Various Pets Alive and Dead

by Lewycka, Marina

  PART FIVE

  Everything Must Go

  CLARA: Give ’im no tea

  At half past three precisely on Wednesday, Clara zips out of the classroom, straight into her car, and off to Hardwick Avenue.

  They’re having a family meeting to discuss Oolie’s future living arrangements. Mr Clements has called it, Marcus and Doro have reluctantly agreed, and Oolie has insisted that Clara be there.

  She notes as she comes through the door that the house has been tidied up. An unfamiliar smell greets her that is floral and slightly sickly – Doro must have been spraying air freshener around.

  Oolie greets her with a hug in the hall. ‘Hiya, Clarie. ’E’s not ’ere yet. Mum says we ent gotter give ’im no tea.’

  ‘No tea? Why?’

  ‘She says she don’t want ’im ’angin’ around.’

  Clara shrugs. Doro seems to be getting more and more peculiar.

  ‘Well, I need a cuppa. I’ve had a hard day at school.’

  She goes into the kitchen to put the kettle on. Oolie follows her.

  ‘Did it come back, that ’amster?’ An obscure emotion flits across her face.

  This is the second time she’s mentioned it.

  ‘Oolie, are you sure it wasn’t you that let him out?’

  Oolie shakes her head emphatically. ‘It worrent me. ’E done it ’imself. Cheeky bugger. ’E nicked the key. I seed ’im.’

  ‘Oolie, you’re fibbing! You’re winding me up!’

  Oolie lowers her eyes sulkily. ‘No I in’t. Cross me ’eart. Let ’im die. Poker needle in ’is eye.’

  Clara has always assumed that Oolie sometimes gets things muddled, but doesn’t have the ability to actually invent things. What else has she been inventing?

  But before she can pursue this line of enquiry, the doorbell rings and her parents materialise in the hallway. Her mother is wearing a T-shirt that says ‘Rectify the anomaly’. Her father is wearing a tie.

  Clara stares. This must be serious.

  They seat themselves around the kitchen table.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Her mother fixes the social worker with a cold eye.

  ‘Mum says you ain’t gotter ’ave no tea,’ says Oolie.

  ‘No. I’m fine, thanks,’ he says.

  ‘Mum says she don’t want you ’angin’ around,’ says Oolie.

  ‘I’ll try to be brief, then.’ He blinks rapidly as he takes a folder out of his briefcase. ‘As you may know, there’s going to be a sheltered housing scheme as part of the Greenhill Lees redevelopment plan. There’s already a waiting list for places. Now, as you know, I’m very keen to get Oolie-Anna’s name down on that waiting list. But I’d like your agreement.’

  ‘And what if we don’t agree?’ says Doro.

  ‘I think you will,’ he says.

  Wow! He’s quite brave, thinks Clara, to face Doro down like that.

  ‘Tell ’er, Clarie! Tell ’er I wanna have my own flat,’ says Oolie. ‘I’m fed up of living at home. Cos Dad farts all the time.’

  Marcus laughs. ‘It’s a good enough reason.’

  ‘Who’s going to make sure she doesn’t eat rubbish?’ says Doro. ‘Who’s going to make sure she takes … her medication?’

  ‘What midi-cakes?’

  ‘It’s not the end of the world if she sometimes eats a bit of pizza,’ Clara chips in.

  ‘We’ll put support in,’ says Mr Clements. ‘We’ll monitor things carefully.’

  ‘And Megan’ll help,’ says Clara. ‘Like she said, Oolie’ll be more of a presence in her life now than she was in the past.’

  ‘That’s not difficult, is it?’ Doro retorts.

  ‘You can be involved just as much or as little as you want, Mrs Lerner. It’s better to start letting go now, in a planned way, when all the services are in place, than to wait for an emergency …’

  ‘He’s got a point, Mum,’ says Clara. ‘You and Marcus are getting elderly, if I may say so.’

  She’s noticed how tired Marcus looks, and how distracted Doro seems.

  ‘No, we’re not!’

  ‘Yes, you are, Mum. It’s not going to get any better.’

  Doro rolls her eyes. Mr Clements frowns at Clara.

  ‘See it in a positive light. Don’t think of it as an imposition. Think of it as a lovely gift to your daughter, Mrs Lerner. The gift of blossoming independence.’

  He’s obviously been on one of those positive-thinking courses.

  ‘Giff! I wanna giff!’ cries Oolie.

  ‘And what if she gets P-R-E-G-N-A-N-T?’ Doro spells.

  ‘What’s ayan tea?’ asks Oolie.

  ‘She’s longing for a B-A-B-Y.’

  ‘Look, Mrs Lerner, I know what you’re worried about,’ says the social worker quietly. ‘I went through the case notes, right back to 1994. You know, in the nineties they were finding child abuse all over the place. Since then, we’ve come to accept more … er … unconventional living arrangements.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I said at the time,’ snaps Doro.

  ‘Mm. The other thing I discovered –’ he shuffles around in his chair and nods towards Doro almost apologetically ‘– is that you and Mr Lerner never actually completed the legal adoption process.’

  ‘Because we weren’t married! Because we lived in a commune! Because the social worker who interviewed us was a narrow-minded bigot with an obsession about nudity and paedophilia! Probably you are too! What? Don’t you shush me!’ Her mother turns furiously on poor Marcus, who’s had the temerity to raise a finger to his lips.

  ‘I think this is very helpful,’ says Mr Clements calmly. ‘You need to express your worries.’

  ‘There was a fire! Somebody set the bloody house on fire! Isn’t that worry enough?’

  ‘Mum thinks it were me, but it worrent,’ Oolie confides to Mr Clements in a loud whisper. ‘It were some lads. I seed ’em.’

  Doro’s cheeks have gone chalky, like an old woman’s. Clara feels quite sorry for her.

  ‘I think that’s enough,’ she intervenes. ‘Unless you’ve got something constructive to say?’

  ‘Why not try it for six months? If after that it isn’t working out, you can always go back …’

  ‘All right!’ Doro sighs, and throws up her hands. ‘You’ve bludgeoned me into submission.’ She gets up like a sleepwalker and blunders into the kitchen to put the kettle on.

  ‘Well done,’ whispers Clara to Mr Clements.

  He shrugs, and smiles. ‘D’you think she’ll let me have that tea now?’

  ‘I expect so,’ says Marcus.

  ‘Dad, you’ve just farted again,’ says Oolie.

  Pity about the beard, thinks Clara.

  DORO: The fire

  Despite the Christmas decorations already drooping between the lamp posts, or maybe because of them, Doncaster town centre looks particularly cheerless on the last Saturday of November, as Doro makes her way along almost empty pavements towards Woolworths, in search of Janey. There are things she needs to ask about the fire, things she needs to clarify. It was so long ago, everyone has forgotten, apart from her, and even her own recollection has become muddied between what she saw, what she inferred, and the things she said at the time, which have become fixed in her memory as a true record of events. Janey’s words last time they met are lodged in her mind. ‘Wasn’t it some lads?’

  But Woolworths’ windows are plastered with giant ‘CLOSING DOWN SALE!’ posters, and Janey isn’t there. She wanders around the desolate store, between the picked-over counters and posters proclaiming ‘BUY NOW WHILE STOCKS LAST!’, vaguely remembering having read something about Woolworths going into receivership. It seems incredible that something so apparently permanent, something which has been here since her own childhood, can suddenly disappear just like that.

  When she was a little girl, her mother used to take her on Saturday to spend her pocket money on the Woolworths pick-and-mix counter in Norwich. Thirty years later, when they lived in Solidarity Hall
, she did the same with Clara and Serge. Serge was one of those kids who always hoarded his sweets, and cried when the other kids tried to steal them. Doro smiles, remembering the tears and squabbles of long ago. Later, he gave up hoarding sweets, and started hoarding other things – snail shells, dried seed heads, pine cones.

  Yes, she found the charred remnants of the pine cones in the grate after the fire. Serge must have gathered them in Campsall Woods – there weren’t any pine trees near the house. She remembers so vividly, even after fourteen years, driving back from work that day, late because of a hold-up in the town centre. A little girl knocked over by a speeding car. Someone else’s tragedy.

  She remembers how her heart lurched when she turned into their lane and saw, through the swish of windscreen wipers, a tight little knot of people gawping at the fire engine in front of their house, the great arcs of water playing from the hoses. She remembers the smell of charred wood and scorched paint, the billowing plumes of smoke rising up through the thin useless rain. But why was Serge there? He should have been at school, at the four o’clock chess club. Yet there he was, tears running down his face with raindrops and grey rivulets of ash, jabbering about Oolie and how he’d seen smoke and run all the way to the red telephone box in the village. And she’d looked around for Oolie, thinking she should be back any minute now, and suddenly she’d realised and started to scream, ‘Oolie! Where’s Oolie?’

  They’d broken down the door of the annexe, and pulled her out. She was unconscious, with horrific burns to her arms. Doro had forced herself to be calm, putting her arms around Serge, covering his eyes with her hands. Only when the ambulance arrived did she break down and shout at the idle onlookers blocking its way up the lane. Where had these people come from? She barely knew them. A woman put her arm around her. ‘She’ll be all right, duck. It’s just the smoke.’

  Doro shrugged her off angrily. What did she know?

  The others drifted back between four and six o’clock – Otto and Star first, then Toussaint and Kollontai, followed by Nick, Moira, Marcus and lastly Chris Howe, who finished work at five thirty. The police took statements from all of them. The absentees were Clara who was away at university, Chris Watt who’d gone to visit her sister in Skelmersdale, and Fred who was in London. The neighbours had melted away. Presumably the police interviewed them too.

  They questioned Oolie while she was still in hospital.

  ‘Come on. You can do better than that, sweetheart. Who was there when you came home?’ the policewoman coaxed.

  Oolie put her hands over her face and started to howl.

  ‘Can’t you see, you’re just making it worse,’ Doro pleaded. ‘Why don’t you let me talk to her alone?’

  The detective was a mother herself. ‘I’m sorry, love,’ she said. ‘It wouldn’t stand up in court. I’m just doing my job.’

  Doro was sure that Oolie herself was capable of starting a fire by accident, but could she have put the pine cones there and put a match under them? Or was it Serge, home early from school, trying out an experiment or playing a game that had gone dreadfully wrong? Or had someone unknown set out to harm her? Doro shuddered, recalling the incident with the bricks when Oolie was a toddler, wondering why vulnerable people attract such malice.

  The minibus driver who’d dropped Oolie off was quizzed.

  Why was she there alone at that time? Why had she come home early?

  The driver denied he was early; three thirty was the normal dropping-off time. Yes, he’d taken her right up the lane to the house, he said. He thought there was someone at home, because Oolie had waved and disappeared into the house, so the door must have been unlocked.

  Had the last person out not locked the door when they left? Or did someone inside the house let her in? Serge?

  Serge had called the fire brigade, so he must have been there at the time, or shortly after. Oolie had seen no one when the door from the house slammed, trapping her inside the annexe.

  ‘Have you anything you want to tell me, Serge?’ Doro had asked quietly when they were alone together. He was about fifteen at the time.

  ‘Why does everybody think it’s me?’ he’d yelled, and burst into tears.

  She didn’t press him any more, but buried the pine-cone fragments in the garden under the broad beans.

  The commune with its free-and-easy living arrangements came under scrutiny. The police seemed more concerned about who was sleeping with whom than with how the fire started. Chris Howe confirmed their worst suspicions when he opened the door half naked, and started railing about fascism. Then Social Services got involved and there was talk of taking all the children into care.

  The Chrises and their kids decamped one night, without leaving contact details. Jen came and took Otto away, and Nick followed them. Fred stayed in London; he came back one weekend to collect his books and say goodbye. Only Moira and Star, who had nowhere else to go, stayed on in the commune, until they too left at the beginning of 1995. Maybe Doro, Marcus and Serge should have left at the same time. But Oolie was happily settled in a new school and Marcus had become Head of Department at the Institute.

  For a while, the four of them rattled around in the huge empty house with its burned-out annexe, charred exposed rafters and sickening stink of smoke that tainted everything. The police investigation dragged on and eventually ground to a halt, with the finger of blame seeming to point at Oolie herself. But Doro still wondered in her heart how Serge’s pine cones had ended up in the grate. There were no further clues. A neighbour thought she’d glimpsed a fleeting figure running up the lane, but couldn’t give a description or a precise time. Serge running to the phone box, or some bad lad running away?

  Despite all the gawping, it seemed nobody had seen anything – or if they had, they weren’t saying. In closed communities there’s always talk, tittle-tattle, but although they’d tried so hard to be accepted, the commune had never become a part of that subterranean rumour mill, tuned into its gossip networks, subject to its loyalties, secrets and feuds.

  But Janey was. Janey must know someone who knew someone who’d lived in Campsall or Norton at the time. Janey must know what had been said, and what was left unsaid.

  ‘Do you know Janey Darkins?’ Doro asks a greasy-haired young man on the toy counter, but he just shrugs.

  A young woman on cosmetics tells her she’s left. ‘We’re closing down. Everybody’s leaving.’

  Doro wanders blindly out into the dank wintry morning, wondering what to do next. Maybe it’s for the best that the questions will never be answered. She sits in a tiny gloomy café, where maybe she would have taken Janey, and drinks bitter charred-tasting coffee from a polystyrene cup, wondering, is it better for Oolie to let the memories lie buried until they finally rot and dissolve away? Or is it better to dig them out and expose them to the bright disinfectant light of day?

  There’s a whole industry of therapy and counselling and analysis based on the belief that the past must be unearthed and sanitised like a leaking sewer. And there’s Time the Healer – with his muddled, murky comfort of forgetting.

  Slowly, as if walking has become a great effort, she makes her way back up the empty High Street, with its sprinkling of newly boarded-up fronts, fly-by-night shops selling Christmas tinsel, and shops with closing-down sales. Waiting at the bus stop with her pensioner’s bus pass at the ready, she feels the weight of the low grey sky pressing down on her.

  What will happen to Oolie now? How could Marcus lie to her for all those years? What is Serge hiding from her?

  Everything that has underpinned her life for the last twenty years has been turned upside down in this last month. The allotment, her paradise and sanctuary, is about to be destroyed. Even the city where she lives seems to be disintegrating around her. ‘SPECIAL OFFER!’, ‘£1 GREAT VALUE!’, ‘EVERYTHING MUST GO!’ scream the banners.

  SERGE: The Treasury Committee

  Serge decides to walk to work on Monday, rather than catching the tube, to give himself time t
o prepare mentally for what awaits him. It’s a cold, fresh December morning, with a low sun nudging away last night’s snow clouds, and melting the traces of snow on the pavements. He says good morning to the shopkeepers opening up their blinds and putting out their pavement signs. He says good morning to the buffed-up office drones sipping a pre-office lungo at the heated tables on the pavement outside Peppe’s. He says good morning to the doorman at FATCA and the blonde girls on reception. He says good morning to the four morose guys and one sullen sleepy girl crammed in the lift. He feels good.

  The wall of noise as he swings open the doors into the trading hall almost blows him away, after the silence of the last fortnight. But he pulls himself together and smiles. He says good morning to Tootie and Lucie and the Frenchies. The Hamburger’s chair is empty. Maroushka is in the glass-walled office, wearing a new black dress with a matching jacket, talking on the phone and swivelling on Timo’s old chair. She looks fabulous in black, but older. And her hair’s different, pulled back in a tight bun instead of cascading down her shoulders. She catches his eye, wiggles four fingers, then turns away. He hangs his jacket on the back of his chair and switches on his desktop. It takes an age to warm up, upload its fortnight’s worth of security scans, configurations, patches and updates, tick-boxes for unintelligible policies, then reboot itself. So he strolls to the glass-walled office and leans in the doorway.

  ‘How’s things?’

  She finishes her phone call and looks up.

  ‘Everything normal. Welcome back to Securitisation desk, Sergei.’

  ‘I’ve heard there’s a new VP?’

  She meets his eye with an uncertain smile, from which the mischievous twelve-year-old grin has only recently been banished.

  ‘He is I.’

  A wave of gloom washes over him, blotting out the brightness of the morning. But why does he have this bad feeling? Shouldn’t he be pleased for her?