Human Croquet

by Kate Atkinson

  For a startled moment I think I must have conjured him into being, albeit fully clothed, for there he is – down on the pavement. The bus stops, ingesting passengers, giving me plenty of time to inspect his lovely dark curls, his smooth cheek and his slender surgeon’s hands. What is he doing in Glebelands when he should be practising life and death at Guy’s? But wait, who is this he is engrossed in conversation with? This person who is tossing her blond hair around like a horse advertising shampoo and simpering and smiling in a very girly way? ‘Hilary!’ I fume helplessly to Eunice. Eunice mimes being sick. ‘What’s he doing here?’ I say, baffled.

  ‘Oh, his mother’s been taken ill,’ Eunice says, without a trace of emotion. ‘Cancer, or something.’

  ‘And what’s he doing with her ?’

  ‘Apparently they’re going out together, have been for some time.’ Is there nothing that Eunice doesn’t know?

  When she’s talking to boys, Hilary has a way of holding her head on one side and half-closing her unnaturally blue eyes, a position that for some reason has the effect of raising testosterone levels in a radius of ten feet. She’s undoubtedly pretty. ‘Pretty awful,’ Eunice says.

  ‘That’s it then, I’m going to have to kill her.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Eunice says reasonably.

  Standing at the kitchen sink doing the washing-up in a half-hearted kind of way I glance out of the window and let out a scream of horror at the face looming fuzzily through the dark glass, a strange Quint-like figure trying to attract my attention. For a moment I think I’ve finally spotted my invisible ghost, but then understanding dawns – this is no ghost, it is Mr Rice standing in the garden, a halo of light from an electric torch illuminating a very unattractive sight. Mr Rice is giving a one-man show. His torchbeam is directed down at his other torchless hand, which is jerking up and down like a jackhammer around the toadstool of his penis. I recoil from the window in horror and when I next dare to look there’s no sign of him.

  When I can finally bring myself to go out and investigate, the garden appears to be devoid of human life, only the faint sound of someone whistling ‘On Top of Old Smokey’ that quickly fades into nothing. The giant hogweed have probably got their hands on him.

  Somewhere over on Sycamore Street an owl hoots softly, a ghostly hoohoohoooo that floats like a feather on the silent air, but Mr Rice has disappeared.

  Mr Rice wakes up slowly from a bad dream in which he closed his eyes and embraced the barmaid Shirley only to open them and find he’s holding the body of a decomposing Vinny, eyeballs hanging out and flesh liquefying. It leaves him feeling quite stupid.

  None the less he chortles to himself at his ruse, he has put his suitcases of samples and a bag with his best clothes in the Left Luggage at Glebelands station, and is planning to walk out of Arden first thing after breakfast as if he was on his way to work and never come back! He owes nearly three months’ rent and has no intention of paying it. Getting out of this dump will be a blessing, he thinks, if he can wake up, that is.

  Mr Rice opens his eyes uneasily and sees double. His head feels thick and heavy, the result no doubt of too much brandy and Babycham in the Tap and Spile last night. He opens his eyes again. He isn’t seeing double, his vision seems to have multiplied into a hundred honeycombed images. Mr Rice moves a leg and sees something thin and black and hairy waving in front of him. His legs were never very manly – but not that bad, surely? He tries the other leg, to the same effect. And then his four other legs.

  Mr Rice screams, but it is a silent scream – all he can hear is an almighty buzzing in his head. He catches a hundred glimpses of himself in the mirror, oh no … it can’t be … this is another nightmare from which he will wake very soon. Surely?

  He tries to move. His centre of gravity has shifted to somewhere else. It’s impossible to co-ordinate so many arms and legs, or maybe they’re just … legs. He decides to try and jump off the bed. He concentrates on all of his legs, one-two-three jump! and finds himself on the window-sill. The window is open, it is just possible, Mr Rice thinks, that he could squeeze through that space. The smell of Mrs Baxter’s apple sauce cooking and a pile of dog excrement down in the garden are like a siren song to Mr Rice as buzzzbuzzzz-buzzzzzzzzzzz he pushes his big body through the gap and unfolds his iridescent wings …

  Next morning I get out of bed and draw the curtains, half-expecting to see Mr Rice still performing in the daylight. But he’s not there, instead, in the morning mist, Mrs Baxter is in the field filling a basket with trompettes de mort. Bundled up in cardigans and wearing an old woollen hat like a tea-cosy she looks ancient, an old hen-wife gathering her potions. I suppose she’ll cook the mushrooms for breakfast. How satisfying it would be if Mr Baxter’s grilled mushrooms really did trumpet his death. Mrs Baxter and Audrey would be so much better off without him. Maybe then Audrey would cheer up and be herself again. Whoever that is.

  I puzzle at what to say to Mr Rice over the breakfast bacon, but find I am saved from this nicety of etiquette as he doesn’t appear at the breakfast table, never appears again in fact.

  ‘Done a runner,’ Vinny concludes, surveying the debris he’s left behind. She brushes a bluebottle away. ‘This stuff’s breeding,’ she says, finding pile after pile of magazines under the bed.

  Vinny burns Mr Rice’s magazine collection on a bonfire, holding each item with the wooden tongs that the Widow used to retrieve washing from the copper with. Mr Rice’s magazines are an altogether more dirty kind of laundry than that which Vinny or Debbie are used to dealing with. We are baffled by Mr Rice’s literary tastes. ‘Why would anyone want to look at pictures of people in macs and gas-masks?’ Debbie asks. I can’t imagine. ‘Poor old Auntie V,’ Debbie laughs, not very nicely.

  ‘Disappeared?’ Charles asks eagerly, but Gordon assures him that Mr Rice has not vanished into the crowded air because he’s had the foresight to take his suit and his suitcases of samples with him. Perhaps what I saw last night was some kind of valedictory salute.

  ‘The bloody bastard bugger,’ Vinny says, throwing his clothes on the bonfire. ‘A real insect,’ Debbie summarizes.

  A plume of matching smoke curls up above the hedge next door, where I find Audrey tending a bonfire of leaves for Mrs Baxter. Her hair is loose and keeps lifting in the breeze and strands of the red-gold cover her face like a veil. ‘We know nothing,’ she says mysteriously, when she catches sight of me. Perhaps she’s referring to the biology exam we’ve just failed.

  The sadness of autumn is in the air, the smell of woodsmoke and earth and things long-forgotten. Over our heads the first skein of geese (the souls of the dead) scissor through the air, heading for their winter home, north of Boscrambe Woods, the creaking noise they make engenders a fit of melancholy in both of us. The Dog lifts its head, watching them make their black wingprints across the sky and gives a sad little whine. ‘Here comes winter,’ Audrey says. It was this time of year when my mother left and sometimes it seems to me that, in autumn, the whole world becomes an elegy for Eliza. Sometimes – like now – the loss of her swamps me, my heart turns hard like a stone and something drags my insides like the tug of a retreating tide. It’s like being a child again, feeling her absence paralysing me until all emotion is reduced to one mantra, I want my mother, I want my mother, I want my mother.

  Audrey sighs deeply as if in empathy. Despite being wrapped in a shapeless old coat of Mrs Baxter’s, she seems to be losing her skinny child’s frame and beginning to bloom, like a very late flower. This new womanhood doesn’t seem to be a result of her eating any more though, in fact, if it’s possible she eats even less, little-bird portions that she pecks dutifully at when someone’s watching her.

  In her kitchen, Mrs Baxter has a pot of mushroom soup on the stove (‘Daddy’s favourite’) and is busy making a blackberry and apple pie with apples from her own tree and the very last of the year’s blackberries from the church graveyard, unconcerned about what her blackberries might have been feeding on (flesh and b
lood). She presses a brown paper bag of apples on me to take home, ‘For an Eve’s pudding, or something.’ But there is no Eve in our house to cook it.

  Mrs Baxter rubs fat into flour, lifting it high in the air and then letting it fall again like fine, soft snow and says, ‘Audrey’s filling out at last, isn’t she?’ She cuts up the apples, slicing the full moons of cored apples into a dozen new moons.

  Mrs Baxter’s face has blossomed with an enormous bruise, like a gorgeous truncated rainbow – violet, indigo and blackberry-blue. ‘Silly me,’ Mrs Baxter says when she catches sight of me looking at it, ‘I tripped over the cat and hit myself on the sideboard.’ The Baxters’ neat tortoiseshell tabby sits indifferently on the window-sill, gazing at the birds feeding at the bird-table in the garden. The kitchen door stands open to let in the bright blue October day outside. Sithean would be such a lovely place if it wasn’t for Mr Baxter.

  Mr Baxter is taking early retirement at the end of the Christmas term, although not through choice. There has been some heavily suppressed scandal at Rowan Street Primary to do with a small boy who had to be hospitalized after one of Mr Baxter’s routine punishment sessions. Mr Baxter is like an overheated boiler that Mrs Baxter spends a lot of time trying to damp down.

  On cue, he storms into the kitchen, destroying the peace, asking Mrs Baxter what the bloody hell she’s done with his pipe and knocking the colander of blackberries all over the kitchen floor and I make a hasty exit in case he’s about to blow up.

  ‘There you are,’ Debbie says when I come in, carrying the apples. ‘Or are you?’

  ‘Pardon?’ We must be playing Lost Identity again.

  Vinny sits at the kitchen table eating a biscuit at the same time as she smokes a cigarette, contemplating a huge, bloody ox heart sitting on a white enamel plate in the middle of the kitchen table like the results of an Aztec sacrifice (I could swear I can see it still pumping). I presume this is our tea for tonight and not the remains of Mr Rice. It doesn’t seem to be Vinny’s heart – it’s too big and anyway her scrawny chest looks intact.

  One of Vinny’s subjects – Pyewacket, a gentlemanly black tom with white bib and tucker and spats – is delicately licking the heart in a way that looks oddly affectionate.

  The cat does not attempt to drink from the saucer of milk which is also on the table, which is just as well as the milk is full of chopped-up fly agaric. ‘Kills the bluebottles,’ Vinny says by way of explanation and drags hard on a roll-up and lets smoke stream out through her nose, so that she looks like a dragon letting off a head of steam.

  The Dog lays its head on Vinny’s knee and starts to drool gently onto her skirt, its expression suggesting it’s giving up its soul to Vinny (whereas in fact it’s wondering if she’ll drop any biscuit crumbs).

  Debbie is too preoccupied to notice any of these assaults on kitchen hygiene. She’s standing at the sink washing her hands over and over again as if she personally had just removed the heart. She is obviously mad. Yesterday I found her trapped in the living-room, watching the mantelpiece to see if anything had moved, quite unable to move herself. ‘If I turn my back for one second they’ll be off,’ she said.

  ‘They?’

  ‘Those candlesticks.’

  ‘Do you see that dog?’ she says to me now and I follow her gaze to Gigi who is ripping an old slipper to shreds in a particularly psychopathic way.

  ‘Yes, I see it.’

  ‘It looks like Gigi, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Very like,’ I agree. ‘Identical, in fact.’

  Debbie drops her voice to a whisper and looks around the room in a paranoid way. ‘Well, it isn’t.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No,’ she says, and gives my sleeve an urgent tug to move me out of Gigi’s earshot. She moves her little piggy snout nearer my ear. ‘It’s a robot!’

  Vinny snorts contemptuously and Gigi responds by snarling, retracting her upper lip to reveal a row of tiny discoloured shark teeth. Pyewacket looks up from his adoration of the ox heart and regards this stand-off with some interest. Chaos, I suspect, is about to break out in the kitchen again.

  ‘A robot? Gigi’s been replaced by a robot?’

  ‘Yes.’ What a bampot, as Mrs Baxter would say, but what can you expect from a woman sharing her one brain cell with a poodle on a turnabout basis. Whose turn it is today is anybody’s guess. I take hold of the Dog’s collar and present it to her like a dog show judge. ‘And what about this Dog, is this the same Dog – or has it also been replaced by a robot?’ To help her guess, the Dog runs through its limited range of facial expressions (sad, sadder, tragic) but she refuses to respond.

  ‘Have you talked to Gordon about all this?’

  ‘Gordon?’ she repeats, giving me one of her mad looks. (Oh no, not him as well.) ‘Yes, Gordon.’ Debbie’s eyes narrow (if that’s possible) and she looks away, chewing her lip and finally says, ‘The person pretending to be Gordon, you mean.’

  ‘Look,’ I say to Gordon when he trudges home from work, a suburban Atlas with the cares of Arden on his shoulders. ‘Look, there really is something wrong with Debbie.’

  ‘I know,’ he says wearily, ‘but I’ve taken her to the GP.’

  ‘And?’

  Gordon shrugs helplessly. ‘He prescribed her some pills, said her nerves were frayed (frayed nerves, what an idea). Poor Debs,’ he adds sadly, ‘it would all be different if she had a baby.’

  To make up for not having a baby, Gordon (the person pretending to be Gordon – who knows, she might be right, after all, Charles and I have had our doubts) does the best he can and takes her out for a meal to the Tap and Spile.

  Charles has taken the Dog for a walk and Vinny and I are watching Coronation Street (Vinny’s a member of the Ena Sharples fan club). She’s preoccupied during the advertising break by the disintegration of her roll-up and keeps picking out shreds of tobacco from her mouth so that she looks like a tortoise trying to eat brown shredded lettuce. She’s got a piece of cigarette paper stuck to her lip as well. She really ought to go back to smoking Woodbines.

  ‘There’s someone at the door,’ Vinny says without taking her eyes off the television screen.

  Vinny is covered in Cats, like someone in a surreal film – three on her lap, one draped around her shoulders, one at her feet. I half-expect to see one on her head in a minute. She could make a tippet out of the next two to die, that would be unusual. (Why do cats sleep so much? Perhaps they’ve been trusted with some major cosmic task, an essential law of physics – such as: if there are less than five million cats sleeping at any one time the world will stop spinning. So that when you look at them and think, what a lazy, good-for-nothing animal, they are, in fact, working very, very hard.)

  Catskins Vinny picks up a toasting-fork and looks as if she’s about to spear Gigi with it. ‘There’s someone at the door,’ she repeats impatiently.

  ‘I didn’t hear anyone.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean there isn’t somebody there,’ she says. (Isn’t this the way the Dog was introduced into the story? I must be having déjà vu, one more alarming little snag in the fabric of time, I suppose.)

  ‘All right, I’m going, I’m going,’ I say when she starts waving the toasting-fork at me.

  I open the back door cautiously, you never know what might be walking abroad – it’s nearly Hallowe’en and there is still the vivid memory of Mr Rice to contend with. I’m half-expecting there to be another dog on the doorstep, Arden is all exits and entrances, its thresholds the places where the interesting things happen. It isn’t a dog, however, it’s a cardboard box. Inside the cardboard box is a baby.

  A BABY!

  I close my eyes and count to ten and then open them again. It’s still a baby. The baby is fast asleep. It’s very small and apparently very new. There’s a piece of ruled paper sellotaped to the box on which someone (not the baby, presumably) has printed in block capitals:

  PLEASE LOOK AFTER ME

  I doubt whether this exhortation is addressed to
me personally, I am not particularly renowned for my nurturing skills, we don’t have much direct experience of babies in Arden, I’ve never even seen one close-up.

  My poor heart’s turned into a little rib-caged bird, there’s something exhilarating about finding the baby – like spotting fish in rivers (or foxes in fields or deer in woods) but at the same time finding the baby is terrifying (tigers in trees, snakes in the grass). And the baby isn’t just a mysterious mis-delivery by the baby shop, it brings with it myth and legend – Moses and Oedipus and the fairy’s changeling.

  Gingerly, I pick up the whole box, I don’t really want to handle the baby in case I damage it (or vice versa).

  ‘Look,’ I say to Vinny, holding out the cardboard box for her inspection.

  ‘Whatever it is, we don’t want any of it,’ she says, pushing it away.

  ‘No, look,’ I insist. She lifts one of the flaps of the box and her mouth falls open in disbelief. ‘What is it?’

  ‘What does it look like?’

  Vinny shrinks away from the cardboard box in the same way other people shrink from rodents. ‘A baby?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She shakes her head in bafflement. ‘But why?’ But this is not the time for existential questions, the baby has opened its new eyes and started to bawl. ‘Take it away,’ Vinny says quickly. I place the box on the floor between us so that we can get used to it slowly.

  Charles comes back with the Dog and we show him the baby, which has given up crying and gone back to sleep. The Dog sticks its head inside the box and wags its tail enthusiastically but then, unfortunately, starts to lick the baby and it wakes up and starts bawling again. Maybe the Dog can look after it, ‘Like Romulus and Remus?’ Charles says. ‘Or Peter Pan.’ (He knows, he is a Lost Boy himself.) The baby’s crying has reached a critical level but unfortunately the Dog is the wrong sex to succour it.

  Charles lifts the baby out of the box as if it’s an unexploded bomb and holds it out from his body with his arms stiff so that the baby, thinking it’s about to be dropped from a great height, starts to scream horribly. Vinny has a tentative go, jiggling it around in a self-conscious way, with a rictus of a smile on her face, but, as you might expect, this only makes matters worse. Luckily, just then Debbie and Gordon come home and although there are a few minutes of complete disbelief, followed by hysteria and ending in furious discussion, the end result is that Debbie ‘will keep the kid’.