Wonderboy Page 8

“Are we nearly there yet?” Tod asks, as I point the car into a graveled lane.

  “We’ll have to stop. Something’s wrong with the engine.”

  “What is it?” he shouts, ogling me through his binoculars.

  The car judders to a halt. Turning the key triggers a metallic screech, like a sheet of aluminum being rammed through a sewing machine.

  “What’s happened?” Tod asks.

  My car has died. My son will celebrate his birthday in a golf course parking lot. “Nothing serious,” I say.

  chapter 7

  Needing a Cigarette

  According to Lucille’s husband Carl, Lexley Golf Club is the kind of establishment to which Marcus should belong. Its members wear turquoise LGC sweaters bearing a logo of a skinny man with bowed legs, jauntily swinging a club. Carl is a wedding photographer, requiring him to wear a suit and tie, but when he’s not working he sports his LGC sweater, and the sort of trousers you’d call slacks. Carl looked rather worried when Marcus explained the rudiments of octopush and said, “If you change your mind, Marcus, I’m happy to recommend you. What’s your handicap?”

  And now Tod and I are stranded in Lexley Golf Club car park, having not been recommended by anyone. I am in possession of a terminally sick Mondeo with a cheesy interior and a son firing questions: “What’s this place? You said we were going to a maze. Where is it? Why can’t we go? It’s not fair.” Tod uses a grubby nail to dislodge cheese from between his teeth, and extends his bottom lip like a table leaf.

  A man raps on our windscreen. I open the driver’s door to see what he wants and discover which rule I’m breaking.

  “Great place to break down,” the man says.

  “Yes, we’re very lucky.”

  “Use the phone,” the man says, “in the clubhouse. You can wait there until the AA arrive.” He has a large, pink face, like a ham. The ends of his golf clubs sport knitted bonnets, possibly to keep them warm.

  In the clubhouse Tod plunges into a toilet cubicle, banging the door with such force that the paper towel dispenser reverberates uneasily. In the members’ bar he pauses to apply oily fingerprints to a glass trophy cabinet, then installs himself in a fat leather armchair as if he, like Carl, is a fully paid-up member of the club.

  “At least it’s stopped raining,” says the girl at the bar. She hands me an orange juice for Tod and tells me to help myself to coffee or tea. By now, with my good fortune on a par with that of a rollover lottery winner, I tap out the AA number on my mobile, feeling chuffed to belong to such an organization. It’s the kind of reassuring thing Mum’s husband Perry does, like pulling plugs out at night, and owning a rake.

  Tod crunches brown sugar cubes and licks crystals from a finger, making himself suitably sticky for further fouling up of the trophy cabinet.

  “So you’ve changed address,” says the AA lady. “What was your previous postcode?”

  My brain seizes. “E-something,” I say, watching Tod as he experiments with the hot water dispenser intended for golfers’ beverages. He has placed a saucer beneath the tap, and is filling it with quick spurts. I could have just brought him here for his birthday outing instead of bothering with Summerlea House with its entrance fees. Children are thrilled by ordinary things. When I took him to London Zoo, Tod showed little interest in the animals. He wasn’t even thrilled by the baboons’ red bottoms. We spent most of the afternoon clambering up and down a short flight of concrete steps, which he told Marcus was “fantastic fun.”

  “Can you be more specific?” the AA woman asks.

  “E2.” Or was that Suzie’s street? “E3,” I say. She runs a search and discovers that only Marcus is eligible for rescue. “But I’m his wife,” I plead. “A woman alone with a child. Anything could happen to us.”

  “That’s boiling water,” the barmaid warns Tod. “You’ll scald yourself.”

  “We are vulnerable,” I bark into the phone.

  The AA woman sighs. “Please call to update your address. Someone’s on their way.”

  I have never been in a clubhouse before. Occasionally, I have wondered what goes on in such places, but not enough to participate in a sport requiring the lugging of a massive bag of metal. Carl mentioned that there’s a ladies’ division I could join (“You’ve got powerful arms, Ro. I’m sure you could master a swing”) but I can cope with that term—“ladies”—only in a public convenience context.

  However, I can see that such a grown-up establishment holds a certain appeal. Tod is certainly enjoying himself. He’s back at the trophy cabinet, clouding the glass with his breath. Outside, our Mondeo sags pitifully among sportier models. Marcus still has his harlotty motor. It’s good for business, he says. When he takes high-caliber clients to view properties, the car shouts: I am successful and rich. I will show you a successful, rich person’s flat. My lumbering tank, with elderly sandwiches decaying in its crevices, says only: mother.

  Tod needs the loo again. He makes grunting noises, insists on leaving the cubicle door open and regards me through his yellow binoculars.

  “Hello?” the barmaid says, poking her head round the door. “Your AA man’s here.”

  The man has tight silver curls and a turned-down mouth. While he examines our car’s innards, Tod busies himself by picking out loose mortar from a brick wall. I show him the Summerlea House leaflet, a poor substitute, admittedly, for the real thing with its maze and raised summerhouse.

  “We’ll still go,” I reassure him. “I’m sure it’s just some piddly thing.” I leave a terse message on Marcus’s voice mail, informing him of our situation.

  The AA man beckons me over and says, “Cylinder head gasket.”

  “I thought it might be that. Is it fixable?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Shit,” I mutter.

  “When can we go to the maze?” Tod demands.

  “Sorry, love, we can’t go.”

  “Can we go somewhere else instead?”

  “Tod, we’re not going anywhere. The car’s broken.”

  This is all my fault. For five years I have treated the Mondeo shoddily—despising its murky blueness, never topping up oil or water—as if it’s a boyfriend I’ve wanted to be rid of and hoped would desert me due to maltreatment. I realize now that the Mondeo is my only means of escaping from Chetsley, from which three buses leave daily, and only to mysterious places called Rippenden and Newton Meadows.

  “Anyone you can call?” the AA man asks.

  “Dad’s coming to help us,” Tod informs him. “Mum just phoned him.”

  “You’re not going to be stuck?”

  “We’ll be fine,” I say. I sign the form on the AA man’s clipboard and tap out Marcus’s number again, then try home. It rings and rings.

  And we wait. Tod gnaws the last lump of cheese from his lunchbox, and we share the remaining breadsticks. A white truck pulls into the car park. A tall, long-limbed man climbs out and investigates a skip loaded with wood. He selects an armful of planks, and flings them into the back of the truck where they land with a crack.

  This man does not belong here. His jeans hang baggily about his legs and his enormous boots are daubed with paint. They are even bigger than my boots. Tod observes him through the binoculars.

  “Stop that,” I hiss.

  The man notices that he is being spied on, and coils fingers around his eyes as if he’s wearing binoculars, too.

  “Our car’s broken,” Tod shouts. The man strides toward us and looks sympathetically at the Mondeo. “Mum said ‘shit,’” Tod adds.

  “That’s understandable,” the man says, “in the circumstances. Where are you going?”

  “We need to get back to Chetsley. I’ve called my husband, he should be along pretty soon—”

  “That’s where I’m going,” the man says.

  Never accept lifts from strangers. How many times have I told Tod that? Not that he would. He is fearful of people he doesn’t know—even those he does know, like Mum’s husband Perry, who thinks you b
efriend children by whirling them like windmill sails or flinging them on to the sofa and being a fierce bear. My scaredy-cat son has already opened the truck’s passenger door and plonked himself in the middle, next to the driver’s seat. I climb in beside him.

  This man, Joe, lives at the perfect white cottage across the road from Gorby Cottage. “So I’m your new neighbor,” he says.

  I don’t know if he is, by Carl’s standards, the right kind of neighbor. He doesn’t look like someone who belongs to clubs. Not a joiner-inner.

  “You bought the old lady’s house?” I ask.

  “It was my mother’s place.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I say, which feels fake, as I didn’t know her. The one time I shouted hello over the fence, she plucked a plastic peg from her washing line and gripped it between her lips, like a small yellow beak.

  Both windows of Joe’s van are wide open. Fine rain sprays the side of my face, like wet breath. My feet rest among a jumble of crushed coffee cartons, cigarette packets and an open toolbox spewing chisels.

  “Mum was seventy-four,” Joe continues. “Lived in that house all her life. I’ve been telling her for years that it was too much, but stubborn wasn’t the word.”

  “How old are you?” Tod asks.

  I give him a sharp nudge with my knee.

  “Ancient,” Joe says.

  “Like the Egyptians?”

  “Way older than the Egyptians.”

  “I’m six,” Tod announces. “It’s my birthday. I got these.” He puts the binoculars to his eyes and gawps at the driver until I tell him to stop, Joe needs to concentrate on the road. Tod puts the binoculars down, but keeps gazing at Joe. Children love men, boy children especially. They spend so much time among females—their mother, her friends, women teachers—that a mere whiff of maleness has them babbling excitedly and trying to clamber on to their backs. The effect is heightened when they don’t see dad much.

  Joe pulls into his drive. “Want to come in?” he asks abruptly.

  “Yes, please,” chirps Tod.

  “We’d better not. Dad will be home any minute.”

  Joe smiles at me, and I’m horribly aware of my burning face. Damn this blushing gene. I read once that it can be suppressed by taking pills to stimulate seratonin levels in the brain. Perhaps blushing is due to my brain being stuffed with largely useless information: remembering to pack Tod’s gym kit, Egyptian topic work, sandwiches that won’t be laughed at. Since moving to Chetsley, I feel like my brain’s congealed, like a flabby rice pudding. There’s no room for any seratonin in there.

  Joe’s still smiling, kind of cheekily.

  “Thanks for the lift,” I say.

  “Shame about your car.”

  “That’s okay. At least it saves me cleaning it out.” Now he thinks that, whenever my car’s interior starts to stink unbearably, I just throw it away.

  “Let me know,” Joe says, “if you’re ever stuck and need a lift somewhere.” He pushes back a tangle of dark hair, and rests a hand on Tod’s shoulder.

  “I’ll do that,” I say, hauling Tod across the road, his binoculars bouncing against his damp birthday top and his face blasted by smiles.

  “But I didn’t know you’d broken down,” Marcus says. “I had no idea.” He is crouching on the kitchen floor, hastily wrapping an enormous glass box in paper emblazoned with dancing fairies. I’m not saying that boys’ presents must be wrapped in paper with a repeat BIRTHDAY BOY pattern, but there are limits.

  “I called you,” I tell him. “Why is your phone always off? Where the hell were you?”

  “Ro, I was rushing about like crazy, getting this.” The fact that he is wrapping it in full view of Tod—he’s loitering in the kitchen doorway, slapping the rolled-up road map against his thigh—rather spoils the surprise.

  “You don’t care about us,” I announce.

  “Of course I do. You’re just getting more…ridiculous.” The tape keeps tangling itself up. He jams a gummy ball on to the floor beside the half-wrapped present. Then he looks up at me and reaches for my hand. “I’m so sorry, Ro. I wish I’d known. Is the garage collecting the car?”

  “Yes, I think it’s wrecked.” A relationship over, like Tod’s white rat.

  “And you never got to that natural history place.”

  “Stately home,” I correct him.

  “We went to a car park,” Tod announces, “and this building with trophies and a boiling water machine. It was great. The AA man came and another man drove us home in his truck and Mum said ‘shit.’”

  “What man?” Marcus asks.

  “A stranger,” Tod says dramatically. “He took wood from a skip without asking. He stole it.”

  Marcus frowns at me. “Was that wise, Ro?”

  “What choice did I have? Anyway, he’s not a stranger. He’s just moved into that old lady’s place across the road.”

  Marcus shakes his head, and tries to cover the naked section of glass with a leftover strip of fairy paper. He wouldn’t have passed the library three times, triggered carsickness or tried to drive into a school playground. And he certainly wouldn’t have broken down, because he looks after his car. He nurtures it.

  “Well,” he says, “aren’t you going to open your present, Tod?”

  Tod steps forward warily, as if he’s at school prize-giving with mums and dads all staring. He peels away the paper carefully. It’s a fish tank; we knew that already. There are two speckled fish: one silver, one black.

  “What are they for?” Tod asks.

  “They’re pets,” says Marcus. “Dalmatian fish. They’re for you to look after.”

  Tod nods solemnly and says, “Thank you, Dad.”

  “Happy birthday, son,” Marcus says, ruffling Tod’s hair like a Christmas uncle.

  I find Tod still awake at eleven-thirty, wide-eyed in the glow from the fish tank.

  Marcus realized too late he shouldn’t have filled it and dropped the fish into their new habitat before placing the tank on Tod’s chest of drawers. We lifted it together, with the water slapping over the edge, dousing the front of Marcus’s work shirt. He was annoyed, too, that the chest of drawers hadn’t been cleared of unfinished collages made from clumsily glued lichen that Tod and I picked off the shed. Like I should have known that a fish tank was about to enter our lives.

  “I can’t sleep,” Tod complains. “The tank’s noisy.”

  A humming sound is coming from the water heater, or maybe the gadget that will enable the tank to self-cleanse, requiring no effort whatsoever on my part. “If I turn it off,” I tell him, “the water will go cold and the fish might die.”

  “Can’t sleep,” Tod repeats.

  I climb into the bed with him, pull the spaceman duvet around us and lie there until his breath comes warm and steady against my chest.

  Later I find Marcus awake with the bedroom light blazing and work papers littering the duvet.

  “I met Carl at the station,” he says, without looking at me. “Helped me lift the fish tank in the car. Said he’d seen you earlier, driving terribly fast. He reckons you must have been doing seventy on a B-road.”

  “Tod needed the loo,” I explain. He was desperate, Officer. Yes, I should have stopped at the roadside. Isn’t that an offence, too? Fouling a public place? I should have taken him to the bathroom before we set off, like an organized mother would.

  “Were you smoking in the car?” Marcus asks.

  “What?”

  “Carl saw you.”

  “You know I don’t smoke. I haven’t had a cigarette since—” I realize I’m shouting, propelling Tod into another livestock nightmare. He’s had two this week, woken up yelling about horses—not sleek, elegant creatures, but snorting beasts with foul breath and decaying teeth.

  “He said,” Marcus continues, “you had something hanging out of your mouth. He said you were puffing away.” He gathers his papers together and gives me a strange look, as if I’m a child who’s just knocked her lunch off the table. He�
��s not angry, just disappointed. I undress, slide under the duvet and Marcus’s paperwork, and curl up with my back to him.

  It’s much later when Tod’s voice comes again, wanting me. I find him perched stiffly on the edge of his bed.

  “I can’t look after them,” he mutters.

  “Look after what?”

  “The fish. It’s my job, Dad said.”

  “Don’t worry. Just forget about them.”

  “I can’t because of that noise.”

  With patience dwindling I leave him, bundled angrily in bed, and make insipid tea, which I drink while sitting on an unopened box containing the crockery Marcus’s parents have forced upon us over the years. In this box is a set of earthenware pots that might come in handy if we are ever seized by an urge to make eleven casseroles at once. Scraps of fairy wrapping paper litter the floor.

  One male in this house doubts his fish-parenting skills. The other takes work to bed, and accuses me of smoking. I remember now, as I dunk plain biscuits into my tea, what I had in my mouth in the car: a breadstick. The snack favored by modern parents to guard children’s teeth against sugar decay and acid attack. My habit of puffing on over-long sticks, devoid of taste or pleasure, will no doubt make it into the Lexley Gazette.

  For the first time in years, I could murder a Silk Cut.

  Before leaving for work, Marcus reminds me to feed the fish daily with colorful flakes that reek of rank seafood. When the water needs changing, I should remove only a third and replace it with fresh water at room temperature so I don’t upset the fish. On no account should I slosh in icy water straight from the cold tap. The shock could kill them.

  Thoughtfully, Marcus bought a red plastic sieve that I must use when washing the gravel from the bottom of the tank. I must not confuse this with the other sieve, the blue one, which we use for straining vegetables.

  “I thought the tank was supposed to self-cleanse,” I remind him.

  “Let’s just try to look after them,” Marcus says. “They’re live breeders, the pet man told me. We could have lots of little fish, a whole family.”

  Live breeders. We are heading for a tank stuffed with juvenile fish, a school of Dalmatians, with potential for sibling rivalry and shoddy parenting. I wonder when this breeding might start, and whether Tod will realize what’s going on. On the sex front I have attempted to palm him off by explaining that the man’s seed meets the woman’s egg, like they have a coffee and chat and, somehow, a baby is made. “But how does the seed get to the egg?” Tod asked once in our old East London park. We were sharing the bench with a prim-looking lady who was deconstructing a slice of Battenburg.