friend”, so he lets you come around any time. I bet you’ll even get that date with Sophie.
It’s my turn to look at Dad for A long time.
‘But do I want it?’ I say at last. ‘That’s not how things work. Her stepdad’s ashamed of something, so he makes me guilty too - of something else. And deep down he’ll really hate me because I’m keeping his secret, like some kind of blackmailer - my silence for a date with his stepdaughter. Sophie’s not his to buy and sell!’
‘Neither are you, son.’ Dad gets up and comes to me with his arms held out. ‘Long time since we hugged, eh?’ We do the father/son bonding thing.
‘What do I do, Dad?’
‘It’s a tough one, Fergus,’ he says. ‘But you could try staying away for a while, just until things cool off.’
Dad leaves me to my thoughts and I know he’s right.
I get up super early next morning, all ready to head off to school. At breakfast, Mum thinks I’m coming down with something but Jennifer brightly tells the world I’m moping because of a girl.
‘You got that one right,’ I mumble into my cornflakes.
‘Leave it, Jennifer.’ Dad makes a frowning expression with his eyebrows.
I escape from the table and hit the highway, taking a different route through a couple of streets of high-rise flats - anything so as not to pass Sophie’s place. Once at school it’s easy enough to hide out somewhere amongst two hundred and fifty students until the bell goes.
In class, I take another desk further away from Sophie. Lambert comes too.
‘What gives?’ he asks. ‘We nearly had to bribe guys to get that close to the girls, now here you are moving away again.’ Luckily Mr Boddie is once again a picture of ruddy good health.
‘As I recall,’ he interrupts, ‘you lot were doing an assignment. Twenty-three words.’ He knocks the dust out of an old chalk box and sends a girl around to collect the entries. When she gets to me, I just shrug. Sophie looks and questions me with her eyes. I shrug again. Body language: I lost the list.
It’s actually a lie. My precious list is now torn up into confetti and lies in the bottom of our kitchen tidy at home. Lambert claims twenty-four words, all of the ones I got, but he included ‘ain’t’. Before I can stop myself, my hand’s up.
‘There’s another one, sir,’ I say. ‘It’s an old Scots word, “amn’t”, which means “am not”.
‘Example?’ Mr Boddie waits. I put on a Scottish voice.
‘I’m doing it, amn’t I?’
Mr Boddie is pleased with this, but not so happy that I don’t have a full list, so it’s no book for me, Lambert wins a Eugénie Telfer and even before he gets back to his desk I know he’s planning to give it to Angela, but she is runner-up with twenty-three anomalous finites so she gets the other one. That wipes the smile off Lambert’s face. I don’t look to see how Sophie is taking it.
At lunch time, I try to avoid her but she corners me under the shade of a lonely tree where we sit. She doesn’t care about me losing the list of words. She has something else on her mind.
‘Guess what?’ She sounds bright.
‘I give up.’
‘You didn’t guess very hard,’ Sophie complains. ‘The thing is, my stepfather mentioned you this morning. At breakfast.’
‘What did he say? “‘This slice of toast is Fergus McPhail, now watch me stab it.’”
‘No, stop being a prawn.’ She grins. ‘He said, “I haven’t seen that young Fergus McPhail recently.’” Since I know what brought that on, my heart sinks. Mr Carter’s keeping his side of our ‘bargain’.
‘That time at your front door, I was right on the outer,’ I remind Sophie.
‘But not any more.’ She waits for a reaction. ‘What do you think?’ Sophie looks down at her fingers then gazes across the playing fields. Since the next move’s up to me, I employ a well-known bloke tactic and change the subject.
‘Sorry about losing the list of words,’ I say. ‘We’d have won hands down.’
‘I can borrow Angela’s book.’
In the distance, the bell rings out the grateful news that it’s time to go back into class, so I rise but Sophie stays there. I wait for her but she stays, head down, making no effort to join me.
Ah, well. I go back to the classroom, hoping that no one will want to talk to me. I can’t go to Sophie’s place, not now. And how can I explain things to her?
Lambert notices that Sophie and I are cool, as he puts it. And he doesn’t mean hip or groovy. He finds me skulking back after school, shooting hoops at an old basketball ring that hangs at a crooked angle because some eager-beaver sports hunk swung on it, American style, only this guy was a fat sports hunk.
‘Hey, Sophie’s gone home already,’ he tells me.
‘Yep,’ I shoot again and miss.
‘So what’s the score?’
‘Ninety-seven misses.’
‘I mean with you and Soph?’
‘Sophie.’
‘Yeah, Sophie.’
‘Nothing.’ Mr Carter’s secret is safe with me. I’m not telling Lambert what’s in my mind. I’m not telling anyone. Instead, I gather the ball, shoot again and make it ninety-eight misses.
‘You broke your arm, your leg and neck to get close to her,’ he says. ‘Now you’ve backed off.’
‘You’ve got to be cruel to be kind, Lambert,’ I tell my friend.
‘That’s not an answer,’ he says. ‘That’s only a clever-dick saying.’
‘And here’s another one.’ I shoot and this time the ball goes through the hoop. ‘The sins of the father.’
‘Huh!’ Lambert leaves me there, shooting at that sad, wonky basketball ring. After another five minutes of it I give up and take the long way home through the gathering gloom to start writing the first chapter of Every Boy’s Book of Cracking On To Girls.
Home Affairs
It is winter holiday time, which means I’ve survived six months down here. It also means a whole wonderful fortnight of not getting up for school and seeing Sophie Bartolemeo sitting across the room. Yes, no more Sophies for me. That’s over and done with and Sophie obviously doesn’t mind that we’re not friendly any more because before the split, every time I looked in her direction she never so much as gave me a glance. We’re being mature about it, which is the way it should be.
Who am I kidding?
It’s miserable. And what’s worse, I was the one who called it quits and I’ll never be able to tell Sophie the reason. But the school holidays help take my mind off things. I agree to help Dad with his renovations, which is a sure-fire way of sending other worries to the back of your mind because when you work with my father, you need all your wits about you.
Out in the backyard, under one of the trees, Dad and I get stuck in with a pair of saws and soon we have a great pile of sawdust on the ground and some of Dad’s long lengths of timber sawn into short lengths of timber. We can see Mum through the kitchen window, making a wonderful smell which is going to be rissoles. A chilly wind gets up, the sawdust flies but that’s all part of the working life.
‘Fetch in one of those long four-by-threes, Fergus,’ Dad says. I remind him of metrication.
‘Shouldn’t that be a hundred by seventy-five, Dad?’
‘Don’t get technical with me, lad.’ Dad strides off inside and soon appears at Senga’s open bedroom window. I shoulder a long four-by-three and point it in his direction. Dad grabs the end. ‘Okay, slowly in with it, slowly, slowly, a bit more, in it comes.’
I feed the four-by-three inwards, metre by metre. ‘Say when, Dad.’
‘Keep her coming, son. Hang on! Whoa, whoa! That’s enough!’ I already know that. The loud crash from inside speaks volumes. With worry all over his face, Dad appears at the window to whisper, ‘Nip out to the street and turn the water off, Fergus. And not a word to your mum. She’ll only worry.’
My eager thrusting of the four-by-three has not only punctured the ceiling, it has also broken part of the hot wat
er system which is up there somewhere.
It takes tern minutes to find the right stop-cock. (Yes, I turned off the neighbour’s too.) By the time things are under control, Senga’s bedroom is pretty moist. We don’t need towels to mop it up, we need a gutter to run it away.
‘Well, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,’ Dad says.
‘We weren’t making an omelette, Dad,’ I point out but Dad only calls me Mr Pedantic. The other bit of bad news is that we can’t get the four-by-three back down the way it went up so it’s easier to take a couple of tiles off and go right through the roof. The four-by-three gets jammed and has to stay in place for a while. Dad puts a red tarpaulin over it so that it looks like some Cherokee has parked his wigwam up there for the winter.
Mum is none the wiser, until she wants to wash up. Luckily, Dad has collected a soothing bucket of water from the leaking hot water system.
The plumber cost $273.95. Dad says it’s daylight robbery. The plumber says thanks.
The rissoles are a bit chewy but Dad and I just get on with it, masticating thoughtfully. Mum and Jennifer have a salad.
‘You must have used really thick breadcrumbs, Morag,’ Dad suggests conversationally. ‘Or were they a bit past their use-by-date?’
‘I’m trying to place the flavour,’ I say. ‘Is it oregano?’
‘No,’ Mum answers. ‘Just Oregon.’
‘And a bit of pine thrown in,’ Jennifer adds. ‘Oak, ash, elder, larch, mahogany -’
‘It was that gust of wind.’ Dad cuts her off then pauses to swallow. ‘One minute we had a neat pile of sawdust, the next -’ he makes an expressive gesture with his hands.
‘Well, we’re getting plenty of fibre,’ I point out cheerfully as I saw my way through another rissole. With a pregnant mother it helps to be positive. Then Senga enters. Dad and I exchange glances. She’s straight home from work and hasn’t seen her room yet.
‘Mummy, Daddy,’ she begins. ‘You know I love you both very much.’
‘Uh-oh,’ Dad says. ‘This is gonna cost me big time.’
‘No, Daddy,’ Senga calms him. ‘It’s just that I want to leave home.’ Dad looks skyward and I see him mouth the word, Hallelujah.
‘Why?’ Mum asks.
‘Well, it’ll be closer to work, it’ll be cheaper -’
‘Can’t be cheaper than here,’ Mum says. ‘You don’t pay anything.’
‘But there comes a time when a girl needs to sprout wings and fly,’ Senga pleads poetically.
‘You’d be better sprouting webbed feet,’ Jennifer pipes up. She has seen the damage.
‘Jennifer!’ Dad frowns a warning. ‘You want piano lessons, don’t you?’ But Senga just takes it as a sisterly insult and carries on with her plea to be set free.
‘Well, I suppose -’ Mum sighs.
‘Oh, thank you, Mummy.’ Senga hugs Mum. ‘I’m off to pack.’ She rises and leaves.
‘Wait for it,’ Dad whispers.
I still get time to hang out with Mitch and Lambert, although with Mitch we have to steer clear of certain words and phrases such as ‘bank account’ and ‘saving up for a drum kit.’ Lambert and I have been totally slack. Mitch has banked $112.47. We’re at Lambert’s place one afternoon, sitting out the back with a tray of drinks and a plate of jam sandwiches his mother has thoughtfully provided.
Lambert has lived here since he was born so I secretly envy the certainty in his life, his familiarity with every square centimetre of the back garden. Over there lie the remains of his sand-pit, down the end, the shed where he and his dad pottered, the tree where Lambert hung a swing only it was a bit lop-sided and still is. But despite having his two good buddies around, Lambert is more morose than usual.
‘Somebody’s cheerful today,’ Mitch observes, nodding in Lambert’s direction.
‘Yeah, lighten up, Lam-bam,’ I tell him. ‘It’s holiday time. The sun’s sort of shining. Apart from the cold, life’s great.’ .
‘Dunno about that,’ Lambert responds gloomily. ‘Things are just queuing up to go wrong for me. Or not go at all.’
‘Give me an example,’ Mitch demands.
‘Well, for a start, look at my love-life,’ Lambert sighs. ‘It’s like jam on bread.’
‘How’s that?’ I ask.
‘Okay.’ Lambert gets into his stride. ‘You drop the bread, it lands jammy side down.’
‘Not every time,’ Mitch says.
‘Does for me,’ Lambert persists. ‘Then Mum or Dad gives you a hard time for being clumsy and on top of that, you get dirty hairy stuff on your jam.’
‘Prove it,’ Mitch challenges.
‘Right, I will.’ Lambert takes up the last slice of jammy bread. ‘Here goes.’ He tosses the bread in the air and it falls on the ground, jammy side up. There is a silence.
‘There you are,’ I tell him. ‘Your theory’s up the spout.’ Mitch gives Lambert a dig with his elbow.
‘So lighten up. Life’s not so bad after all, eh?’
Before Lambert can make it best of three, his mother, who’s been watching us from the kitchen window, pops her head out to harangue her son for throwing good food around. There are people who’d be glad of that slice of bread and jam, et cetera, et cetera, whole families who could live on it. She sounds like my mum. When his mother withdraws, Lambert has a smile on his face.
‘I was right, wasn’t I? Mum gave me a hard time.’ But at least he’s cheered up.
Ah, holidays, dear old school holidays. Surely that’s what they’re for? Good mates meeting together in a freezing backyard, passing the afternoon hours away, talking crap.
But in the midst of all the happy school-free days, there comes a black spot to wreck the atmosphere. It begins with Jennifer making louder and louder noises about getting piano lessons. In musical circles they call it fortissimo. She uses all sorts of arguments to support her claim. Mozart was belting out tunes at four years of age, composing them before his fifth birthday.
‘Besides, you didn’t object when Fergus took up the guitar.’ She folds her arms to wait for Mum’s response. That’s a girl thing, that folding the arms. She also says, ‘Hmmfl’
‘Well, I suppose,’ Mum says, ‘Dad can clear the rubbish off the piano in the back room.’ At this, Jennifer stiffens.
‘That old thing! Mum, it’s a death trap. I’ll get a disease off it.’
‘I bet it’s got a lovely tone,’ Mum enthuses. But Jennifer exaggerates. The piano is a baby grand, old but still playable. It is buried under a pile of magazines and boxes of books and surrounded by escritoires, commodes and other obscure furniture:. Mum spells out the deal - Jennifer learns on the old baby grand or she can take up the kazoo.
‘So where do you get a kazoo teacher?.’ Jennifer demands.
‘Yellow pages,’ Mum says, but with a new mouth to feed, who can afford another instrument? Not even a second, third or fourth-hand one. Jennifer capitulates and Dad and me get the task of unearthing the baby grand.
We spend a busy morning, shifting lots of dusty stuff and at last, we uncover the piano. It is an Ikebana, I read when I lift the lid. One of the first Japanese pianos ever made, Dad tells me. The company only did six then they switched to making suitcases. The white keys have yellowed with age and the traditional black ones have faded to grey. There arc lots of rings on the woodwork where people stood glasses plus scorch marks from carelessly parked cigarettes.
‘Lick of paint will fix that,’ Dad says. ‘I’ve got some primrose out the back.’
‘I don’t think you paint them, Dad.’ But the piano doesn’t sound bad. All the notes make a noise and the dust wipes off. It is when we move it closer to the window that the disaster overtakes us. One of the legs snaps off and the piano crashes down on its left side, catching Dad’s shin and making him hop.
After a lot of Ooh-ing, Ah-ing and Ee-ing, Dad limps to the couch in the living room where he nurses his pain as Mum surveys the damage.
‘How can Jennifer use it like that?’
she asks.
‘She’ll have to play uphill for a while,’ Dad groans, miming the angle Jennifer will have to adopt. ‘Mind you, play a long scale she’ll be knackered before she gets to high doh.’
Lambert comes to help and between us we prop the piano upright on a pile of 1936 encyclopedias, then we report to Dad.
‘So how’s the leg, Mr McPhail?’ Lambert asks.
‘Out in the yard, riddled with woodworm,’ Dad grumps. I see Lambert surreptitiously counting my father’s legs. Dad will be out of action for a while. And Jennifer just shakes her head when she sees what has become of her piano. Mum has run up a lithe curtain to hide the encyclopedias but Jennifer wasn’t born yesterday.
‘You expect me to play on that?’ she demands then high-noses her way out of the room.
‘Mozart would,’ I call after her. ‘He wasn’t fussy. You should see the piano he played on. It’s ancient.’
First week of the holidays almost gone, and I’ve hardly thought of you-know-who. I’m just having too much carefree fun and my days are filled with interesting winter things to do. Dad has to slow down because of his leg but I am there for him, cheerful little helper.
Mum makes a beef casserole and slips some of it into a plastic container. She asks me to nip around to Senga’s new place and give this to her. She’ll be glad of it after work and I’m to tell her just to stick it in the microwave. Not that my sister hasn’t been keeping in touch since she moved out. She often pops in, usually at meal times.
‘Well, I have to see how my mother is,’ she explains. ‘Make sure you’re not overdoing things in your condition.’ Senga brings laundry and stuff to be ironed. She also uses the phone.
‘Haven’t you got one at your place?’ Dad asks.
I can read my parents like a book and I know they are suspicious about Senga’s new address. Senga is evasive.
‘The phone’s broken, Dad,’ she answers too quickly. ‘Be fixed soon.’
‘So how is the flat?’ Mum wants to know. ‘It is a flat, or is it a home unit?’
Fergus McPhail Page 9
