Wonderboy Read online

  Mum called him Ern. She called him lots of other things, too, like idiot, nitwit and good-for-nothing-get-back-in-the-garage, but never Ernest.

  The stew coats the roof of my mouth, like engine oil. Tod has walloped his portion down and wants more.

  “Mum never makes nice food like this,” he announces.

  After dinner, Dad takes us for an evening walk and everywhere I look there are families with fathers. Some children have ice-lolly-stained lips and dads who let them jump down to the beach from the yellow stone promenade and race each other. One of the dads joins in and falls over on purpose, making himself lose the race. Another dad is roaring, “If you do that again, your bike’s going back to the shop the minute we get home and you’re not going out again, ever.” He tries to smack the child’s rear but the boy zooms forward and the dad is left slapping air.

  We sit on the warm, yellow stone of the promenade, dangling our legs over the edge. Tod is telling my dad about his 3-D maze.

  “I found this wood in the shed and cut pieces of green stuff to make hedges. It’s really brilliant,” he says.

  “Remember getting lost in that maze just outside York when you were little?” Dad asks me.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “It was in some botanical gardens. You spotted it in our guidebook and nagged so much that we agreed to take you.”

  “What was it like?” Tod asks, eagerly.

  “Natalie was the first to run in. She was tall enough to see over the hedges and started guiding other families who were sick of the heat and finding themselves back at the same dead end.”

  “Typical Natalie,” I say.

  “You followed her in, but you couldn’t keep up and no one could see you over the hedges. I kept shouting for you, telling you to just squeeze through the hedges and make your way to my voice. By the time you finally stumbled out, your mum was sunburned and her eyes had started to puff up. We had to take her to the doctor.”

  “Why didn’t you do what he said, Mum?” Tod asks.

  Dad laughs. “She said she didn’t want to cheat.”

  By the time we reach Dad’s apartment, Lily has woken up and shows no sign of settling. Freda is standing at the top of the spiral staircase, rocking the child in her arms. I remember this part—a child’s inability to distinguish day from night. Marcus said, “If I’m sleep deprived I can’t work, simple as that, and the business could go under.” That’s why he started to spend the occasional night at Will’s.

  Dad’s apartment still smells of tinned stew, with a hint of regurgitated milk. Tod and I will sleep on the sofa bed in the living room. From the bedroom come Lily’s weak cries. I haven’t slept the whole night with Tod since the period after I was called to his old school, and he refused to sleep on his own. He would squirrel between Marcus and me, thieving our pillows and sleep.

  The story tape is still playing. I made Tod turn it down to a murmur so it wouldn’t disturb Lily.

  It’s Danny the Champion of the World again, the bit where Danny and his dad fill raisins with sleeping medicine to drug the pheasants. Tod thought that pheasants were poor people with raggedy clothes until I explained that they’re birds and that hunters shoot them. He found this disturbing, which I found odd, considering that he relishes the ancient Egyptians’ more disturbing practices.

  The powder won’t harm the birds, just put them to sleep. It’s not poison, not like the stuff that Carl has stashed in his hut behind the double garage. Lucille told me about it when she came to wax my legs, the final stage in the three-pronged approach to holiday beauty. She said, “He’s borrowed a knapsack sprayer from a landscape gardener he met at a wedding. I don’t want anything to do with it. I’m not even happy about having the stuff in the shed.”

  “He can’t just kill someone’s garden,” I protested.

  “Ro, he’s obsessed with that damn grass. I told him it’ll look even worse if he sprays it, all straggly and dying. But there’s no stopping him, not now he’s got the equipment.”

  I was so stunned I didn’t even wince as she ripped the gauze from my shins.

  Tod isn’t being Salmon Man, but really trying to swim. Small waves lap around Dad’s palm-printed trunks. Tod is horizontal on the water’s surface with his neck jutting forward like a turtle’s. All that’s stopping him from plummeting under the water is Dad’s hand, supporting his belly.

  At first, Tod wouldn’t follow Dad’s instructions. He wanted a net and a bucket so he could catch hermit crabs like those other boys were doing. Sunscreen clung to Tod’s pale back in thick swirls. Catching crabs looked much more fun than swimming. He said, “I’ll never be able to swim in sea water. It moves about too much.”

  “The salt helps you to float,” I explained, but he didn’t believe me.

  I went to buy three strawberry ice creams from an elderly man with a freezer compartment attached to his pushbike, and when I came back, a small cluster of children was gawking at the wild creature, with seemingly unconnected limbs, flailing through the sea toward my dad.

  Tod swims a little farther each day. By day four, the frenetic sploshing has been replaced by jerky strokes, which require such mental and physical exertion that Tod needs at least half an hour’s rest, shrouded in beach towel, after each five-minute swim.

  “What’s wrong with him?” asks a small child. She is wearing a crisp white dress patterned with embroidered poppies and is clutching the hand of a slightly larger, identically dressed girl.

  “He’s been swimming,” I explain. “It’s really hard work, when you’re learning.”

  “We’re not allowed to go swimming,” the older girl says.

  “Why not?” Tod asks from under the towel.

  “We’d get wet,” the little one says. They are sisters, named Margot and Darcey, after the ballerinas.

  “You know what?” says the big one. “There’s a special machine near the pizza café. If you twist the handle really hard, a toy falls out and you don’t have to put in any money.”

  The girls’ mother is wearing tight, pale pink trousers and a pink T-shirt. She looks like a fondant. Tod has emerged from the towel and instructs Dad to help him make a sand maze, which must have its entrance close to the water so the channels fill up as the tide comes in. “Me and Dad did this,” he explains, “on the Island of Wight.”

  Margot and Darcey want to help. “As long as you don’t sit on the sand,” the fondant says. “They’re your best dresses, remember.”

  We find Margot and Darcey each morning, gathering spoils from the free toy machine, and also Jacob, who is five and a half, yet insists on being transported by buggy, which makes me feel better about Dog and the spout cup. Jacob shows Tod how to climb the gnarled pine trees by fixing the toe of your sandal into the cracks of the bark. Tod shows him the pound coin from the old lady at Gatwick. He’s made friends, simple as that. I haven’t been forced to invite anyone for tea or damaged a kid’s stomach with my spaghetti.

  I buy postcards and write TOD CAN SWIM!!! in enormous letters on one depicting a flamenco dancer with real satin stuck onto her dress, like the one Dad once sent me. Jacob wants to see what’s under the satin.

  “It’s just another dress,” he retorts, awash with disappointment.

  As I write our address, I wonder what’s happening at that other house, where weed killer will be seeping into the roots of poppies and cornflowers, causing them to droop and finally keel over. Don’t criminals often return to the scene of the crime? I picture Carl slowing down as he drives past Joe’s house, checking that everything’s poisoned. I asked Marcus, “Can’t you talk to Carl, stop him doing this?”

  “It’s Carl’s business, not ours,” Marcus said.

  On our last day, the rain comes. It hammers the spiral staircase like a downpour of nails and causes Dad and Freda to conclude that Lily shouldn’t be taken out, as she might catch a chill. Dad is delighted to see rain because it will be worth opening the Happy House for once. He runs the soft play center by
himself. I’m not sure if this is legal but he says his opening hours are too erratic to employ staff.

  Dad takes the entrance fees, stacks kids’ shoes in the pigeonholes, and sells plastic jugs of rank purple juice and spongy disks impregnated with raspberry gloop. At the end of each session, he cleans the play equipment, fishes half-nibbled cakes and the occasional abandoned nappy from the ball pool and mops down the toilets.

  “I’ve never seen you looking so happy,” I told him last night, over another tinned dinner.

  “It’s Freda and Lily,” he said. “They’ve made me feel properly alive.”

  I felt a little twist in my stomach when he said that.

  A boisterous family from Bradford arrives at the Happy House. They have brought their own ice creams, which is not allowed, but Dad is too busy dispensing drinks to notice. The ice creams are called Crazy Zoo. They come with a plastic animal whose head and limbs can be removed and attached to the body of another species, to make a composite creature. A girl wearing sunglasses—the frames are yellow and heart-shaped—yelps that she’s lost a vital part of her Crazy Zoo animal. “I want my bull’s head,” she bellows.

  “I’ve got one at home,” Tod tells her. “It won me a prize.”

  “I want mine,” the girl mutters, peeling a fragment of sunburned skin from her shoulder.

  He helps her to hunt for it, and when they come back, still minus the bull’s head, they’ve lost her sunglasses, too.

  Even Tod can’t stomach Dad’s jammy cakes, so we head out into the rain and share a pizza in the Italian café. It wasn’t supposed to have spinach, and has to be entirely de-spinached before Tod will acquaint himself with it. I spot Margot and Darcey, eating daintily without requiring alterations to be made to their food. The fondant mother is wearing a plunging white top made from crinkly fabric, the kind that’s meant to look un-ironed. The girls’ dad is holding their mum’s hand across the table and not eating at all, just looking at her. “Try this,” she keeps saying, offering him forkfuls of food.

  Then I get it: they haven’t been together long enough to accumulate filing cabinets and a vat of horse manure. Darcey doesn’t say Dad, she calls him Peter.

  When we come out of the restaurant, the rain has stopped and Tod finds Jacob knee-deep in the sea. Tiny fish dance around his chunky legs. He’s feeding them torn strips of bread. I plonk myself near his parents, who have come on holiday with another family. I once suggested to Marcus that we try a two-family holiday so Tod would have someone to play with. The only people we could think of with children of around Tod’s age were Will, captain of Marcus’s octopush team, whose trips to Africa and Thailand exceeded our budget, and Suzie, with whom Marcus is reluctant to engage in a five-minute telephone chat, let alone a two-week holiday.

  Jacob stumbles out of the sea, announcing, “I want a Crazy Zoo.”

  “You don’t even eat them,” his father retorts. “You just want the bloody toy.”

  Jacob climbs into his buggy, beaming hatred.

  “It’s only an ice cream,” his mother hisses. “Let him have it.”

  “He’s had one already.”

  “It’s his holiday, for God’s sake.”

  Holidays are supposed to make everyone happy, so why are they so difficult? On the last holiday I had with my parents—camping in Scarborough, we always headed north to Dad’s childhood haunts—it took us nearly three hours to put up the tent. He had forgotten to pack the poles, so we clambered over barbed wire and scoured the woods for sticks of the right length. When Mum opened the boot of the car, a gas bottle rolled out and clanged onto her foot. Her big toe swelled up so badly she couldn’t wear her favorite tan sandals, only Dad’s wellies. She accused Dad of making the bottle fall out—at least not packing the car carefully—and threw fruit at him. Strawberries or even a tangerine might not have been so bad, but these were tinned mandarin segments.

  As Tod coaxes Jacob out of his buggy, I wonder if divorce can actually be a good thing. Since she met Perry, Mum has swapped her faded dresses and put-upon hair for smart trouser suits and a springy perm. And I can’t imagine that Dad would hide in the garage these days, nibbling cheese, even if he had one.

  We are leaving and Dad’s car won’t start. I had planned to buy a small gift for Marcus at Palma airport and now we’ll be lucky to make the flight. The car rouses itself briefly, then slides back into its nap. “Easy, girl,” Dad murmurs with each turn of the key.

  Freda teeters at the top of the spiral staircase, clutching Lily and chewing her bottom lip. “Call them a taxi, Ernest,” she insists.

  “We’ll just have to be patient,” Dad says cheerfully. “She’ll go when she’s ready.”

  Finally the engine growls into life and we’re off, with Dad driving so slowly I have to jam my teeth together to prevent myself from nagging at him to slam his foot down.

  “What will happen,” Tod asks, “if we miss the plane?”

  “We’re not going to miss the plane.”

  “Will Dad be upset,” he continues, “if we’re stuck in Majorca forever?”

  “Of course he’ll be upset. He’s dying to see us.” As we approach the airport I remember how keen he was for us to come here without him. I had barely mooted a tentative plan before he had applied for Tod’s passport and booked our flights, which I thought was unusually helpful.

  Tod and I tip out of the car and I haul our case from the boot. I want to hug Dad but there isn’t time. A gaggle of stringy brown girls tumble out of a taxi and leg it, their sandals slapping the tarmac. I grab the hand of my son who can swim and make friends and yank him toward the check-in desk.

  We are Late Passengers. The zingy pink label slapped onto our suitcase announces our shoddy timekeeping. The girl at the desk makes a big show of checking her watch and phoning the departure gate to announce our late arrival. I can’t understand what she says but suspect that it’s something about an idiot mother and a boy with a chaotic eyebrow who is rapping a pound coin on the edge of her desk.

  We are thundering across the concourse when Tod stops in his tracks. “Mum,” he asks, “does something bad happen if you lick a tree?”

  “Tod, we’re going to miss the damn plane.”

  “Damn is a bad word, Miss Cruickshank says.”

  “We’re going to make the plane late. Everyone will be really angry.”

  “Mum, does something—” he starts again.

  I set down the case, which another late passenger knocks flat as he hurtles past us. “Why are you asking me this?”

  “Jacob made me do it. We were climbing the big tree and he told me to lick it. When I’d done it he said something bad would happen to my insides.”

  I grip his hand and kiss the top of his sweaty head. “Nothing bad’s ever going to happen to you,” I say, and we run.

  part four

  The maze is a journey, a puzzle to be solved.

  chapter 18

  More Trouble With Tod’s Hair

  We bring home a carrier bag of Crazy Zoo animals, a pottery dolphin money box in which Tod will keep his pound coin and tiny, blood-sucking insects.

  It’s in the garden that I first notice Tod raking his scalp. Marcus and I are acting according to instructions on the leaflet slipped through our letterbox, urging Chetsley residents to ensure that borders and hanging baskets are well tended in preparation for Best-Kept Village judging day. I spot Tod clawing his head and conclude that his scalp is flaking from all that Majorcan sun. Or maybe I didn’t wash his hair properly—Dad’s place had only a dribbly shower, and no bath—and there’s sand stuck to his scalp.

  A flat-leafed plant, like ivy but meaner and faster growing, has snuck up our garden walls and spiraled itself around the lupins. If I tried to unwind it, I would be here for years. Gardening is, according to the glossy magazine I found in the seat pouch on the plane, the new sex. The magazine also reported that navy is the new black and staying in is the new going out. Everything is the new something. But the magazine lied;
there is nothing enticing about weeding, particularly when the other adult present flips the top off a beer and chats to the newsagent girl over the wall, while you fret that you’re confusing weeds with proper plants.

  Marcus has at least mown the lawn, with Carl’s whizzy machine, and instructed Tod to collect the clippings. Tod is squeezing the fluted petals of foxgloves, trying to trap bees. “Can you help?” Marcus demands, when he’s finished his garden-wall chat.

  “I don’t know where to put it,” Tod says, stuffing handfuls of grass clippings into his jeans pockets.

  “Use the wheelbarrow,” Marcus suggests.

  “Do I have to?”

  “Yes, you do. This is a family thing. We all help each other.”

  By midday, Marcus has fetched a second cold beer, which he drinks while lying on a blanket on our front lawn. He has even brought out a cushion to use as a pillow. Tod has also given up on our gardening enterprise, having filled the collapsible wheelbarrow with grass clippings and knocked the thing over. I am the only one actually gardening. I thought this was supposed to be a family thing, with everyone helping each other.

  By one-thirty, Marcus has consumed a third beer and is snoring softly in the faint sunshine. Despite our—mostly my—efforts, the garden still doesn’t look right. The plants Marcus ordered from an advert in a Sunday supplement—enough to fill a ten-foot-long border, the ad said—turned out not to be proper adult plants, but wizened little things called plugs. I suspect that we should have nurtured them in some cozier place: the shed, maybe, rather than scaring them witless by thrusting them straight into the ground.

  Marcus wakes up just after three, by which time Tod has added an annex to the 3-D maze and retired to his room to continue his What Joe Does dossier. I find him writing: Joe is macing the treehows roof. It is pointy like a reel roof. He stops writing to poke at his scalp with the blunt end of his pencil.

  “I’m all itchy,” he complains.

  “Yes, me, too.” Muck from the garden has impregnated our skin, like the plant extracts in those anti-cellulite tights.