by Hatch, Ben
We stare at the apartment across the courtyard.
‘I got back in touch with her after you left me too. After I moved to London. When I was writing my book. We went for dinner. She was horrible to me. Very dismissive. I was embarrassed about that. That’s another reason I didn’t tell you.’
‘How old was she?’
‘In her twenties.’
‘And you were what then?’
‘In my thirties.’
‘You idiot,’ she says.
‘I know.’
‘What was her name?’
‘Smith.’
‘Smith!’
‘After some Canadian writer her dad liked.’
‘I don’t remember her.’
‘It was a long time ago.’
Dinah sips her drink. Her face is rigid, the way it goes when she’s upset with me.
‘Are you upset?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Shall I pull the nets round so we can argue in silhouette?’
She doesn’t laugh. I picture Smith. Her frizzy black hair. The tight red round-necked jumpers she wore. The childish clumsy way she juggled things in her hands – a pen, a box of matches – whenever I was talking to her. How I’d catch her eye in the newsroom. The sight of her legs walking past my desk.
‘I’m going to bed,’ says Dinah.
‘Shall I stay here?’
‘Do what you want.’
I look across the courtyard wondering how the argument is going in their flat. I walk to the fridge to fetch another bottle of wine, taking flat-footed steps, my feet slightly splayed. It’s Dad’s walk.
In bed Dinah’s reading. I lean over for a kiss. Her eyes are red. I wonder if she’s been crying.
‘You all right?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Fine fine? Or just fine?’
‘Fine fine. Come here,’ she says.
I hug her tightly and now she is crying.
‘We were both such fools,’ she says.
‘I know.’
‘To think what might have happened. That we might not have had…’ She looks towards the kids’ bedroom. ‘But it didn’t happen.’
CHAPTER 10
Draft Copy for Guidebook: Noddingham, as Kevin Costner pronounced it so convincingly in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, is principally known for one thing: its connection to the evil sheriff of Robin Hood fame. Many city attractions are geared around him and the thigh-slapping outlaws in Lincoln green he hunted down with his blunt spoon, including The Tales of Robin Hood and Nottingham Castle. The city has been dubbed the gun crime capital of Britain, and so we fully expected to be ducking volleys of machine gun fire every few seconds as we shopped in the Old Market Square, the largest of its kind in Britain, and can only assume these tales have been exaggerated or else it all happens at night when parents with small children are safely inside drinking wine and watching HBO box sets. Other highlights include the city’s lace market, the world’s oldest pub, Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, and, a little further out, the Sherwood Forest Country Park where you’ll find the Major Oak, the tree beneath which Robin Hood plighted his troth to Maid Marian, and a visitor centre where you’ll be exposed to semi-boring detail about preserving heathland and managing forests that really needn’t concern you unless you are either a) John Craven or b) a vole.
At Sherwood Forest Center Parcs we’re allotted a villa in the Red Maple section. A grocery hamper awaits us – milk, sausages, Kettle Chips and two bottles of locally brewed beer. The villa has three bedrooms, a lounge and plate glass doors giving on to a BBQ area, and on one whole wall of the lounge is a restful colour photo of dappled woodland. Free bike hire has been arranged and Phoebe’s been gifted a make-a-teddy session. The sense of comfort and order is palpable, yet there’s something disquieting I can’t put my finger on. It might be the amount of people with jumpers tied round their waists. It might be the number of bikes with children’s seats and tag-alongs. Or it might be us.
As we follow our map to the cycle centre, it’s like being on a cheery orienteering course. People with kids in tow stop to look at signs to the village square or the information centre, or Robin Hood’s Adventure Golf, then back at their maps again. Their politeness is a sharp contrast to being buffeted by passers-by outside the Gala Bingo hall on Maid Marian Way. I no longer feel I must conceal my bumbag under my jumper. Instead of litter we see squirrels, swans, rabbits and moorhens. Changing the timing for the teddy-bear-making session is fine; we don’t have to argue. At bike hire we forget our docket. No problem. All we do is give our villa number and it’s sorted. It’s easy, effortless. We should be relaxing but like Vietnam vets on home leave, we feel alienated.
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Dinah.
But we do know. It’s like this is no longer our world but someone else’s. Our normality is getting lost on ring roads. Our world is fighting to get toddler food heated up.
As we ride our bikes to Café Rouge in the village square for dinner I start to recognise toddler faces. It reminds me of the movie The Truman Show. Are they the same toddlers we saw earlier looking for the village square with their parents? And are they
really still lost, or is our whole visit being choreographed by TV producers filming in secret our every waking moment for some ultimate reality show we’ve stumbled into unawares? And what happens at the edge of Sherwood Forest? Are we even allowed to leave Center Parcs before turnaround day?
In Café Rouge the kids’ fishcakes arrive speedily and the waiter doesn’t bat an eyelid bringing our enormous glasses of Pinot Grigio, but the kids are finding the adjustment hard as well. Charlie, his face admittedly pinched earlier by the straps of his cycle helmet, is tired and cries continually, while Phoebe, brutalised by us/the East Midlands/ the drunk on Maid Marian Way yesterday afternoon muttering obscenities, wets herself and runs off shouting, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’
‘Fluff,’ we shout after her. ‘It’s fluff, Phoebe.’
We have trouble sleeping. The kids, used to being in together, cry out alone in their beds. Charlie demands more and more milk and Phoebe has nightmares about the skulls she saw on the pod ride at The Tales of Robin Hood.
The next morning we try to enjoy the facilities but can’t relax. Cars are banned except on change-over days. You leave them at the entrance car park and use bikes. But, for some reason, we cannot bear to be without our car. We’ve lived in it for a month. It’s our home, it’s our lifeline. The one constant in our lives. Driving illegally to the Jardin des Sports, dodging bikes and walkers, for Phoebe’s make-a-teddy session, I’m contemptuously stared at by parents as if I’m stood bolt upright staring out of the gun turret of a Challenger tank.
‘They hate us, Ben.’
‘I know.’
‘What should we do?’
‘Drive slowly and pretend we’re lost.’
‘How do I do that?’
‘Shrug a lot, gesticulate.’
But emerging from the make-a-bear session there’s a stroppy note on the windscreen: ‘Move it.’ We turn up for ‘swimming with baby dolphins’ at the Subtropical Swimming Paradise and find another. ‘Move it immediately,’ this one says, in red ink.
‘What’ll they do next?’
‘Capital letters?’
That afternoon we try the Time Out Club for kids in the Jardin des Sports. The idea is that Dinah and I will have a little time on our own. We’ve not had any in daylight hours since Brighton more than six weeks ago. We’re excited.
‘I’ll buy Heat magazine and read it in the bath,’ says Dinah. ‘What about you?’
‘I’ll go back to bed. I’ll snooze, wake up, read, snooze again, wake up and read. I love doing that.’
‘I don’t feel bad. Do you?’
‘Not at all. They must be sick of the sight of us.’
‘We’ll probably have to drag them out.’
Within minutes of dropping them off we get a call from the nursery. Phoebe won�
�t be separated from Charlie, and is standing at the door between the two rooms stamping her feet.
‘Can’t they go in together?’
‘What age are they?’
I tell her.
‘Sorry, we don’t put children that age together.’
‘But they’re brother and sister?’
‘If I made an exception for you…’
‘What shall we do?’ I ask Dinah.
‘Give them a few more minutes.’
A few minutes later there’s another call – this time I’m told Charlie’s not settling. He’s crying, inconsolable. He wants Phoebe and is calling for Mum and Dad.
‘What do we do?’
‘This is so typical. So typical,’ says Dinah. ‘One hour. They won’t give us ONE hour. I haven’t even got to This Week In Pictures.’
‘Do you want me to go?’
‘Thank you.’
Extracting the kids, I’m caught red-handed when I come back out.
‘That’s your car, isn’t it?’ says the security man. ‘I’ve been monitoring you.’
‘Have you?’
‘Yes,’ he says.
‘I see. I didn’t know I was being monitored.’
‘You’re in Red Maple, aren’t you?’
I nod.
The security guard asks me to move the car and, I’m not sure what gives me the boldness, but I find I’m asking what’ll happen if I don’t. He’s clearly stumped, has probably never been asked the question before.
‘Erm, I will… tell you off,’ he says, ‘and…’ and I wait for the next bit. Will he sling us off the park? Contact Frommer’s? Impound the car? Rescind the complimentary breakfast hamper with the locally brewed ales? ‘… and that isn’t very nice, is it?’ he concludes, sounding like me feebly rebuking Phoebe.
Back at Red Maple, when Dinah emerges from the bath, full of gossip about Dougie Poynter from McFly and Hayden Panettiere, we leave the park for the afternoon ‘to take the heat off’, we joke. At the gates we half expect to hear The Truman Show producer shouting to us from giant speakers to return. We joke the gates will be mysteriously broken, that choreographed traffic jams will prevent us leaving.
Our nearest attraction is the Vina Cooke Museum of Dolls & Bygone Childhood, thirty minutes up the A1. The kids fall asleep, are still flat out when we arrive.
‘What shall we do?’ asks Dinah.
‘We don’t both have to go in. Do you want me to go?’
‘You’re being very nice today,’ says Dinah, suspiciously.
‘Am I?’
‘Feeling a bit guilty about Smith?’
She raises her eyebrows.
‘Stop it.’
The museum looks like someone’s house, which it is. Amassed by Vina and her husband Charles over forty years, the largest collection of dolls in Britain is housed in the museum. Vina shows me around, pointing out a copy of the Cliff Richard doll she made and presented to the singer in 1959. It was shortly afterwards that Cliff himself began collecting dolls and not long after this he recorded ‘Living Doll’. Coincidence or not? Vina lets me decide.
There are pictures of bygone celebrities on the walls including those of several, like Reginald Bosanquet, who died just as Vina, not at all menacingly, was preparing to make dolls of them. Vina learned to make dolls out of socks and her husband used to construct them out of porcelain. Now a major player in the doll world, she tells me she only makes them by appointment for large fees ‘that I will not disclose’.
In one room upstairs, hundreds of dolls are all turned eerily to face me as I enter the door. More scary is the workroom downstairs, where, laid out face down on a lace draped dining table, there is a plastic doll, its detached arms and an ominous pair of sharp scissors lying close by.
It’s the ‘operating table’ of what Vina calls the ‘the doll hospital’. They mend dolls, new and old. They remake eyes, reattach limbs. It’s in this room I realise I’m being referred to, when Vina and her husband Charles think I’m out of earshot, as ‘the man’. As in, ‘The man wants to know about the Shirley Temple letters.’ And, ‘The man is asking about The Beatles dolls.’
Back in the car, Dinah and I decide a doll museum curator would be a great new Royston Vasey character in The League of Gentlemen. We pad the character out as we drive back. ‘Silence, dollies. We agreed that would never happen again.’ ‘I am sorry you have upset the dollies. NOW YOU WILL HAVE TO GO.’
Returning to Center Parcs, it takes me a while to realise the road signs have all moved. It’s like World War Two when the Germans needed to be confused in case of invasion. Entry signs are now exit signs and vice versa. Where we turn right for Red Maple, there’s now a No Entry sign. Whatever we do, whichever way we turn, we cannot return to the villa. Defeated, we’re forced to abandon the car in the main entrance car park.
We spend the rest of the afternoon riding around on bikes with tag-alongs. The kids love it. It’s 26 degrees. I’m so hot I tie my jumper round my waist. Dinah does the same.
‘This is nice,’ Dinah admits, cycling beside me.
‘I know, we should have done this earlier.’
Later I see a VW Passat creeping around the village square. I dismount my bike way before I have to and stare after the driver in a hyperbolic display of anger and protection. He shrugs and gesticulates. And I have to stop myself saying to Dinah, ‘God, that’s selfish.’
That night, sat outside, it’s comforting watching other parents performing the rituals we’ve just completed – feeding their children, putting them to bed. The smell of barbecued meat wafts through the trees, there’s a cackle of moorhen, distant threads of laughter. We’re wrapped in blankets drinking wine, and I’m editing the day’s photos when Dinah says, ‘What you told me last night.’ She gives me an arch look. ‘It does make me wonder what else you haven’t told me.’
I tap my nose.
‘There’s a fifteen-year rule,’ I say. ‘It’s like government papers. That’s how long until they’re released. I’m doing all sorts right now you won’t know about for years.’
She flicks the end of her blanket at me.
‘You wouldn’t dare.’
‘I know.’
‘Seriously, though?’
‘Dinah!’
I fetch some crisps and two locally brewed ales. I sit back down. Dinah leans forward, wrapping herself more tightly in the blanket.
‘Come on, what stopped you? Being serious now. I don’t mind. It was years ago.’
‘You.’
She nods. ‘Good answer.’
I remove the cap on her beer and pass it to her. She looks away, biting her lip.
‘God, I was a bitch. Your family really hated me, didn’t they?’
‘My dad didn’t.’
‘Pen and Buster?’
‘Yeah, they did.’
She laughs.
‘Thanks for softening that for me.’
‘That’s all right.’
She holds my hand across the table. She twiddles my wedding ring.
‘Although, you were horrible to me.’
‘You wanted to settle down. I didn’t and I didn’t take you seriously. My mum was ill. I took my eye off the ball. And we were very young and… why are you looking at me like that?’
‘I’m not,’ she says. But she carries on with the same piercing look.
‘Dinah, I’d hardly tell you about something that almost happened that you had no idea about if something really had happened, would I?’
She picks up a crisp.
‘That’s true.’
She pops it in her mouth.
‘So your dad supported me, did he?’
‘Of course.’
‘He saw how much you loved me?’
‘Plus he was always going to take the opposite side to me in any dispute.’
Dinah laughs.
‘Your family are so funny about you.’
‘I’m the baddie, it’s my role.’
CHAPTER 11
That said, adolescent rebellion then meant to me stealing a hot hatch, drugs, anti-social behaviour, maybe some under-age sex. All I had to do for my dad to think I was The Wild One when I was sixteen was to leave, despite being told not to, used tea mugs in my bedroom, then deny they were there when challenged about this. He’d go to bed convinced I was on the fast track to a young offenders’ institution because I wore trainers most of the time, didn’t enjoy Circus Act of the Year on TV ‘quite as much as I used to’, and spiked my hair with Country Born gel rather than paste it to my head in the Lego-style side parting he’d insisted on for the last eight years because it was like his and could be done at Roy’s in Chesham for £2.50. I wound my dad up so much somehow just being a teenager under the same roof as him, the night he dropped me at college he wrote a only half jokey letter stating, ‘I am now opening a bottle of champagne. I shall drink it very slowly, with a very large smile on my face. I am by turns proud and appalled by you, my son. I reckon based on your sister’s experiences you might well visit home three times this term, where I would have felt inclined to give you on each occasion £50. In the bottom of your bag I hope you found a cheque, for £150. Please, let’s not see you until Christmas. I don’t think my heart could take it. Love you to death, you utter menace, Dad.’