Hens Dancing

by Raffaella Barker

  ‘We bought them with Granny in Budgens,’ explains Felix, wrapping one leg round the other and overbalancing in anticipation. He has given me a packet of chocolate cornflakes.

  ‘How delicious, Felix, how did you know that I love these the most?’

  He is terribly pleased with this reaction. ‘Do you? That’s really good. I chose them because they’ve got Space Trolls inside, and I wanted one.’

  Giles kicks him; he howls.

  ‘Shut up,’ says Giles. ‘You shouldn’t give people things just because you want them.’

  ‘Shut up yourself. You didn’t even buy Mummy something in Budgens. You—’

  Wave my arms and yell as forcefully as possible from trapped position beneath my tray. ‘Come on, you two, let’s not have a row. Let’s see what Giles has given me.’

  It is a false arm.

  ‘It’s meant to be like The Thing in The Addams Family,’ says Giles, watching me keenly and trying to gauge my reaction. ‘I got it in the shopping mall in Cambridge.’

  The arm wears a white sleeve and likes to be draped out of pianos or car doors. Am nonplussed. Fortunately Giles has stopped looking at me. He has seized the arm and is demonstrating its skill at dangling from my knicker drawer. Following the success of this interlude, the arm is accompanied out of the room and around the house, until it is finally given some peace when it is posted through the letter box.

  ‘Mum, will you take a photograph of the postman when he sees it?’

  The Beauty gives me a pair of false eyelashes and a leather diary.

  ‘How smart and kind. What a thoughtful—’

  Am interrupted by the return of Felix. He picks up the diary.

  ‘Oh, no! You can’t have this, Mum. You’ll be arrested. The Beauty stole it. In fact, she shoplifted it. What’s the difference?’ Felix pauses to glare at his sister.

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Well, anyway, Granny didn’t notice it in the pushchair when we came out of the newspaper shop. It’s a crime, and I said I’d take it back and I forgot. Will she be in trouble?’

  He removes the stolen goods. Am very impressed by the high moral tone, but also disappointed; a new diary would be perfect. Perhaps I can sneak it back when Felix has forgotten about it again.

  My mother meets me at the cinema with a green furry hot-water-bottle cover and a bunch of white roses made of satin and adorned with plastic dewdrops. David is with her. Immensely cheering, as Simon and Vivienne cannot come, and three are always better than two at dealing with Cromer.

  ‘Happy Birthday, Venetia.’ David kisses me and proffers a selection of gifts. ‘I couldn’t decide what to give you, so I brought all the things I had available.’

  Not quite sure how to take this. There is a leopard-skin lead for Rags, who never has one, with a label saying, ‘Love from Digger.’ There is a scarf with poppies and anemones on it, and a glass scent bottle with a crystal stopper.

  ‘Oh, David, how lovely. And how girlie.’

  Eyes begin to smart with emotion and excitement. Suddenly realise what a thrill it is to receive girlie things, and how I have missed it. Hug him, accidentally dropping my hot-water-bottle cover into a puddle.

  After the film (most satisfactory, being a costume drama with many horses, spirited heroines plus swashbuckling men, almost all of Georgette Heyer or Tolstovian quality), we scuttle down the High Street to the Indian, which apart from Le Moon, is the only restaurant to stay open beyond nine o’clock. Order Tiger beers and piles of poppadoms from a waiter who looks like a parrot with a curved nose and shaggy hair in a crest from his crown to his shoulders. Mouthwatering smells of grilling chicken and sauces seep from the kitchen and we eat all the poppadoms while admiring the disco decor of black velvet walls with hanging baskets of neon-green plastic plants and gold foil ceiling. David is wearing a grey shirt of extreme softness and loveliness, cut to emphasise broad shoulders. Cannot stop looking at it, coveting it and the notion of having someone to give it to. Wonder who gave it to him. Don’t dare ask. We stay at the restaurant until one in the morning and drink quantities of Bailey’s Irish Cream liqueur.

  Driving my mother home, am engulfed in warm joy.

  ‘This was an especially nice birthday,’ I enthuse, but am met with a deep exhalation of breath. She is asleep in the back seat, propped up against The Beauty’s throne, having refused to travel in the front because of my driving.

  November 27th

  Winter, as always, sets in as soon as the birthdays are over, and a sharp frost last night has left the hens’ water bowl frozen and the car windscreen sparkly and groovy to look at but impossible to see through. Pour kettle of boiling water over it; very pleased with myself for remembering this practical tip. The piglets are going to the butcher today, so I cannot bear to be at home. We gave them apple crumble and fish fingers and macaroni cheese for their last supper. During this melancholy half-hour, one of the fruitcakes bit Giles, while a pink scraped the top layer of skin from my shin with its razor-sharp hoof, so their departure is not all bad.

  Drop the boys at school and take The Beauty shopping in Norwich. Appalled to discover that Christmas is in full swing a mere twenty miles from my home, and all shops are decked with tinsel and piping carols. The Beauty has huge fun dancing along to ‘Ding Dong Merrily’ in the Marks & Spencer’s ladies’ changing room, where I try on and reject three depressing, matronly skirts, and finally select a knee-length pink felt one from the children’s section. Marks & Spencer fourteen-year-old girls are the size of normal adults. Must be the delicious oven-ready meals. Buy many of these, especially the puddings. Supper with the boys tonight will be great, we shall have chicken Kiev with ready-washed new potatoes and chocolate bread-and-butter pudding.

  ‘Mmmmmm. Yummy, yummy,’ says The Beauty, who is most interested by the shopping and has climbed onto the conveyor belt to help me. Think about doing Christmas shopping, like everyone else, but am too daunted to begin. Have made no lists as yet, so am paralysed. The Beauty and I spend the afternoon in the toy shop testing different kitchen sets. She likes the most expensive one. It is an architect-designed cooker and surface set based on a highly fashionable restaurant, and has lots of organic-looking plastic veg on shelves and sheaves of black spaghetti. It also has heavenly miniature enamel implements, and a set of saucepans I could share with The Beauty. They would be big enough for boiling a bantam egg or making hot chocolate for one. Very practical. Very economical. Am so relieved that she doesn’t like the soppy Cabbage Patch kitchen that I buy the architect-designed one for her. It costs more than I can believe; all the props are extra, but I am in too deep and just pay up. It will be delivered the week before Christmas. Hooray. One down, just a few more now. Pity it cost all my money.

  Head for home, but pause at a groovy men’s clothes shop, attracted by my favourite Willie Nelson track reaching its crescendo on the shop’s sound system. A completely beautiful purple shirt beckons from the first rail. Simultaneously, The Beauty and I reach out and touch it.

  ‘Aaah,’ she says.

  ‘Ooh,’ I agree.

  Buy it, and on the way home wonder why. Who can I give it to? Desmond, I suppose. What a waste. Maybe I can keep it myself.

  November 29th

  Sunday morning is spent arguing with the children. Their view of Christmas shopping is that I should take them to a shop, let them run riot and then pick up the tab. Mine is that they should choose very tiny, inexpensive items for everyone and pay for them with their own money. Cold War; no compromise is reached.

  In despair, I make cheerful Blue Peter suggestion: ‘I know, why don’t you make a few things instead?’ Giles is horizontal under the table, throwing tiny blobs of Blu-Tack at the underside of the tabletop above him. He drips sarcasm.

  ‘Like what? I suppose you think it’s easy to make a remote-control aeroplane which flies, or a size four rugby ball? You’re on totally the wrong wicket, Mum.’

  Pleased to know roughly what his slang means, and to note
that ‘wicket’, popular when I was a child and in P. G. Wodehouse books, is making a comeback.

  ‘No, I mean things like lavender bags and furry purses like we saw at that craft fair.’ Felix takes the bait.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, already getting overexcited, ‘we can do giraffe-skin frames, too. Mum’s got some giraffe skin, haven’t you?’

  I nod, scanning my memory hastily to see if I can remember where I put the large fake-fur slices I bought last Christmas to make cuddly toys and did nothing with.

  Felix continues, his tone now one of serious responsibility, ‘But I don’t think we should use the zebra skin because it’s whole.’

  Giles continues to kick furniture and look cross. We ignore him and assemble excellent items including glitter glue, fake fur, sequins, dyed feathers, gold spray and bubble wrap. These are irresistible. Before Felix has finished cutting his first strip of giraffe, Giles is at the table, expression now friendly and interested, demanding to be shown how to spray bubble wrap. Am able to enjoy fully the smug sense of being a Blue Peter kind of mother with Blue Peter children until I remember The Beauty. She has been occupied in silence, in the playroom, for some twenty minutes. Disaster. I have wronged her. She is in her tent with a Superman cape flung over her shoulders and a Red Indian headdress round her neck. On her head she has a suede cap with a foil hoe sticking out of the top, a relic from Felix’s school play. Her tiny feet are wedged into the long toes of a pair of red velvet stilettos with one stiletto missing. When I look in, she is leaning towards a hand mirror dabbing at her face with a paintbrush.

  ‘She’s getting ready to go out and she’s dressed up, just like you do, Mum,’ laughs Felix.

  The Beauty glances round at us and bats her eyelashes before turning back to her toilette.

  Winter

  December 1st

  Postcard from Rose arrives with picture of a dolphin on it. ‘Darling Venetia, you must have one of these new massages. It will make you feel like a dolphin. This is your late birthday token. Ring me to activate it and a pint-sized masseuse will arrive bearing table and swaddling gear. Prepare for meltdown.’

  December 2nd

  Do I want to feel like a dolphin?

  December 4th

  Am now an astral body and live on an astral plane where nothing matters and calm is deep and blue like the sea. Have been pummelled, kneaded, unravelled, unwound, stroked and filleted. Am more like an ear than a whole skeleton, being boneless now, and lacking any tension anywhere, so I could just slide through a wedding ring if anyone wanted me to. Thankfully, my mother is collecting the children and has The Beauty, for I am fit for nothing but silken sleep. Mmmmmm.

  December 6th

  Silken sleep was short-lived, but state of blue calm lasted forty-eight hours. It has now evaporated and been replaced by hysteria and also dogged determination. I have a puncture and I don’t know how to fix it. More importantly, I do not want to find out how to fix it. I want someone else to do it. Am keen to master a variety of physical skills, including how to get rid of garden moles and how to syphon petrol, but not punctures. Have reached the age of thirty-five and had three children and, briefly, a husband, all without knowing how to change the tyre on a car. Anyway, I would be bound to do it wrong and the wheel would come off round a bend and cause a terrible accident.

  Stand idiotically on the side of the road, next to a very smart triangle I found in the car boot. The triangle has an exclamation mark in the middle. Am sure that it makes me look efficient and in control. A silver car with blacked-in windows and throbbing music radiating from it stops. A greasy-haired creep gets out.

  ‘’Allo, sweetheart. Need rescuing, do ya?’

  His neck is wider than his head, giving him the appearance of a gorilla. But not a friendly one. He leers and chews gum aggressively. Wish I had a big dog or a gun. The Beauty has taken charge inside the car, and stands on the driver’s seat twiddling knobs and wiggling the steering wheel. Her lip trembles when the creep approaches, and tears well. I lean against the door, shielding her from him, and make a feeble excuse.

  ‘I think I’ll just wait a minute. Someone’s coming to pick me up soon, anyway. I can manage. Thank you for stopping, but there’s no need for you to wait, my friend will be here any minute.’

  This is a big lie, but as I utter it, it becomes true. A throaty chugging sound heralds David’s ambulance. It pulls up, menacingly close to the creep’s car, the brakes squealing a protest like the fruitcake pigs.

  David leans out, his face hard, angry, with his jaw clenched, and says to my would-be rescuer, ‘OK, mate, thanks for your help but I’ll sort this one out.’

  Am most impressed by his aggressive stance as he swings out of his vehicle and moves over to stand protectively next to me and my puncture. Have to fight impulse to giggle weakly and hide head in his manly biceps. The creep narrows his eyes, rolls his jaw as if moving marbles in his mouth and evidently cannot think of anything cutting to say. He curses under his breath and spits his gum into the road before slamming himself back into his car and roaring off. Look to David to make fun of this interlude, but find he is grinding his teeth and wearing thunderous expression, not unlike that of thwarted creep, in fact.

  ‘How can you be so stupid, Venetia? What if I hadn’t come along? You are here on your own, in the middle of nowhere, with a baby. It’s getting dark. Christ only knows what you’ve done with Giles and Felix, but presumably they’re waiting for you somewhere. And don’t even pretend that you know how to change that tyre. I know you don’t and I’m going to show you now, so this cannot happen again.’

  Mouth gapes, arms hang slack in astonishment and I keep quiet until he has finished and is scrabbling about in the boot looking for something. He doesn’t find it, and slams the boot but starts rummaging in the Land Rover instead. Have an urge to vent my own spleen, and do so.

  ‘I don’t want to learn how to change a bloody tyre. That’s what men are for. I would have easily got someone to do it by now if you weren’t standing here giving sanctimonious lectures. And actually the boys are with Vivienne and we’re on our way to meet them and have tea.’

  He misses most of this, as his head is in the bowels of the Land Rover.

  ‘You need a jack first. Your car hasn’t got one, which is peculiar. You must buy one.’

  ‘I don’t want one.’

  ‘You will when you know what to do with it.’

  ‘I don’t want to know what to do with it.’

  ‘Grow up.’ The crisp delivery of these words leaves me smarting. David looks round to see why I am not answering back, and continues smoothly, passing me a weird-shaped bit of metal.

  ‘Now I want you to do this yourself. This is the jack. Put the jack here behind the wheel and twist the handle clockwise. I said clockwise…’

  On and on he goes, bossing me about as if I am five. The Beauty waves occasionally from her snug disco scene within the lopsided car, but is mainly oblivious to any humiliation and David’s smug and patronising manner.

  ‘… And you just check for one last time that each nut is tight before you put the hubcap back on.’

  It is almost dark now, and my fingers are blunt and without feeling. I am cold, tired and depressed. David, on the other hand, appears overjoyed, and his former flintlike expression has given way to a wide grin.

  ‘Well done. It wasn’t so bad, was it? I’m really glad you made the effort, and I know you will be too. Next time it’ll be so easy for you.’

  His good cheer radiates through the dark and it is impossible to go on being cross. Instead I have a go at being graceful.

  ‘It was very considerate of you to teach me how to change a puncture, and I really appreciate it.’

  He laughs and climbs into his car, switching on the engine and letting it idle a little.

  ‘I’m sure you don’t. But you will. A single woman needs to be practical. I’ll teach you now to split logs with an axe next.’ He chugs away, missing a selection of filthy language whi
ch The Beauty copies.

  ‘Oh, bugger off. Oh, bugger off. Bugger, bugger, bugger, HA HA!’ she trills all the way to Vivienne’s. There, just for good measure, she tries her new word on Simon. Finding him watching television, she homes in on him, patting his arm, smiling angelically and announcing, ‘Oh, bugger,’ in her breathiest voice. Simon’s response is pleasing.

  ‘That’s really splendid, isn’t it? Such a shame about the fog. Come and watch the local news, my dear.’ He pats the seat next to him and The Beauty, sensing a kindred spirit, climbs on and becomes absorbed in the teatime news and weather.

  December 8th

  Sidney is ill. His coat stares and his eyes are dull. Dare say he has swallowed a fishbone or half a pheasant, but take him to the vet anyway, as work-avoidance exercise. It backfires. The journey is ghastly. We have no box, so he flits about the car miaowing and shedding hair. Finally subsides, emitting a menacing whine and flurrying hair, under my foot. Have to kick him to avoid crashing into a sugar-beet lorry. Vet gives him a pill, says, ‘He’s got worms,’ and charges me £28. Wish I had Pet Plan, as recommended by Charles.

  December 10th

  Hurtling towards Christmas now, and am in deepest disgrace with Felix for not having the skill to make his costume for the nativity play. He is Joseph, and he has to sing a solo.

  ‘All the other mothers are making costumes. They come to the school and sit in the library and sew and have coffee and stuff.’ This outburst accompanies a session in the charity shop where I attempt to put together an Galilean carpenter’s outfit scaled down to seven-year-old size; Felix refuses to have anything to do with me.