Green Grass

by Raffaella Barker

  ‘She’s got the leading role in the new Disney movie, so we’ll be seeing a lot more of her,’ says Inigo.

  ‘Oh my God, Mum, it’s squidgy,’ squeaks Dolly from the floor where she is examining Zeus’s ear. ‘And I can’t get it off. It’s stuck, it’s stuck.’

  Fred drags his chair back and crouches beside his sister and Zeus, who is trembling now and licking his lips apologetically.

  ‘Oh, rank!’ exclaims Fred. ‘There’s a smaller one too on the inside.’

  Inigo tries to continue. ‘And she wants to buy one of my—’

  Laura leaps to her feet and rushes to scrabble in a drawer by the cooker. ‘Oh for heaven’s sake! I’ve just remembered what they are!’ she shouts. ‘They’re ticks. He must have got them in the garden at the Gate House last weekend. We just need a cigarette to burn them off.’

  Inigo is torn between exasperation that no one wants to hear his story, surprise that there are cigarettes in the house and irritation that the bloody Gate House has contaminated his return with grey polyps. He will not even allow his gaze, never mind his thoughts to stray towards the amount of attention Zeus is getting.

  ‘You don’t smoke,’ he says, frowning as Laura puffs on a cigarette to draw red heat into the end. ‘Neither of us do. We gave up ages ago.’

  A guilty look flashes across her face. ‘They’re not mine, someone left them here, but actually I quite like having one from time to time.’ She inhales defiantly and at length.

  ‘No one in New York smokes at all,’ says Inigo crossly.

  ‘So what do they do about ticks?’ asks Fred, leaning over his mother as she applies the flaring tangerine heat of the cigarette to Zeus’s black velvet ear.

  ‘They don’t have them,’ says Inigo, trying not to sound superior as he knows it’s not helpful, but rather longing to be back there, and away from the sordid elements of English pest life. ‘The only reason you are smoking is that you lack self-control. Now let me put it out for you.’ He reaches over to Laura, but she is beyond his reach, bending over the pug whose mouth is turned down in deepest gloom. Laura pushes Inigo away. ‘Don’t be silly, I’m smoking to get rid of the tick.’

  ‘Mum, be careful, you’ll burn him!’ screams Dolly as Zeus yelps and scuttles under the table.

  Laura drags surreptitiously on the cigarette, just to keep it alight, she assures herself. ‘No, I won’t. Honestly, I’ve done this thousands of times before and you just burn the tick. The heat hasn’t touched his ear, he’s just frightened.’

  ‘Poor thing. I’ll hold him,’ coos Dolly, crawling after the dog. Fred and Laura watch for a second as she tries to extract Zeus from the table legs, and hearing him whimper, both crawl in too. ‘Let’s just do it under here,’ says Laura.

  Inigo is left alone at the table with half a famous actress story untold, and substantial evidence that his family prefers pest control to conversation. Nothing is going well in the greater scheme of things.

  Chapter 17

  At the studio on Sunday morning matters are worse. Dust and piled-up post greet Inigo when he opens the door and he is on the telephone to Laura immediately.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello?’ Laura is piling supplies to pack into the car as Fred shouts through to her from the computer the meteorological predictions for the next few days at Crumbly.

  ‘It says there’s going to be an ice cap,’ he announces gleefully. ‘Oh, no. Sorry, that’s in Antarctica. We’re having flash floods and freezing cold wind.’

  Dolly groans, ‘Oh no. Do we have to go? I’d rather stay here and finish my project with Becca. That house is so dank when it rains. Can’t we wait until tomorrow? Then we won’t have to be there for so long.’

  Laura, tethered to the telephone, flaps her hand at them to be quiet and continues to throw things into a basket. Matches, batteries, candles, her theme this week seems to be power; last week it was air, and she took a bag of balloons, a bicycle pump and a harmonica in her pile of essentials.

  ‘Have you been to the studio at all while I was away?’ Inigo paces in front of the windows of the studio, rolling his bicycle wheel in front of him, agitated and querulous.

  ‘Er, yes, I think so.’ Laura isn’t concentrating; she is trying to open the fridge door with her toe as her arm cannot reach from within the circle of the telephone’s wire.

  ‘But it’s like Sleeping Beauty land here – there’s dust everywhere, and unopened post and it looks completely neglected. Manfred has left six messages about that bloody papier-mâché. I finished it in such a rush to get back to you that I expect it’s sodding well imploded or melted. This is the centre of operations for me. It’s very important that you keep it working if I’m away.’

  Laura is irritated by the tone of his outrage – it’s his bloody studio after all, not hers, and if she doesn’t choose to go there when he’s swanning around in New York, it’s her own affair.

  ‘I’ve been busy,’ she says silkily.

  Inigo’s pacing subsides next to a desk on which a large blue-bottle fly has died. This is the last straw. He spins his bicycle wheel like a coin upon his finger and yells down the line, ‘Why can’t you get your bloody act together and look after things properly? I get home and the fridge is full of mould, the studio is thick with dust, your precious dog has got ticks and I expect the children are infested with something unspeakable, and all you do is carry more and more rubbish from home to your play house in the country. Get your act together, Laura. I’ve got to speak to Jack. At least my sodding agent takes care of things.’

  Laura only hears the end of this tirade as the phone has slithered from her shoulder while she concentrates on filling a Tilley lamp with paraffin.

  ‘Oh yes, I will when I’ve got time,’ she agrees sarcastically, ‘but at the moment I’ve got too much to do. We’ll sort the studio out next week when the children are back at school, shall we? Come home so we can leave for Norfolk. You’ll feel so much better out of London.’ Her anger passes and automatically she soothes him, talking him down off his high horse.

  He responds sulkily. ‘I won’t be better out of London, I hate the countryside,’ he growls. ‘I should really stay here and get some work done, but I suppose if I want to see you and the children, I’ll have to come to that dump.’

  ‘Yup,’ agrees Laura, relieved that this conversation is on the telephone and not taking place in front of Dolly who would use it as ammunition in her stockade of sulking about going away. Laura tries to rally the sinking sensation she experiences by smoking a cigarette. It was too much to expect that Inigo’s homecoming would be an unqualified success, but at least she had the sense to let him return to the studio by himself. He had wanted her to go with him and Laura had almost agreed to, indeed would have done but for the persistence of Fred who, having crawled out of bed at eleven, claimed he wanted her to help him with some homework he now refuses to look at.

  Laura adds his folder to a pile of things to take to the country. With any luck Inigo will relax once he’s at the Gate House. Laura, blissfully uninterested in its domestic shortcomings, can’t imagine anyone not relaxing there. She and the children have been as often as possible while Inigo was away, and she is addicted to it now. Inigo can chill out and when he is ready he can help Fred with his geography project. Fred is on section six: ‘Analysis of data and geographical conclusion’. Even reading the heading transports Laura straight back to the school feeling of frustration and boredom. It is, however, the sort of thing that Inigo uses in his work, minutely collaging endless maps, tufts of grass, photographs and the odd stone to create a bewildering whole; he will be quite at home with it. Just as well, as Fred certainly isn’t. When Laura asks him what he is doing for his geography project, he looks at her blankly for a while as though she is speaking an exotic language.

  ‘You know,’ she says encouragingly, ‘what topic or subject have you chosen? It might be something like cliff erosion, or it might be artesian basins – that must be a popular one as I s
eem to remember that London is one or is on one. I just wondered what you are doing your project on.’ Laura sits down at the table opposite her son, propping her chin on her hands, awaiting an answer with real interest. Fred’s expression changes from blankness to pain, presumably at the effort of thought. Finally he manages to drag the word, ‘Dunno,’ from the distant part of his brain used to operate speech. He then subsides, clearly exhausted by the effort, back into the cereal packet he was reading when Laura first approached him. The ignorance is odd, considering he claims to have reached section six of the project, and disturbing. Laura wonders if he might have contracted a hideous amnesia virus like an invaded computer, or if it is just his teen hormones manifesting themselves in sluggish contrast to Dolly’s smouldering hysteria. Combine these two with Inigo’s giant baby stance and Laura begins to wonder if she can stand any amount of time with them all in the cottage, and to think of the goat with sincere affection as the only sane member of the household. The linchpin.

  As it turns out, Inigo can hardly see by the time they arrive at the Gate House, and remains in the car for some time after it has stopped, moaning, gasping and sneezing. ‘Poor you. I’ll bring you some water,’ says Laura, not very sympathetically as Inigo is a difficult invalid and has been a vile passenger – Laura was forced to take the wheel on the way, so violent were his paroxysms. The hay fever began as they passed the sign announcing their arrival in Norfolk. Even through his wheezing attack, Inigo was able to point this out. The road swept out of a shaggy density of pine trees and climbed a hill to a point where two vast fields stretched away on either side to the horizon. Laura gazed out across the field on her side of the car at corn ripening and swaying, a smattering of poppies dancing crimson above the green-gold whiskers of barley, and sighed her pleasure. Inigo, on the other side, took one look at the frothing crome-yellow of acre after acre of ripe oil-seed rape and began to sneeze. Ten minutes after the first sneeze he conceded defeat and pulled into a lay-by to swap places with Laura. From there, with a soothing baby wipe laid over his eyes by Dolly, and a few puffs on Fred’s inhaler, he spent the rest of the journey suffering loudly and complaining about Laura’s driving.

  ‘Oh, I feel ghastly. My head is full of snot,’ he announced with relish, interrupting himself to shout, ‘GO ON – you can pass that one now. I can see – I can see there’s nothing coming.’ Inigo slammed his hand against the dashboard as the car jerked, slowed and then accelerated, swaying wildly, past a caravan. ‘Come on, Laura, we’ve got a lot of ground to make up with that stop.’

  Laura, knuckles white, her neck muscles knotted and her jaw clenched, glanced sideways at him and was pleased to see he looked wiped out. ‘Just shut your eyes and leave me to drive,’ she suggested between gritted teeth.

  ‘Achoooo! Oh God.’ Inigo paused to blow his nose. ‘I’d love to, but will we actually ever get there?’ he gasped through his handkerchief.

  Only by rubbing soothing lavender oil (dispensed by Dolly the pharmacist) into her wrists and turning up the Waylon Jennings tape to top volume does Laura survive the journey without assaulting Inigo. Having got him into the house and bent double over the bath where he is running cold water over his head to get rid of any pollen that might have alighted on his slicked-back hair, Laura takes herself out to the compost area pretending that she will plant some marrows there, but in fact stealing a moment of peace. Fred joins her. ‘What are you doing, Mum?’

  It is amazing how frequently Laura is asked this by her children. When she is hanging out washing, when she is cooking supper, when she is putting clothes away, when she is waiting for them in the car. For Dolly and Fred, these seemingly routine moments are fraught with mystery, and Laura herself is evidently a creature of strange and elusive habits.

  ‘I am casting runes upon the compost heap and then I’m going to make some witchy spells,’ she replies promptly.

  ‘Why are you doing that? Why don’t you just plant them in the ground?’ Fred grabs the packet of seeds from her hand. ‘Hey, these aren’t runes, they’re giant courgettes. Silly Mum.’ He grins at her fondly and Laura laughs.

  ‘What are you doing anyway?’ she asks him. Fred is on his way to milk Grass.

  ‘Dad’s gone to lie down,’ he explains. ‘Dolly’s making him a disgusting drink with leaves and nettles and stuff in it. It looks rank. I wouldn’t drink it, but she says she looked it up in a book and it’s good for his hay fever.’

  In the sheds, the darkness is a cool contrast to the sunny afternoon outside, and the smell of goat and musty hay tickles Laura’s nose. She sneezes and Grass leaps in alarm across her pen.

  ‘Let’s tether her in the garden and milk her later,’ suggests Laura, finding herself less keen on goat work than she had anticipated. Fred leads Grass outside, her chain clanging like a convict’s, and bangs the metal spike into the ground.

  ‘Mum, you know what? I think Tamsin has got a telescope trained on our house. Whenever we come she arrives like milliseconds later.’ And on cue, the gate opens and Tamsin and a small girl with a giant inflatable hammer march up the path and into the house.

  ‘I don’t think it’s a telescope,’ Laura tells Fred. ‘It’s teen semaphore – Dolly must have texted her to say we’re here. I wonder who that baby person is?’

  Opening the kitchen door moments later, Laura shrinks back, not wishing to interrupt the conversation between this child and Inigo. The latter, a large red spotted handkerchief mopping his nose, is sitting at the table transfixed by the small figure who has settled, legs crossed, sunglasses akimbo on her head, on the bread bin. She has had to climb onto the table to sit on the bread bin, and she is thus looking down on Inigo in the manner of a teacher. An imperious teacher.

  ‘Do you want to know how to wash a worm? Yes or no?’ Head on one side like a small bird, the child regards Inigo intently.

  Inigo apparently does, since he nods. Gesticulating with small confident hands, the child elaborates.

  ‘Well, what you do is you get a thin bowl – one you’ve stretched – and you square up the worm and you put it in the bowl.’ This on a note of triumph. Beaming, she looks around the room, eager to embrace a larger audience. Laura and Fred remain hidden behind the half-open door.

  ‘Anyway, then you soap the worm and dry it, and then it’s ready to go back on the grass.’ She gives him a measured look. ‘Or you can eat it if you like. How do you like that?’ The little girl jumps up and capers on the table. Inigo tries to talk her down,

  ‘I think you should climb off there before you hurt yourself. I don’t think Tamsin would like to see you on the table,’ he urges.

  The child throws him a mischievous look. ‘No, she wouldn’t,’ she agrees. ‘But I don’t really care what Tamsin likes today.’

  Recognising signs of bumptiousness, Laura decides to interrupt. She steps in and scoops the child off the table.

  ‘You be careful, young lady,’ she says lightly, not wishing to alarm her.

  ‘I’VE ALREADY BEEN CAREFUL!’ roars the child, red-faced with the ignominy of being carried by a stranger. Inigo edges away towards the stairs but is blocked by Dolly and Tamsin coming in, both self-consciously batting neon-bright eyelids.

  ‘Oh, thanks for keeping an eye on her for me. I’d better take her home now for tea.’ Tamsin squats to embrace the child. ‘Hello Beauty, what have you been doing?’

  The Beauty’s tears vanish as if a plug has been pulled on them. She presses her hands to the sides of Tamsin’s face and turns it to the light. ‘Can I wear some make-up like yours?’ she demands.

  Dolly laughs. ‘Oh Mum, isn’t she cute? She belongs to some friend of Uncle Hedley’s and Tamsin is looking after her for half-term. I’m going to help her.’

  Laura realises that this is the child in the christening paddling pool. ‘Good luck to you both,’ she says with feeling, as Tamsin carries the infant out of the house, accompanied by new fury because The Beauty is not ready to depart yet.

  ‘Is it safe?’ Inigo�
�s red handkerchief appears around the door like a flag of surrender, and behind it Inigo, his eyes still small slits in blotched red skin despite the application of camomile tea bags and more baby wipes. ‘I’d forgotten what small children can be like,’ he marvels, shaking his head. ‘That one is diabolical. It’s called The Beauty, but I’ve never seen anyone turn ugly so fast. She found me lying down upstairs and decided to be my nurse. I’ve been give three spoonfuls of neat Ribena which she insisted was Calpol, and I’ve had my temperature taken with a nail file. The only way I could stop her ministering was to come downstairs for a lesson in worm management. You know she keeps worms – she had about ten in a tangle of mud in her pocket.’ Inigo shudders, sneezes and takes himself off to watch cricket on the television with Fred.

  Laura is secretly glad he is ill; it stops him challenging her authority here, and has made him too feeble to protest at the changes wrought since his last visit. In his absence the emphasis in the Gate House has swung determinedly towards Inigo’s big enemy – nostalgia.

  It began with Guy’s housewarming present, a copy of the My Guy annual in which seventeen-year-old Laura, along with Guy and Hedley, appeared as a model in one of the photo love stories. Guy brought the book round one Sunday recently, when he came to receive his orders concerning Grass – having agreed to become her babysitter during the week. Laura was crouching in front of her broad beans when Guy arrived, singing them a song of encouragement. Cally always insisted that sung-to plants performed better, and although she could hardly be classed an expert as she only possessed two urban window boxes, Laura was so desperate for bean success that she would follow any lead.

  ‘Here, Laura, I’ve been doing some clearing out and I thought you might like this.’ Guy waved the book, and laughing, Laura took it from him.