Wonderboy Read online

  By the time Marcus comes home, our worktops are slopped with juice puddles. “For you,” I announce, handing him a blend of carrot and celery that has come out a pale terra-cotta shade. These concoctions, while not as pleasing as wine or beer, are quite drinkable.

  “Had a coffee on the train, thanks,” Marcus says.

  The juicing session has become a stressy affair now that Tod is nagging for our old liquidizer with the cracked jug so he can set up a rival juice bar at the other side of the kitchen. He loads it with more fruit, switches it on, and clatters to the front door with the appliance still whizzing.

  “Joe,” he shouts into the street. “Joe, can I have your wild-flowers for show-and-tell?”

  “What, all of them?” Joe calls back.

  I follow Tod out and explain. “Whoever brings the most varieties wins a prize. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “The most species,” Tod corrects me.

  “Sure,” Joe says, “come over anytime. Help yourself.”

  I watch him marching down the High Street, smoking in public. He looks back, and gives Tod and me such a gigantic smile that I step back, amazed. It would appear that I have been forgiven for any connection, however remote, to the Distinguished Driveways brochure.

  Three days later, when my insides have made a partial recovery from the juice onslaught, Lucille shows up to take me running. I would rather run by myself, so that I could walk if I felt like it, and had hoped that she’d forget about our arrangement.

  Lucille is wearing dazzling trainers, an immaculate pale blue tracksuit, and is bouncing lightly on our front step. The plan is to run over the common and round the new estate, which she has figured is about a mile. This seems rather punishing for a beginner. I had hoped that we’d jog to the Poacher’s, maybe pop in for a drink and packet of crisps to revive ourselves.

  She streaks ahead, able to talk normally, while I worry that I am putting my blood vessels under unnecessary pressure, and will need surgery. Running—I mean proper running—has its place, like when we’re late for school, but I can’t really see the point when you don’t actually need to go anywhere.

  “It gets easier,” Lucille yells back to me—but does it really? People only say this when you’re embarking on something unpleasant, which you’ll have to keep up for months—years, even—before visible effects are achieved.

  The inside of my mouth has withered, as if vacuumed by a dentist’s suction device. My tongue feels like a dried mushroom. There’s a drinking fountain on the common, but Lucille says, “We’re not stopping, you need to keep up the momentum.” I have swallowed a bug—something meaty, like a bluebottle. It’s jammed in my throat, I need water, but we’re past the fountain now—nearly home, in fact, where Joe will glance down from the tree-house platform and spy a gasping shire horse, staggering to a halt at our gate.

  There’s no sign of Joe. I am ridiculously pleased about this. My tracksuit bottoms are splattered with mud, as well as the emulsion from my painting session. I lurch into the house. Marcus looks up from his book.

  “God, Ro,” he says. “You’d better lie down. You look like you’re having a seizure.”

  I spot Anna immediately. Everyone else in the Covent Garden café is wearing black, white or gray, to match the stark decor, but my former boss dazzles in a flowery tea dress with gathered sleeves, and is the only person smoking. In the ashtray are the remains of three cigarettes, smoked down to their filters.

  “Hello, country girl,” she says, briskly kissing my cheek. “You look well—been exercising?”

  I have been forced to accompany Lucille on two more runs, but suspect that my healthy flush is due to the anti-cellulite tights I am wearing in preparation for Majorca. Lucille sells them at Fab-U-Look, and brought some home for me to try. They are impregnated with sea minerals and plant extracts and are supposed to “melt away” dimply flesh.

  “I’ve been running,” I tell Anna.

  “I suppose you’ve got to find something to do in the country,” she says, sniggering.

  Anna has compiled a shopping itinerary to help me select my capsule holiday wardrobe with minimal walking. She’s had to learn to be organized since I deserted her; Stanley the assistant is incapable of registering when a phone is ringing, and she seems unwilling to replace me. I suspect that Anna still thinks we’ll move back to London.

  In the shoe shop, the dainty pink sandals she thinks I should buy have been designed for dolls’ feet. Sarah might wear them while padding around her garden flat, where Marcus keeps a toothbrush and dressing gown.

  “If you won’t buy them, I’m going to buy them for you,” Anna threatens.

  In the quirky boutique, Anna selects a shift dress in yellow silk. She has never encountered children on holiday with their chocolate ice creams and sunscreened bodies. Silk is impractical, yellow makes me look terminally ill and I don’t need anything so grown-up. This isn’t a dressing-up holiday.

  We wander up Regent Street and into four floors of fashion, all of which appears to be constructed from flimsy fabrics, the kind you could spit through, and which I fear would require a sturdier garment underneath, like a jumper. I pick a plain navy dress, drag Anna into the changing room and strip off.

  “Why,” she asks, “are you wearing tights under your jeans?”

  I glare down at my legs. The tights are pale tea–colored and making my thighs feel quite unwell. That must be the plant extracts, seeping in. “They’re for cellulite,” I mumble.

  “Has something happened to your brain? Take them off. They’re disgusting.”

  I pull off the tights, liberating a powerful foot smell. It’s too hot for tights, and for shopping. The navy dress makes me look like a fierce nurse. I dump it, plus the tights, on the changing room bench.

  We stop for lunch in the café on the top floor of the shop. Mother-daughter duos are admiring their purchases and tasting each other’s desserts. Anna wanted to come here, said the service was quick, allowing us time to hare over to the chemist’s where she had spotted a two-for-one offer on sunscreen.

  “Marcus okay about you going away?” she asks, picking at her help-yourself salad.

  “I suppose so. Actually, he was quite keen.”

  “Why?”

  “He thinks I need a break. He can’t take time off. We’ve spent so much on the house, with the rot and electrics and woodworm, that we can’t afford for him to come.”

  “That’s a lot of reasons,” Anna says carefully.

  “And it would be good for him, too—ideal, really—because I think he’s seeing someone else.” The words have fallen out before I could stop them. Now they’re out there, and it’s all real, horribly real.

  Anna drops her fork on to a small mound of barely touched leaves. A mother nudges her daughter: Stop staring, it’s rude, turn around and finish your ice cream. “Oh, my darling,” Anna says.

  “Anna, I don’t feel like shopping anymore. I just want to go home.”

  My mother says, “You’re having separate holidays?”

  I have the phone tucked under my jaw while I inspect Tod’s nails, which look quite sinister with their long, blackened tips. “Not separate holidays. Marcus isn’t having one. And I want to see—I want Tod to see Spain.” It’s not a lie exactly. I just don’t want her to start remembering those Majorca days, the mixed fish specials on the seafront. There will never be a right time to tell her that Dad will soon be acquainting himself with nappies.

  “You will be back for Perry’s sixtieth?” Mum asks.

  “Of course. We’re only going for a week.” I glance at the miniature Big Ben that sits on the hall shelf. Eight forty-nine, six minutes until school bell, and I still have to trim Tod’s talons or at least gouge out the black stuff with a chewed match.

  “I can’t see why you’re traveling all that way with a child,” Mum continues, “when there are lovely places in this country. There’s no foreign food, no language problem. You could go on a Diamond Break to Durham, like we did.�
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  “Maybe next year,” I tell her.

  “And finally, the project prize is awarded to a boy who has only been with us since Christmas, and has produced—”Mr. Quigley consults his white card—“excellent work on our Egyptian topic and also collected the most flower species in the whole of Chetsley Primary School.”

  I am squashed next to a woman with a gigantic backside who is slapping mentholated gum around her mouth. Tod pops up from a sea of burgundy sweatshirts and struts toward the stage. Mr. Quigley shakes Tod’s hand vigorously, and everyone’s clapping, apart from the mentholated woman who pulls a string of gum from her mouth and winds it tightly around her index finger.

  Tod bobs back down to the floor. His collection has been illustrated with cutout drawings of flowers stuck to a roll of paper, roughly painted to look like grass: long grass, which the council should do something about.

  “Happy holidays, everyone,” booms Mr. Quigley.

  There’s a cheer, and the children scatter, the older ones crying because they’re going to big school, and the younger kids scanning rows of parents for the right face. Tod waves his white envelope, thunders toward me and lands on my lap like a comet.

  “Will you miss us?” I ask.

  “Of course I’ll miss you,” Marcus says.

  “How much?” Tod shouts from the back seat. In that children’s book—the one I hid behind the storage heater—the little brown hare asks, “How much do you love me?” The dad hare stretches his arms as wide as he can and says, “This much.” Of course Marcus can’t do that, because he’s driving.

  At Gatwick, Marcus buys a Meccano crane for Tod to make on the plane, but is disappointed to discover that this Meccano is plastic, not metal. He browses in The Tie Rack, visits the toilet twice, and buys three toasted cheese sandwiches which come in waxy packets and cost almost as much as my pink sandals.

  “I don’t want this,” Tod says from a precarious stool. “I want plain food.”

  “It is plain,” Marcus says. “You can’t get much plainer than a toasted cheese sandwich.”

  “I want plane food,” Tod insists. “It comes in a tray from the hostess lady.”

  “They’re called flight attendants,” Marcus tells him, “or cabin crew.”

  “Yeah,” Tod says, nudging away the toasted slab. “I want flight attendant food.”

  At the next table a woman with fragile hands is unwrapping her lunch. You’re not supposed to eat your own food in the café. She removes three layers of wrapping—kitchen roll, foil and a clear plastic bag—from her sandwich. She is telling someone, possibly us, that her legs are going and her daughter has already gone, accused her of trying to rule her life. The woman pokes a hand up her sleeve. “I can’t find my hankie,” she announces. “I’ve looked in my bag and it’s not there, either. I must have left it on the bus.”

  I don’t have tissues, but offer to fetch her some loo roll from the ladies. “I shop at Iceland,” she tells me. “The girls there are kind. I can’t read the coins so they help me. The doctor said I’d better forget about reading, so I took all my books to charity.”

  “You could get books with big writing,” Tod suggests. The woman studies him for a moment, and delves into her handbag. I assume that she’s looking for her hankie again but she pulls out a pound coin and hands it to Tod.

  “No, please, don’t do that,” I protest.

  “That’s for your holiday,” she tells Tod. “Have a lovely time with your mum and dad.”

  At the departure gate Marcus puts his arms around Tod, who is clutching the Meccano crane and pound coin and standing rigidly, as if waiting for the hug to be over. Marcus drops his arms and says, “Tod, your shoes are on the wrong feet.”

  Tod is staring at me and frowning. “What’s the matter?” he asks.

  “Nothing.”

  “Oh, darling,” Marcus says, “it’s only a week. Don’t be upset.”

  I dump our case at my feet. “Wish you were coming,” I tell him.

  He grasps my hand and says, “You want to make things right with your dad. It’s important for you. You don’t need me around.”

  I do need you around.

  His kiss lands on the bridge of my nose. “Have the best time,” he says.

  “You, too.”

  “I’ll just be working.”

  “Yes, of course you will.”

  As he walks away I want to yell that word he said in his sleep: the word that has grown in my brain, swelling like pizza dough, and acquired a face, an extensive collection of delectable shoes and a waxed bikini line. I wanted to ask him that night, not long ago, before morning had begun to sneak into our room. His mouth was on mine, his arms wrapped tightly around my back. When it was over he fell away from me, like he hadn’t really woken up.

  Marcus is striding along the concourse, away from us. Tod is still waving.

  “Marcus!” I shout after him.

  He turns and mouths, What?

  “Don’t forget to feed the fish.”

  chapter 17

  My Baby Sister

  He looks like my old dad, but dipped in nutty brown paint and dressed in a startling ensemble of lobster-colored shorts and faded lime-green T-shirt with a fifties car on the front. Dad does not drive a car like the Chevrolet on his T-shirt but a decrepit tin vehicle, held together by thick silver tape and kind words. There is a hole in its underside, allowing the person occupying the passenger seat to view the road surface. Dad calls the car “girl.” “Come on, girl, good girl,” he says, as the engine strains to manage a slight incline.

  Tod sits in the back with his tape player on his lap, his Meccano model and pound coin in one hand and Dog in the other. Around his neck are the binoculars and a hairy scarf he insisted on bringing in case Majorca was cold. He wouldn’t believe me when I tried to explain how hot it would be. “Even hotter than sports day,” I told him. He still brought the scarf, just in case.

  Tod has never been in another country and is thrilled that my dad can drive on the wrong side of the road without crashing or being arrested. He’s so excited, he forgets about playing a story tape. “Is this Majorca?” he keeps asking. “Is this Majorca, as well?”

  “It’s all Majorca,” Dad says, laughing. Other cars, and even loose dogs without collars or owners, zip past us like rockets.

  “So how’s fatherhood?” I ask him.

  “Fantastic. You know, Lily smiled at just three days old.”

  “Really? That’s amazing.”

  “It’s all new to Freda but she knows just what Lily wants. She understands her. It’s like they’re…telepathic.”

  I assume that they haven’t purchased a seat that rocks all by itself, like the one I had.

  In town, shuttered buildings with scuffed edges huddle beneath scarlet flowers. The car fills with the smells of warm dust and cooking. Dad and Freda live on the town’s scrubbier edge in a basement flat, which is accessed by a spiral staircase. In the small, square yard, a wiry cat springs out of the baby’s pram.

  Freda has pale lemon lines in her toffee-colored hair, and no discernable age. Lily, a bald, pink bean of a child, is attached to her breast. “Hello, Ro, Tod,” Freda says, trying to haul herself up from the worn corduroy sofa to greet us properly. Lily roars her disapproval at having supper interrupted, and Freda flops back into her feeding position. I’d forgotten how small new babies are, how their elbow skin hangs baggily. Freda smiles unsteadily. It hadn’t occurred to me that she might be nervous about meeting us.

  “She’s a beautiful baby,” I say.

  “We think so—don’t we, Ernest?”

  Dad nods and rests a hand on her shoulder.

  Tod steps carefully toward Freda and the baby. “It was in her tummy,” he announces. “It was made with a seed and her egg. Seeds can swim. They get in where she goes to the toilet and—”

  “She’s not an it,” I cut in. “She’s Lily.” What is she to him? A half aunt? It doesn’t seem possible that an aunt can own a Three Lit
tle Pigs play mat.

  There are so many items of baby equipment in the living room that it’s hard to believe that adults actually live here. A wicker crib on a stand is festooned with pink and white frills. The play mat, which fills most of the floor, is littered with knitted animals, velour bricks and pastel-colored rattles.

  Tod waggles his Meccano crane too close to Lily’s drowsy eyes. “She can have this,” he announces.

  “That’s very kind of you,” Freda says, “but she can’t hold anything yet.”

  “She can have it when she’s older.”

  “Thank you,” Freda says. “Ernest, do you think Lily needs changing again?”

  “What time did we put that nappy on?” asks Dad.

  “About three, just before you set off for the airport.”

  “Let’s do it—don’t want that rash springing up again.” Together, Dad and Freda place Lily on a plastic mat patterned with butterflies. Freda unbuttons the Babygro and removes the nappy, which looks perfectly clean and dry to me. Dad wipes Lily’s bottom, then pats it dry, then polishes it with a towel. I realize that I’m holding my breath. Freda lifts the child’s lower half, which Dad secures, tongue poked out in rapt concentration, with the new nappy. Twenty fingers are required to fix the adhesive strips. “There,” Dad says.

  I feel as if I should clap, or at least should have videoed the procedure.

  When Lily has fallen asleep, and they’ve checked several times that she’s not too cold or too hot, Dad cooks for us. It’s stew from a tin that retains its cylindrical shape as it plops into the pan. It smells like pet food. Dad serves it with rice, which he’s boiled to mush. Our plates are flooded with water from the rice pan.

  “This is great,” Tod enthuses.

  “Ernest’s been such a support,” Freda says, “taking over the shopping and cooking.”