Wonderboy

by Fiona Gibson

  Tod is too busy clawing his head to greet tea with any enthusiasm.

  “Why are you scratching?” Marcus asks. There’s a pale line over the bridge of his nose, where his shades blocked out the sun during his three-hour nap.

  “Can’t help it,” Tod says.

  “Do you think he’s got nits?” Marcus asks.

  “It’s probably bugs from the garden.” Aren’t gardens swarming with wildlife? I remember Pest Controller and his warning about biting insects. This is our comeuppance for trapping a nest, probably housing several chicks, in the attic. I read an article in the Gazette about thieves raiding birds’ nests and selling the eggs to collectors. The ornithological expert warned that it’s against the law to interfere with wild nesting birds. We have shut out the adult birds, leaving underage chicks with no food or parents.

  Marcus abandons his dinner and rakes his fingers through Tod’s hair, but it’s too matted to see anything. “Is the chemist open on Sundays?” he asks. “We need a nit comb.”

  “I don’t have nits,” Tod insists, using his fork to access a troublesome zone behind his right ear.

  I am armed with a fine-tooth comb, a gloopy lotion that promises to kill head lice plus their eggs, and a leaflet that informs us that black specks are, in fact, nit dung, meaning that my son’s head is being used as a toilet. Tod huddles on the sofa beside me, wincing at each stroke of the comb. I tap it onto a sheet of white paper. There are brown dots, which do not appear to be doing anything spectacular, or even moving. Tod’s binoculars don’t work close up, so we dig out the magnifying glass from his bug-collecting kit.

  “They’ve got bodies,” he announces, “and wriggly legs.”

  We find some in my hair, too, and place them next to their relatives so they can party together.

  “Do they look like that?” I ask, studying an illustration on the leaflet of a head louse, magnified two thousand times.

  “Much worse than that,” Tod declares.

  I could cope with a more photogenic species, like dragonflies or ladybirds. On the leaflet, this super-nit appears as a horrific, armor-plated beast with hairy, jointed limbs and a rabid appetite for small children. We learn that, after hatching, young lice are capable of reproducing within ten days. Now I feel really sick. They are doing it right now, copulating wildly on my head and Tod’s head, but not on Marcus’s head, as he has checked himself thoroughly and reported that he is entirely louse free.

  Never mind reassurances that nits “prefer clean hair.” That’s put on the leaflet to make you feel better. We may not be obviously dirty but, as a family, the Skews appear to attract vermin. Look at the birds, the Anobium punctatum. I wonder if the nit lotion is a milder, heavily perfumed version of KillAll, which Mr. Leech sprayed on to our joists. We never required so many poisons in London.

  “You could have picked them up in Majorca,” Marcus suggests. “You said Tod played with lots of other kids.”

  “Only Jacob and those girls, Margot and Darcey.”

  “Even ballerinas get nits,” Marcus retorts.

  I notice that he has positioned himself at the far end of the table, at a safe distance from Tod and me, and says that it might be better if I, rather than he, slap the lotion onto our heads, save him being infected.

  Then he trips off to join Carl’s quiz team at the Poacher’s.

  Tod and I are sprawled across his unmade bed. I am trying to read to him but it’s too distracting, having your head smelling of sick roses. The nit lotion must be left on overnight so that it penetrates the eggs. “You missed a bit,” Tod keeps complaining—we’re on the chapter about picture mazes, where a recognizable shape, like an eagle or dragon, can be seen from above—then grumbles, “I’m hungry. Can I have supper now?”

  As I wait for his toast to pop up, I haul in our suitcase from the hall and open it. Why are pink sandals quite acceptable in Majorca, but not for the school run? Something good happened to us on that holiday. There are so many people in our pictures: Dad, Freda, Lily, Jacob, the chef from the restaurant across from Dad’s flat, who let Tod watch chickens sizzle on their spits in the kitchen.

  Even Jacob’s parents, and the ballerinas’ mother in her fondant ensemble, have snuck into our photos. We appear to have lashings of friends. Tod’s toothy smile beams from a brown face, and my own face appears almost crack-free. I look like Ro who used to run a film archive and never encountered lice infestation.

  My holiday clothes still smell of Dad’s stew. I tap out his number, hoping that I won’t interrupt a cozy Ernest-and-Freda moment, or an intense nappy-changing procedure.

  “Hello?” It’s Freda who answers. “Oh, Ro, it was wonderful to meet you both. The flat feels so quiet without you.”

  “Freda, I’m sorry to tell you this, but Tod and I have nits.”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” she tells me, “we’ve applied the lotion and we think they’re all dead now.” I start to ask if Lily caught them, then remember that she doesn’t have hair.

  I put down the phone and play a message that we haven’t picked up. It’s Will, captain of Marcus’s octopush team. “Marcus, Ro, haven’t seen you in ages. We’re planning a barbecue, week on Saturday, can we drag you back to the city for our famous lamb burgers? Speak soon, toodle-oo.”

  I call him back.

  “All settled in the middle of nowhere?” he asks.

  “We’re fine, how’s the team?”

  “Great, best season so far if we win next week’s match. Pity Marcus has been out of action since you moved.”

  I go to speak but my voice doesn’t work. Nothing happens. Tod is shouting from his room. It starts with a barked Mum. Mum.

  “Ro? You still there?” Will asks.

  “He’s just been…very busy.”

  “I understand. You’re doing up a derelict house. He has to put his family first.”

  Tod is yelling louder now: Maaaam. Toahhhst. “That’s right, Will,” I say, prodding my head to check whether the lotion is still sticky or has formed a meringue-like crust.

  “So you’ll come on the nineteenth? I’d hate to lose touch just because Marcus has jacked in octopush.”

  “Let me see what we’re up to.”

  I put down the phone, snatch two slices from the toaster, and slap on hard slices of butter straight from the fridge. I half fill his milk cup, microwave it for twenty seconds, then dispatch supper by express delivery to His Supreme Highness upstairs.

  “This toast’s cold,” he retorts.

  Mum didn’t snoop in cupboards, drawers or even the garage, after Dad had left her. I took a week off work to stay with her, when the martini was taking hold, and watched as she loaded everything he owned, and had not taken to Majorca, into black bin liners. Dad hadn’t been one for hobbies or hoarding, and I was surprised that he actually owned so much stuff.

  Mum got up at six-thirty on a Friday, the council’s special collection day, and placed the sacks on the pavement. You could see his silver reading lamp, and his own breadboard that he had kept in the garage, poking though a hole in a sack. Mum seemed much cheerier as she made breakfast. If Natalie had been there, and not engulfed by chicken pox, she would have commented that the chi had started to swish through Mum’s house more freely.

  There was so much chi flying about that Mum had a nap after breakfast, although that also could have been due to the effort of lugging thirteen full bin liners into the street. I wondered why he hadn’t taken these things with him, and what he’d have done if he’d seen them being driven away by a truck with a cage on the back, filled with rusting cookers and foul mattresses.

  Like Mum, I don’t rake through other people’s private things. I’m just curious, and that’s an admirable quality. Tod wants to know things, like what the inside of a stomach looks like, and how dead people turn into skeletons. I’m pleased about that. Like my son, I’m just interested.

  Marcus’s system is so finely honed that I can flick through his papers without removing anything from its file.
Here are instructions, plus guarantees, for every appliance we own, even the baby listener we haven’t used since Tod was a toddler. Does anyone read these things? We never learned to tape a program, even before the video broke. The microwave is used only to warm Tod’s bedtime milk. How did we accumulate so many appliances? Those Boxed Brainwaves don’t recommend shopping for white goods together. The juicer hasn’t been switched on since my pre-holiday health kick. We used the bread-maker once, to make pizza dough, and it came out gloopy and glued to the sides of the tin. We would have had better results with the Corby trouser press.

  I check Marcus’s mobile account in the bills file. The only numbers I recognize are my mobile and our home phone. These are work-related people, so why should I know them? Sarah, of course, is too busy having her toe cuticles pushed back and massaged with sweet almond oil to rifle through anyone’s personal things.

  Upstairs, in Tod’s room, the Dalmatian fish dart between fronds that could be plastic or real, living plants. Tod has kicked off his spaceman duvet and is lying with arms and legs splayed. Toast crusts litter the carpet. In our bedroom, one wardrobe door hangs from a single hinge and won’t shut properly. It never recovered from the removal men’s rough handling. Marcus has promised to fix it, but I know that he remembers the trauma of building the thing in the first place. The shop where we bought it offers a home-build service, but who bothers with that? It looks so easy, in the diagram. “Any idiot can do this,” Marcus announced. He made me take Tod to the park by our old flat so he wouldn’t be distracted. When we came back three hours later, with hailstones trapped in our hair, he was still surrounded by rectangular panels and crumpled instructions and said, “I didn’t expect you back so soon.”

  The inside of his wardrobe is reasonably neat, apart from a jumble of old jackets and flippers at the bottom. Each shirt is on its own hanger. His ties are loosely rolled and stored in a shallow wicker tray on the top shelf. In his chest of drawers are folded sweaters and T-shirts in black, white, gray, navy. These are the only colors I’ve ever seen him wear.

  A packet of condoms has been slipped down the side of his pants drawer. “How do you know you won’t have any more babies?” Tod asked in front of my mother and Perry at Boxing Day dinner.

  “We just know,” I said quickly.

  Marcus grunted as he tried to unscrew the lid from the piccalilli jar.

  “But you said,” Tod blundered on, “it just takes some kissing and the seed swimming along the woman’s pipes.”

  “Anyone for some tongue?” Mum asked, waving a plate laden with purplish slices.

  “Mums and dads only make a baby if they both want one,” I muttered under my breath.

  In the hall I find Marcus’s briefcase. It contains details of flats, three of last week’s papers, and a velvet giraffe stuffed with beans, which he must have bought for Tod and forgotten to give him. I find his address book in the briefcase’s inside zip pocket. I am listed in the H section—Ro Hall—with work and home numbers. No mobile, then. No child, or jointly purchased white goods with instruction booklets carefully filed, back then. There are lots of names I don’t know in his book, but no Sarah, not even an S.

  Marcus shows up just after midnight with the excellent news that Carl’s team won by twenty-two points, despite the dimwit who insisted that the Velvet Underground came from Stoke. I sit up in bed, watching him undress. He flings his jeans in the direction of the linen basket, but misses.

  “What have you been doing?” he asks.

  “Oh, this and that. I spoke to Will.”

  “Will? What did he want?” He tries for a smile but it’s so unsteady he has to turn away from me.

  “He asked us over for a barbecue, week on Saturday.”

  “Oh.” His T-shirt lands in a soft hoop on the floor. He places his socks in the linen basket. Wearing just his pale blue and white striped boxers, he lowers himself to the edge of the bed. “Don’t think I can make it,” he says.

  “Why not? I’d like to go. In fact I want to go. Is there a problem?”

  “Did he invite all of us?” All of us, that sounds like a lot.

  “Of course he did.”

  Marcus glances at me. He has drunk just enough to give his face a slight sheen. His cheeks are flushed, and I can smell beer.

  “What?” he says.

  “You’re a bloody liar, Marcus.”

  “What are you talking about?” There’s a little laugh, as if he thinks I’m hysterical—imagining things again, like bad smells in the house.

  “You know.”

  “You’re just weird these days. Sometimes I think I don’t know you any—”

  “It’s always me,” I yell, “who’s weird or making stuff up.”

  “Well, it is,” he says, tugging off his boxers and trying to slam them to the floor, but of course they don’t make any noise, not even a soft flump. He slides into bed and curls up at its farthest edge.

  And it’s not me: it’s you. You don’t play octopush anymore. You say you’re playing, every Thursday night, but that’s not what you do. I wonder if Sarah has asked him to leave me, if she stomps around her flat in her spindly heels, with her hair flying, or if she’s content with a part-time arrangement. Let’s keep it this way, darling. She’ll never find out. She’s hardly ever in London. Yes, she does pop in to see that dreadful friend of hers—the one who’s addicted to fried food and producing children—but your paths won’t cross. Why would they? When she’s not at that bookshop, serving three customers a day, she’s usually at home, socializing with damp-proofing contractors and pest controllers. She never used to be like this.

  “Don’t you dare pretend to be asleep.”

  “I’m not pretending anything,” he says.

  “Marcus, I know you don’t play octopush. You haven’t played for months.”

  He sits up, and is laughing now, chuckling softly like he’s just cottoned on to the joke: oh, I get it. “Not in Will’s team,” he says. “I switched, remember, just before we moved? I’ve been coaching Hackney Under 21s. I told you, Ro.”

  “You’ve gone to a youth team?”

  “It’s great coaching experience. They’ve been in the top three of the junior ladder since—”

  “You told Will you’d stopped playing?”

  “I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.”

  “Won’t he find out?”

  “I’ll speak to him,” he says, then his lips are all over my face, and he’s no longer tired: can’t I see how much he still wants me? I close my eyes, and we’re back in my old flat, on one of those workday afternoons when we’d meet in the park and sneak home to bed, where we’d lie until lilac-tinged shadows crept into my room.

  If you want to know something, just ask. And I can’t.

  chapter 19

  Bad Tarts

  Perry had planned to celebrate his sixtieth birthday in the garden, enabling guests to mingle on the lawn and admire the koi carp. But what started as a promising day has, by lunchtime, slumped beneath pewter clouds. We are now jammed into Mum and Perry’s low-ceilinged, white-with-a-hint-of-green living room, surrounded by crystal rose bowls and bone china plates bearing Mum’s tarts.

  “More nibbles?” she asks.

  “I’ve had enough, thanks,” I say, as she waves the plate in my face. Everywhere I look, there’s barely touched pastry. No one seems to know what to do with themselves. Perry’s old workmates from the electrical appliance shop are bunched up at the back door, smoking Embassy cigarettes. Mum’s friends from her flower-arranging group are lined up on the sofa like quiz show panelists.

  “Anyone for Trivial Pursuit?” Perry suggests, petting his moustache with a forefinger.

  Marcus is pulling his let’s-go-home face. I am experiencing an overwhelming desire to be out of here, away from Trivial Pursuit, which Perry is setting out on the dining table, and Mum’s fishy mayonnaise.

  “It’s been lovely,” I tell her, “but I’m seeing a friend while I’m in town, and Marcus has
business to sort out.”

  “Here,” she insists, “we’ll never get through all these.” She fills a Tupperware carton with tarts, hands me my birthday present—a swan-shaped parcel with red ribbon tied flamboyantly around its neck—and hurriedly kisses my cheek.

  Tod and I tumble from Marcus’s car at the park gates. I turn to wave the carton of surplus tarts and mouth to Marcus that I want to leave them in the car, but he has already driven away.

  “Ro!” Suzie shouts. Tod grins and pelts toward her.

  Suzie’s kid, Barney, plummets headfirst into my stomach. He looks up at me, grinning, and says, “What’s in that box?”

  “You really don’t want to know, Barney.”

  “Good party?” Suzie asks, smirking. I pull a face. “Come on,” she says, tugging my arm, “let’s see if we can knacker these two out.”

  In our old park, a bunch of adults are playing noncompetitive football. I recognize a few of the regular players from our street. It’s noncompetitive because caring about winning is deemed a Bad Thing. One Sunday morning someone buzzed at our door, asking if we’d like to join in. The man had flaccid pink thighs, and curly black hairs sprouting over the neck of his T-shirt. “We’re busy today, maybe next Sunday,” Marcus explained, a pattern that continued until the man gave up and left us alone. We had to avoid walking past the park on Sundays.

  Noncompetitive football appears to consist of jogging daintily on the grass, and occasionally shouting, “Well done, Libby!” although today I spot one of the women delivering a pretty competitive kick on the ankle.

  I drink insipid tea, and Suzie has water, in the park café where all the food is deep fried, even the bacon for sandwiches. Tod and Barney are crouching on the path outside, studying ants. They are trying to make the ants carry things: fragments of leaves, cigarette butts.

  “Ro, I have something to tell you,” Suzie says. Her hair is secured in a fuzzy bun, and her lipstick has worn away, leaving a wonky brown outline like chocolate.

  “No, you’re not.”