by Unknown
‘She must be nigh on fourteen, isn’t she?’
It is Nick’s imagination. Geordie knows exactly who she is.
‘Where is she?’ says Frieda. ‘You’ve surely never left her in the car?’
He can’t explain about the drawn curtains. ‘I’ll get her.’
Miranda comes in shyly, standing self-consciously by the china cabinet while they exclaim over her height. She’s going to be a tall girl. Nick sees it more clearly now he’s looking at her through their eyes, and for a moment he feels almost dizzy, wanting to slow the pace. He seems to be living in one of those speeded-up sequences beloved of wildlife photographers. Fran’s stomach swelling, the children growing, the house rose blooming and decaying, Geordie dwindling into death before his eyes. Time must move at a constant pace, he supposes, but that’s not how we experience it.
He waits until Miranda and Grandad are chatting, then goes into the kitchen to help with the tea.
‘What pills is he taking?’
She gets them down from the shelf. ‘Mr Shepherd says if the pain gets very bad he’ll have to go back into hospital, but as long as he’s OK he can stay at home.’
‘Does he think it’ll get bad?’
‘No, he says quite often they just slip away.’
‘Doesn’t sound much like Geordie, does it?’
‘No, it doesn’t.’ She stands twisting a pink striped tea towel round in hands that are as creased as tissue paper. ‘I don’t like to think about it.’
You’ll have your life back, Nick thinks, but he can’t say that. There’s too much he doesn’t understand in this relationship. He knows that sometimes – no, often – Geordie and Frieda behave more like husband and wife than father and daughter. Not that he’s suggesting – or thinking – anything wrong, but, emotionally, that’s the truth. Just as when she forgets and refers to Grandad as ‘your dad’ that’s also the truth. ‘I’ll carry the tray,’ he says, and she holds open the door.
In the hospital Geordie had a beaker, but here he’s reverted to his usual method of drinking tea, pouring a small amount into a saucer, blowing on it assiduously for several minutes, then raising the saucer to his lips. One of the recurring sights of Nick’s childhood: an orange sea with the gale of grandfather’s breath blowing across it. It had been a source of tension at home; Nick’s father thought the habit utterly disgusting.
The saucer, precariously balanced, makes it all the way to Grandad’s lips. He sips delicately, repeats the performance, and then he’s had enough.
‘I can’t seem to keep tea on my stomach,’ he explains apologetically, passing the saucer back. ‘Fills me full of wind.’
Every twinge of pain – and in spite of all his disavowals it’s quite clear from his braced position, his restlessness, that he is in pain – is firmly dismissed as ‘wind’. An innocuous problem uniting the two ends of life.
The talk revolves round him, small circular talk about family events, past and present, Miranda’s school, what she wants to be when she grows up. On the screen men in white run up and down, or – more often – walk on and off, but silently. England are all out for a total that seems incredible. Geordie’s eyes are closed, he doesn’t notice or comment on the disaster. Abruptly he opens them and quotes with approval a tombstone he once read:
Let your wind go free
Where ere ye may be.
For ’twas the wind that killed me.
Never one to proffer advice he’d be afraid to follow, Geordie accompanies the quotation with an immensely long rumbling fart. Then he needs the toilet, urgently.
‘It’s like this,’ Frieda explains to Miranda. ‘He either can’t go at all or he’s got the runs. Never anything in between.’
As Geordie struggles to stand up, the front of his pyjama trousers gapes open, revealing a shrivelled cock, a dangling and wrinkled scrotum. Miranda blinks, but only once, and then she’s helping Frieda wrap the dressing-gown round him, and offering her shoulder for him to lean on. But he prefers Nick’s shoulder, he’s tottery on his feet, needs more support than an old woman or a young girl can give. ‘Bloody rations are late again,’ he mutters, as they limp out of the room together. Or does he? A second later Nick isn’t sure that this is what he heard. Probably not, since a second later Geordie makes, through the half-closed door of the lavatory, a disparaging comment on the England middle-order collapse.
The sight of Geordie’s genitals disturbs him. It’s not merely awkwardness about Miranda’s presence, it’s the speculation he doesn’t want to have to entertain about what form sexuality might take in that inconceivably frail, and dauntless, body. How do you reconcile yourself to that loss? Sophocles was relieved. ‘Like freedom after a life spent in bondage to a cruel master.’ Sophocles was seventy. At seventy-eight Geordie had started an affair with Norah Atkinson, the widow of an insurance agent, a woman whose opulent bosom was frequently sheathed in Bri-nylon leopard skin. At home she’d gone down every bit as well as tea in saucers. Nick feels obscurely cheered by the thought of Grandad’s 78-year-old cavortings. He starts to think how much longer his grandfather has had than his father, how much longer he’s had than he might have had. Lucky to survive the bayonet wound. But even without that – Loos, the Somme, Passchendaele – the odds must always have been stacked high against his reaching twenty.
So Nick helps Geordie back into the living room feeling rather cheerful about the prospect of mortality, at least as it affected somebody else. Geordie too seems cheerful, doesn’t talk much, perhaps, but the few comments he does make show he’s following the conversation. As it grows dusk he remarks that the nights are drawing in. Part of him likes winter evenings, he likes coming in to a good fire. All the same he’ll be glad when next summer comes. He dreads the ice and frost of January and February, and his tone of voice reveals no doubt that these are difficulties he expects to contend with. It’s impossible to tell what he believes. They don’t mention how ill he is. Perhaps he takes his cue from them and thinks he isn’t? Equally likely he colludes with them for their sakes, the last dreadful courtesy the dying extend to the living. He can’t last a month, Nick thinks, but he’s no idea, really, how long a man of Geordie’s formidable willpower might survive. At any rate it pleases him to see the old man with Miranda. He strokes her forearm, as if marvelling at the smooth flesh, and seems to take comfort from the contact. This is his great-granddaughter. He won’t live to see her grow up, but he’s lived long enough already to see the woman she will become clearly visible in the child.
After tea’s cleared away and washed up, Nick takes Frieda to one side and asks if she wants him to come back that night. She hesitates, but he can see she’s tired. ‘I’ll just take Miranda home,’ he says. ‘And then I’ll be back.’
He rings Fran, but there’s nobody there. Slightly puzzled – they ought to be back by now, Fran hates driving through the rush hour – he lets the phone go on ringing and ringing in the empty house, until finally the answering machine clicks on, and his own voice invites him to leave a message after the tone.
‘Nobody in,’ he says, going back into the living room to say goodbye.
TEN
Fran’s car is so hot she has to open all the windows to cool it down before they can get in. She swings one door to and fro out of a vague feeling that this will help. Jasper’s trying to throw handfuls of gravel, but his coordination’s so poor he topples over and lands on his bottom. One whimper, and he’s on his feet again, this time throwing the gravel at Gareth, who thumps him on the arm.
‘Gareth!’
‘He started it.’
‘He’s just a baby, he doesn’t understand.’
‘He started it.’
‘Just get in, will you?’
Gareth sits in the front passenger seat.
‘Not there. In the back.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s the law. You’re not allowed in the front till you’re twelve.’
‘Nick lets Miranda.’
; ‘Miranda’s thirteen.’
‘I’m nearly twelve.’
‘And when you are twelve then you can sit in the front.’
Gareth gets in the back. Fran’s not inclined to congratulate herself. In dealing with Gareth, there’s nothing more ominous than a small, early victory.
Jasper, who hates the hot plastic car seat, stiffens his legs till they’re like planks. Fran, holding a heavy toddler at arm’s length, back aching, stomach getting in the way of everything, pendulous breasts each with a swamp of sweat underneath, thinks, This is stupid. She stops, lets Jasper get out, and plays with him for a while, pretendy chases and tickling and incey-wincey-spider-climbed-up-the-spout, then when he’s curled up and helpless with giggles she slips him quickly into the seat and clicks the buckle. He opens his mouth to scream, but she crashes the gears, turns the radio on full blast, starts to sing ‘Incey Wincey Spider’ at the top of her voice, until Jasper, bowling along the open road, breath snatched out of his mouth, deafened by the noise, forgets what he’s crying about, and points at the shadows of leaves flickering across the roof. ‘’Ook, ’ook.’
‘Yeah,’ says Gareth sourly. ‘’Ook.’
Fran slips one hand into her blouse and surreptitiously rubs the sweat, flaps the cotton, does what she can to dry off. When she was a girl – back in the middle Jurassic – she’d been one of the last in her class to hold a pencil under them. Get pencil cases in there now. Be a pencil factory soon if she doesn’t do something about this bloody saggy bra. ‘Look, Gareth,’ she says, trying to keep the lines of communication open. ‘There’s your new school.’
And why the fuck would anybody want to look at that? Gareth thinks.
But look at it he does. It’s empty now, of course, the middle of August, a long, low huddle of buildings, one of them with its windows boarded up, because last winter the pipes burst and flooded the labs and there’s no money to get them repaired. Though Digger says it wasn’t burst pipes, it was his brother Paul and a gang of lads broke in and left the taps running. Gareth doesn’t know whether to believe him or not.
He’s dreading it. At his last school he knew all the places you could hide. Behind the fire escape, in the caretaker’s cupboard, out on the flat roof, in the bogs. Gareth can make a pee last fifty minutes if he has to. And he knew all the boys. Who was hard, who wasn’t, which of the girls was hard enough to take on nearly all the lads. Joanna Martin could take on everybody in 6M except Darryl Davies. There are 1,500 kids in the new school. He can’t even imagine what it would look like, if they were all in a room together. Not that they ever are. You don’t have assemblies in the big school. Instead every morning there’s Family Groups, big kids, grown-ups, little kids all mixed up together. Like in families. It’s supposed to make you feel safe and if Jasper doesn’t stop saying ‘’Ook!’ soon he’s going to strangle the little fucker.
None of it would matter if him and Digger were still mates, because apart from anything else Paul always looked out for Digger – he might kick his head in, but he wouldn’t let anybody else do it – only Digger hung round with Darryl and them now. When September comes nobody’ll call for him. He’ll have to walk up that drive on his own.
Last year was the best time. Digger and him had been a gang all on their own, people said you couldn’t have a gang with just two, but you could, they were, though probably because nobody else wanted to join. And they made a den on the waste ground behind the railway line. A stream ran through it, with lots of willow trees, small ones, and they always had rags and bits of polythene hanging from the branches. At one point the stream had big pipes going across it, making a kind of bridge, and then on one side it opened out into a swamp and further up there was a steep hill with bushes on the top. Gareth saw you could have a den in the bushes, they were quite thick, nobody’d be able to see in. But what was even better you could dam the stream, flood the marshy ground and turn the whole area into a real bog, like in the Hound of the Baskervilles, and nobody’d know the way through, but they would, and anybody who tried to find the den would sink into the mud with screams and yells, hands clawing and waving in the air until there were just a few bubbles breaking on the surface and the hands sticking out, twitching a bit, and then going still and sliding slowly into the mud. Fucking brilliant.
But the marsh wasn’t easy to flood. He was the one who saw how to do it, nobody else, but by that time they’d turned into a real gang, everybody wanted to join. Even Paul sort of belonged and one night the three of them slept out and Paul spunked up. He said he had and Gareth didn’t disbelieve him for a second because he went all red in the face and there was a new smell in the tent.
He didn’t know why it had gone wrong. Except they all started thieving and one day in Woolies Gareth panicked and ran away and Darryl got nicked and blamed him though it wasn’t his fault and Darryl said he was chicken and Digger joined in and then Darryl started pushing and shoving and trying to make Gareth fight and there was a ring of lads all round yelling and Digger was yelling and when Gareth got knocked over and kicked in the teeth he didn’t do anything, didn’t even say anything. Just looked.
‘Can I go to Metroland?’ he asks.
‘After we get the shoes.’
And after I find somewhere to park, Fran thinks. Round and round, up and down, why couldn’t people stay at home and sunbathe? She’d never expected it to be this busy. She sees a place, on the edge of the road in full sun, but it’ll have to do. Jasper stands patiently while she gets her handbag from under the passenger seat and then puts his hand in hers. ‘All right, off we go.’
Gareth’s dragging his feet, not just figuratively. ‘It’s no wonder your shoes don’t last,’ Fran says, as he scuffs and trails along behind.
The windows of clothes and shoe shops display huge photographs of smiling children, neatly dressed in school uniforms, clutching new pencil cases and satchels, greeting the new term full of energy and hope and youthful vigour.
Twats, Gareth thinks.
Mum stops outside Stead & Simpson. ‘All right,’ she says. ‘Let’s have a look in here.’
The next hour’s a nightmare. It’s the sort of thing you’d like to blot out of your consciousness for ever, but you can’t. Fran was afraid, when they set off, that Gareth might be uncooperative, but it’s worse than that. He’s being pseudo-cooperative. Every shoe in the shop’s on the floor in front of them. Gareth’s still limping obediently up and down. ‘No, it’s too tight,’ he says, shaking his head regretfully. ‘Would you like to try the other one?’ says the assistant. ‘What’s the point of trying the other one if this one’s too tight?’ Gareth snaps. Mask slipped a bit there. He forces a smile.
‘No good, I’m afraid,’ the assistant says to Fran. She wants them out of the shop. Jasper, excited by the idea of taking shoes out of boxes – he’s been watching her do it for an hour – decides to join in. Soon high-heeled shoes from the ladies’ display stand are flying through the air. It’s time to retreat.
Outside Fran says to Gareth, ‘If you ever show me up like that again, I’ll bloody murder you.’
‘What have I done? It was him hoying shoes.’
Fran walks on.
‘But of course that’s all right, isn’t it, he never gets wrong for anything.’
‘He’s a baby. He doesn’t understand.’
‘Anyway they don’t wear shoes like that.’
‘Black shoes, Gareth. It says on the list.’
‘I know what it says. But they wear trainers.’
He can’t understand why she doesn’t get it. If he goes to school wearing shoes like that he’ll get filled in. And then he thinks, What does it matter? He’ll get filled in anyway.
Barratt’s next. Jasper can’t believe his luck, and immediately starts following the lady round, taking shoes off the stands and hurling them across the floor with shrieks of joy. Fran, desperate, taps him on the leg, not hard, but he starts to scream. Several women turn to stare at her. Rotten lousy mother, she hears them thi
nking. Can’t control her child without resorting to slaps. ‘No, it rubs a bit at the back,’ she hears Gareth saying. Dragging a screaming Jasper by the arm, Fran marches across and says, ‘We’ll take those.’
By the time she gets them out of the shop Jasper’s dancing with rage. Fran kneels down and tries to reason with him. Several women turn to stare at her. Stupid, middle-class, Hampstead-style mother, she hears them thinking. Can’t she see what that child needs is a good slap?
And then Gareth starts, and that’s terrible because a two-year-old having a temper tantrum’s just normal. An eleven-year-old boy having one’s a case for family therapy. She offers him money to go to Metroland, too much money, she’s bribing him, she knows she is, she doesn’t care, and then, guiltily relieved to see the back of him, takes Jasper into Mothercare. He’s quiet now, upstaged by Gareth’s performance, by how much sheer noise Gareth can make.
Twenty minutes later Fran’s in a communal changing room trying on shirts, about the only garment she can get into now that will still fit her after the birth. The room’s crowded, but at least Fran’s spared the usual feelings of inadequacy. She has a cast-iron excuse for having no waist. Jasper’s sitting on the bench staring at a little girl, a few feet away, who’s sucking her thumb and watching her mother try on dresses. That’s what I could do with, Fran thinks. A bit of mother–daughter bonding. ‘What do you think?’ the mother says, craning round to see her back view in the mirror.
The little girl takes her thumb out of her mouth, and says, ‘Your bum’s wobbly.’
The woman and Fran exchange glances and laugh. Cancel the mother–daughter bonding, Fran thinks. I’ll settle for a football team.
Five minutes later Jasper’s near the end of his tether, grizzling and pulling his ears. Fran pays, scrabbling about for her Access card, and in the process drops all her bags. Blowing wisps of hair out of her eyes, she picks them up again, but by this time Jasper’s run out of the shop. She chases him, grabs him by the hand, pulls him, screaming, back to the counter, collects her things together again, forgets the blouse, goes back, gets it, finally sets off for Metroland, where she finds Gareth absorbed in a game that involves two vaguely oriental-looking gentlemen taking it in turns to kick each other in the head.