Wonderboy Read online

  Marcus warned me that at his favorite Chinatown restaurant the waiters were incredibly rude and prone to throwing your food at you. All the intimate tables were taken, so we were shown to a vast, glass-topped oval, like an ice rink. The waiter carried away superfluous chairs, leaving just two, several hundred miles apart.

  I didn’t feel like eating, not after all that chocolate. My noodles had set in a jellied pile. I worried that my seaweed starter had glued itself to my teeth. I watched Marcus, a speck in the distance, fascinated by his succulent mouth as he gnawed prawns.

  He talked about work, about his talent for matching tenant and flat. I couldn’t take my eyes off that mouth. He could have sold me a lean-to shed, reeking of cat wee, under the Westway. After dinner we squeezed into a chaotic pub dominated by heavily sweating girls on a hen night. A drunk woman with mascara-smeared cheeks kissed Marcus on the mouth. He laughed and wiped off the kiss with his hand.

  “Sorry,” the girl said to me, “I couldn’t help myself.”

  I wanted to take him home. I was trying to be normal but my libido had taken on a life of its own, simmering over the hen party screeches. The bride-to-be, a pale stem of a girl, was dancing furiously on the worn carpet. She swung her pink sequined bag and motioned for Marcus to join her, doing a “come here” thing with her arms. He smiled and edged closer to me. We were jammed on to a PVC chair with yellow foam spilling out of its arms. I wondered, with all the attention Marcus was getting from the hens, whether I should cool off a bit, be aloof. We had only been out four or five times, yet had spent around sixty hours in bed. Maybe we should start doing other things, like visit art galleries, or go shopping.

  I examined myself and examined my reflection in the pub loo. A fresh wrinkle ran from my nostril to my mouth. It was a serious wrinkle, almost a crack. It hadn’t been there that morning. The stress of the egg hunt or a buildup of sleep deprivation must have brought it on. I tried to erase it by stretching my mouth as wide as it would go. I looked like Munch’s The Scream. “Need a paracetamol?” the bride-to-be asked, tumbling out of a stall. She delved into her sequined bag.

  “I’m fine, thanks,” I said, trying to make my face normal and rearrange my hair in the mirror. The wax I’d smeared on had made it look oily, like crow’s feathers. My new flatmate was a hairdresser. The tiny, meek girl had told me to rub in the wax, saying it would give better texture. Only after I’d rubbed it in did she add that you had to shampoo your hair three times to get the stuff out.

  I glided out of the loo and gave Marcus an aloof smile, hoping it didn’t emphasize the wrinkle.

  He stood up and said, “Let’s go home.”

  My insides swirled with Easter eggs, seaweed and wine. I had to cool off, make him realize he couldn’t have me whenever he wanted. I had to make it clear that, while I found him amusing and undeniably easy on the eye, I didn’t need him.

  “Okay,” I said, “let’s go.”

  And that summer, everything changed. Marcus filled my flat and my life with surprises. I’d come home from work to find a love note pushed through my letterbox. He would show up at Anna’s, and we’d take so long over lunch that I’d pull down my sleeve to cover my watch, and stop worrying.

  One evening, as we lay in my bed, Marcus said, “Go look in your wardrobe.”

  I found a suit comprising charcoal trousers and nipped-in jacket, like something you might wear to create a good impression during a court appearance. I didn’t need a suit to work at Anna’s—I could show up in what the hell I liked—but tried it on anyway, and wore it to work the next day. Anna gave me a confused look and said, “You look like a different person.”

  Then Charlotte, my small, timid flatmate, disappeared. I came home from work to find her things gone. She’d left the hair wax but no note or forwarding address.

  “Why don’t I move in?” Marcus suggested as I spilled my woes down the phone.

  “You really want to do that?”

  “Of course I do.”

  Did I want him around all the time? It was the sensible thing. His place was rented; he’d invested everything in Skews Property Letting and that swishy car. “It would help me out,” I said.

  “Ro, I’m not moving in to help you out. I’m moving in because I—”

  My heart lurched.

  “Because I want to,” he said.

  I had never lived with a boyfriend, and wondered how the introduction of grocery shopping and the cleansing of bathroom fittings might affect our relationship. That night he came over, climbed into the bath with me and announced that he had called his landlord to give notice on his flat.

  Just after eleven, the door buzzer sounded. A woman babbled unintelligibly into the intercom. I peered out and saw my mother, huddled in pastel-pink rayon, being battered by rain. It had to be bad. She didn’t just show up like this, without a coat.

  We dressed in a hurry and I let her in. Up close I registered bloodshot eyes and a slack mouth. “He’s gone,” she announced. She lowered herself onto the sofa, giving Marcus a brief nod. He shook her hand, then disappeared to the bedroom so we’d have privacy.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “Gone for good?”

  Her mouth was too shapeless to form proper words, but later, over the weakest tea possible—“just briefly introduce the bag to the water, Rowena”—I learned that my father’s departure had required a passport and his favorite no-factor coconut oil.

  “Majorca,” Mum said, trembling. “Of all the places.”

  “But Majorca’s yours. Yours and Dad’s.”

  “Don’t I know that? He’s gone, Ro. Said I should have spotted the signs.”

  “What are the signs that someone’s about to bugger off to Majorca?”

  “There weren’t any. Nothing had changed. I told him, we’ve never got on, never liked each other. Why leave me now?”

  Mum started crying again into a tissue. Bits fell off, landing on her lap in damp flakes.

  Marcus emerged from the bedroom and offered my mother more tea. “Here,” he said, handing her a proper cloth hankie with navy blue MS initials.

  “Thank you, dear,” she said. She looked up at him and managed a feeble smile. “I’ve heard lots about you, Marcus.”

  She hadn’t really heard lots, but she approved of the fragments I’d told her. Convertible car. Property letting. A man who buys smart, grown-up clothes for his girlfriend when it’s not even her birthday.

  “Majorca was our place, Marcus,” she explained. “We had a favorite restaurant, right by the sea. He’s probably there now, having the mixed fish special.”

  “Your mixed fish special,” Marcus said softly. He patted her arm, squeezing more tears out of her.

  Marcus drove home to his own flat that night. I made up a bed in the little room, placed a full box of tissues within easy reach, and spread out Mum’s pink dress on the radiator.

  “There’s one good thing,” she whispered. “You’ve met a decent man at last.”

  chapter 3

  Being New

  Tod was right. Gorby Cottage smells. There’s a sickly whiff left by Gordon and Betty, along with a pair of medical-looking beige knickers draped over the bath. Marcus thinks I’m making it up. Soon, he says, I won’t notice anything because you can never smell your own house.

  I can’t think of this place as really belonging to us. Gorby Cottage feels like a holiday house, somewhere you’ve rented for the week. In its current state, you’d be registering complaints with the letting company, taking photos as evidence: close-ups of puddles under radiators and staggering cracks in walls. You might even abandon the cottage and transfer your family to a hotel and fire off a furious letter using words like furthermore and mention a solicitor you don’t have. Marcus enjoys writing that sort of letter. He keeps copies in his filing cabinet.

  And the smell’s there, all right. I worry that there’s something in the locked cupboard under the window in Tod’s room, which we don’t have a key for. I called Betty to ask about the ke
y but she just said, “It’ll be where we left it.” And she banged down the phone as if expecting the announcement that we’d changed our minds, had mistaken the country for somewhere we wanted to live.

  “Think you’ll like it here, Tod?” I ask.

  He is lying flat on his bed on a fuddle of dirty laundry, designing a maze with an island section in the center to make it more complex. “You have to get the queen bee back to her hive,” he murmurs. The queen bee has fuzzy black hair, not unlike mine, and is wearing an elaborate crown. At his last school, some of Tod’s drawings were laminated and displayed in the entrance hall. They were different views of some kind of castle, built in a tree, encrusted with emeralds to create a kind of glittery pebbledash. His teacher, Emily—they used first names at his old school—grabbed my arm after school and said, “You must come and see Tod’s pictures.” She led me into the hall, and beamed at the drawings. “Tod calls it a tree palace,” she said. “They’re incredibly detailed for a five-year-old.” On his last day, Emily presented Tod with a pack of glitter pens. I meant to ask for the tree palace drawings, but with the chaos of moving straight after Christmas, I forgot.

  Tod is gnawing his pen end, biting off fragments of clear plastic. “Last one I did,” he says, “you’d find your way out by keeping one hand on a wall. You’d get stuck at dead ends but you would escape, in the end.”

  “This one looks difficult,” I say, studying the crumpled sheet of A4.

  “Yeah. You could get really lost.” He flashes an excited smile. “You might never get out. You could die in here.”

  Marcus thinks Tod takes the maze thing too far. “Can’t we encourage other interests?” he asked once. “Are those stabilizers off his bike yet? Has he swum a width?” Marcus knows that balancing on two wheels is beyond our son’s capabilities, and that my attempts to teach him the breast stroke resulted in Tod demanding to sit on the poolside, where he fiddled with a discarded plaster.

  Tod attaches tape to each corner and sticks the maze on the yellow wall above his bed. He stands on the laundry, following the path with a finger, making a buzzing noise, being the bee.

  “Don’t you think you have the nicest room, sweetheart?” I ask.

  “Bzzzzz,” Tod says.

  “It’ll be lovely in summer, so sunny and cheerful. You’ll be so happy here.”

  “Did it!” Tod says, arriving at the hive.

  “Remember how gloomy and miserable your old room was?”

  “No, it wasn’t,” he says firmly.

  In fact, none of the rooms here are what you’d call cheerful. The estate agent’s blurb acknowledged that Gorby Cottage would “benefit from a general upgrade.” Now that it’s ours, it has become apparent that “upgrade” does not mean choosing fancy paint colors or a new bathroom mirror, but extensive joinery work, rewiring and damp-proofing.

  “It’ll feel better,” I tell Tod, “when we’ve put up some shelves. You’ll be able to arrange all the stuff you got for Christmas. It’ll be just like your old room, but bigger.”

  Tod flicks dirty socks on to the floor with his toes. The washing machine hasn’t been plumbed in yet. When I called the plumber to enquire when he might show up and get the thing working, he said, “Well, not today,” and bit into something crunchy.

  In the country everything happens in slow motion if it happens at all. Dogs raise hind legs in a can’t-be-fagged manner, dribbling rather than creating an arc. Across the road, a spindly ginger cat sneaks through the wrought-iron gate. The leaf collector is out there again, unpegging a sweater from the washing line. It has frozen solid. She carries it into the house by a rigid sleeve.

  Tod joins me at the window, twisting the single russet curtain, which hangs by one plastic hook. His hair is the color of rained-on sand, with cradle cap underneath. I have tried olive oil and special lotions but can’t budge it. Cradle cap is for babies, like the spout cup and Dog.

  He breathes on the window and draws spirals on the steamed-up patch with a finger. His nails need cutting again. Can’t have him showing up at his new school with grubby claws. On his bed, next to The Magic of Mazes and Labyrinths, is the Chetsley Primary School Handbook detailing uniform—gray trousers, burgundy sweatshirt with oak tree emblem—plus an introductory letter from the head teacher: “I sincerely hope that, with the support of parents, we can maintain an environment in which children can achieve their full potential.”

  Tod picks at a streak of cream-colored paint on the window. “Why did we move?” he asks.

  I open my mouth to tell him: because of what happened at your old school. And the upstairs girl, the fighting. Because it’s better for you, Tod. We’ve done this for you. Why can’t children be grateful for big things? They greet major gifts—a new scooter, a bike, a picturesque country cottage—with bored indifference. Then they’re ridiculously pleased with a sticky rubber lizard to fling at the wall, which cost fifty pence. No wonder their parents can’t figure out how to please them.

  “Because we’ll have a better life here,” I say, scooping an armful of laundry from his bed so he can’t see my face.

  The day that Jill, the head teacher, called me, I took a taxi to school and found Tod hunched in a chair in the office. Jill explained that two older boys had pushed him to the ground during afternoon playtime and tried to do something to his face—cut his eyebrow—with scissors they had stolen from the classroom.

  There was a cut on his forehead and scrapes on his knees and shins from where he’d hit the ground. He was sitting by the photocopier, with his shoulders pulled down and his arms tightly folded across his stomach, like he was trying to burrow into himself. His class teacher, Emily, was dabbing the cut on his face with a cotton wool pad. The office smelled of antiseptic.

  Jill said, “I can’t tell you how sorry we are. It’s the worst incident of bullying I’ve ever seen in this school.”

  When Marcus came home that night he took one look at Tod and insisted it was time for us to leave. To leave London and make a home in the country.

  “It’s for the best,” he whispered to me after I’d tucked Tod in and read him to sleep.

  Gorby Cottage has a box off the kitchen, grandly entitled The Breakfast Room. There’s a utility room, which houses our dormant washing machine, and the rotting conservatory, which must have been tacked on to the back of the house when you could do what you liked to old properties. Now you have to contact several stern-sounding organizations to gain permission to remove a concrete hedgehog from your front step.

  Upstairs, in the eaves, is our bedroom, Tod’s room and a spare room to which Marcus optimistically refers as The Study. This is where Tod found a block of green sponge, like my mother uses for flower arrangements. Tod places the block in the center of the breakfast table. “That maze I did,” he says, pulling up a chair with a scrape, “it’s not right. I don’t want it flat.”

  “Right,” I say. “You want it 3-D.” He nods, stroking the green stuff. “Like hedges,” I suggest. I wonder what to offer. Pipe cleaners? Miniature hedging used for toy railway settings? Of course we don’t have these things. “We’ll get the stuff when we’re in town,” I say, although we have yet to discover what town has to offer. Lexley is where Marcus will catch the 7:45 to Charing Cross. The Lexley Gazette, which we trawled through when looking for a suitable house with the right kind of odor, announces “Man Steals Drill Bit From Garage” and “Oldest Cat In Village Dies,” but gives no indication of the availability of miniature hedging.

  Tod is unimpressed by his fried breakfast. He has a habit of rejecting meals, then declaring that he’s starving, clutching his belly in mock agony, the minute the last fork has been washed up. His neck, I notice, is filthy. My brisk flannel rubs are proving ineffective. He hasn’t had a bath since we moved in, as there’s no plug. I jammed the plughole with Marcus’s black monogrammed sock—sporting an ornate MS, like on his hankies—but the water still seeped away.

  “Eat up,” Marcus instructs. “We’re going exploring toda
y. You’ll need energy for that.”

  “Aren’t I going to school?” Tod asks.

  “You start tomorrow,” I remind him.

  We looked around the school before Christmas. I had pictured a cottagey building, like a family house, with a garden. But Chetsley Primary is a stark yellow block, like a slab of butter, with a tarmacked yard bordered by chipped blue railings.

  “Stop playing with your food,” Marcus scolds him. “It’s not a toy.”

  Tod gnaws his bacon, pulling rind from his mouth. “Don’t like this egg,” he mumbles. Anything Tod does not wish to eat must be removed from his line of vision immediately. If the offending foodstuff has left a slimy trail on his plate, this, too, must be erased. For a child forever marred with felt tip and food particles, he is incredibly fastidious.

  Marcus has cleared his own plate and is now wiping out wall-mounted cupboards with a wet tea towel. He takes wineglasses from a cardboard box and tears off their newspaper wrappings.

  Sometimes I try to pinpoint precisely when he changed, when he started to step back, away from me. But of course it wasn’t marked by one incident, or even a day; he crept away while I was too wrapped up in our new baby to pay proper attention. Tod refused to acquaint himself with his rocking crib and would only sleep in the adult bed. Even when splayed between us, he would wake several times during the night, thrashing and wailing and sometimes spurting milk-sick all over our pillows.

  Marcus started to spend the occasional night at Will’s, a friend from his octopush team. To get away from the screaming and the sick. “It’s important,” he said, his face chalk white. “I’ve still got a business to run, clients to take out. I still have to function.”

  I pointed out that Will’s wife had just had a baby, too.