Goggle-eyes

by Anne Fine

  ‘Oh, Kitty,’ she said, her voice all wobbly. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Just at that moment, through the wall, I heard the ring of second bell. I couldn’t let anyone see her in this state.

  ‘Quick,’ I said. ‘Before everyone tramps through to lessons. Get in the cupboard!’

  I reached out and pulled her to her feet. Before she could pull back, she caught a glimpse of her. reflection in the mirror between the racks. She looked the most dreadful sight. Her face was blotchy where it wasn’t scarlet. Puffing around her eyes made them look piggy and bloodshot. Dried tears had stiffened all the hair round her face.

  ‘Oooh!’

  ‘Come on.’

  I rattled the knob of the lost property cupboard until the door sprang open. It has one of those ball bearing catches, so stiff some people always think it’s locked. There is a proper light inside because it isn’t really a cupboard at all, but the tiniest room with a steep sloping ceiling that fits under the back fire stairs. You can’t stand up in there unless you’re a midget. You have to sit on piles of everyone’s lost property. It’s comfortable enough, unless the games staff have just done one of their massive clear-outs and left nothing but one old tennis racket with busted strings, and the odd welly boot.

  We were in luck. It was quite full. I pushed Helen down on the softest-looking mound of stuff, and stood guard at the door till I heard the burblings of the first people going through to their classes. I waited through a couple more door bangs, and then, as I expected, saw Liz prowling between the racks, looking both ways in search of her best friend.

  ‘Helly’s in here,’ I said, pointing.

  ‘Is she better?’

  ‘No. Worse.’

  Liz made a face. ‘Maybe she ought to be sent home.’

  From inside the cupboard came a strangled, ‘No-oo!’

  ‘She doesn’t want to be sent home,’ I told Liz.

  Liz glanced behind her anxiously.

  ‘I’m definitely not supposed to be down here,’ she told me. ‘Loopy insisted I was to stay right away. “This one is up to Kitty,” she kept saying. I think she’s mad.’

  She looked at me as if I ought to be the first to leap up and agree that anyone who thought to send me on an errand of mercy rather than her had to be queuing up to sign on at the bin.

  ‘Maybe you’d better push off,’ I suggested.

  ‘Maybe.’

  She peered over her shoulder again, as if she feared Mrs Lupey might materialize in the cloakroom doorway any moment. Then, leaning forward, she called over my outstretched arm into the dark of the cupboard: ‘See you later, Helly.’

  She turned to me. ‘I’ll tell Loopy you two are hiding in the cupboard,’ she said. ‘In case she worries that you’ve both got run over.’

  Then she hitched up her school bag and drifted off towards the cloakroom door. I caught the last few words that floated back.

  ‘I just can’t understand why she chose you…’

  I didn’t bother to reply. To be quite honest, I couldn’t think of anything to say. I couldn’t understand why I’d been chosen, either. So far as I’m aware, the name Kitty Killin is not a byword for sensitivity in our school staffroom. Especially not since Alice came in one morning really upset because her pet rabbit Morris had got too doddery to climb in and out of his hutch, and I suggested that she change his name to Morribund.

  So why me? Why me? But Mrs Lupey must have had her reasons. Helen and I must have something in common, apart from mothers who shop at the same Safeways, and fathers with sticky-out grey hair…

  But I’ve seen Helen’s father. He hasn’t any hair at all. He is completely bald. And her parents have been divorced longer than mine!

  I wrenched the cupboard door wide open. She was still sitting, hunched and miserable.

  ‘I know!’ I cried. ‘I know why you’re so upset! I know why you’re crying your eyes out! I know why you don’t want to be sent home!’

  She lifted two fierce, red-rimmed little eyes that burned through the gloom of the cupboard like live coals.

  ‘Your mum’s going to marry that man with grey hair!’

  Her mouth fell open. I felt like Sherlock Holmes on a good day.

  ‘And you think he’s a proper creep! You’ve thought he was a creep all along, but, being the sweet Helly that you are, you’ve been too gentle and polite to say so. And now she’s talking about your happy future together, and it’s too late to explain that you don’t like him.’

  She twisted her fingers so tightly I thought they would snap.

  ‘Don’t like him?’ she repeated in a cold, low voice. ‘I can’t stand him.’

  And all the colour drained out of her face.

  ‘Helly?’

  I flicked the cupboard light switch. Luckily for her, it was the dimmest light bulb ever seen. I slipped inside and dropped on a pile of old gym shorts and woollies. I pulled the door closed to shut us in.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, leaning towards her. ‘No need to tell me about this sort of thing. I am the World’s Great Expert, Helly Johnston. The stories I could tell you!’

  She looked up.

  ‘Go on, then,’ she said, still ashen. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Wait till you hear.’ I prised a rather sharp welly boot out from under my bum, and shifted till I was more comfortable. There was no hurry. We’d be left in peace. Good old Mrs Lupey must have known from the start that it would take me hours to get through even a half of it. Not for nothing has she been sloshing her red ink all over everything I’ve written this year – all my poems and free essays, my play in rhyming couplets, even my supposedly anonymous contributions to the school magazine. Oh yes, she knows all about what happened to me when my mum took up with Goggle-eyes.

  And I knew why she’d sent me down, and not Liz.

  2

  Mum’s had boyfriends before, of course. Goggle-eyes wasn’t the first. For a long time it was Simon, who was tall and dark and a bit wet, and wore nice suits. I liked Simon. He was the only person in the world who could sit down and help Jude with her arithmetic homework without her ending up in floods of tears. ‘Now you have to go next door and borrow from Mr and Mrs Hundreds,’ he’d remind her, over and over again. ‘Don’t forget to pay back Mrs Tens.’ He never got ratty, like Mum and I do. He never abandoned her in the middle of a sum, saying, ‘I’m sure you’ve got it now.’ I used to sit the other side of the kitchen table, admiring his patience, with Floss tightly clenched between my knees so she couldn’t break away under the table and spread dribble and cat hairs over Simon’s nice suits. Floss is friendly and sweet but she’s terribly messy, and Simon works in a very posh bank.

  Then Simon got the push, I’m not sure why, but I suspect he was too wet for Mum. She went a few months without anyone, and said she quite liked it, and wasn’t going to bother with fellows in future. ‘I’d rather stay home and watch telly,’ she said. Whenever she really needed a partner for something, she took a woman friend from work. And sometimes she borrowed Reinhardt from next door in return for their really long loan of our ladder.

  Then, one day, she met Gerald Faulkner. Don’t ask me where and why and how. All I know is, one day my mother’s her normal, workaday Oh-God-I-hate-my-job-I’m-going-to-resign-what’s-on-telly self, and the next she’s some radiant, energetic fashion plate who doesn’t even hear when you tell her it’s the last episode of her favourite series, and she’s going through last year’s babysitter list like the Grim Reaper, winnowing out all the old biddies who’ve cracked and gone off to spend their last years with their daughters-in-law, and all the bright teenagers who made it to college.

  ‘I can’t find anyone for Friday night!’

  ‘Why don’t you stay home and watch Dynasty with us?’

  She sweeps round, all fancy skirts and high heels and different eye make-up.

  ‘Oh, lovies! You watch it, and then you can tell me what happens.’

  How old does she suddenly think we are? Three? And who was he, this m
an who had made all the difference? I’d heard his voice. He rang up early one evening before Mum even got home from work. I was the one who picked up the phone because Jude just ignores it whenever it rings. It could go on and on for hours, and she’d never bother to pick it up. She’s odd that way.

  I lifted the receiver and sang out our number. There was a little silence, then a voice said,

  ‘Hello. Is that Kitty or Judith?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. (Well, it was.)

  There was another, infinitesimal pause. I got the feeling that, if he’d ever been introduced to me in person, he might have come out with something either funny or waspish. But all he actually said was,

  ‘This is Gerald Faulkner. Please tell your mother I managed to get tickets, and the film starts at eight.’

  I said, ‘Oh.’ (I hadn’t realized she’d be going out again. I thought she was going to stay in and help with Jude’s cardboard Roman amphitheatre. We’d promised to knock up a few woolly ravenous beasts.)

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, and then, after a pause, ‘Goodbye.’

  I didn’t say anything back, so after a couple more seconds of silence, he just hung up.

  I went into the kitchen, where Jude was sitting with Floss in her arms.

  ‘That was him,’ I told her. ‘They’re going out again tonight. He called you Judith.’

  She made a face but didn’t say anything; and two minutes later Mum came through the door, loaded with shopping and all bright-eyed.

  ‘Did anyone phone?’

  She never comes in asking ‘Did anyone phone?’ If I tell her Granny’s rung, or Simon’s rung, or someone from the hospital office where she works wants a quick word with her, she only groans.

  Jude gave me a look, as if to say: See? And I wished that I hadn’t picked up the phone in the first place. But a message is a message. So,

  ‘Mr Faulkner rang about some film,’ I told her. ‘I expect you forgot to tell him that you were stopping home tonight, to make Jude’s woolly ravenous beasts.’

  She got the point.

  ‘Sweetheart!’ All guilt and glossy lipstick, she swooped down on Jude. ‘We’ll finish your amphitheatre tomorrow, I promise.’

  ‘Tonight’s the last possible night.’ I poured cold water on this plan of hers. ‘We already put this off twice, remember? She has to take the whole thing into school in the morning.’

  Mum went out all the same at half-past seven. Jude didn’t seem to mind. And when I’d finished looking after the babysitter – making her coffee, fetching her reading glasses, finding the Radio Times – we all settled down to watch an old Carry On film and make woolly ravenous beasts, though Jude’s all turned out larger than hairy mammoths, and Mrs Harrison’s looked like dispirited sheep.

  Then I went off to bed. I’d had enough. But it was hard to sleep, and I was on my way back from my third trip to the bathroom when I heard Mum push open the front door shortly before eleven.

  I leaned against the banisters, and watched her clinking about in her purse.

  ‘Three and a half hours?’ she said to Mrs Harrison, who was already struggling into her coat.

  ‘That’s right, dear,’ said Mrs Harrison. ‘Have you had a nice evening out with your young man?’

  ‘Young man!’ Mum snorted with amusement. ‘Mrs Harrison, Gerald is over fifty.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Mrs Harrison, holding Mum’s shoulder to steady herself as she stepped into her wellies. ‘You know what they say. Better an old man’s darling than a young man’s slave!’

  Mum was still giggling when she shut the door. I thought about slipping downstairs and surprising her. She could tell me about the film while we turned off the lights and unplugged the telly and put the milk bottles out on the step. But something about the smile on her face put me off, and I went quietly back to bed instead.

  Over fifty!

  Old enough to be a grandfather. Maybe he had false teeth and sagging skin, and tufts of grey hair sticking out of his ears.

  Next morning when I came downstairs, I asked her, ‘When are we going to meet this Gerald Faulkner, then?’

  I was convinced she’d be so embarrassed about him she’d drop the teapot on the spot, scalding poor Floss, and stare at me, wild-eyed. Instead she said,

  ‘How about tomorrow? He’s coming round here anyway, to pick me up.’

  ‘I won’t be here,’ I said promptly. ‘Tomorrow is Thursday, and I have a meeting.’

  So did she. She’s our group treasurer, in fact. And she’s usually even more fanatical about Thursday meetings than I am. I thought she’d at least blush, letting her private life come before what she always claims is our civic duty; but she just said, ‘Oh, is it Thursday tomorrow?’ and flipped the toast under the grill.

  ‘Well?’ I asked. ‘Will you be coming to the meeting with me, or going out with him?’

  She didn’t take it like the challenge I meant it to be. She had a little think, and then she said,

  ‘Oh, I think it might be a little late to tell him I’m backing out of our arrangement.’ And then she added brightly, as if I’d be pleased and relieved to hear it: ‘But you’ll still have time to meet him before you go off.’

  ‘That’ll be nice.’

  The coldness of my response intimidated her, I know. She tried to change the subject.

  ‘How did you get along with the amphitheatre?’ she asked.

  ‘Splendid,’ I told her between gritted teeth. ‘Mind you, the gladiator is a wreck. His face has shrivelled and his legs are wobbly, and that carpet fluff we stuck on for his hair keeps falling out. I tell you, he looks over fifty.’

  The toast was blackening under the grill, but she eyed me very steadily indeed.

  ‘I hope you’re going to be polite on Thursday,’ she said.

  *

  I know a storm warning when I hear one. On Thursday I was determined to make sure that there’d be nothing in the bad manners line that she could pin on me. When he rang the doorbell I made as if I simply hadn’t heard, so it was Jude who reached the door to let him in, while I stood in the shadow at the bottom of the stairs.

  He stepped inside. He was Mum’s height, a little tubby, and he had silvery hair. His suit was nowhere near as smart as any of Simon’s. There again, he wasn’t a posh banker, though he did have the most enormous box of chocolates tucked under one arm.

  He shifted the chocolates, and shook hands.

  ‘Judith,’ he said. ‘Right?’

  She nodded. I sidled out of the shadow.

  ‘And Kitty.’

  He smiled, and kept his hand stuck out for a moment, but I pretended that I hadn’t noticed it. And after one of those infinitesimal little pauses of his, he handed the huge box of chocolates to Jude.

  They were those rich, dark, expensive, chocolate-coated cream mints. I’ve had a passion for them all my life. The box was three layers deep at the very least. I saw Jude’s eyes widen to saucers.

  ‘Are these for Mum?’ she asked.

  ‘No. They’re for you.’

  He could have meant either you, or you two. It wasn’t clear. As he spoke, he was looking at Jude, but he did glance at me briefly. It was terribly clever. It meant that when I didn’t pile straight in with Jude, thanking him lavishly, he wasn’t in the slightest embarrassed. He didn’t have to be, you see. He might not have meant to include me at all.

  ‘I’ll tell Mum.’

  Jude rushed upstairs, clutching her booty to her chest, and Gerald Faulkner and I were left alone in the hall. I thought I’d discomfit him with my silence, but no, not at all. He simply swivelled away as though he wanted to inspect the pictures on the wall, and peered closely at a photo of me as a toddler.

  ‘What a face!’ he said admiringly. (I wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that.) ‘It looks as if it might be you.’

  Really cunning, right? He doesn’t actually ask if it’s me, and then he can’t look silly if I don’t answer.

  Just then Floss padded in through the front do
or, and started rubbing up against his trouser legs as if she’d known and loved him all her life. He stopped to pet her. ‘Puss, puss, puss.’ I thought now he’d be bound to try and get me to speak. It’s hard to fondle someone else’s cat in front of them, and not ask its name. But Gerald Faulkner’s made of sterner stuff than that.

  ‘Up you come, Buster,’ he said, scooping Floss up in his arms. ‘Who’s a nice Kitty?’

  I wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that, either. I was still trying to work it out (and Floss was still purring shamelessly) when Jude came thundering downstairs.

  ‘Mum says to help yourself to a drink, and she’ll be down in a minute.’

  ‘Right-ho.’

  He tipped the enraptured Floss into Jude’s arms, and ambled past me with a nod. I realized that he must have been in our house at least once before. How else would he know which door led into the kitchen? Jude padded after him like a pet dog, and I was forced to lean back against the door frame so I didn’t look ridiculous, standing there doggedly staring the other way.

  He stood at one end of the cabinets and opened the first two doors, looked in, then closed them. He moved along and did the same again, and again. I said nothing, just leaned against the door frame and watched. But Jude caught on before he’d gone very much further.

  ‘Do you want glasses? They’re in here.’

  And she rushed about, finding him the only sharp knife, and a lemon, and groping about on the floor for a couple of ice-cubes that slithered off the table. The two of them kept up a steady chat about nothing at all – how quickly bottled drinks lose their fizz, how long it takes for water to freeze in an ice tray. I was astonished. Jude’s not a talker, on the whole. It’s like the business of the telephone. She can go hours without bothering. But here she was, burbling away merrily to this perfect stranger.

  He only spoke to me directly once. He’d just pushed my school bag further along the table to keep it safe from a small puddle of melted ice. The bag was open and my books were showing – not just France Aujourd’hui and Modern Mathematics, but also the things I’m reading on the bus and at bedtime: A Thousand Worst Jokes and that thriller Coma, about a hospital where the anaesthesia goes haywire.