Wonderboy Read online

  Put your shoes on. Putyourshoeson. PUTYOURSHOESON.

  Monday morning. Late, late, late. There’s no excuse: Marcus was up by six, gone by seven-thirty, after giving me a surprisingly tender kiss on the back of the neck as I sloshed water on my face.

  He cooked for me last night. Tiger prawns stir-fried with garlic, lemon and parsley. When we’d waved off Health and Efficiency, he said he needed to nip into Lexley. He brought home ingredients and instructed me to soak in the bath while he cooked. I heard foul language—I think he was having trouble de-heading and tailing the prawns—then good smells drifted up and the swearing stopped. Natalie phoned, and I heard Marcus saying, “Lovely to see you, too. Tod’s always wanted Swingball—he’s delighted.”

  We ate in the kitchen, by the light of the Tranquility candle. I wolfed all my prawns, so he gave me some of his, saying, “I’m really not hungry.” I think he felt bad about hogging the kite, and triggering Tod’s tantrum in front of my sister.

  The last thing he said this morning was “Don’t go breathing in those chemicals.” Mr. Leech, our Dampblaster, is due any minute to carry out stage two of the de-rotting process. Instead of the Kangol hammer, he will bring a joiner to remove and replace rotting timbers, plus poisonous sprays to kill the Anobium punctatum that reside in our floorboards and loft. I have started to consider these woodborers as part of the family. They are certainly less bother than the fish.

  On the bottom stair, Tod peels open the Velcro fastening of his left shoe and peers inside, as if checking for bug infestation. He waggles his toes, limbering up for the arduous task of feeding said foot into shoe. “Tod, we have six minutes before school starts,” I inform him. On mornings like this, Tod behaves as if he ran barefoot, having been raised in a forest by wolves until ill-tempered adults dragged him away from his woodland buddies, forced his feet into unwieldy leather constructions and sent him off every weekday to be confronted by Miss Cruickshank’s blouses. “That’s the wrong foot,” I snap. “What’s wrong with you? I’m not putting your shoes on for you. You’re six.”

  Since his birthday, I have taken to reminding him of his age several times a day. Of course you can tell a B from a D, Tod. You’re six. Put your cycling helmet on by yourself. You’re six. Can’t you do a wee without spraying the floor? How old are you? Six! I hear my haranguing voice and have to remind myself that six is young enough to get things wrong occasionally.

  A white van pulls up outside our house. The Dampblasters logo is depicted in orange on the van’s side: a modern house, like Lucille and Carl’s, enclosed in a circle with sunbeams around it. The van is filthy, but someone has cleaned the bit with the house and sunbeams.

  Mr. Leech explains that he and the joiner, Bob, will rip up much of our kitchen, hall and living room floors and treat the remaining joists with a vile substance called KillAll. “The fumes are dangerous,” he warns. “I assume you’ll be vacating the house for at least twenty-four hours.”

  “I had no idea—”

  “Will we die?” Tod asks cheerfully.

  “Most people make plans,” Mr. Leech says. “Especially people with children.”

  I hope that if Tod and I run straight upstairs after school and open all windows—even hang out by our ankles—nothing terrible will happen to our respiratory systems. Rich people experience none of this. At the first sight of an unfamiliar male wielding a spirit level, they are off to some spa in Mustique for detoxing treatments, returning home only when everything is lovely again and the van’s pulling away from their house. Like one of those rich people, Marcus has decided to stay at the office tonight.

  Tod’s left foot has now been successfully inserted into its leather casing. At this rate, I estimate that it will take twenty-five minutes to put on the right one.

  “Mum,” he says, “how does Velcro work?” Although un-cooperative on the shoe front, he has thoughtfully unpacked his schoolbag. I ram everything—gym kit, crisps, rumpled homework, Dog—back in.

  “We’re late,” I snarl. He turns away and I jiggle two fingers behind his head. Mr. Leech and Bob narrow their eyes at me, as if I have no business raising a child.

  Tod straightens up slowly and examines his shoes. “Is it little hooks?” he asks.

  “Is what little hooks?”

  “Velcro.”

  I open the front door in the hope that Tod, like a trapped starling, will glimpse the pale rectangle of daylight and flutter out. “Yes, one side is hooks. The other is loops. Let’s go.”

  Natalie’s children left a note pinned to Tod’s bedroom wall that reads: Thank you for a lovely time we love your spooky new house. As we pelt to school I wonder when he’ll become polite, a writer of thank-you letters, with each word in a different shade of felt tip.

  “Late?” enquires Tina, heading back from school with Harry no doubt installed in the classroom, having successfully completed sixty-five sums.

  “Had to let the damp men in,” I explain.

  “Damp? You’ve got your work cut out with that house.”

  In the playground the janitor is chasing a rogue candy wrapper. As I fling Tod through the chipped blue gates, I realize that his lunchbox still rests at home beside an enormous can of KillAll.

  I am the proud owner of a new car, purchased from the ticket office man at Lexley station. Although aging, and the fact it must never ever be run on less than a quarter of a tank of petrol, the vehicle has been lovingly nurtured and at first boasted a small arrangement of flowers, in palest pink silk, lashed to the rearview mirror. Tod demanded these, and tacked them next to his poster of the mummified head with linen pads in its eye sockets. Occasionally, I manage to convince myself that Sarah bears an uncanny resemblance to this mummy, complete with worn-away teeth, from eating three-thousand-year-old gritty bread. Tod told me that the ancient Egyptians didn’t mind the odd bit of gravel in their sandwiches.

  I pick him up from school in my new, sweet-smelling car. We are not heading for a country wedding for glasses of Pimm’s, but the chip shop in Lexley. It’s easy to find. Apart from a hastily painted sign reading Fat Billy’s Fast Food, a giant cone spilling fiberglass fries hogs the pavement in front of the shop’s dazzling new facade.

  Tod and I are eating out in grand style as our kitchen is out of bounds. When I popped in after work, Mr. Leech and Bob were gazing sadly into a hole in the floor by the sink. Bob scratched his belly and pulled his top lip in on itself, exposing his upper teeth.

  Tod is playing with a basket of sachets, sorting the horseradish from the ketchup and brown sauces, so everything is in its proper order. Still feeling bad about the shoe episode and doing the fingers behind his head, I say, “You can choose whatever you like.” He orders Dinobites. These are supposed to be dinosaur shaped, but resemble no recognizable species. They have rust-colored crusts, and pale gray interiors.

  When they’re finished he asks, “Can I have a cake from the counter?”

  “Okay, go and choose.” He picks a hideous confection slapped with neon-blue icing and chocolate strands. If he asked for a bag of sugar right now, I’d probably say yes.

  After tea we prowl around the greengrocer’s. Miss Cruickshank has requested ingredients for an Egyptian feast. They snacked on grapes, figs and pomegranates, apparently, as a change from gravelly bread. As the greengrocer’s is devoid of exotic varieties—they don’t even have grapes—I assure Tod that the Egyptians would have gone crazy for flaccid bananas, if they’d had them in those days.

  In the stationery section of the newsagent’s, he caresses a plain black clipboard. “Can I have it?” he asks.

  “You really want that? Wouldn’t you rather have a comic?”

  “I really want it. Please-please-please.”

  Tod clutches the clipboard to his chest the whole drive home. He looks like a health and safety inspector. I wonder if he’ll turn out like Marcus, with a filing cabinet of a brain, rather than a cluttered handbag for a head, stuffed with dented Fruit Shoot bottles and the sugary wrappers f
rom doughnuts.

  “Great tea,” he announces, snapping the clipboard’s clip bit open and shut. Parents fritter away at least eighteen years of their lives, worrying about what’s good for their children. We’re so hung up on figuring out how to please them that we forget it’s ridiculously easy to make a kid happy.

  Marcus comes home the following evening to a lingering odor of KillAll and a fabulous surprise. His birthday is in two weeks’ time. We won’t be eating out at Ruby’s, the restaurant recommended by Lucille where the owner made a big show of checking the vast, empty pages of his reservations book to make sure we’d really booked a table. And we certainly won’t be going to Fat Billy’s Fast Food. I’ve booked us a night at Millington Park, a country hotel frequented by pop stars and curvy-car owners.

  One afternoon, when I was just about to leave work, Marcus showed up at Anna’s with my suitcase and passport and everything booked. He took me to Paris. He’d forgotten to pack my makeup, so next day we went to Les Halles and I chose a new face. It was only a few months after our wedding. I was still thrilled at being married to him.

  Millington Park will be just like Paris. I’m so excited, I could bite my own hand.

  Since Marcus returned he’s been making sure that Mr. Leech put every board back in its proper place, and hasn’t caused any new squeaks. I hand him the page I ripped out of a magazine, a roundup of luxurious hotels: “Each room at Millington Park is individually decorated in sensual reds, golds and purples. Lounge over a late, late breakfast, take a romantic stroll through the hotel’s untamed yet beautiful grounds, or relax in the superb spa. Millington Park is the perfect haven for lovers.” I’d written “HAPPY BIRTHDAY” next to the bedroom picture.

  “What’s this?” he asks.

  “We’re going. I’ve booked it.”

  “What, for the whole night?”

  “That’s the idea, Marcus. It’s a hotel.”

  “What about Tod?”

  “Your parents will stay over. They’re fine about it. I’ve checked.”

  He opens his mouth as if to protest some more, then flings his arms around me and says, “You’re my darling.”

  Later, in bed, it’s almost like Sarah never happened.

  chapter 14

  Mrs. Monoblock

  It’s Freda who answers the phone. Freda, the mother of my dad’s unborn child. “Is Dad—is Ernest—there please?” I ask.

  I assume she knows who I am, that he’s filled her in on his other family.

  “Ernest!” she shouts.

  I’m phoning to check that this baby is real because I cannot possibly have a half sister or half brother who is not even born yet, is less than zero years old, when I’m ancient enough to remember Funny Feet ice lollies and On the Buses.

  “Ro, love,” Dad says, sounding as Yorkshire as ever. “So Natalie told you our news.”

  Runny yolk drips from Tod’s spoon on to the front of his school sweatshirt. “It’s very exciting,” I manage to say.

  “We’re delighted,” Dad says, “and Freda’s coping so well, even in this blasted heat.”

  “Is this her first child?” My voice comes out prim, disapproving.

  “Yes,” he says, “but she’s a natural with children—you should see her.”

  Freda will cope, but how will Dad manage? Mum reported his parental input consisted of installing us—first Natalie, then me—into a padded seat attached to a metal frame he would crank up with an enormous handle, to cause a swinging action and keep us blissfully silent while he watched golf. I have memories of Dad and me tackling the occasional project together, like making a lie detector from electronic components with sensors to attach to your hands. It was supposed to bleep when you told a fib—a liar’s hands sweat, apparently—but nothing happened. We tried to grow crystals, but our lumps of rock just sat in neon-orange liquid and never turned into sparkling beauties like the ones on the box.

  “Dad, how are you going to manage?” I blurt out. “Manage? What do you mean?”

  I mean how is he planning to support this child, my half-sibling? According to Natalie, Dad has run into trouble with the standard of his soft play equipment at the Happy House. “I’m just worried about you.”

  “We’ll manage just fine.”

  It occurs to me that Dad has always managed. Even when he wouldn’t come into the house, he made a comfortable nest, with a ready supply of crackers and mild cheeses, in the back of the Morris Traveller.

  By lunchtime, only three customers have come into the bookshop. As they popped in to collect orders, I couldn’t do any advising or hard selling. The trouble with days like these is that Sarah creeps into the shop, with her shirt unbuttoned just enough to reveal a glimpse of her Agent Provocateur bra.

  Sarah’s car isn’t fouled up with festering foodstuffs and the perpetual cry of “Are we nearly there yet?” She has expense account lunches and a secretary who ensures that there are always fresh flowers on her desk (lilies? Yes, white lilies). She has never had to deal with woodworm, or endure nocturnal scratchings above her head, or complaints that a boiled egg is slightly too runny or too hard, or too cold, because the intended consumer of substandard egg has not been eating his breakfast, but rolling Blu-Tack to make maggots.

  It worries me that I am less disturbed by what Marcus and Sarah might get up to together, than by the fact that I know for certain that she has really great shoes.

  Joe strolls into the shop, and at first I think he’s here to buy a gardening book because that’s the shelf he looks at. “Can I help you, Joe?” I ask.

  “Just looking,” he says, still facing the gardening shelf.

  He’s behaving as if we’ve never met before. It must be my weird, formal voice. Or maybe I’m out of context, like Miss Cruickshank at the chemist’s in Lexley—familiar, but who was she?—asking for that clear liquid, she couldn’t remember its name, to burn warts off her hands. Tod shouted, “Hello, Miss Cruickshank!” and she rammed her purchase into her mock-croc handbag.

  Joe runs a finger along the books’ spines. We sell a lot from this section because even customers with tiny gardens, or hanging baskets, want to do their bit to retain Chetsley’s Best-Kept Village title. I put down my drawing book. Even my drawings are starting to look like Sarah, with her perfect teeth, not crumbling, ancient Egyptian teeth.

  “We can order anything you like,” I tell him.

  “Thanks,” he murmurs.

  His hair curls down his neck. It’s kind of mud colored, the color that splats Tod’s face when he falls off his bike. I figure that he won’t go for any of the gardening manuals about which colors you should and shouldn’t put together, or even the pocket-size books on single species, like lavender and peonies. For one stupid moment, I think he’s come in to see me.

  He turns to face me, looking confused. Maybe he’s forgotten what he wants. Customers do that all the time. The dim lighting, or maybe Sian’s clove smell, numbs their brains and has them murmuring “There’s this book, what’s it called again? I think it’s by… John somebody.”

  Joe holds out a large manila envelope. “Here,” he says, “this is for you.”

  “What is it?” I smile at him, can’t drag my eyes away from that serious nose. Any woman would have spent her adolescence despising that nose, to the point that she would have refused to go to the cinema with a boy, as that would have meant being seen side on. On Joe, the nose looks elegant and proud.

  “Why don’t you open it?” he asks.

  I rip it open and pull out a brochure from a company called Distinguished Driveways. “Traditional-style paving and contemporary monoblocking to enhance your home, year after year. Available in charcoal, pale gray and sandstone effect for effortless elegance. Let Distinguished Driveways set your home apart from those of your neighbors.”

  “What is this?” I ask.

  “I assume your husband put this through my letterbox after our conversation on the common.” His voice is distant, like Tod’s when we’re in one-wo
rd territory.

  “This is nothing to do with Marcus,” I say. “It must have been Carl, he’s a friend of—not a friend, we hardly know—”

  Joe turns away, brushing past the revolving display stand of Boxed Brainwaves, which wobbles nervously, and marches out of the shop. A handwritten note falls out of the brochure. I pick it up, and read:

  Dear neighbor

  The residents of Chetsley are concerned about the condition of your lawn, in particular as judging for the Best-Kept Village contest takes place at the end of July. Enclosed is a brochure for a reputable local company which specializes in hard landscaping. We hope this will satisfy your needs.

  The note is unsigned. Julia saunters in, clutching milk and a catering tin of coffee. “Was that Wyn Beadie’s son?” she asks.

  “No idea.”

  “Isn’t he living in his mum’s old place, across the road from you?”

  “Yes, I think I’ve seen him around.”

  Julia blinks at me. I pretend to tidy the pens in the beehive-shaped pot.

  “You okay?” she asks. “You look awfully hot. I’ll put the fan on for you.”

  “I’m fine, really,” I tell her, dropping Distinguished Driveways into the bin at my feet.

  Marcus’s mother is a retired primary school teacher, Tod’s caregiver while her son and I indulge in an utterly filthy weekend and unofficial President of the Ro Skews fan club.

  “Wonderful house,” Maureen gushes, tactfully ignoring the fact that our flooring consists of filthy bare boards and the occasional new replacement, yellow and cheap-looking, where the rot had taken hold. She clasps my hand and says, “After all the upheaval, you deserve this little break.”

  According to Maureen, there are many great things about me. My prime achievement has been to raise a gifted, articulate son, whom she smothers with lipsticked kisses and knitted waistcoats for the Action Man he never plays with. Action Man owns an entire knitted wardrobe—pants, cardigans, wetsuit and, curiously, a cape with ribbons to tie around his plastic neck. These garments lie in a box beneath Tod’s bed, starved of human contact.