Wonderboy Read online

  I return to the kitchen and heat his milk in the microwave. Babyish, but he still likes it warm in a cup with a spout. And he still owns a ratty stuffed dog, called Dog, which he insists on taking to school in his bag. No one needs to know about these things. Apart from Dog, his milk and his mazes, he’d pass for your regular five-year-old. London isn’t harming him one bit.

  Marcus is immersed in a TV program about a couple with lightly grilled noses who have swapped their semi in somewhere called Shirley for a crumbling structure on the Greek island of Santorini. The woman has tired, sagging eyelids but is trying to appear brave for the cameras.

  “What about my job?” I ask. “I wouldn’t be able to commute to Anna’s from Chetsley. Someone has to pick up Tod from school.”

  Marcus keeps staring at the TV. The woman complains that the sand on Santorini is the wrong color; it’s gray, volcanic. If she’d known that, they might have picked somewhere else. Sand should be golden, she says.

  “Anna drives you crazy,” Marcus adds. “You don’t even like your job.”

  “I do,” I snap.

  “The whole point, Ro, is that you don’t need to work. We can’t stay in London just because of a piddling job that pays you—”

  “I want to work. It’s not about money.”

  “Then get yourself a little local job.”

  What kind of job is little and local? Pelmet making? I can’t imagine being utterly dependent on Skews Property Letting. Would I have to ask Marcus for money to buy his own birthday present? Gain permission before purchasing new shoes?

  On the TV the Shirley man admits that life will become easier when their house has hot water, and they’ve stopped missing little things like Coronation Street and being able to communicate with people. His wife complains that everyone has a nap after lunch; that’s lazy, she says, adding, “You have to give things your best shot. If it doesn’t work out, we can always go back to Shirley.” Her husband throws her a sharp look when she says that.

  Marcus takes my hand, pulls me on to the sofa beside him and kisses me full on the mouth. It feels like such a strange, self-conscious kiss; there are Marcus’s lips, and Marcus’s tongue, and the Shirley woman on the phone to her best friend in England, sniveling, “Love you, too, Deborah. Promise you’ll visit soon.”

  “Where’s my milk?” Tod yelps from his bedroom.

  I pull away from Marcus and find my son pinning his maze to the sloping ceiling that looms over his bed. In the bathroom I run his bath, sloshing in thick blue gloop from a pirate-shaped bottle. Tod steps into the tub and assumes his usual flat-on-back position with his hair fanning out in the water.

  “Toenails,” I announce.

  “Oh, Mum.”

  I growl, closing in with the dastardly pink-handled scissors. Tod cannot bear anything being done to him, especially involving scissors. That’s why his hair’s out of control, flapping all over his face. The back of his head looks quite matted and germy, like a dog’s blanket, but dragging him to the hairdresser isn’t worth the hassle and bribes of the Haribo sweet variety.

  “Toenails,” I repeat. He offers a foot, but screws up his eyes as if I might be planning to amputate each toe, one by one, with a rusting saw. He’s still whimpering later as he pulls on pajamas and squashes next to me on his bed, breathing spearmint and clutching The Magic of Mazes and Labyrinths.

  We read at least six pages per night. We’ve done the entire book countless times, but each evening, Tod flicks open a random page and that’s where we start. I always pray that he won’t pick the bit about the sexual imagery of Celtic maze patterns, how the curves and coils represent ovaries, wombs and vaginas. If I’d known about that part, I would have chosen a more appropriate book.

  “Ready?” I ask.

  Tod nods, checking that the toenail clipping has not involved blood loss. He opens the book and passes it to me.

  A labyrinth is a maze with only one pathway. In the middle of the original labyrinth, built by King Minas on the island of Crete, lurked the terrible Minotaur. Half man, half bull, this ferocious creature devoured Greek prisoners. When Theseus entered the labyrinth, he unwound a golden thread as he progressed, his marker to help him find his way out.

  “What’s the mistake in Theseus’s story?” I ask.

  “There’s only one way out of a labyrinth,” Tod chirps. “You wouldn’t need the thread.”

  He’s right. One pathway, no difficult choices. He traps a yawn with quivering lips, and I kiss him good-night, remembering to take his cooled milk so he won’t wake up and slurp from a cheesy cup.

  To avoid the Gorby Cottage conversation, I sink into Tod’s now-tepid bath water and think about my piddling job. My first task at Anna’s Film Archives was to transfer the card index on to the computer so that, when a client wanted to rent a film, we’d stand a vague chance of locating it. Because I could work the computer, Anna seemed to think I had a brain the size of a bus. She would hover at my shoulder, putting me off with her dazzling secondhand dresses and diamanté accessories. Her hair fell in a smooth sheet, like black glass. Soon she had me running the place, with the help of a teenage assistant called Stanley, which enabled her to devote more time to scouring markets for frocks.

  Anna isn’t a fan of the countryside. Like computers, it brings out a rash and triggers sneezing fits. When Marcus and I started looking at houses, she said, “You’ll wear wellies with everything. Hairy sweaters. There’ll be no point in phoning you. You’ll be out at the Women’s Institute.”

  Now Marcus is in the bathroom with me, trimming his nasal hair with the battery-operated clippers. I pour in more hot water and lie back and wet my hair, the way Tod does. I picture the bulging calves I’ll develop, the rucksack I’ll have permanently attached to my back, stuffed with Ordinance Survey maps and Swiss Army knives incorporating that implement for prising pebbles from horses’ hooves. Then I can’t think anymore because the upstairs girl is shouting, “Help me—get somebody, please.”

  “Christ,” Marcus says. He turns off the clippers and stomps to the phone. I hear him saying, “Domestic incident. Yes, sounds like it, had this sort of trouble before.”

  I dry myself, pull on jeans and a sweater—it’s hairy, the country is seeping into my wardrobe already—and check on Tod. The noise hasn’t woken him. An arm dangles over the edge of his bed, as if testing water.

  Two police officers clatter up the short flight of steps, press the upstairs girl’s buzzer and run up to her flat. I can hear them above our bathroom: the girl crying, her boyfriend shouting over everyone else, protesting. Marcus opens our door, catching the constable on her way down.

  “I’m the one who called,” he explains.

  “We had lots of calls,” she says. Her eyes have sunk into her face, like upholstery buttons. Marcus starts to tell her about our fallen-down plaster, as if she cares about his deceased laptop. “Look,” he says, beckoning her into our living room, “it’s been replastered but it’s still rough as rice pudding.”

  The constable blinks at our ceiling. On the table lie details for Gorby Cottage, marked with a giant red tick.

  “We have a little boy,” Marcus continues. “We’re having to move because of this trouble.”

  “It must be difficult,” the constable says.

  Tod appears like a specter with a pillow-creased cheek. His left eyebrow looks even bushier than normal. “What’s that woman?” he demands.

  “Go back to bed,” Marcus says gently.

  Tod glares at the policewoman. His face is the color of Horlicks. “Why don’t you have a truncheon?” he asks.

  I steer him back to bed as if sudden movements might cause him to fracture.

  “Is anyone going to jail?” he shouts.

  Later, I find Marcus making penciled notes in The Commuter’s Bible, a book detailing every settlement within a seventy-mile radius of London and offering vital information about schools, transport links and the likelihood of 747s slicing the tops off your gladioli.


  CHETSLEY. Pop: 1,200. Journey time: sixty-five mins. Delightful village with welcoming pub, the Poacher’s Retreat, serving excellent Sunday lunches, children welcome. Village-store-cum-post-office, pharmacy, hairdresser, bookshop-cum-tearoom. Good state primary school in village. See Lexley for commendable state secondary (fifteen-min drive).

  From upstairs comes a smash and a scream. “See?” Marcus says, slamming the book shut.

  I escape to the kitchen and accidentally stand on a block of Cheddar that Tod has thoughtfully left on the floor. It’s now embedded in the bumpy sole of my suede slipper. Cheesy feet. Great.

  Marcus’s arms are around my waist, his mouth hot on the back of my neck. “Please, Ro,” he says, “I can’t stand living here anymore.”

  Even in bed I can’t help wondering how I’ll get the cheese off my slipper. It turns out that Marcus has been thinking about matters other than the delights of my body because the instant he’s finished he says, “I’ll call the estate agent on Monday, first thing. Let’s put in an offer.”

  At least I didn’t mention the slipper.

  chapter 2

  Treasure

  Marcus was different when we met. He reminded me of a large-pawed dog that gets away with gnawing soft furnishings, due to his visual appeal. This stranger drove a curvaceous blue sports car that clearly did not belong in my street.

  He had arrived at my flat because Pip, my flatmate, was moving in with her saxophone teacher. As I would no longer have to endure her endless practicing of scales and blaming the duck-honks on substandard reeds—and, presumably, she would no longer be charged for lessons—this was good news all round. I wouldn’t miss her fondness for lurking behind me whenever I opened a book, ruining the funny bits by asking, “Why are you laughing?” On the plus side, at least her sax practice had drowned out the upstairs girl’s racket.

  Marcus showed up at eight. I pretended that I’d been expecting him, although I didn’t have a Marcus on my list. His lips were full and very sexy. He was the kind of man you see sketched on the covers of romance novels, wearing a doctor’s coat, pressed against a woman with tumbling hair. My hair didn’t tumble. It was—and still is—roughly chopped, supposedly gamine, as in subtitled-French-film gamine. It’s the kind of haircut that prompts small children to shout, “Is that a man or a lady?”

  I was pretty certain that this man with such a harlotty car wouldn’t be interested in renting a bleary room furnished only with a single bed and precarious pine shelving that trembled when you brushed past it.

  “When will the flat be vacant?” Marcus asked, handing me a card with “Skews Property Letting—We’ve Already Found Your Perfect Home” printed on the front.

  “It won’t be,” I said. “I live here. I’m just letting out a room.”

  He sighed and fished out a diary from the inside pocket of his jacket. “This is Cedric Street.”

  “No, Cecil Street. You’ve come to the wrong flat.”

  “God, I’m sorry.”

  We stood there looking at each other. Someone else was due at eight-thirty but I didn’t want him to go. “I could show you round anyway,” I said.

  “I don’t want to waste your time.”

  “You’re not,” I told him. In fact, I had already decided on a girl so meek and tiny that she’d barely be noticeable around the flat. Then again, she might have been into crazed orgies or owned a bassoon. You never can tell.

  It was only March, but Marcus had a caramel tan. I wondered if he used one of those bronzing machines that grill you on all sides at once. To stop myself staring, I clattered around the kitchen, filling the kettle and delving into the cupboard to find acceptable biscuits. He used my name a lot—“These are lovely original sash windows, Ro”—and stared right into my eyes as I gave him his coffee, like he’d attended a course on how to look at women.

  Marcus said I wouldn’t believe the way prices were zooming round here. To illustrate this, he flattened his hand and made it soar, like a plane. I was sitting on a gold mine, he said. The view over the park—where men smacked their pit bulls and couples lay on top of each other, rummaging up T-shirts—were real assets. He glanced at my chest. Men think you don’t notice them doing that.

  He wandered along the hall to the bathroom, which he virtually filled all by himself. I squeezed in there with him. Sweat tweaked my upper lip. I wished that he’d vacate the bathroom so I could snatch a piece of loo roll and blot myself.

  His gaze rested upon a small heap of pubic hair trimmings that Pip must have left on the side of the bath. A gingery nest, like Golden Virginia tobacco. Everyone I’d shown around must have seen them. No wonder only one person had expressed a keenness to move in. I considered making excuses (I’d trimmed my fringe, it was head hair) but my own hair is virtually black, with no hint of ginger, so he’d have known I was lying. Marcus blinked at the trimmings and gave me an amused look. I clung to the grubby light pull.

  “Well,” Marcus said finally, “if you ever want to let this place out, you know where I am. Call me, Ro, anytime.” He smiled, showing brilliant, sharp-edged teeth.

  Minutes later I watched from the window as his car streaked away down the street. We both knew I’d call, and not to have him let out my flat. I gathered up Pip’s trimmings with a paper-covered hand, and was still laughing as they swilled down the loo.

  Until Marcus, I had slept with two types of men: those so delighted to find themselves in bed with me—or, for that matter, with anyone—that it would all be over in a flurry of knickers and youthful panting before they sprang off and called for a mini-cab. Or the tedious lays, when you’d find yourself drifting off, wondering why the central heating system was making that juddering noise and whether you should have “bled” your radiators, whatever that means.

  For a while I’d had a purely practical arrangement with Seth, a jeweler I’d met on the night bus who sliced Perspex into crescent shapes to make clumsy earrings. He presented these to me as thank-you gifts. Sex with Seth was pleasant but predictable, like a Meg Ryan movie. At least it ensured a good night’s sleep, and was less hassle than getting up to make hot chocolate.

  Anna liked to hear about the men who snuck in and out of my life. Some nights—before Tod, before Marcus—we’d find ourselves so bogged down by the card index system that we’d lose the will to go home. Stanley the assistant, a mushroom-colored boy who shunned daylight, would croak a weary good-night. At the slam of the door, Anna sloshed mescal into chipped mugs bearing the slogan “Call Savage Office Supplies for your stationery needs.”

  Mescal made her frisky and tactile. One evening, she gave me a hug, supposedly for eating the worm from the mescal bottle—she’d bet me a tenner to do it, fibbed that it tasted like fudge—and for rescuing her from chaos, because finally we had transferred the entire index on to the PC. Or rather, I had. Anna had swished about in fuchsia silk, rubbing orange-scented oil into her bony shoulders. She was doing that, slathering this stuff into her freckled skin. Then her lips were on mine. I don’t know how it started. A thing went on then with her tongue, and my brain filled with a flurry of help-lines and tense conversations with my parents, and I stumbled away to refill our mugs. I had yet to form a meaningful relationship with a man. Bringing women into the equation would make everything doubly complicated.

  That’s what I liked about Marcus. We slipped into a boyfriend–girlfriend arrangement so smoothly that I didn’t need to debate whether we were having a proper relationship or just sex. He phoned when he said he would. We held hands in the street, and talked about how we might spend Christmas. He was well-practiced in bed and maneuvered my legs like joysticks, finding out how I worked.

  When we were out, I’d see people glancing from Marcus to me, wondering why such a photogenic male was clutching the hand of a woman who looked as if her hair had been attacked by blunt pinking shears. I could tell they were thinking, She must be stinking rich or have a great personality, but I didn’t care. I felt sparkly and light, as if I’d been turn
ed into tinsel.

  We’d been seeing each other for a couple of weeks when a bouquet arrived at Anna’s Archives. The showy combination of scarlet and orange looked like Anna’s dresses, in plant form. The card read, “?&%! Love, Marcus,” which I assumed was a reference to the indescribable nature of his feelings for me.

  Anna found me stuffing the flowers into a glass vase with dirt in its cracks and said, “Darling, you shouldn’t have.”

  My hot cheeks coordinated nicely with the tulips. “Can I go early today?” I asked.

  Her eyebrows shot up. They were penciled fir-tree green; Anna had a habit of applying her makeup in the dark. I didn’t tell her that Marcus and I had arranged to meet in Green Park at four-thirty. That mescal kissing thing, it was nothing—but I still felt kind of disloyal.

  I found him lounging on a bench, eating ice cream from a tub with a wooden spatula. His vanilla kiss landed on my ear.

  “I’ve hidden some eggs,” he announced.

  “Eggs? What for?”

  “Easter treasure hunt. There’s half a dozen. Find them all and I’ll buy you dinner.”

  Flowers and eggs. I had never been given so much in one day, not even by Seth, the earring man. But I didn’t want to look for eggs. The idea was cute—I valued originality in a man—but I didn’t fancy all that bending down and him copping a full view of my backside while I scrabbled in bushes.

  “Start looking,” he said, scraping the last of the ice cream from the tub.

  I started pacing around halfheartedly. “Can’t find any,” I said.

  “You’re warm. Getting warmer.” I spotted one, its purple wrapper glinting in a patch of bleary primroses. A couple more were stashed behind litter bins. One had been stamped on, so we abandoned that. I found another partially concealed by a prickly shrub that caused my wrist to itch, and searched for the last egg until an Irish setter bounded past, chomping foil. Couldn’t chocolate make a dog sick, or even kill it?