She kind of laughed when I said that with her shoulders all shaking. ‘Unfortunately, Peter,’ she said in a kind of wet whisper, ‘there isn’t anyone else. I’m the only mother you’ve got.’ And then she sniffed and said: ‘I just thought we needed a break. A little holiday. And then everything will be like it used to be. You’d like that. Wouldn’t you?’
Doctor Todd, in a safari suit and a silk cravat, came to see us off. ‘If you’re absolutely sure,’ he said, smoothing his sideburns before touching my mother and kissing her cheek. ‘You’d best leave right away. Right away. It’s a hot day and the roads are atrocious. Atrocious.’
‘Yes,’ said my mother. ‘The sooner the better. Peter,’ she snapped, ‘stop chattering and use the toilet.’
Doctor Todd glanced at my wrist. ‘Where’s your watch?’
‘Come on, Peter. You know what you’re like.’
When the car door closed, Doctor Todd’s face appeared leering against the glass, his terrible teeth gleaming. ‘Off you go, then,’ he said, and the engine roared.
The day was hot and the car stank of fresh leather. My stomach gurgled and churned as we passed the hospital with the pretty nurses, and weary mothers shunting prams along the pavement. Everything was different: the colours had all changed, the sun was bright. I saw daffodils, and sunlight falling through the branches of trees. I saw people on their way to work: people for who this was just another day, people whose daddies were fixing cars or mowing lawns or rolling pens back and forth across office desks. The car slid across the lanes and the motorway swept us away from town.
I kept a scrapbook, of sorts, like Doctor Todd said, bits and pieces pasted on paper. I always wanted to control things, you see, the things that happened and put them in order just like the kings and queens on the classroom wall. But it was so hard. I could never tell what mattered. I couldn’t control the world any better than I could an armful of snakes. The hills and fields unfolded like pages and the contents of my scrapbook shuffled all higgledy-piggledy across the back seat of the car. I scrambled to collect everything and hurry it back between the covers.
But why was it so frightening? I mean, you know, when everything got all muddly? Grown-ups always pretended that everything could be answered or explained or justified. But if you ever looked at the face of a lady who’d lost her child or a child that’d lost its mummy or daddy you might think that, well, maybe, life is all confusing and messy and wouldn’t fit between the pages of a book no matter how hard you tried. Maybe it’d be better if you just closed your eyes and went to sleep and dreamed. And then when you woke up, if you had to wake up, you might as well just forget about trying to make everything make sense and lie in your bed, eyes wide open, waiting for another day to start.
I saw handfuls of sheep scattered across the hillsides, and villages small enough to put in my pocket: so small that I imagined ruling over them, bringing destruction whenever the mood took me. The people would scream in terror at the wild world I’d made.
‘Peter,’ my mother’s eyes flared in the rear-view mirror, ‘what is it? What are you saying?’
‘Nothing!’ and I slapped the back of her seat. Sometimes I wondered what it would be like if I really could kill someone.
She twisted around, her finger jabbing at me. ‘Are you trying to cause an accident?’ She spun back to the road and I sat plastered with fear to my seat, her spit on my face. ‘Not long now,’ she muttered. ‘Amberley: two miles. Thank God. As soon as we get to Everlasting Lane—’
Everlasting Lane? I hadn’t heard that name before. It took me by surprise. How long would we have to drive down an everlasting lane?
‘It’s just a name, Peter!’
And then we passed the sign—Amberley—and everything changed.
I made up stories, you see, and filled my scrapbook with the people I knew: a widowed mother; a lost child; the woman, smiling, her shadow sliding back towards the large house; the young man taking a match to a bundle of secrets. And now the swinging chain, turning, creaking, the air still. I made a world where summers were warmer, where the winters were whiter, and even love seemed better.
I can’t promise that this is the way it was, not exactly, only that this was perhaps how it sometimes seemed to be. Because it’s a strange kind of courage, isn’t it? The courage to let someone die; to let them die alone without a word. And you should tell her that I’m sorry because, in the end, I didn’t do the right thing at all. But, you see, although I believed them open, my eyes were closed.
I stood in the doorway of the little white cottage as my mother ruffled through her handbag and produced a bundle of keys. I heard church bells: chimes rising into the spring sky, and a tumble of silver notes. I heard the turn of the squeaky lock. The branches of a weeping willow rose and fell; birdsong twinkled in the taller trees.
And, so, this is how I begin.
My father died when I was nine years old. I must have been nine because I was ten when I went to live in Everlasting Lane.
It was all so long ago, how could I ever forget?
3
The cottage in Amberley made me think of an old library: dusty and undisturbed.
I sat at the kitchen table, lurching from thought to thought, watching my mother’s every move. She brought out biscuits and lemonade and perched on the yellow worktop to watch me eat and drink. I wasn’t hungry but ate anyway, forcing mouthfuls of digestive down my throat. The table-top was plastic and patterned to look like wood. It was funny because there was something familiar about it just as there was about the floor tiles and the cupboards and the yellow curtains tied up with blue knots at the window.
The kitchen smelt empty. Opening a brown cupboard, my mother cleared a space among old packets and tins for beans and bread; in the fridge she placed butter, milk and cheese. The fridge shuddered as she switched on the power and at the same moment a memory flickered across my brain. I found myself building towns of coloured paper, my feet swinging clear of the kitchen floor, large blocks of pale afternoon pasted on the walls. There was a smell of fresh paint and brushes soaking upended in old jam jars. I could hear my father singing and I could see myself, my tiny self, giggling with glee at his funny voice and thoughts of hippopotamuses and glooorious mud as he slipped ginger cake into the oven and warmed cocoa in the pan.
I could hear my mother’s footsteps upstairs stomping on the old floorboards and the Hoover rattling against the skirting and whooshing under the beds. I listened out for the sudden silence that would follow the end of her housework. You see, something was about to happen. Something only I knew.
My father stood behind me admiring my work.
I wondered how much I knew about this man. Not much. He had a moustache and his tummy hung a little over the rim of his belt but he was tall and proud like the soldier he’d once been. He never talked about it but at least I knew what a soldier was. I’d seen pictures and read comics and, sometimes, my mother told me stories. But he wasn’t a soldier any more. He was a businessman and I didn’t really know what he did or understand that world of suits and ties and secretaries. There were no comics about businessmen. He was so much older than me I couldn’t imagine the world through his eyes. He was a mystery; a mystery in my own house, but I never thought to ask. In my dreams he never changed. He was never ill and he was never dead. He was always Daddy and that was all that mattered.
‘Peter,’ he said, smiling, ‘have you seen this trick?’ He moved to the opposite side of the table and—
‘Peter?’ I flinched. My mother’s eyes were scorching me, a whisper of smoke rising from my hair. ‘What is it?’
A sip of lemonade washed down the last stubborn bite of biscuit. I shook my head. ‘I’ve been here before.’
‘Peter,’ she frowned at my confusion, ‘why don’t you remember?’
‘Who lives here now?’ I demanded.
‘We do.’
‘Yes, but whose house is it?’
‘Well, your grandma lived here awhile,’ s
he said. ‘But now it’s ours.’
‘And we live here?’
She nodded.
My mother clunked my suitcase up the narrow stairs. If the downstairs was small, the upstairs was smaller still and the wooden chair onto which she sank filled most of the landing. I nearly toppled backwards but she seized my wrist. The shadow of the gloomy, green drape hanging behind her slid across her face.
‘You nearly had a nasty fall,’ she said.
She produced a brass ring from which rattled an assortment of keys. She removed four. ‘Bathroom,’ she said, handing me the first. I fitted the key, unlocked the door and returned the key to my mother. ‘Mine,’ she said, and I repeated the task a second time. ‘Yours.’
I twisted the third key into its lock. As the door opened the room coughed out a puff of stale, stuffy air. My mother jerked back the curtain and pushed open the tiny window. ‘Oh, Lord,’ she said as a triangle of light fell across the room and its contents. ‘This,’ she said, shuffling an armful of clothes from the pink eiderdown, ‘is, apparently, where your grandmother decided to store all her junk. She was a devotee of Woman’s Weekly,’ my mother went on, a stack of magazines threatening to slip from her grasp, ‘and clearly reluctant to throw away a single edition.’ Sniffing the bedding she said, ‘And a change of sheets is in order, methinks.’
She winced as she lowered herself to her knees. She reached beneath the bed and began tugging free toys and books. ‘Your old Action Man,’ she cried, ‘your Robin Hood set, your Rupert annuals. Oh, and look who we’ve got here!’ It was a piggy bank, pink and smiling, forgotten pennies rattling around inside. And then a tattered glove-puppet. ‘Goodness me, Peter, you were always “Pinky-this, Perky-that”. You drove us to despair.’ She slipped the toy onto her hand and wiggled it as if it were talking. ‘Pinky-Perky-Peter we used to call you,’ she said in a squeaky voice. ‘Don’t you remember?’
I shrugged and scowled at the pig. I wondered whether I wanted to remember.
‘Look,’ she sighed, removing the puppet from her fingers and reaching back under the bed, ‘I know it’s not much, but sort out your pictures and things, it’ll be just like …’
She now held a skipping rope. It looked nearly new. She caressed its silky strands and wrapped it around her fingers like beads.
‘That’s a girl’s toy,’ I said.
Alone in the living room, afternoon sun speckling the air, I counted porcelain animals roaming the shelves in packs or lurking alone between the spines of tattered books. A clock squatted on the mantelpiece, its hands still. Kneeling before the TV I scrawled my name across its dusty screen.
I studied a row of photographs that sat along the sideboard. They made me feel happier. Photographs always did. It was like I could pretend that they were real and the room around me was the picture. Like when you look in a mirror and see the world where everything is backwards, so that your right hand is your left hand and all the writing looks funny and mysterious. It’s like another world where the things that happen are opposites and if you’re sad in the real world, then you’d be happy in the mirror, and if you were lost in one world, then you’d be found in the other. And the people who were dead might be alive and everything would be different and better.
Some of the photos were black and white, others pale and coloured. Some I’d seen before at home, stacked in a box in the garage, damp-dry at the corners. Others I hadn’t seen before, like this one with my father and mother sitting side by side and smiling for the camera but the picture was torn like a third person had been removed.
I couldn’t guess who.
‘What are you up to?’
I jumped. ‘Nothing.’
My mother held a lemonade in each hand, bubbles rising. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, passing a glass to me and tugging a duster from her back pocket. ‘It just needs a good clean.’ The yellow cloth swept across the television’s blank eye, erasing dust and signature in a single swipe. She went to the window and glowered at the tangle of weeds that had once been a garden.
I stared at her. She’d changed her clothes. She was all made up like a younger person, with pink cheeks and a storybook smile. She wore a T-shirt, red, white and blue like an American flag; and proper jeans, flared ones, almost like a teenager. But her eyes, when she turned to smile at me, were the same smoky shade as always.
‘Where is she now?’ I asked.
‘Who?’
‘My grandmother.’
My mother shuddered as if tasting something sour. She fiddled with an earring. ‘Maybe, when you know me better,’ she said.
‘I do know you.’
‘Oh, Peter,’ she said, joining me on the sofa, ‘you don’t know me at all.’ She took my hands in hers. ‘I was thinking about what you said. You know, about not wanting to live with me.’
‘But I—’
‘No, it’s all right. I was wondering what it would be like if you could live with someone else. Someone who wasn’t cross all the time.’
And then she explained. We were going to play a game, she said, a game of the imagination. She told me how she was going to be my Aunt Kat (with a ‘K’) and how my mummy had gotten very tired and had decided to take some time to sort herself out because I knew what it was like when I was tired and how grumpy I got, didn’t I?
I nodded. I didn’t want to make her cross.
‘Do you know why people play games, Peter?’
‘Because it’s fun?’
‘Well, yes, sometimes, but sometimes it helps them discover something too.’
‘Like Hide and Seek.’
The game had rules, of course—just like with that man in It’s a Knockout who tells everyone the rules before he blows the whistle—but in this game you could change, you could be anything or anyone you wanted because the past and the things we’d done, which I’d always thought were carved in stone, might as well be carved in water. And it was a strange game, yes, but a good one because, as she explained, if you were losing, you just returned to ‘Go’ and started all over again.
But then she said how she wanted us to keep ourselves to ourselves and that people in a village had big noses and would want to poke them into our business given half a chance and I wasn’t to tell anyone anything and even when I went to school—‘Yes, Peter, school. Did you really think you wouldn’t have to go?’—I needed to be careful because the game, she said, and the rules were secret. ‘And if people ask questions,’ she said, ‘never answer.’
‘Why?’
She groaned and then laughed. ‘Do you know something, Peter Lambert?’
‘No. What?’
‘You ask too many questions.’
‘But what do I call you?’
‘I told you: you can call me Kat—’
‘Why?’
‘—with a “K”.’
‘But why? It’s not even a proper name.’
‘Of course it is. You are your name,’ she explained, ‘and your name is who you are. It’s just sometimes you need another name to make yourself something more, something better. Your dad understood that,’ she said, ‘but I let him down. And now I’m making up for it. Well, what do you think?’
Well, sometimes, I didn’t know what to think.
‘Let me look at you,’ she knelt down. ‘Oh, Peter, your daddy would be so proud,’ as if seeing me for the first time. Her fingers teased my hair. And then, ‘Oh, Peter,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry.’ And then, ‘It’s all right,’ as she reached for me. ‘Don’t cry. Big boys don’t cry.’ And I didn’t.
Hardly at all.
‘Listen, Peter,’ she said, her smoky eyes filling the room, ‘can you keep a secret?’
‘Yes.’
She put a finger to my lips. ‘Then keep it.’
A butterfly fluttered among the thick, green leaves of the overgrown garden. Gardens at home were mirrors, reflecting other gardens, other houses and other small boys, but this garden backed onto trees. Not like the skinny trees at home either. These trees were
thick and old with dark stories stuffed into the lines of their rugged faces.
Having turned it onto something big, thumping and full of summer, Kat, as I was supposed to call her, slipped a radio onto the seat of the rusty garden chair. ‘There used to be a scythe,’ she said, squinting at the chaos before her, ‘but I’d hate to take you home with less legs than when you arrived.’ And then, turning her back on the jungle to survey the rear of the house, she cried out: ‘Oh, no. Look! The local yobbery have put a brick through a window.’ A jagged black hole gaped from the first floor. ‘Oh, Peter, is nothing sacred?’ she sighed. ‘I won’t rest until I’ve done something about that. Can you entertain yourself, Peter? Yes?’
‘What about Doctor Todd?’ I said.
Kat sighed again, ‘Ooooh,’ as if I’d stuck her with a pin. ‘Listen, Peter, my suggestion to you is that you don’t worry about Doctor Todd. In fact, that’s not even a suggestion,’ she said. ‘It’s pretty much an order.’
That seemed too easy.
‘Okay?’
I nodded.
‘I’ll not be long,’ she said. ‘Now be good.’
Left alone I couldn’t resist plunging into the overgrown garden, like Doctor Livingston, I presume, or Doug McClure, fully expecting to discover the ruins of some dark forbidden temple or one of those Japanese soldiers that never know the war is over. I had to keep my wits about me, of course. You never knew what dangers might be lurking deep within the undergrowth: lions, probably, ready to rip your throat out; snipers, a pot-shot from the shadows; maybe aliens.
I tightened my grip on my gun and, with my walkie-talkie pressed to my ear, I could communicate with HQ and keep them alerted to my progress: ‘I am approaching the nest,’ in a whisper, twisting the dial. ‘Over. I must be absolutely silent,’ I went on. ‘Over. Who knows what I might find,’ I concluded. ‘Over and out.’
There was a burst of activity. I crouched and gazed in wonder at the mighty beast rising in to the air, leathery wings beating over the land that time forgot. Awed by its ancient beauty, I—
Everlasting Lane Page 2