Wonderkid

by Wesley Stace

  And though the plan had been to cordon Blake off from the line, he’d invariably move his chair and invite a free-for-all: kids crawling up on his lap, smiling for the camera, a look of pride in their parents’ eyes. Sometimes the mothers seemed as interested in Blake as their children were; in some cases, more interested in Blake than in their own kids. The registers never stopped ringing, and Blake never ran out of conversation.

  “Do you study Ancient Greek?” A shake of the child’s head. “Shall I teach you some?” He’d wheel out some silliness—have them repeat the component parts of “Awa Tafoo Lie Am” and then make them say it altogether “Oh! What a fool I am!”—or give them some old routine, a tongue-twister (“does this shop stock shot socks with spots?”) or even just play a trick on them: “Say ‘joke’ five times!” (“joke, joke, joke, joke, joke”); “what do you call the white of an egg?” The kids couldn’t help but say “yolk”; and if that didn’t get a big laugh, he’d have them “Say ‘boast’ five times!” When then asked “What do you put into a toaster?” no kid ever said “bread.” Blake’s bag of tricks was bottomless.

  And the parents waved their credit cards once more. It wasn’t until Mitchell came to pry Blake from the melee that there was any sign that it would ever end.

  In the WonderBus on our trip back to Lookout, everyone was tipsy on success. Becca was in awe—she’d known from the rehearsal room and Simeon’s House that Blake had something, but it was the first time she’d found out what it was actually was.

  “How on earth do you do it?” She asked, her hands and arms moving smoothly through some kind of seated yoga. She even did it when the bus was moving.

  “He’s like the Pied Piper!” I said.

  “God, I hope not,” said Blake, peeling the label from a beer, strip by agonizing strip, as he gave his standard demonstration of restless leg syndrome. “He takes all the kids into a hillside, doesn’t he? All except a lame boy. It’s not that he took the other kids—that’s okay—why leave the lame boy?”

  “I don’t know how you have the patience,” said Curtis.

  “My patience for other people’s kids is infinite,” Blake replied, and then he fixed his eyes on Becca. “All you have to do is look them in the eyes: never take your eyes off them. Kids are only interested in themselves.”

  “Well, you’re born to it,” said Becca, squeezing his hand. “You’re gonna have trouble with the real Mums. They like you.”

  “Oh, tell that story,” said Jack.

  “No!” said Blake, laughing. “No. Not now. Late, late, another night.” He retired to the back lounge, but as he passed the coffins, he looked over his shoulder.

  “Sweet, come on. Let’s watch some Marx Brothers!”

  On the way home, we pulled into a diner, more as a stop on my tourist itinerary than anything else. The waitress put a glass in front of each of us.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Iced water,” said Blake. “They always give it to you.”

  “Am I going to have to have a salad as well?”

  “No,” said Jack. “Order off the breakfast menu. Syrup on everything.”

  When our food was in front of us, Blake dabbed at the slick on my plate. “You’ve found your spiritual home, Sweet. America. Dr. Seuss! Did you ever read Dr. Seuss? Cat in the Hat? Wonderful. Wordy. Fake words. Green Eggs and Ham? Weird.”

  “Doesn’t seem any weirder than bacon and syrup,” I said, considering my plate. Even I was dubious.

  “Oh, Seuss is great stuff. All ages. Our dad wouldn’t allow it in the house. Too American.”

  I had my first bite.

  Syrup and bacon. Waffles and strawberries. Pancakes. Peanut butter and jelly. French toast. English muffins. Belgian waffles. Dutch cocoa. German pancakes. Swedish fish.

  America!

  Jack was too cool to be wowed by it, the weird new continent. He was here to do a job, make some music, amass some CDs. As we traveled, and this is what we now did, if I so much as glanced out of the window at an approaching skyline, he’d sarcastically say: “Ooh! Look at the big buildings!” But he couldn’t keep the façade up forever, and even he was impressed as we drove through a lunar landscape of pockmarked desert one night, all of us glued to the windows.

  “Hey guys!” Randy shouted from the front. “WNOK, right now! They’re playing ‘Rock Around the Bed’!”

  “Turn it up!” shouted Blake.

  The moment was complete. We were over the moon.

  And when the song was done, Blake shouted: “Got a riff, Jack? Let’s write a swimming pool.” Apparently, that’s what Lennon and McCartney used to say when they sat down to write a new hit. And it’s what Blake always said.

  “It just so happens that I do,” was Jack’s unfailing reply. They’d head to the back of the bus and there’d be a new song at soundcheck the next day. That night’s was called “Noon in June”:

  Spring, she will come back this way

  One day in May, one day in May

  Spring, she will come back this way

  No matter what your parents say

  Summer will return so soon

  One noon in June, one noon in June

  Summer will return so soon

  One noon in June.

  In England, you run out of road before it begins, or you’re caught in traffic and can’t leave the motorway soon enough. In America, you drive forever and it never ends: we were mobile, on the wagon train, young men going east (frequently, and then west back home again). We sampled our first hotels, each a world apart from the grimy B&Bs of Great Britain with their confrontational landladies and sandpaper toilet rolls. Each room, in fact, had its own bathroom, which was a complete novelty; and in that bathroom, a shower that delivered the right water temperature, unlike the showers at home, which were finicky as shortwave radios and needed just as much fine tuning to avoid scalding or freezing. (Blake always bathed for this reason: he traveled with a rubber duck called Lucky.) The service stations, the travel plazas by the side of the highway, were the size of large English villages.

  Blake assumed the role of teacher—simple things: how to eat (not just sugar); how to read (not actually how to read words, but how to read books, without music on, to concentrate, and God knows we had enough time); how to buy books (I’d never been in secondhand bookstores before; he loved to be on his hands and knees, the more disordered the stock, the better the browse); how not to steal (from shops—hotels were fine); how to watch movies more than once; how to listen to music—the idea was you didn’t just have it on in the background! You listened to it, bathed in it, which had simply never occurred to me. Everything he did, I did, if possible in the precise way that he did it, just as any child might copy his father.

  And it was easy to absorb all this because no one had ever taught me anything useful before, let alone with enthusiasm. But it wasn’t even just that: it was the first time anyone had paid attention only to me. It’s what good parents do. Being singled out in front of the rest of your class is hardly the same; sitting round at the Terrys in a silence punctuated only by a pointedly cleared throat that represented the apex of debate was no substitute.

  Later, I’d pick and choose what was really important to me, but for now I just sponged it all up: books, music, films, diet, wardrobe—check. If this was Greg’s beloved university of life, I liked the uniform. And the hours.

  One evening we drew into a truck stop to stretch our legs, buy “candy,” and raid the bargain cassette bin, while Randy “gassed up.” I was starting to get the hang of it all.

  A trucker approached; he walked like he thought he was hard: shaved head, mirror shades, bushy moustache, and leather jacket, all at odds with the cut-off denim shorts that revealed his hairy legs. We were dressed scruffy, hair perhaps slightly long. As we passed, he muttered under his breath: “Fags.”

  “Keep walking,” whispered Blake, taking Jack and me by the arm.

  When we were out of earshot, Jack said, like he might actually
do something about it: “Did he call me a fag?” Given the chance, some might have wanted to teach the trucker a lesson in political correctness, but Jack just didn’t want to be called a poof.

  “Let it go, Jackie,” said Blake. “See, what he doesn’t realize is that he looks like all the Village People rolled into one.” I watched the trucker strut off in his short shorts.

  This was the life I’d always wanted.

  I wasn’t holding a plate of oranges at half-time, caught between the athletes and the parents.

  I had my own team now.

  Quack!

  8

  “Hey, if you think really hard, maybe we can stop this rain.”

  AFTER THE EXPERIMENTAL FIRST LEG OF GIGS, THERE WAS A BREAK before the real slog began. Blake unexpectedly announced that he and I were heading home for a fortnight to tie up some loose ends. The Terrys had boxed up my stuff, which we’d store at Blake’s, where we’d stay. Just as well. I didn’t want to spend one more night in the anechoic chamber of their house, even for old time’s sake.

  Blake had meetings with Mr. Hedges and a valedictory summit with Greg, much to the satisfaction of both.

  “Greg’s right,” Blake said, as he surveyed the rainy London afternoon from the window of his apartment. “They’re gonna hate us here now. Unless they forget we’re from here. He said: You can’t make a profit in your own parish.”

  “Is that right?”

  “It’s rightish,” said Blake, laughing. “It might even be more right.” That, in a nutshell, was what he’d miss about Greg

  “Well,” I said, “be grateful for what you have elsewhere, I suppose.”

  His grin became a broad smile: “I hate London. I hate the rain. I hate everything.”

  We went to visit his father and took tea in a conservatory. It was as if the whole event had been stage-managed to convey the strongest possible antidote to America: a dizzying choice of teapots, carpeting that clashed violently with the William Morris wallpaper, and a vast array of lace doilies on every chair to prevent the spoiling of the fabric by . . . what? Edwardian pomade?

  There wasn’t a single picture of Blake and Jack’s mother, Edie. She was dead, yes, but not one photo? Even hiding in the dusted frames on the piano? This wasn’t just dead. This was, and buried.

  “Well, James,” said Barry firmly, “it should be Wunderkinder.” It was a surprise to hear Blake called anything but Blake. No one called him Jimmy except Jack, and I’d never heard him called James. “Wunderkinds doesn’t mean anything.”

  “It doesn’t matter anymore, Dad, and I’m not really sure it ever did.” They talked on the phone very occasionally, conversations that focused almost exclusively on the quality of their phone connection. The afternoon had begun with a detailed interrogation on the subject of our flight over and how there could possibly be an airline called Virgin.

  “Wunderkinder is the plural. Die Wunderkinder. And no umlaut, you know that, right? You don’t use one, do you? I suppose that’s some kind of relief.”

  “Germany as a nation is probably very relieved.”

  “There’s no need for sarcasm.” To tell him they’d occasionally thrown an umlaut over the “I” would have been a low blow.

  “But you know that we’re not called the Wunderkinds or Die Wunderkinder any more, right, Dad? We’re called the Wonderkids.”

  “Ah yes,” said Barry. “Is that further evidence of what they now call dumbing down?”

  In Barry Lewis’s mind, America and Britain were on two sides of an uneven scale, the balance of which he checked at every opportunity: “I suppose it’s mostly that Budweiser rubbish over there, is it? Served ice cold to disguise the lack of taste?”

  “Oh, there’s good beer. We drink something called Anchor Steam in the bus.” Blake seemed awkward; unable either to let the man have it all his own way or to disagree with him.

  “Anchor Steam!” snorted Barry, as though this name was any more ridiculous than Old Speckled Hen.

  “We went to the brewery,” I piped up.

  “Did you, by Jove?” He turned an enquiring eye on me as though I was expected to provide a full report on the operation and maintenance of the Anchor Steam brewery based on my tour of inspection. That shut me up.

  “And what do you eat over there? I expect Anchor Steam beer complements, complements . . .”—he repeated it to show he was aware that he wasn’t using the word compliment and that he knew how complement was spelled—“. . . your hamburger and fries quite nicely.” He pronounced hamburger as though the word were freshly minted, a crazy new experience for all of us. At the drop of a hat, I thought, he might conjugate a verb, or start putting the date of publication in parenthesis when a novel was mentioned. There was almost certainly going to be an exam. “A lot of ‘have a nice day’ is there, James?”

  “Well, everyone is friendly, easy to deal with; everyone’s very polite.”

  “Oh, customer service,” said Barry dismissively. “Second to none, of course. They’ve always been good at that. They know how to keep the customer satisfied.” This seemed to carry some extra implication over and above its (surely accidental) quotation of a Simon and Garfunkel song, as though customer service always masked a sinister ulterior motive. “That’s how they get you.”

  “Well, it’s quite nice to have people be polite for a change.”

  “It must be,” said his father wistfully, as though no one had ever been polite to him, or that he vaguely remembered a time when someone had been polite to him, since when he’d only known rudeness. “It must be. You must be happy to get a good cuppa inside you back in old Blighty. Bet you miss that. We’ve still got some things going for us.”

  “They do actually have tea out there, Dad.”

  “Iced tea,” said his father. “Iced coffee. I see it on the cop shows. Iced this and that.”It was like a sparring match, but only one person was sparring. I would have enjoyed this kind of thing back at the Terrys. It was combative and relentless but quite funny.

  “Well, it’s warm out there,” said Blake. “The weather is better on the west coast. We haven’t seen anything but bright sunshine the whole time, have we, Sweet?”

  Barry sniffed at my name suspiciously. “And it’s going okay, is it? Die Wunderkinder? My two sons, the fruits of my loins, my progeny: the Wonderkids. Will we see evidence of your success on these fair shores?”

  “Soon, I hope.”

  “But they’ve taken you to their hearts, the Yanks,” said his father, not without pride at the idea of a mini-British invasion. “They’ve worn their hearts to a nubbin trying to nuzzle up to you. Robert Benchley. Or Perelman. I can’t remember which. Now there’s an American, every bit the equal of Wodehouse.”

  “They love them,” I confirmed.

  “And you’re traveling around with them, are you, young man?” He couldn’t actually bear to say my name, which made me all the more determined not to reveal that it was really Edward.

  “Yes,” interrupted Blake. “He’s having fun.”

  “I’m in charge of merchandising,” I said.

  “And what do your parents, your foster parents, have to say about that?”

  I wanted to point out that Blake was now my legal guardian, but I thought better of it. Perhaps Barry didn’t know. I decided to answer as though his question was: And how do the Terrys feel about your being taken off their hands? The answer was the same either way. “I think it’s a relief to them actually,” I said.

  Barry harrumphed. “And how about your education, young man?”

  Blake came to my rescue: “It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity, a unique education: he’s learning every day and we’ll sort out the qualifications when we get back. What he needs is a little more childhood before life begins.” I wasn’t sure I liked Blake’s implication, but perhaps this was mostly for his father. He was right, though: I’d read more, heard more, learned more.

  “Another cuppa,” concluded Barry.

  When he was gone, Blake w
inced and swatted an imaginary fly. “Never changes,” said Blake, “but, y’know, family.” He felt claustrophobic in the conservatory, clicking his fingers repeatedly in a way that announced an imminent exit. “I’m glad we’re out of all this.”

  “What?”

  “England. I hate the way you hear something on Start the Week on Monday morning, some tiny silly thing, and then at the pub that lunch people are talking about it, and then it’s become a minor controversy by the Nine O’Clock News that night, and then the next day it’s on the cover of the Sun looking this way and the cover of the Guardian looking that. And then someone responds to it, and the next day it’s a national scandal, and it’s on Question Time on Thursday. It’s so small.”

  “You’ve only been in America a few months!” I said. I could see his father pottering about in the kitchen, inspecting the leather elbows of his cardigan as he waited for the kettle to boil.

  “Well, it feels liberating. I always felt a little gauche over here; over there I realize I’m just normal. Not being the most enthusiastic person in the room anymore: that’s good. Do you know what I mean? This place does me in. It’s so barbaric.”

  “Barbaric?”

  “Everything. The way you have to put your underground ticket in at the beginning of the trip and then again at the end of the trip. The bayonet lightbulbs,” he said pointing above him, then turning his attention to the wall: “those massive plugs with three prongs; that stupid little switch.”

  “You’re as bad as your father.”

  The kitchen light extinguished before Barry emerged carrying a tray clinking with crockery. His relationship to electricity was very much the same as the Terrys’ to volume and heat: off was preferable. “Now . . . Garibaldis, do they have those or equivalent? Or Custard Creams? What were you two Wunderkinder chatting about?”

  “How much I dislike America,” said Blake, quick as a flash.

  “Obsessed with their teeth, aren’t they?” Barry mused absentmindedly. “I remember your sister liked the Osmonds. Miles and miles of teeth, gleaming Mormon teeth, rows of huge white gravestones. She had posters of them all over her wall: may still do for all I know.” Danielle and Barry didn’t talk, though she lived only three streets away. When they saw each other in the post office, they nodded. Barry didn’t like her “friend” Michelle. “You’ll probably be getting your teeth fixed. But not on the National Health you won’t. Not on the National Health.”