by Fiona Gibson
Two ambulance men pull out a stretcher and load the person onto it. Lucille wipes her face on her coat sleeve and climbs into the ambulance. Carl and Adele march across the road and bang on our door.
“So sorry to burst in on you like this,” Carl says.
“That’s okay, what’s happened?”
“That tree house. It’s coming down, if I have to do it with my bare hands. He shouldn’t have been up there—but that’s boys for you. Next thing he’s fallen off, and his friends, his so-called friends—”
“Who fell off?” I ask, as they follow me into the house.
“Leo,” Adele announces, with a dramatic shiver. Her eyes gleam excitedly. “His friends ran off and left him.”
“Thank God he had his phone,” Carl says. “I’d only just given it back to him. Confiscated it after that Chile business.”
I offer Carl a drink, but he asks for Marcus instead. “We’re going to go over, as soon as that weirdo shows up.”
“Marcus isn’t here.”
“Where is he?” Carl has plonked himself on the sofa. Adele, I realize, is wearing bunny slippers, their whiskers smattered with mud.
“He’s in London,” I tell Carl.
“Then I’ll see him myself, first thing tomorrow.”
“Joe’s away,” I tell him. “He’s camping in Dorset with his son.”
“You know him?” Carl snaps.
“Yes,” I say, “I know Joe.”
When they’ve gone, I switch the PC back on and try to write, but only garbage spurts out, which I delete. As I’m undressing, I notice that there’s something in my trouser pocket, that has been through the wash. Sarah, her mother and the yellow birthday cake have survived a forty-degree spin cycle.
“Can I come in?” he asks.
“What are you doing here? You should have warned—”
“Dad!” Tod roars, haring downstairs and careering headfirst into Marcus’s stomach. “Dad, Dad,” he pants, “Leo fell off the tree house and broke his leg. It’s in a big plaster like a mummy’s leg.”
“Poor Leo,” Marcus says, glancing at me. There are dark smudges under his eyes. He hasn’t been clipping his nasal hairs.
“What do you want?” I whisper, when Tod has scampered to the living room to drag through the 3-D maze.
“I just wanted to see you.”
We take Tod to the common, so he can show Marcus how amazingly fast he can ride his bike. This was Marcus’s idea. He thinks that this way, we’ll be able to talk. I rant on about school, and Tod’s collection of “I’m a Good Helper” stickers, which he carefully sticks to his window frame.
“It was one little mistake,” Marcus says.
“And he got five house points on Friday. Tod’s house is in the lead now.”
“I don’t want to be away from you.”
“Tod!” I shout. “Use your brakes, not your feet. You’ll wreck your new trainers.”
“I can’t stay at Will’s any longer. I’ll need to get a flat. I don’t want to do that, Ro.”
“You think I care what you want to do?”
“Yes, we’re having a baby,” he hisses.
“I had a miscarriage, Marcus.”
Tod pedals like crazy toward us, yelling that something terrible’s happened. His magnetic bracelet has fallen off, by the stream, he thinks. We help him look for it and keep pouncing on scraps of foil wrapper, thinking they’re silver balls. We finally spy it, still in one piece, glinting in the grass.
Tod slides it onto his wrist.
“I’m so sorry,” Marcus says.
“Why don’t you take Tod out somewhere? He’d love to spend some time with you.”
“Let’s do something together, the three of us.”
He has forgotten that it will never be just the three of us.
1:25 a.m. I am trying to finish the story but have hit a dead end.
One little mistake. It was a mistake to take Tod to that puppet show in Lexley Town Hall last weekend. I thought he’d enjoy it, but it turned out to be way too babyish, about a flying panda. Tod leapt up, relieved, when the curtains closed and everyone clapped. He looked so disappointed when I explained that that was only the interval.
That’s what I’d call a little mistake. It didn’t matter; we sneaked out before it was over and discovered a jumble sale at the church. We bought a board game called Labyrinth. You use handles to tilt the wooden board, coaxing the ball to follow the right pathway.
Sarah isn’t a little mistake. My baby wasn’t a mistake. I wanted it to happen that night. It wasn’t an accident.
A pregnant woman came into the bookshop today. Julia was creating an autumnal window display. She’d pulled out handicraft books—embroidery, quilting, appliqué—which our customers want to keep them occupied during the longer nights—and arranged fir cones and leaves to create a forest floor effect.
The customer’s belly was round and tight as a pumpkin. The effort of carrying it had flushed her cheeks, and she sank heavily onto a chair.
Julia dumped an armful of twigs and said, “Like a coffee?”
“Fruit tea?” the woman asked, hopefully.
I went into the tiny back room to make it. As the water turned faintly purple I heard Julia say, “Not long to go now.”
“Three weeks,” the woman told her. “That’s assuming she’s not late.”
“Oh, you know you’re having a girl?”
“Yes, we found out. Wanted to get everything ready, have someone real to focus on. We’ve waited a long time for this baby.”
I brought the woman her tea, but I couldn’t look at her face.
There’s a noise now, coming from outside. I’m not sure how long it’s been going on, but the banging and crashing have wrecked any hope of finishing this story tonight.
I watch through the window. A pointed structure—the roof—hits the ground. Then the window is gone, and slowly—like a film of a tree house being built, but being played backward—the walls tumble down, and finally the wooden platform, until all that’s left is an ordinary tree.
chapter 24
Kite Flying Made Easy
Suzie’s children are engaged in a heated dispute over who gets to operate the remote control of a silver convertible car. Whoever manages to take possession of the joystick ensures that the car smacks into my ankles. Even Tod, who has no interest in vehicles, wants a turn.
Barney is four now and has shot-putter arms, but is still attached to his dummy and keeps pulling down his trousers to show me his new Dexter’s Laboratory pants.
“Barney,” Suzie says wearily, “no one’s interested.” This pregnancy isn’t agreeing with her. She retches at the sight of an unwashed frying pan, and craves damp cellar smells, which are hard to come by in a second-floor flat. Peter brings home used dishcloths from the department store restaurant where he works as a porter.
Charts and rotas are pinned haphazardly around the kitchen. There’s a star chart for the efficient cleaning of teeth, and a stern-looking timetable entitled Who Gets to Sit Next to Dad. “You wouldn’t believe the scenes we have over who sits next to Peter for tea,” Suzie says. “I try to remember who sat next to him yesterday, and the day before that, but they’re convinced I’m giving someone special treatment.”
Peter emerges from the bedroom, having enjoyed a lie in, bringing with him an odor of duvet. It’s twelve-thirty p.m. Suzie can’t think what to make for lunch.
Barney’s trousers and pants are off now, and he’s twanging his thing and shouting, “Auntie Ro, I fell off the toilet and hurt my willy. Mum thought it had snapped.”
“Let’s go out,” Suzie announces.
“Where are we going?” Barney asks, excitedly.
“You’re not going anywhere. Auntie Ro and I are off for lunch. Goodbye.”
“Aww,” Barney moans, collapsing backward on the carpet.
“Wait!” Peter says. “What shall I give them to eat?”
“Dishcloths,” she snaps.
“
Yum yum,” Tod sniggers, sending the car careering into Barney’s naked backside.
In the café I tell her about Joe coming home to find the tree house no longer wedged firmly between the oak’s branches, but shattered all over the garden. I tell her that Tod wrote What Joe Does on a fresh sheet of paper and drew a series of pictures, like comic-strip frames, of Joe fixing the tree house until it was just like before. He refused to believe that it could never be mended.
Suzie is spooning in rice pudding, her comfort food of choice. She clears the bowl and stomps up to the counter to ask for a refill, then returns. “And he’s a friend of Marcus, this Carl guy?” she asks.
“Kind of.”
“How is Gorgeous these days?”
I watch as she stirs the thick, gloopy pudding. It looks like something you’d slap on to a wall to create a textured plaster effect. “He’s fine,” I say.
She looks up at me. “Ro, has something happened?”
“Well, I assume he’s fine. We’ve split up.”
“God, why didn’t you say?”
“He had an affair, around the time Tod was born…” I want to blurt out every detail—Sarah, the birthday cake, his overnight stays—but the café’s too public, with its dazzling strip-lights, and the woman behind the counter doesn’t look like she’d tolerate an emotional display. She prods the jacket potatoes in the oven and bangs the door shut.
We take the slow route home, through the park where we used to push Tod and Sam in their buggies, when I really thought Suzie knew everything. We stop at the pond, and I wonder if those ducks are still choking on Mum’s fishy tarts, and I hear myself saying, “I had a miscarriage, Suzie. I keep thinking the baby knew what was happening to us, and didn’t want to be born.”
I can feel her firm bump as she hugs me—her fourth child, the one she’s scared she won’t be able to manage.
“Sweetheart,” she says, “the baby didn’t know anything.”
Tod doesn’t want to leave Suzie’s. Peter allowed the children to pile up the sofa cushions and pillows from all of the beds, and make a den in which the four of them huddled together and feasted on fluoro-pink and -blue popcorn, which was, Tod reports, “much nicer than the boring stuff you make, Mum.”
However, for practical reasons—space, sanity—Tod and I are spending his half-term break at Anna’s. Her three-story town house, inherited from her parents, is far too big for one person.
“Love your bracelet, Tod,” she says, kissing his head and pulling me into the house by a hand. “And your binoculars, too. You’ll be able to see the canal from your room.”
Anna has bought a narrowboat, which she has christened Beatrice, in honor of Beatrice Dalle, her heartthrob. She has promised to take us for a cruise, and Tod is delighted to learn that this will incorporate a stop-off at the King’s Cross sanitary station to empty the chemical loo. We also plan to visit the British Museum and Parliament Hill, where Tod can fly the kite he has packed in his bag. This will be such a fun trip.
Anna shows Tod the room at the top of the house. On the sequined bedspread she has laid out children’s books she picked up from junk shops. In these stories the mums wear aprons, the dads wear ties, and they are greeted by excited children when they come home from work. There is often a large, bounding dog—a red setter or collie—and everyone’s always delighted to see one another.
“Where are you sleeping?” Tod asks me.
“In the little room downstairs.”
“Can’t you sleep here?”
“Do you mind?” I ask Anna. “I think he’d be happier with me.”
“Of course,” she says, “you do whatever feels best.”
Tod unpacks slowly, carefully placing his clothes and kite on the double bed. He places Dog on the pillow, to guard Mazes and Labyrinths, and his pens, drawing books and dolphin moneybox on the dresser.
“How has he been?” Anna whispers on the landing.
“He’s been okay. Actually, he’s been more than okay.”
“I’m fine,” Tod shouts from his holiday bedroom.
He doesn’t want me to read to him tonight; he wants Anna to do it.
“I tried to skip a bit,” she tells me later, “because I thought it was too grown up for him. He gave me such a telling off.”
She pours me a drink and I’m relieved that it’s not mescal but lukewarm white wine, which she forgot to put in the fridge.
“So, darling,” she says, “is this really it?”
“Yes, this is it.” I have never known her to have a relationship that progressed beyond a few, nervy dates. She told me once that she couldn’t possibly live with another person; she’s too selfish and set in her ways.
“How do you feel?” she asks.
“Starving. What do you have?”
“More wine,” she says, laughing.
In the British Museum, Anna swoons over gilded Egyptian masks. Tod gazes at a fragment of filthy linen from a burial tomb. It is three thousand years old and reminds him, I suspect, of our bed linen at home. “Mum, it’s one of those spikes,” he yelps. In his loudest voice he tells Anna that it would have been poked up a dead person’s nose to pull out the brain.
“Ugh,” she says, “why did they do that?”
“The Egyptians thought that brains weren’t important,” Tod informs her. “The heart, that was the special bit.”
A group of children are examining a dead man, called Ginger, who lies in an oval-shaped hollow with his knees pulled up to his chest. The sand in which he was buried sucked the water from his body, preserving him.
I worry that there’s too much death here: bones, bandages, the ochre remains of what used to be skin. “Maybe we should have gone to the zoo,” I whisper to Anna.
“No,” Tod says, “this is great. Look—that’s a mummified bull.”
“Can’t we look at the jewelry?” Anna says with a sigh.
It’s taken us nearly an hour to find the right spot on Parliament Hill where Tod will agree to try to fly his kite. “It’s too steep here,” my kite master kept protesting, “and too close to those other people. We’ll get tangled up.” Now Tod is clutching the kite, ready for takeoff. Anna has the string. “We’re so high,” he announces, “I can see everything. Where’s Dad’s office?”
“Let’s concentrate on the kite,” Anna says.
“Can we go and see Dad?” he asks, stamping his foot impatiently.
On the sole occasion that Tod visited the premises of Skews Property Letting, he spun on Marcus’s swivel chair, fell off and cracked his forehead on the edge of Nettie’s desk, requiring a speedy trip to A&E at University College Hospital.
“Tod, are we going to fly this thing?” Anna shouts into the wind. “Hold it up high, higher…that’s it—let it go, here’s the string, now run.”
Up, up, up it goes.
Anna has a plan. I will sell Gorby Cottage, move in with her until I find a place for me and Tod, buy decent shoes that at least make a noise when I walk, and run the Archives again. She might even pluck up the courage to sack Stanley, and let me choose my own assistant. Someone who doesn’t flinch when the phone rings.
Tod will go back to his old school. It will be as if Chetsley never happened.
“So that’s the plan,” she says.
“It’s a great idea, but we’re not moving, Anna.”
“Don’t tell me,” she says, “you actually like living out there in the sticks?”
“I do,” announces Tod.
“So it’s true,” Mum says, “that you’re in London, with no plans to see me?”
“Mum, I’m in a hurry.”
“I’d have thought you’d want to talk to me. Natalie said that Marcus has moved out. I could have told you, the moment I met him. A-ha, I thought, here’s someone who thinks he’s so charming—”
“You liked him, Mum,” I remind her.
I am tugging Tod along Frith Street by a clammy hand. He keeps pulling back, trying to peer into restaurant windows.
&
nbsp; “Did I?” Mum says. “Well, I’ve never had the best taste in men. Look at your father.”
“I’m sorry, Mum, but we’ll have to talk another time. I’m meeting someone for lunch.”
“Oh, who?”
“An agent. I’ve never met her before—”
“You’re having lunch with someone you’ve never met, but can’t see your own mother? Natalie wouldn’t do this.”
“Wouldn’t do what, Mum?”
“Get herself into this terrible mess.”
In a blond wood Soho café, Antonia Devine leans forward to examine Tod’s wobbly tooth. “It’s really loose,” she says. “Looks like it’ll fall out any minute. You should eat something hard—why don’t we order the crudités?”
Antonia called me on my mobile, saying that she had left several messages on my answering machine at home. She had received the illustrations and story and wanted to meet me. I had expected frightening poshness, even minor aristocracy, but Antonia has a rowdy laugh and doesn’t even seem to mind Tod being here.
“What I think we should do,” she tells me, “is start by sending it off to an editor I know who likes this kind of style.”
“What happens then?”
“If she likes it, you have an excellent publisher for your book. Of course, there are no guarantees.”
“What does ‘no guarantees’ mean?” Tod asks.
“It means that no one knows what will happen,” Antonia says.
We are upstairs on a double-decker bus. Here is the park, where I would push Tod’s pram, looking for people to talk to. I’d be pleased when Tod had a doctor’s appointment, and would babble to strangers in the waiting room until they buried their faces in ratty copies of Woman’s Own.
Until I met Suzie, I hadn’t figured out that what a new mother must do is install herself on a park bench. If she waits long enough, another mother with child, who frequents the same doctor’s waiting room, will park herself a respectable distance away on the bench. The women will glance at each other and ask their babies’ ages. It’s a sizing-up process. That’s how Suzie and I became friends.
Here is the playground with the helter-skelter Tod was always too scared to go on. This is where we get off the bus. “We’re going,” a dad announces, holding open the playground gate, as if that will encourage his son to walk through it. The boy has pouched up the front of his T-shirt in order to carry the maximum quantity of bark from the ground. The playground used to be tarmacked, but recent improvements include the bark, and the removal of the squeaking roundabout. “Don’t you care,” the dad shouts, “that Robert will be standing at school with no one to meet him? What will he do then?” The boy runs up the helter-skelter and sends down a shower of bark. “Robert will cry,” his dad shouts up.
