When Carl came out he was panting slightly and his eyes were bright. I’d never seen anyone look like that before, not even in films. It was an ‘ideas’ expression. Something new, something shining, deep in his mind. He was wiping his boots on the grass as if he’d stepped in dog-dirt.
‘What did you do with him?’ Chloe asked. She went over and tried to put her arm through his. He shook his head and shrugged her away.
‘Get off pawing at me, will you?’
Carl wiped his mouth and hawked up snot, spat on the grass, wiped his mouth again. ‘He ran off. Quick little bastard. Can they all move like that?’
I shrugged, and Chloe tittered and tried to hold his hand.
‘You want to go back in the car?’ she said, and moved her face so those loops of hair fell over her eyes. Carl was taller than her – a lot taller. She looked up at him through her eyelashes.
‘Get in the car,’ he said, and pushed her so hard she had to run a few steps for her feet to catch up with her body. She nearly fell and I was about to say something. I took another look at Carl and thought better of it. Chloe didn’t say anything either, just carried on moving. She didn’t look back at him. Trotted over to the car and didn’t wait, like she usually did, for him to open the door for her.
‘In the back,’ he gestured with his thumb, ‘both of you. I’m taking you home.’
‘What’s the rush?’ Chloe said, once we were strapped in and on the move. ‘I thought we had plans?’
She drew out ‘plans’, just so that I wouldn’t miss the reference – wouldn’t be able to take my mind away from what she and Carl would be doing as soon as I was out of the way. We were on the road that circled the outside edge of the park – spooning the trees and the Asda superstore.
‘That’s the rush,’ Carl said, and slowed the car to a crawl. He tapped his knuckle against the window and we looked into the Asda car park.
The shutters were down and the lights were off in the supermarket, but there was a van in the car park – a beige- and oatmeal-coloured Bambi camper with a sheet draped over the side of it. On the sheet someone had painted something in red paint or thick marker, and there were several men with scarves wrapped around their faces standing around admiring it. One of them looked in our direction. Carl put his foot down and we were on our way back towards the City.
‘Who were they?’ I asked. I felt sick.
‘Group of lads getting together to go through the woods, bus station, places like that. Looking for this pest.’ Carl laughed, and looked at me in the rear-view mirror. ‘Think they can do a better job than the police – slipping about on the ice all tooled up with potato peelers and bike chains.’
‘They’re a vigilante group,’ Chloe said knowledgeably. ‘Someone asked my dad if he wanted to be in it. Fathers only. He said he wasn’t sure if it was mob mentality or grassroots action. My mum went to one of their meetings and said they were a load of council-dossers and doleys.’
‘Your dad not going in on it?’ Carl said, and I looked away from the mirror and shook my head.
‘There’s some tea in the fridge for you, Lo.’
The house was overwhelmingly hot after outside, and it smelled of turkey and pine needles and Donald’s feet. That special Sunday dinner and Christmas smell. I used to really like it.
‘I’m not hungry. I’m going to bed,’ I shouted from the doorway, trying to get up the stairs before they could come out of the living room and grill me.
‘Bed? Bed?’ Barbara managed to get to the bottom of the stairs before I could cross the upstairs landing and get into the bathroom. ‘You can’t go to bed. It’s barely four o’clock. Come and have some cheese and crackers and watch the film with your father.’
‘I’m really tired.’
Barbara stared up into the dim hollow of the upstairs landing. I couldn’t hear much from the living room, but I bet it was It’s a Wonderful Life they were watching. You could practically guarantee it.
‘Have you been drinking?’
‘No. No, I haven’t.’ She carried on staring. ‘I haven’t. Smell my breath if you want.’
‘And you’ve not had another falling out with that Chloe, have you?’ Barbara took a step and put her hand on the immaculate cream receiver of the hall telephone. ‘I was hoping you were going to start seeing a bit less of her. Shall I call her mother?’
‘I’m just tired. I’m going to have a sleep. I’ll be back down in a bit, right? I’ll watch the end of the film with you later.’
Even I could hear it: my voice, thin and pleading. It wasn’t a lie. I really was very tired – although there was something else to it too, the way that those men in the car park might have been wearing their scarves over their faces because it was cold, but there was another reason. I thought of them crashing through the undergrowth, shouting into the stillness of the woods, and shivered.
‘Leave her alone, Barbara. She says she’s wanting her bed.’
Donald’s voice rumbled around the open living room door. I could imagine him sitting there with the remote control and a jar of pickled onions. A bottle of Newkie Brown and a glass between his feet.
‘He’s waiting for you,’ I said. ‘You’d better go in to him.’
When I opened my eyes someone had turned my bedroom light off and pulled the duvet up to my chin. I was roasting and I think that’s what woke me up. I looked around me. If I’d gone back to sleep that second I wouldn’t have remembered anything about waking up at all. It’s a fact, that – people wake up ten times in the night, on average, but as long as you surface for less than three minutes you never remember it.
That night I woke up worrying. It was dark. I could hear the telly downstairs and Barbara laughing every now and again.
I used to get sent to bed after my tea as a punishment when I was little. I would get out of bed and lie on the floor with my ear against the carpet, listening to the echo of Terry doing the six o’clock news between the floorboards. I could always imagine Donald and Barbara very clearly. Having a great time and completely forgetting about me.
It was still Boxing Day and I imagined them again. Barbara was going to stand up at the end of the film and brush imaginary crumbs from the front of her skirt.
‘Well, that’s that for another year,’ she’d say, and turn the lights on the Christmas tree off. Donald would nod absently.
‘You did us proud, love.’
And they’d laugh as if that was the remains of a hilarious joke the pair of them started years and years ago, before I was born and when they were still young.
I lay there, something fluttering in my stomach, and wondered about how long they were married before I was born. Fourteen years, which is ages. And I thought about how old they were when they had me. Old. They didn’t go to work anymore. They didn’t look too much like old people, they could still walk and everything, but when it came to getting picked up and parents’ evenings and things like that, it was humiliating.
Didn’t they really want to have children? Didn’t they worry about me turning out funny, like Wilson? Didn’t they realise I’d get hammered for it at school? In my bed I tried to muster up the energy to hate them again but Wilson was in my head, those hands tucking the ends of the scarf into his jacket, and my throat got so tight I felt like I was going to suffocate.
Chapter 7
It was New Year’s Eve and I should have been at Chloe’s house, not at home with too many boxes of Ritz crackers. Barbara had bought them cheap because the boxes had fallen off the display and had to be patched up with brown tape.
Chloe had said there was going to be a party, with cousins and friends of the family. There would be a room set aside just for us, with films up to certificate fifteen, and a limited amount of booze. Her mother had said she could invite one friend, and it was a toss-up between me and Emma right up until the last minute. But on the last day of school, Chloe had hugged me and said she was going to lend me her pointy shoes. I’d bought some white tights to match. The tights
were still in the packet and Chloe hadn’t called me since Boxing Day.
I could have telephoned her. We both had our mobile phones – heavy, brickish objects we flashed about at school. We had no one to send messages to but each other because hardly anyone else had them. They were secrets from our parents. Donald would have been suspicious about radio waves that near to your head, and Barbara liked to listen on the upstairs extension. People at school knew, of course. We’d let them beep and then refuse to let anyone else have a go. Other girls were jealous, or hated us. Not even Emma had one. I loved that phone. It was what made me special.
I never forgot, because Chloe never wanted me to forget, that we only had them because Carl worked in Currys. He liked to keep tabs on her, and it wasn’t as if he could ring her at home. She gave her first one to me and told Carl she’d lost it so he’d get her another. Now and again, she’d promise to get Emma one. Emma would shrug and pretend she didn’t care, but when she thought I wasn’t looking she stared at Chloe’s phone like it was a lump of chocolate.
I didn’t ring Chloe. I remembered her saying ‘bring you out’ and I was angry. It was her turn to phone me, and she hadn’t. By tea-time on New Year’s Eve I was in a full-blown sulk, loitering sullenly around the kitchen and thinking about Emma’s lumpy feet in Chloe’s pointy shoes, wearing her glitter eye-shadow and drinking my share of the limited amount of alcohol. I wasn’t going to ring and invite myself. Wasn’t going to act desperate. Barbara had her own plans for the three of us, and was standing at the draining board hacking tomatoes into garnishes.
‘Will you take that look off your face and put a dress on?’ she said, without turning. ‘We’re going to have a nice evening,’ she insisted, ‘the three of us together. It’s going to be quiet, and civilised, and nice.’
Donald sat at the kitchen table and flattened empty cornflake packets. He was making Secchi disks by cutting circles out of the cardboard and using a black marker pen and a bottle of Tipp-Ex for the design. He used my school ruler to divide the circles into half, and then four, and then started to colour in the quarters. The kitchen stank of solvents instead of cocktails. The point of these disks was to measure the transparency of sea water. The depth to which light from the surface could penetrate. Donald had a theory. He always had a theory.
‘I think twelve should be enough, for the first outing,’ he said.
I was almost at the bottom of the stairs, escaping to the silence of my room with a bag of clementines and a magazine, but Barbara turned and looked at me pointedly, pursed her lips, and nodded at the kitchen chair next to Donald’s. She wasn’t fond of his projects and the effect they had on his moods but we had a deal: when she was cooking or otherwise occupied it was my job to babysit him, and how I did that was up to me.
‘What are you going to do to make them waterproof?’ I asked. I’d asked the same question the last time, and the time before that.
‘I could cover them with sticky tape, I suppose,’ he said thoughtfully, as if he’d never considered it.
‘How long do they need to last in the water for? Sticky tape might not be enough.’
‘I really don’t know.’ Donald smiled and shrugged and started colouring in with his black marker. I watched him, and I wondered if all families were like this: sitting in kitchens, speaking their lines and acting in a soap they already knew the ending to. For a minute, the peaceful, vacant expression Donald had on while he was colouring, the way the rims of his eyelids were pink – it reminded me of Wilson.
I picked up a pen, started to help, and asked another question – something not in the script – just to take the thought away.
‘Are you going to get the boat soon?’
Donald nodded. He looked excited.
‘I need to collect all the evidence for the article before the spring sets in. The tides, the organisms in the water – they’ll all change once it starts getting light.’
Donald looked up as he spoke but carried on moving his marker. The nib of the pen slipped from the edge of the cardboard and made a mark on the table, but he didn’t notice.
‘As soon as I’ve got my statistics,’ he went on, back onto his script, ‘I can write up the article and send it off whenever I like. I’ve got months before they’ll be deciding on the trip.’
I wasn’t really listening. It was the kind of thing he said a lot when he was planning his application to the National Geographic Field Trip Sea Eye Programme. It was an annual programme and this year they were accepting proposals from parties interested in coming along on the first manned trip of a deep-sea submersible in years. Last year, it had been the jungle somewhere, and the year before, one of the Poles.
Donald hadn’t been interested then – he was still on magic or hot air balloons. But this year, it had caught his eye and he was determined to impress them with his investigations and win a place as a research assistant. Barbara told him it was for PhD students and university professors and they didn’t mean people like him. She said there was more to being an assistant on a trip like that than typing up, making tea, and cleaning lenses.
‘You’ve not got the qualifications,’ she’d say.
If he was in a good mood Donald would just shrug at this. ‘So?’ he’d say, grinning. ‘So? Anyone that can read can find out what they need to do to conduct an investigation. I’ve trained myself,’ he tapped his head, ‘all up here. Whole world of it. Information’s free, isn’t it?’
Barbara would put the yellow magazines in the bin when he was sleeping. It didn’t work because I’d bring them back into the house for him.
I made a lot of effort to keep him off the subject when Chloe was around. I knew how it would sound and what him and his junk room and his felt-tip pens would look like to someone outside the family who didn’t know his phases.
‘Blockbusters’s on now,’ I’d say, or something like it. It was like rolling a ball for a dog – he’d chase it into the living room and Barbara would feed the video cassette into its slot and close the door on the theme tune and Chloe and I would have the kitchen, my bedroom – the house – to ourselves. When that didn’t work, there were the magazines – brought back in from the bin in the shed, pushed under his door. That’s what I did.
‘You’re getting it on the table, Dad,’ I said, under my breath.
I was aware of Barbara at my back, still slicing at the tomatoes, and the tension in the room – Donald was a soap bubble and we all needed to keep him away from the walls and the floor, just by blowing.
‘I reckon if I write it all out you could type it up for me, couldn’t you, love?’ He stopped colouring, and I moved the card-board closer to his pen and rubbed at the marks with the cuff of my jumper.
‘I can use the computer at school, I suppose,’ I said. ‘As long as it isn’t too long.’
‘I’m not sure yet. It depends what I find. I have some theories about the water-flows that are going to need a lot of backing up so they make sense to someone else. There are organisms there that should not be there. I’m not sure if it’s light, or temperature, or mineral deposits, or what. Need to get out there and do a spot of investigation.’ He twirled the disk. ‘That’s what the measuring is for. Science is precise measurement, and nothing more. Remember that one, for when you do your exams,’ he said, then pointed at me, smiled, and carried on, lost in the whirl of his own words.
I didn’t need to listen. Donald’s talking was disposable. I’d heard the speech about precise measurement many, many times before. The Sea Eye application had come out of nowhere, one of Donald’s fussy little projects, and there had been a lot of them. Most of the time they hadn’t amounted to much more than the hoarding of books and papers and magazine pictures pasted up on the walls of his room. But this one, this latest ‘spell’ had gone a bit further than the other ones I could remember. Sometimes I thought he really would find something out about the water at Morecambe – something new – and then I would help him write an article about it and then he would send the arti
cle to the scientist who was in charge of the Sea Eye and then he would be allowed to go too.
People discover new things all the time, so why not someone who is actually trying to? That would make Donald happy and everything would be normal. Not ‘back to normal’, because as long as I could remember I’d seen Donald being a bit weird, but it would get normal, and once it was, Barbara would loosen up a bit and I’d magically get on a bit better at school and everything would be easier than it was.
Barbara had her back to us; the knife nestled between her fingers like a pen.
‘Why your father thinks taking a friend’s wreck of a boat out through the quicksand into the rip-tides and whirlpools of Morecambe Bay, very possibly illegally, when he can barely swim, is totally beyond me,’ she said, without turning. She’d been holding it in for long enough, and couldn’t wait any longer.
‘You could come, Barbie, if you wanted to. I could do with a hand for the note-taking,’ he said. ‘Your mother’s got lovely handwriting.’
I snorted and Barbara’s shoulder blades moved together, although she didn’t make a sound. She could have been laughing or just coughing silently.
‘Think of it,’ Donald said, standing up and scraping his chair back. He waved his hands in the air. I thought he looked like Michael Aspel. ‘Think of the romance. The sand, the sea. Floating in the moonlight…’
‘… through a tide of untreated sewage,’ Barbara said, rolling her ‘r’s.
Donald shrugged.
‘Your mother’s no imagination, you know that? She knows it, of course – otherwise why pick a man of vision, like myself?’ He winked. There was a moment of silence. ‘And you know what I found out at the library today?’ He started paddling through the papers on the table, sticking his pale, sausagey fingers between the flaps of scuffed paper folders.
‘I’m wanting to set the table now, Donald.’
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