Various Pets Alive and Dead

by Lewycka, Marina

  ‘If just one family eats more vegetables as a result, it will have been worth it!’ she shouts, and slams the phone down.

  The post-argument silence reverberates in the kitchen. Upstairs, she can hear the clack-clack-clack of Marcus’s keyboard. The sound makes her feel hollowed out and useless. It’s as if all her energy has gone into external things – her relationships, her children and the daily life of the commune – leaving nothing but memories, certainly nothing she could write a book about.

  ‘D’you want a cuppa?’ she calls up the stairs.

  Serge was more placid than Clara, even as a baby, engrossed in his own funny little world. Yes, if only he could install himself in his old bedroom with his computer, away from the distractions of student life, she’s sure he’d soon polish off his PhD. This project at Imperial College London seems to be a pointless diversion. And she can’t understand why Clara insists it’s University College and not Imperial College – she must have got confused. If only she’d calm down, and stop trying to organise everybody, she’d soon find someone tolerant and good-natured to settle down with. It would be nice to be a grandmother. And if only the weather were better she could have gone up to the allotment with Oolie, but Oolie threw a tantrum and she didn’t feel like going on her own.

  If only …

  She switches the kettle on and tries to find the news on the radio, but her ears are still ringing with Clara’s invective.

  Clara was the first of the babies in the commune, and everyone practised their parenting skills on her, so maybe that’s why she turned out to be so cussed. Doro feels a pang of guilt about Clara’s communal upbringing, though that can’t be entirely to blame, for right from birth she was a grizzly and fretful little bundle. She learned to walk and shed her nappies early, and by the time she was three she could sustain a lengthy conversation, consisting of one word on her part – why? – and a detailed and ideologically correct response from the person who was supposed to be looking after her. Yes, there were occasional mishaps. Like that time she caught her brushing her teeth with a tube of Canestan, which one of the sisters had left in the bathroom. That’s what happens when you have four or five intensely involved co-parents, all bringing their own experiences and agendas to the task of childcare, and no one in overall authority. It must have reinforced Clara’s sense of self-importance. After all, she wasn’t just a child, she was a prototype of a new kind of human being – the torch bearer of the non-bourgeois non-private non-nuclear non-monogamous non-competitive non-violent society they’d set out to create.

  Poor kid.

  By the time Serge came along, then Otto, Star and finally Oolie, the adults had got a bit bored with all that, and were content to play football or watch TV with the kids. Besides, the commune itself was undergoing so many changes that the idealistic principles they’d embarked with more than fifteen years ago were coming under strain.

  The Chrises Watt (female) and Howe (male) had arrived at Solidarity Hall in 1985, after the acrimonious split in the Workers Revolutionary Party which some attributed to the defeat of the miners’ strike, some to financial involvement with Libya and Iraq, and some to the sexual shenanigans of the Party’s leader, Gerry Healy. (Chris Watt once confided in Doro that Gerry, though less handsome than Chris Howe, was a tiger in bed, which made Doro shudder with double horror.) They arrived on a Friday afternoon with their two pale silent children, installed themselves in the room which Jen had vacated recently and, over the course of the weekend, glumly munched their way through the commune’s entire supply of fruit, baked beans, beer, cheese and cornflakes while bemoaning the lack of meat and the historic defeat of the working class.

  Everyone expected they would leave on Monday, but by lunchtime there was no sign of movement from their room. However, when Fred and Marcus returned from Tesco in the afternoon with replenished stocks they emerged and began eating again. The pale kids lolloped out into the garden and started kicking a ball around, trampling Doro’s pea seedlings and decapitating the tallest sunflower. Doro went out to remonstrate with them, but seeing their eyes bright and cheeks flushed with colour, didn’t have the heart to tell them to restrict their games to the rough patch behind the fruit trees set aside for the kids.

  By Thursday, they’d run out of food again, and Doro, setting out on the supermarket run, asked Chris Howe whether they’d like to contribute.

  Chris Howe looked shifty. ‘What’s your policy on sharing? I thought you worked it out according to ability and need.’ He pointed at the slogan stuck up on the fridge.

  ‘Yeah, we do,’ said Doro. ‘Everyone contributes according to how much they earn.’

  ‘We don’t earn nothing. We’re on benefit.’

  He said it with such finality that Doro just nodded and went out to the car.

  She pushed the trolley around Tesco, seething with resentment, and heaped it up with white sliced bread (reduced), potatoes (reduced), baked beans (three for two), cornflakes (jumbo-size own brand), tea bags (ditto), margarine (cheap and nasty), cheese (mild cheddar, plastic-wrapped), powdered tomato soup (cheaper than tinned), lentils, dried split peas, red kidney beans, porridge (all own brand), tinned tomatoes (three for two) and a large bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk which she ate in the car on her way home.

  ‘Didn’t you get no beer?’ asked Chris Howe, helping her unpack. He was wearing a baggy Che Guevara T-shirt and no trousers. And, she couldn’t help noticing, no underpants.

  ‘We can’t afford it.’

  As he was stowing the bread, potatoes and cornflakes in the larder, the etiolated children moseyed in from the garden, ripped open the pack of cornflakes, and started to cram dry handfuls into their mouths.

  ‘Stop that!’ snapped Doro.

  They looked at her silently with sad eyes.

  She retreated to her bedroom with a cup of tea, a bad conscience and a slight feeling of nausea from the chocolate. The book she was in the middle of, Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy, had disappeared from her bedside table and she had to make do with a two-year-old copy of the New Left Review from Marcus’s side of the bed. The trouble with communal living was that everything drifted towards entropy. If Marge Piercy had ever come to Solidarity Hall, she might have envisioned a slightly more chaotic utopian future. Then there was a knock on the door, and Chris Watt sidled in with the book in her hand.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind. I borrowed this.’

  Doro did mind, so she didn’t say anything. She could see immediately that the bookmark she’d put in near the end had vanished, and been replaced by a cigarette paper stuck in near the beginning. Chris Watt perched herself on the foot of the bed, and surveyed the room. She was wearing a grubby cheesecloth blouse and no bra.

  ‘Are you and Marcus a couple, like?’ she asked.

  ‘Mmm.’ Doro tried to sound non-committal. Being part of a couple was, in some circles, considered worse than being a running dog of capitalism.

  ‘Like Chris and me. We thought it was time we tried a … you know … less monogamous way of relating.’

  Doro thought of Chris Howe, the limp pink sausage-like penis dangling below the T-shirt, and felt another wave of nausea.

  Chris Watt picked up the copy of New Left Review which Doro had put down, and started flicking through it. Doro could smell her earthy, soapy and slightly herby smell from the foot of the bed. She must have borrowed Moira’s shampoo.

  ‘It’s not me, it’s him that wants to try non-monogamy,’ Chris said after a while in a low voice, almost a whisper.

  ‘But … don’t you feel jealous?’ asked Doro, remembering her own paroxysms of unvoiced jealousy, mainly relating to Moira.

  ‘He says jealousy’s a bourgeois emotion. He says it’s about possession – like you feel you have the right to possess another person.’

  ‘Men always say that,’ Doro sniffed, suddenly emboldened by Chris’s candour. ‘But is it what you think?’

  Chris shrugged. ‘The kids like it here.’ She was looking direct
ly at Doro now. Her eyes were brown and cow-like, and a bit watery, as though she’d been crying. ‘They asked me if we can stay.’

  Doro felt her cheeks flush. ‘But haven’t you got … I dunno … a place of your own?’

  She felt she was handling this very badly.

  ‘You see, we were expelled …’

  ‘From the WRP, I know. But where you live …’

  ‘After the split we were living in Tufnell Park, sharing a house with some comrades from the Workers International Solidarity Collective. We held the meetings in the basement. Then there was a disagreement about the nature of the Soviet Union. The others said it was state capitalism, but Chris was heavily into Posadas and he insisted it was a partly regenerated deformed workers’ state. I don’t know exactly what the argument was, because I was in the sitting room, watching telly with the kids. Then Chris burst in and said we’d been expelled.’

  ‘Oh, heck!’

  The commune was still adjusting to Bruno’s departure at the end of the strike, the silent spectre-like presence of Megan, now visibly pregnant, and the disruptive weekend forays of Crunchy Carl. Could they accommodate new members? In her heart, Doro would probably have preferred the two Chrises, despite their far-out politics and their lollopy ever-hungry children, to Megan and Carl. But asking Megan to leave was out of the question – she was Bruno’s leaving gift.

  When the small black underpants had disappeared from the washing line for the last time, Doro had felt an intense pang of loss. It was as if he’d left behind Megan to remind them the commune wasn’t just about free love, it was about looking after each other, especially those who are most vulnerable and needy. However hard you try to set up the perfect self-contained world, there are always more needy people out there, desperate to come in. You can’t turn them away without turning your back on your own better self. At the end of the day, you just have to be grateful that you’re not one of the needy ones.

  ‘So you’re sort of homeless?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  Doro caught Chris’s eye, and thought she noticed the glint of a tear.

  ‘I don’t know if Jen’s coming back. I’ll have to talk to the others.’

  ‘Thanks, sister,’ said Chris.

  CLARA: Down sin drum

  ‘Down sin drum. Downs in drum. Downs in drome.’

  Whichever way nine-year-old Clara configured the words, they still didn’t make any sense. She pressed her ear against the door and listened. She could hear the yowling of the new baby and the Groans talking in whispers. It was so different to how she remembered the night they brought baby Serge home, or newborn Star, when there were corks popping and laughter and people dropping in with bunches of flowers and second-hand Babygros. In the end, Doro opened the door. Megan was there, sitting in an armchair with one boob hanging out of her blouse. She looked exhausted and thin. Clara had never noticed before how many grey hairs she had.

  ‘Come and meet your new sister, Clarie. She’s a very special little girl.’

  Doro took her hand and led her into the sitting room, where the baby was in a carrycot, fast asleep. It didn’t look very special, though it was cuter than baby Serge, who was horribly puckered and yellow when he was born. She was secretly thinking that babies are very overrated.

  ‘She’s downs in drum.’

  Clara stared blankly. Sometimes the words of the Groans were utterly baffling.

  ‘She’s got extra chrome zone,’ said Nick Holliday, who was pouring out tea from the big brown pot. Marcus, Moira Lafferty and Chris Watt were there too, squashed together on the saggy red sofa. It was deadly cold in the room, despite the fire smouldering in the grate.

  ‘Look, she’s only got one line,’ said Marcus, taking the baby’s tiny hand and turning it up to show Clara the palm. ‘It means she’s going to need lots of help growing up.’

  He slipped his arm around her and pulled her on to his knee. ‘What d’you think, Clarie? Are you up for it, my special girl?’

  She nodded. She couldn’t see what having one line on your hand had to do with growing up, but she liked the feel of his warm body and the tobacco smell of his breath on her cheek. She wanted to be the one who was special, not this silent interloper.

  ‘We’ve chosen a great name for her,’ said Chris Howe, sticking his head in through the door. ‘We’re going to call her Oolie-Anna in honour of Lennie.’

  It was a weird name, but nice. Clara knew all about Lennie the Leader from Fred, who’d shown the kids a picture of a wild man with a big coat and goatee beard, and told them the story of how Lennie had caught the train to the station in Thinland. Where Oolie-Anna came into it she had no idea. She hung around the cot for a while, hoping the baby would open its eyes or do something interesting, but it just lay there snuffling in its sleep.

  She went to fetch Serge, who was in the annexe watching Doctor Who on TV with Fred.

  ‘Come and see the new baby.’

  He came and stood by the cot, trying to look interested. She saw him poke it with his finger when he thought no one was looking. It cried a bit, then went quiet again.

  ‘It looks all right,’ he said non-committally.

  She went up to her room and made a card on folded paper with drawings of hearts and flowers and bows and a baby in the middle, and the words ‘Happy Birthday Oolie-Anna’ in big red letters. She gave it to Megan, who started to cry.

  The arrival of Oolie-Anna (no one ever called her Ulyana) changed all their lives. As the adults adapted their routines to make time to look after her, Clara, who’d just turned ten, took on more responsibility for the other kids, seeing them to and from school, supervising their games and checking on their homework. It seemed only a small step up from being in charge of the pets – first the hamster, then the rabbits – though her track record here had not been fantastic.

  She has only a hazy recollection of Megan, who tended to ignore all the kids, including Crunchy Carl and Oolie-Anna. Doro, on the other hand, threw herself totally into her new role as a co-parent of a Down’s syndrome child, as if she could overcome the developmental effects of the spare chromosome through sheer willpower alone. She spent hours coaching Oolie’s speech and movement to minimise the outward signs of her disability. She read books, badgered the health and social services endlessly, and campaigned against slights and petty discrimination. Helping Oolie-Anna to fulfil her potential became her new project; and although it was hard to feel actually jealous of Oolie, Clara sometimes resented all the attention she got.

  A new Oolie rota was set up so everyone had a turn looking after her. Doro, who was still working as a liberal studies lecturer at the Tech, cut down her hours. Marcus swapped his Coal Board job for a part-time lectureship in economics at the Doncaster Institute, to spend more time at home. Chris Howe crossed the counter and started work in the Benefit Office. Fred the Red stayed at home doing something called ‘theoretical practice’, which seemed mainly to involve talking on the phone. There was now a bit more money coming in. Little luxuries started to appear – chocolate cake and ice cream, fish and chips once a week, beer and the occasional bottle of wine for the Groans. Nick Holliday, who wasn’t into babies, spent more time with the older kids, and Clara learned there was more to teaching than just bossing people around. Megan, silent and catlike, watched all this from the sidelines. It was hard to tell what she made of it all.

  Baby Oolie-Anna wore rainbow-coloured hand-me-downs, crocheted by Moira, and when she acquired teeth, Chris Watt carved vegetables into animals and flowers for her. Chris Howe made a flying-saucer mobile from painted cardboard, and Fred emerged from his room with his guitar and sang revolutionary songs involving plenty of clapping and chanting, in which Oolie participated with drooly enthusiasm. Marcus stuck a new sign on the kitchen noticeboard beside the rotas:

  A society’s greatness is measured by the way it treats its weakest members.

  CLARA: Leviathan

  As soon as Clara enters her classroom on Monday morning, she senses s
omething has changed – a subtle alteration of smell or mood. The room is quiet, but the texture of the silence is different. Something’s missing. Then she realises Hamlet’s cage door is fastened – but the cage is empty. She forgot to check on Hamlet before she went home on Saturday. She has a vivid flashback to the chaotic scene on Community Day and, although 6F is due to arrive any minute, she rushes off to find Mr Philpott.

  He’s sitting in the boiler room reading a book, wearing two pairs of glasses, one on top of the other, because the light’s dim and murky. The boiler is smouldering with a dry clinkery smell, and the air is opaque with heat and smoke. A fine layer of ash and coal dust coats every surface.

  ‘What happened to Hamlet, Mr Philpott?’

  ‘Alas, poor ’amster …’

  She feels her stomach lurch. Could she have saved it, if she’d remembered to check on Saturday?

  ‘But where’s the body? He needs a proper burial.’

  ‘What did you ’ave in mind? Christian? Muslim? ’Indu?’

  ‘Er … what d’you suggest?’

  He doesn’t say anything, just cocks his head over to one side, and she realises he’s indicating the boiler.

  ‘You mean … Hamlet …?’

  ‘Cremation. No muckin’ around in’t graveyard.’

  Just then, there’s a knock on the door and a pale knobbly scalp pokes in. It’s Jason, his head newly shaved. It looks awful.

  ‘I came to find you, miss. Please, miss, the kids are all waiting.’

  ‘Oh – I’m sorry! Thank you, Jason!’

  As she makes for the door, Jason shuffles up to Mr Philpott in his oversized trainers, and mumbles, ‘Me mam says can you lend me some dinner money, sir?’

  ‘Jason, you know Mr Philpott can’t …’

  But Mr Philpott is already fumbling in his wallet for a fiver.