by Neil Cross
When I was alone, Gary and Wayne’s irritation spilled over and they hit me or pinned me to the floor and pressed a pillow on to my face, to stop me breathing. I panicked, but didn’t cry, and never told.
Margaret made no pretence of including me in her jokes or her conversation. It was between her and her husband and her sons. It wasn’t her fault or responsibility that I happened to be there, too.
She cooked my meals, but set them down with distracted contempt. When I told her the food was nice–they still went shopping at Marks and Spencer–she looked at her son and said, ‘We always have this on a Tuesday, don’t we, Gary?’
She didn’t voice her dislike, not even when Dad wasn’t around. It was coded in certain gestures, and coded in the lack of certain others. It was in the furtive hiss of her endless, private wrath.
Dad liked one-armed bandits, and so did Margaret. He whiled away the Great Yarmouth afternoons by pumping fistfuls of five-pence pieces into the slots and slapping at agitated Nudge and Hold buttons. He gave Gary, Wayne and me 10p each.
I wandered the sandy-smelling arcade. I stopped to get change in two-pence pieces from a bored man in a tubular booth. I loved the arcade, the smell of sand and candy-floss and rubber and suntan lotion. Eventually I bumped into Gary and Wayne, or they bumped into me, and I spent the money and we went to loiter around Dad.
We waited for a win. When that happened, he’d scoop coins from the steel pot riveted to the bandit’s belly and he’d dispense one or two to each of us. Otherwise, he remained oblivious of our presence. If a payout was too long coming, Gary and Wayne moved to the next machine, where Margaret stood, yanking down the ratcheted arm. When Margaret gave them money, she gave them some for me, too.
In the evening we had fish and chips and ate them on the sea wall as the sun went down, and sometimes we went to the camp-site bar and I drank lemonade shandy from a blue and gold can. Sometimes Dad and Gary and Wayne played darts.
On the beach, I made high sandcastles and demolished them with the aid of miniature, invisible armies equipped with pebbles for siege equipment. There came a moment when the castle, having withstood the early assault, began at last to crumble, and that was the best bit.
Dad and Gary and Wayne and sometimes Margaret played cricket on the beach, with wooden stumps and a tennis ball. When Dad caught Gary or Wayne’s ball, he threw it in the air and shouted Howzat.
At night, in the narrow caravan bed, I longed to be home.
At the end of my two weeks, Dad and Margaret drove me to Birmingham airport. I said goodbye to them at the gate. They stood there, waiting.
When another woman with red nails and a little hat took my hand, I looked over my shoulder and Dad called out, ‘Go on, Nip!’, and raised his thumb. Then he looked at Margaret and they laughed. The woman led me on to another plane, the same as the first.
When we arrived at Edinburgh, the woman led me off the plane and on to the tarmac. In the airport, Mum and Derek were waiting for me. This time, it was they who were flattened by the airport lights. Their smiles of greeting were bright and unreal. Looking at them, I missed my dad.
We caught the bus home. The smell of the two-tone hallway was cruder than I had remembered. And all the time I’d been away, in the arcades and at the beach and by the side of the bowling green, Suzie the dog had cowered on the same mat in the same semi-darkness, snarling at whoever passed. That made me feel funny; sad inside my stomach, like I wanted to be sick.
Mum unpacked the suitcase. Margaret had washed and pressed my clothes, so Mum put them straight into the wardrobe and the chest of drawers. They smelled liked Dad’s house.
I ate some tea, an egg sandwich, and drank some lemon squash. Mum and Derek didn’t have a telephone and neither did Dad, so we hadn’t spoken in two weeks. Now they wanted to know everything. They leaned in towards me and asked how my trip had been.
I said, ‘All right.’
I thought how stupid I’d been, to lay in that bed in Bifield Road–on the bedroom door was a little plaque with a vintage car on it, and the words Neil’s Room– longing so desperately to be home. It had only been fourteen days, and those days had gone and they would never come again.
And now I was back home, thinking about Bristol. I wished I’d joined in the games of beach cricket instead of poking round rock pools and building castles to destroy. I wished I’d shrieked and squabbled when Gary and Wayne teased me or hit me, because Gary and Wayne shrieked and squabbled when they hit each other. I wished I hadn’t submitted silently to their blows and their scorn. I wished I’d gone running to Dad. I wished I’d told.
But I didn’t say any of that to Mum and Derek. I told them it had been a nice holiday, that the bowls had been a bit boring.
When all the other questions had been asked, Mum said, ‘And how’s your dad?’
I knew she was asking because, once upon a time, he’d been a telegram boy in a jaunty hat, who wheeled his motorcycle to the bus-stop when she was on her way to school. She wanted me to say he was happy. I told her he was.
It was true.
8
During the summer break, I sometimes went to work with Derek. He was the manager of a St Cuthbert’s supermarket in Corstorphine.
On my first visit, he introduced me as his son. But he didn’t like me going with him, not really; it made him uncomfortable.
Sometimes we wandered the shop floor together. I clasped my hands at the small of my back, just like him. He liked to inspect the shelves, to make sure they were neat, tidy and well-stocked. If a popular product wasn’t being moved speedily enough from the stockroom, it made him furious. Several times, I saw him curtly summon a shelf-stacker to the back, where he bellowed at them for leaving the Heinz Tomato Soup half-empty, or for not properly mopping up a spillage of milk.
‘For God’s sake, man,’ he shouted, ‘what do you think you’re here for?’
His staff didn’t like him. They made faces behind his back, like he was a strict headmaster.
But he always smiled for the customers, even when he was angry with one of his workers. If an old lady couldn’t find her brand of cat-food, Derek gave her a big smile and called her ‘Madam’ and asked if she’d be so kind as to wait, just a moment. Then he marched off and promptly returned, a tin of Whiskas clasped like a baton in his right hand.
When the customer thanked him, he always said, ‘You’re very welcome’, and kept smiling until they turned away. Then he turned pointedly to whichever of his staff might be watching and gave them the cold, dead eye. Finally he looked at me. Silently and secretly, he arched an ironic eyebrow and we moved on.
But I didn’t go to work with Derek very often. Mostly, I went with mum, because it was easier. She also worked for St Cuthbert’s, part-time at a much smaller branch on Nicholson Street.
It was a bus ride away, along Princes Street and across the Bridges; past the museum and the ABC. It was a small supermarket, antique, with a staff of five or six. Mum worked 10.30 a.m. until 3 p.m. on the check-out, the busy period.
Her boss was Bob Cruickshank. He was an old man with brushy white hair. One of his eyes was gluey. The other was fierce blue. But he was a kind man, and he let me work to pass the time.
At the back of the shop–at the end of the aisle where you found tins of beans and stewing steak–a pile of Tate & Lyle sugar stood on a rough wooden pallet. When the pile grew low, I restocked it, carefully cross-hatching the hard-packed pouches. They leaked small landslides of sugar from their folds, and sugar was ground into the splintery wood of the palette. I pretended the bags of sugar were sand-bags, and I was on a D-Day beach. When the sugar was stacked, I took the price gun and labelled the cans of beans and the cans of tomatoes and the cans of soup. Then I restocked the shelves, neat and tidy, labels forward.
Sometimes, an old lady asked me to fetch her a half tin of Whiskas from a low shelf, and she told me I was doing a grand job and that made me happy. It was fun, working in the shop. But behind the shop was better.
In the corner was a stairwell. The banister was dotted with ancient nails, around which had been tied plastic tags and fraying bits of coarse string. The stairs were noisy and loose. Halfway down, they took a sharp turn, to the basement.
It was built of stone and low-ceilinged, and had a smell which incorporated soil and wood and cardboard and plumbing. A high, wired window stood at ground level, but it too had grown a milky cataract with age. In one corner was a square table of unfinished wood. It was set out with old tea-making things on a tray, and pushed to it were some stools polished by generations of arses.
Down a short, dim passage were two stockrooms. Each was windowless and wet-walled, piled with damp boxes on wooden pallets. There were trolleys to move the pallets, and there were rat-traps. The bulbs were naked and cobwebbed.
Down there, as you sat at the table, drinking a can of Cresta, it was easy to convince yourself there had been sudden, secretive movement in one of the stockrooms; that something was preparing to rush at you, moving so quickly you couldn’t reach the stairs in time. It would grab at your flailing ankles, as you clambered towards the daylight and the safety of those bent old women in headscarves, buying half tins of beans for themselves and tinned steak in gravy for their cat.
Mum’s best friend in the shop was a woman called Ida. They sat on the two checkouts, in blue-checked nylon overalls, and when the shop was quiet they talked. Mum also liked Mike and Rab, because they were cheeky. Rab was big and blonde and ruddy. Mike looked like a scrivener; an intense brow, eyes in shadow. His hair was curly and monkish. They wore white coats, just like Bob Cruickshank’s, but not as white. Rab’s strained at the buttons.
They spent as much time as they could in the stockrooms, talking quietly, sometimes giggling. When I interrupted they threw me a ball, and we played football, or they made a Frisbee from a flap of cardboard, and they launched that for me to catch. These games always ended too quickly, because Mike and Rab had to carry boxes upstairs. In the shop, under the baleful, Viking eye of Bob Cruickshank, they communicated in winks and whispers and secret, passing taps on the shoulder.
After a couple of weeks, I grew bored of putting out the sugar, pricing cans and reading comics in the creepy basement. Instead, I went out to explore.
I took my 10p to the newsagent. I bought a Texan bar. I liked the adverts. When I got back to St Cuthbert’s, there was a queue at the till. Mum was ringing up the prices, taking the money, counting change into outstretched hands. She didn’t see me come in, so I went back out. I went for a long walk. I went to the museum and I wandered round the echoing display of stuffed animals. They were creepy. Then I walked back to the shop.
The next day, I walked to Princes Street and caught the bus back to St Cuthbert’s. I enjoyed being on the bus alone. It was like being on the aeroplane, except I had the responsibility of pushing the bell at the right time.
Every day, I walked a bit further. I walked to the old town. I walked up the Royal Mile, to the castle, and in the opposite direction to Holyrood House. I walked across the gardens to Princes Street.
Once, I got back to find that Mum was on her tea-break. She was angry. She asked me where I’d been. I told her that I’d spent most of the day in the basement.
Rab perjured himself on my behalf. He told Mum that he’d seen me not half an hour ago, in the basement, reading my comics. She didn’t believe him, but she was satisfied. She was pleased that he liked me enough to lie for me.
The next day I went out again. Edinburgh sent taproots into my brain.
In the pantry there lived a mouse with the habit of poking its pointy little head under the door and surveying the room, to see if all was well. When Derek clapped his hands, the mouse whipped its head back under the door.
But there is never just one mouse, especially not in a block that old, with a communal garden so overgrown and stuffed with junk–fridges, TVs, old bike frames, sofas, mattresses–it was not possible to take a single step into it.
Eventually, the pantry mouse, or one of its descendants, grew bolder and took to skittering along the skirting boards, towards the kitchenette. At first, when Derek clapped his hand it would spin in terror, expanding and contracting like an accordion, then return to the pantry with the haphazard rush of a housefly.
For a while, that was good sport. When the mouse popped its head under the pantry door, we sat still and silent, allowing it to think itself unobserved. Then, as it grew close to the kitchenette, we made a single loud noise–boo–and it nearly died of shock. Its terror was comical.
But the mouse, or its descendant, grew still less afraid: eventually, it learned to expect the loud noises, then to ignore them. Eventually, frustrated, Derek followed it to the kitchen. He slammed down a metal tea-tray, cutting the mouse in half. He stood back, the tray in his hand.
Mum scooped the quivery halves into a carrier-bag with the edge of a newspaper. She rinsed the edge of the tea-tray under running water. Her face was grim.
Then one evening, as I lay on the floor with my chin cupped in my palms, a mouse leapt over me and into the duct behind the gas fire. We laughed because it was an impressive leap. But, as I sat up and turned round, laughing, another mouse streaked over my lap. Then a third. One mouse jumping over you might be cute. But three made me squirm.
I sat on the sofa with Mum. Derek was in his deckchair.
That night I imagined that, while I slept, my bedroom was carpeted by a shifting knot of mousy grey, and that pink anemones of baby mice pullulated behind the skirting boards. When a trickle of sleep-sweat woke me, I believed it was the scuttering paws of a night-mouse. And that when I stirred, the fidgety bedroom paused: the darkness, watchfully silent.
On Saturday morning, we bought a cat. The pet shop stank of sawdust and shit, but the grey kitten just smelled of sawdust. I cupped her in my hands and sniffed her, soft as a paintbrush, a sharp little undercurrent of urine, not unpleasant.
Perhaps because the cat been housed next to a wire cage of puppies, it was an eccentric creature. It followed me round the flat, hogging my heel. I threw a ball for it, underarm. It followed the ball’s arc of progress with laser eyes, then pounced on it. It killed the ball and returned it to me with a tilt of puppyish pride to its chin. It nuzzled the palm of my hand, impatient to play. It would have killed the ball all afternoon, if I let it.
In the morning I got out of bed, impatient to see the cat, and I ran barefoot in my pyjamas to the living room. The light was pearly with sunrise.
I opened the door and went in. I put my foot down on the cold, wet corpse of a mouse. Its fur was in black spikes and its teeth were comically bucked. It was flat, as if it had been pressed in a book like a flower. I leapt back, into the hallway. I shouted.
Mum came rushing from her bedroom, belting her dressing gown.
I said, ‘She got one.’
Mum knotted the dressing gown.
‘Where?’
I pointed. ‘Down there.’
But I wasn’t pointing at the same mouse. This one’s teeth were also bucked, and its fur was similarly spiked. But it lay on its back, not on its side, with its tiny pink paws in the air. It lay several inches from the mouse I’d stepped on. And there was another dead mouse next to it, and another next to that. Mice were distributed all over the room: all over the floor and chairs and sofa and kitchenette. The room was carpeted in dead mice, as if somebody had run around shaking out a large bag of them.
&nb
sp; I hopped to the bathroom and sat on the edge of the bath and soaped my foot. Then I went to my bedroom. I didn’t want my feet to touch the floor. The carpet made them feel funny. In my room, I put my trainers on.
Mum and Derek spent a long time wearing one yellow Marigold glove each, picking up dead mice by the tips of their tails and dropping them into a St Cuthbert’s carrier bag. After a few minutes, they stopped counting them.
I sat on my bed, hugging my knees. The cat ambled in. Sinewy as a gunslinger, it leapt on to the bed and wormed its way into my lap. It was purring, tired. It had been up all night. It nuzzled my chin, and its breath smelled of raw mice.
It clawed me for comfort. Its eyes were in blissful slits. I couldn’t throw it away, not for being a cat and doing what we’d bought it to do. So it fell asleep on me while Mum and Derek cleaned up the aftermath of its slaughter.
After that, I knew the mice were still there. They watched from the corners; in the cracks and the shadows were innumerable frightened eyes. The cat killed several a week, and we lay out traps and caught them that way, too. They liked chocolate, not cheese. They were still there, but none of them felt confident about running over your feet.
Late at night, the cat joined me in bed. I’d hear no movement: just sense the tiny displacement of air as it tensed and leapt. Touching down, it began to purr. It worked its way into the bedclothes and lay on my chest. It pulsed its claws into my sternum. It hurt, but the cat was mine. And it kept away all those little ghosts, those resentful little eyes in the dark corners.
That September, I started in Miss Dick’s class: Primary Three. Miss Dick was a thin, pale woman in A-line skirts and dark blonde hair, worn in a long pageboy. She had a pointy nose.