Human Croquet

by Kate Atkinson

  A plaintive screeching from the foot of the stairs indicates that Vinny is growing impatient. Just then, I spy a stray shoe lurking at the very bottom of the wardrobe, a partnerless one – but definitely not Vinny’s or the Widow’s style. A high-heeled brown suede shoe with a strange piece of matted fur stuck to it, like a piece of dead cat. The inside of the shoe’s spotted with mould and a rhinestone glistens from within the little nest of dead fur. The nap on it is dark and rough and the thin heel of the shoe is splayed at an angle like a tooth waiting to fall out.

  The smell of sadness which has drifted at my back into Vinny’s room, is suddenly overwhelming, enveloping me like a damp cloak and I feel quite queasy with misery.

  Vinny’s squawks are growing louder, is she going to have to go barefoot to the hospital? What am I doing up there? Have I climbed into the wardrobe and disappeared?

  Hurriedly, I take the shoe and close the wardrobe door and, as I turn away, notice Vinny’s brown brogues sitting amongst the clutter of her dressing-table, their tongues silent. Vinny, on the other hand, has reached a critical level and if she shrieks any louder will explode.

  Charles sniffs at the inside of the shoe like a bloodhound, he lays the brown suede against his cheek and closes his eyes like a clairvoyant. ‘Hers,’ he says decisively, ‘definitely.’

  Vinny is as unhelpful as ever. ‘Never seen it before,’ she says coldly, but when I first showed it to her she flinched away from it as if it was made of red-hot iron. ‘Don’t you dare go rooting around amongst my things again,’ she warned and stomped away.

  We know, in our bones and our blood, that the shoe has travelled through time and space to tell us something. But what? If we found its partner would it help us find the true bride (‘it fits, it fits!’) and bring her back from wherever she is now?

  ‘She could be dead for all we know, Charles.’ Charles looks as if he’d like to attack me with the shoe. ‘Don’t you ever think about her?’ he says angrily.

  But there isn’t a day goes by when I don’t think about her. I carry Eliza around inside me, like a bowl of emptiness. There is nothing to fill it, only unanswered questions. What was her favourite colour? Did she have a sweet tooth? Was she a good dancer? Was she afraid of death? Do I have diseases I will inherit from her? Will I sew a straight seam or play a good hand at bridge because of her?

  I have no pattern for womanhood – other than that provided by Vinny and Debbie and no-one could call them good models. There are things I don’t know about – good skin care, how to write a thank-you letter – because she was never there to teach me. More important things – how to be a wife, how to be a mother. How to be a woman. If only I didn’t have to keep on inventing Eliza (rook-hair, milk-skin, blood-lips). ‘No, hardly ever,’ I lie to Charles in an off-hand way, ‘it was such a long time ago. We have to move on with our lives, you know.’ (But where to?)

  Perhaps she’s coming back in bits – a drift of perfume, a powder-compact, a shoe. Perhaps soon there’ll be fingernails and hair, and then whole limbs will start to appear and we can piece our jigsaw-mother together again.

  ‘Whose shoe is this?’ Charles asks a distracted Gordon, struggling to keep the barbecue charcoal alight. Gordon turns and sees the shoe and goes a strange colour, like raw pastry. ‘Where did you get that?’ he says in a hollow voice to Charles but then Debbie elbows us out of the way and says, ‘Come on, Gordon, the guests’ll be here soon and those coals need to be glowing. What’s wrong? Dad never had any bother with it. What’s that?’ she adds, nodding her head in the direction of the shoe. ‘Throw it away, Charles, it looks unsanitary.’

  Mr Rice appears in the garden looking for something to eat and when he finds only raw meat, disappears back inside. Mr and Mrs Baxter make a tentative appearance in the garden. Mr Baxter is rarely seen at any neighbourhood gathering. He casts a long shadow, even when he isn’t standing in the sunlight.

  Mr Baxter’s hair has been newly cut in an army crop that bristles angrily from his scalp. Mrs Baxter’s hair, on the other hand, is softly waved and the colour of small timid mammals. There’s nothing harsh about Mrs Baxter. She favours neutral colours – oyster, taupe, biscuit and oatmeal – so that sometimes she just seems to fade right away into her pretty, chintzy living-room with its well-behaved curtain tie-backs and orderly teak display-unit. This is better than Vinny who wears funereal shades as if she’s in permanent mourning for something. Her life, according to Debbie, who’s more of a pastel person herself.

  At the unexpected sight of Mr Baxter, Charles says, ‘Right, I’m off then, I’m going to the cinema,’ and before Debbie can say, ‘Oh no you aren’t!’ he’s gone. Poor Charles, he can never find anyone to go anywhere with him. ‘He should get a dog,’ Carmen suggests – the McDades have a pack of assorted dogs for every purpose – ‘a dog would go anywhere with him.’ But Charles wants someone who’ll sit in the back row of the cinema with him, someone to rendezvous with in cafés and drink frothy coffee and eat toasted teacakes, and although a dog would probably be perfectly willing to undertake these duties I think it’s a girl, not a canine, that Charles wants. (‘Hmm,’ Carmen says, frowning, ‘that’s a bit more difficult.’) Why don’t girls want to go out with Charles – because he looks so odd? Because he has strange beliefs and obsessions? Yes. In a word.

  Mrs Baxter, unsure of the etiquette of something as novel as a barbecue, has brought a large Tupperware bowl with her which she proffers to Debbie. ‘I just made a wee bitty coleslaw,’ she says with a hopeful smile, ‘thought you might be able to use it.’

  ‘Or even eat it,’ Mr Baxter says with a sarcastic smile so that Mrs Baxter grows flustered.

  More neighbours begin to troop into the garden and Debbie grows increasingly edgy about her unglowing coals. The neighbours are suitably impressed by Debbie’s barbecue grill – ‘very new-fangled’ – but less impressed by their uncooked food.

  Mr and Mrs Primrose arrive with Eunice and Richard, Eunice’s unattractive brother. Mr Primrose and Debbie fall into an earnest conversation about The Lythe Players’ next production – A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which they’re going to perform (‘just for the heck of it,’ Mr Primrose laughs) on Midsummer’s Eve in the Lady Oak field. Why on Midsummer’s Eve? Why not on Midsummer’s Night? ‘As if it matters,’ Debbie says dismissively.

  Debbie has a speaking-part at last, playing Helena, and is constantly complaining about the number of words she has to learn, not to mention the awkwardness of those words, ‘He [meaning Shakespeare] could have made the whole thing a lot shorter in my opinion, and he uses twenty words when one would do, it’s ridiculous. Words, words, words.’

  I don’t bother entering into an argument with her, or explaining that Shakespeare is beyond all possible measure. (‘Unusual’, Miss Hallam the English teacher says, ‘in a girl of your age to find such enthusiasm for the Bard.’) The ‘Bard’! This is like calling Eliza ‘our mum’, bringing them down to the level of ordinary mortals. ‘If anyone came from another planet,’ I tell Charles, ‘then it was Shakespeare.’ Imagine meeting Shakespeare! But then what would you say to him? What would you do with him? You could hardly take him around the shops. (Or maybe you could.) ‘Have sex,’ Carmen says, sticking her tongue into a sherbet fountain in a vaguely obscene way. ‘Sex?’ I query doubtfully.

  ‘Well, you may as well,’ she shrugs, ‘if you’re going to go to all the bother of time-travel.’

  Assorted hungry guests turn to Mrs Baxter’s coleslaw and munch their way through it stoically. Gordon delivers a plateful of chops, black on the outside and a vivid Schiaperelli pink inside. People gnaw politely at the edges and Mr Baxter discovers a pressing engagement elsewhere. ‘Is this horsemeat?’ Vinny asks loudly.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve invited the Lovats?’ I ask Debbie hopefully.

  ‘The who?’

  ‘The Lovats. On Laurel Bank. He’s your gynaecologist.’

  Debbie gives a little shudder of horror. ‘Why on earth would I want to in
vite him? He’d be standing there, eating a steak, and knowing what I look like inside.’ An unsettling thought. But he’d be exceptional if he was eating a steak, no-one else is.

  Faced, as he is, with so much ‘women’s trouble’ (especially such ‘women’ as Debbie and Vinny), one might feel almost sorry for Mr Lovat – but he is not a particularly nice person – ‘a cold fish’ in Debbie’s estimation, a ‘queer fish’ in Vinny’s – so an unusual consensus there from the warring-parties, about the fish part anyway.

  Debbie has made dessert for the occasion – a sophisticated moulded concoction, Riz Imperial aux Peches. ‘Cold rice pudding?’ Mrs Primrose ventures doubtfully. ‘With tinned peaches?’

  Mr Rice reappears just in time for Richard Primrose to snigger, a horrible kind of snarf-snarf noise, and say, ‘Mr Tapioca! Mr Semolina!’

  I tell him this is an old joke, but Richard isn’t interested in anything a girl says. Mr Rice is beginning to look like a pudding, now I think about it, a stodgy suet rolypoly one, with his pasty skin and currant eyes. Richard himself would make a very poor pudding. He’s a bespectacled and bespotted youth the same age as Charles and a first-year student of Civil Engineering at the Glebelands Technical College. Richard and Charles have several things in common – they are both equally potholed with acne and subject to a similar red-raw shaving rash. They both also smell faintly of old cheese rinds, although this is possibly true of all boys (except Malcolm Lovat, of course), and they both have a geekish, unsocialized quality which alienates them from both girls and their male peers. Despite their similarities they detest each other.

  There are some things they don’t share, however. Charles, for instance, is human (despite what he likes to think to the contrary) but Richard is possibly not. Possibly an extra-terrestrial experiment gone wrong in fact – an alien’s idea of what a human is like, put together from spare parts, the creation of a Martian Frankenstein.

  He’s the complete physical opposite of Charles, thin and lanky as a vine, his body dangling from his big coathanger-shoulders like an ill-fitting suit. Lantern-jawed, in profile his face is a concave new moon.

  Richard keeps trying to make sly physical contact with me, shooting out a surreptitious hand or foot and trying to rub them against whatever bit of my body he can reach. ‘Sod off, Richard,’ I say nastily to him and stalk off.

  ‘And this is?’ Mrs Baxter says warily to me, holding up a collop of singed flesh.

  ‘Poodle?’ I offer hopefully.

  ‘I think I might go home, dear,’ Mrs Baxter says hastily. ‘I should get back to Audrey.’ Audrey is still harbouring ‘Some kind of bug, summer flu,’ Mrs Baxter says, ‘probably.’ Whenever she refers to Audrey’s ‘bug’ I imagine poor Audrey playing host to some giant lady-bird or shining iridescent beetle. ‘What’s wrong with Audrey?’ Eunice asks, annoyed at a mystery that her click-click-click brain can’t solve.

  I wander disconsolately round the garden, the smell of sadness trailing at my heels – April’s perfume hasn’t been burnt up in the heat of June and lingers as a slight vibration in the air. Aren’t ghosts supposed to squeak and gibber? What is it? Who is it? I can feel its invisible eyes on me, perhaps it’s a manifestation of my adolescent energy, a mysterious poltergeist. If only Malcolm Lovat was here instead, following me around. I wish to go by Carterhaugh, to kilt up my skirts, forfeit the fee of my maidenhead and walk on the wild shores of sexual passion.

  ‘I saw you this morning,’ Eunice says, appearing at my side, a bloody smear of tomato ketchup on her face. ‘Pretty terrible barbecue,’ she says cheerfully, ‘I could have made a much better job of it.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Where what?’

  ‘Where did you see me this morning?’

  ‘In Woolworths, by the Pick ‘n’ Mix, you ignored me when I waved at you.’

  But I wasn’t in Woolworths, by the Pick ‘n’ Mix or anywhere else, I was in my bed, dreaming about Malcolm Lovat’s head. ‘Maybe it was your double then,’ Eunice shrugs, ‘your doppelgänger.’ My self from the parallel world? Imagine if you were to come around a corner of the world and meet yourself – what questions you could ask! ‘Do you have this odd feeling, Eunice?’

  ‘Odd?’

  ‘Yeah, as if something’s not quite right …’ But then the barbecue bursts into flames and the heavens open in an attempt to quench the fire and the social gathering comes to a wet and sooty halt.

  I go round to see Audrey to tell her she hasn’t missed much. Mrs Baxter’s sitting at the kitchen table knitting something as delicate as a cobweb in a pattern of cockleshells and ‘silver bells’?

  ‘Hearts.’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ I say, fingering its snowy falls. ‘A shawl, for my sister’s first grandchild,’ Mrs Baxter says. ‘You remember, Rhona in South Africa.’ Mrs Baxter always looks sad when babies are mentioned, perhaps because she’s lost several babies herself. ‘Never mind,’ I try to comfort her, ‘you’ll be a grandmother one day, I expect,’ and Audrey, who’s standing at the cooker making unseasonable convalescent hot chocolate, accidentally knocks over the milk pan, sending it crashing to the floor.

  When I come back from Sithean I find Charles has also returned and is sitting on a deck-chair amongst the ruins of the barbecue. The new-found shoe has disappeared back into obscurity. When closely questioned, Vinny – whose waste-disposal motto is, ‘if it doesn’t move, burn it’ (and sometimes if it does move too) – admits to having barbecued it.

  I pull out a deck-chair and join him in the twilight garden. The rooks are coming home late, hurtling on their rag wings towards the Lady Oak, racing the night, caw-caw-caw. Maybe they’re afraid of being transformed into something else if they don’t get back to the tree in time, before the sun dips below the horizon that saucers blackly beyond the tree. Perhaps they’re frightened of shifting into human shape.

  What’s it like to be a caw-cawing crepuscular rook ripping through the sables of night? A black bird flying high over the chimney-pots and blue-slate roofs of the streets of trees? The last rook, a straggler, dips its wing in salute as it flies overhead. What do we look like from the air? A bird’s-eye view? Pretty insignificant, I expect.

  ‘Shape-shifting,’ Charles says dreamily, ‘that would be interesting, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Shape-shifting?’

  ‘Into an animal or a bird or something?’

  ‘What would you like to be, Charles?’

  Charles, still wretched at having lost the shoe, shrugs his shoulders indifferently and says, ‘A dog, maybe,’ and then adds hastily, ‘a proper dog,’ as he catches sight of Gigi squatting indecorously in the middle of the lawn.

  ‘Maybe people can shape-shift into replicas of themselves,’ Charles says after a pause, ‘and that’s how you get doppelgängers?’

  ‘Oh, do shut up, Charles, you’re giving me a headache,’ I say irritably. Sometimes Charles’ ideas are just too complicated to bear thinking about.

  ‘Do you think the aliens are already here?’ he carries on relentlessly.

  ‘Here?’ (On the streets of trees? For heaven’s sake!)

  ‘Living on the earth. Among us.’

  Wouldn’t we have noticed? Perhaps not. ‘What do they look like – little green people?’

  ‘No – just like us.’

  Just because you feel alienated, I explain to Charles, it doesn’t mean you’re actually an alien, but he turns his face away, disappointed in me.

  It’s quite dark by now, the moon pale and distant, a white coin flipped up into a sky the colour of washable ink. The stars are all out, sending their indecipherable messages. Starlight, starbright. Debbie comes out into the garden and asks us what on earth we are doing out here in the dark and Charles says, ‘Starbathing.’ Really, the sooner he can hitch a ride back to his own planet the better.

  * * *

  I lie in bed for a long time trying to get to sleep even though I’m bone-weary. Wouldn’t it be peculiar if Charles was right? If we came from so
mewhere else, far, far away and didn’t know it? Perhaps on our own planet things are much better, like in the parallel world. The parallel planet.

  I wait for the noise of gravel, like flaw-blown sleet, on my windowpane. I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight – Malcolm Lovat shinning up the Virginia creeper that’s slowly smothering Arden and entering my bedroom window so that our two bodies can melt into one. (‘Melt?’ Carmen says doubtfully – more of a beast-with-two-backs kind of girl herself.)

  The Cats are murdering sleep, the walls rumbling with their engine purrs – prut-prut-prut as they snore their way to oblivion. The other occupants of Arden sleep less soundly. I can hear Charles’ restless dreams – silver-suited spacemen wading through the nothingness of space and riveted tin rockets landing in the dusty craters of the moon, like something imagined by Méliès. Vinny’s dreams are less audible, the noise of unoiled hinges, and Gordon isn’t dreaming at all, but Debbie’s baby dreams echo emptily around the house – fluffy, pink marshmallow dreams of stuffed rabbits and ducks, romper suits and pudgy putti bodies.

  ‘Where’s Charles?’ Gordon asks, as he passes me on the stairs. ‘He seems to have disappeared.’ He’s incongruously cheerful for having just made such a statement.

  ‘Where’s Charles?’ Debbie shouts at me from the dining-room, where she’s vacuuming the curtains with the nozzle attachment from the Hoover (she looks like an anteater). It’s nine o’clock at night and sensible people are sprawled in front of their television sets. Like Vinny who’s shouting abuse at Hughie Green from the comfort of her armchair.

  ‘There’s somebody at the back door,’ Vinny says to me when I sit down. She leans forward and gives the fire a vicious poke. She’s probably imagining sticking the poker into Mr Rice’s head. Mr Rice has gone a-wooing and Vinny, who has got it in her head that there’s some kind of ‘understanding’ between her and Mr Rice, is very, very annoyed. This understanding – or, more properly, misunderstanding – has arisen from a casual compliment from Mr Rice to the effect that Vinny would ‘make someone a wonderful wife’. He might have meant the bride of Frankenstein’s monster but he certainly didn’t mean himself.