  ‘Er,’ said Posy.

  ‘Model Role Models. I would supply people on an hourly basis to do things like help with homework, teach children to read, play football, make cakes, do craft activities and clear up afterwards, go on walks and identify flowers, teach children to ride bikes. All the things that modern parents know they should be doing but either have no time or inclination
for.’

  ‘Hmm. But where would you recruit these Model Role Models?’

  ‘Childless people? Grandparents who live too far from their own grandchildren? Aspiring grandparents? Poor but efficient parents?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Posy. ‘You’d have to get them all police-checked. People might not want someone in the house who was better at baking and football than they were.’

  ‘Maybe it needs some more thought.’ Flora was slightly disappointed by Posy’s response.

  ‘Maybe.’

  Just when Posy thought that she was doing everything right she’d overhear someone saying, ‘See you at football!’ or ‘How’s Tabitha’s German going?’ She knew that Tabitha was seven. She was in James’s class. Or ‘I wondered if you might be able to lend us your spare toddler-sized wetsuit.’

  ‘I thought that we had all the bases covered by starting swimming lessons. I thought that wrapped it up,’ she told Frank. ‘And now I find out that there’s some Saturday football club we aren’t members of. What’s next? Pre-school squash? And tennis lessons! They are all doing tennis lessons! We haven’t even got a tennis racquet between us.’

  ‘But would James want to do any of this?’ Frank sighed.