by Amanda Craig
‘If you miss taking the rubbish to the B-road on Monday morning because you’re too lazy to walk the girls to school, you can drive it to the town dump,’ she snaps.
Lottie can’t look after the girls, so the full brunt of childcare falls, for the first time ever, onto his shoulders.
‘Shit!’ he exclaims, wiping his hand after touching a gatepost.
‘No, frogspawn,’ Stella says.
‘Maybe if you kiss it, it’ll turn into a handsome prince,’ Rosie says.
Of course, the solution is to take them to his mother’s. Naomi is always delighted to see her grandchildren.
‘They’re like pigs in mud,’ he says, watching them through The Hovel’s window.
‘I long for it to warm up enough for me to go outside,’ murmurs Hugh.
Every week, Quentin’s father fades, and Quentin can hardly bear to witness it, not least because he knows that he himself will probably look just like Hugh in thirty years’ time.
‘It’ll be warm soon,’ he says awkwardly, though they are all aware that for Hugh, summer may never come. A disabled toilet has been installed next door: a grim reminder that from now on there can be no improvement in health and strength. There is a hospital bed in the living room, close to the hearth, and everything stinks of smoke as if kippered.
‘Can you really keep him with you until the end?’ he asks quietly, when they are alone.
‘I wouldn’t dream of anything else,’ Naomi says.
She would probably offer the Grim Reaper a cup of tea, he thinks. His father’s cancer has spread, but Hugh carries on as if the whole thing is a temporary inconvenience from which he’ll recover.
‘How can I help?’
‘I wouldn’t mind more firewood,’ she says.
‘I’ll fetch some now.’
‘Thanks, Quent. It’s not so easy to chop logs with arthritis.’
Who will do this for me one day? Quentin wonders. The question is absurd: he won’t be living in a rotting cottage on the edge of Dartmoor. But seeing how dependent Hugh is on Naomi is disconcerting. He got away with it, Quentin thinks … although Quentin’s sister, who now lives in New Zealand, still won’t talk to her father.
Hugh pokes at the fire. This has become his great hobby. The open hearth renders the heat almost indiscernible, except when Hugh throws on another firelighter, making it flare up with bright, evil-smelling flames.
‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light,’ he murmurs.
His father had written just two memorable poems in among a great many that are not. ‘That’s all that were allotted to me,’ he said once.
Those two poems, ‘Silage’ and ‘Barn Owl’, frequently anthologised, have kept his reputation going – such as it is. They are on the National Curriculum (earning him about £100 a year in royalties) and Trelorn has become quite proud of him, apparently. It must help that Hugh looked like a poet, or used to. Quentin had grown up seeing girls at school telling his mother that she should make way for their grand passion. She would be very kind to them, and after a while, they went away, though the fellow teachers he seduced did not. Of course, his adventures were small beer compared with, say, Gore Tore’s, but they still mortified his family.
‘I’ll use the bellows, Fa.’
‘No need. Ah, that’s better,’ Hugh says with satisfaction, while smoke billows out and makes them all cough.
Lunch is excellent, as always. How his mother manages to summon up such meals from a lean-to kitchen whose ancient, lopsided shelves are cluttered with rusting tins, plastic cartons and dusty herbs is a mystery. Surreptitiously, Quentin scrubs the hand-thrown mugs in which coffee will be served. I am almost as bad as Lottie, he thinks.
‘Let me make coffee,’ he offers, as Stella and Rosie dash outside again; but Naomi refuses.
‘Stubborn as a mule,’ his father says, once she retreats to the kitchen. ‘Any news on the London house?’
‘Still rented out. We’re waiting until late spring before trying to sell again.’
‘I used to think that I could never live anywhere but the Big Smoke,’ Hugh remarks. ‘I still miss it, only the city I remember doesn’t exist now.’
‘It changes, like anything that’s alive,’ Quentin says.
‘How could anything be more alive than what’s all around us?’ Naomi asks, bringing coffee. ‘Just look at those lambs skipping about.’
‘Charming, but if only every field had a twenty-four-hour corner shop in it.’
‘We get a couple of lambs for the freezer in return for the grazing,’ Naomi says. ‘That’s enough for me.’
Quentin grins sardonically. His mother always goes on about living the Good Life, but her family owns one of the best vineyards in the Cape, as well as quite a few other things. He never even knew what she renounced until he went out to South Africa after graduation, and found his relations. The houses, the cars, the jewels, the staff, and above all the money that would have come his way had she been able to accept living with apartheid were the cause of some bitterness. He admires her for her principles in rejecting that life, and yet – how he wishes she hadn’t made him pay, too.
‘He’s a town mouse, not a country one,’ Hugh remarks.
‘I’m just glad you’re living so close,’ his mother says.
Quentin sighs. All of his life, Hugh has loomed in the background like Zeus, fulminating, fornicating, fantastically irritating, and yet—
‘I’m glad, too.’ He pauses. ‘Of course, I was very surprised to find you’d forgotten to mention that the previous tenant at Home Farm was the victim of an axe murderer.’
Naomi looks puzzled. ‘You’re not superstitious, surely?’
‘No. But you might at least have told me.’
‘I didn’t think it would matter to you.’
‘How did you hear it was up for rent?’
‘Oh, I know Di Tore,’ Naomi says, to his surprise. ‘She’s bought a couple of my pieces, and I’ve taught pottery at Shipcott Primary.’
‘So you actually know Gore Tore …?’
‘Oh, not him! He’s always touring, when he’s not rolling naked in the morning dew.’
Quentin barks with surprised laughter. ‘Truly?’
‘No, of course not. You never could tell when I was joking! But mostly, he’s never around. In fact there were some rumours that the poor man who was murdered was—’
‘Yes?’
Naomi’s voice suddenly sounds more South African than it usually does.
‘Quentin, I do hope you’re not going to upset everybody. That column in the Chronicle is you, isn’t it?’
‘The Questing Vole,’ says Hugh.
‘Er – yes, the Vole, c’est moi.’ He waits for applause, then continues sulkily, ‘I need the work. Of course, it’s different for Lottie. She’s found a new job.’
‘I heard. Her training shouldn’t go to waste,’ Naomi says.
Hugh says irritably, ‘Bloody architects. They should be lined up and shot for what their buildings have done.’
How had his parents survived each other for over fifty years? He loves his mother, but can see how ridiculous she is. Hugh is worse. He had been so embarrassed by them at Xan’s age that he thought he’d die if anyone he knew even saw, let alone spoke to them. Yet the strange thing was that other people seemed to accept them.
‘You should see what my own parents are like,’ said one of his few friends who had ever set foot in The Hovel. ‘I used to long to be taken away by social services.’
When Quentin visited his friend in turn, his parents seemed perfectly fine. Quentin said this, but his friend at first professed not to believe him, thinking he was being polite, and then became quite angry.
‘Can’t you see they’re completely raving?’ he demanded.
‘No. I’d swap them for mine any day.’
‘You wouldn’t if you knew what they were really like.’
Almost everyone you get to know turns out to be bonkers, Quentin thinks, it’s
just that most people don’t know that, say, your father bites off his own toenails or your mother keeps twenty-year-old cheese in the fridge. Maybe he himself will seem just as loony to his own daughters one day.
Yet children, too, are insane. He listens to Stella and Rosie talking to the doll they dug up in the garden, which they have decided is one of Sleeping Beauty’s children. Thank God, he thinks, they’d found only a doll and not the severed head. He’s still gripped by anxiety each time he remembers it.
‘You know Janet is Malevola,’ Stella says.
‘You should feel sorry for Janet, not make her a wicked witch,’ Quentin says. ‘She’s just a poor woman who earns her living cleaning.’
When he gets back from his parents’, he’s surprised to see Lottie digging deep trenches around the back of the house.
‘What on earth are you doing?’
Lottie looks up, briefly. ‘I’m laying a damp-proofing course.’
‘How can you possibly do that? You aren’t a builder.’
‘Quentin,’ Lottie says, in exasperation, ‘I’ve often told you that I’d make more money as a builder, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know how to do what builders do. I’m laying down a French drain.’
‘A French what?’
‘It’ll take away some of the damp, maybe most of it, because it’s basically just groundwater running down the hill. The slots in the top of the pipe let the water in, and then the pipe channels it away into the ditch.’
‘Are you sure?’
Smearing mud over her cheek Lottie says, ‘No, I’m doing this for entertainment in my limited free time. But anything is better than nothing.’
‘Just stay away from my compost heap,’ Quentin says. ‘You’re not to touch it, d’you hear?’
‘As if I’d want to,’ Lottie replies.
‘How should I know what you want and don’t want? You don’t talk to me, you pay no attention to me, you are completely wrapped up in your own bloody world—’
‘Pot, kettle.’
‘At least you could appreciate the efforts I’m making!’
Lottie leans on her fork, and begins to laugh, tears streaming down her face.
‘Oh Quentin, you’re wasted on us!’
18
Xan Among the Poles
Now that his body has adapted to the night shifts and the mind-numbing nature of Humbles, the real irritation for Xan is that they won’t give him enough regular work. He waits for the agency texts telling him he’s needed, always anxious that Home Farm’s wavering mobile reception has let him down. The problem is that if he does more than a certain number of hours he’s entitled to employee benefits, so the management ensure he can never earn more than £120 a week. This is why few local people want to work for them, rather than stay on benefits.
‘With one hand they give, with the other they take back,’ Katya says.
The Poles not only earn all their income from Humbles, but also rent their cramped and shoddy homes from them. It’s better than the caravans where farm workers live, however. They all know that farming is the worst work of all, for who would stand, hour after hour, in freezing mud with a pair of scissors to be paid 5p a bunch, or digging up potatoes? That work goes to the Romanians and Lithuanians, labourers who must pay for their own uniforms out of the earnings they may or may not receive, and who dream of getting a job at Humbles.
Everything to do with food seems to be built on a pyramid of exploitation and unhappiness. Katya and her friends accept it and Xan admires the way they manage to distil a kind of happiness from their disappointments and sorrows, much as they do alcohol from fruit and potatoes.
‘UK is better than Poland for work, you understand,’ Katya says. ‘We love our country, we love our people, but to make business – impossible. We do not want your benefits, we want to work.’
Xan has grown up among people who never discuss money; it’s the big secret which even husbands and wives keep from each other. The Poles, however, have no qualms about showing their intense interest in earning and saving, and the banks on Trelorn’s square all advertise their existence with signs in Polish. The immigrants’ willingness to not only work for the minimum wage but save from it is both impressive and depressing.
‘They say we take jobs and homes from English peoples, but how many will live this way?’ Katya demands. She treats Xan as an oracle on all things native, but he knows even less than she. ‘How many, Xan?’
‘Not many, I suppose,’ he says. He thinks of the cramped hall, heaving with the shoes they take off so as not to bring dirt into the rest of the house. The only communal space is the tiny kitchen. Yet even this has been made a home, painted with bright stencils and pots of herbs in the window.
‘Polish peoples work ver, ver hard.’
‘I know you do,’ Xan says. He’s heard this so often it’s a bit like a catechism, and what they don’t grasp is that once the Poles returned from their Christmas break, the wages paid to everyone were adjusted back down again.
‘There aren’t enough affordable homes for anyone to rent or buy,’ Lottie tells him. ‘That’s why the extension to the town we’re building is really needed.’
‘But won’t it be bought up as second homes or something?’
‘That won’t be allowed. Tore has gone into partnership with the council – he owns the land, so he’s not going to lose money on it – but he really does have a vision.’
‘I thought he was supposed to be a wicked old rocker.’
‘Maybe he was, once. But I think that he wants to leave a legacy. People can change, Xan.’
‘Can they?’
‘I believe people can become better versions of themselves, under the right circumstances.’
Xan thinks of his stepfather and says,
‘From what I’ve seen, people don’t change much. The ones who are tools in primary school are still tools now. People are as they are, Mum, they just get better at hiding it.’
‘Yet there are more good people than bad. We’re not running around killing each other all the time.’
‘Not in this country, no, but this country isn’t the rest of the world, is it?’
Sometimes, Xan thinks that this must be the reason why his biological father has never tried to get in touch. He has told himself long, complicated stories about how his real dad must have gone back to whatever part of Africa he came from, and died there. Maybe he was a hero, or maybe he is a villain. Often, he’s studied his reflection and tried to disentangle the parts of himself that are not Lottie, to see where in that vast continent he might have come from. He’s looked at pictures of actors online, and maybe he’s half Nigerian or Ghanaian … definitely West African rather than, say, Somali. If only his mother had talked more to his father! It seems extraordinary to him that Lottie, so careful and anxious, should ever have done such a thing as have a one-night stand with a man she didn’t know. But maybe that’s why she is as she is, now. Or maybe – and this is what he hates to consider – she was raped.
‘Did you have lots of boyfriends before my dad?’
‘No, not at all. He wasn’t a boyfriend, Xan, just someone I – well, it was all unintended.’
She doesn’t seem to sense how desperately he longs to know who his father was, and he can’t tell her because it will sound like reproach. Even if there’s no stigma about being the child of a single parent any more, and even if he has never, until he left London, experienced racism, he still feels it as a hole through which his confidence leaks.
Before his mother’s marriage, Xan never had anyone but Lottie and Marta as family. (His godfather, Justin, didn’t really count.) He’d only become aware of the absence of a father when Stella was born, looking like such a mixture of Lottie and Quentin. Even as a tiny child, he could spot his stepfather’s big toes on her, his mother’s knees, his grandmother’s fingers, his dead grandfather’s eyelids. Heredity is such a fascinating puzzle, and although he is pretty sure that his love of music comes from Lottie’s side,
he wants to know if his ability to jump is his father’s, or his asthma, or his poor grasp of maths …
‘Is smooth, your skin. Like wood.’
‘You know, in this country people don’t say things like that.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s not polite.’
‘In my country, no white person ever touch a black person, or even see one.’
‘Why not?’
‘Everybody is white. But I am not like the others, so much,’ she says shrugging, although her only visible difference is that she has a lot of piercings in one earlobe. Still, he isn’t complaining.
In North London, where girls are as sharp as knives and almost as dangerous, he had felt doomed to obscurity and rejection. He wasn’t black enough, or Jewish, or the son of somebody famous, or at a cool school; he didn’t do drugs or play in a band or even travel to exotic countries. He was just a bit of a nerd, mildly popular but definitely not the kind who’d expect to pull a girl like Katya. Polish men are larger, tougher, more pale and more male than he, with their giant sausage-fed muscles, clipped heads and practical expertise at any kind of job. Yet she likes him. He hopes it doesn’t piss the others off. Most are pleasant, but he can feel that they think of him as a boy, not a man. One, Arek, continues to be pointedly hostile.
Arek is bloody enormous – well over two metres – and heavily muscled. Beside him, Devonians look like dwarfs. He’d arrived at Katya’s house radiating fury, and although Xan doesn’t understand a word of Polish he’d gathered Arek didn’t like him being there. Eventually, the giant had said,
‘This girl, Katya – she is from my town, you understand?’
‘Yes,’ Xan said, not understanding at all.
‘You are bad to her, I—’
Arek made a chopping motion onto his left hand, and Xan saw the wedding ring there. He wondered why Arek was so protective.
