Human Croquet

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘There’s someone at the back door,’ the bride of Frankenstein’s monster repeats irritably.

  ‘I didn’t hear anyone.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean there isn’t somebody there.’

  Reluctantly, I go and investigate. There is a strange scratching noise coming from the back door and when I open it, a hopeful whine directs my eyes downward to a large dog which is lying Sphinx-like on the threshold. As soon as I make eye contact with it, it leaps up and launches into its canine routine – head cocked to one side in a winning way, one paw raised in greeting.

  It’s a big ugly dog with fur the colour of a dirty beach. A dog of uncertain genetic origin, a touch of terrier, an ancient whisper of wolfhound, but more than anything it looks like an outsize version of the Tramp in The Lady and the Tramp. It has no collar, no name tag. It’s the essence of all dog. It is Dog.

  It keeps waving its huge heavy paw around in a determined effort to introduce itself so I bend down and take the proffered paw and look into its chocolate-brown eyes. There’s something in its expression … the clumsy paws … the big ears … the bad haircut …

  ‘Charles?’ I whisper experimentally and the dog cocks one of its floppy ears and thumps its tail enthusiastically.

  I suppose a better sister would have set about weaving him a shirt from nettles and throwing it over his furred-over body so that he could be released from his enchantment and resume his human form. I give him some cat food instead. He’s absurdly grateful.

  ‘Look,’ I say to Gordon when he comes into the kitchen.

  ‘Have you seen Debs anywhere?’ he asks, scratching his head like Stan Laurel.

  ‘No, but look – a dog, a poor, lost, homeless, hungry, lonely dog. Can we keep it?’ and Gordon, who looks as if he might have been playing the game of Lost Identity from The Home Entertainer says vaguely, ‘Mm, if you like.’

  Of course, I know the Dog isn’t really Charles under an enchantment and anyway he comes back from wherever he’s been in time to drink Horlicks with Gordon. Neither Vinny nor Debbie are speaking to Gordon having simultaneously discovered the usurper dog finishing off the remains of supper in the kitchen. It will eat anything, it transpires, even Debbie’s cooking.

  With the arrival of the warm weather and the Dog, the flea population of Arden is on its way to achieving mastery of the planet, not to mention driving Debbie to the edge of it. ‘Fairly louping with them,’ Mrs Baxter laughs as one of them leaps off the Dog on to her nice white tablecloth.

  ‘A lot of fuss about nothing,’ Vinny says, catching one expertly and squashing its little jet-bead body between her thumbnails with a tiny explosive crack! (I imagine it’s Richard Primrose’s head.) Life at the level of the minutiae is fairly teeming in Arden – the fleas, the dust, the tiny fruit flies. And the invisible world, of course, is even more crowded than the visible one.

  ‘Vitamins!’ Vinny says. ‘Who needs them?’ ‘Everyone?’ I murmur. ‘Molecules!’ Charles says. ‘Who understands them?’ ‘Scientists?’ I venture. (Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t important.)

  Vinny is so scrawny, and probably cold-blooded, that no flea ever bothers biting her. Debbie, however – plump, warm-blooded and fine-skinned – is a banquet for them, a moveable feast.

  Debbie blames the Cats (there’s a musical waiting to be made), always a source of contention between the warring mistresses of Arden

  (A Word about the Cats: There were no cats in Arden until the arrival of Vinny. Vinny used to have her own house, a dingy little terrace on Willow Road, but when our parents disappeared so thoughtlessly she had to give it up and come and live with us. She’s never forgiven us. She brought the First Cat with her, the begetter of the Arden dynasty – Grimalkin, a bloodthirsty, belligerent grey female from whom we have bred many a fat fireside companion.)

  Debbie is not the only person who dislikes the Cats. Mr Rice is not above administering the odd kick catwards when he thinks no-one is looking, unaware apparently that Vinny has radar in her ears and eyes on revolving stalks.

  Sensing her unpopularity à la lodger, Elemanzer, Grimalkin’s youngest and fiercest daughter, goes out of her way to annoy him, sleeping on his pillows when he’s out and lying in wait on the stairs to trip him and even going to the length of getting pregnant and delivering her litter in Mr Rice’s sock drawer.

  For days after, we are entertained by the idea of Mr Rice delving into his drawer in the bleary light of dawn, expecting to come out with a blue and grey Argyle and screaming in horror as he discovered his socks have come to life – wriggling, damp and furry, in their little nest. And one very, very large, silver-grey tabby sock sinking its angry maternal teeth into his hand.

  By the time summer comes one of those mewling socks, a handsome young kitten called Vinegar Tom, has gone missing and Vinny has become obsessed with the idea that Mr Rice had somehow had a hand in this disappearance.

  Debbie and I are agreed on one thing (and one thing only); we loathe Mr Rice. We loathe the way he eats with his mouth half-open and the way he grinds his teeth when he’s finished eating. We loathe the way he whistles tunelessly through those teeth when they aren’t eating or grinding. We particularly loathe the way, at night, those same teeth grin out at us from a glass on the bathroom shelf.

  I’m repelled at having to share a bathroom with him, not just because of the teeth but for the overwhelming smells he leaves behind – of shaving-foam and Brylcreem and the unmistakable (but not to be dwelt on) smell of male excrement. Once or twice I’ve encountered him coming out of the bathroom in the morning, with his dressing-gown hanging open and something slack, like a pale fungus, flopping out from its lair. ‘Oops,’ Mr Rice says with a leering grin. ‘Death of a Salesman,’ I fantasize grimly to Charles.

  ‘Men,’ Vinny mutters with feeling. (Vinny was herself once married, but only briefly.) It seems men fall into one of several categories – there are the weak fathers, the ugly brothers, the evil villains, the heroic woodcutters and, of course, the handsome princes – none of which seems entirely satisfactory somehow.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Eunice asks impatiently as we walk home, Audrey-less, as usual, from school. I don’t know, I have this peculiar feeling – both familiar and at the same time unknown, a dizzy, fizzy kind of feeling as if someone had dropped an Alka-Seltzer into my bloodstream. ‘Bloodstream,’ I say thickly to Eunice. We’re taking a shortcut, to save time (but where will we put it? In the banks of wild thyme?) standing in the middle of a bridge over the canal and Eunice looks over the parapet in alarm at the murky wool-wasted water below.

  ‘Maybe you’ve got a thing about bridges,’ she says earnestly, more like Freud than Brunel. ‘If you’re frightened of crossing bridges it’s called—’

  Oh no, here we go again – Eunice has disappeared, the bridge itself has gone but – luckily – has been replaced by another one, little more than a series of wooden planks. The snicket, Green Man’s Ginnel, that the bridge leads into is still there but the lamppost that overlooks its entrance has gone, as have the warehouses either side of it, replaced now by a couple of rough-looking wooden buildings. I venture cautiously into the ginnel and emerge the other side into Glebelands marketplace.

  It still is the marketplace, that much is clear – the market-cross stands where it always does, in the middle of the square and Ye Olde Sunne Inne is there on the other side, no words announcing its name any more, just the sign of the sun on a wooden board – not the present one, a garish yellow thing, but a muted, old-gold kind of sun. I expect it’s not called Ye Olde Sunne Inne any more either, just the Sun Inn probably, because we’re obviously back in the days when it was new, as it’s just a hovel of its former self. Indeed, we seem to be back in Ye Olde Glebelands if the evidence of my eyes is to be believed.

  Wooden carts barrel across the cobblestones, fish-wives in sixteenth-century fustian are yelling their wares. A couple of dandies in velvet preen themselves on the street corner and when I approach t
hem I catch a smell of something rank and unwashed. Will they look at me and scream? Can they see me? Can they hear me?

  When I was in a time warp last time (not often we get to say things like that, thank goodness) the man I met in the field seemed to be able to communicate very well indeed, but this pair stare right through me and no matter how much I shout and jump up and down it seems I am invisible. Of course, if the laws of physics have been overturned there’s no reason for things to remain constant from one experience to the next. Chaos could break out at any moment. Probably has.

  I push open the door of The Sun, or Ye Sunne, I may as well see what it used to be like. This is, after all, the underage haunt of Carmen and myself (how confused my tenses feel), we have spent many a shadowy hour lurking in the Snug when we should have been in science class. If only I had paid more attention in Physics instead of dropping it for German. The front door in 1960 is a bright shiny red one, but in this unknown year of Our Lord it is a two-part wooden stable affair. Perhaps I should introduce myself with ‘I come from the future’?

  Maybe this is my own form of the moon illusion, maybe I’ve got the wrong set of references and am misinterpreting the phenomenal world?

  There are only a couple of people inside, looking like extras from The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, only a lot scruffier than is usual in Hollywood. They’re all staring gloomily into their pewter tankards as if they don’t know the Renaissance has ever happened.

  In the shadows, in the corner of a high oak booth, there’s a man with his eyes closed, he’s quite young, in his twenties somewhere, and there’s an odd familiar feel to him as if I’ve met him in the present – or what was the present in my immediate past but is now the future, if I ever go back there. Dearie, dearie me.

  The man opens his eyes and looks at me. Not through me, like everyone else, but at me and he gives me a smile, sort of lop-sided and cynical, a smile of recognition, and he raises his tankard to me and I have an overwhelming desire to go over and talk to him because I think he knows me, not the everyday, exterior me, but the interior Isobel. The real me. The true self. But just as I take my first step towards him everything vanishes, just like before.

  It isn’t opening time yet and Ye Olde Sunne Inne seems to be deserted. It’s definitely the present again – beer mats and beer towels and pineapple-shaped ice-buckets. I leave the Snug and wander through the Lounge and the Public Bar and finally find the back door of the kitchens open. I come down a passage full of dustbins and open a door and find myself on the market square again and see Eunice coming out of Green Man’s Ginnel looking puzzled and I hail her from the other side of the square.

  ‘Where did you go?’ she asks crossly when she’s negotiated the traffic. ‘Gephyrophobia,’ she says unexpectedly.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Gephyrophobia – fear of bridges.’

  ‘Right,’ I say vaguely.

  ‘Dromophobia – fear of crossing the street? Potamophobia – fear of rivers? Perhaps,’ Eunice says airily, ‘some deep-seated terror in your past is coming back to revisit you.’

  What is she going on about? ‘What are you going on about, Eunice?’

  ‘You can have a phobia about anything, fire for example – pyrophobia – or insects – acaraphobia – or the sea – thalassophobia.’

  Eunicephobia, that’s what I have. I walk quickly across the road and jump on a bus without looking at the number of it and leave Eunice weaving in between cars, trying to follow me. I personally, for no discernible reason, have discovered a rip in the fabric of time, free-falling through its wormholes and snickets as easily as opening a door.

  Are there other people who are dropping in and out of the past and not bothering to mention it in everyday conversation (as you wouldn’t)? But let’s face it, if it comes right down to it, which is more likely – a disruption in the space-time continuum or some form of madness?

  What is the fabric of time like? Black silk? A smooth twill, a rough tweed? Or lacy and fragile like something Mrs Baxter would knit?

  How can I trust reality when the phenomenal world appears to be playing tricks on me at every turn? Consider the dining-room, for example. I walk into it one day and find it has a quite different air, as if it’s changed in some subtle and inexplicable way. It’s as if someone’s been playing What’s Wrong? from The Home Entertainer, where one person leaves the room and the others move a chair or change a picture so that he (or more likely she, it seems) has to guess what’s different when she comes back in. That’s what it’s like in the dining-room, only more so, as if, in fact, it isn’t really our dining-room at all. As if the dining-room is a looking-glass room, a facsimile, a dining-room pretending to be the dining-room … no, no, no, this way utter madness lies.

  Debbie comes in the room behind me. She’s wearing a home-made version of a Tudor costume that unnerves me for a moment.

  ‘Why are you dressed like that?’ I’ve tried very hard to forget my trip down memory lane to Ye Olde Sunne and this is an unpleasant reminder.

  She looks down at her dress as if she’s never seen it before and then stares at me with her little eyes. ‘Oh, dress rehearsal,’ she says suddenly as if she’s been translating what I said, ‘Midsummer what’sit.’

  I could tell her that she doesn’t smell high enough to be authentic but I don’t bother. ‘Izzie?’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘Do you think there’s something missing from this room?’

  ‘Missing?’

  ‘Or something not quite right. It’s like—’

  ‘It’s like it’s the same room as before and yet it’s not the same?’

  She stares at me in astonishment, ‘That’s it exactly! Does that happen to you as well?’

  ‘No.’

  Perhaps there’s a God (wouldn’t that be amazing) who’s playing some strange game with reality on the streets of trees. Or gods in the plural, more like.

  ‘Anyway, I’m off,’ Debbie says, gathering up her skirts.

  ‘Your head perhaps?’ I query.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing?’

  Will I ever escape the madness that is Arden?

  Midsummer’s Eve. The high-point of the year, more daylight than we know what to do with. In the Garden of Eden, every day was Midsummer’s Eve. We should be jumping over bonfires or doing something magical. Instead Mrs Baxter and I are taking tea on the lawn, just as the master-builder intended. Audrey is languishing in her room. The Dog is sprawled on the grass, dreaming rabbits. Mrs Baxter’s tortoiseshell cat is sleeping under a rhododendron. There’s a fairy ring in the middle of the lawn, the grass flattened as if a miniature spaceship had landed there during the night.

  Mrs Baxter’s made a big glass jug of home-made lemonade and cuts slice after slice from a pink-coloured cake that looks like a bathroom sponge.

  Mrs Baxter knows how to produce an amazing number of variations on a Victoria sponge, each embellished with a different decoration – chocolate cakes labelled with chocolate vermicelli, lemon cakes tagged with jellied lemon slices and coffee cakes signposted with walnut halves that resemble the brains of tiny rodents. Vinny has never even baked a cake, let alone been initiated into the protocol of decorating them.

  Mrs Baxter also eats a lot of her cake of course and sometimes after she’s eaten several slices back to back she’ll put her hand over her mouth and laugh, ‘Dearie me, I’ll be turning into a cake soon!’ What kind of cake would Mrs Baxter turn into? A vanilla sponge, soft and crumbly and full of buttercream.

  ‘No wonder you’re so bloody fat,’ Mr Baxter says to her. Mr Baxter himself has never been seen to eat cake (‘He’s not a cake hand,’ Mrs Baxter says sadly).

  Mrs Baxter always gives me an extra slice of cake, wrapped in a paper napkin, to take home for Charles. Anyone watching me scurrying home from Sithean would think that there was some kind of endless birthday party taking place inside.

  Today, in honour of the sun, Mrs Baxter has strayed from her usual be
ige spectrum and is wearing a sundress with brightly coloured red and white candy stripes, like an awning, or a deck-chair. It has thin red shoelace-straps and a lot of Mrs Baxter’s flesh is on show – her fat arms and dimpled elbows and the voluptuously maternal cleft of her cleavage in which pink cake crumbs have lodged. Mrs Baxter’s skin has turned to the colour of cinder toffee from working in the garden and she’s covered in big freckles like conkers. She looks hot to the touch and I have to stifle a desire to jump down into the chasm of Mrs Baxter’s bosom and get lost there for ever.

  Mrs Baxter sighs happily, ‘It’s just right for playing Human Croquet,’ but doesn’t elaborate on whether she means the lawn or the weather or the mood. ‘Of course,’ she adds, ‘we don’t have enough people just now.’

  Mr Baxter appears suddenly on the lawn, casting his menacing shadow over the tea-tray like an evil sundial and Mrs Baxter’s cup trembles in its saucer. Mr Baxter gazes into the distance, far beyond the Albertine, towards the rise of green that is Boscrambe Woods.

  ‘Cuppie, dear?’ Mrs Baxter enquires, holding up a cup and saucer as if to make it clear what she means. Mr Baxter looks at her and seeing her sun-hat – a red plaited-straw coolie hat – frowns and says, ‘Just come home from the paddy-fields, have you?’ and Mrs Baxter knocks over the milk jug in her hurry to pour Mr Baxter’s cuppie (they are an incredibly clumsy family). ‘Silly me,’ she says with a big smile that owes nothing to being happy. ‘Nothing better to do?’ he asks, raising an eyebrow at the bird-table. It is not the birds he is questioning though.

  Mr Baxter doesn’t like to see people idle. He’s an autodidact (‘That’s how I avoided the pit,’ he explains darkly) and resents people who’ve been ‘given things on a plate’. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t like cake.