Gifted and Talented

by Holden, Wendy

  David now burst into the kitchen. He was wild-eyed, clutching what looked like a list, and wore a tight Shetland jumper whose sleeves barely reached his skinny elbows. Olly had learnt early on not to give any of his laundry to Dotty. It came out either unrecognisable in colour, or fit only for a dwarf.

  A muscle worked in David’s thin cheek and he pulled agitatedly at his skimpy beard. He was glancing fitfully at the ceiling, through which the music continued relentlessly to thump. ‘We agreed to just ignore it,’ Dotty reminded him soothingly. ‘That’s our new approach,’ she said to Olly. ‘The “hands-off” parent. Non-intervention.’

  Olly nodded. During the seven days he had been here, Dotty and David had tried three previous new parenting approaches, each more ineffectual than the last.

  ‘We’re letting her anger run its course,’ Dotty elucidated brightly, glancing at her husband for corroboration.

  ‘But what’s she so angry about?’ Olly asked, feeling this was the nub of the question.

  Dotty’s chest heaved in a great sigh. ‘She says she’s angry about everything. About society. So she’s taking a radical position and staying in her room.’

  Up until now, Olly had not appreciated that university academics could be like this. The ones he had been taught by at St Alwine’s had been suave, self-confident, superior. But Dotty and David were all over the place.

  David was indeed in a state of high anxiety. His fears for his career had intensified since Olly’s first encounter with him. The interview with Professor Green had not gone well and she had apparently cut some of his responsibilities. He was sitting now, at the table, muesli untouched, staring at the diminished list of students.

  ‘Never mind,’ Dotty said comfortingly. ‘The fewer students you’ve got, the more you can concentrate on them.’

  ‘I know it’s because of that Facebook page,’ David fretted. ‘But Gillian refused to believe me when I said I couldn’t upload anything, even a towel on a shelf.’

  Ah yes, Olly thought. The Stringer towels. They hung stiffly on the chipped rail of the downstairs shower room – worn, thin and of a cardboard rigidity. Using them was like rubbing yourself all over with sandpaper.

  He decided to beat a retreat. ‘I’ll start the cleaning,’ he said brightly. Minutes later, he was bumping the Hoover up the stairs. It was an ancient machine, like something out of a museum, with a proper old-fashioned bag to take the dust.

  He Hoovered the upstairs hall, staring at the bookshelves as he did so. Books were everywhere in the Stringer house. Neither Dotty nor David possessed the ability to pass a charity shop without buying an armful of paperbacks. The range they had collected was enormous: Greek myth and picaresque, dense volumes of Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle, histories of architecture and music, and biographies of everyone from Voltaire to Field Marshall Blucher. There were also many children’s classics, each in several editions; enough Wind in the Willows to constitute a howling gale and a Garden of Verses stretching as far as the eye could see. Even the loos – one up, one down – were bursting with books: 1000 Places To See Before You Die, 1000 Paintings To See Before You Die and 1000 Buildings To See Before You Die loomed at Olly whenever he entered. This fat-spined mixture of death and compunction could have an arresting effect, although Dotty’s signature dish was obviously the answer to that.

  Olly had a shelf in the fridge and another in the cupboard but was welcome to eat with the family if he wanted to. He was not sure how much he wanted to. He had discovered on the first night of residence that Dotty’s organic chilli con carne rather emphasised the chilli and the result was altogether too brisk an experience for his insides. And David’s fondness for very smelly French cheese – he seemed to actively prefer the rotten end of the spectrum – meant that opening the fridge was like encountering the breath of Grendel, the monster with halitosis in Beowulf.

  Olly decided to do Hero’s room next. He had never yet actually been in it but suspected it was fetid. She smoked in it, for a start, and as he never saw the takeaway boxes in the kitchen bin he concluded she either ate those as well, or shoved them under her bed.

  He stood before the door, Hoover in hand. Thrashing guitars and hoarse, furious yelling blared out from behind the ‘Nuclear Facility’ posters.

  He knocked.

  ‘Go away!’ Hero shouted, much as expected.

  Olly put his head round the door. The curtains were drawn and the lamps were on. Hero’s long, skinny form stretched out on the bed looking longer and skinnier than ever in her tight black jeans. Her eyes in her white face were ringed with black and her lips and hair were the same colour.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said, without enthusiasm.

  He was about to advertise his intention to clean the room but the powerfully vinegary scent of stale cigarettes made him cough. He waggled the Hoover pole at her instead.

  ‘No way,’ Hero said. But Olly had none of her parents’ fear of this trenchant teenager and advanced into the room, the soles of his trainers crunching over the crisps in the carpet.

  ‘Can we turn that down a bit?’ Olly bent to the volume control. ‘What are you’re listening to?’

  ‘Wanker.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’ Olly pretended to be offended.

  Hero rolled exasperated eyes. ‘No; the band’s called Wanker, you . . .’

  ‘Wanker?’ Olly supplied, good naturedly.

  ‘Actually, according to your T-shirt, you’re the Antichrist. Ironic, is it?’

  ‘No, I am the actual Antichrist,’ Olly said, ironically. He was peering into the stinking darkness under the bedframe. ‘How long is it since you cleaned under here?’

  ‘What’s the legal position?’

  ‘Eh?’ He was looking for the plug socket.

  ‘If someone decided to kill you.’

  ‘Why would anyone want to kill me?’

  ‘Your T-shirt. Someone might think they were ridding the world of a great evil. Imagining they were killing the Antichrist. It might be a defence, you know, against a murder charge.’

  Olly was, despite himself, impressed. He had gathered from David and Dotty that Hero had, before nihilism descended, once contemplated law as a career.

  He plugged the device in and poked the end of the suction pole under the bed. There was a zapping noise and, when he pulled it back out, a Happy Meal box was attached to the end. He detached it with dignity, pulled out the black bin-bag he had shoved into his belt, shook it open and dropped the box in. Then he stuck the pole under again. Five more Happy Meal boxes followed, some in the advanced stages of decay.

  That, Olly decided, was enough. He extracted the Hoover pole. Whatever else was mouldering under the bed could wait until next time, although there was a fair chance that by then it would have got up and gone of its own accord. He dragged the duster out of his jeans pocket and began flicking it around gingerly among Hero’s collection of fantasy figures with coloured glass eyes and vampire wings.

  ‘Do you mind?’ Hero shouted as he started to pull the curtains. ‘I like them shut, yeah? This is my room.’

  ‘Yeah, and you should be out of it and at school,’ Olly retaliated.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. You learn things,’ Olly said. ‘You pass your exams; you go to university. You find out what you want to do in life. Get a good job.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Hero smirked. ‘Like you have, right? How’s the novel coming on?’

  Olly regretted ever having mentioned this to Hero. It had been in a weak moment, probably immediately after the chilli had struck.

  The laptop was open on Hero’s Twitter page, he saw. Her address was @GothGirl and the photo was of a pair of black lips up close. She had a smart laptop, Olly saw, and a scanner as well. Her parents had obviously tried, at one stage, to appease her with computers.

  Hero had turned up
Wanker again. ‘This one’s called “Arse to Everything”,’ she announced.

  Olly decided to take the hint.

  Dotty was still at the kitchen table when he came back downstairs with the Hoover. ‘That dog’s there again,’ she observed. Olly followed her eyes out of the kitchen window. The white poodle that had first turned up a week ago was staring in through the pane.

  Olly had spotted it first. He had seen its nametag – silver, with ‘Coco’ engraved on it in swirling script – and attempted to make friends with it until a couple of vicious nips on the hand had curbed his enthusiasm. Dotty had wondered whether the jewels on the collar were real. They had given it food and water. It had left the chilli but responded eagerly to Hero’s somewhat unexpectedly giving it leftovers from her burgers. She was the only one of the inmates it hadn’t bitten, but perhaps it didn’t dare.

  It was David who made them get rid of it. He was allergic to canines as well as everything else at the moment and insisted the creature was best off at the local dogs’ home. Dotty had taken it there some days ago, so the fact it had returned was unexpected. Olly eyed it apprehensively.

  ‘Still,’ Dotty sighed now, meeting Coco’s somewhat crazed black eyes through the glass, ‘it’s nice that someone seems to like me.’

  ‘I like you, Dotty,’ Olly said comfortingly. He did, too. She was, he felt, impressively cheerful in the face of her difficult family and he particularly liked her lowbrow streak, the way she loved nothing better than to have a bowl of pasta – or the dreaded chilli – on a tray in the sitting room with David and watch Strictly Come Dancing.

  He had found it hard to believe that Dotty, the passionate violinist and Royal College of Music graduate, could take anything but the most ironic interest in the likes of X Factor, but after sitting next to her on the battered sitting room sofa as she clenched her fists, shouted at the television and wept copiously as the fat lady who cleaned the council loos belted out a heart-stopping – or, as David wryly put it, Harpic-stopping – version of I Will Always Love You, Olly realised that her interest was genuine. He realised, too, that after a day spent teaching certain pupils of hers, and dealing with certain mothers, such undemanding downtime was essential for Dotty’s sanity.

  A strange, grinding noise interrupted them: the doorbell, Olly realised. Dotty glanced fearfully at the clock. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘It’s the Lintles.’

  Limited though his time in the Stringer house had been, Olly was already aware that Lorna Lintle was Dotty’s least favourite client. Most of the mothers whose offspring she taught sat outside the house listening to Radio Two in their cream-leather-lined four-wheel drives and ordering the weekly shop from Waitrose on their iPads as little Ottilie or Jasper scraped the catgut inside. But Lorna not only sat in on the entire lesson, but looked as if she grew her own vegetables and wove her own clothes out of hemp. She was a terrifying, grey-ponytailed harridan with an unrelentingly cultural focus and in this powerful and unflinching spotlight squirmed Alfie, her son. He was small, skinny, thickly bespectacled and being groomed to genius by every means to hand. He had two lessons a week and they always arrived outside Dotty’s house with something improving like Peter and the Wolf booming from Lorna’s battered, claret-coloured Volvo.

  ‘What instrument was playing, Alfie?’ Lorna would be shouting as she dragged him up the path.

  ‘Er . . . trombone?’

  ‘Alfie!’ his mother would explode. ‘It was a bassoon. Honestly, Mozart had written several operas and done a world tour by the time he got to your age.’

  Olly felt powerfully sorry for Alfie because he had Lorna as a mother, and powerfully sorry for Dotty because she had Hero as a daughter. He had not expected merely renting a room to give such insight into the complexity of family relationships. He wasn’t sure he wanted this insight; life at the moment was tricky enough. As the bell rang again, louder and more insistently, Olly beat a hasty retreat back upstairs.

  As he did so, he could hear the poodle barking outside.

  It was all his own fault, Richard knew. He should never have got involved. He should not have taken any notice when Allegra Trott rang up and told him that, if sending her a list with six-pound mugs on it was the best Branston could do, she was going to blow her bonus on shoes, handbags and a part-share in a racehorse.

  He should certainly not have considered this alongside the presence of the ghastly Amber Piggott and concluded that the college was going the wrong way about raising money. And, even if he had reached such a conclusion, he should have left it at that. He should certainly not have gone along to Flora Thynne and told her that Branston needed a bigger idea, a bolder vision and the courage to carry it out. But he had; he had done all this and now he was sitting in the meeting that Flora had called with the college high command in order to tackle what she called his ‘issues’.

  The Bursar was there, looking furtive and flustered, plus a couple of people whose names he couldn’t remember, and Gillian Green. The chair opposite his was occupied by Flora Thynne. To her left sat an extraordinary creature.

  He was male, mid-twenties, plump and his powerfully sweet-smelling aftershave overwhelmed Richard, seated several feet across the table. He wore glasses in exuberantly thick black retro frames and had spiky, gelled-up hair. He had been slightly late to the meeting and, as he had entered, Richard had been afforded a view of his trousers. These, while skintight round his plump thighs and solid calves, bagged off his generous bottom in a manner reminiscent of a full nappy, and exposed most of his underwear. The effect was completed by a heavy silver chain belt.

  Flora did the introductions. The apparition, Richard learnt, was called Clyde Bracegirdle and was a freelance public relations expert. He had formerly headed a local firm called Gobstopper PR whose clients included a manufacturer of llama ice cream. Richard tried not to groan as, emitting gusts of violently scented aftershave, Clyde invited ideas from round the table for ‘a mega-brainstorm to chuck ideas around for re-engaging the client in the Branston story.’

  Richard felt he might scream soon in frustration. ‘I thought,’ he said, ‘that you were supposed to be the one with ideas. That’s what we’re paying you for, isn’t it?’

  Clyde acknowledged that he was and it was. ‘OK; let me level with you. Let me introduce you to . . .’ he paused, theatrically, before adding, extravagantly, ‘the Big Branston Ring-Round!’

  In the absence of a reaction from anyone else, Flora coughed politely.

  The basic idea, Richard gathered, was that groups of current Branston students were corralled to ring up alumni and chat to them in a jolly, informal fashion about what life in the college was currently like. In theory, the person rung up would be seized by nostalgia and would subsequently seize their credit card, eager that this idyllic way of life and learning could be perpetuated.

  Richard stifled a yawn and passed a weary hand over his eyes. None of this was new to him. He’d heard it before, many times. American universities had been doing it for years. Probably lots of British ones had too, although the way Clyde was looking triumphantly around the table he was evidently expecting to be credited with the invention of it.

  ‘Just running it up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes,’ Clyde beamed.

  Richard drummed his fingers on the table. ‘Fine by me.’ He glanced at Flora, who looked terrified. ‘Think you can get some students together?’

  There was a spasm in her thin throat as she swallowed. She nodded.

  How difficult, Richard thought irritably, could it be? He’d seen it done a dozen times. All she need do was produce a poster saying, ‘Your College Needs You!’ offering free booze and tack it up on the student noticeboards alongside the ones about safe sex, jazz concerts, internet grooming, services in the egg chapel and auditions for Huis Clos. His mouth opened to say as much, but then he closed it again. He was not here to micromanage Flora Thynne. He was
here to work at his research, and that was where he was going now.

  ‘Good,’ Richard said, rising abruptly to his feet. He had done his bit – more than his bit. He would now retire from the whole fundraising business and leave it to the experts.

  As he pushed back his chair, he glanced out of the meeting room window into the garden. He felt something like a grim relief that it looked as bad as ever. That woman gardener had either not yet penetrated these drearier areas, or, with any luck, might already have packed in the job. From what the Bursar had said about her wages, he would not blame her.

  A movement caught his attention; someone was working at the far side of the scabby lawn. The gardener? She had been camouflaged before; her soft brown hair and faded green jacket just smudges in the general autumn picture. There was something about her which drew the eye. He watched as she pulled up dandelions and tossed them into a bucket. She had wide eyes and a wide mouth stretched in a dreamy smile.

  Richard felt something thud into his chest, as if someone had hit him. He recognised her; it was the woman from the car – the woman he had almost collided with on his bike. But more than that, he recognised her smile. She smiled just as Amy had. To see her, smiling like that, whilst working in a garden . . .

  He looked away hurriedly, heart crashing in his chest. Heat and chill surged after each other through his body. He wanted to leave, get out and get away, but his feet would not move. It was as if something was compelling him to stay.

  For a time after Amy’s death, hard-nosed scientist even though he was, he had read messages from her in the appearances of various birds, in sightings of butterflies, in the pictures formed by clouds. It had taken time, a long and miserable time, to accept that none of this meant anything, that she really had gone, that he would never see her again in any form. So, to see someone so similar, now, in the last place on earth he had expected it, was a horrible shock. To have to face, presumably daily, something so painful in the place he had hand-picked in order to avoid such pain . . .