‘I wish you was my teacher, Clarie.’
‘I’m glad I’m not. You’d be naughty all the time.’
This makes Oolie laugh, throwing up her little round chin and closing her eyes.
‘No, I wouldn’t.’ She points. ‘I like that picture.’
It’s a drawing by the class swot, Dana Kuciak, of sunset over Doncaster Cathedral, copied from a photo.
‘What d’you want to talk about, Oolie?’
‘I want to go and live in my own flat.’ She sits down opposite Clara with a sulky face, and starts fiddling with the coloured pencils. ‘Mr Clemmins says it’s all right. But Mum won’t let me.’
‘Who’s Mr Clemmins?’
‘He’s the social worker in charge of me. Mum don’t like him.’
Clara’s eyes widen. This could be interesting.
‘Why not?’
‘She says he thinks he knows everything and he don’t.’
‘Hm. But why do you want to live on your own?’
‘Cos Mum makes me work on the allotment and Dad farts all the time.’
‘It’s because they love you, Oolie.’
Oolie looks unconvinced. ‘I don’t want to work on the allotment. It’s boring.’
‘So what d’you want to do?’
‘I want to watch filums but they won’t let me.’
This is new. Can Oolie even follow a film?
‘I’m sure they will.’
Unless Doro has dreamed up some new rule. Her behaviour has become so erratic recently. Surely it’s not still the menopause. Or maybe incipient Alzheimer’s.
‘What d’you want to watch, Oolie?’
‘Filums.’
‘Like what?’
‘Girls at Play. Unin’abited. This lad at work give ’em me.’
‘Oh, you mean they’re like DVDs?’
‘Yeah. Filums.’
‘Oolie, can’t you talk about this with Mum yourself?’
‘No. Cos soon as I start she goes on about you know what and she thinks it’s going to happen again if I live on my own, but it in’t, cos I’m older now, and not so daft.’
Clara has never heard her sister utter such a long sentence before. In fact, she can’t recall ever having heard Oolie allude to the long-ago fire which almost killed her and blew the commune apart.
‘What’s going to happen again?’ she prompts gently.
But Oolie shakes her head and clams up.
All of a sudden, a sound of rustling paper over by the book corner breaks the silence. A couple of books have slipped on to the floor, and an invisible hand is leafing through the pages. They stare. A brown furry head peeps round the corner of a page, rips it off and stuffs it into its cheeks.
‘Hey …’ Clara whispers.
‘Hey!’ shrieks Oolie, and dashes off in pursuit.
But he’s quick, this Horatio. Before Oolie can get there, he’s already round the other side of the room. Clara tries to intercept him, but he slips between the cupboard and the wall, and re-emerges by the waste bin.
‘Quick, Oolie! Over there!’
Oolie isn’t so nimble. She stumbles over a chair, stubs her toe and squawks with pain. The hamster disappears. Clara tiptoes over to the spot where he disappeared and silently gets down on her hands and knees.
But Oolie doesn’t do silent. ‘There! There!’ she yells. ‘The little bugger!’
They’re both down on their hands and knees now. The hamster is back in the book corner, staring at them through beady eyes. They crawl towards him. He watches, still busily chewing up Horrid Henry and tucking the shreds into his cheeks. When they’re about a metre away, he vanishes again. This time Clara saw where he went. There’s a space between the bottom of the bookcase and the floor. He scuttles along it, dives round a corner, then he’s gone again. Oolie races after him, knocking chairs over in all directions. The hamster is heading towards the door, with both of them after him on hands and knees, when the door swings open and in walks Mr Philpott.
‘What –?’
‘Quick!’ she shouts. ‘Quick! He’s run away!’
She races out into the corridor, just in time to glimpse a ginger blob slipping round the corner.
‘This way! He’s on the loose!’
The three of them break into a run, but the hamster is quicker.
At the end of the corridor, where it widens into the entrance hall, they stop and catch their breath. There’s no sign of the hamster. Then the door of the school office opens and earthy-but-godlike Mr Gorst/Alan emerges.
‘What’s going on?’
‘’Amster on the run!’ cries Mr Philpott.
‘Call the coppers! Quick!’ shrieks Oolie (she likes men in uniform).
Mr Gorst/Alan follows them out into the hall. They fan out in different directions.
‘There ’e goes! Little bugger!’
Oolie hares off through the double doors towards the playground, running and shouting at the top of her voice. She comes back, pink-cheeked and breathless.
‘’E done a runner.’
The hamster has completely disappeared.
‘You’re quite a runner too,’ says Mr Gorst/Alan.
She laughs. ‘Not as fast as ’im. ’E were reyt quick!’
‘I had a hamster once.’ A dreamy look has come over him.
Clara gazes deep into his twinkly eyes, and hears herself putting on a low mellifluous tone to murmur, ‘Really? Tell me about it, Alan.’
But no words come out of her mouth.
Oolie is full of excitement on the way back to Hardwick Avenue.
‘’E were nice, ’im.’
‘Who?’
‘’Im what said ’e ’ad t’amster. I wish I could ’ave a ’amster.’
It’s past five o’clock when she drops Oolie off. But something is snagging in her mind as she drives back towards Sheffield. Before the encounter with Mr Gorst/Alan, before the chase for the runaway hamster, there was something else Oolie had let slip.
‘I’m older now, and not so daft.’
Clara’s always assumed that Oolie never talks about the fire because she’s forgotten. But obviously something’s still there, buried in the storeroom of her mind, and if she’s ready to talk, maybe it’s time to exhume those old ghosts and lay them finally to rest.
DORO: The cries of Catty Lizzie
After Clara has left on Monday evening, Doro resists the temptation to reprimand Oolie for not coming straight home, and busies herself in the kitchen. Fish pie of cod, prawns and smoked haddock, topped with dauphinoise potatoes, is what she has in mind as she watches the brown coils of potato peel tumble into the sink under the blade of her peeler.
Marcus and Oolie are curled up together on the sofa in front of the television. She regards them fondly through the open door, observing how alike they are, despite Oolie’s distinctive Down’s physiognomy. There’s a funny way they both have of wrinkling their noses when they laugh. She’s never noticed that before. They say people can grow alike through spending time in each other’s company, the way some people come to resemble their pets. Though Doro sometimes thinks she catches a trace of Bruno in Oolie’s features, and wonders whether maybe that’s why she finds it so easy to love her.
Where does biology end and nurture begin? In the commune days, they’d tried to escape the whole oppressive nuclear family set-up, drawing inspiration from the communal childcare on Israeli kibbutzim. After all, weren’t shared beliefs and commitments a much more logical basis for love and parenting than a mere accident of biology? It’s strange, but kind of nice, that after all these years Marcus wants to get married. They must get around to talking to Oolie about it. She’s never questioned – why should she? – that she’s just as much their child as Clara or Serge.
Does Marcus ever question where Serge’s looks come from? She wonders. Neither she nor Marcus are small and dark, and his maths ability is not inherited from them, that’s for sure. He was always a strange, moochy little kid, sneaking off up to the att
ic to play with his pine cones and snail shells. Clara and Marcus, on the other hand, are similar in looks and personality – serious, earnest, impractical. Which is why she’s in here peeling the potatoes and he’s in there watching the Channel 4 news. To be fair, Marcus did ask whether there was anything he could do, but his way of peeling potatoes is to cut thick slabs off each side. You’d have thought someone who can manage the history of the Fifth International could master a potato peeler, but apparently not.
‘Come and sit, Mum!’ Oolie pats the space on the sofa beside her. ‘Dad says it’s about the cries of Catty Lizzie.’ She tries to tickle Marcus. ‘Catty Lizzie!’
‘Ssh! I’m listening. Scarper!’ He wriggles free and turns up the volume.
‘I wanna watch telly with you!’
‘Collapse of a major American bank,’ he calls to Doro through the open door. ‘Crisis in the world’s financial markets. Just as we predicted. What a sight – look!’
She puts her head through the door and sees on the screen a procession of men in suits, carrying boxes.
‘What’s going on?’
‘Staff at Lehman Brothers leaving the building carrying their possessions in cardboard boxes.’
‘Why?’
‘No one will do business with them. Their assets are all tied up in toxic loans. Capitalism eats its own children.’
‘She never!’ says Oolie.
‘I’m sure they won’t be the last. According to Kondratieff’s theory, another slump was long overdue.’
‘Mm.’ Doro slices the potatoes, arranges them over the fish and puts it all in the oven. Then she joins them on the sofa.
Marcus is sipping in excited gulps from a bottle of lager. ‘What I fear is that a depression will once more bring the ugly spectre of fascism to our streets.’
‘Really?’
Doro tries to picture what fascism in Doncaster would look like. Gangs of blackshirts goose-stepping around the Frenchgate shopping centre? The idea seems a bit ludicrous.
‘When people feel insecure, they look around for someone to blame – Jews, immigrants, gypsies. That’s what happened in 1929 after the crash – governments everywhere slashed public spending. There was chaos. The Great Depression. Then Roosevelt came along with the New Deal in 1933. Spent millions on infrastructure. Created jobs for the unemployed. Turned the whole thing around.’
‘But how could he spend, if they’d run out of money?’
‘He borrowed. You have to borrow to invest. Keynes argued we should do the same in Britain, but they were saved by the Second World War. Of course war is the biggest public spending spree of all.’
Marcus is the only person she knows who talks in fully formed sentences, but his cleverness is sometimes a tad irritating. It’s strange how someone so bright can be so unaware of this. Dear Marcus. The spark that used to flash between them has long since given way to a cosy glow, warm but not exactly incendiary. She finds her mind drifting back to the fish pie, whose delicious smell is stealing in through the open door.
‘We were supposed to be the generation at the end of history,’ he’s saying. ‘We were supposed to be on the threshold of a new era of accumulation of unlimited wealth. Now we see the truth behind this seductive facade.’
‘Dad, you’ve just farted!’
‘No, I haven’t!’
‘Quick! Open the window!’
Oolie fans the air with her hands. The bottle rolls on to the floor, dribbling lager into the carpet. I’ll have to remember to wipe it up before it begins to smell, thinks Doro, wondering if she’ll end up like her mother, her clever, witty mother, who surrendered to domesticity after the birth of her children.
What did Clara call it – trapped in the Domestos fear?
After the others have gone to bed, she scrapes the burned remnants of the fish pie out of the dish and remembers that Bruno Salpetti had once used the same phrase that Marcus used tonight: ‘the seductive facade’.
SERGE: J1nglebell
Serge, too, feels trapped, squeezed in the lift, chin to chin with half a dozen vacant-eyed traders on Tuesday morning. Why is he here? What is the meaning of life? Is there a God? What is happening to property prices in Brazil? Such questions have been preoccupying him more and more recently. To judge from the look in their eyes, the other guys haven’t got the answers either. Putting all your heart and skill into running round inside a spinning hamster wheel is fine for a while, if you’re making money, but demoralising and exhausting when you’re pushing flat out and getting nowhere. The collapse of Lehman has made everything around them seem shaky and insubstantial. Will FATCA be next?
Talking to Otto yesterday made him feel better, but Otto’s quite a fantasist, so desperate to please that he’ll make promises he can’t deliver on. It was stupid to pin so much hope on that ‘borrowed’ memory stick. And even assuming Otto can get access to the FATCA bank accounts, it won’t necessarily solve Serge’s problem, and it could make things much worse. The trades he made with the cash from his remortgage are going nowhere, drifting up a bit, down a bit. He frets as he sits at his desk trying to squeeze numbers into a new formula which will take into account the hits that are already piling up in the sub-prime property market. Maroushka is at her desk, head down, doing the same thing.
At last, in the late afternoon, the message comes through from Otto. He feels it vibrate silently in his pocket. A one-word text.
J1nglebell
Duh! Alphanumerical. It’s so obvious! Really, he could have worked it out for himself. He heads off towards the washrooms. As he turns into the corridor, the door of the disabled loo swings open, and Tim the Finn emerges in front of him. He has a strange expression on his face, a grimace of pain maybe, though Serge wonders whether, in the fleeting moment before it turned into a grimace, it wasn’t actually a grin.
When the coast is clear, he sneaks into the disabled loo and rings Otto back.
‘Did you get a user name?’
‘There’s two: k.porter1601 or Kenporter1601. 1601 is the girl’s birthday.’
Just as he’d guessed. Ripples of relief radiate through his body. He takes a long breath, pulling the damp smelly air into his lungs.
‘Hotmail?’
‘Gmail. And I found a bank account. It’s a private account, though, not FATCA, and obviously not his main account. He only seems to use it for trading. As far as I can see, it’s not registered at FATCA at all.’
‘Tut tut. You had a peep?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How much?’
‘Just over seven hundred k. That should ease your problem, Soz. Strange thing is, there’s been quite a lot of movement in the last few weeks.’
‘Oh yeah?’
That’s interesting – if it’s an unregistered account the FATCA Compliance Officer doesn’t know about, Chicken probably won’t be in a hurry to draw attention to it. Maybe he’ll hesitate to make a fuss over a few irregular transactions. So long as they’re not too irregular. The mistake is always to be too greedy.
‘By the way, there’s a new remote desktop app that lets you trade online with an iPhone. I’ll send you the link.’
‘Perfect. Thanks, Otto. Hey, our little secret, right?’
‘Right.’
The black panther of dread crouched above his heart yawns, stretches and, with a limber leap, vanishes through the tiled wall. He throws open the door and makes his way lightly back to the trading floor.
Tim the Finn is there, jabbing away at his keyboard. He hasn’t noticed Serge’s absence. Maroushka is in the glass-walled office now, eating a muffin and flicking through some printout graphs. At the end of the row, the two Frenchies are discussing Sarko and Carla, and the troubles at AIG, in between furious bouts of number crunching. Across the trading floor, he can hear the voice of the Aussie VP joking about the need for a Government banks bailout plan. On the huge TV suspended from the ceiling Maria Bartiromo, the Bloomberg Money Honey, presides over her domain like a silent queen, mouthing her animate
d but soundless pronouncements on the day’s exchanges. The facade of normality is intact. Everything is as it should be.
DORO: The seductive facade
‘Beware the seductive facade of bourgeois feminism,’ Bruno had warned, drawling out his vowels so-o-o seductively. ‘Behind its revolting exterior is conceal the desolate hinterlands of neurosis and self-indulgency.’
But after Bruno returned to Modena in 1985, the women who had loved him – Megan Cromer (furtively), Moira Lafferty (noisily) and Dorothy Marchmont (guiltily), to name but three (though doubtless there were others) – instead of falling into a quagmire of jealousy and recrimination, decided that they should keep alive the flame of his memory and maintain the links they’d developed during the strike with the local miners’ wives.
One day in March 1986, when Oolie was just a few months old, they ran off 200 copies of a leaflet entitled Which Way for Women? on the inky old Gestetner in the outside toilet (it had been moved there from the Marxism Study Centre, when it became the playroom) and distributed them through the letter boxes of the houses in the Prospects and nearby streets in Campsall, Norton and Askern, inviting women to a meeting in the front room of Solidarity Hall at 2 p.m. on the following Sunday, to discuss women’s oppression.
In anticipation of the hordes who might attend, Chris Watt hoovered the threadbare carpet in the sitting room, Doro brought in the chairs from the kitchen and arranged a vase of dried flowers in the fireplace, to hide the heap of old newspapers, pamphlets and other stuff that accumulated there, and Moira Lafferty brought down three mirror-work patchouli-scented floor cushions from her bedroom, and lit a joss stick to cover the smell of damp and mice. Megan had gone away for the weekend, to stay with her mother and Crunchy Carl in Harworth, and although none of them actually said so, Doro was sure she wasn’t the only one to feel relieved.
The front door had been left open, but all three of them jumped to their feet when the bell rang; someone tall and slim, with sun-brown skin, pool-green eyes and tight golden curls, hesitated for a moment in the doorway, then stepped forward into the room. The trouble was, it was a man.
Various Pets Alive and Dead Page 15
