The People at Number 9

by Felicity Everett

  “Patrick? Caleb?” Sara called, sniffing the sock in her hand, before tossing it, with a grimace of distaste, into the laundry basket. “Can you brush your teeth please? We should have left five minutes ago.” They moved at the speed of tectonic plates, only with more audible moaning. Even now, the gargling and hawking coming from the bathroom had an undertone of fraternal needle. Caleb’s behaviour towards his younger brother, peevish at the best of times, had seemed to Sara to verge on bullying lately. His enthusiasm for school had waned since the start of term. Then again, he had had four different supply teachers in as many weeks and had been relegated to the bottom maths set, so it wasn’t surprising. Now that Lou had raised the tantalising prospect of home-schooling, Sara couldn’t think of a single reason to prolong her children’s mediocre school career a day longer than necessary.

  The doorbell rang.

  Well, perhaps there was one.

  “Hi, Gav.”

  “Hi,” he looked tired and distracted. “Massive, massive favour?”

  “Try me.”

  “Could you take them to school? I’ve got to do a radio thing at nine-thirty.”

  “Sure, no problem,” she said, disguising disappointment with a breezy smile. “Lou busy, is she?”

  “She’s been up all night watching the rushes. Only crashed out an hour ago.”

  “Oh,” said Sara. “Fantastic. So we’ll be able to see the film soon?”

  Gav laughed sardonically and Sara smiled, unsure what she was meant to take from this.

  She arrived at school late and out of breath. Chivvying the boys through the gate, she scanned the playground for Zuley’s childminder, whom she spotted at last, slumped on a bench staring at her phone, while her small charges swarmed over the climbing frame. Seeing Mandy, Zuley leaned forward in the buggy and wiggled her fingers needily.

  “Hello Princess,” Mandy said in the kind of fake baby voice Sara knew Lou despised.

  “Sorry to keep you,” Sara said. “Gav had to do a work thing at short notice.”

  “I know,” Mandy said, “he texted me.”

  She glanced at her phone again and, smirked before putting it back in her pocket.

  “It’s a radio interview,” Sara told her, determined to pull rank. “He tried to reschedule, but it’s going out live so…”

  Mandy stood up with an air of indifference and slung her bag over the handle of the buggy. Zuley bucked eagerly, and Sara felt usurped, peripheral.

  “Bye darling, have a lovely time,” she said, leaning down for a kiss, but the child screwed up her face with displeasure.

  “I wouldn’t worry,” Mandy said, “she does that.”

  Smarting from the rejection, Sara nevertheless forced herself to stroll alongside the buggy as far as the school gate. As they turned to go their separate ways, the childminder paused, and met her eye.

  “Do you not get a bit sick of it?”

  “What?”

  Mandy smiled pityingly.

  “At least I’m getting paid!” she said.

  Sara was still inventing killer put-downs as she primed the coffee percolator half an hour later.

  “Sick of living in a mutually supportive community where people don’t keep score?” she wished she’d said. “Sick of supporting important artists?”

  Sara was so cross that she forgot to drink the coffee when it was brewed and so distracted that she had only made half a page of notes on Lewisham’s Home Education policy when a ring at the doorbell brought welcome relief.

  “Oh, good, you’re in!” Lou said. “Is that coffee I can smell?” She headed for the kitchen.

  “I thought you were catching up on your beauty sleep,” Sara said, following happily behind.

  “I couldn’t get off,” said Lou, “my head’s too full of the film.”

  “I bet it is. Are you pleased with the way it’s looking?”

  “It’s more of a cataloguing process at this stage, but, yeah I think it’s going to be okay.”

  She pushed a striped paper bag into Sara’s hands.

  “Forgot to give you this the other night.”

  “What is it?”

  “Just a little present from Belgium. A thank-you.”

  Here, then, was the definitive proof. On a tight schedule, with egos to massage, crew to supervise, a film to bring in on time and on budget, Lou had still gone out of her way to buy Sara a gift.

  She pulled off the tissue paper to reveal a bronze-coloured plastic cherub.

  “Oh…” she said. “Cute!”

  “It’s a Pissing Boy drink dispenser,” said Lou, “like the fountain in Brussels. Not that I was in Brussels, but anyway. You fill him up and he pisses out your drink.”

  “Hysterical!” said Sara, “I’ll put him here, in pride of place.”

  She stood the figurine on the middle shelf of the dresser and they both took a moment to enjoy the subversive kitsch of the gift.

  “So what are you up to?” said Lou, at length. “Oh God, don’t say I’ve interrupted your writing?”

  “Nope,” said Sara proudly, “all finished.”

  Lou turned to her with saucer eyes.

  “Sara! That’s amazing! God, you put me to shame.”

  “I got loads done while you were away. Gav’s got a great work ethic, hasn’t he? I did my best to distract him, but he kept sending me back to my desk!”

  Lou didn’t seem to be listening. She pursed her lips as if making some calculation.

  “Okay, that might work,” she murmured. “If I take a look at your manuscript this weekend and give you my comments, then you could send it off next week.”

  “Send it off?” said Sara.

  “To literary agents,” said Lou. “You’ll need an agent, Sara. I’ll talk to my friend Ezra. We might try his guy first. Won’t hurt to use the connection.”

  “Ezra?” Sara pricked up her ears.

  “Ezra Bell.”

  “You know Ezra Bell?”

  “We do, yeah. He was one of Gav’s early collectors, back when no one had heard of him.”

  “Of Gav?”

  “Of Ezra. Well, of either of them, actually. Their careers have risen in tandem, which is kind of nice.”

  Sara digested this. Ezra Bell was a name to conjure with. Carol, she knew for a fact, would swap her Donmar Warehouse membership for a chance to touch the hem of Ezra Bell’s corduroy jacket. Gavin, on the other hand – celebrated, certainly; respected by the cognoscenti, but surely not quite as high-profile as the Pulitzer-prize-winning chronicler of post 9/11 America? Then again, Sara didn’t necessarily trust her own instincts any more. Lou was always bandying about the names of people Sara had never heard of, with an air of reverence that suggested they were demi-gods. The fact was, until she met Lou and Gav, she had been ploughing a pretty narrow furrow.

  “He’ll be kipping on our couch next month when he comes over for his author tour,” Lou said. “You can pick his brains then.”

  “Oh, I can just see that,” scoffed Sara. “Ezra, do you think I should hold back on the electronic rights until the marketing campaign’s gathered momentum, or should I just go balls-out?”

  Lou cocked her head on one side.

  “You’re doing it again,” she said.

  “I know, but come on, I’m me and he’s…”

  “Ezra Bell; who, when we first got to know him was an ordinary self-deprecating guy who happened to have an unpublished novel in his bottom drawer. Sound familiar?”

  Sara couldn’t help smiling, whether at her friend’s unfeasibly flattering comparison, or at the veiled suggestion that meeting Lou and Gav had itself somehow been the catalyst to greatness, she wasn’t sure. And yet to dismiss Lou’s hubris would have been to denigrate her own work and just lately, for the first time, Sara had started to believe in it. She had taken Lou’s advice to heart, banished from her mind’s eye her mother’s lemon-sucking face and written through her shame; plundering the furthest sordid reaches of her imagination and creating scenes of a r
awness and pathos that had made her blink back tears even as she composed them. She had filleted her original manuscript in ruthless fashion, sacrificing paragraphs that had once seemed indispensable, but which now struck her as overwrought and pretentious. The resultant slender novel felt like something that had been waiting all along in the ether to be captured by her and her alone. When she looked at the wad of printed papers, nestling within their grey mottled box file, she wanted to pinch herself. It felt like a small miracle. The thought of exposing this final draft to Lou’s critical gaze was daunting enough, but the idea that it might soon find its way, perhaps with a word of recommendation from the great man himself, into the inbox of Ezra Bell’s literary agent, was enough to bring her out in a cold sweat.

  “Just leave it with me,” Lou insisted, “and get on with the next thing. What is the next thing by the way?”

  Sara waved her notebook cheerfully.

  “I’m all about home education now.”

  “Ah!”

  “It’s actually much more straightforward than we thought. There’s a process to go through, of course, but they can’t stop you from doing it. And it’s actually surprisingly common. Over four hundred families in the borough, and rising.”

  “Oh,” said Lou doubtfully. “Good.”

  “You’re not having second thoughts?”

  “Christ, no. Just, I’d quite like to be involved in planning it but at the moment I’m too busy with the post—”

  “The post…?” an image sprang to mind of Lou sorting jiffy bags.

  “Post-production. Always takes longer than you think. Realistically, I reckon New Year, don’t you? Fresh start, new leaf?”

  13

  The end of term concert at Cranmer Road was a true test of Sara’s resolve. As every year, the children forgot their lines, sang out of tune, corpsed, fidgeted and then killed it with a rousing rendition of “Winter Wonderland”, which would have melted the heart of Gradgrind himself. Even a failing school had to be failing pretty dismally to stuff up Christmas.

  The dusk was already gathering as they walked home and the council Christmas lights had just come on. The route, past betting shops, newsagents and dry cleaners, whilst drearily suburban, had been the backdrop to a phase in Sara’s life, which would never come again. Excited as she was to be on the brink of something new, something that she hoped would bring her children’s lives rushing from two dimensions into three, as they discovered the transformative power of their own creativity, she was mindful now, suddenly and poignantly, of the value of ordinariness; of the consolation of being an ant on an anthill working, unthinkingly, to a common purpose. There was dignity in that too – and perhaps a kind of liberation.

  “So, he didn’t put up a fight, the Head?” said Neil over supper, as Sara reported back on the events of a momentous week.

  “Not really,” said Sara, “if I didn’t know better, I’d say he seemed glad to get rid.”

  “Probably had it up to here with pushy middle class parents,” said Neil, loading his fork with fish pie.

  “Carol said he almost cried when she and Celia told him they were jumping ship.”

  “Carol exaggerates,” said Neil, plucking a prawn tail from between his teeth and laying it carefully on the side of his plate. “What did he actually say?”

  “Oh, you know, he hoped we knew what we were taking on. He could assure us the school was back on track and that they wouldn’t have any trouble filling the places. He firmly believed they were doing right by all ability groups. That was when Lou put him on the spot.”

  “Oh?”

  “She showed him Dash’s reading record. She’s got him on the classics: Treasure Island; Tom Sawyer; Salinger, even, which I don’t think is really appropriate for a…”

  Neil revolved his fork to indicate she should get to the point.

  “Anyway, Dash has filled every page, and the teacher’s put big ticks next to his reports and given him smiley faces, but when you actually read what he’s written, he’s just copied out the same review over and over again. And because she knows he’s brainy, she hasn’t bothered to read them.”

  “Crafty little sod,” said Neil. “What did the Head say?”

  “He said Dash was a unique student whose specific learning requirements had tested the robustness of oh, some policy or other. He used a lot of jargon but I think he just meant they couldn’t keep up with him.”

  Neil snorted derisively and Sara was unsure whether this was a comment on the Head Teacher or Dash.

  “Did he say anything about Patrick and Caleb?” he asked, as an afterthought.

  “He said they would be greatly missed by the recorder group and the football team respectively.”

  “Do we have to go next door?” Caleb was slumped on the sofa in his pyjamas, watching toddlers’ TV. “Their house smells funny.”

  “No it doesn’t,” said Sara, “you’ll have fun. You’ll be with your friends.”

  “Why can’t they come here?”

  “It’s easier for me if we go there. It’s where Zuley’s toys are.”

  “I hate Zuley.”

  “Caleb!”

  “She makes things up and she cries all the time.”

  “Yes, because she’s three. Come on. It’s hard for her. She just wants to join in with you guys. Cut her some slack.”

  “Why should I? She’s not my sister.”

  “You like girls.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You like Holly.”

  Caleb stared vacantly at the screen, before a thought flickered across his face,

  “Why don’t we see her anymore? Is it because you’ve gone off Carol?”

  Sara adopted a deliberately light tone of voice.

  “I’m very fond of Carol,” she said, “and you can see Holly any time you like.”

  There was no response when Sara rang the bell. She rolled her eyes and smiled to herself, imagining Gavin hard at work in the studio, deaf to the world on account of his headphones. He had once made her guess his favourite thing to listen to when working. She had squirmed and fretted, like the Princess trying to guess Rumpelstiltskin’s name in the fairy story.

  “Pearl Jam?”

  “No.”

  “Kraftwerk?”

  “No.”

  “Steve Reich? Muddy Waters? Patti Smith?”

  “No, no and no.”

  Turned out to be Magic FM. All that nostalgic slush, hour after hour, she could hardly believe it. But Gav said it took him to his happy place. It was the fish finger sandwich of broadcasting and it hit the spot. It amused her to think of him producing his tortured, existential sculptures to the strains of Air Supply and Lionel Richie. It would be nice not to have to wait on the doorstep in the cold, however, with the boys cursing and scuffing their shoes. Where were Dash and Arlo? At this rate they’d be waiting all morning. Eventually, repeated rings brought Zuley skittering down the hall in her pyjamas. Agonising minutes passed while she teetered on tiptoe, trying to reach the latch. At last, with a heroic leap, she succeeded.

  “Go and ask Dash and Arlo what they want for breakfast,” Sara told the boys, then she marched through to the kitchen and started flipping open cupboards in search of basic provisions. The sink was filled with greasy dishes, half submerged in cold water and there was a smell of drains. She needed a coffee, but opening the stovetop pot, she found it full of mouldy grounds from days ago. She banged them out on the draining board, tossed the filter in the sink, squirted a river of washing up liquid in after it and turned the hot tap on full.

  “Mary Poppins, as I live and breathe,” said a familiar voice.

  “Oh, hi Gav,” Sara said, doing her best to ignore the plummeting sensation in her belly, “looks like the washing-up fairy gave your place a miss last night.”

  “God, yeah, what a tip. Listen, don’t you be doing that.”

  Sara was about to shrug it off, when Caleb hurtled into the room, skidded to a halt and announced breathlessly:

&n
bsp; “Arlo wants rice pops and Dash wants prawn wonton!”

  “Breakfast,” Sara explained, seeing Gav’s look of bafflement.

  “Prawn wonton,” Gav shook his head admiringly, “cheeky fucker!”

  “Bit of a stretch,” said Sara. “You seem to be down to army rations.” She unscrewed the lid of a vintage canister and demonstrated, to add insult to injury, an absence of coffee.

  “Jesus!” Gav sighed as though none of this were any of his doing, and Sara felt torn between sisterly indignation on Lou’s behalf and a hint of schadenfreude that her friend’s all-out pursuit of her career goals, had left her exposed in the house-keeping department.

  “Oh well,” shrugged Gav, “if there’s no coffee, we’ve got no choice, have we?”

  ***

  Sara didn’t know when she’d enjoyed a fry-up so much. They had lived around the corner from Dimitri’s for over a decade, but she had never before set foot in the place. Neil always said he could feel his arteries furring up just walking past the extractor fan. But this morning, the eggs were fresh, the bacon dense and salty, and the fried bread had a crunch and ooze that felt as sinful and delicious as, well, as flirting with one’s best friend’s husband over a weekday breakfast in a greasy spoon. As Zuley chased a button mushroom round her plate and the boys squabbled over Angry Birds, Gavin drained his coffee mug and smiled at Sara over its rim.

  “I like a girl who can eat.”

  Sara looked at the sunset streaks of egg yolk and tomato sauce on her plate and grinned. Notwithstanding the occasional roll-up and a love of hard liquor, Lou was a health-food freak. She and Neil would be united in priggish disapproval if they could see their spouses right now. Every other week Lou subjected her family to some new nutritional fad. If she wasn’t addressing Arlo’s eczema with low gluten, she was urging Dash to new heights of intellectual endeavour with an abundance of omega 3 or enhancing Gavin’s creativity and (wink) his all-round performance with cruciferous vegetables. But Sara had seen enough to intuit that his wife’s anxiety and inconsistency around food got on Gavin’s nerves, in the same way as her fussy subservience toward people like Dieter and Korinna did. There were not many domains, Sara knew, in which she trumped Lou, perhaps only in this – she was not neurotic. Here, then, was an opportunity to press home her advantage.