Funderland

by Nigel Jarrett

  ‘Looks like a good place for a stop, Max,’ Mr Charlton said. ‘Everyone in favour say Aye.’ They all said ‘Aye!’ and the car pulled on to a patch of ground by a five-bar gate. When they were seated, Mr Charlton said ‘Watch!’ and produced six lumps of sugar from his right shirt sleeve.

  ‘How did you do that?’ Kate laughed, squatting on the blanket her mother had fetched from the boot, along with a Thermos flask from under the dashboard.

  ‘He put them up there when you weren’t looking, stupid,’ Max said.

  ‘Max, don’t be so nasty to your sister,’ Mr Charlton said. ‘We’re on holiday.’

  ‘Does that mean it’s all right at any other time?’ Kate’s mother asked, letting the words slip out under her breath.

  ‘Now look what you’ve done,’ Mr Charlton said. ‘You’ve upset your mother.’

  ‘She’s not my mother,’ snapped Max, turning his gaze on Kate. ‘And she’s not my sister.’

  ‘Gosh, we are in a tiz, today,’ said Mr Charlton. ‘Aren’t they, Kate?’

  Mr Charlton decided that they would break their journey at Barnstaple. Kate heard them discussing it after he had booked their St Ives B&B. He’d told her mother he had the money. Max, in a better mood, announced that they stopped over before because it was a long journey: twelve hours, especially if the Beachley-Aust ferry was busy, which it had been, with all those cars on the slipway dipping towards the water and their drivers gazing at the estuary’s glitter. Mr Charlton only used the crossing for holidays. At other times, his car stacked with polish, mops and cylinders of Vim, he would take the long route through Gloucester. One evening, with her mother knitting by the fire and Max fiddling with his Meccano, he’d shown Kate his itinerary for the following day, a Friday, and his list of orders in places she’d never heard of – Aylburton, Minsterworth, Dursley, Easter Compton. Drawing close to her, he’d said: ‘I want you to be at the front door when I get home at six.’ She’d caught Max turning to her with a surly expression. She’d done what her stepfather had asked, to find that he’d returned with more than his outward stock. But her glee had been forced because Max had already told her that every weekend at a depot in Bristol his father would replenish the wares he kept piled in the spare bedroom. Because she hadn’t let on, she felt Max taking a step closer to her, and she’d somehow feared keeping her knowledge from his father, her stepfather.

  ‘Let’s be having you all,’ Mr Charlton said when they’d finished, tapping the end of another cigarette on the lid of his silver case. His cigarette fingers had iodine stains on them, which turned a buttercup yellow after scrubbing but never went away. He had shown her once.

  Max was already sitting in the car. She saw her mother struggle to her feet.

  ‘Are you all right, mam?’ she asked.

  ‘Just a bit of tummy ache, love,’ her mother said as she got up in two goes, weightlifter fashion. Her stepfather didn’t notice because he was reading a road map with his back to her and peering into the distance.

  ‘Do you know, Max, we’ve travelled this way many times but I’m never sure of the turn,’ he said. When he gulped in smoke it stayed inside him for ages until he decided to let it go, dragonlike, through his nose. Max watched Kate and her mother approaching the car. He gave them another of his gruff looks, which made Kate feel that he regarded them as two hitchhikers they’d regretfully picked up.

  But when they were chugging along again and Mr and Mrs Charlton were speaking to each other in the front – sharing a joke, in fact, because Kate saw her mother turn her head away and blush secretly – Max became friendlier.

  ‘He always gets lost about here,’ Max confided in a whisper. ‘It’s all because he likes whizzing along country roads. One summer we ended up in Woolacombe. He told mum he meant to go there, to show us the long beach. After that, if he did something he didn’t mean to, mum called it ‘a Woolacombe’. Like the time he put weed killer on the lawn and killed the grass. He said he did it to start again, to make a proper lawn instead of the scraggy one we had. A Woolacombe, mum said.’

  Kate didn’t like Max. He smelled like a dog smells when it has been out in the wet and his legs appeared to grow longer each day. His hands were always moving in his pockets, like Bobby Berridge’s had been that time he smuggled a white mouse into class. She was glad when Mr Charlton caught her attention again in the rear view mirror. With his thumb and finger he pretended to pluck out his left eye, buff it on his lapel and replace it – the wrong way, because he was cross-eyed. So he repeated the trick and got it right.

  When he saw Kate’s face light up, Max sneered and stared fixedly at the back of his father’s head, where Brylcreem had made teeth of his plastered hair. ‘It’s Brylcreem that makes your collars dirty,’ his mother had once said. They’d always argued. When she’d left, in a grey suit and smelling of rosewater, she’d knelt down with tears in her eyes and hugged him. If only his father had known where things were – collars, studs, the road to Barnstaple with Arlington Court sailing by in the distance – she might have been in the front instead of that stupid woman in her stupid beret, and he’d have been in the back alone rather than with the person who might have been his girlfriend if she hadn’t been his stepsister. He suddenly felt hungry.

  ‘Not long now, Max,’ Mr Charlton said, checking that it was Kate who was reassured.

  Because they’d had to wait for the ferry, it was approaching dusk when Barnstaple appeared in the distance. They passed a fairground with anguished, riderless horses rising and falling on a carousel, and began driving slowly down a back street of guest houses. In the lighted windows of some, old people were silently eating.

  ‘There it is: Pilot House,’ said Mrs Charlton. ‘Doesn’t look as if there’s anyone in.’

  ‘Don’t fret, Ez,’ Mr Charlton said. ‘It’s all booked.’

  Kate’s father had never called her mother ‘Ez’. But he also couldn’t have told you what card you’d picked from a shuffled pack or where a button was hidden under a row of three shifting thimbles. ‘Ez’ was something new, and at everything new, Kate’s mother turned to her daughter, lifted her shoulders and looked helpless.

  The sight of Max eating made Kate retch. It wasn’t so much eating as noisy shovelling. The landlady, dressed as if to go out, was what Kate’s father would have called ‘hoity-toity’. She served them herself, telling Mr Charlton that her ‘girl’ had gone home and implying that her attentions were therefore a privilege, though Kate thought her turned-up nose might also have been a reaction to Max’s behaviour at the trough.

  ‘Max appears to be famished, Kate,’ Mr Charlton said, by way of excusing his son’s antics. Then he looked at her mother. ‘You’ll have to sort him out, Ez. It’ll be one of your jobs.’

  Max was so tired that his eyes were closing and his head was dropping on to his chest, movements punctuated regularly by sleepy, bemused revivals.

  ‘It’s up the stairs to Bedfordshire for you, young man,’ Mr Charlton said, rising to his feet like someone who had decided that his patience was exhausted but winking at Kate to suggest that she was beyond his imperative.

  It was then that Kate saw her mother move to Max’s side and begin running a hand through his hair, which on their journey had been unravelling and was now out of control. Sometimes, like now, the blobs of sweat on Max’s nose ran together and flowed to the end of it.

  ‘Come on, Max,’ she said. ‘You must be dog tired.’

  Kate’s impulse to snigger was stifled by the hint of abandonment in her mother’s action, which seemed to ignore her despite her own tiredness. It was then that she felt Mr Charlton’s arm sliding across the back of her chair and coming to rest on her shoulders, and she recalled the way Miss Moseley divided up the class into groups for reading with a pointed finger but not saying a word, the best with the best and the rest with one another.

  ‘We’d better sort out the rooms,’ Mr Charlton said, though he had already placed the big suitcase in the double with the rose-patte
rn wallpaper and Max’s duffle-bag in the one next to it, reached through a connecting door.

  ‘You come, too,’ Kate’s mother told her. ‘I’ll get your stuff.’

  Kate’s ‘stuff’ comprised soap, flannel, scrubbing-brush, a limp stick of emery board and the things she knew she would now need every few weeks until she was an old woman. Her mother had told her so. Though associated with pain, she was pleased to have taken charge of something of which the stupid Max would only ever have an inkling. It was therefore her mother who led her to the attic room once Max, lying like a rag doll on the quilt, had been stripped to his vest and pants and been tucked in.

  Kate’s room had no window and belonged in a dream. It was as high as you could go in the house. The sloping roof meant there was no ceiling. It scared her. She thought she might wake in the morning to find it had grown smaller, and this made her feel hot. She was undressed and in her nightie when her mother entered, clasped her silently and whispered, ‘Goodnight, sweetheart’ with a kiss on the forehead and a lingering look that seemed to say, ‘Perk up, old girl; everything will be all right!’

  As the new Mrs Charlton left, Kate could see Mr Charlton waiting his turn at the top of the stairs in the half-light, the bit of the stairs that had been added on like part of a doll’s house and which clattered when her mother came up before descending to the carpeted landing.

  ‘Is this OK, princess?’ her stepfather asked, closing the door behind him and gently snapping it shut. He spoke quietly. She could barely hear him. He seemed taller in the little room.

  She nodded, remembering that her father had often called her that, especially when he wanted her co-operation – if he’d been too tired to take her to Brownies, for instance.

  She was sitting on the side of the bed with sheets pulled back and her mother’s new husband was standing before her. She was afraid his eyes might roll and that he would fall with a thump on the floor and make the landlady angry. He seemed to fill her little space in the sky. She couldn’t see his face properly because he was beyond the light shed by the bedside lamp, but he looked strange, in the way grown-ups do when they have been let down.

  Then she started as he shot out his right hand into the lamplight. The fingers were straight but closed together, all except the forefinger, which was missing its top two joints. He took a step forwards and brought up his left hand, with the top joint of its thumb missing and its forefinger resting on the stump. Next, he placed the left thumb beside the shortened right finger and, with the join covered, moved the top of the left thumb up and down as though the broken right forefinger were in two pieces.

  She giggled and put her wrist to her mouth, but immediately he spread both his hands to reassure her (‘Don’t get the girl too excited,’ she’d heard her mother say) and he, too, sitting himself beside her, chuckled, raising his knees and slapping them.

  But that was the moment it fell into the bowl made between her legs by the nightie – the top of a finger, pink and covered in blood where it has been sliced off, yet making no stain, no mess, and she felt tears rising and saw objects splintering in the light.

  He drew closer. ‘Don’t worry, princess,’ he said. ‘That’s the joke, you see. Not the trick with the hands but where I’ve hidden the bit of plastic finger. Did you guess it was plastic? Do you know where I’d hidden it?’

  She didn’t know how to answer, what to answer, and as her fear fought the giggles, his hand, his uninjured right hand and its buttercup-stained finger, moved towards the bowl in a slow, hushed act of retrieval.

  Nomad

  My father should have seen me at first, feeling sorry for myself when I ought to have been a bit more imaginative. ‘Take a grip of the situation,’ he would have told me. But I was upset. The start of that whole business with Mick made me physically ill, and not just because of a sense of loss or failure. It’s hard to explain how I’ve just about got over it late in the day. Maybe I caught a glimpse of a hidden self.

  Molly and I used to look forward to the time when we would finally be on our own. The whole place to ourselves. No dependants under the same roof, a feeling of paid-for freedom. Even the cat was part of the scheme, its death the end of a relationship that nothing could replace. Everything would go as planned, leaving only the two of us. We all need time to look at life, to examine our lives, and decide what’s in and what should be out, done with. And others may have to make sacrifices to ensure we can do so.

  Perhaps it was a mistake to move into this house, the one Molly’s great-grandfather built. There are four of them, identical but discreetly separated, on the road out of town, and in their way they still look quite modern. Molly’s Uncle Max lived here before us but he had to be shifted into a nursing-home – he’s still there, hanging on – so we bought it from him, partly to provide him with funds. Error or not, I have come to love our house. The architect, a friend of Molly’s great-grandfather, went mad, threw himself out of a high window, his long moustache swept back like a swallow’s wings. I think there must be a lot of him in the design, a lot of the superfluous stuff, off the point, enclosing a solid core. I once read a piece about Bell, the inventor of the telephone: it appears that, in his dotage, he thought a massive block of ice might be raised by the condensation coming off it, like a hovercraft. I suppose it was a case of genius run to seed. Anyway, in this house there is a long landing with recesses and plaster gargoyles, and at the end a circular window of stained glass.

  At the time, I was selling insurance and Molly had been working for three years as a nursery assistant. Pensions were the coming thing; I was being trained to go out and tell people how flawed their pension arrangements were – that was if they had made any at all. It was true: people never think of the future. For once I felt I was being paid for doing something worthwhile. Molly seemed happy, though Mick, our teenage son, was becoming a handful. One night he arrived home skewingly drunk, bundled out of a taxi on to the drive. We overlooked it, put it down to an overstretched adolescence. Then, one afternoon when she was with her kids on a trip to a nearby town, Molly saw Mick, who should have been at school, walking in the park with an old man – older than me, at any rate. The man had his arm around Mick’s shoulders. I smiled inwardly when Molly told me she’d had to divert her crocodile of little charges. She was certain it had been Mick – well, almost.

  Strange as it may seem, we couldn’t bring ourselves to tackle Mick about it, not even the truancy part. He’d never gone absent from school before. In fact, he was bright and attentive in class. But things got worse. One weekend, Mick ran away, leaving a note. We received a picture postcard from London. It showed a woman smothered by pigeons at the foot of Nelson’s Column. She was feeding the birds, this woman, yet seemed to be in some kind of private torment, while all around her laughed or strolled idly by.

  Neither of our other two had ever been difficult. Peter, the oldest, is a teacher in London, which raised our hopes for Mick when the boy began to give us grief. Settled down – that’s the expression we all use to describe the time after we’ve taken hold of our lives. Peter was settled. Maria, too, our middle one: she was married to Jed, a trainee supermarket manager, and they were about to make us grandparents. You could say we’d been model guardians. Not that we’d tried; we’d just done what we’d thought was best by our children and had hoped things would turn out pretty well.

  On the Saturday Mick left, we went over to the house Maria and Jed had bought. Jed was fitting kitchen units and decorating. Unlike me, he’s very practical. I remember his cheek was smudged with paint, like a lipstick heart, when he came into the living-room.

  ‘That boy needs a kick in the trousers,’ Jed said of Mick. (We’d sorted out straight talking as well, though its unguarded expression often gives me a jolt.)

  ‘You must feel terrible,’ Maria said. She’d already referred to her younger brother as a tearaway. She was wearing one of those dungaree outfits specially shaped for mothers-to-be. She was carrying all before her.

&nb
sp; Molly was exasperated.

  ‘It’s not us!’ she stammered. ‘It’s him we’re worried about.’

  But Jed was unmoved. He shook his head at the pair of us, Molly and me, and just for a moment I understood why so many people spurn the pity of others. It must make them feel small. We didn’t need moralising from Jed; we wanted him as someone not much older than Mick to offer an explanation for his behaviour.

  Back home later the same evening, we phoned Peter. He had been out in the day and now he was halfway through marking. I could hear a jazz record playing and other voices in the background. I didn’t ask if he had company and he didn’t mention it. I quite like that. It’s evidence of another life going on independently of your own, with small private happenings that have nothing to do with you even though you are conscious of them.

  ‘Well, he hasn’t contacted me,’ Peter said, a bit matter-of-factly. ‘What’s the postmark?’

  I told him ‘N15’ and there was a pause as we both must have admitted to ourselves that this represented the proverbial haystack. I sustained a vision of endless streets, and a vast swarm of the desperate and dislocated.