Fly in the Ointment

by Anne Fine

  She’d managed to drag him as far as the gate before I could shut the car door. As I unwillingly wound down the window, Janie Gay said in what she no doubt took to be a persuasive way, ‘Here, Lois! Didn’t you say you didn’t mind taking him this morning?’

  If I had said it, it was news to me. ‘I was just off to Marriot’s,’ I explained. I looked at Larry and it was obvious that he’d been crying. My heart went out to him as usual. ‘But I can easily take him along.’

  She pushed him forward. ‘Good. Because there’s something that I want to do.’

  She started back to the house then, on an impulse, turned again. ‘Oh, by the way, what’s all this talk of his about him seeing his Dada?’

  Again, I looked at Larry. Now his small tear-stained face had taken on that cretinous emptied look with which he generally tried to fend off trouble. I laughed. ‘It’s not really his Dada, obviously,’ I said to Janie Gay. ‘But, of all the rabbits up there on the petting farm, the one called Dada is the one that Larry likes best.’ Loosening my seat belt, I leaned out of the window. ‘That’s right, isn’t it, Larry? You do like the rabbit called Dada best of all?’

  Not giving him a moment in which to ruin things, I pressed on. ‘Larry spends ages cuddling the rabbits – especially Dada. He even saves cake crumbs for him, even though rabbits aren’t fond of cake. And he talks to him about everything. Dada and he have lots of conversations.’

  I thought I must have covered everything.

  ‘Oh, yes! And he always kisses Dada goodbye when he’s put back in his cage.’

  At the first mention of rabbits, she had lost interest. ‘Well, I’m not sure when I’ll be back.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. He’s quite welcome to stay.’

  ‘Good.’

  Larry climbed in the car. I didn’t wink at him. What was the point? Only that week I’d heard some millionaire’s daughter saying on the radio that she’d assumed that every child in the whole world had their own bodyguard. Children that age take everything for granted. There are a million things that they don’t understand. The best that I could hope for was that next time Larry let slip something about his Dada, Janie Gay would just brush him aside as usual. ‘Oh, stow it, Larry! Who gives a flying toss about your bloody rabbits?’

  Yes. Strange to think that was the best I could hope for. But it was.

  24

  THE PHONE CALL came while I was busy picking up the litter hurled over the fence by passing revellers. Back in the kitchen the washing machine was making such a din I never heard the ring, and so came in to the message.

  ‘Oh, hi. Remember me? From Pritchard Sales and Rentals. I’m in the Kenton office now. I showed you round that house in Limmerton Road.’ There was a little silence as he gathered his senses. ‘Where you are now, in fact. Well, the thing is, there’s been a bit of movement with this property. So I was wondering if—’

  The tape had cut him off mid-ramble, so I phoned him back. ‘This is Lois Cartright.’

  A baffled silence.

  ‘Ringing you back,’ I prompted. ‘From the house in Limmerton Road.’

  ‘Oh, right!’ I could tell from the sound of the shuffling of paper that he was rooting round his desk for something that might give him a clue as to why he’d phoned me. At last he found it. ‘Ah, yes! Of course!’

  And after that he was coherent enough. Did I remember the story he might have mentioned about the brothers in dispute over the will? Well, that was now settled. The two had come to terms on a division and wanted to sell the house. Was I aware that I was on a lease that offered me just two months’ notice? It was the firm’s policy never to post a Notice to Quit through the door without getting in touch first – partly in case the tenant found it upsetting (a lot of them were quite old) and partly because the rental side of Pritchard Sales usually had so many excellent similar properties to offer instead. Why, on the books of the Kenton office alone right now there must be over—

  I cut him off. ‘All right, then. I’ll come in and look.’

  ‘And I’ll post out this letter. I have to warn you that it is a legal document and therefore—’

  ‘Yes, yes. I understand. Two full months’ notice. From today. And then I must be out.’

  ‘Well, it’ll be dated from tomorrow, actually. Because, by law—’

  I thwarted his amiable quibbling. ‘See you tomorrow.’

  I sat and thought. Another move. And there’d no longer be the hole in the fence, the sheer convenience of being only a curse, slap or squawk away from Janie Gay and Larry. Could it be time to draw back? Had I put in enough for him to start to stand on his own feet?

  Clearly not. All I had done so far was tempt a little boy out of the shell that would, if he’d been left to cope alone, have hardened enough to protect him. If he’d been stuck with Janie Gay without me to intercede, he would have grown the sort of carapace that hard-faced children get. He would have taught himself to dull all feeling – firstly for himself and then for others. He would have gone the usual route. She would have swiped him round the head and he’d have rid himself of misery by passing the spite along – pulling the wings off flies or stamping on ants. By the time he was twelve, he might well have become the sort to get a kick out of tormenting cats. By fifteen he’d be getting drunk and kicking his enemies into the gutter.

  Why make such efforts, go to such great lengths to start a job and then not finish it? If I bailed out now, Larry would be a deal worse off than if I’d never found him. He’d lose his Aunty Lo, his warm safe house next door, and even have to suffer the misery of losing contact with his precious Guy a second time around.

  Out of the question. So I obediently showed up next morning at Pritchard Rentals. ‘What have you got on Limmerton Road? Or off its side streets?’

  Nothing.

  ‘Down towards Marriot’s?’

  Nothing again.

  ‘What about near the flats?’

  Oh, there were places there all right. Half the damn street was boarded up. The rest looked like a bombsite. There was no question of leaving the car within half a mile of the place. And I wasn’t even sure I would be brave enough to give it a go. Before I was halfway home I’d almost managed to convince myself that I’d reached such an impasse there was no way out. Kidnap Larry? Ridiculous. I’d be tracked down in a week. Suggest to Janie Gay I rented a room in her house? Forget it. We’d be at one another’s throats in under an hour. Feeling a thousand years old, I dragged myself out of the car and up the path, only to find Larry already on my doorstep. He was the easy half of things, I found myself thinking, and took the chance to glower across the fence at Janie Gay’s house and will it to crumple to a heap of rubble, crushing the real problem inside.

  Larry, it seemed, had come with an agenda. ‘Aunty Lo, I want a little brown dog.’

  Instantly the image surfaced of some poor desperate puppy getting a kicking from Janie Gay the same way Larry got the wrong side of her tongue.

  ‘I wonder what your mum will think of that idea.’

  He looked quite baffled. ‘I mean you and me.’

  What sort of world is it in which a child can spend so many hours with another person that he assumes he leads a double life?

  ‘I’ll have to think about it.’

  And I did. But not the way that Larry would have wanted. All the suggestion had done was once again bring me up hard against the sense that I was trapped. A dog? Another damn commitment. Another living breathing thing to bring me worry. I was still thinking about the idea when Janie Gay turned up at my door, brandishing a card sent by the Child Health Clinic.

  ‘You’ll take him, won’t you, Lois?’

  ‘When’s the appointment?’

  ‘At three.’

  ‘This afternoon?’

  She turned a little sullen. ‘I meant to ask you but I kept forgetting.’

  Usually I wouldn’t have said no. I quite enjoyed these little interviews with the plump lady doctor and her bag of tricks. ‘So, Larry,
can you be a clever boy and point to the yellow bead? . . . Can you throw me the ball? . . . I’m just going to peep in your mouth for a moment.’ The little boxes on her chart were ticked off one by one. She’d flick back through her notes. ‘Mother’s still working full-time, then?’ I’d roll my eyes as if to say, ‘These girls! What can you do?’ She’d tactfully disguise her sympathy for me as a farewell to Larry. ‘Now you be good to your Granny because she’s definitely good to you.’

  This time, on impulse, I told Janie Gay, ‘I’m sorry. I can’t take him.’ If she’d been anyone else, I might have pointed to the tax files heaped on my table and muttered something about too much work. But Janie Gay was not the sort to think in terms of duties or commitments, and so I said instead, ‘I’ve the most shocking toothache and that’s the only time this afternoon the dentist can fit me in.’

  ‘Sod it!’

  She stood there scowling at me for a while, then added sulkily, ‘Oh, well. I’ll skip it.’

  ‘Couldn’t you simply take him yourself?’

  She looked at me as if I were insane. ‘For God’s sake, Lois! It’s two whole bus rides and a walk away.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s their own fault for closing down that other clinic that they had in Beaver Street.’

  She turned away, scratching abstractedly. A memory stirred of Malachy standing at the top of our stairs in Rosslyn Road, using his bitten nails to shred his upper arms in just the same way, sometimes till they were raw.

  Even the most tolerant child-protection officers take a dim view of certain addictions. Was this the chance to gather ammunition?

  ‘Janie Gay—’

  Back she turned, on the off-chance. And yes, indeed, there was the greasy, slightly flushed look that I remembered so well. There were the old blue shadows round the eyes.

  Instantly I changed tack. ‘What if I dropped you off?’

  She made a face. ‘No thanks. I’d still have to do that sodding trek all the way home.’

  Now that suspicion had taken root, I was determined. ‘Not necessarily. They have a coffee bar. And Larry will be happy with the toys. You could just wait there till I pick you up on my way back.’

  She glowered at the card, still scratching furiously. Finally she muttered sourly, ‘Oh, all right.’ I didn’t want to rile her, so I suppressed the urge to point out it was me, not her, offering the favour. Besides, that was no longer true. How often do you get the chance to let yourself in someone else’s house with total confidence they can’t come rushing back? The urge to snoop had been getting stronger and stronger from the day I got that key. It was her absence of routine that held me back. Sometimes she would be out for hours, sometimes for only as long as it might take to buy a packet of cigarettes, or supper in a box. On one or two occasions I’d even driven past her at the bus stop then, within minutes, seen her stomping back up her garden path, clearly too irritated with the short wait to persist with her plans. Only the most fearless trespasser would risk her sheer benighted unpredictability.

  But if you didn’t have to be brave . . .

  At twenty to three she was, unusually, ready to go. The nervousness I felt affected my driving and twice at successive roundabouts I nearly rammed into the back of the same taxi. She didn’t notice and we reached the clinic safe and sound. To keep her happy, I slid Larry a handful of coins while she was watching. ‘Here you are. This is for you to buy you and Mummy a cake.’

  He looked a little anxious as I drove off, but I felt worse. Suppose some neighbour saw me? Suppose some passer-by reported back? And yet it was a chance not to be missed, and less than twenty minutes later I had carried a chair out of my kitchen and used it to climb the fence. Inching along the shadow of her wall, I checked to see that no one was about, then scuttled round the front to slip the purple key into her lock. The door swung open at a push and I stepped in that dark dank hall. It took real self-control not to pick up the bags of rubbish she’d left lying there and take them out to the bin. Just looking, Lois, I kept having to remind myself. Hands off.

  I started with the front room. I’d been in often enough when I’d brought Larry home. Always, then, I had made a point of tipping the sleeping child promptly on to the sofa and hadn’t risked rousing Janie Gay’s temper by staring nosily around. The carpet, I now noticed, was laid in strips, making it clear that, like my own next door, it must have been bought as off-cuts. Where anyone else would have a sideboard or a cabinet, she had a heap of boxes. The greying nets that kept out prying eyes were bunched over the rail in fistfuls rather than pinned or hung. The only pictures were a pencilled view of Notre Dame and a cartoon of a cat. Both looked to me so unlike any choice she might have made that I assumed they must have been abandoned by the last tenant. The room had always struck me as grubby and cheerless, and now I realized one more reason why. There was a fireplace, but it was clearly never used because the heavy chair in front of it faced back into the room. The only splashes of colour came from the heaps of Larry’s toys spread on the carpet and across the sofa.

  I’d never yet been up the stairs. Usually when my eye fell on all the shreds of tissue and the scraps of toast trailing from top to bottom, I itched to fetch a dustpan. On this occasion they were not too bad; she must have done some cleaning. I didn’t have to pick my way round little messes as I climbed.

  To the right was the bathroom. She must, I reckoned, have cleaned that too, because it was passable. The towels were thin and nasty – the sort most people keep only to dry a dog. And yet the bath was clean enough. Most of the shampoo bottles on the tiled window sill had their tops screwed on, and apart from a couple of sodden flannels on the floor – and that was probably Larry – it was quite tidy.

  I moved on to Larry’s room. I knew it must be his because, disquietingly, there was a proper lock on the outside. How often was that used? With gathering unease I pushed the door and stared around. It was so bleak. For one thing, perhaps because it overlooked the garden, she hadn’t bothered with curtains. The place seemed chilly enough simply to look at, but it was obvious it would be freezing in winter. His bed looked cheap but adequate, with only its pillowcase of snapping sharks to make me frown: fine fuel for nightmares. I tried to cheer myself on Larry’s behalf. At least both of the bright framed posters I had sent around the previous Christmas were up on the wall.

  Still, something was wrong.

  It took a moment to work out what the problem was. No toys. No books. No jigsaws. Nothing. And when I thought about what I had seen downstairs, I realized that all the bright and cheerful toy cars and games and cuddly animals I’d ever sent him home with (‘Tell Mummy Sandy doesn’t want it any more’) were down in the front room. Had she just finished some ferocious tidy up? Oh, no. I didn’t think so. Inside the cupboard there were only clothes. Inside the drawer, just socks. There was a shelf, but it was too high on the wall. No child could reach up there. Only when I had fetched the chair from the hall and climbed on top could I see the things she’d thrown up there: key rings from the pizza house, a broken torch, a plastic banana with chewed ends –

  And Malachy’s old prism.

  The glass was dull with dust and fingerprints. No doubt she’d torn it down in one of her fits of temper. ‘I’ll stop you staring at rainbows! Get those socks on right now!’ She’d hurled it up here where the poor boy couldn’t reach it as just one more of her spontaneous vendettas against the tiny comforts of someone else’s childhood.

  Mean-minded little bitch.

  I wasn’t going to leave the prism there. It held too many memories, and it was doing Larry no good out of sight. I didn’t feel the slightest guilt, only a rush of anger at Janie Gay’s sheer nastiness, and shame at my own unimaginative failure to realize just how hard her heart could be. How often had I heard her threatening poor Larry with being marched upstairs? But who would ever have thought she’d find the discipline inside herself to make sure that same bedroom could always double as a punishment cell?

  And so to her room. What I wanted was a big sur
prise. What I was longing for, I realized, was to step into such a different world that it would make her guilty, guilty, guilty in everyone’s eyes. I wanted to find some warm and comfortable nest that made it plain that here was a mother who knew exactly what she was denying her son. A room so pretty and cared for that it would justify my growing anger and set me free to accuse her: ‘Look at you! You leave your boy for hours in that cheerless dump you call his bedroom, and yet in here you have soft pillows, gentle lamps and thick lined curtains. You’ve left your son to fend for himself in that cold cell but you’ve created for yourself a cosy haven!’

  That is what I wanted. A simple black and white scenario to banish the exhausting shades of grey that sent the compass of my feelings forever swivelling to and fro – pity to hate, and back again to pity. But Janie Gay, it seemed, was not one of those mothers who make a palace for themselves and banish their children to an outhouse. Her room was just as bleak. A bed. Drab, serviceable bedclothes. An ugly wardrobe and a couple of pictures on the wall no one her age would choose.

  Only one corner of her room would catch your eye – the bedside table. The thing was nothing in itself, small, cheap and chipped. But set on a saucer next to the overflowing ashtray there was a candle. And, next to that, something the shape of a hedgehog made out of strange little wires.

  Some sort of lamp? I pressed my toe down on the switch set in the grubby skirting board. Almost at once the spine ends lit up in a glorious metallic blue and, as I watched, melted mesmerically to green, then silver, then to pink, and on and on, through all the colours, clean and beautiful.

  I peered in the table’s little drawer. My life with Malachy had taught me more than enough to recognize what I saw there: Janie Gay’s own small hoard of magic spells. Here was the place she went to throw off all her miseries and disappointments. The only place, perhaps, where it was possible to push away all thoughts of her own childhood, and how things had gone wrong, and how she’d ended up tethered to a responsibility she’d never sought even before she’d had a stab at making something of her own life.