Wonderboy Read online

  “But it’s on the ground.”

  “Some of it is. You build the main supports around the trunk and then you add the house. It’s much easier to make the house on the ground. That way, you cause less damage to the tree.”

  “I know,” Tod says. “I’ve been looking from my bedroom. I watch you all the time—”

  “He’s just curious,” I cut in quickly.

  “What’s it for?” Tod asks.

  “Well, what would you do in a tree house?”

  “I’d climb up,” Tod says, poking a finger through the mesh fence in an attempt to access a Highly Commended fruit scone bursting cream and blackcurrant jam. “I’d sit all by myself and look out.”

  “That’s what I’m planning to do,” Joe says.

  An announcement: “Could children please make their way to the main marquee for fancy dress judging.” Where’s Marcus? He only gets lost when he wants to, like at IKEA or a Spring Fair.

  “I’m going to find Dad,” Tod yelps, charging out of the tent and across the muddied common toward the main marquee. His tail—I made it too long, from a strip of leftover fur—wraps itself between his legs, and he steps on it, flipping backward and landing on his rump in mud and discarded May Fair programs. It splatters his peach sweatshirt body, the back of his bull head, and somehow works its way up his nose.

  I expect him to cry but he ploughs onward into the marquee where sodden grown-ups step back, as if scared of mud contamination, past fairies and mermaids who stare with gobstopper eyes at the state of him. He climbs on the stage and joins the end of the line. The other children tilt their faces toward him. I wonder if Marcus simply grew tired of the rain and Mr. Tickles’s balloon tricks, and sneaked off home. I start to tap out our home number on my mobile, then ram it back into my pocket.

  Behind me, someone says, “What’s that furry thing supposed to be?”

  “A dog?” comes the reply.

  An elderly lady with an embroidered shawl pulled around her shoulders talks to each child in turn. She clasps the microphone at the center of the stage. “This is extremely difficult,” she begins.

  She should have seen me at midnight last night, hacking out those blasted ears. We didn’t have time to look for the lost one. It’s probably lying by the even-numbers stall.

  “You all look wonderful,” the woman continues, “but I’d like to award third prize to Veronica Hines, a beautiful mermaid.” Veronica flutters to center stage to collect a small silver parcel.

  “Second prize, Juliette Shandler, the human pyramid.” Juliette is in Tod’s class. Her tiny, delighted face pokes out of the top of the pyramid, which bobs at her shoulders as she thunders across the stage.

  “And first prize, Harry Fisher, our fantastic knight.”

  My heart is no longer in its proper place. It has plummeted to my stomach at least. Tod pulls off his bull head and drops it at his feet. Now he just looks like a boy in silly fur trousers and his mother’s wet, washed-out sweatshirt. I scan the crowd, in case I’ve missed Marcus, and spot only Lucille, who offers a sympathetic shrug.

  “Finally,” the woman says, “a special prize for the most original outfit. In all my years of judging the Spring Fair contest, I have never seen anything like it. Please, everyone, a round of applause for a very muddy boy here—Tom Skews.”

  “You can’t even tell what he is,” someone growls behind me.

  “So, Tom,” says the woman on stage. “Let’s see—there’s a cow’s head, a sort of lady’s top, and furry legs…you’ve had us all guessing. What are you?”

  “My name is Tod and I’m a—” he begins. No one hears because the majorettes have kicked into action, lead by Adele in sparkly silver and turquoise, but even their bang-bang racket cannot blot out the walloping grin on my son’s face.

  I find Marcus, Carl and Joe emitting ill-humor at the cakes and candies stall. “Where have you been?” I ask him.

  “Looking for you. Where have you—?”

  “I won a prize,” Tod announces. “I was most original, just like Joe said.”

  “That’s great,” Marcus says flatly.

  “What we’re worried about,” Carl says, jutting his jaw toward Joe, “is that it might become a health hazard. Don’t you have a mower?”

  “I’m not planning to cut it,” Joe says.

  “It wouldn’t be so offensive,” Carl continues, “tucked down a side road where no one could see it. But you’re smack-bang in the High Street.”

  “Yes, that’s where I live.”

  “We’re only trying to help,” Marcus chips in.

  I try to tug Tod away, but he won’t budge. None of our nests has been sold, I notice, apart from the one we bought, although I spy some of our sugar eggs embedded in mud.

  “We all have to live here,” Carl adds firmly.

  “Do we?” Tod asks. “Why?”

  “Let’s go home,” Marcus says. He reaches for Tod’s hand, but Tod needs both to rip silver paper from his prize. It’s a kite, which he wants to fly now, but it needs to be built before you can use it.

  We stride home with Tod waving the tail above his head. I glance back to see Carl tipping the leftover cakes and candies into a plastic sack. Joe is perched on a bench by the river, smoking. Carl drops the sack on to the muddy ground, and rips the checked plastic cover from the trestle table.

  A drooping banner is attached to the footbridge. It reads: Happy May Day. “What does May Day mean?” Tod asks.

  “It means ‘Help,’” I tell him.

  chapter 13

  Put Your Shoes On

  At Coffee & Books, most customers take care to put books back in their proper places. Rarely would anyone be so badly behaved as to stuff a gardening manual back into the local history section, or slide an author beginning with B on to the S–Z shelf. Their cups leave no rings on the three circular tables. If a book has taken longer than expected to arrive, the customer doesn’t complain or cancel the order. They actually say thank-you, even though they leave empty-handed.

  Julia’s daughter Sian, and occasionally Julia herself, serves coffees, teas and brittle biscuits for dunking into hot drinks. I man the till, a task which, as our customers are thoughtful enough not to stampede in all at once, is low on stress, and high on caffeinated beverages.

  Sian is a dreamy girl of around eighteen who smells of cloves and hums unidentifiable melodies. As she wafts her smells around, I align the spines of paperbacks or draw on the backs of old posters that have been displayed in the shop window. There are notices for church coffee mornings and aqua-natal classes at Lexley Leisure Center. On their plain sides I draw that boy, the one who crept into my head years ago, before Tod, or even Marcus, and sometimes I look up to see a customer, holding a cookbook or a guide to cycling in Southern England, waiting patiently to be served.

  Marcus says that since I’ve started working again, I’m more like my old self. I’m not sure what this means. I don’t feel like I’ve ever been any different. For years now, I’ve waited for something to happen, to feel suddenly sorted and be seized by an urge to start using the National Trust place mats donated by Marcus’s parents. But that hasn’t happened. The place mats are still stashed in the box with the casserole dishes.

  Some nights I lie with Marcus curled around me, thinking he’ll soon complain that his shoulder hurts, or his arm’s gone numb, and assume his usual edge-of-bed position. But he doesn’t move, and I wake up still wrapped in his arms.

  I buy him books from the shop—books about war, with grainy black-and-white covers—and not just because I get a thirty percent discount. I have stopped grumbling if he misses the six–thirty-five, or the seven-twenty, and no longer call him at work because he’s either too harassed to talk properly or out with a client.

  If you want to know something, just ask. I don’t want to know. I have my job now, and Tod after school, and a new kitchen to choose, which I pick from a catalogue without even going to see it in the shop.

  “That looks fine,�
� Marcus says when I force him to admire pictures of plain white units.

  “Well, I like it. It’s very…”

  “…white,” Marcus says, wandering away from me and the flapping catalogue so I’m left talking to the back of his head. His hair is freshly cut, shorn close to his ears and neck. I wonder how he manages to fit in regular haircuts when he’s so busy that he keeps missing trains.

  “Or I could paint the old one,” I suggest. “That would work out much cheaper.”

  “Yes, good idea.”

  “Purple, maybe, with tangerine spots and glittery handles.”

  “Whatever you think’s best,” he says.

  Natalie and her family burst into our house on a breezy, late-May morning. Daniel and Jessica have matching dappled eyes and smell of fabric conditioner. My sister gleams with efficiency. Her life’s compartments—children, husband Hugh, job as a speech therapist, voluntary shifts at a youth center—are held together by a complicated list system involving star stickers, clear plastic wallets and a highly functioning brain.

  I was up at six-thirty this morning, bashing Gorby Cottage into shape for the arrival of Health and Efficiency. Natalie once said, “It’s great that you don’t care what your house looks like,” which I interpreted as: “Oh, dear.” And so I have baby-wiped every visible surface—even Tod’s wellies—and shaken the toaster upside down to liberate its collection of antique crumbs. I was behaving as if a reality TV crew were due any minute, and planning to maximize humiliation by showing close-ups of old bits of sausage poking out from under the cooker.

  Why do I do this? I flew the parental nest eighteen years ago. I don’t need to prove that I’m a grown-up, I just am one. I have a child, a house, an adult-size body and, I think, life insurance. I still dealt with the furred-up fish tank, which requires zero maintenance, yet needed two-thirds of its water replaced, slime wiped from its sides and stale food scraped from the plastic ledge, where most of the stinky flakes land on the rare occasions that Tod takes charge of the fish’s nutrition. I have also prepared a picnic to show Natalie and her high-achieving children how fantastically sorted we are here in Chetsley.

  Natalie can do many things, simultaneously. Here she is, praising my appearance—“I have to say, Ro, I prefer your hair now it’s grown out and looks less severe”—while helping Tod to glue a fiddly curve on the 3-D maze and construct the kite he won at the Spring Fair. It’s as if she has seventeen hands. Next to her, I feel like an ancient baked spud, left to shrivel at the back of the oven.

  “Why don’t you show Daniel and Jessica your room, Tod?” Marcus suggests. My nephew and niece bound upstairs.

  I must quiz Natalie on how to raise children who do as they are asked and never smear nostrils on cuffs.

  Marcus shows Hugh around our garden. Hugh has fine silver hair with a combed-down fringe and wears a shimmery gray tracksuit. Upstairs, the children are playing hide-and-seek. Tod is counting loudly. He likes his older cousins; they never laugh at his eyebrow or do anything scary.

  “I’ve got something to show you,” Natalie says. From her bag she pulls out a letter.

  Dear Natalie,

  I have important news to tell you. Freda and I are expecting a baby and are very happy. Please tell Ro this. Love and kises,

  Dad

  At first I think it’s a joke or that I’ve added a bit that’s not really there. But Natalie is saying, “Isn’t it great that he’s made a new life and is finally happy?”

  “But he’s old,” I splutter. That woman from the cheese shop—whom I have never met but imagine smells of Gorgonzola, a pong she can never get out of her hair—is having a baby. My dad’s baby.

  Tod appears at my side. “Are we having a baby?” he asks.

  “No, Granddad is.” He thinks I mean Marcus’s father. He has forgotten he has another granddad.

  “I’d like a sister,” Tod adds.

  “No, you wouldn’t. She’d throw all your toys in the fish tank.”

  He looks pretty excited about this. I am still clutching Dad’s letter; the name “Freda” is concealed by my thumb. “When is it due?” I ask.

  Natalie shrugs. “No idea. Why don’t you write to him?”

  “And say what?” Thanks for the sole visit you made to see Tod, just after his birth, when you kept asking what Tod was short for and I told you it was just Tod. You said it sounded like a nickname, not a real name at all. And thanks for your occasional postcards. I see that you still can’t spell “kisses.”

  “I’m sure he’d love to hear from you,” Natalie says. She hands the finished kite to Tod. It is rainbow striped, with each color bleeding into the next.

  “It seems so…reckless.”

  “It’s a baby, Ro. That’s what couples do. They make babies.”

  Last time I suggested that we stop using condoms—just to see what happened—Marcus said, “Please, Ro, I’m too old now to start at square one, with all those sleepless nights.”

  He was thirty-seven, and looked a decade younger in dim lighting. My dad is sixty-one.

  “He’s a worry,” Marcus tells Hugh. We’ve all flopped out on blankets on the common. Pale smudges of cloud smatter the milky-blue sky. “Up all hours,” he continues, “bashing and banging, building some kind of hut in a tree.”

  “He just sounds eccentric,” Hugh says. He has been playing football with the kids, leaping dramatically and missing the ball on purpose. Tod has scored sixteen goals, which gives a distorted impression of his ball skills.

  “This friend of ours, Carl, is worked up about it,” Marcus adds. “He’s spoken to Joe—that’s the weirdo—and offered to help, but of course he won’t cooperate. Now Carl’s thinking of contacting the council.”

  “What for?” Hugh asks.

  “To see what the legal position is. Chetsley’s a Best-Kept Village. He can’t let it grow rampant like that.” I worry that Marcus is going for too many pints at the Poacher’s with Carl. He is no longer a neighbor, but a friend, our friend.

  “I wouldn’t get involved,” Natalie chips in. “You don’t want to get into a dispute. It could turn nasty.”

  “It’s not a dispute. Carl just wants to measure the grass so we can give the council hard facts and figures.”

  “We?” I say. “Why are you getting involved, Marcus?”

  “It doesn’t pay to make enemies,” Hugh adds.

  “Tod says there are noises in your attic,” Jessica announces, rolling over and settling in her mother’s lap. “He says it keeps him awake.”

  “We think there’s something living up there,” I explain. “Probably mice—nothing serious.”

  “Ugh.” Natalie shudders.

  “I’ve been up to check,” Marcus says. “Couldn’t see anything. He’s probably been dreaming. You dream about animals, don’t you, Tod? Animals chasing you, going bump in the night.”

  “I’ve heard it, too,” I tell Natalie.

  “I’ve told you, Ro, there’s nothing there.” Marcus gives a little laugh, as if I’m as silly as Tod, imagining things.

  “Hey, who wants to fly this kite?” Hugh suggests.

  “How?” Tod asks.

  “Just hold it up, let the wind catch it. That’s it, Tod, nice and high. Now let it go. Here, take the spools, go on now—run…”

  The kite spears the ground. “Let me try,” Marcus says, and soon sends it soaring, forgetting that it’s Tod’s prize, and possibly that there’s anyone else on the common.

  “I want a go,” Tod mutters.

  The kite swerves too close to a tree, but Marcus tugs it away, avoiding disaster. “Well done, Uncle Marcus,” Jessica chirps, clapping.

  “It’s my kite,” Tod thunders. “I won it at fancy dress.” My son might whine and be incapable of flushing the loo, but he doesn’t have tantrums, not anymore; yet here it comes—mouth crumpling, body arching and a horrible wail, coinciding with the instant that he hits the ground and starts thumping the life out of Chetsley Common.

  “Now, Tod,
” Natalie says.

  “He’s just excited because you’re here,” I explain unconvincingly.

  Marcus has reined in the kite and carefully winds the string round its spool. He slips it into his rucksack, which he zips up firmly.

  The curious sound—part sob, part small mammal with run-over tail—comes from deep in Tod’s gut. He’s curled up on his side, with his head resting on a small heap of rabbit droppings. Natalie reaches for his hand, but he kicks her away.

  “Stop this,” I hiss. “It’s only a kite.”

  “Leave me alone,” he rages.

  I offer him a halved boiled egg from my mouthwatering picnic—the yolk has a gray layer around it—but this makes him cry even harder.

  “I’m so sorry,” I tell Natalie as we walk back to the house.

  “Don’t worry. They all have their moments.”

  Tod is still whimpering—and, for some reason, affecting a limp—although he has at least allowed Jessica to hold his hand and offer comfort in the form of a chewy bar made from compressed raspberries.

  The men and children have reached the house and are fixing up the Swingball game Natalie brought for Tod as an extra birthday present. Tod is hunched on the wall with his back to the garden. Natalie and I sit on the front step and pick at picnic remains. No one felt like eating much on the common. The children seemed to prefer Natalie’s raspberry bars to my boiled eggs and sandwiches.

  “Everything okay with you two?” she murmurs, glancing at Marcus.

  I busy myself by trying to unflatten a sandwich. It looks like it’s been stamped on. “It’s probably just the move,” I tell her.

  “He just seems a bit…tense. The way he shouted at Tod…”

  “We all lose it sometimes,” I say quickly. “Don’t you ever shout at the kids?”

  “Of course I do but…”

  I want to tell her what’s happening, but the words won’t come.

  “It’s so different here,” I tell Natalie. “We’re still adjusting. We’ll be fine, when we’ve all settled in.”

  Natalie squeezes my hand. “Yes, of course you will.”