Wonderboy Read online

  Praise for Fiona Gibson’s first novel, Babyface

  “Babyface is enthralling. Gibson’s original voice, which is at once comic and accurate, exactly captures the lofty and lowly moments of being a new mum.”

  —Adele Parks, author of Larger Than Life

  “I loved Babyface so much I read it twice! Gibson’s deadpan style is amazing, and her novel is absolute gold.”

  —Melissa Senate, author of See Jane Date

  “A fantastic debut. More than funny, it’s true.”

  —Louise Bagshawe, author of The Go-To Girl

  “A bittersweet take on bringing up baby in modern times and a great first book.”

  —Heat

  “A winsome debut about first-time motherhood.”

  —Observer

  “Original, funny and engaging.”

  —Romantic Times

  Wonderboy

  Fiona Gibson

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Big thanks to Wendy Varley, Cathy and Liam Gilligan, Jenny Tucker, Kath Brown, Ellie Stott, Marie O’Riordan, Stephen Amor, Cheryl Zimmerman and Deany Judd (for being brilliant, supportive friends) and my parents, Margery and Keith. My lovely writing group: Tania, Pam, Vicki, Amanda and Elizabeth. Chris and Sue at Atkinson Pryce, the perfectly formed little bookshop.

  For generous help: Arlene at Castle Landcare, Amanda Huntley, Andy Myles, Patrick Fulton, Bobby Coulter, Jim “land artist” Buchanan.

  Huge gratitude to Laura Langlie, Annette Green and Beth Scanlon. All at Red Dress Ink, especially Farrin Jacobs.

  Love to Jimmy, for sending me away to finish this (I worked and worked and only used room service seventeen times, honest).

  For Sam, Dex and Erin, my gang

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter 1: Requiring General Upgrade

  Chapter 2: Treasure

  Chapter 3: Being New

  Chapter 4: Livestock Nightmares

  Chapter 5: The Trouble with Tod’s Hair

  Part Two

  Chapter 6: Happy Birthday

  Chapter 7: Needing a Cigarette

  Chapter 8: How To Make Friends

  Chapter 9: Daredevil

  Chapter 10: More Treasure

  Chapter 11: Sleep Talking

  Part Three

  Chapter 12: Mayday

  Chapter 13: Put Your Shoes On

  Chapter 14: Mrs. Monoblock

  Chapter 15: We’re All Right

  Chapter 16: Will You Miss Me?

  Chapter 17: My Baby Sister

  Part Four

  Chapter 18: More Trouble With Tod’s Hair

  Chapter 19: Bad Tarts

  Chapter 20: Sarah

  Chapter 21: Acting Normal

  Chapter 22: A Little Mistake

  Chapter 23: Tooth Fairy

  Chapter 24: Kite Flying Made Easy

  Chapter 25: Home

  part one

  Children are better than grown-ups at negotiating mazes. They follow their instincts. Adults think they know all the answers, and find themselves hopelessly lost.

  —From The Magic of Mazes and Labyrinths,

  a book treasured by Tod, age five

  chapter 1

  Requiring General Upgrade

  Gorby Cottage. Gordon and Betty bumped together: Gorby. This is how people name their houses around here. The fact that they name them at all should send the three of us tumbling back into the car and speeding away in a cloud of relief. But we don’t do that. Marcus scans the facade of the house, nodding approvingly, as if he has made up his mind to buy it. Already, he belongs here. This is his concrete hedgehog on the front step. His red front door with the lion head knocker. Big, six-footer Marcus, solid as these cottage walls.

  I clutch the sugary hand of Tod, our five-year-old son. He is sucking a vivid green strip that looks like something you’d use to bandage your car’s exhaust. He nudges the hedgehog with the scuffed toe of his trainer. Marcus gives me a wide, “this is going to be great” kind of smile. It’s the kind of smile a dentist offers just before yanking out your molar.

  Tod jabs the white plastic button next to the door. The doorbell sounds like the old Avon ad: ding-dong, Avon calling. But we haven’t come to enthuse over cuticle creams. We are here because this is for the best for Tod, best for all of us.

  “I have such a good feeling,” Marcus whispers, squeezing my hand.

  I don’t know why he’s whispering, as no one is making any move to answer the door. Apart from us, the only other life-form in sight is an elderly woman in an immaculate garden across the road.

  It’s a cool, late-September afternoon. Leaves are falling from a gnarled oak at the far end of the woman’s garden, playing chase-me across the vast lawn. She’s trying to stuff them into a black plastic sack. It’s the first time I have seen anyone tidying a lawn.

  Marcus ding-dongs again. Tod slides the green strip slowly between his lips as if it’s a debit card, and his mouth the cash-point machine. “Maybe they’ve forgotten,” I suggest, hopefully. “Or they’ve decided it’s such a lovely house that they’ve taken it off the market.”

  “It’s not lovely,” retorts Tod.

  “Why are you so negative?” Marcus asks. “Do you know what that means, being negative?”

  “Of course he knows,” I murmur. He’s advanced, his teacher told us, at least in terms of knowing stuff: “That brain of his!” she exclaimed at parents’ evening. “Tod’s a mine of information.” Then she moved on to shakier areas—concentration, sociability—and started tweaking her crystal choker in an agitated fashion, and my smile set like cement.

  “It means seeing bad things,” Tod says, grinning. He has wrapped the sweet around his top teeth, like a gum shield.

  Marcus raps the door. I suspect that Gorby Cottage’s owners have glimpsed Tod through the floral net curtains, with his horrible sweet and his bed-heady hair, and are lying flat on the floor, behind the sofa, waiting for us to go away. It’s a trick I occasionally played when my mother showed up at my flat, awash with martini and shredded tissues, after Dad had left her.

  “I’m sure someone’s in,” Marcus says, crouching to spy through the letterbox.

  The woman across the road has put down her sack and is staring at us. I wave, but she carries on glowering.

  “I want to go home,” whines Tod.

  “We’re not going home,” Marcus mutters, with his face still jammed at the letterbox. “Ro, do you have anything to wipe his hands? We don’t want him making everything sticky.”

  “Peel that stuff off your teeth,” I tell him. “Lick your hands, wipe them on your sweatshirt.”

  “You never have tissues,” Tod complains.

  I wish now that I had raked a comb through his hair, made him respectable.

  A mortise lock fumble comes from inside the house. Marcus springs up. “Keep an open mind,” he grits.

  But my mind isn’t open. It has snapped tightly shut, like a trap, and will remain so until we are safely home, within easy reach of an all-night supermarket, offering papayas, lychees and several varieties of tomato.

  Betty wavers in the doorway, frail as grass. She seems to be staring at Tod’s green lips. Marcus introduces us, shakes her hand too vigorously and strides right in. In the living room, Gordon is running a carpet sweeper across the violently patterned rug. He and his wife are wearing matching fawn cardigans.

  “Marcus Skews,” Marcus says, offering Gordon a hand. “Fantastic house. What a lovely village this is.”

  “It’s pleasant,” Gordon says carefully.

  Tod clusters around my legs like more than one child. “What’s that smell?” he asks loudly.

  My son is the kind of child who, on the rare occasions when he is invited to another kid’s house for tea, barks, “
That’s a horrible sausage.” I give him a gentle nudge in the ribs. Gordon resumes his carpet sweeping enterprise, as if trying to erase the jangling pattern of ferns.

  Marcus’s voice is too big for the living room. The lowceilinged room has too many corners, all gloomy and impenetrable. There are so many items of dark wooden furniture—dresser, sideboard, glass-fronted bookcases, all bearing crystal decanters and vases—that I feel like we’ve blundered into an antique shop, and that one clumsy movement would send the whole lot toppling over.

  “I suppose,” says Betty, “I’d better show you around.”

  She treads softly from room to room without speaking. Tod keeps sniffing and sliding his nose along his wrist. I can hear the back-and-forth burr of the carpet sweeper.

  “This is just what we’ve been looking for,” Marcus announces in a bedroom entirely done out in pastel pink, giving a marshmallow effect.

  The whole house smells of old flowers and pastry. Tod coughs without covering his mouth, and clutches his groin with a felt-tip–stained hand.

  “If you need the bathroom,” Marcus says pleasantly, “why don’t you ask?” My husband was brought up to say “bathroom”—not “toilet” or even “loo”—by schoolteacher parents who use engraved silver napkin rings, even on ordinary days.

  In the bathroom a startled-looking doll with a lime-green crocheted skirt prevents the spare toilet roll from being embarrassingly naked.

  “What do you think?” I ask Tod as he jets in the approximate direction of the loo.

  “Where would I sleep?” he asks, eyeing the toilet-roll doll fearfully.

  “In that bright, sunny room, the yellow one, overlooking the street.” The one you’re going to love, I add silently.

  “It smells bad.”

  “No, it doesn’t. You’re imagining it.” I try to give him a reassuring smile, but know that I resemble the molar dentist. I lick my finger and try to flatten his eyebrow—the left one, which flares up defiantly—and examine Betty’s toiletries. Talc in a gigantic lavender-colored tin, a litter of puppy-shaped soaps. I can hear Marcus’s voice bouncing off the downstairs walls. “Wash your hands,” I remind Tod. He turns on the cold tap too hard, spraying the cuff of his sweatshirt.

  “But it’s different, of course, when you have children,” Marcus is telling Betty when we join them in the rickety conservatory. “You’ve had enough of the city. Dirt, crime, the stress of it all. It’s not good for a child to grow up in that environment. Isn’t that right, Ro?”

  I nod and grip Tod’s damp hand. The conservatory seems like a pointless and possibly dangerous addition, built to house a macramé plant holder containing a cheap plastic pot and dead stick.

  “When are we going home?” Tod asks.

  “In a minute,” says Marcus. “Stop asking.”

  “I only asked once.” Tod’s lip juts out, his “shelf lip.” Betty shows us the kitchen which she wiped down just before we arrived; it still smells of wet cloth. “Want to look in the shed?” she mutters.

  “Is there a shed?” Tod asks, brightening.

  “No, thank you,” Marcus says, “I think we’ve seen everything—”

  “Please,” Tod whines. “Please, please, Dad, the shed.”

  “No, darling,” I say. “We’ve taken up enough of their time already.”

  “What are sheds for?” Tod demands.

  I usher him to the front door and bat his hand away from the doorbell before he can press it. I wonder why Gordon and Betty have a ding-dong bell and lion head knocker when they seem distinctly unkeen on answering the door. Tod is an obsessive button-pusher—he can’t help himself. He stomps down the path to the front gate with his index finger still extended. With an absence of any more buttons, he uses the finger to excavate his right ear, and smears his findings onto the front of his trousers.

  “Thanks for your time,” Marcus says. “We’ll be in touch.”

  Betty nods quickly, and bangs the door shut. Tod, I notice, has a fragment of loo roll attached to his heel. When Marcus catches up to him, he picks it off and stuffs it into his pocket.

  “Well,” he says, as Tod clambers into the car’s back seat, “I don’t think we need to look at any more houses.”

  “Are we staying in London?” Tod asks, as excited as when Betty mentioned the shed.

  “No, I mean, this is perfect. It really has everything we could want.”

  As we drive away I glance at that sign again—Gorby Cottage, spindly black lettering on a varnished wood oval—and imagine Ro and Marcus combined. Rocus.

  Is London really so awful? By the time we arrive back at Cecil Street, the horseshoe-shaped flowerbeds in the park—usually bleak and battered by feet—have been dusted with brightness. The front of our building sparkles, as if lightly glittered. Even the garbage bin looks more shiny than usual. Everything feels right, in the way that your hair looks especially pleasing on the day you’re having it cut.

  Tod leaps up the stone steps ahead of us, clearly relieved to be back in our shared magnolia hall with the upstairs girl yelling and banging. Odd words ping downstairs: You. Pathetic. Out. There’s a deafening clang, like some outsized porcelain object being thrown, possibly a toilet. I shimmy Tod into our ground floor flat where you can still hear the shouting, but not as bad as in the hall.

  Occasionally, I glimpse the upstairs girl in the street—she looks like she lives on thin soup—but we haven’t spoken since the ceiling incident. Marcus had been working, and left his papers strewn all over the dining table, when water started dripping from our center light. I rattled the bathroom door and said, “Marcus, hurry up, something’s dripping.”

  “You’re imagining it,” he shouted back. (My husband thinks it’s my hobby, collecting nonexistent sounds and smells.)

  The small puddle beneath the light proved that I was right this time. “It’s bulging,” I yelled, at the precise moment that the ceiling cracked and splattered downward, dowsing Marcus’s papers and laptop with water and sodden plaster. We vacuumed the keyboard to suck out the water, and blasted it with a hair dryer, but it never recovered.

  Marcus thundered upstairs and banged on the girl’s door. Nobody answered. That night he wrote: “We shall expect full compensation for damages incurred” and placed the letter in her pigeonhole. Next morning someone had slipped it, unopened, under our door.

  The upstairs girl is screaming now, like her fingers are trapped beneath something heavy and she can’t tear them free. Tod gazes upward with his mouth lolling open. Marcus is hunched over the estate agent’s details for Gorby Cottage, trying to blot out the noise.

  “That house was too dark,” I say, over the wailing. “Ceilings too low. I felt squashed. I’m only starting to feel normal again now.”

  Upstairs, it sounds like someone is bounding from a trampoline onto the floor. That girl is wrecking my carefully planned argument of why we should stay in London forever and how fantastically stimulating city living can be. Marcus looks up from the estate agent’s blurb.

  “Call this normal?” he asks. “You really want this for Tod?”

  “He’s fine,” I say, weakly. “Aren’t you, sweetheart?”

  “I’m hungry,” he says, wandering to our tiny kitchen, which is really part of the living room, separated only by a waist-high partition.

  The shouting has died away. This is the usual pattern. There’s the terrible noise, then it stops, as if she and whichever boyfriend it happens to be have decided to calmly make themselves cups of tea.

  “You think it’s fine,” Marcus continues, “all the bullying he’s had to put up with? That thing with his eyebrow?”

  “Shush,” I hiss. “Let’s not bring that up again.”

  Tod emerges from the kitchen, chomping on something that could be loosely termed a sandwich: orange cheese boulders rammed between crusts. To avoid discussing our imminent move to the country, I stalk him to his bedroom. The room is long and narrow, painted leaf green at his request, with space only for a single b
ed, chest of drawers and shelves housing messy stacks of books. His toys are stored in a drawer under the bed, but he rarely plays with them.

  He lies, stomach down, in the skinny space between his bed and the wall. I read once that animals squeeze into small spaces so bigger predators can’t get them; it makes them feel safe. I wonder if that’s why Tod spends so much time here.

  “You okay, love?” I ask.

  “Yuh,” he mutters.

  In his hiding place he has an airmail notepad and a clutch of Biros, some with their ink tubes removed. He has been drawing a maze, a diagram really. That’s what Tod does, he draws mazes. They cover his bedroom walls, twisting like nightmare sewage systems.

  “Dad really likes that cottage,” I tell him.

  He nibbles a corner of his sandwich. “Why are we moving?”

  “You’ll love the country, Tod, I promise.” I want to tell him what a wonderful life we’ll have in that unsullied village. We’ll go for walks on the common, admire its primped shrubs. We will be neater. We no longer wish to live three doors down from a mini-cab office where the drivers switch off their engines when traveling downhill, to save petrol. Sometimes, though, nostalgia surges through me, and we haven’t even moved yet.

  Marcus and I have lived all our lives in London. It hasn’t suddenly become terrifying and dangerous. Anyway, we never know what to do with ourselves in small places. We wind up in some quaint village on a house-hunting mission and, after viewing a dinky cottage, read the notices in the agent’s window—“Suite Success: for all your upholstery needs including pelmets made to measure”—and wonder what to do next. Our park exploration usually coincides with the heavens opening, so we grab prepacked Spar sandwiches and drive home.

  “We can’t live in that house,” Tod says now, having put down his sandwich, carefully writing “Way In” at the start of his maze.

  “Why not?”

  “They live there. Those old people with the carpet machine.”

  “They won’t live there when it’s ours.” I’ve said it: “when,” not “if.” I decide then to tell Marcus that we’re staying right here. This is my flat. I chose it, before Marcus was even invented. Tod has friends—he knows people at least—and we can’t uproot him, not at five, when he’s just started his second year of school, and has got over the bullying.