Human Croquet

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘She wasn’t a saint, your mum, you know,’ Debbie says, reducing Eliza to her own pedestrian vocabulary. Eliza (or, at any rate, the idea of Eliza), isn’t a cosy person, ‘our mum’. Invisible, she has grown sublime – the Virgin Mary and the Queen of Sheba, the queen of heaven and the queen of night in one person, the sovereign of our unseen, imaginary universe (home). ‘Well not from what your dad says,’ Debbie says smugly. But what does ‘our dad’ say? Nothing to us, that’s for sure.

  Who is Debbie? She is the fat, wan substitute that four years ago ‘our dad’ chose to replace ‘our mum’ with. In his seven-year voyage on the waters of Lethe (the north island of New Zealand actually), Gordon forgot all about Eliza (not to mention us) and came back with a different wife altogether. The Debbie-wife with brown permed curls, little piggy eyelashes and stubby fingers that end in bitten-off nails. The doll wife, with her round face and eyes the colour of dirty dishwater and a voice that contains flat Essex marshes washed with a slight antipodean whine. The child wife, only a handful of years older than us. Snatched from her cradle by Gordon, according to Vinny, Vinny who is the Debbie-wife’s arch-enemy. ‘Think of me as your big sister,’ Debbie said when she first arrived. She’s changed her tune now, I think she would rather not be related to us at all.

  How could Gordon have forgotten his own children? His own wife? In his lost years at the bottom of the world did he hear Abenazaar’s wicked invitation (‘New wives for old!’) and trade in our mother for the Debbie-wife? Perhaps even now the treasure that was Eliza (greater than a king’s ransom) is trapped in some dismal cave somewhere waiting for us to find her and release her.

  It is hard to know what tales Gordon might have spun Debbie in the downunderworld but he didn’t seem to have prepared her very well for the reality of his life back home. ‘So these are your kiddies, Gordon?’ she said with an air of incredulity when Gordon introduced her to us. She was probably expecting two charming little moppets, delighted to be relieved of their motherless state. Gordon didn’t seem to realize that in the seven intervening years we’d become underground children, living in a dark place where the sun never shone.

  Heaven only knows what she was expecting of Arden – Manderley, a nice suburban semi perhaps, maybe even a small castle where the air was sweet – but surely not this desolate mock-Tudor museum. And as for Vinny – ‘Hello, Auntie V,’ Debbie said, sticking out her hand and grabbing Vinny’s claw, ‘it’s so lovely to meet you at last,’ so that ‘Auntie V’s’ face nearly cracked. ‘Auntie V? Auntie V?’ we heard her muttering later, ‘I’m nobody’s bloody auntie,’ obviously forgetting that actually she was our bloody auntie.

  My brother Charles left school with no talents discernible to his teachers. He works now in the electrical goods department of Temple’s, Glebelands magnificent department store built to outdo the great London stores and once boasting a small Arcadian bower on its roof, complete with green sward, rippling brooks and a herd of grazing cattle. That was a long time ago, of course, almost in the time of myth (1902) and Charles must content himself with a more mundane environment amongst an assorted miscellanea of vacuum cleaners, hand whisks and radiograms. Charles seems neither particularly happy nor particularly unhappy with this life. I think that most of his time is taken up with daydreaming. He’s the kind of boy – I can’t imagine ever thinking of Charles as a man – who believes that at any moment something incredibly exciting might unexpectedly happen and change his life for ever. Much like everyone else in fact. ‘Don’t you think that something –’ his eyes nearly pop out of his head as he searches for the words to articulate the feeling, ‘that something’s about to happen?’

  ‘No,’ I lie, for there’s no point in encouraging him.

  ‘I’m just marking time at Temple’s,’ Charles says, in explanation of his remarkably dull outer life. (Ah, but what does he give it? B−? C+? He should be careful, one day time might mark him. ‘Och, without doubt,’ Mrs Baxter says, ‘that’s the final reckoning.’)

  Charles also has his hobbies to occupy him – nothing so normal as stamp-collecting or bird-watching, the kind of pursuits that fulfil other suburban youth – but an obsession with the mysteries of the unexplained world – with aliens and flying saucers, with vanished civilizations and parallel worlds and time travel. He’s preoccupied with life in other dimensions, yearning for the existence of a world other than this one. Perhaps because his life in this one is so unsatisfactory. ‘They’re out there somewhere,’ he says, gazing longingly at the night sky. (‘If they’ve got any sense they’ll stay there,’ snorts Vinny.)

  Mysterious disappearances are his speciality – he documents them obsessively in lined notebooks, page after page, in his babyish round hand, cataloguing the vanished – from ships and lighthouse keepers, to whole colonies of New World Puritans. ‘Roanoke,’ he says, his eyes lighting up with excitement, ‘a whole colony of Puritans in America disappeared in 1587, including the first white child ever born in America.’

  ‘Yeah, well that would be because the Red Indians killed them all, wouldn’t it?’ Carmen (McDade, my friend) says, leafing through one of his notebooks – Carmen has no notion that private and property can coexist in the same sentence.

  Charles is looking for a pattern. The vast numbers of ships – the boats found crewless on the high seas and the Mississippi riverboats that have sailed off into nothingness – are not accountable to the perils of the sea but to alien kidnappings. The tendency (‘Well, two anyway,’ he admits reluctantly) of boys called Oliver to vanish on their way to the well for water, the number of farmers in the southern states of America observed disappearing in the act of crossing a field – the writer Ambrose Bierce who wrote an essay on one such disappearance entitled, ‘The Difficulty of Crossing a Field’ (‘and then disappeared himself, Izzie!’) – are all part of some vast otherworld conspiracy.

  The category that excites him most, unsurprisingly given our own parents’ tendency to disappear, are the individuals – the society girl out for a downtown stroll, the man on the road from Leamington Spa to Coventry – people who were going about their ordinary lives when they vanished into thin air.

  ‘Benjamin Bathurst, Orion Williamson, Dorothy Arnold, James Worson’ – a curious litany of human erasures – ‘just like that!’ Charles says, snapping his fingers like a bad conjuror, one red, red eyebrow cocked in the cartoon position of surprise (whether relevant or not) that he favours for most conversations. People plucked from their lives as if by an invisible hand, ‘Dematerialization, Izzie – it could happen to anyone,’ he says eagerly, ‘at any moment.’ Hardly a comforting thought. ‘Your brother’s a nut-cake,’ Carmen says, sucking a mis-shapen mint so hard that it looks as if her cheeks have just imploded, ‘he should see a trick-cyclist.’

  But the real question, surely, is – where do the people who vanish into thin air go? Do they all go to the same place? ‘Thin air’ must surely be a misnomer, for the air must be fairly choked with animals, children, people, ships, aeroplanes, Amys and Amelias.

  ‘What if our mother didn’t run off,’ Charles muses, sitting on the end of my bed now and staring out at the blue square of window-sky. ‘What if she had simply dematerialized?’ I point out to him that ‘simply’ might be the wrong word here, but I know what he means – then she wouldn’t have voluntarily abandoned her own children (us), leaving them to fend for themselves in a cold, cruel world. And so on.

  ‘Shut up, Charles.’ I put my head under the pillow. But I can still hear him.

  ‘Aliens,’ he says decisively, ‘these people were all kidnapped by aliens. And our mother too,’ he adds wistfully, ‘that’s what happened to her.’

  ‘Kidnapped by aliens?’

  ‘Well why not?’ Charles says stoutly. ‘Anything’s possible.’ But which is the most likely really – a mother kidnapped by aliens or a mother who ran off with a fancy man?

  ‘Aliens, definitely,’ Charles says.

  I sit up and give him a good hard punch in t
he ribs to shut him up. It’s such a long time ago now (eleven years) but Charles can’t let Eliza go. ‘Go away, Charles.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ he says, his eyes alight with a kind of madness. ‘I’ve found something.’

  ‘Found what?’ It’s still only eight o’clock in the morning and Charles is in his pyjamas – maroon-and-white striped flannel that say ‘Age 12’ on the label on the collar, but which he has never outgrown. If the aliens kidnap him will they believe what he tells them or what his label says? He seems to have forgotten that it’s my birthday. ‘It’s my birthday, Charles.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, look—’ From his striped breast-pocket he takes something wrapped in a large handkerchief. ‘I found this’, he says in a church-whisper, ‘at the back of a drawer.’

  ‘The back of a drawer?’ (Not my birthday present then.)

  ‘In the sideboard, I was looking for Sellotape.’ (For my present, I hope.) ‘Look!’ he urges excitedly.

  ‘An old powder-compact?’ I ask dubiously.

  ‘Hers!’ Charles says triumphantly. I don’t need to ask the identity of ‘Her’ – Charles has a particular tone of voice, reverential and mystical, that he uses when speaking about Eliza.

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘It says so,’ he says, thrusting it in front of my face. It’s an expensive-looking compact, but old-fashioned – thin and flat, like a heavy gold disc. The lid is a bright blue enamel, inlaid with mother-of-pearl palm trees. The clasp is still springy and snaps open. There’s no powder-puff and the mirror is covered in a thin film of powder and the powder itself – a compacted pale pink – has been worn down in the middle to reveal a circle of silver metal.

  ‘There’s nothing at all to prove it’s hers,’ I tell him crossly and he snatches it back and turns it over so that an almost invisible shower of powder falls out on to my eiderdown. ‘Look.’

  On its golden underside, striated in fine circles, there is an engraving. I hold it up to the square of blue and make out the stilted message:

  To my darling wife, Eliza, on the occasion of your twenty-third birthday. From your loving husband, Gordon. 15th March 1943.

  I feel quite faint for a moment, even though I’m sitting up in my bed. It’s not so much the compact, nor even the words, it’s the pink face-powder – it smells sweet and old, it smells of grown-up women and it is – without a shadow of a doubt – the evocative topnote in the scent of sadness, L’Eau de Melancholie, that trails so disconsolately at my heels.

  ‘Well anyway,’ Charles says, ‘I think it’s hers,’ and he pockets it moodily and leaves without wishing me happy birthday.

  A little later, Gordon pops his head round my bedroom door and attempts a smile (even then my father manages to look sad), and says, ‘Good morning, birthday girl.’ I don’t say anything to him about the powder-compact, it would only plunge him into greater gloom and is unlikely to jog his memory about his first wife, for nothing else seems to do. Perhaps in his seven absent years in the downunderworld, Eliza was erased from his memory cells by aliens? (This is Charles’ theory, needless to say.) But then this is a man who even forgot who he was himself, let alone his immediate family. (‘But isn’t it wonderful that your daddy’s alive and well?’ Mrs Baxter said. ‘Why it’s like –’ Mrs Baxter searched for the right word, ‘it’s like a miracle!’) Yet when he came back – walking in the door as casually as Anna Fellows did in 1899, he remembered who we all were perfectly. (‘Isn’t that a miracle,’ Mrs Baxter said, ‘suddenly remembering who he was after all that time?’)

  He hands me a cup of tea and says, ‘I’ll give you your present later,’ the words more cheerful than the tone in which he says them (it was ever thus with my father). ‘Have you seen Charles anywhere?’ This is another peculiar trait of my father’s – he is constantly questioning people about the whereabouts of other people – ‘Have you seen x?’; ‘Do you know where y is?’ – even though the person he is looking for can easily be found in their usual habitat: Vinny in her winged armchair, Debbie in the kitchen, Charles lost in a Bradbury or a Philip K. Dick, Mr Rice doing heaven knows what in his room. Once, in her early days with us, Debbie knocked peremptorily on Mr Rice’s door, duster and polish at the ready, and turned on her heel and came straight out again when she saw what he was doing. ‘What?’ Charles asked eagerly but Debbie refused to say. ‘My lips are sealed.’ If only her nose could be stopped up too.

  I myself am usually to be found lying on my bed imitating the dead Chatterton, killing time by reading book after book (the only reliable otherworlds I’ve discovered so far).

  ‘I expect Charles is in his room,’ I tell Gordon and he makes a surprised face as if this is the last place he expected him to be.

  Gordon would perhaps like Charles to make more of himself, but says nothing. After all, Gordon is a man who has succeeded in making less of himself. He was once a quite different person, heir to our own personal retailing fortune, the licensed grocery business of Fairfax and Son – an inheritance scuppered a long time ago by carelessness. Fairfax and Son, now called ‘Maybury’s’, is at this very moment being converted into Glebelands’ first supermarket and about to rake in profits for someone else, not us. And before that, before he was a grocer, Gordon was someone else again (also in the time of myth – 1941), a hero – a fighter pilot with medals and photographs to prove it. Once a bright, shining person, he came back from his seven-year sojourn a faded man, not really ‘our dad’ at all.

  ‘Perhaps it’s not really Daddy at all?’ Charles conjectured quietly at the time. (For it’s true neither the exterior nor the inward man resembled that it was.) But if it wasn’t him then who was it? ‘Somebody pretending to be Daddy – an impostor.’ Charles explained, ‘Or like in Invaders from Mars where the parents’ bodies get taken over by aliens.’ Or perhaps he was from the parallel world. A looking-glass kind of father.

  Of course, he could just have been Gordon come home after seven years’ absence with a new young wife and Eliza might never be coming back. But this version of reality was not to our taste. ‘He’s sad, your dad, isn’t he?’ Carmen says, unnaturally poetic. At least he’s not mad or bad. But we’d prefer it if he was glad. ‘Bit of a lad?’ Carmen offers. But no, not really.

  Malcolm Lovat. If I am to have a birthday wish it must be him. He is what I want for birthday and Christmas and best, what I want more than anything in the dark world and wide.

  Even his name hints at romance and kindness (Lovat, not Malcolm). I have known him all my life, the Lovats live on Chestnut Avenue, and he has grown up handsome, tall and fit and with all his limbs in proportion – not as common as you might think amongst the boys of Glebelands Grammar.

  Girls idolize him. He’s the kind of boy you could take home to your mother (if you had one), the kind of boy you could take up to Lover’s Leap and steam up the car – a boy for all seasons in fact. No-one ever mentions Malcolm Lovat without saying what a great future he’s going to have, he’s reading medicine at Guy’s and is home for the Easter holidays at the moment. ‘Following in my father’s footsteps,’ he says with a wry little smile. His father’s a gynaecologist. ‘Perverted’ is Vinny’s verdict on this particular speciality – she has had ‘women’s trouble’ treated by Mr Lovat – ‘what man wants to specialize in sticking his hands inside women? Perverts, that’s what kind.’ I wonder where Charles and I would get if we followed in our father’s footsteps? Lost, presumably.

  Malcolm wants to be a brain surgeon, which seems just as perverted to me; what person in their right minds would want to stick their hands inside other people’s heads?

  Poor Malcolm, his mother is an ogress. Both his parents are so intolerant and snobbish that it seems a wonder they have a son like Malcolm. Perhaps not such a wonder, for Malcolm is adopted. The Lovats were quite old when they adopted him. ‘I don’t think they knew what to do with me when they got me,’ Malcolm says, ‘I didn’t drink gin and I didn’t play bridge.’ He has learnt to do both.

  Un
fortunately, he is a prince out of my star. ‘I don’t know though, Iz,’ he says, rather glumly, to me over a shared packet of crisps. ‘Do I really want to be a doctor at all?’ The dreadful thing is, he thinks of me as a friend. He runs a hand through his dark curls and brushes them away from his handsome forehead. ‘You’re a good pal, Iz,’ he sighs. I am his friend, his ‘pal’, his ‘chum’ – more like a tin of dog food than a member of the female sex, certainly not the object of his desire. Too many years of wandering around the streets of trees after him like a large faithful pet have robbed me of female qualities in his eyes.

  I fall back into a fitful morning doze, it’s the weekend and even a birthday isn’t enough to get me out of bed. The possibility of sleep is too precious. We are unquiet sleepers in Arden, we all of us hear the watches of the night being called by screeching owls and howling dogs. ‘Not asleep yet?’ a tousled Gordon enquires with a rueful smile as we encounter each other on the staircase in the middle of the night. ‘Still up?’ Vinny (irritable in hairnet and bed-jacket) asks.

  When I wake up, the sky is no longer still, thin white clouds are racing each other across the window and the wind rattles the glass. Will anything happen to me on my birthday? (Apart from the pricking of the spindle.) I drag myself reluctantly out of bed.

  Of course, I could have spent the weekend with Eunice. ‘How would you like,’ she asked enthusiastically, ‘to come caravanning with us in Cleethorpes? That would be a nice way to spend your birthday.’

  Enthusiastic Eunice is the last person I would have ever chosen as a friend, but of course you don’t choose your friends, they choose you. Eunice arrived in secondary school on the first day and attached herself to me like a mollusc and has stuck firmly on ever since, regardless of the fact that I’ve nothing in common with her and spend a considerable amount of time trying to prise her off. I think I was just the first person she happened to see when she walked through the school gates. (‘Like she was under a spell or something?’ Audrey muses.) But Eunice isn’t the kind of girl to fall under enchantments, she’s far too sensible for that.