Disputed Land

by Tim Pears

  The note was slightly, strangely, larger than a normal one, and an odd salmon colour. For a moment I thought it was counterfeit. A joke. Then I saw that it was a £50 note. I felt lightheaded. The thought that as soon as we got back to Oxford after Christmas I could buy the black-and-red Bentley bass guitar someone I knew had for sale, with its maplewood neck and rosewood fingerboard, and its own heavy padded black gig bag, made my heart glow with gratitude. ‘Thank you, Uncle Jonny,’ I said. He nodded, frowning, smiling in a seigneurial, Mafia-like manner. I tried to imagine Dad handing out money to his nieces and nephews like that. Quite apart from the absurdity of my skinflint father doling out fifty-pound notes, if he were to try it in that secret-agent way it wouldn’t work: the note would come back, stuck to his own hand, or fall fluttering in full view to the floor. The idea almost made me laugh out loud.

  We collected a warmed plate each, under Grandma’s instruction, and after Melony had served us with either couscous or rice, Auntie Gwen ladled roast vegetables: peppers and squash, garlic, parsnips, potatoes, carrots. They were delicious. There was honey roast ham for those who wanted it, purchased in Harrods’ Food Hall that very morning by Uncle Jonny, and now carved by him. My mother, who was jointly responsible for her college wine cellar, ‘and so knows a thing or two’, Dad said proudly, had bought two boxes of wine as a contribution to proceedings, and was telling Grandpa about the vintage she’d chosen for this evening. Grandma decreed that those of us under sixteen should be allowed one glass each, diluted with water, ‘in the French style’, whether we wanted it or not.

  Someone whose handwriting I didn’t recognise had set folded tabs with our names on around the table, though I was quite sure it was Grandma’s arrangement. She had her sons on either side of her, while Grandpa had Lorna to his right and Melony to his left. Xan sat between Melony and Mum, Baz between Mum and Auntie Gwen, who was next to Jonny.

  I was in the middle on the other side, with Sid on my left, then Lorna, and Holly on my right between me and Dad. I could see that no one was sat next to someone from the same nuclear family, and was rather astonished that the twins had assented to this arrangement, which, I imagined, was not going to be much fun for Mum, stuck between them, since from the first mouthful Xan and Baz were leaning backwards to snigger to each other behind her back.

  ‘Have you oiled the guns, Pa?’ Uncle Jonny wondered in a loud voice, from one end of the table to the other, demanding that other, quieter conversations cease.

  Grandpa turned to his left and explained to Melony – and reminded the rest of us – that he and Jonny had a tradition that they always went hunting together on Christmas Eve on a friend’s estate. Melony asked what they shot, and Grandpa said they might bag a couple of rabbits, or a pheasant. Occasionally a deer. Surely, Melony questioned, you need to hang venison or game; you wouldn’t eat it the day after it’s killed.

  ‘Oh no,’ Grandpa said. ‘You’re absolutely right. This is for my son to take back to London. Share with his pals on New Year’s Eve. Isn’t that so?’

  Dessert was a bowl of fruit served with a mixture of cream and yoghurt, with a layer of burnt sugar on top, one of Grandma’s classic combinations, made by Bronwen before we’d arrived. Grandma was listening to Dad talking when suddenly she exclaimed, ‘No. I’m sorry. I’m not having it,’ with such vehemence that everyone turned towards her. ‘Well?’ she demanded, and ordered her son: ‘Tell them what you just told me.’

  My father explained that he’d recently given a talk, a guest lecture, to the Part-time Master of Arts course at the Department of Continuing Education ‘down the hill’, as he referred to the University of Oxford. (Mum, in turn, described Dad’s place of work, Oxford Brookes University, as either ‘the Poly’ or ‘up the hill’, depending upon the state of her feelings towards him.)

  The programme of this course consisted, apparently, of half a dozen four-day seminars and one week-long summer workshop. Chatting informally with the students afterwards Dad had been surprised to learn that one of them flew over from Vancouver.

  ‘Seven long-haul return flights,’ Grandma fumed. ‘For a part-time course in …’ She fluttered her hand at Dad in a way that suggested both her ignorance of his subject and its irrelevance. ‘And the other one?’

  ‘Another student,’ Dad admitted, ‘revealed that she was coming to Oxford from Los Angeles.’

  ‘Do they not have universities in California any more?’ Uncle Jonny asked. ‘Has Arnie terminated all the centres of learning?’

  But Grandma was in no mood to be deflected by flippancy. ‘It’s simply not good enough,’ she said. ‘No, I’m sorry, Rodney, it has to stop. I forbid you from teaching there again. Where are your principles? As for whatever paltry fee they pay you for doing this, it’s nothing less than blood money.’ Grandma’s face was flushed, her voice was becoming as tremulous as it was strident. She seemed to be trembling with anger. ‘As for you, Amy,’ she said, turning to Mum, ‘I would have thought that you might be in a position, and of a mind, to do something about it.’

  Xan and Baz began simultaneously to snigger.

  Grandma turned back to Dad. ‘You can start by giving the money they paid you to those fine people trying to halt that evil expansion of Heathrow. In fact,’ Grandma said, addressing the whole table once more, ‘you should all join their campaign, if you’ve not signed up already. You younger ones especially. There’s nothing I hate more than apathy amongst the young.’

  There were nervous smiles, a tiny eruption of giggles from Holly, to join the twins’ underhand titters. Our grandmother, furious now, stood up. Her chair fell backwards behind her. ‘Do none of you understand the gravity of the situation?’ she railed. ‘This planet is choking. We, the human race, are killing this world. You are my children, my grandchildren, and you do nothing about it. Nothing.’ She threw her napkin, which she’d picked off her lap as she stood up, back down on to the table. ‘It’s not good enough,’ she decided. ‘I’m not having it.’ And she marched through the kitchen area and out of the room. We heard her steps angrily mounting the stairs.

  If it hadn’t been for Grandpa’s presence, I suspect we would have all burst into embarrassed laughter. It was outrageous. What did Grandma know of what we were doing? Nothing? We were each one of us most likely doing plenty! Her accusations were unfair, her behaviour unhinged.

  As it was, we stared at our bowls and took little sips of our drinks. The fact of the matter was our grandmother, we all surely understood, was going mad right in front of our eyes. Apart from the fact that when you thought about it you realised, after all, that she was right. Meanwhile, I stole a glance at my mother across the table, and felt immediately sorry for Dad, head bowed along the table from me, who, I knew, was really going to get it in the neck when they got back up to their room.

  6

  ‘Shall I give the dogs their biscuits?’ I asked my grandfather.

  ‘Thank you, Theo,’ he said. ‘And turn off the lights out there, would you?’

  Grandpa had strung a cable from which hung different coloured light bulbs along the eaves of the stables and, from the corner nearest the house, overhead across the patio to the arched gateway down to the garden. Red, blue, green, yellow. I switched off the lights at the socket in the tack room and walked out beyond the yard, past the outbuildings. The dogs were sniffing around in the pitch-dark night. There were no stars visible above.

  I thought back on Grandma’s behaviour. It wasn’t so much what she’d said, her accusations, her reference to my mother – a book could have been compiled of examples of her rudeness – as the fact that she had become so angry and upset: she was never usually affected herself by the way she treated others. She displayed only a haughty disdain. As for what she’d said, well, as I heard Mum whisper to Dad, ‘They live all alone in this mansion, and lecture others on energy use?’

  My parents and I rarely went abroad on holiday – preferring to stay in cottages on the British coast or go walking in the Welsh hills –
and even then it was usually over the English channel by ferry. But they both flew off on occasions to deliver papers at academic conferences. The thing was that Grandma was right: it was up to us. I took a solemn oath on my grandmother’s honour not to ever fly in an aeroplane again.

  I whistled for the dogs and trotted back to the house. By the time I reached the back door they’d caught me up, and wriggled excitedly around my legs. I gave them each a Bonio from the tin on the shelf and patted them goodnight, before switching off the light and closing the door of the pantry.

  Holly was still in the bathroom and the twins, one in each of the alcoves opposite ours, were explaining how the unfortunate – if unspecified – defects of Holly’s personality were attributable to her parents’ divorce, some years earlier. I couldn’t remember my American uncle, Sid and Holly’s father. Neither his name, nor his face. I could recall, faintly, the lilt of his Mississippi accent; his hair, grey and thinning, with a stringy little ponytail tucked, customarily, inside his collar; and his paunch. It was like how pregnant women looked beautiful for most of their term, their stomachs perfectly curved, but then – right at the end, as birth became imminent, I supposed – they became enormous, grotesque, with this great blob sticking out in front of them; like a space hopper was about to burst straight out of their navel. My uncle had a belly like a woman about to go into labour, which he bore proudly before him, but of his face I recollected not a single feature. He’d become in my memory like a character from a certain episode of Doctor Who: victim of an alien erasure, his face rendered blank.

  ‘What many people don’t realise, Theo,’ Xan told me, ‘is that divorce is like this massive electric shock. You see, every child imagines that their parents’ relationship is secondary to – and somehow even a consequence of – the one he or she has with them.’

  ‘I don’t,’ I objected.

  ‘Ah, but you’re an only child,’ Baz pointed out.

  ‘Exactly,’ Xan agreed. ‘The parents’ relationship feels, to a normal kid, naturally, intuitively, subservient to the child’s with them.’

  ‘But divorce is a cruel rupture,’ said Baz, ‘which makes clear that the parents’ relationship was always – and remains – more important.’

  ‘Which comes as a terrible surprise,’ Xan said.

  ‘Which the child internalises into guilt, as being the one who caused the rupture.’

  ‘I mean, you only have to look at Holly.’

  ‘What about Sid?’ I asked.

  ‘Too old,’ said Xan. ‘According to Freud.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Baz.

  I knew they were talking nonsense, but I wasn’t sure how to prove it. My twin cousins went to a famous (or ‘notorious’, as my mother described it) private school, whose pupils sat their GCSEs as young as twelve; the most successful occasionally went up to Oxford or Cambridge at fifteen. Even the dayboys like Xan and Baz had to stay in school to do their homework until eight-thirty every evening, and go back in on Saturday mornings. Their half-terms consisted not of a week off, as comprehensive schools did, but one single Saturday morning. They had an entire free weekend. It almost made you feel sorry for them.

  When Holly came up and climbed in to the pod next to mine Baz, opposite, informed her that on the third of September that year he’d been abducted by aliens.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Xan. ‘He was.’

  ‘They conducted medical experiments on me.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘She doesn’t believe you,’ Xan said.

  ‘Fine with me,’ said Baz. ‘I’m not seeking publicity.’

  ‘Show her the scars.’

  ‘Actually,’ Baz said, ‘they detained me for fifty years.’

  ‘Fifty years?’ I repeated, idiotically.

  ‘That’s like about two minutes in earth time, Theo,’ Baz explained.

  ‘Seriously,’ Xan said, nodding gravely. ‘He did reappear after a couple of minutes. It’s the truth. I was the only one who knew he’d gone. Go on, show them one of the scars.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ Baz agreed. He climbed out from under his duvet. With a stoical reluctance he lifted up his pyjama top and pulled down the bottoms a little, revealing a neat scar in his lower abdomen.

  ‘Right,’ Holly said. ‘That’s not for an appendiceptomy, by any chance?’

  Baz stared at her. ‘She said a-ppen-di-cep-to-my.’

  ‘Maybe she meant appendectomy,’ said Xan, shrugging.

  ‘I can’t really show you the other scars,’ Baz said. ‘Seeing as you’re a girl.’

  ‘You could show Theo,’ Xan suggested.

  I wrinkled my nose, and declined the offer.

  ‘You’re grossing him out,’ Xan said.

  ‘At least he believes in the existence of non-terrestrial life forms,’ Baz said, climbing back into his alcove. ‘Unlike some people round here we won’t mention.’

  ‘Speaking of whom,’ Xan took over, ‘you’ve got to tell us, Hol.’

  ‘I mean, you don’t have to,’ said Baz.

  ‘But what’s it like having a lesbian for a mother?’

  ‘He means having a mother who’s turned into a lesbian.’

  Holly shrugged. ‘Some people think it’s sketchy,’ she said. ‘But I think it’s pretty cool.’

  ‘You know her and Melony?’ Baz asked. ‘How do they, you know. I mean, when they do it. What do they do?’

  ‘Ignore him,’ Xan advised. ‘Use YouTube like everyone else,’ he told his brother.

  ‘Melony’s been trying to get pregnant,’ Holly said, in a matter of fact way. She told us their plan was to mix Gwen’s egg with the sperm of a gay friend of theirs, and when embryos began to develop they’d be put into Melony’s womb. The twins and I listened in silence while Holly proceeded to tell us in unnecessary obstetric detail about intrauterine inseminations, cytoplasmic sperm injections, gamete fallopian transfers and other such outlandish fertility treatments.

  ‘They sound almost as disgusting as the natural method,’ said Baz.

  ‘How do you know all this stuff?’ Xan asked.

  ‘They talk about it all the time,’ Holly said. ‘It hasn’t worked yet, but they’re still trying.’

  ‘When our mother was pregnant with us,’ said Xan, ‘she told us she had, what was it?’

  ‘Wrestler’s legs,’ his brother declared.

  ‘Precisely. Wrestler’s leg syndrome. She’s all right now, you’ll be glad to know.’

  ‘She’s still a very good runner, actually,’ said Baz.

  I told them about this Australian frog I’d read about in Biology, which swallows its eggs: they hatch in the stomach and the tadpoles swim around in the inky blackness until they become frogs, when they pop out of their mother’s mouth.

  ‘Up to twenty-five of them,’ I said. ‘Like coins from a fruit machine.’

  At that moment, as if in response to my snippet of natural history, Holly broke wind, with a loud, wet, bubbly and protracted noise.

  ‘Holly!’ said Baz.

  ‘That wasn’t me,’ she protested. Baz and Xan sniggered in their alcoves. ‘What’s going on?’ She farted again a moment later, and this time it was Xan who berated her. The third time, Holly jumped up as if she’d been bitten, bashing her head against the roof of her pod, which seemed abruptly to make her fart again. I realised that the twins had planted something in her alcove. It was a pathetically puerile kind of humour, and I thought I was going to be sick with suppressed laughter. I had to hide my face in my sleeping bag and bite the fabric. Holly climbed out and pulled everything after her – pillow, duvet, sheets, mattress – until she found the speaker the twins had placed there, and which one of them was operating with a remote control.

  I wasn’t sure what time things eventually quietened down. Not before a false lull, during which it appeared that I was the one to start blowing off: the other twin had planted a speaker under my mattress. This repetition
was almost as funny as the first one. Holly at least seemed to think so. She claimed that men pass wind between fifteen and twenty-five times a day, according to official National Health Service figures; while women only fart ten times, ‘and a lot more quietly’. Xan told her she wasn’t so screwed up after all, that Sidney was the screwball in her family, at which Sid’s voice carried through from the landing: ‘I can hear you.’

  None of us mentioned our grandmother. Instead we turned off the lights and in the dark fell into an argument about the ethics of carrying knives.

  ‘I mean,’ said Xan, ‘I’m not saying it should be obligatory.’

  ‘If you don’t want to,’ Baz agreed, ‘you shouldn’t have to.’

  ‘But every citizen has a duty to defend himself,’ Xan opined.

  ‘Only cowards carry weapons,’ said Holly.

  ‘And idiots,’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ said Xan, ‘obviously no one in Oxford needs to carry a shank.’

  ‘Unlike the ghetto of Hampstead Garden Suburb,’ said Holly.

  When we’d run out of words, there were fake snores in the silence, which were almost as funny as the farts. It was a raucous night.

  As things finally settled, I reflected upon the fact that, back in Oxford, I rarely noticed how quiet our house was. Occasionally, however, a friend would come round after school. At first, they wouldn’t notice it either. If one or other of my parents were at home, which was unlikely (I’d had my own front door key for as long as I could remember) they’d do little more than return my greeting from their desk. My parents, as I’ve already intimated, were content to live in companionable tranquility, threaded with the rippling stream of their conversation or by Beethoven piano sonatas on our stereo. It was left to me to provide a snack for my guest and take him to my room, where I’d show him the chessboard or the Lego or my collection – like my father before me – of hand-painted knights of medieval Europe.

  It was only gradually, as we played in the silence of my bedroom, surrounded by the greater silence of the house, that my companion’s face would begin to betray his unease, and puzzlement – which I think was actually more intuitive than conscious. He would stop what he was doing, sit motionless, ears cocked. He would look towards the door, then, after some moments, shrug to himself, and resume whatever activity we’d been amusing ourselves with. Once I was playing backgammon with a boy called Billy Lake when he frowned, gazed at the walls of the room, and said, ‘It’s like a tomb in here, isn’t it?’