by Anne Fine
He tapped the jacket of Coma with his knuckle.
‘Is this a book about punctuation?’ he asked me. ‘Because, if it is, the author can’t spell.’
I couldn’t resist.
‘A pity the other book isn’t A Thousand and One Worst Jokes,’ I snapped. ‘You could have offered them yours.’
There. I had spoken to him. I had done my bit. So I turned on my heel and walked out of the kitchen.
Mum was halfway down the stairs, wearing a frilly blouse and smart velvet trousers. I glowered at her and, misunderstanding, she said:
‘Listen, I’m really sorry about missing the meeting tonight.’
‘Missing the meeting?’
This was him. He had sneaked up behind me with the tray. On it four glasses fizzed, tinkling with ice, and I could smell the tang of lemons.
Mum took the glass he offered her, and smiled at him.
‘Kitty and I always go together on Thursdays,’ she explained. ‘She’s a bit cross because, now I’m not coming, she’ll have to take the bus.’
I hate it when people just assume they know the reasons for everything. I don’t mind taking the bus. I never have. I like Mum to come because our car ride together to the meeting is about the only time – the only time – I’m sure I’ve got her on my own. That’s one of the worst things about Dad moving away to Berwick upon Tweed. Jude and I hardly ever get to be alone with him or with Mum. We’re either both with the one or we’re both with the other. And they can’t split themselves in two, so one of us can have a private chat down the back garden while the other is pouring out her heart on the sofa.
I was about to say ‘I am not cross’ when Gerald Faulkner touched my elbow with his, proffering his tray.
‘Here,’ he said, nodding at the closest glass. ‘That one’s yours.’
Without thinking, I lifted the drink off the tray. I could have kicked myself. In spite of all the effort he’d put in to making them, I had intended to refuse mine. But at least I could still refuse to say thank you. Unfortunately, just as Mum opened her mouth to prompt me, he waved his hand as if to cut off all the profuse and gracious thanks on which he was sure I was going to embark any second, and said, as if I were eighteen, or something:
‘I didn’t put any alcohol in yours because I didn’t know if you liked the taste.’
That threw Mum. She doesn’t like anyone even to suggest within ten miles of my hearing that, one day, I might be old enough to go to a pub without being sent home to bed by the landlord. For someone to imply, even if only out of tact and politeness, that I might be on the verge of growing out of fizzy lemonade, well, that was more than she could handle. Changing the subject as fast as she could, she plucked at the frilly blouse and the velvet trousers, and asked us both:
‘Are these all right?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘They’re all right.’ (I was still mad.)
She turned to him.
‘Gerald?’
He put his head on one side. ‘They’re lovely,’ he said. ‘Absolutely smashing. You look tremendous. But won’t you spoil me a little? Wear the blue suit with those tiny wooden toggle fasteners, the black diamond stockings and the shiny bow shoes.’
I stared. I absolutely stared. Was he some wardrobe pervert, or something? Dad lived with her for years, and he could no more have described any of her clothes like that than flown up in the air. In fact, I don’t think Dad even noticed what Mum wore. Obviously if she came down the stairs all tarted up to go out somewhere special, he’d say, ‘Oh, you look very nice.’ But ask her to go back up and change into something he liked even better? You have to be joking.
And her? Blush and shrug, and turn round to trot obediently back upstairs to change, holding her glass high? Was this my mum?
‘Lucky for you this is Request Night,’ she chirruped down from the landing.
No. This was not my mum. I was still staring after the apparition in horror when Gerald Faulkner slid one arm round Jude and one round me, and steered us both into the living room.
I shook him off. He moved away and sat on the sofa. Jude made one of her nests in the beanbag. I stood and scowled.
‘So,’ he said. ‘You’re all mixed up in it as well.’
Though I had no idea what he was talking about, I got the feeling he was speaking to me.
‘Mixed up in what?’
‘You know,’ he said, grinning. ‘The Woolly Hat Brigade. Close Down the Power Stations. Ban the Bomb.’
Fine, I thought. Lovely. Jolly nice for me. My mum’s busy upstairs turning herself into some simpering Barbie-doll for the sort of man she’d usually take a ten-mile hike to avoid, and I’m stuck downstairs with the political Neanderthal.
‘I’m in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, yes.’
Tones of voice don’t come much more frosty than mine was, I can tell you. But he didn’t even seem to notice. He was bent on telling me what he thought.
‘Nuclear power’s been invented now,’ he said. ‘You can’t just pretend that it hasn’t. You can’t disinvent it.’
‘You can’t disinvent thumb screws either,’ I snapped. ‘Or gas chambers. But you can dismantle them. And you should.’
He spread his hands.
‘But why? Nuclear weapons are our best defence.’
‘They’re no defence at all,’ I said. ‘Bombs that poison the planet you live on can’t defend you. You can’t use them. It would just be suicide.’
Now he was leaning forward and beaming at me. You could tell he was really getting into the discussion.
‘But you won’t ever have to use them,’ he argued. ‘Just having them around has kept the peace in Europe for forty years.’
There’s no point in trying to win someone round once they’ve made up their mind to think something different. All that happens is that you get frustrated and annoyed, and they get to practise their cruddy old arguments. And it’s a cosmic waste of time. I’ve spent hours arguing with stubborn old geezers in the street, while dozens of potential sympathizers strolled past and never even got to see the collecting can I might have been rattling under their noses. But I get so exasperated I can’t keep my mouth shut.
‘Some people have smoked high tar cigarettes for forty years too, and not got lung cancer,’ I said. ‘But they might get it next week. Or the week after. Something’s bound to go wrong some day, isn’t it? What sort of peace do you call that?’
‘Good enough for someone like me,’ he said shortly. And he turned to Jude, safely sunk in her beanbag stuffing chocolate mints, as if to say: This conversation is over.
I should have left it there, I know I should. But I was annoyed. I hate it when people insist on wrangling with you about something, then try to stop as soon as they see the arguments are no longer going all their way.
‘Good enough for someone like you?’ I repeated. ‘Maybe you mean someone as old as you? But it’s a bit selfish not to be bothered about what might happen to the planet just because you won’t be on it much longer.’
Two spots of pink were rising on his cheeks. I could tell I was really getting to him now.
‘You probably forget,’ he said coldly. ‘Someone as old as me remembers another time. A time when bombs weren’t so terrible as they are now, so countries didn’t have to be so careful not to start huge international wars. A time when in almost every city in Europe, orphans were picking their way through piles of stinking, smoking rubbish!’
Jude lifted her head and stared. Gerald Faulkner went scarlet. I think it suddenly occurred to him he’d got in pretty murky waters for what was supposed to be just a friendly first meeting.
I said:
‘Don’t look so worried, Jude. Mr Faulkner probably didn’t have too bad a time in the war. He probably spent it safe in some air-raid shelter.’
‘I lost my father in it. Will that do?’ he snapped.
I should have felt awful, I know I should. I should have been truly ashamed and embarrassed. But somehow I wasn’t. I felt an
gry and cheated, as if he’d somehow conjured a rabbit out of a hat to end the argument unfairly on his side. I couldn’t speak to him. I couldn’t say sorry. I just stared down at my feet and started to trace some complicated pattern with my shoe on the carpet. And it was Jude who whispered,
‘How old were you?’
‘About your age,’ he said.
Her eyes widened, but she didn’t speak. He didn’t seem to have anything more to say, either. So we just waited in silence, avoiding one another’s eyes, till Mum came clattering down the stairs.
She threw the door open.
‘Ta-ra!’
I expect she assumed the silence that greeted her was caused by her dramatic entrance. She certainly didn’t appear to sense anything was wrong. She stepped in, swirled round twice in front of us, then made straight for the mirror, muttering,
‘I think I’ve done up all these little toggles wrong.’
She looked terrific, honestly she did. I never would have thought that if she put together all the things he’d suggested, she’d end up looking as good as she did. And she was clearly pretty impressed as well.
‘You’re a genius, Gerald,’ she told him, leaning forward to see where she’d gone wrong fastening the toggles. ‘You ought to close down that printing business of yours, and take up dress designing instead.’
‘You’re looking lovely, Rosalind,’ he told her.
Rosalind! Nobody calls her Rosalind. I haven’t heard my mum called Rosalind since Granny stayed here on election night and caught her swearing at some man on the telly. Rosalind! I hate it when perfect strangers stroll in, quite uninvited, and don’t even bother to find out what other people call themselves.
‘Mum’s called Rosie,’ I told Gerald Faulkner. ‘And Judith is Jude.’
It was the first time I’d spoken since our spat about bombs. I said it pleasantly enough, since Mum was in the room to hear. And I thought he’d at least be grateful for the information. But, guess what.
‘Oh, I can’t possibly call your mother Rosie,’ he said. ‘She’s already Rosalind to me.’ Then he leaned towards the beanbag Jude was nesting in, and, without even asking, used a fingertip to flip a peppermint cream out of its hole. It spun high in the air, and he caught it between two fingers like a party trick, making Jude giggle. ‘And I can’t call your sister “Jude” either. Judith is such a lovely name. I couldn’t bring myself to shorten it.’
He smiled. Mum, if she saw the reflection of his expression in the mirror, might have believed that he was just being pleasant. But I was pretty sure that I could hear a message underneath: And if you had any fine feelings, you couldn’t either.
I turned my face away. Mum was up on her toes now, practically climbing in the mirror in her attempt to see the toggles more clearly. Her skirt rose up, revealing a couple more inches of black diamond stockings. I looked back hastily.
And, sure enough, there he was goggling at her. When Granny catches anyone staring, she says to them tartly: ‘Had your eyeful yet?’ But Mum’s forbidden Jude and me to say that any more, and I’d already been warned about being polite. So I just scowled at him so hard you’d think his eyeballs might have shrivelled up and dropped right out of his face.
But he just kept on goggling, while Mum stepped back, satisfied with the toggles at last, and took one more look at the rest of herself in the mirror.
Her face fell. She’s like me – no good at convincing herself for more than a couple of minutes that she looks all right. She plucked at the blue suit where it clung to her hips.
‘Oh, dear,’ she sighed. ‘I tell you, I’m dead fed up with my body.’
‘Give it to me, then.’
That’s what he said. I heard him. Mum said – no, Mum insisted afterwards that it was just a silly joke, it meant nothing, and I should never have made that dreadful fuss, or yelled ‘Goggle-eyes!’ at him like that, and slammed out of the door to rush off to the meeting. She said it absolutely ruined their evening. She said the restaurant he’d booked cost the earth, and everything they ate ended up tasting like carpet. He kept on blaming himself, and she was absolutely miserable. She said if I ever, ever behaved as badly as that again, I’d be more sorry than I could imagine.
I said that I was sorry anyway. I told her I hadn’t really meant any of the terrible things I said, but I was just a bit upset about her going out so much that week, and not helping with Jude’s amphitheatre like she promised, and missing the meeting. I said I wouldn’t ever call him Goggle-eyes again, or lose my temper, and I wasn’t sure why I’d been so cross with him anyway. He was quite nice really, I said. I didn’t mind him. In fact, when the row was finally over, and she’d put her arms around me, and I was blowing my nose over and over, and trying to stop crying, I even told her that I quite liked him really.
‘And did you?’ Helen leaned forward eagerly. In the small cupboard the shadows swayed, as footfalls on the staircase overhead rocked the dim light. ‘Did you quite like him really?’
‘Like him?’ I laughed. ‘You have to be joking. I wasn’t too keen on him from the start, I admit. But after that row –’ I thought back, surprised to remember so very vividly everything I felt. ‘After that horrible, horrible row with Mum, I absolutely hated him.’
3
I’ll tell you this, I’d made a big mistake complaining to Mum that she was going out too much. To please me, she started staying in. But since I’d been daft enough to say that I didn’t really mind Gerald Faulkner, she’d twiddle the telephone cord around her fingers whenever he phoned to invite her to something, and say: ‘Oh, I don’t know, Gerald. We had a really busy day at the hospital, and I’m a bit tired this evening. Why don’t you simply come round here?’
I hated having Goggle-eyes about. I hated the whole house whenever he was in it. I can’t describe exactly what it was, but it just didn’t feel like home any more if he was ambling from room to room in search of a pencil to do the crossword, or slipping out of the downstairs lavatory leaving the cistern hissing behind him, or lifting my school bag off the coffee table so he could lean back on the sofa and watch the news on the telly. I hated Mum for being happy and relaxed, and nice to him. I hated Jude simply for answering whenever he asked her a trivial little question or said something casual and friendly. And sometimes I even hated sweet furry Floss for taking advantage of the fact that Goggle-eyes wasn’t the most active of men, and settling on his trouser legs to moult and purr and dribble away contentedly.
But most of all, of course, I hated him.
And he knew, too. He wasn’t stupid. It can’t have escaped his notice that during all the evenings he spent in our house, I never once spoke to him willingly, never began a conversation, and only answered when he spoke to me if Mum was in the room to see and hear. If she was busy on the phone or in the bathroom when he said something, I’d just pretend I hadn’t heard, or I’d walk out of the room, or start to play ‘The Muppet Show Theme’ on Jude’s descant recorder as loudly as possible. It sounds rude and childish, but that’s how I felt. Each evening I’d hear the tell-tale noise of his car engine cutting out at our kerb, and I’d glance out of the nearest window to see him heaving himself out of the driver’s seat and reaching his thumbs in the waistband of his trousers to hitch them straight before he strolled up our path. The very sight of him used to annoy me so much I’d make some excuse to slip upstairs, and I might even stay there the whole of the evening, pretending to read or be doing some homework, rather than come down and be forced to be civil and friendly.
Mum saw – but didn’t, if you see what I mean. Oh, she knew I wasn’t exactly crazy about him. She knew I’d probably just as soon he fell under a bus, or pushed off to Papua New Guinea or Kuala Lumpur, or took up with someone else’s mother instead. But I don’t think she had the faintest idea how strongly I felt, how much he got on my nerves, how much I loathed him.
And I couldn’t talk to her about it at all. Each time I tried, I found myself standing fishing helplessly for words, and we’
d just end up with her peering into my face, a little concerned and expectant, and me saying irritably: ‘Nothing! It doesn’t matter, honestly. Forget it.’
Once, when she was out, I tried to talk to Dad, but he wasn’t very helpful.
‘What’s wrong with him, sweetheart?’
I twisted the coils of green plastic telephone wire around my little finger, and pulled hard.
‘He’s horrible. That’s what’s wrong with him.’
‘What do you mean, horrible?’
‘He’s slimy.’
‘Slimy?’
‘Yes. He’s slimy and creepy and revolting. He makes me absolutely sick. I only have to glance in his direction and I want to throw up.’
‘What does Jude think of him?’
There’s no point in telling actual lies. They always catch you out in the end.
‘Jude sort of likes him.’
There was a silence, then:
‘As a matter of curiosity, what does this Gerald Faulkner look like?’
‘Horrible.’
‘Kitty, I bet this is nonsense. I bet this new friend of your mother’s doesn’t look horrible at all. I bet he looks perfectly normal – middle-aged, getting a bit thick in the middle, going a bit thin on top…’
He might as well have been describing himself. I expect he’d turned round to admire himself in his hall mirror.
‘I suppose so.’
I pulled the plastic wire even tighter, to make the tip of my finger go blue.
‘And I expect he has a normal face too, hasn’t he? I mean, if people saw him coming down the street, they wouldn’t shriek and scuttle up the nearest alley.’
‘I would.’
My finger was bright purple now.
‘But what’s wrong with him?’
You could tell from the tone of his voice that he was getting as frustrated as I was with this phone call.
‘Apart from the fact that he’s horrible and slimy and creepy and revolting and makes me absolutely sick?’
