Various Pets Alive and Dead

by Lewycka, Marina

  ‘That’s ridiculous. How can being in debt create wealth?’ she snorts. ‘People who say that have obviously never been to Doncaster.’

  This is going to be harder than he thought.

  ‘Recycling may be good for the environment, Mum, but the economy needs growth.’

  ‘Nonsense. We can’t keep squandering the planet’s resources on needless junk, creating mountains of waste alongside mountains of debt.’

  She has this embarrassing way of raising her voice in public, as if trying to rouse the slumbering starlings. Ranting is probably one of the few pleasures left at her age. In the slanting light of the window, the little puckers on her upper lip look like crinkled paper, with deeper creases where the corners of her nose and mouth meet. Definitely sub-prime. Her last birthday was the big six-oh. Poor Doro. Age doesn’t suit her. Well, it doesn’t really suit anybody, does it?

  ‘If everyone was like you, Mum, the system would collapse.’

  ‘But that’s what we want. Isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, but …’ He smiles indulgently. There’s something particularly baffling about Doro’s brand of illogic.

  ‘So how’s the PhD going?’ She changes the subject, recycling a couple of spare sugar sachets into her handbag. ‘Just remind me again, darling. What is it about?’

  ‘The Hausdorff–Besicovitch dimension, Mum.’

  Doro nods blankly. They have this conversation almost every time. She never seems to get it.

  ‘Chaos theory. You know, the butterfly effect? How small events can have huge unforeseen consequences? Like the beat of a butterfly’s wing in Mozambique can result in a typhoon miles away in Thailand. You’ve heard of Poincaré?’

  ‘The rabbit man?’

  ‘That was Fibonacci.’

  ‘Ah yes. I always knew you were a genius, darling. One day they’ll name a theorem after you.’

  When he was a kid, Doro used to tell him he was brilliant, and she said it with such conviction he almost came to believe it, though deep down he thought these mathematical tricks were so obvious that anyone could do them. This thing he has with numbers, this knack of seeing patterns everywhere, sometimes seems more like a disability – the way some people are extra sensitive to pollens or soap powder.

  ‘So this research of yours, Serge, does it have any practical applications?’

  ‘It’s a tool for predicting things which are usually considered unpredictable –’

  ‘Like winning the lottery?’

  ‘That sort of thing. Though it’s more generally epidemics, earthquakes, hurricanes –’

  ‘I expect one day you’ll be fabulously rich,’ she remarks innocently.

  ‘If I ever am, I’ll take you on the shopping spree of a lifetime.’ He smiles to himself. It could be closer than she imagines. ‘And not in Oxfam, either, Mum.’

  ‘What’s wrong with Oxfam?’

  ‘Nothing. I just thought you might like –’

  She leans forward across the table and looks at him critically. ‘What’s that flashy suit you’re wearing? I bet that wasn’t from Oxfam.’

  When he got his first pay cheque, he went on a splurge in a boutique sale in Shoreditch.

  ‘Ermenegildo Zegna, Mum, but I got it in the sale. It was less than half price.’

  Her mouth puckers as if she can’t decide whether to be cross about the label or pleased about the bargain.

  ‘And why are you wearing those heavy glasses, darling? They don’t suit you. They make you look like Buddy Holly.’

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  ‘But he was tall and handsome, darling.’

  ‘Mum …’

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean you’re not tall and handsome. Not not handsome, anyway, but what I meant was –’

  ‘Don’t go there, Mum.’

  ‘But the glasses make you look –’

  ‘They’re ironic.’

  ‘How can glasses be ironic?’

  ‘They can. Trust me.’

  Doro leans back in her chair and laughs, a deep middle-aged chuckle. He laughs too, realising how much he loves Doro, with her bad clothes, wrinkles and merriment. He wouldn’t have her any other way – well, perhaps he would change a few things. But he knows at heart he’s Mummy’s boy.

  Clara, on the other hand, takes after Dad. Whenever he thinks about his sister, he hears the faint sound of a door slamming in the back of his mind. Although she’s only three years older than him, she’s constantly lecturing him about what he should be doing with his life. She never misses a chance to put him right about whatever she thinks he’s doing wrong. Example: ‘Maths is so abstract, Serge. You should engage with the real world.’

  By ‘the real world’ she means the deindustrialised North. She believes she’s a cuddly right-on human being bringing learning to those no-hope kids, when it’s all an ego trip to make her feel morally superior, make other people feel bad about their life choices, and give her an excuse to pontificate about stuff she knows nothing about, such as global warming, fashion and capitalism. God knows what she’ll say when she finds out about his job.

  She’s not bad looking – tall and slim like Doro, with Marcus’s curly hair and amazing blue eyes – but men don’t go near her because they’re scared of her bite. Apparently she dumped her last boyfriend, a perfectly okay guy called Josh, a civil engineer, because he always agreed with everything she said. As far as Serge knows, she’s been on her own for the past year – no wonder.

  Clara’s probably like this because she was the first baby of the commune. She was born in 1976 and named after Clara Zetkin, a German proto-feminist who invented International Women’s Day. This was a day when the food at Solidarity Hall was always particularly horrible because the pre-‘new men’ took over the cooking, furiously boiling up random combinations of dried beans, lentils and veggies, while the women sat around moaning about ‘women’s impression’, according to nine-year-old Clara, who was allowed to join in. When he was born in 1979, they named him after Victor Serge, a Belgian-Russian revolutionary with ‘librarian tendencies’.

  Their parents lived through a time of excitement and adventure in the late sixties and seventies, when they threw off the shackles of convention and freed themselves to experiment with completely new ways of living, cool music and stupid clothes – which can’t be that different from the excitement of creating completely new formulae for managing risk, setting money free to roam the world in search of undreamed-of returns.

  He just wishes he could explain the thrill of it to Doro.

  ‘Like I was saying, Mum, storms, clouds, galaxies. All the great forces of nature …’

  But she’s not listening any more. Her attention has been caught by a woman with a large brown poodle on a lead, which is crapping on the pavement outside. She raps on the window. The woman looks. Their eyes meet.

  ‘… they all follow certain hidden rules.’

  Doro raps again. The dog is still straining away.

  ‘And not just nature. For example, the stock market –’

  ‘It’s just a giant lottery, isn’t it?’ she says.

  ‘Exactly, Mum. But if you study it over time –’

  ‘Darling, people who study the stock market usually contribute nothing useful to society and sponge off the honest work of others.’

  Her eyes have that manic gleam. This confession is going to be harder than he thought.

  ‘I know. But if you do, you can see trends and patterns emerging …’

  The woman, who is wearing pink leggings tucked into black boots, gives the dog’s lead a little tug to encourage it.

  ‘… so you can apply the same theory to the markets …’

  His mother’s eyes are fixed on the scenario outside the window. Maybe this isn’t the right time to tell her.

  ‘Look!’ she snaps. ‘Treating a public space as a lavatory. No thought for anyone else.’

  The woman tugs harder, but the dog braces itself and carries on straining. He can feel himself getting ho
oked on this mini-drama too, but he tries to press on with his confession.

  ‘You remember Fibonacci, Mum? The rabbit man? Well, some people use the Fibonacci code …’

  His mother pinches her nose theatrically between her finger and thumb. The dog gives one last heave – and behold! A golden mound appears on the pavement beneath its bottom.

  ‘… to predict when they’re going to turn …’

  A look of satisfaction lights up the poor mutt’s face. Doro is still rapping on the window, holding her nose with the other hand. She may be right, but normal people wouldn’t do that, would they?

  ‘… though of course the irony about predicting the markets …’

  The pink-leggings lady looks upset. The dog is sniffing happily at its steaming pile of gold. She tugs the lead and starts to walk away.

  ‘… is that if there was foolproof prediction, there’d be no market!’

  ‘Stop!’ Doro leaps from her chair and dashes out into the street, yelling at the top of her voice. ‘Someone could step in that! A child!’

  People stare. The pink-leggings lady yanks the lead but the poodle drags back, not yet ready to be separated from its product. Doro is gesticulating wildly. Still, you have to admire her guts. At last, the dog lets itself be dragged away, and Doro comes back into the café and plonks herself down in front of her lukewarm cappuccino.

  ‘The whole world’s gone mad. It’s all me, me, me! No one has any sense of social responsibility!’

  ‘Calm down, Mum.’

  As people drift away, he notices a woman in a yellow jacket staring straight at the window where they’re sitting. Maroushka! What’s she doing out on the loose?

  ‘And someone should take her aside and tell her she’s too old for pink leggings!’

  CLARA: Hamlet, Fizzy

  The new head teacher at Greenhills is called Mr Gorst. Mr Alan Gorst. He looks too young for a head, with round pink cheeks and black spiked-up hair. When he took over the headship at the end of last term, he announced that the traditional summer sports day (too many losers) would be replaced with an autumn Community Day (everybody a winner), to welcome new parents and encourage involvement between the school and the community. The way he said it, with a dark twinkle in his eye, made the staff (especially the female staff) feel as though they’d made a supremely fulfilling career choice.

  Not everyone was pleased.

  ‘They’re already involved with the police and the Benefits Agency,’ grumbled fag-deprived Mr Kenny. ‘What more chuffin’ involvement do they need?’

  But Clara supports his approach. ‘A Greener Greenhills’ is her chosen theme for 6F’s Community Day stall. If she can only get the kids to cherish their own immediate environment, it will make them more aware of the beauty and fragility of our planet, she tells a twinkling Mr Gorst. (Dare she call him Alan? It seems too intimate.) Mr Gorst/Alan says it’s inspirational.

  Their stall will feature potted tree seedlings – rowan, poplar, hawthorn and cherry – from which the streets of the estate are named. The parents will plant them in front of their houses, hopefully in the appropriate streets (otherwise there could be confusion in twenty years’ time). There will also be petitions to save dolphins, cut carbon emissions and ban kids from playing football on Rowan Green (this suggestion came from Mrs Salmon, whose mother lives nearby). There will be a paper recycling bin and plastic recycling crates where parents can put their used plastic bottles. Kids from 6F wearing wellies will jump up and down on them (Miss! Please! Me! Miss! Me! Me!). At the end of the day, it will all be collected for recycling by a local firm called Syrec (South Yorkshire Recycling) based out at Askern. This is the tricky part.

  It took her two hours of dialling through the Yellow Pages to find a firm willing to collect the waste. The man at Syrec, when she got through to him, sounded like a nineteen-year-old on speed or a call-centre salesman flogging a dodgy mortgage. He agreed to take it all away for twenty quid, and she wasn’t in a position to argue, but she’s not managed to contact him since to confirm, and according to Mr Kenny, whose wife works in the Council, they’ve just been awarded a big regional development grant, so maybe that’s why.

  In the corridor after lunch she bumps into Miss Historical Postlethwaite hauling two big display boards towards the hall. She’s wearing Roman centurion-type sandals with high wedge heels, a cowgirl blouse and a medieval-style chain belt around her middle. (Really, you can take history too far.)

  ‘Hello, Heidi. Is that your Community Day display?’

  ‘I’m giving the folks on the estate a little peek into their history,’ she breathes, jingling her faux-Victorian ear-danglers. ‘They’re so deprived of any connection with the past.’

  Clara looks at the boards, covered with neatly mounted photocopies of black and white photographs and spidery handwritten memoirs. According to Historical Heidi’s display, the Greenhills Estate was built in the 1930s, to replace the slums of red-brick terraces that sprawled around Doncaster, and they named the streets after trees to give it the feel of a little corner of rural England.

  ‘Fascinating!’

  She and 6F spend the afternoon mounting their own idealised version of the estate, the kids’ wonky drawings of their streets and homes floating on a leafy crêpe-paper sea. After they’ve gone, she tidies up her classroom and sorts her things for tomorrow, when there’s a knock on the door and in comes Mr Philpott, the caretaker, wearing his brown button-up overalls. He advances, grinning mysteriously, holding out a large package wrapped in brown paper.

  ‘Ta-daah!’

  ‘Is it for me?’

  She tears off the paper. Inside is a clear plastic box with air holes in which a ball of gingery fluff is curled up asleep. A rush of emotion colours her cheeks.

  ‘Why …?’

  ‘To teach the little villains kindness and responsibility. Remember what the Head said? You can keep it in the classroom. I’ll look after it at weekends.’

  She remembers vaguely that Mr Gorst/Alan mentioned something in a staff meeting, and she’d immediately dismissed the idea as not for her (Dead Hamster Debacle – Teacher Arrested).

  ‘I … I don’t think I can keep it.’ Her heart is beating so hard she’s sure he must be able to hear. ‘I’ve had some bad experiences with pets.’

  Mr Philpott looks crestfallen. ‘I thought you’d like it, duck.’

  The ball of ginger fluff stirs. Tiny pink paws rub trembling whiskers. Two bright button eyes blink open. It is heartbreakingly adorable. Well-meaning people like Mr Philpott and Mr Gorst/Alan think caring for pets will teach children kindness and responsibility, but she knows that what you really learn is the precariousness of life, the inevitability of death.

  ‘I do … only … Has it got a name?’

  ‘’Amlet the ’Amster.’

  ‘That’s a great name. But … Hamlet died young!’

  ‘’E ’ad personal problems, din’t ’e? But this one just sleeps all the time.’

  The little creature has curled up again and gone to sleep.

  ‘For in that sleep what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this ’amster coil.’

  ‘He’s talking about death.’

  ‘You know, I wondered what the ’eck ’e were on about. I saw t’ play at t’ Civic Theatre. Watched it twice, and I were none the wiser. I even bought t’ boowk.’

  ‘Your boiler room is a sanctuary of erudition and culture in a barbarous world, Mr Philpott.’

  ‘Aye, if I had my time over again, I could’ve been an intellectual, like you.’

  After he’s gone, she puts the hamster box on the window sill, takes her phone out of her bag, and scrolls down to Serge’s number. The little curled-up ginger creature has jolted her memory.

  Serge is often mysteriously unavailable for weeks, but this time he answers on the first ring.

  ‘Serge Free.’

  ‘I know it’s you, you little troll. Have you been avoiding me?’

  ‘Claz! Why would I do that?’


  ‘Has Doro talked to you about these proposed parental nuptials?’

  ‘Yeah, she came down to London today.’

  Which is strange, since Serge is still at Cambridge finishing his PhD. He mumbles something about collaboration with a maths team at University College, then starts on about an argument concerning doggy-doo with some woman wearing pink leggings. Her mother seems to be getting more and more eccentric in her old age.

  ‘Poor you. Was it embarrassing? Did people stare?’

  ‘Just a bit.’

  ‘D’you remember that time you fell over in the park and came home covered in it? You even got it in your hair. Doro went ballistic.’

  Serge was always uncannily accident-prone as a kid. Doro used to call him dyspraxic.

  ‘Yeah, I remember. Wasn’t it Freud who said shit is a dream-metaphor for money?’

  ‘How Doggy-Doo Can Make You Rich! Billionaire Secrets Revealed!’

  ‘There could be something in it.’

  ‘Get a grip, Soz.’ He’s almost as mad as Doro. ‘Anyway, she wants us to track down the kids from the commune. But I’ve got my hands full trying to organise a stall for the school’s Community Day. I can’t get hold of the recycling company.’

  She talks about her problems with Syrec, and Doro’s strange letter. He makes occasional supporting grunts down the phone.

  ‘I’ve looked on Facebook, but none of the Solidarity Hall kids seem to be signed up,’ she says.

  ‘Tosser and Kollon aren’t really Facebook types. I last saw Tosser … ooh … two years ago?’

  ‘I last saw Star on TV. In a police raid on a climate camp. She was still wearing that rainbow crochet top and raggedy velvet skirt. I thought social networking was the big thing among that lot.’

  ‘Mm. Maybe.’

  He sounds distant and distracted. She can feel her irritation rising. How did it happen that holding the family together became her job?

  ‘And it’s strange Otto isn’t on Facebook, given his obsession with all things technical.’

  ‘Otto? I dunno. Maybe he’s changed his online name. Isn’t this more your sort of scene, Claz?’ he mutters.

  ‘Why’s it always me that has to do everything?’