Snowflake

by Heide Goody

  “So, we have two problems,” I said. “We need to sort out those foxes and we need to get out of here,” I said. “And we need to do both of those with the minimal damage.”

  “Damage?”

  “I think the little one likes tearing up soft furnishings,” I said, giving a meaningful nod to the soft-top Jaguar.

  James nodded. He went over to the garage door and pointed at some sort of mechanism above his head.

  “This here is the manual winder. If the electricity fails or you find yourself stuck like we are now, it’s the way that you’d open the door.”

  “Brilliant!” I said. “We can do that.”

  “The problem is that Uncle Phil broke the handle off a few weeks before his operation. Getting it fixed was one of the jobs on my list while I’m here.”

  “Not to worry,” I said with a brave smile. “We can sort this out. I’ve even got some snacks to keep our spirits up.”

  I lifted the carrier bag full of cakes that I’d cleaned out of his bread bin earlier and held it open. He grinned and reached inside to grab a cake. At that moment, the red fox ran from its position at the back of the garage and as it rocketed past us at top speed, it grabbed the bag of cakes in its fang-filled mouth and hauled it out of our hands. It disappeared over the soft top of the Jaguar and hid in the gap down the other side. We could hear the sounds of it ripping open packaging as it tore into the cakes.

  “Right, now it’s personal,” I said. “I was looking forward to a cake. We need to trap them and now!”

  We worked our way around the garage and examined the options that we might use to trap a pair of foxes and operate a broken door winder. James peered at the winder and announced that he could probably operate it manually with a pair of pliers and began sorting through a side drawer in search of one.

  Meanwhile, I assembled the basics of a superb fox trap.

  “Check this out,” I said.

  He looked round and checked it out. I generally expect the ‘checking it out’ facial expression to have a bit less scepticism.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  “It starts as a simple washing basket.” I had placed it upside down on the bonnet of the Jaguar and then used a pair of clothes pegs to prop up one end. I had tied the clothes pegs to a piece of string so that any fox that went under the basket would be trapped when I pulled them away.

  “These are foxes, not the Road Runner,” said James.

  “We just need some bait,” I said. “Your job is to steal a cake back from the red fox’s stash in a minute. First, we need to make something more secure to put them into. This won’t hold them for long.”

  I had a roll of netting, and I was sure that we could create a big bag from it, but it took quite a long time. James reluctantly joined in and helped me use string to fasten two huge loops of netting together into a large bag. More string around the top gave us a handy drawstring that we used to hang the bag up from a ladder that was stored along the roof of the garage. In the meantime, the red fox was steadily eating its way through the bag of cakes and the fennec fox trotted back and forth along the shelf, looking down enviously.

  “The little one’s going to be our best bet. If we get some cake under the trap it’ll be straight down,” I said, nudging James.

  He went round to see if he could rescue some cake from the red fox. It slunk under the car as he approached and he was able to retrieve a Mr Kipling’s French Fancy. We waved it around a bit so the fennec fox wouldn’t miss it and then we put it under our trap and stepped back to wait, holding onto the string. We didn’t have to wait for very long. It was obviously hungry and it went straight under the washing basket and gobbled up the cake. They probably don’t get many French Fancies in the African desert. I pulled the string and the washing basket fell off the pegs, trapping the tiny fox. I let James transfer it to the bag hanging from the ceiling, which he did with a minimum of fuss once he’d donned a pair of gardening gloves. Now we had to repeat the process with the red fox. Unfortunately, it had eaten nearly all of the available bait. James went round to see if there was any more he could salvage.

  “Greedy bugger’s eaten the lot,” he reported. “He looks a lot less perky now though.”

  I went to see what he meant. The red fox looked back at us from its hiding place underneath the car with a glazed and slightly unfocused expression. We edged closer and it moved away, but in a very half-hearted and lethargic manner.

  “It’s got bellyache,” said James.

  “I once ate a whole Viennetta,” I said, sympathetically. “With my hands. Like it was a choc ice.”

  “Maybe we can just grab it,” he suggested.

  I nodded. It was as good a plan as any. He lunged forward with his gloved hands, but the fox found some last reserve of energy to shoot out of its space and scramble up the shelving. It made it about halfway to the top before sagging and falling backwards onto the car. Unfortunately, it displaced most of the contents of the shelf as it scrabbled for purchase. Rollers, trays and (most significantly) tins of paint clattered down onto Uncle Phil’s Jag. A tin of crimson paint burst open and splattered across the soft top and down the paintwork at the sides.

  James made a low moaning sound as he saw the state of the car, but all credit to his powers of focus, he grabbed the fox as it bounced onto a paint-free part of the car and wrested it into the bag.

  We stood and looked at the mess. It was all over the car, and all over me as well.

  I picked up the paint can and read out what it was. “Vinyl matt emulsion. Can be re-coated in thirty minutes.”

  “What does it say about cleaning the brushes?” asked James.

  “After use, clean brushes with plenty of water,” I read.

  I looked up at James. “We can get it off with water!”

  “Only if we can do it in thirty minutes. Maybe we can find a car wash...” His face fell. “But I’ve been drinking.”

  “You can’t drive.”

  “I can’t drive.”

  The look of panicked disappointment on his face made me really want to help.

  “I can drive,” I said. I didn’t mention that I’d had my very first lesson ever that very day. It was unhelpful, I thought, given the circumstances.

  “Right! Let’s do this then,” he said. “I’ll get the pliers on this winder, we can put the foxes in the back and take them... somewhere after we’ve washed the car.”

  “Yeah!” I said. “Although I do have paint all over my clothes. I’ll make a mess of the upholstery if I get in like this.”

  “Not a problem,” said James. “See that hanger up at the end of the shelf? Uncle Phil’s beekeeping outfit. Get into that and it’ll be fine.”

  I wrestled my way into Uncle Phil’s beekeeping suit while James worked on the winder. The suit turned out to be something like an elaborate boilersuit with a complicated hood. James got the garage door up and found the car key on a hook at the side of the garage. We put the bag containing the foxes into the boot, where they screamed pitifully. I prepared myself for my second driving experience of the day.

  Chapter 20

  I wanted to maintain an aura of calm confidence, so I settled silently into the driver’s seat. It felt very different to Terence’s tiny car. The seat was low and made of leather and the dashboard featured lots of expensive-looking wood, like an old person’s sideboard or a Wetherspoons pub. James sat in the passenger seat and handed me the key. I put it into the ignition, but before I turned it I tried to remember all of the checks that Terence had drilled into me. I fiddled with the mirror and the seat and then turned my attention to the gearbox. It was some ludicrous contraption featuring letters and numbers. I stared at it, as if it was the Countdown Conundrum, in an effort to will those jumbled letters into something meaningful, but there were no vowels, and two D’s. I’d just have to work my way through them using trial and error. My feet went to the pedals but something was wrong. There were only two.

  “Is your uncle’s car defi
nitely driveable?” I asked James.

  “Oh yes, he looks after it very carefully. It’s in tip-top vintage condition, but he only takes it out on special occasions.”

  So, it was safe to assume that there wasn’t a missing pedal. I turned the key in the ignition, knowing that the only way to find out how to work this car was by experimentation.

  “Is it worth a lot of money then, this car?” I asked, keeping my tone casual.

  “Not sure to be honest, but Uncle Phil loves it like a baby.”

  The engine of Uncle Phil’s baby purred away and we clearly weren’t going to move until I did something, so I tried the pedals. Nothing happened, so I turned my attention to the mysterious gear stick. It went P R N D D 3 2. Maybe they were in code and I just had to work through them one at a time. I moved the gear stick tentatively to R and we slid straight back into the shelving with a small bang. Luckily, it didn’t make any more paint fall onto the car. I tried not to look at James as I quickly discovered which pedal was the brake and then tried N. That was no good, so I tried D and we crept slowly forward. I was jubilant. The car was moving in the correct direction and I also knew how to stop it if I needed to! I went down the drive at the side of the house and stopped at the kerb. I tried the other pedal. It made the car move again and I turned us safely onto the road. I had complete mastery of the pedals. There was a go pedal and there was a stop pedal. It was all I needed. The car kept moving. I felt compelled to move the stick to the position 2 and it worked! I was in second gear and I hadn’t broken anything yet. I realised that I had no idea where we were going.

  “Where is there a car wash?” I asked James.

  “I think there’s one next to the petrol station near the big traffic lights,” he said. I had no idea what he was talking about but he gave me lefts and rights to take, so I followed his directions. We’d been driving for a few minutes, the engine making quite a lot of noise because I was scared to move it to another position, but James simply nodded.

  “You’re just like Uncle Phil. He likes to hear the engine revving as well.”

  I smiled as if I was a complete petrolhead and was doing this on purpose.

  We got to the petrol station and pulled onto the forecourt.

  I went to buy a token from the yellow-haired woman in the cashier’s booth. On the way over, I scanned the dark road for green hoodie-wearing stalkers. I’d already decided that if I saw one he was getting a knee in the goolies and an elbow to his position as sort-of-boyfriend.

  “If you take a soft-top through it’s at your own risk,” said the cashier. She frowned. “Can you hear screaming?”

  I harkened. It was the foxes.

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s coming from your car.”

  “Oh, that. My boyfriend’s into thrash metal. Devil Preacher, Terminal Panda, Thunderquake, um, all the bands. That’s the chorus of Eat My Fruit, Bitch. It’s a classic.” I screamed along a bit.

  “Thrash metal?” said the cashier.

  “Yup. Just come back from a concert in fact.”

  “In a biohazard suit?” she said.

  “It’s a beekeeper’s suit,” I said, “and, yes, there’s an interesting story behind why I’m wearing it.”

  “Oh, yes?”

  “Yes,” I said and took my token and went back to the car.

  “Everything all right?” asked James as I got in.

  “Peachy,” I said.

  I drove the car into the car wash, putting the token into the machine on the way in. I stopped at the bump in the floor as instructed and we waited. After a few moments, the car was sprayed with water and the shaggy blue brush monsters at the sides started to whizz round. They went down the sides of the car and whirred and chunked as they went around the back. But it was the horizontal roller on top that I was worried about. As it came onto the soft top, the fabric of the roof sagged down towards our heads.

  “Should be getting a good cleaning,” said James. He was working hard on that optimistic tone. He wasn’t very good at it.

  As the brushes moved along, they dragged the soft top along slightly, pushing it slowly into the down position.

  “No!” yelled James. A gap appeared and water started to pour into the car. We both reached up, but with our seat belts on we fell short. We scrambled to release the seat belts and tried to pull the roof back into place, but there was nothing to get a grip on, and water was running down our arms.

  “This is terrible!” he shouted over the cascade.

  “We need to do it from outside!” I yelled.

  I timed my exit for that moment when the side brushes were out of the way. I nipped out, skilfully. Seriously, it was like a scene from Indiana Jones and the Car Wash of Major Inconvenience. I climbed onto the bonnet and James was beside me. From here we could reach over the windscreen and pull on the soft roof, shutting it again. I had the left side and James had the right. I turned briefly to grin at our small triumph, but the brushes came over again and I buried my face between my outstretched arms. It wasn’t a painful experience, but the menace and noise of the automated machine and the complete soaking that I got made it seem as though the car wash lasted for much longer than it really did.

  When the brushes had all retracted and the machinery fell quiet, I dared to open my eyes. James looked as appalled as I did. We both had the imprint of a wiper blade across our face, like a battle scar. We carefully slid off the car, our legs a bit wobbly.

  “It’s done a good job on the paint,” I said, looking at the roof. I pulled open the door and was pleased to see that the interior was not awash with water. I shook myself, in an effort to get the excess water off Uncle Phil’s beekeeping suit and slid back inside.

  There was a mournful howling coming from the boot and we discussed where we should release the foxes. It was fully dark now, so we drove to the park by the airport and pulled up in the small car park. We wrestled the bag out of the boot and unfastened it to release the foxes. They ran off into the night.

  We were both wet through and shivering with cold, so we got back into the car, worked out how to put the heater on and drove Uncle Phil’s baby back to its garage. If you’ve ever wondered how it feels to have stiffened emulsion drying against your skin at the same time as wearing an outer layer that’s soaking wet, I can tell you it’s a miserable experience, so when James offered me use of the bathroom and produced from somewhere a set of women’s clothes I wasn’t about to ask questions.

  I came downstairs wearing clean clothes and feeling almost normal. James handed me a tumbler with a thin layer of something potent and warming, which I sipped gratefully.

  “So?” he said, giving me a strange look. “Uncle Phil says I need to ask you about balloon animals.”

  Chapter 21

  James topped up our glasses when I’d finished my explanation. When he stood, I could see that his brows were knitted. I could have kicked myself. What sort of idiot would come clean about making a giant condom order just because the button was there and their brother was being annoying? The sort of idiot who knew that Uncle Phil was available for easy cross-checking. Maybe I could have woven a plausible lie that made me look less stupid and shallow, but it was too late now.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to make you angry.”

  “Oh, I’m not angry,” he said, his face softening. “That’s my concentrating face. I was trying to think of some practical suggestions. I was wondering if the university could be persuaded to take them off your hands for freshers’ week? They’ve given them away before, although I think they’re trying to play down the idea that freshers’ week is a giant sex party.”

  “Oh.” I was stunned. “That’s actually a great idea.”

  “I’ll have a word with the vice-chancellor, see if I can sell it to her. She can be a bit old-fashioned.” I couldn’t help a small snuffle of laughter at that. “What?” he said.

  “Old-fashioned,” I said, nodding towards the dry clothes he had changed into (which included
a knitted cardigan for goodness sake!). “That’s like the cat calling the pottle black, or whatever the saying is.”

  He flopped back and rolled his eyes, amused. “Yeah. I know I’m not exactly down with the kids.”

  “No.”

  “Elena used to tell me I was trapped in another decade.”

  “Elena?”

  He shook his head and it seemed it was shook at more than just my question.

  “Elena is my ex-wife. Theo’s mom. Things are…” He pulled a face. “This evening…”

  “Were you out with her this evening?” I asked. I had no idea what the situation was, but he clearly hadn’t had a fun time.

  He sighed heavily. “No. God, no. That would have been a different kind of terrible evening. No, we haven’t seen Elena since she left. It’s been over a year now.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  He raised his tumbler. “You need another drink?” he asked. “And that’s code for ‘I need another drink’.”

  He took our glasses and filled them at the drinks cabinet.

  “This evening, I went out to see a friend of Elena’s, Pippa, who said that Elena had been in touch. It turned out that I had been invited out under false pretexts. Pippa had planned the whole thing as a date. Perhaps I should be flattered. Should I be flattered?”

  “Do you feel flattered?” I said, taking the fresh glass. James had been a bit liberal with the measures but it was a very pleasant and cosyfying drink so I wasn’t going to complain.

  “No. I felt cheated,” said James. “I was an idiot not to realise what I was walking into. It didn’t go well. I couldn’t wait to get back here.”

  A nugget of guilt took hold at this point. “Was that because you were worried about Theo?” I asked. I didn’t say the words ‘because you’d left him with the babysitter from Hell’ but then I probably didn’t need to.

  He looked thoughtful. “Perhaps it has something to do with Theo,” he said. “Not that I thought he was in any immediate danger, but I mean, the stakes are higher when you have a child. There’s a feeling that you can’t just go round having fun.”