‘What?’
Harrie smiled. ‘It’s just another of my many daft theories. Sometimes, I feel I am living a parallel life and that I shall be close to no one until I reach the great beyond. See? I am definitely daft.’
Will nodded. ‘We all have our aberrations. Most of mine are in class Nine B.’
‘Nine B?’
‘Yup. They wear their convictions like medals of honour.’
‘Good to know they have some convictions. Most of us believe in nothing these days.’
‘Criminal convictions, Harrie.’
‘Yes, I realized that. I was being deliberately obtuse. Or, in Woebee’s words, opertuse. She has a language all her own.’
‘I have talked to her.’
‘Listened, more likely.’
He laughed nervously. Here he sat with the light of his life and a currently unbiddable dog. This was meant to be a beautiful moment filled by an invisible orchestra playing a quiet bit of Beethoven’s sixth, but, in reality, he was in the garden of an insane family with a girl whose own brother was as loony as Milly. Milly would probably be trained in time, but Harrie carried the same genes as the rest of the Compton-Milnes. When would she crack? At thirty? After the birth of a child? In menopause? God, she was beautiful . . .
‘You seem too shy for teaching,’ she said.
‘No. I wear a different hat at school. In fact, I have a whole rack of hats – depends which class I am taking.’
Harrie cringed when more hoots of laughter arrived from the morning room. ‘Bridge,’ she said. ‘Mum and her friends. Bridge evening. Losers buy lunch next week.’
‘Ah.’
‘None of them plays well. In reality, it’s probably a meeting of the planning department.’
‘What?’
‘They are laying foundations for new faces and flatter bellies. Some of them can’t even laugh properly, since their faces are paralysed by Botox. Several won’t laugh, as it encourages crows’ feet.’
Will swallowed hard. ‘You should walk with me and Milly sometimes. When you’re not working, of course.’
‘Of course.’
He hesitated. ‘Walking is good exercise – better for the system than jogging. And chasing my mutt keeps the heart pounding.’
‘Right.’
‘Will you?’
‘Will I what, Will? Chase your bloody dog?’
‘Yes.’
‘I might.’ Harrie could hear his fear, could feel his desire. He was a good enough specimen, well-etched and defined as perfectly as only a dark-haired man could be. He was pleasant, educated and a very desirable property. But her antennae picked up every mixed feeling, every doubt and hope. Was this chemistry? ‘You did chemistry at Cambridge?’
‘Yes.’
Ah, well, he would know all about it, then. As a qualified chemist, did he sense her hopeful desperation? Or was it desperate hope? And was that organic or inorganic chemistry? ‘I’ll walk with you if and when I get the chance of it.’
‘Good.’ He was excited by the prospect, though not a little dismayed.
It happened then, just as the couple had taken the first tentative steps towards each other. A side door burst open, and Ben ran out into the night. ‘Harrie!’ he screamed. ‘Harrie? Where are you? I’m injured.’
Will leapt to his feet. ‘Shall I go to him?’
‘No. It has to be me.’
Will sat in the gazebo and listened while the MG’s engine came to life, heard the swishing of displaced gravel, waited until the car could no longer be heard. Bridge-players had spilled on to the lawn, their arrival causing security lights to illuminate the scene. With a tightly tethered Milly, Will dragged himself away. The lunacy continued, it seemed. And he feared becoming a part of it, feared not becoming a part of her.
Ben refused to be abandoned by his sister. She was forced to hold his hand while he was examined, but to turn away while he was undressed. Feeling like an amateur contortionist, she managed not to scream when her metacarpals seemed in danger of becoming crushed. How would she manage jewellery with a broken hand?
An Asian doctor and two nurses were Ben’s attendants. Harrie listened to the questions and opinion:
‘How did this happen?’
‘You used the wrong bottle of bleach? Human skin should never be exposed to bleach.’
Ben talked about Milton, a preparation used for the sterilization of infants’ bottles. ‘That’s watered down bleach,’ he insisted.
As time ticked on, Harrie came to realize that her brother had scrubbed his genitals with Domestos. She shivered, pictured that crease-free cling film on the hob, cups perfectly aligned, books sectioned – would he be sectioned?
The doctor spoke. ‘I want to talk to your sister alone.’
‘She stays with me.’
Harrie decided to contribute. ‘Is he decent?’
‘Yes,’ replied the nearest nurse.
Harrie turned and looked at her brother. In the hospital gown, he looked about nine years of age and scared out of his wits. ‘I am going to talk to the doctor. No one will touch you. If anyone does touch you, I shall sue the bloody hospital. All right?’
‘It’s not all right.’
Anger bubbled in her chest, but she squashed it. Ben couldn’t help it, couldn’t help any of it, and she must not allow herself to become irritated with him. ‘You managed a driving test, so you can manage to lie there for ten minutes.’ She followed the doctor into the ward office.
Invited to sit, she perched nervously on the edge of her chair. ‘Miss Compton-Milne,’ he began, ‘have you any idea of what your brother has done to himself?’
‘I think so.’
‘Do you know why he has done this thing?’
‘No. He lives apart from me. In the same house, but he has his own rooms. Has he hurt himself badly?’
‘Badly enough, though he did have sense enough to rinse himself with cold water. And I am about to send for a psychiatrist so that we can have him assessed.’
The room began to spin. What could she do? What would Ben do if committed to a psychiatric unit?
‘It has to happen,’ said the doctor gently. ‘For his own good.’
Harrie caught her breath and managed to keep her seat. ‘Look, he has an IQ in the one-sixties. He isn’t like other people. My father is Gustav Compton-Milne, and he, too, is gifted. They aren’t . . . They aren’t normal.’
The young man nodded. ‘Please wait here. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. The nurse will bring you tea.’
After the third cup, Harrie felt as if she would drown in Tetley’s. What were they doing, and how was Ben coping? And why the hell had he scalded his penis with neat bleach? It was all connected to the OCD, the rituals, the orderliness that dominated his life.
Another man came in. He had receding grey hair and twinkling blue eyes. ‘Miss Compton-Milne?’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t get up, please.’ He walked to the other side of the desk, sat down, placed joined hands on a copy of Woman’s Realm that promised, in bright red capitals, to teach a reader how to improve her bust without surgery. ‘Your brother is fine. Physically, at least, there is to be no lasting damage to his person. But he seems very childlike in the emotional sense.’
‘I know.’
‘With people like him, there is often a disparity in areas of development. He has galloped intellectually, yet is as confused as any twelve-year-old. Does he spend a lot of time alone?’
Harrie nodded.
‘I should talk to his parents, really.’
‘They can’t do anything. Things are . . . difficult at home. My father is seldom around and my mother maintains a position of neutrality – like Switzerland.’
‘Ah.’
‘You can’t put him away. You mustn’t. I am the only person he trusts, but he will grow out of this, won’t he?’
The man sighed and shook his head. ‘I can’t in conscience section him this time. I have to take his story at fac
e value and accept its content. But I warn you – this may well happen again. Or worse.’
Harrie looked him full in the face. ‘Why did he do it? Why did he hurt himself?’
‘That I can’t say. I am bound by an oath, as you are probably aware. But I will go so far as to admit that I consider Ben to be a very disturbed young man. He is not steady, not confident. You tell me he seldom socializes?’
‘Almost never.’
‘And you?’
She shrugged. ‘The same. I have a job in my family’s business, Ben needs me from time to time, my grandmother is disabled and my father—’
‘Is the Compton-Milne,’ the doctor finished for her.
‘Yes.’
‘Ben needs to grow up.’
‘He will. I’m sure he will.’
Harrie parked the car on a quiet stretch of Beaumont Road. She turned off the engine, sighed, then rested her weary head on the steering wheel. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Why, and what’s your next trick going to be?’
‘Fuck off,’ he mumbled.
She laughed mirthlessly. ‘How can I fuck off? I have to hang around and look after you.’ She raised her head. ‘What the hell were you doing, Ben?’
‘Thought it was shower gel.’
‘Tripe,’ she snapped. ‘I’m not as daft as the doctors. What is this fixation with cleanliness of yours?’
‘I hate dirt.’
‘Then work with Dad. He’s on a mission to clean up society. You’d be very useful to him.’
‘I’d rather die.’
She couldn’t say all of it, couldn’t lay completely at his door the blame for her own intellectual arrest. For him, she had remained at home. She wasn’t a coward, was she? Surely, she could have coped at Oxford, but she hadn’t been able to leave this boy.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He put his head in his hands and began to weep.
Harrie tapped on the steering wheel and made a decision. ‘Right. The self-pity isn’t moving me any more, but I am moving – moving out.’
The tears dried up immediately. ‘What?’
‘The summer house, gazebo – whatever – will be dismantled and I’ll have one of those American jobs. Foundations, drains, then a prefabricated house on top. It will be single storey, because that’s all the planners will allow, but it will be all my own.’ She turned and stared at him. ‘If you want to see me, you’ll have to come out of Celibate City and visit. I’m not coming to you any more. The place stinks.’ She started the engine.
‘You can’t leave me,’ he shouted. ‘You’re all I have.’
Harrie nodded. ‘Sorry, bro. If I’m all you have, that’s hardly my fault. But you are not all I am going to have.’
‘You don’t love me any more.’
‘We aren’t married,’ she snapped. ‘Yes, you’re my brother; yes, it was a hard childhood. But I can’t carry on beating up the demons you create. Stop making me feel as if I have to compensate for all you endured. I was there. I was alive. I suffered, too.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘And if you say that again, you’ll be left with nothing to bleach, because I’ll cut it off. Don’t worry, I’ll use pinking shears – it won’t fray and you’ll never need a circumcision.’
The rest of the journey was completed in silence. Harrie informed an apparently only mildly interested Lisa that her son had accidentally dropped sharp-ended scissors into his thigh. The bridge eight had dispersed, so there was no other audience to bear witness to the lie.
Sleep eluded Harrie that night. When she did drift towards the edge of it, she saw a terrified child in a hospital bed, came to full wakefulness when the face on the pillow changed into that of a handsome young man with a panting, overgrown puppy by his side. ‘He’s afraid of me,’ she whispered into blackness. ‘Will’s terrified of this whole damned family.’
Resolution remained intact. Tomorrow, Harrie would travel up into the gods, probably on Gran’s stairlift – everyone needed some fun – and begin the process of ordering the wooden house that would contain the future of Ben’s big sister. She had to stop being Ben’s big sister; she must begin a new life as Harriet Compton-Milne, ready-and-willing spinster of this parish.
Ben turned off his eye on the world. For a moment or two, he considered smashing the webcam, but soon decided against such action. If Harrie installed a computer, he might be able to talk to her across the acreage without leaving his safe place. There was nothing to do. He played some music, medicated his injury, managed to pass water without losing consciousness.
Surely, having a partner had to be easier than this? Synchronized wretched masturbation with sickos all over the world was not ideal; nor was the need to cleanse the filth afterwards. But the thought of being touched by a human being whose standards of hygiene could scarcely be quantifiable was not attractive. The slightest rim of grey under a nail and he would head for the Pennines, wouldn’t he? He wiped a smudge from a light switch, showered, prepared for bed.
Like a corpse, he lay flat, head slightly raised by a thin pillow. With arms on top of the duvet and hard by his sides, he endured the painful result of his earlier behaviour. He should suffer. It was only right that he should suffer. Because he wasn’t normal.
Animals knew best. When one of their number became disabled or frail, he was left behind, sometimes killed by the rest. ‘I should be culled,’ he whispered. ‘Because I don’t belong. I can’t make myself belong.’ He didn’t even want to belong.
Hermione seldom missed a thing. With dormer windows set into both sides of the roof, she needed only to wheel herself from room to room in order to have a panoramic opinion of all that happened around the house known as Weaver’s Warp, a property handed down through generations of the Milne family. Before cotton had become Lancashire’s staple factory industry, weavers had taken in spun thread and had worked it into cloth. The rooms she occupied had possibly been a sweat shop a couple of hundred years ago. When the builders had come to move out Gus’s trains, they had found evidence of reinforcement in the beams; this had probably been put in place in order to support the weight of half a dozen looms. Now, it supported her.
The boy had been. He was a good-looking lad with a fine dog, and he had managed to talk to Harriet this time. Watching him had become a source of amusement and pleasure for Hermione; he clearly wanted to be with her granddaughter, yet was exquisitely shy in her presence. It was some kind of love, she supposed. Harriet deserved love. Hesitation on the part of a male was probably an asset in this age of bed-hopping, heartbreak, single parents and AIDS.
Ben. Hermione lit a cigarette and opened a window. Eileen Eckersley had the nose of an elephant when it came to residual nicotine. Harrie, Hermione’s partner in crime, was the guilty party who smuggled in Benson and Hedges once a week. Ben. Such a kerfuffle tonight, all spinning car tyres and flying gravel. He wasn’t right. Lisa’s fault? Hardly. Lisa was, always had been, an excellent jeweller and a good saleswoman. Love had died in her. Hermione had watched the premature death of her own daughter-in-law. Gustav? She shook her head. Gustav was the creation of his own father, a good enough man who had pushed his son into Bolton School, into Oxford, into medicine. Later on, Gus had placed himself under the wings of the Universities of Manchester and Liverpool, together with the financial backing of pharmaceutical companies. It was hard to place all the blame at the feet of her only son.
‘Was it me?’ she asked herself aloud. ‘Or Woebee? We did our best. If I could only get out of this damned chariot and walk, I’d march all the way to the root of the problem that is Ben.’
Tomorrow, she would talk to Harrie. Today, she reminded herself inwardly, because midnight was ages ago. Time to swing her senseless body into a prone position on the bed. Soon enough, she would need putting to bed before Eileen/Woebee’s daily departure. Not yet. For as long as possible, Hermione Compton-Milne would wear purple with red, would rattle a metaphorical stick along life’s railings, would wear slippers in the snow. Who wrote that poem?
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Harrie, summoned into the Presence, placed her rear on Gran’s padded footstool and waited for the inquisition to begin. Her second-in-command would open the shop and marshal the comings and goings of staff. ‘I can’t stay long,’ she began. ‘The clockmaker’s due this morning. I have an early-nineteenth grandfather that needs attention.’
‘Bring him here, then. He’ll be more use than your real grandad, God rest him.’
Harrie smiled tentatively. ‘No. He’s all tick and no tock, Gran.’
‘Even so. Eileen?’
A turbaned head poked itself through the kitchen doorway. ‘I’m cupboards today.’
‘Coffee, please. And don’t fall off that stepladder; I am not insured.’
Grumbling softly, the head disappeared into the kitchen.
‘What’s going on?’ Hermione asked.
Harrie scratched her head. ‘I’m not sure. I thought he was getting better, because he did the driving test without even telling me, but I may have been mistaken. He’s still scrubbing everything. I found him last week making a terrible decision about double CDs. Should they stay with the singles in subdivisions of artistes, or should he make a new section for doubles?’
‘His conclusion?’
Harrie shrugged. ‘Don’t know.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Ciggies bottom drawer, bedroom bureau. She won’t find them while she’s doing the kitchen.’
‘What? Old X-ray eyes? Don’t be too sure.’
The younger woman laughed softly. There was no point in hiding anything from either of these two. Between them, they would probably spot without hesitation an igloo in a white-out. And Gran had proved herself to be almost unshockable. Any problem at all could be laid at the numbed feet of this eccentric, delightful creature.
‘What happened last night, Harriet?’
Ah. ‘Harriet’ meant serious business. It had been the same at school. On normal days, she was Harrie, but when officialdom prescribed prize-giving day or some such formal occasion, it was Harriet. ‘I’m not quite sure, Gran, but it was dealt with at the hospital.’
‘I see. Which department?’
‘A and E, swiftly followed by psychiatry.’
Parallel Life Page 4