Wonderboy Page 6

  Marcus laughed in an embarrassed way, which heightened his appeal. Aunt Isa scowled at him over her gin and tonic.

  In fact he wasn’t brand new—we’d been married nine months, and I was already pregnant—but he still whispered rude things in my ear. I snorted, causing Perry’s frail father to lurch up from his chair and clutch the buffet table for support.

  My sister Natalie kept glancing at my tidy bump and smiling conspiratorially. She had already produced two children of her own, and made child rearing look as easy as introducing new cushions into the house. Her husband Hugh, a bounding PE teacher, gripped a glass of sparkling water and chatted politely to Perry’s workmates from the now-defunct electrical appliance shop. Natalie’s children, Daniel and Jessica, piled half-eaten vol-au-vents into an ashtray.

  Mum’s friends from her flower-arranging group raised glasses and emitted sparkly laughter whenever the newlyweds kissed. Mum and Perry were flying to Cyprus next morning. Not Majorca, obviously. Those mixed fish days, they were over.

  Monday. “All settled in, Rowena?” My mother is the only person who uses my full name. She also phones at inappropriate moments: as I’m lacing up Tod’s school shoes or at story time when we’re seconds away from the climax of the Minotaur bit. Right now I am gripping the phone while trying to locate Dog, which Tod will not go to school without. I have made every effort to locate the wretched creature, thus making us late. Mum is making us doubly late.

  “I’ll call you later,” I say, peering behind the living room radiator for evidence of the missing stuffed beast.

  “It sounds like your house needs an awful lot of doing,” Mum says, launching into her old houses versus new houses debate. “Why couldn’t you have bought a modern bungalow?”

  “I need Dog,” whines Tod.

  “We wanted something with character,” I say, wondering why I am even bothering to explain at 8:55 a.m., the precise moment at which a shrill school bell is piercing the air. Mum seems to have forgotten that school even exists. These days, she doesn’t behave like a parent at all, or even a grandparent. She sends Tod money instead of real presents and thinks nothing of fondling Perry’s backside in front of her impressionable grandson.

  “You could have saved yourself all this trouble,” she adds.

  “It’s no trouble,” I insist, as if the modernization of a century-old property is equal, in terms of effort required, to fetching a glass of tap water.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “I’m not doing the work myself, Mum.” I march into the kitchen where Tod has returned to the table to mash wet Golden Nuggets in their bowl. I glimpse the tradespeople list on the wall. Marcus stuck it there, to propel me into action. He used to get me going with heart-shaped pralines hidden under my pillow. Now he tantalizes me with stern messages that read: RO! URGENT. CALL OIL.

  “Old houses are always going wrong,” Mum continues. “Look at the drainage at our old place. That silly bend in the big pipe, always clogging up with solids.”

  “I know that,” I sigh. “It’s hard to figure out what comes first. You want to get a wall plastered but realize they’ll hack it to bits to squirt damp-proof chemicals in.”

  “Where’s Dog?” Tod shouts. He has yet to comprehend that it is impossible to conduct a face-to-face conversation, and another by telephone, simultaneously.

  “Perry says it sounds like there’s something wrong with your foundations,” Mum adds.

  Perry knows everything, although neither he nor Mum has seen Gorby Cottage yet. “The thing is,” I tell Mum, “old houses last forever. The walls are at least a foot thick.”

  “Why do they need to be that thick? It’s a family home, not a castle. You’re not likely to be besieged.”

  “Mum, I’ve got to go. We’re already late for school.”

  “School?” she trills. “Why didn’t you say?”

  “Of course Tod goes to school. It’s the law.”

  “Call me when you’re in a better mood,” she huffs. “This old house is obviously affecting your temper. You never used to be like this, Rowena.”

  I replace the receiver.

  “You put him somewhere,” Tod thunders.

  “Put what somewhere?”

  “Dog.”

  On the school walk I add to Tod’s displeasure by delivering a lecture about being responsible for his own possessions. Then I catch sight of his drooping face, and feel myself shrinking. Mean mother, barking at a child who has just started a new school. A tear slides down his cheek. I am the size of a pea.

  “What’s your school topic about?” I ask, to take his mind off Dog.

  “Jipshuns.”

  “What?”

  “Egyptians.”

  Ah, one-word territory. Designed to cause further shrinkage, until mother withers to a barley pearl.

  “You like that?” I ask.

  “Yuh.”

  “And you’re getting along with Miss Cruickshank?”

  “Yuh.”

  Coming from Tod, this counts as crazed enthusiasm. And the Egyptian thing, that’s promising. Could become a hobby. Kids should have a range of interests, not just one. I decide to drive to Lexley, locate the library and bring home books about sphinxes and tombs. Photocopied images of dead people wrapped in filthy bandages might cheer up his bedroom.

  After dropping off Tod, I put off the evil business of calling tradespeople by going for a walk. Isn’t that what you do in the country? You follow signposts and footpaths. But there aren’t any paths, at least not leading from Chetsley Common, where I had expected to find a sign depicting a walking figure and the instruction Walk This Way.

  City dwellers assume that country people spend weekends striding through woodland and catching trout with their bare hands. They forget that most of the countryside actually belongs to someone, possibly someone with slavering dogs and a gun. On these walks, we townies expect to stumble upon bushes bearing fat bubbles of fruit, not realizing that raspberries do not burst forth in January. Even if they did, we would have nothing to take them home in. We never have the right kind of receptacle.

  I march across the common, following the stream in which some bright spark has placed a traffic cone—not Best-Kept Village behavior—but reach a dead end where there’s only beer cans and a barbed wire fence. Marcus calls my mobile, asking if I’ve been on to the oil man yet.

  I must get a job.

  At teatime, Lucille taps on the window and invites herself in. She has brought me a present, a scented candle called “Tranquility,” which they had loads of at the salon and couldn’t sell. “I thought it might make you feel at home,” she says.

  “That’s lovely, thank you.”

  Tod looks up from his workbook and says, “You know what the ancient Egyptians did? They pulled out dead people’s brains through their nostrils, with a spike.”

  Lucille laughs nervously.

  “His school project,” I explain. “Want to show Lucille your hieroglyphics, Tod?”

  He shuts his workbook and slaps a hand on top of it.

  At the front door I whisper, “Take no notice of Tod. He’s just iffy with people he doesn’t know very well.”

  “He’ll grow out of it,” she says, as if it’s that simple.

  Tuesday. Despite having no paid job, and therefore no real excuse, I still have masses of unpacking to do. Moving house forces you to admit that your precious possessions, which you lovingly wrapped in newspaper and gently placed into tea chests, amount to one gigantic pile of crap. Now I wish that we had decluttered before moving, binning pointless items donated by Marcus’s parents: the three-tier cake stand, several yards of navy moon-patterned fabric, a Corby trouser press.

  Actually, the trouser press came as part of the package when Marcus moved into my flat. It has, to my knowledge, been used only once, during Tod’s fourth birthday party. Unbeknownst to the adults present, Suzie’s eldest kid Laura used it to heat up a pizza. The resulting four-cheese mess was a nightmare to
scrape off, and Laura received a non-PC slap on the backside.

  You cannot bin your belongings when they have been transported, at great expense, by courteous removal men.

  I leaf through my folder of drawings: scribblings from my illustration course, most of the same disheveled boy. I’d draw him carefully, then place a second sheet over the first so I could still see my lines, and sketch him as fast as I could so he’d look like a real boy who couldn’t stay still. I wanted to make a book of this boy with his dirty face and hair flying, but my lecturer said I’d never make a living out of that.

  I stuff the drawings back into their folder, wishing I was more like Natalie. She doesn’t live in one gigantic lost-and-found depot. As I unpack boxes of cheap vases and candlesticks I remember Natalie’s warning: “Clutter is bad for your heath, Ro. It collects dust and triggers allergies.”

  “But I don’t have any allergies,” I told her.

  “That doesn’t matter. All your stuff—it’s blocking your chi. It can’t flow properly.” I knew that already. My chi had always been bunged up. Natalie is so efficient that you can feel the chi whooshing through her house, whipping your face.

  The oil man cometh. I am ridiculously pleased about this, and watch as he struggles with his whopping pipe. He has sore-looking hands and one leg several inches shorter than the other. I fire questions about the workings of his tanker and pipe. When he’s gone, I feel bereft. I must get a job/life.

  Marcus comes home in a sullen mood despite the fact that I have worked like a slave, unpacking tea chests and packing them again, because I couldn’t decide where to put stuff. Instead of talking, he delves into his filing cabinet, which glowers sternly from the breakfast room. His goal is to file every aspect of our lives. Drawers are labeled Finances, House & Cars, Skews Prop Let and so on. I suspect that the entire filing enterprise is a ploy to enable him to duck out of teaching Tod to ride his bike.

  The Hobbies drawer is empty apart from Marcus’s octopush training schedule and match fixtures. When Marcus first moved into my flat, I found it intriguing that he liked to waggle a big stick in a swimming pool. But when I saw a match, I didn’t get it at all. Why would anyone wish to make hockey—a tortuous game that had forced me to fake period cramps and, on one occasion, an impressively authentic faint—even more difficult, and wetter? With snorkels on, and all that frantic flapping of flippers, it was impossible to distinguish Marcus from his teammates. “Fantastic goal,” I said after the match.

  “I didn’t score,” Marcus said. “That was Will, our captain.”

  The exhaustion of filing, plus the fact that I have cranked up our central heating to its hottest setting, sends Marcus into an open-mouthed slumber on the sofa. At midnight he’s unwakeable, so I go to bed without him.

  Wednesday. I phone Mr. Leech, the damp-proof specialist. His name has a reassuring, sucking-out-badness feel about it. However, I speak only to Mr. Leech’s answering machine, then the builder’s answering machine and the plumber’s answering machine. None of these people is scrambling to transform Gorby Cottage into a model of style and efficiency.

  After my fruitless calls I spy Tod’s schoolbag on the kitchen table. How could he have walked to school without sensing a lack of bag against his back? I should have noticed. I should have found Dog. I light Lucille’s Tranquility candle but it fails to have a calming effect. I need something else, like real people, not machines, to talk to.

  I need London.

  The restaurant is tucked down a dank side street, close to Leicester Square, and is staffed by grinning waitresses wearing headdresses adorned with dazzling feathers. “I’d love to meet up,” Suzie had said, “but not at my place. The guy who took our boiler away found loads of asbestos. They’re coming today to remove it.” She suggested that we meet at Geronimo’s. The restaurant has a Native American theme, hence the headdresses.

  “How’s Gorgeous?” she asks, plonking Barney on a gummy chair and thrusting him a color-in menu. “Gorgeous” is her name for Marcus. Gorgeous Marcus or, usually, just Gorgeous.

  “We’re probably adjusting, nothing’s really wrong…”

  “Stop that,” she snaps, “or we’re leaving.” Barney has tired of the color-in menu, peeled the paper off the crayons and is making swirling patterns on the table with salt. “Why are we at Geronimo’s?” she asks him.

  “To see Auntie Ro.”

  “Yes, that’s true, but we’re also here because it’s your favorite place. Otherwise we would not be at Geronimo’s.”

  Barney snatches the vinegar bottle and upends it. Some children are capable of eating out in a sophisticated fashion; these kids tuck into olives and salami and can inhabit a chair without flipping over its back. The parents of such infants say, “If you expect your child to misbehave, they will,” as if it’s your fault. They brag that their offspring has been eating out since birth and never caused a problem; they’d barely cut the umbilical cord and he was chomping braised wood pigeon in a raspberry jus.

  These people are liars. In restaurants, small people need the loo every ten minutes—a ploy to enable them to play with the hand dryer—or they’re under the table, as Barney is now, rapping adult shins with a spiteful-looking plastic figure called Falcon Man.

  Children cannot keep still. Boys especially have an inability to remain stationary for long enough to nibble the wafer from their ice cream. It’s their testosterone, bubbling madly. You can hear it, swishing about their insides.

  “Anyway,” Suzie says, “there’s a new bunch of us, lovely women, we meet every—you should come up more, look like you need a…” She’s drowned out by the squaw waitresses who are bellowing “happy birthday” to a sprawly assortment of little girls wearing gauzy wings and tiaras.

  Before I rush off to catch my train, she says, “I’ve been meeting up with Colette, the French girl who bought your flat. Baby’s due any day. Lovely girl.”

  “That’s great,” I say.

  On the train I think: I needed London, but not Geronimo’s.

  Thursday. Marcus has been whacked by the sledgehammer that is the common cold. This strain turns eyes into moist pink slits, and is definitely flu. Despite the fact that he could quite possibly be dead by lunchtime, Marcus staggers into the car to catch the 7:45 to Charing Cross.

  The plumber shows up with a broiled face, smelling of last night’s lager, and I spend the day loading putrid clothing into the washing machine.

  Job. Need one.

  Marcus calls. “I’m too ill to face the journey home,” he says.

  “You’ll only be sitting on a train,” I protest. “Come home and go straight to bed.”

  “Just can’t face it.”

  “Can’t face what?”

  “I’m not having a row when I feel awful.”

  “It’s a cold, Marcus.”

  My terminally ill husband will sleep on the sofa in the back room of the office. Nettie has whisked him up a concoction of lemon juice, honey and whiskey. Good, kind Nettie.

  He says, “At least you could sound sympathetic.”

  Friday. Tod is having his hair cut. The spooky dome requires urgent attention and so I have assembled a variety of bribes (doughnuts, shopping trip tomorrow to purchase 3-D maze components) if he cooperates. Tod is not a friend of scissors. Before the thing happened at his old school, he would cut up gummed paper to make pictures and didn’t even mind having his nails trimmed. Then I was called to the school, and he was wary of scissors after that.

  “Hop into the racing car seat,” commands Tina the hairdresser. “Are you in Miss Cruickshank’s class? Then you’ll know my son Harry. Mad about this seat, he is. I have to drag him out of it.”

  “Want an ordinary chair,” Tod announces.

  “Don’t you like racing cars?” Tina asks. She has apricot-colored cheeks and a small, upturned nose, like a child’s.

  Tod thrusts his hands into his trouser pockets where he stores pebbles and bits of stick. He has never exhibited a glimmer of interest in
vehicles. Suzie often complains that her children’s obsessions with diggers and forklift trucks have resulted in her spending vast portions of her life on the fringes of building sites. I’m glad Tod’s not like that. At least his mazes don’t require me to loiter on churned-up ground, gawping at cement mixers.

  As Tod peers at his reflection, I see how truly dreadful his hair has become.

  “Goodness,” Tina says. “Let’s go much shorter, thinned out all over, smarter for school. Would you like that, Tod?”

  “All right,” he says carefully.

  Tina starts trimming with such speed that I worry that her prices—a third of what we were charged at Clippers in Bethnal Green—reflect the fact that she is no more capable of cutting hair than removing a bunion.

  “Settling into the village?” Tina asks.

  “Oh, yes,” I tell her, “we’re very happy.”

  “Planning to do much with your garden?”

  “Lots,” I say. In fact, I have never been in charge of a garden before. Behind my old flat was a patch of communal ground. Lydia from the basement flat potted up insipid pink geraniums that turned sick, then got knocked over and rolled out of their containers. Marcus made Tod a wooden sandpit and bought plastic molds for stamping fish shapes, but Tod just traced coils in the sand with a finger.

  “If you need any help or ideas,” says Tina, now raking the back of Tod’s neck with a buzzing device, “there’s the Chetsley In Bloom committee. We’re always looking for new members.”

  “I’ll think about that.” Could gardening become enticing to me? Certain aspects—like writing “nasturtiums” in a smart leather-bound notebook—are appealing. But that’s not what it’s about. Real gardening, as any idiot knows, involves weeding and the extermination of slugs.

  “Pity,” Tina says over the buzzer, “about Wyn Beadie. Have you heard? Collapsed in her garden on Wednesday. Found by the post girl, the new one with the attitude. Carted off to Lexley General, but of course it was too late by then.”

  “Wyn Beadie?” I repeat.

  “Didn’t you meet her? Lovely lady, across the road from you. Lived in that house all her life.”