‘Drink?’
‘I won’t, thanks. What is that, steak?’
‘Venison.’
‘Oh, very posh.’
‘Well, venison family,’ he said, turning the meat again and pressing down with the spatula, making it hiss. ‘You remember the parade through town last Christmas Eve? Santa’s grotto and the sleigh ride in the precinct?’
‘Yes, we took some kids from the children’s home.’
‘Well, you remember that reindeer pulling the sleigh?’
Felix nodded and swallowed. Jimmy flipped the meat over one last time in the pan. It slapped against the Teflon and hissed. Then he slipped it on to a plate and parked himself at the table, reaching over to a drawer in the sideboard for a knife and fork.
‘They said it had come all the way from Lapland, but it hadn’t. It had come from a deer park near Wigan. Anyways, muggins here volunteers to take it back, Christmas spirit and all that. So I coaxed it into the van, right, but I’d had a few bevvies that night so thought I’d better wait till tomorrow. Anyways, next morning, when I looked in through the back doors, the thing was spark out on the floor.’
‘Dead?’
‘Dead as a dodo. I reckon it was the cold that killed it. Very parky that night. There was frost on the windscreen.’
He pinioned the meat with the fork and cut into the middle with the knife. Blood and melted butter oozed on to the white plate.
‘A reindeer killed by the cold?’
‘Yep. It’s a different kind of cold we get here. Not like up there with the northern lights and all that. Anyways, I phoned up the deer park and they were going to charge me thirty notes just for them to chuck it in a hole. So…’
He lifted a chunk of it towards his mouth.
‘Oh, almost forgot.’
Placing the cutlery to one side, he put his hands to his mouth, and when he stuck out his tongue Felix could see a small stud, like a silver rivet, countersunk in the flesh. Jimmy fiddled with the clasp, removed the stud, then clipped it back together and set it down on the rim of the plate.
‘I wouldn’t have bothered, but the girlfriend likes it. Know what I mean?’ he said, raising his eyebrows and extending the tip of his tongue until it met with the point of his nose. Then he took up his knife and fork again and, through a mouthful of red meat, said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s been in the freezer. Sure I can’t tempt you?’
Abbie’s car was in the driveway but there was no sign of her in the kitchen or the living room. As Felix was pouring himself a glass of water, he thought he heard music. And then the smell of perfume or flowers came to him as he stood in the hall calling her name. ‘Up here,’ he heard her say. As he climbed the stairs the music became louder and the smell stronger, something like pine or maybe lavender. Pushing open the bedroom door, he found Abbie sat up in bed with the pillows behind her head and the corner of the duvet pulled diagonally across her body. She was naked and she was smiling. Scented candles floated in a bowl of water on top of the chest of drawers, the little flames like bright yellow sails. Abbie leaned to one side and turned off the radio. On the bedside table Felix saw the silver end of a thermometer poking out from between the covers of her diary, like a bookmark.
‘It’s now, is it?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘I thought you were never coming home. Get into bed.’
In the shower, Felix stood motionless under the jet of hot, fizzing water, as if work had formed a layer or film that had to be blasted away and rinsed from his skin. He let the water pound on his chest, then between his shoulder blades. By the time he slid into bed next to his wife, the upper part of his body glowed with a kind of raw heat.
‘You shouldn’t have it so hot, it kills them off,’ said Abbie, sending her hand under the covers.
As she sank into the pillows and pulled him with her, Felix moved his head towards hers, then suddenly stopped and propped himself up on his elbow. ‘What’s that?’
‘What?’
‘That noise.’
They listened and heard a flapping sound coming from outside, like someone shaking a sheet or blanket.
‘It’s nothing,’ said Abbie. ‘Come here.’
Then the noise happened again, louder this time, like the cracking of a whip or a small dap of thunder, very near, and accompanied by a kind of creaking, and not just once but over and over again.
‘Ignore it, Felix,’ said Abbie. She gripped his waist with her arms and locked her fingers behind him. Then, looking beyond him, over his shoulder, she screamed, ‘Oh, my God.’
Felix swivelled round just in time to see the flash of a hand as it disappeared below the sill of the open window. They heard the noise again, the flapping and the creaking, and watched as the hand appeared once more then vanished, then the noise again, then two hands, then two whole arms reaching for a moment towards the sky, and finally two outstretched arms and the top of a man’s head. Felix pulled the duvet around him, padded over to the window and looked out. In the garden next door, there was something new. It had just arrived. Or it had just landed. It had big, circular feet and several poles jutting into the air. Padded plastic cushioning covered its metal frame. Across its base a shiny black membrane was held taut by thick, stern-looking springs, until Jed, all six foot four and fifteen stone of him, plunged into its centre, at which point it flexed and quivered and groaned, then flung him high into the air, above the garden fence and the bay window, way above the safety net stretched around the poles, ten or a dozen feet clear of the ground. With his face suddenly level with Felix, he grinned like a mad person and just managed to shout, ‘Trampoline. Got it for the kids,’ before plummeting again.
5
It was a bright morning and almost ten o’clock when Felix went downstairs to make a drink and open the curtains. He’d already surfaced once, about an hour ago, but after Abbie’s quick consultation with the thermometer had been called back to bed. Now she was lying on her back with her feet up on the wooden footboard. As he put a cup of tea down on the chest of drawers, she took his hand and put it against her tummy.
‘It’s all warm,’ she said.
‘Inside?’
‘No, your hand.’
‘From the cup,’ he said.
‘Tell your stuff to do its stuff.’
Felix bent forward and kissed the flat of her stomach. Abbie held his head against her. Sounds came from under her skin, sounds that reminded him of lying in the bath with his head under water, listening to the muffled echoes of the world beyond and the internal throbbing of his eardrum. His mother had told him never to stay under for too long because the pressure might damage his hearing, and had also given him the statutory warning about not putting anything smaller than his elbow in his ear. But the pleasure of a cotton bud wiggling about deep within that particular cavity had always proved irresistible and had led, in time, to several infections and one very nasty bout of labyrinthitis three years ago. Felix had never suffered from travel sickness and had been the only child in his class not to throw up on a pleasure-boat ride during a school trip to Lake Windermere. But the labyrinthitis was a killer. For almost a week he lay flat on his back, with just the slightest physical motion causing a violent whirling sensation at the very top of his head, like a weather vane in a windstorm. At its worst, anything travelling across his eyeline brought on the nausea, and on one occasion the sight of a blackbird flying past the window caused him to vomit. A course of antihistamine tablets did the trick, eventually. But even though the memory of the illness made his stomach turn, it hadn’t stopped him meddling within his ear. Every once in a while he still caught himself with a toothpick or a spent match halfway to his brain, or fully submerged in a bath of cooling water.
‘Your hair could do with a wash,’ said Abbie, kneading his scalp with her fingers.
‘I’ll get a shower.’
‘I’m just going to lie here for a while.’
Felix opened the French windows and took a cup of coffee and a slice of toast outside. He
sat on the bench in a patch of sunlight at the far end of the garden, to the side of the greenhouse. A tile had slipped from the roof; he’d have to fix that, or borrow Jed’s ladders from next door, or better still get Jed to fix it for him. Felix and Abbie had moved to the house five years ago, a red-brick semi on a dose of twelve other identical properties. It was all they could afford at the time and had thought of it as a stop-gap. Abbie didn’t see herself as someone who lived on a close and Felix would have liked an older house - something he could tinker with. But they’d spent money on it - a new bathroom and a new kitchen, including the dry-lining of the back wall, which was once part of the garage and partially below ground. More than that, they’d become comfortable, and a large part of that cosiness was to do with the neighbours, Jed and Marine. Jed and Felix had gone to the same school, and although he’d never really had any contact with him, Felix had always thought of Jed as a bully, probably because of his size. Even at fourteen he was well over six foot and big with it. But a couple of days after they’d moved in, a football had sailed over the garden fence and straight through a roof-pane in the greenhouse, followed seconds later by Jed, offering an apology, a huge handshake and a four-pack of Stella. Maxine wasn’t far behind him, a tiny woman with dyed black hair, telling Abbie and Felix what a clumsy of she was married to and if only his brains were as big as his feet. To which Abbie had responded, ‘If only everything they had were that big,’ a remark that made them instant friends. The cans of Stella had the same effect on Felix and Jed. The following month they’d put a gate in the fence. These days there was a well-worn path between the two lawns, scored in the grass by the coming and going of four adults, an ageing Rhodesian ridgeback called Smutty and two four-year-old girls, Molly and Alice, generally referred to as the twins. The twins were another reason for staying put. Maxine had once said that if Felix and Abbie moved away it would break their hearts, or their one, collective heart, as it sometimes seemed. Abbie had replied, ‘Yes, and mine too.’
Thinking about Jed at the top of a ladder suddenly brought to mind an image of his face as it had appeared yesterday, in mid-air, with long wisps of his hair floating weightless above his head. Felix walked over to the garden fence to inspect the new trampoline. It looked even more impressive on the ground, very sturdy, with chocks under the feet and iron pegs driven into the turf to hold it in position. It was then that Felix caught sight of two training shoes poking out from under its base. One pair of very big training shoes connected to two hairy ankles.
‘Morning,’ said Felix.
One leg twitched. Felix scooped a handful of gravel from the rockery and showered it in the direction of the feet.
‘I said, GOOD MORNING.’
There was a groan, then the clearing of a throat, then a low, rough-sounding voice. ‘Time is it?’
‘Half past ten. Sunday. AD 2004.’
‘Which planet?’
It wasn’t uncommon to find Jed asleep in the garden in the morning. In the hammock, in the shed, once in the kids’ playhouse and once in the inflatable paddling pool. Sometimes it was because the twins had climbed into bed with their parents and wriggled and turned until Jed couldn’t stand it any longer. But more commonly it was the result of a domestic dispute, and, judging by the noise coming through the wall yesterday evening, this latest episode had nothing to do with the children.
‘Slight disagreement?’ asked Felix.
‘Difference of opinion about sex and violence in contemporary cinema,’ said Jed, yawning.
‘Meaning?’
‘She wanted to watch Pretty Woman again and I wanted to watch Terminator 2.’ There was a pause while he coughed, then added, ‘Again.’
Jed half stood up, so the indentation of his head protruded through the trampoline. Then he crawled into the daylight. He was wearing a fleecy jacket zipped up around his neck and pulled down over his hands. He rubbed at the stubble on his face and leaned backwards against one of the metal posts.
‘So I took Smutty down the park and when I got back the chain was on. I nearly called for you but there was no light on.’
‘We had an early night. So where is he now?’
‘Who?’
‘The dog.’
‘Oh, don’t worry about him. He jumps on the garage roof, scratches at the landing window and she lets him in.’
Just then Marine appeared in a dressing gown with a big mug of steaming tea and a plate of toast. As she came nearer, Felix noticed two white tablets on the rim of the plate. She put the tea and the toast on the lawn next to Jed, held his face in her hands while she kissed him on the top of his head, then gave a little wave to Felix before disappearing back inside. Jed folded a slice of toast in half, then in half again, and posted it into his mouth, followed by both paracetamol tablets washed down with a slurp of tea. The twins came into the garden, both wearing matching dungarees, and climbed on to the trampoline, using Jed’s shoulders as a step. After bouncing up and down and into each other for five minutes, Molly said, ‘Uncle Felix, can we go and see Auntie Abbie?’
‘Oh, she’s just resting at the moment. She’ll be down in a minute.’
Then there was a voice from up above. It was Abbie, leaning out of an upstairs window, apparently naked apart from the two thin shoulder straps of her nightie.
‘No, come on up, girls,’ she was saying. ‘I’m in the bedroom.’
Molly and Alice clambered down from the trampoline via Jed, ran through the gate and into the house. It had become something of a Saturday morning ritual. An hour later they’d emerge plastered with Abbie’s make-up and hung with clip-on earrings and fake pearl necklaces, with Abbie, still not dressed, guiding her two little princesses into the garden for inspection.
Jed walked over to the fence and now Felix could see the intricate pattern of flattened grass imprinted on his left cheek. Jed finished off the tea and poured the dregs into a patch of raspberry canes.
‘What you up to this aft?’
‘I don’t know. Nothing.’
‘Let’s have a barbie. Come on, we’ll get down the garden centre before they run out of charcoal and grab a fry-up while we’re in town.’
But Felix had taken off his shoes and was heading for the trampoline. ‘Hang on a mo, I just want a go on this.’
‘I thought you were scared of heights,’ said Jed.
‘Why, how high can you go?’ said Felix, hauling himself over the frame and wobbling his way to the middle of the base.
‘As high as your bedroom for a start, little Mr Pink Arse.’ Then he laughed so loud Felix could feel the vibration through the soles of his feet.
The BBQ
The men will take care of the very hot things and the very cold things. They’ll deal with the extremes. They’ll go to the Arctic Circle and to the Gates of Heft, but they won’t be long. An hour and a half later they return with the smell of bacon on their hands, a trace of egg yolk between their teeth and a rolled newspaper in their back pockets. Sustenance and stimulation were required during their expedition.
The mission was a success. Man number one opens the back door of the car and drags out a paper sack almost half as tall as himself. It is awkward and shapeless and fat, a lifeless weight he has to hoist from the boot and carry across his shoulders. He walks unsteadily to the garden, where he lowers it gently, like a dead friend fallen in battle. In front of him is the slab. The shrine. The sacrificial altar made from four concrete paving stones cemented on to four breeze-block legs. It is a fixed and permanent construction, crude but of solid build. It is ‘on the large side’, meaning a whole bison could be roasted here with room at each side for chicken or fish (‘far the wives’). The triangular pile of cold, soggy ash is fettled out with a garden hoe, then cast among bushes and shrubs or dug into a flowerbed. The rusty iron gnu is brushed with a leather glove, banged against a wall, held up to the light and declared dean.
Despite the flimsy appearance of the paper sack and empirical evidence as to the low tensile strength of pa
per in general, this particular paper sack refuses to be torn by bare hands alone. It even resists the strong teeth of man number one as he attempts to rip it open with a firm bite and a shake of his head. The garden shears are collected from the shed, but rather than trim the stitching from the top seam or cut along the perforated line in the right-hand corner, man number one prefers to tackle the problem bayonet-style, dosing the shears to make a single blade, then lunging at his target. A small puff of black-grey dust issues from the puncture wound. Man number one then enlarges the hole and begins to excavate its dark, brittle contents lump by lump. However, on finding this a dirty, piecemeal and time-consuming chore, he finally wrestles the sack on to the barbecue station and shakes out an ample pile of charcoal briquettes on to the concrete plinth. One squirt with the fluid and one strike of a match and the heap ignites, burning with a hazy, invisible heat. To make sure, man number one lowers his hand over the transparent flame until something intensely hot forces him to snatch it away and nurse his wound in his armpit until the tingling stops. It is definitely lit.
Man number two, meanwhile, has carried his burden of eight plastic bags to the shade of a lean-to shed at the side of the house and is currently employed in the redistribution of waste products. He is to be found stuffing the contents of the green dustbin (recyclables) into the already full black dustbin (non-recyclable) by climbing into the black dustbin and jumping up and down. Cans and boxes rupture and pop under his feet, and when he looks down, a small quantity of baked-bean juice has spurted across the tongue and lace of his left shoe. Dismounting, he proceeds to line the inside of the empty green bin with a bin bag, partially burrowing inside it to squeeze out any pockets of air. His cargo is in many ways the opposite of the charcoal carried and ignited by man number one. His cargo is ice. Gouging one bag open with his nails, he swings it into the air and hundreds of bright, gleaming cubes are disgorged into the depth of the green bin, thundering and drum-rolling against the plastic base. Between each deposit, he adds in a consignment of lager or beer until the bin is two-thirds full with layers of alcohol and ice, topped with a litre-bottle of Frascati (‘for the wives’). Then, delving into the coldness, man number two roots out two cans of Stella and carries one across to his friend by the fire, man number one, who touches the cool, wet metal to the parched and filthy blister forming in the slack, pudgy flesh just below his thumb.
The White Stuff Page 5
