Human Croquet

by Kate Atkinson

  The weather begins to grow colder and colder. And then colder. Perhaps this is the beginning of Charles’ eternal winter, a glacial spell cast over the land? I’m used to the cold of Arden, I would be useful in polar experiments – how long can a five-foot-ten-inch, ten-and-a-half-stone girl last in the Antarctic without special thermal clothing? For ever if you were bred in Arden.

  I’m trying to keep warm, sitting in my room, wearing gloves, scarf and hat and wrapped in my eiderdown like a Sioux Indian. The oil-fired central-heating, insisted on by Debbie at such great expense, only works sluggishly at ground level. I can feel my blood congealing and my marrow growing ice crystals, my bones preparing to shatter like icicles. It’s an extreme test of my polar constitution, but I’m surviving, despite the fact that every time I exhale I almost disappear in a white cloud of frosted air. Why can’t we just hibernate, like the squirrels and the hedgehogs? Wouldn’t that make more sense? I could curl up under a great pile of quilts and eiderdowns and only poke my nose out when the air has begun to warm up again in spring.

  I’m trying to write an essay on Twelfth Night – ‘Appearances can be deceptive: discuss’. I like Shakespeare’s masquerading heroines, his Violas and his Rosalinds, if it came down to it I’d rather be one of them than a Hilary. If I was a Viola I would have a Sebastian to twin me, one face, one voice, one habit, but two persons (an apple cleft in two). Perhaps incest wouldn’t be so bad if it was with someone you were so close to. Malcolm Lovat, for example.

  I’m reminded of Mr Primrose – Rosalind and Ganymede, Viola and Cesario – in the same body. I suppose it’s all a matter of perception really – what you see depends on what you think you’re seeing. And anyway, how can we tell if what we’re seeing is real? Reality seems to go out the window when perception comes in the door. And, if it comes right down to it, how do we know there’s such a thing as reality? Dearie, dearie me, soon I will be as solipsistic as Bishop Berkeley. Do I even know who I am? ‘To thine own self be true,’ Gordon says occasionally (although not lately). But to which one?

  Twelfth Night, I write with a sigh, with some difficulty because of the gloves, is about darkness and death – the music and the comedy only serve to highlight what lies beyond the pools of golden light – the dark, the inevitability of death, the way time destroys everything. (‘But, Isobel,’ my English teacher, Miss Hallam, protests kindly, ‘it’s one of his lyrical comedies.’)

  If I could go back in time (which I can, of course, I know) and meet Shakespeare, I could ask him to verify my reading of the play. That would be a surprise for Miss Hallam – ‘Yes, Miss Hallam, but Shakespeare himself says that the carpe diem theme of Twelfth Night is, by definition, a morbid one …’ Of course, Miss Hallam would just think that I’m off my head.

  I look out of the window at the bare black branches of the Lady Oak, scrimshawed against the ivory of a tea-time sky. Troops of crows are racing the twilight to reach the shelter of its branches. The rooks settle themselves quickly into the branches of the tree and when the last wing has been rustled into position and the last caw has faded beyond an echo, you wouldn’t know that the tree is full of birds unless you’d stood there yourself and watched them disguise themselves as black leaves.

  Soon it will be the year’s midnight and I can feel the solstice blues coming on me. And the rain it raineth every day. I should be out amongst the Christmas lights of Glebelands, sitting in the Three Js Coffee Bar – even a milky coffee and a Blue Riband with Eunice would be preferable to this melancholy. I am made of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.

  I sink down on my back, cocooned in the eiderdown, drugged by boredom and cold, and comfort myself with imagining that this is St Agnes Eve – any minute my dream lover (Malcolm Lovat) will cross the threshold and ravish me and carry me away from this dreariness. On cue, there’s a knock at my bedroom door.

  ‘Come in,’ I shout hopefully, but it’s no dream lover, only Richard Primrose, standing in the doorway, shuffling his feet (a strange concept) nervously as if he needs to go to the toilet. ‘How did you get in here?’ I demand, startled by his extreme ugliness.

  ‘Your mum let me in,’ he says, aggrieved at being accused of breaking and entering.

  ‘My mum?’ I reply, startled for a moment until I realize he means the Debbie-mother.

  ‘Congratulations,’ Richard says awkwardly.

  ‘On what?’

  ‘The baby.’

  ‘The baby?’ I’m not at all sure we should be congratulated on the baby, its screams are even now bouncing off the flock wallpaper on the staircase below as if someone was about to cut it up and put it in a pie. ‘Is that why you’re here?’

  ‘No,’ he says gruffly and wrinkles his nose at the smell of sadness. ‘I was wondering if you wanted to go out?’

  ‘Go out?’ I echo blankly. (It’s pouring with rain, why would I want to go out?)

  ‘Go out,’ he repeats peevishly, enunciating the words loudly and clearly as if I might be a foreigner. Or an idiot. He’s staring so intently at a point behind my left shoulder that I turn round to see what, or who, is there. Nothing and nobody, needless to say.

  ‘Go out,’ I repeat cautiously. ‘Do you mean [surely not] on a date?’

  ‘Well,’ he says, looking sullen, ‘we don’t have to call it that if you don’t want to.’

  A wave of mild hysteria begins to roll over me. ‘What shall we call it then? A fig? A prune?’ Richard flushes in an unattractive way that highlights his rampant acne and unexpectedly lurches towards me and pushes me down on my bed. He’s surprisingly heavy, he must be made of some dense alien material, I can feel the air being squeezed out of my lungs. He kisses me, if you can call it that, in a disgusting, slurpy, slippery kind of way, trying to push his tongue up against the portcullis of my teeth. Where’s a time warp when you need one? Or the Dog? Or a woodcutter?

  When Richard’s tongue discovers my gums he starts getting very excited and he has to shift his position to accommodate a body part that’s swelling faster than yeast, giving me an opportunity to free my knee and jerk it into his bulky groin. He rolls off the bed and on to the floor, clutching his detumescence, before scrambling up and, spitting, ‘You bitch, I was going to invite you to a party, but I wouldn’t now if you paid me,’ and turns on his heel and stomps downstairs.

  ‘Drop dead,’ I shout after him. The unbelievable cheek of it – I would sooner have an amorous relationship with the Dog than Richard. Indeed, it makes you question why bestiality is so frowned upon and yet sexual intercourse with someone like Richard is considered perfectly normal.

  Anyway, I don’t need Richard and his parties, I have my own to go to. A party given by no less than Hilary. She hands me the invitation as I come out of English, handwritten on a little white card – Dorothy, Hilary and Graham have pleasure in inviting you to their Christmas Party – to be held on Christmas Eve. ‘You don’t have to bring a present or anything,’ she says, looking less than enthusiastic about inviting me. I’m baffled. Why on earth is she inviting me? Is she confusing me with someone else? My doppelgänger (perhaps she’s the kind of girl who gets invited to parties)?

  Perhaps Hilary is planning some dreadful revenge on me for having inadvertently stepped into her dainty girlfriend shoes and being introduced to Malcolm’s newly erased mother? (For she has died apparently. I have been round to offer my condolences but there was no-one home.)

  ‘Oh,’ says Mrs Baxter, thrilled at my good fortune, ‘I’ll make you a party dress, shall I?’

  ‘Are you sure? So close to Christmas?’

  ‘Och, don’t worry [“dinnae fash yersel”], I’ll make time.’ What will she make it from – the fabric of time itself, or will she unravel it and knit it up anew?

  The Dog has pushed its way restlessly into my room (sometimes it feels compelled to try all the beds in the house in one night) and lies like a dead weight across the bottom of my bed. In its sleep it emits radio signals, high-pitched little whimpers that mean it’s d
reaming about rabbits. The Dog and I (another musical waiting to be made) wake up with a simultaneous start.

  I know we’ve just heard a very odd noise even though everything is deathly silent now. I creep downstairs, the Dog padding silently after me. The clock in the living-room strikes two and the chimes echo through the house. The Dog overtakes me and leads the way to the old conservatory. There is broken glass on the tiled floor from a pane where a bird crashed through once like a falling star. There is soil on the floor, spilt from broken clay pots. The smell of neglect is everywhere. Some few of the Widow’s hardier cacti still survive, their prickled bodies grey and dusty.

  Then suddenly the whole conservatory is filled with a weird green light, a fluorescent neon green, coming from above. The green light is moving, passing over the house, descending to hover over the garden. It’s like a huge green jellyfish, pulsing with energy. White lights like arc lights seem to move around at random inside it, causing it to pulsate more. The Dog, ears flattened as if it’s flying, crouches on the tiled floor and whines.

  I can feel the green light flooding me, filling me with the warm static feeling that comes from thunder and sunlamps – not ultra violet, but ultra green. My mind begins to feel extremely agitated, as if it’s full of large, angry wasps buzzing around in a frenzy trying to escape. The smell of rotten eggs invades the conservatory.

  I feel dizzy, gravity isn’t working properly for me, I’m going to become detached from the ground, rise up like a slow rocket, out of the hole in the conservatory roof. I forget to breathe. My whole body is being sucked up into the green jellyfish, I’m several feet off the floor.

  Then, shockingly, it’s gone, disappeared – absolutely and completely – as if it was never there. The night is black again, the conservatory dismal. I look down and one ancient cactus has turned green and quick and a scarlet flower like an angel’s trumpet is slowly opening at the end of a spiny finger. I reach out to touch it and prick my own finger on a spine.

  I leave the conservatory, it doesn’t feel like a dream, the steps I take seem real, the air is cold and I’m very tired. What was that? The past? The future? My people from another planet come to take me home? Surely if an alien spaceship had just spent several minutes hovering over the house someone else would have noticed? I pass Charles’ room, I can hear him snoring soundly. Poor Charles, what he wouldn’t give for these experiences. What I wouldn’t give not to have them.

  The next morning there are no traces of green jellyfish, no alien mementoes left behind, just a red swelling on my pricked finger and the scarlet flame of the cactus flower. ‘That’s a miracle,’ Gordon says when he sees it.

  This is ridiculous. There should be some rule about time warps (no more than one per chapter, for instance) and surely you should at least be able to tell what bit of the space-time continuum you’re in.

  If time isn’t always going forward – which apparently it isn’t in my case – then fundamental laws of physics are being broken. What about the Second Law of Thermodynamics? What about death, if it comes to that? Experimentally, I drop one of Arden’s old flower-sprigged plates on the kitchen floor where it smashes nicely. ‘What are you doing?’ a harassed-looking Debbie asks, an even more harassed-looking baby slung over her shoulder.

  ‘I’m just watching this plate.’ (Debbie, of all people must surely understand this.) ‘I’m conducting an experiment to see if time can move backwards – if it can, then the pieces of this plate will rise up and re-form.’ But the Second Law of Thermodynamics holds good and the plate remains in pieces on the floor.

  ‘You’re mad, you are,’ Debbie says, stuffing the rubber teat of a bottle into the baby’s mouth.

  ‘You’re one to talk,’ I say before having to rescue a choking baby. I haul it all the way up to my room and feed it lying on my bed while attempting a critical analysis on one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I don’t suppose this is how he imagined his readers. If he imagined them at all.

  The party dress Mrs Baxter is making for me is made from a peculiar synthetic material that crackles when it moves. It’s pale pink, covered in darker pink roses and has cap sleeves and a sweetheart neckline and a big skirt that Mrs Baxter has made even bigger by lining it with a stiff pink net-petticoat so that it’s begun to resemble a big pink puffball.

  In the pattern-book it seemed like the dream-dress, the kind that’s so sublimely gorgeous that the girl inside it is transfigured into a ravishing beauty – the focus of all the eyes in the room. (This is never true, as we know, but that doesn’t stop people believing it.) I might have done better to go and wish under the Lady Oak for my three dresses (one is never enough) – the first as silver as the moon, the second as gold as the sun and the last one the colour of the heavens, sprinkled with silver-sequin stars.

  Mrs Baxter has had to make several adjustments already to the pink dress. ‘I swear if I watch you long enough I can see you grow,’ she grumbles pleasantly, letting the hem down for the second time. The dress has just made the transition to my body from the tailor’s dummy that stands guard in the corner of Mrs Baxter’s bedroom. When it was worn by the dummy it looked reasonably presentable, but on me it doesn’t look right at all somehow.

  I look like a huge pink amoeba, grown to fill the whole of the cheval-mirror. Mrs Baxter, on her knees at my feet, says something unintelligible through a mouthful of pins and then starts to choke and spit all the pins out like a hail of Lilliputian arrows or a shower of elf-shot.

  She cocks her head to one side like a deranged spaniel and says, ‘I thought I heard Daddy’s car.’ She shakes her spaniel-head. ‘But it’s not. I’m as mad as a mushroom, I really am. I’m growing quite dottled, I’m such a bag of nerves.’

  A bag of nerves. What a truly dreadful expression that is. And what kind of a bag? A handbag, such as Mr Primrose’s Lady Bracknell might have carried? Or a soft sack (a bag of frayed nerves), like a dead cat’s body?

  Mr Baxter’s baleful presence is watered down in the Baxters’ bedroom – a cut-glass ash-tray and a copy of the Reader’s Digest on his bedside-table and a pair of neatly folded blue-striped pyjamas on the left-hand pillow are the only indications of his presence. I can’t imagine what it must be like lying so close to ‘Daddy’ every night. Mrs Baxter’s own night attire – a pink brushed-nylon nightie – sits demurely on the right-hand pillow and a pair of pink furred slippers (‘baffies’) are parked by the side of the bed. The rest of the bedroom is sprigged and ruched in a very feminine way that must really get on Mr Baxter’s own nerves.

  Mrs Baxter pins up my hem. ‘Look at me,’ she says, catching sight of herself in the mirror, ‘I look like a tattie bogle.’ She does look a bit of a mess, her hair needs a shampoo and set and her make-up is patchy, as if she put it on in the dark. It’s not helped much by the red marks on her cheekbones – like Iroquois war-paint – where Mr Baxter has punched her. ‘Silly me, I walked into a door,’ she adds, fingering her war-paint. ‘I’ve really let myself go, haven’t I?’ she says, regarding her reflection sadly. (But where has she let herself go to?)

  ‘There,’ Mrs Baxter says, as she puts the last pin in place in the hem of the pink dress and I twirl round to view myself, filling the cheval-mirror with whirling pink roses (for an uncomfortable second I am reminded of the young Vinny’s turquoise party dress). My mother should have been here, handing out fashion tips – telling me that pink isn’t my colour, that the roses are too full-blown and that I need a tight belt at my waist to make me look shorter. ‘Very nice, dear,’ Mrs Baxter says instead.

  When the fitting of the pink dress is over we go down to the kitchen to eat cakes that are appropriate to our madness. Mushroom cakes – little pastry cups filled with sponge and topped with coffee buttercream, the butter-cream scored with a fork to look like gills and a marzipan stalk stuck in the middle. Mrs Baxter doesn’t, thank goodness, attempt to model a cake on the Death Caps that have spawned beneath the Lady Oak.

  I take a cake to Audrey who’s sitting in the livi
ng-room, by the fire, with a listless look on her face. She looks at the little cake as if it was poisonous and whispers, ‘No, thanks.’ The baby’s wailing drifts on the cold wind from Arden and Audrey flinches. ‘Audrey … what’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she says miserably. (‘And … um …’ I say helplessly to Mrs Baxter, ‘how much does it cost to send a shawl surface mail to South Africa?’

  ‘Dearie me,’ she says with a puzzled little frown, ‘I’m not sure – it was Audrey that took it to the post for me.’) I suppose in the hatch and brood of time it might all come right.

  At the back door of Arden I bump into Gordon, coming home from work. ‘Hello, Izzie,’ he says sadly. He’s wearing a dull beige overcoat and carrying a battered leather briefcase. The baby is parked in the kitchen in its pram, sobbing quietly as if it’s forgotten how to do anything else. Debbie has moved on to trying to control the pantry, reorganizing everything into alphabetical order. She’s got as far as the jam – of which, thanks to Mrs Baxter, we have a great deal – and has just started a sub-classification for it – Apricot, Blackcurrant, Damson. After every couple of jars she has to go over to the kitchen sink and wash her hands like some strangely domesticated Lady Macbeth.

  Gordon gives me a dismal look. I think of his sailor-suited former self and feel very sorry that it should have come to this.

  ‘I thought the baby would make everything all right,’ he mutters (I don’t think that’s how babies work), ‘but it’s just made it worse.’ Tenderly, Gordon lifts the baby from its pram and murmurs, ‘Poor thing,’ into its red-gold floss. He carries the baby upstairs and the next time I see it is through the half-open door of the second-best bedroom where it’s sleeping peacefully with the Dog lying guard by its cot. (The Dog is very subdued since it time-travelled.) We really should take it back to where it came from, or at least return it to the baby shop and explain it’s been sent to us by mistake.