Wonderboy Read online

  Marcus lies back on the sand and shuts his eyes. His fatigue must be due to the exertion of watching me lug beach towels, a blanket and the carrier bag containing our picnic to the beach. Marcus has pulled off his sweater to form a thin pillow, and falls asleep instantly.

  It’s so impressive, the way he can click into slumber. There’s no squirming to find a comfy position, no semi-awake state. I suspect that he sleeps on the train to and from work, not using his laptop at all, allowing him two hours’ extra kip per day.

  Salmon Man becomes Tod again, and is instantly hungry and freezing. “What is there to eat?” he asks through banging teeth. Rarely does Tod want to eat at mealtimes. He expects a constant supply of appetizing snacks, as if life comes packaged with round-the-clock room service.

  “Ham rolls,” I say.

  He peers into the carrier bag where wet, pink scraps have escaped their bread casings. “What else?”

  “The barbecued boar will be ready in a minute, darling.”

  “Huh,” Tod mutters. Really, I should take tips on picnic preparation from my sister. Her outdoor offerings include cloudy lemonade she makes herself and some fancy dessert involving loganberries. Natalie never has to babble an apologetic “It’ll taste just fine. It’s just a bit squashed, that’s all.”

  Tod takes a filling-less roll and sucks it, then drops it into the burrow which he’s made in the sand. “Dad, is there water down there?” he asks.

  “Your dad’s asleep,” I point out.

  Tod has yet to master the art of recognizing whether a person is asleep or not. He often blunders into our bedroom at night, announcing, “The sheep won’t be quiet, Mum,” when I can’t hear a living thing, and had been enjoying a particularly pleasing dream about being massaged by a man with incredibly sensitive fingers and no filing cabinet.

  Tod is burying the roll and muttering about our lack of bucket and spade. His hair needs cutting again—the back of his head looks like a matted cushion—but I can’t face jamming him into Tina’s racing car seat. Marcus shows no sign of regaining consciousness. If he were a different dad—the dad who’s in the sea now, towing a squealing girl on a fluorescent pink raft—we might bury him in sand. We’d pile it on his legs and chest and leave only his head poking out. He would pretend to be trapped, and struggle to free himself.

  I don’t think it’s good that I imagine Tod having a different dad.

  chapter 11

  Sleep Talking

  Dinosaurs had clever protective accessories like armored backs, pointed thumbs and spiky frills around their necks. Their remains reside at Dino Experience museum. These creatures are dead, obviously, and therefore don’t do very much, but at least they require no feeding or cleaning out. As far as Tod is concerned, one of the smaller dinosaur species—a Hypsilophodon, perhaps—would make an excellent pet.

  Dino Experience is packed with family groups who are escaping the fine rain. A small group has clustered around a life-size replica of a Neovenator which, says the taped commentary, “was a ferocious predator, ripping its victims with its razor-sharp—” We miss the next bit because a man in a wet navy anorak is barking, “Are you writing that down, Tristan? Come on, you’ve got your worksheets to fill out.”

  Tristan uses his knees as a desk. His flat, damp hair looks like it’s been licked. “Lean on something,” the dad goes on. “Look, you’re rumpling the paper.”

  I wonder whether Marcus would have made Tod fill in a worksheet if he hadn’t decided to stay at the chalet, resting.

  We’re so used to it just being the two of us that Tod rarely asks why Dad hasn’t come. It’s as if he’s forgotten that dads can go out to places other than work.

  “It’s the dinosaur journey,” Tod says, yanking my sleeve.

  We step into a dimly lit passage that leads to a moving pavement. Creatures with abundant teeth and gnarled complexions peer through the undergrowth.

  “How do you know that’s a meat eater?” asks the worksheet dad behind us.

  “His sharp claws?” suggests Tristan. He is a perky, well-spoken kid who, I imagine, uses cutlery in a tidy manner.

  “Wrong. Come on. You know this.”

  “His big mouth?”

  The moving pavement stops. We are trapped in the Triassic period, being eyeballed by life-size Tyrannosaurus rex.

  “What happened?” Tristan asks.

  The dad sighs and looks around for a staff member. A man with a jaunty orange Dino Experience T-shirt stretched tight across his bulbous chest strides along the pavement. “Did someone press the red button?” he asks. “It’s only for emergencies.”

  “I did it,” whispers Tod. His finger is still on the red button. He jerks it away, and tries to hide it behind his back.

  “Can’t you control your child?” scolds Tristan’s dad. “He’s spoiled the whole experience.”

  “For God’s sake,” I snap. “What’s a child supposed to do with a whopping red button like that?”

  The dad ushers Tristan away from us, as if button-pushing tendencies are contagious.

  Later, we see the Dino Experience man mopping up a puddle in the Early Life section. “Sorry about the button,” I say. “I bet children do that all the time.”

  “No,” he says, “they don’t.”

  The small restaurant sits alone and stranded on the hilltop. It’s nine-thirty and too cold to eat outside; we’re all wearing our coats. Tod has a scarf around his head, tied under his chin, like a bandage.

  “You sure you’re okay out here?” asks the waitress.

  I mean to say that we’re fine and it’s lovely out here, but blurt, “We’re all lovely, thanks.”

  “Beautiful night,” she says, smiling. She rubs her delicate hands together.

  Tod has the wide-eyed delight of a child allowed to stay up way past bedtime. Marcus and Tod are trying to identify star constellations, but can’t find any discernable patterns. Now they’re debating whether the brightest one is the Pole Star or Venus or a UFO heading for the garden in front of the chalets.

  “If aliens try and take me,” Tod says, “you’re coming with me, Dad.”

  “Of course I am. I wouldn’t let them take you by yourself.” I rest my hand on Marcus’s thigh under the table. The UFO has gone, must have landed.

  “Me and Dad are going to their planet,” Tod announces.

  “What would I do without the two of you?”

  Marcus shifts his leg and calls the waitress over; she has forgotten his mustard.

  “So sorry,” she says. He flashes a Marcus smile to make her feel better. The waitress keeps fluttering around Marcus, checking that his steak has been cooked the way he likes it. “It’s perfect,” he says.

  At Dino Experience, Tod had found a lift-the-flap section. When you raised one of the wooden doors, the smell of rotting corpse wafted out. He kept lifting and shutting the thing, forcing me to inhale until the stench had embedded itself in my throat.

  Tonight I ordered lamb but can’t taste it—only the horrible thing behind the flap.

  Our last night. We have functioned well as a family. Marcus and Tod have constructed a giant sand castle with a maze of moats that filled each time a wave hit the entrance, then melted beneath the tide. Marcus bought Tod a football, saying, “He just needs practice, he’ll soon get the gist of it.” Tod was more excited about the plastic snow dome, also purchased by Marcus, with its miniature lighthouse inside.

  We leave first thing tomorrow. Tod is in bed and Marcus is curled up sideways on the sofa, reading a book about Stalingrad. At least I think he’s reading, but he doesn’t seem to be turning the pages. Each time I speak to him, he says, “Hmm.”

  If you want to know something, just ask. That’s what I tell Tod. If he asks again, I’ll tell him how babies are really made. How the sperm meets the egg.

  “Marcus?” I say.

  “Hmm?”

  “Is everything all right?”

  He sets the book on the sofa arm and turns down the page cor
ner. “Is what all right, darling?”

  Ask. Come out with it. “It’s just a feeling I get.”

  He comes over and perches on the arm of my chair, which makes him look enormous. He kisses my head, like you might that of a child who has damaged itself, when it really is possible to kiss things better.

  “What kind of feeling?” he asks.

  “I don’t think things are right with us.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since ages ago, Marcus.”

  He sighs, and glances at the book that he wants to carry on reading .”Why do you say that? Everything’s fine. It’s always been fine. What’s different?”

  I can’t tell him, because whatever I say will come out sounding needy. I don’t want to be that kind of person. All I manage to say is, “We’re not like we used to be.”

  He strokes my hair and says, “We just need more time together, all by ourselves.” Then he pats my head, stands up and carefully smoothes out the folded page corner of the Stalingrad book.

  I don’t point out that that’s what we’re having right now.

  When Tod went to bed, I read from the dinosaur book we bought at the Dino Experience gift shop, but he kept sniffing and fidgeting and setting his spout cup on its side so it dribbled on the rose-patterned pillowcase. He wouldn’t pay attention. It was probably my flat voice. I was reading but thinking about my first holiday with Marcus, on the Basque coast of Spain, in a rank hotel owned by an Englishman who swigged wine from a plastic carton, the kind that usually contains car oil.

  There was a small, rectangular swimming pool in the hotel grounds, with an oily film on its surface. The owner dangled a small white gadget into the water, checked a reading and ran away, muttering to himself. Nothing could have spoiled that holiday, not even a poisonous pool.

  I remembered calling Anna, saying I was sick, and lying in bed all day with Marcus and not feeling one speckle of guilt.

  And him actually offering to sit at the tap end.

  And Anna saying I looked thin, and was I on some stupid juice-only diet, when in fact I was so Marcus-demented that I could hardly eat.

  When we had Tod, Marcus didn’t seem to want me so much. He said it was sleep deprivation, that everything would work out fine, and I believed him.

  I remember really minding when he was asleep, because I couldn’t talk to him.

  And telling Nettie that Tod was roaring the flat down—holding the phone to his face so she could hear for herself—so could Marcus please not work late and just hurry home?

  She never seemed to know where he was.

  He said that having a baby had made me suspicious, not so much fun anymore.

  He said: “You never used to be like this,” and I wanted to rewind to Easter egg day, but still have Tod.

  I wanted to have my cake and eat it.

  “Mum. Mum.” Tod has crept into the living room. His cup is empty but he keeps sucking the spout, filling his belly with air.

  “You should be asleep, sweetheart.”

  He flings himself next to me on the sofa. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s late, Tod,” Marcus says, glancing up from his book. “Just five minutes, okay?”

  Tod straddles the sofa arm as if it’s a horse. “Mum, if you could be a dinosaur, what would you be?”

  “Dinosaurs are too old. What’s a bit newer than dinosaurs?”

  “Mammoths.”

  “I’d be a mammoth. I’d spurt you with my trunk. How about you?”

  “Hypsilophodon. They were little, so they went around in gangs to keep safe. They had friends.”

  “What about Dad?” I ask him.

  “A Neovenator,” Tod announces.

  Big, powerful, top of its food chain. The Neovenator can do whatever the hell it likes.

  Two twenty-seven a.m. I have been woken by something, but by the time I’m properly conscious, whatever it was has stopped.

  On the windowsill is the snow dome Marcus bought for Tod. Inside the plastic dome is a lighthouse. I collected domes like this as a child. I must have been older than Tod is now, because I can remember each one.

  Mum and Dad let me choose one every holiday. My favorite dome had York Minster inside. It wasn’t the building itself that I loved—as far as I was concerned, one church looked much like another—but the snow. In the York Minster snow dome, it looked soft, like real snow, instead of the obviously synthetic flakes in my inferior domes.

  Dad bought me a microscope the Christmas after our York holiday. I had examined my hair, a fragment of scab I had picked from my elbow and the wet beads from a pomegranate that Mum, thrilled to introduce such an exotic fruit to our home, had let me dissect.

  I still wasn’t satisfied. I wanted to examine the snow from the York Minster dome. I tried to unscrew it, but of course the dome couldn’t be separated from its black plastic base. So I smashed it against the washbasin, mopped up the water with a towel—it was just ordinary water, I dunked my finger into the puddle and tasted it—and picked up as many flakes as I could. I set three on a glass slide, placed a square of clear plastic film on top and jammed my eye against the microscope.

  They were real. Each flake had its own, perfectly symmetrical shape.

  Dad came into the bathroom and found me crouching on the wet lino with my microscope and bits of smashed plastic. The base, with York Minster attached, had landed in one of Mum’s pink zip-up slippers. All Dad said was, “I think you’d better dry that floor.”

  I shake Tod’s lighthouse dome, and wonder how I could have thought that the York Minster snow was real when it showed no sign of melting.

  Marcus is sleep talking, that’s what must have woken me. It’s a family trait. Tod has mumbled at night since the thing at his old school, when the head teacher called me at work, saying that there had been an incident. He started talking about scissors after that, and has since moved on to beasts with flaring nostrils and hooves.

  It’s hard to hear what Marcus is saying because he’s lying facedown, muffled by pillow. Then one word escapes, as clear as if he were speaking right to my face.

  He says, “Sarah.”

  part three

  When you’re lost, or feel trapped, the worst thing you can do is panic.

  chapter 12

  Mayday

  Dear parents,

  Don’t forget the fancy dress contest at the Spring Fair on Chetsley Common, 10 a.m. on Sunday May 3rd! Entry fee £2—all proceeds to the Chetsley Primary PTA! So get creative! Contributions to the PTA cakes and candies stall also appreciated!

  I am more alarmed by the date on the letter than Miss Cruickshank’s overuse of exclamation marks. This note has lain in Tod’s schoolbag since before the Easter holidays. The fair is in two days’ time. While other parents have been beavering away, sparks flying from their sewing machines, I have been supervising the rewiring of our home and trying to look unconcerned as the electrician announced—rather gleefully, I thought—that we could have burned in our beds.

  “Why didn’t you show me this letter?” I ask, waving it in Tod’s face. He is poring over a library book about animals’ underground homes.

  “I did tell you,” he says. “I reminded you three times.”

  I didn’t listen. I can’t sew. I don’t even own a sewing machine. Bad, bad mother. “Well, do you mind going in your ordinary clothes?”

  “Yes,” he says, giving me a sharp look. “Harry’s going as a knight. I do mind.”

  “So what do you want to go as?” I hope he says a ghost—a sheet with eye holes cut out—or even a mummy. He’s still engrossed in Miss Cruickshank’s Egyptian project. I could simply bandage him in kitchen roll and it would look fantastically authentic, unless this rain keeps up. It could also prove rather problematic if he needed the toilet.

  “Harry’s mum made him a real chain-mail outfit,” Tod adds helpfully.

  “Did she now.”

  “And a real horse on wheels for him to pu
ll along.”

  “Horses don’t have wheels,” Marcus says. He has just come in from the garden where he appeared to spend more time chatting over the wall to Carl than cutting back our beleaguered plants so everything will look tidy and Best-Kept-Villagey come summer. “They have hooves,” he adds. He pours himself a pint glass of orange juice and gulps it noisily, as if to emphasize how hard he’s been working.

  “I’m going to be Minotaur,” Tod announces.

  “Half man, half horse,” says Marcus. He lands heavily on a kitchen chair and flips open the Lexley Gazette. There’s an article about a local children’s entertainer who drove his car through the chip shop window in Lexley, stopping inches in front of the fryer. The entire facade of the shop will have to be replaced. This isn’t the kind of behavior you’d expect from a magician called Professor Tickles.

  “Half man, half bull,” Tod retorts.

  I am uncomfortable with the concept of composite animals. Where does one part finish and the other bit start?

  “He’s got an ordinary body, hairy legs and a big bull’s head with horns,” Tod explains.

  “How am I supposed to make that, Tod? I haven’t a clue how to—”

  “I’ll help,” he says.

  The matter apparently settled, he traces a finger along an illustration of a cutaway burrow, in which small mammals live happily in darkness, unencumbered by needlework projects or mythical half this, half that creatures.

  The most worrying aspect of fancy dress contests is the real possibility of appearing foolish in public. You feel exposed enough in a village like Chetsley. Tina, creator of chain-mail masterpieces, occasionally says things like “I saw you in your garden—planning to do anything with that straggly red currant bush?” or “I hear Tod brought in worms for show-and-tell and Miss Cruickshank didn’t like them.” I could have told him that would happen, had I known that he had dug them out of the garden, and stashed them in an ice-cream carton in his bag. Now my son will be observed by the entire population of Chetsley in a botched animal outfit. Not his fault, of course, poor boy—and isn’t it weird how one of his eyebrows flares up like that? You’d think his mother would do something about it.