Man at the Helm

by Stibbe, Nina

  Consequently, one minute we’d be vowing to get rid of him and then we’d like him again. And then he’d suddenly stop coming round and we’d worry like hell that it was all over. And then he’d turn up and ask for money and if I wasn’t careful I’d remember that he was a liar and that his toolbox was three-quarters empty and he’d been stripped of his gas fitter’s badge and that he couldn’t speak eloquently. Not even as eloquently as Mr Lomax, and Mr Lomax was hardly eloquent. But I’d stay behind my sister and push these things out of my mind.

  Our mother was no help. She was fully in love with him and no amount of patchy behaviour on his part altered that. We made suggestions about other eligible males but it was as my sister said, ‘It’s tough to topple the incumbent,’ which she’d heard on the telly regarding something to do with the news.

  Then something big happened. It was all to do with O’Donnell’s rescheduled funfair which had come to Mr Clegg’s land after all – his wife having not pressed charges and his solicitor being able to show how nice he usually was when not provoked and how remorseful (trying to drown himself).

  We asked our mother if we could go to the rescheduled funfair. She was writing a play and listening to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and kept putting the needle back to the big build-up at the start. Charlie hadn’t been over for a while and the play was bilingual and about a broken-hearted woman running away to Holland to grow tiny edible vegetables.

  Adele: I geen Nederlands spreken.

  Man: You must try.

  Adele: I have grown one hundred little lettuces.

  Man: But to no avail.

  Adele: Ik ben gegroeid 100 stuks.

  Man: Laat me tellen.

  We asked again about going to the fair and she mistook it for an invitation to come with us and said funfairs made her sick – a thing I find I’ve inherited in adulthood – and she put the needle back to hear the Beethoven build-up again. After it had settled to the strings, we changed the nature of our request and asked for money. She was still unable to focus and in the end we helped ourselves to a one-pound note from her purse, which lived in the fruit bowl.

  My sister and I thought we’d kept the fair secret from Little Jack. We didn’t want him tagging along: he was too little and would need a degree of looking after. We skipped off down the road. Soon Little Jack was calling out a word from his babyhood (which meant: yes, no, what, goodbye, hello, wait and help), something like ‘Nur’, and running to catch up with us. Him saying ‘Nur’ was annoying. He must have been seven by then, but he reverted to ‘Nur’ because he wanted to remind us that he was the youngest and little. We didn’t fall for it, though, and we were cruel to be kind.

  ‘You can’t hang around with us,’ we told him.

  ‘We just want to be two girls at a fair,’ I said, as if that was the most reasonable thing in the world, like saying,‘We just want to breathe.’

  But he didn’t care. He just wanted to go to the fair – as you do when you’re his age – and he followed us.

  So we arrived at the fair just as the sun was going down and soon the dark night showed up the hundreds of on-and-off coloured bulbs and it was wonderful. My sister and I shook Little Jack off almost immediately. Something caught his eye and we walked quickly on. Then we ate candy-floss and went on a sickening ride, linked arms and laughed and spent our one pound. But soon we’d had enough of the smell of spoiled grass and braised onions.

  At home, all was dark. Only Debbie was there (pushing her food bowl around on the stone floor with her nose to remind us she’d had no supper). Our mother was out. Beethoven was quiet though the disc, still revolving, crackled eerily. And there was no sign of Little Jack whatsoever. We trudged back to Clegg’s to look for him. We bickered and the night was ruined.

  The fair seemed sinister now. The coloured lights looked like ordinary bulbs roughly daubed. Soft muddy ruts tripped us, a laughing Elvis fell into my sister and made her cry, and harsh voices rang around in the dark. We looked everywhere for Little Jack. We called ‘Jack’ and ‘Jack’ and everyone seemed to be laughing at us. So we went home again, hoping and praying we’d find him there.

  Our mother was home. She was upset because a pot of stove-boiled coffee had melted a great hexagon in the middle of her new fireside rug. And she’d scalded her arm trying to rescue it. A smell of singed hair and burnt coffee heightened the sense of something being wrong.

  ‘Is Little Jack home?’ we asked.

  ‘He was with you at the fair,’ she snapped.

  We looked upstairs and then in Debbie’s basket in the porch and in places he couldn’t even be – like the bread oven, which he couldn’t fit into. He wasn’t anywhere. It had got very late and we assumed he was dead and that if we went back to the fair we’d find his little body slung across one of the dodgem cars being buffeted and spun, surrounded by laughing people and the clumsy Elvis.

  Those minutes were dreadful. I felt sick. It was all our fault, like it had been with the guinea pig and the rat hole, and I began to imagine how I’d get through the rest of my life knowing I’d abandoned my brother and let him die at the fair just so I didn’t have to be in a three, with a kid. Our last memory of him being that stupid word (Nur). How could my sister and I ever be happy again, knowing what we’d done?

  In desperation and against my sister’s wishes, I rang Charlie’s telephone number. ‘We’ve lost Little Jack at the funfair at Clegg’s,’ I told him.

  Charlie met us at the gate by Clegg’s and we set off to look for our little brother properly. Charlie stood in his suit, relit an already smoked cigarette and gazed around with squinted eyes. He seemed to block everything out – all the Elvises and noise and flashing lights. He turned quickly to a row of wagons, flicked the cigarette aside, got down on to his hands and knees and crawled underneath a wagon opposite the Pot o’ Gold, with its fluffy prizes hanging from the panelled roof. A moment later he came out with Little Jack under him, like a baby elephant under its parent.

  We crowded round Little Jack for a moment and Charlie walked away. We all ran after him, me dragging Little Jack by the hand.

  ‘How did you know where to find him?’ I asked.

  ‘I put myself in his shoes,’ said Charlie.

  We saw then what an asset a brute like Charlie Bates could be – for the odd moments of extraordinary peril – and he edged ahead of my sister’s beloved Mr Oliphant. We tried to thank him for helping us and saving Little Jack, but he told us to fuck off home. We hinted that we’d like a lift – our house being almost a mile away – but he zoomed off in Whisper, his white Saab.

  Little Jack was too tired to walk quickly. His cloth animal was gone and he was scared of the dark. I piggybacked all three-stone seven of him – with his jaggy elbows and legs – all the way home. I was so happy to have him back, I didn’t care. I vowed out loud in front of my sister that I would never let her or Jack down again. I’d do my utmost to keep them safe and happy. My sister told me to shut up and walk faster. In the end she stomped off ahead.

  We didn’t want our mother waking in the night and not properly knowing Jack was found, so I started to write her a note:

  Dear Mum. Don’t worry about Little Jack. He’s not lost – he’s home. PS I hate fairs too now.

  She half woke while I was writing and she mumbled, ‘Did you find Bufo?’

  ‘Bufo?’ I whispered.

  ‘Bufo, my little frog.’ And she went to sleep again, leaving me with a guilty feeling that ruined the happy-ending aspect of the night. I couldn’t believe that after having the initiative to phone Charlie and then carrying Little Jack all the way home and being considerate in not waking our mother, I should be rewarded with a poke in the eye and the reminder that I had outstanding obligations vis-à-vis Bufo.

  I lay in bed furious. I made a silent but solemn vow to get the frog puppet back and to punch Miranda Longlady in the face. Not that I ever would punch her in the face, but you fantasize about such things at that age when tired.

  E
verything suddenly went against me. I knew I ought to get Bufo back as we were way past the three-week maximum imposed by my sister, plus our mother had mentioned him. But like always, when you’re the lender, you feel selfish asking for the thing back.

  My sister was unhelpful in the extreme. She said, ‘Oh Lizzie, don’t tell me you’ve not got Bufo back yet.’

  This reminded me what it would be like not to have a sister.

  And I said, ‘You know I haven’t got him back yet.’

  And she said, ‘Well, you’d better sort it out.’

  And I said, ‘Could you help?’

  And she said, ‘Just ask Miranda Longlady for him back – God, what’s wrong with you?’

  So next time I saw Miranda I asked her, in a straightforward manner, for the frog puppet back and she responded, ‘Frog? What frog? Oh, that frog, your little puppet thing, yes, I’ll get it back to you forthwith.’

  Then every time I saw her after that, she’d point at me and say, ‘Frog’. And never did give it back to me. So I decided that if we were ever to get Bufo back, I’d have to get into the Longladys’ house and simply take him.

  I came up with the following plan for rescuing Bufo. I made sure I walked home with Melody on her latchkey day, which was Tuesday when her mother was at Lecciones Espanioles, her father was on his way to the Charles Keene College for his advanced accounting class, and Miranda was at sports club. And then I’d ask if I might pop in to see the Sindy fashion house she’d been telling me about.

  Although Melody was nice, she had some minor defects. Mainly that at only eleven years old she already had silly adult preoccupations. For instance, she always commented on how much things cost and dabbed herself like mad if she dripped anything down her clothes at lunch. Also, she gossiped constantly about her family, inane things, as if they were of great interest to me. Such as how her father always kept an umbrella on the back seat of the car for use in sudden downpours. As well as more unusual things such as the fact that her mother had to keep her pubic hair trimmed right back to prevent the sensation that insects were creeping up her legs in bed.

  A suitable Tuesday came and Melody and I reached Orchard Corner – which was the name of the Longladys’ home, it being on a corner and having assorted fruit trees in the garden – and I asked if I might pop in. And Melody said, ‘Of course.’

  It was an added bonus that I got to see Melody in full latchkey mode, a thing I always liked. Approaching the house, she’d look around to check that no one could see her, then fumble down her collar for the front-door key which was on a string round her neck, hanging under her vest. The string was that bit too short, though, and she’d have to bob down to keyhole height to give herself enough string to work with. I always wondered why she didn’t just take the key-on-a-string off.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be easier to just take it off?’ I wondered out loud that day.

  ‘You never ever take your door key off,’ she said importantly, ‘it’s the number one rule of having a door key.’

  Inside, Melody said she was starving. She tore off her coat and taking something from a wooden dish, placed it on the sideboard and halved it dramatically with a cleaver. In a different story, this might have been a worrying image. It was a pomegranate and, rather than worrying, it was puzzling – a person claiming to be starving, then eating fruit seeds painstakingly with a pin. She pushed the other pomegranate half over to me. I said, ‘No, thanks,’ suspecting it might be more ornamental than edible.

  Then she showed me the Sindy fashion house, which was Sindy in a polo neck and shorts and surrounded by more clothes on little home-made mini coat-hangers in a cardboard box. It was pathetic really, but I said how great it was, obviously.

  ‘The box came with the tiles for the new shower-room,’ she explained.

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘We’re having a shower-room built,’ she said.

  And then I heard about Mrs Longlady’s shower unit, which was being installed in what had been a fourth bedroom. Melody tried to tell me the reasons for its installation, but I really needed to get on with finding Bufo before the other Longladys got home.

  ‘Mum can’t have baths … poor thing,’ said Melody, grimacing.

  ‘I’d love to see round your house,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you give me a speedy guided tour while we chat.’

  So Melody showed me around upstairs and told me the intimate reasons for Mrs Longlady’s incompatibility with baths and the necessity of the shower. I looked as closely as I could without it seeming that I was looking for something. There was no sign of Bufo anywhere. And I’m afraid I left Orchard Corner without him.

  I didn’t come away empty-handed, though. I had the knowledge that Mrs Longlady couldn’t take baths due to unwittingly sucking up the bath water and it seeping out again afterwards for the rest of the day and this causing wetness and all sorts. And that she’d tried bathing at night, but it wasn’t much better and she’d needed an incontinence pad in the bed.

  At home I told my sister that I’d tried and failed to rescue Bufo, and she’d changed her tune. She said I was making a pointless fuss because our mother had absolutely zero interest in Bufo. I reminded her that Bufo was our mother’s last remaining memory of her beloved father. My sister contradicted me and mentioned the lock of hair.

  ‘There’s the lock of Grandpa’s hair,’ she said, ‘with the poem in the frame.’

  I’d forgotten about the gruesome lock of hair that our mother’s mother had cut from his dead head just after he died and wrapped in a cigarette paper. Our mother had been horrified at the time, but had taken the thing anyway and later at home set it down in a little glass dish. We’d all had a look at it and found it a bit morbid and horrible. Our mother contemplated it with a glass of whisky and inevitably started writing a poem about it, focusing on the way the hair grease had turned the cigarette paper translucent.

  The poem was called ‘Murray’s Superior Pomade’ and it mentioned Bufo, now I think about it.

  Always Murray’s Superior in its orange tin

  You didn’t like to mix things up

  You loved celery in the mornings with salt and gin

  My Latin frog and your springer pup

  Always flattened, so neat, mousey, still

  Obedient, waiting, combed

  I only knew it oiled

  It may have been wavy left alone

  The poem seemed to be saying that his hair was always neat and well behaved. My sister said it was about a spaniel dog, not his hair. Whatever, it was written beautifully in looping brown ink on yellow paper, illustrated and framed with the lock of hair behind the glass.

  In spite of my sister and the existence of the poem, I decided it was time to own up about Bufo – if nothing else, to get it off my chest – especially now that I could hide it behind the revelations about Mrs Longlady’s pubic hair and seepage anecdotes.

  13

  Our mother told us she was pregnant. This was an enormous relief to me as it meant I didn’t have to own up about Bufo, not yet anyway, and probably had a good year before I had to make another rescue attempt – with a baby on the way. Everything stops for a baby, I find. She seemed highly tense but excited and overall happy. In fact, this was the absolute happiest she had ever been to my knowledge – ditto my sister’s – and it seemed I was justified in postponing Bufo’s rescue for a while.

  Our mother wasn’t sure whether or not we’d realized that she and Charlie were intimate in that way. We did realize – my sister and I had seen the two of them. Charlie with his hairy bottom going up and down on top of her, as she lay on the rug in front of the fire, fast asleep. Just as we’d seen it when Little Jack’s teacher, Mr Dodd, came round (as previously mentioned) and they’d done a similar thing on that same rug, only our mother had been wide awake that time.

  ‘We must keep it a secret – we mustn’t talk about it,’ our mother said, meaning the baby, and immediately began reviewing her name choices.

  ‘I think I’m g
oing to call it Jack,’ she said.

  And my little brother said, ‘B-but that’s my name.’

  And she said, ‘No, it is not. Your real name is James. We call you Jack because I like the name Jack better than the name James. You’ll have to go back to being James or start being called Jim or Jimmy.’

  But my brother Jack didn’t like Jim or Jimmy, so he stopped speaking.

  ‘What if it’s a girl?’ my sister asked.

  ‘Phoebe,’ said our mother. ‘But it won’t be, it’ll be a boy.’

  ‘Is Charlie the father?’ I asked, and she said, ‘Of course he is.’ But in such a way that meant ‘probably’ or ‘possibly’ or ‘I don’t know’ or even ‘no’.

  We had to keep it absolutely secret. We weren’t allowed to speak about it, even at home, just in case anyone was around. We had a secret code for it among ourselves. It was Bluebell the baby donkey. How silly – it makes me sad to write it – Bluebell the baby donkey.

  We’d say, ‘When Bluebell comes, I’m going to knit him a little jacket.’ And Little Jack would frown. He wasn’t looking forward to Bluebell the baby donkey arriving and having to switch over to being called Jimmy or Jim.

  ‘Mother,’ my sister said one day, ‘should we perhaps start calling Little Jack “Jimmy” now so we get used to it before Bluebell the baby donkey arrives?’