A Bit of Earth (15 page)

Sometimes Felix longed to have somebody to talk to; instead he would just draw in a Black n' Red book, or think about things and whisper into Marmalade's fur.

Today I had to run really fast to the garden. Sometimes if I am too slow there are people behind me and they might see where I go. Once Bradley and Harrison in Year 5 came after me. Today it was Thomas Keane as well, so that was worse. They were laughing and throwing fun snaps so I ran and ran. Harrison's mum saw them and they stopped. I hid behind a car and I heard her say that it was Sweeties Day. They all have Sweeties Day on Fridays. I don't care about that. At least it made them stop.

If I think that anyone is watching I just lurk around until they give up, or sometimes I can disappear when they aren't looking. It's amazing how stupid people are. They don't see something that is really obvious to another person, such as an important path or gate that leads somewhere very important.

If I was bigger I would be better at fighting. Even then
I don't think I'd like fighting much, even if I could beat other people. At least I'm not too bad at running. And I'm very good at hiding and disappearing. I bet I'm the best at climbing in the whole school. I can climb really tall trees where the branches are in really tricky places. Most people would find my trees impossible. I'll probably be an actual climber when I'm a man, and climb mountains as well as climbing walls. There may be a new Olympic sport of Difficult Tree Climbing.

Sometimes I can be in the garden and spy on people. They sit under my tree and say and do things and never even know I am there. I used to spy on Judy quite a lot, but now we are friends and she has made friends with Dad too. She never did anything interesting, just read, ate sandwiches and apples, and fed the birds. She would bring work as well, the sort of stuff Dad has to do. I don't bother spying on Dad. He never does anything interesting. I like spying on students best of all. Sometimes I think of putting up signs saying ‘Interesting Place To Do Interesting Things This Way!' as not many bother coming. But really I like it best when it is quiet …

Guy dreaded questions about how and why Susannah had died, so he hardly ever mentioned her to Felix. Even so, he hoped that Felix still had some recollections of her. Felix could remember her a little, and he had spent so long secretly gazing at the picture he'd stuck in his book and the ones in the albums that he thought he could remember much more than would have been possible. Felix thought that he could now remember being a toddler in a back
carrier on a holiday somewhere, sitting on a wall in Portmeirion eating a very small vanilla ice cream, and being startled by those peacocks (although in the next photos, he had laughed at them and found a feather to keep), that he could remember riding on his dad's shoulders on a walk back up a long sandy path from the beach. He looked and looked. Here was one of Uncle Jon with a funny hat on. And here was one of Grandpa eating a big sandwich. Something had made the bread go yellow, and he had the yellow stuff on his grey beard. It didn't look very nice. Felix wished that there were more photos of Mummy.

The photos stopped suddenly when he was about four. Sometimes he had to close the album quickly and chew on his cuff to stop himself from crying. But sometimes, later, staring and staring out of the window, or just when he fell asleep or woke up, or suddenly for no reason at all except maybe magic, he got a picture that wasn't a photo.

He is sitting on Mummy and Daddy's bed. She is getting dressed. She is cross with her clothes, but not with him.

‘I hate everything I have,' she says, and the piles of clothes on the bed get higher and higher, until he is surrounded. He is peeking out, at the top of a castle looking over the battlements.

‘I don't know why I have all these colours,' she says. Most things are navy blue and black and navy green, the colour of the uniform they have bought him for school. He thinks that colour is nice.

‘Why do I have all of this dark stuff?' she says. ‘I hate dark stuff, and heavy things, and itchy things and tights.'
Some of it is pale brown. She calls it tan. She throws a pale brown cardigan, that isn't dark or heavy or itchy, so that it lands on his head. He kicks some of the piles onto the floor and they laugh and she tickles him.

‘What I want is pink,' she says. ‘I need pink.' Then she says it is time to get ready. She puts on her jeans and a white T-shirt and the pale brown cardigan and they go to nursery where it is colours again. If you wear something red, he thinks, looking down at his shorts, and something white like his T-shirt, you are sort of pink.

After snack and milk, which is in red beakers with two handles but no lid, he does a painting. It is all pink and red.

‘Do you like pink, Felix?' one of the ladies asks. He just looks at the picture and his brush. The ladies all wear green sweatshirts. Some are thin and some are fat. They are all kind except for Diane who won't let you make spare bikes into trailers, even if nobody else wants to ride on them.

‘My mummy likes pink,' he says at last.

Judy had taken Jemima to see
Tosca,
and then to Pizza Express. Jemima stayed the night. Judy loved it when she did. It was so often unexpected, but Judy found that it never upset her equilibrium the way that the presence of almost any other unexpected guest might have. Judy still loved the phrase ‘unexpected guest', as used by magazines suggesting suppers or lunches or presents for them. She always had a bed ready for Jemima. The school of art where she was studying was only twenty or so miles away. Judy hoped that Jemima saw her house as somewhere to bolt to, to have some home comforts without any intrusion. She really was a bit jealous of Peggy, Jemima's mother. Imagine having Jemima all the time, for eighteen years, and even now for almost all of the long vacations. The things that Jemima did that drove Peggy mad – sleeping beyond noon, using the top of her chest of drawers as a palette and getting blobs of oil paint on the carpet, wearing grungy clothes, buying everybody she knew the same thing for Christmas; one year it had been jars of Nutella, and another year hyacinths; they had all been lined up on the table in the hall ready to go, not
even with individual gift tags (that would only complicate things), just ‘Happy Christmas from Jemima' – these things Judy just found endearing.

Jemima slept with such abandon, like a little child. She seemed to lack an internal alarm clock and needed strings of phone calls to rouse her if she ever had to be up for an exam or a train.

When Jemima stayed the night, Judy would tiptoe in with a cup of black tea (this niece was a vegan) at 8.30, knowing that it might still be there, undrunk, at midday. Judy loved the bizarre things that Jemima slept in; ancient long johns, with impossibly pretty and tiny little camisoles that would have given Judy very chilly shoulders. It seemed that young women were now inured to the cold – they wore these minute vests, day or night, whatever the season. Phoebe did it, almost all of Judy's female students did it, including many whom it did not suit. This morning Judy wished that Jemima had been awake to witness her aunt's heroics. There had been six daddy-long-legs in the bathroom. Judy had armed herself with a tray, six large glasses and six postcards and pieces of junk mail. She had caught them all, and carried them downstairs and out into the garden trapped inside the upturned glasses on the tray. Judy Lovage, Daddy-Long-Legs Liberator, looking like an elderly cocktail waitress in a bar for bats. It amused her, even though she was so used to this sort of thing. If you live alone you have no choice but to put out your own spiders and deal with anything that your cat brings in.

‘Hey! Felix! Catch!' Erica swung a sturdy branch of Montezuma pine and neatly batted a cone towards him. But Felix didn't catch. His mouth seemed to slowly slip open, but his arms stayed hanging at his sides. He turned as rigid as a petrol pump. Here, thought Erica, is a child who doesn't play catch.

‘Want to try again?' She batted another cone, more gently. This time Felix made an attempt to get it, and he almost did.

‘I'm not very good at this,' Felix told her. ‘Mrs Cowplain says I always seem to be looking the wrong way.'

‘I expect you're just looking at something more interesting than her. I bet you could be really good if you wanted. You're really good at outdoor things, aren't you?'

‘Only climbing and discovering.' He might have added ‘and silently watching'.

‘Well, those are the most important things.'

Felix looked away from her, then down at the ground, which in this corner of the meadow was studded with pine cones. Many had been gnawed to the core by squirrels, the
copper-coloured damp interiors exposed, all kernels gone. Felix thought that they did look tasty. It might be like eating a cereal bar, or maybe some dried pineapple. They had done food tasting at school and had rings of dried pineapple. It was the chewiest thing in the world, but if you ate too much of it, and you hadn't had much breakfast, it would give you stomach ache.

‘Do you want to bat?' Erica said. She offered him her stick. ‘I'll throw one and you see how hard you can whack it.' The first one he missed. The second he hit so hard that it went whizzing right across the garden and landed on the roof of a greenhouse. Through the milky glass they could see the shape of Guy looking up, startled.

‘Ooops,' said Felix, but they both sniggered.

‘See if you can bat it higher than that tree,' said Erica, jerking her head towards a young willow. Another child would say ‘Easy!' even though it wasn't. Felix seemed to be without bravado. But he did it. The arc was high and wide and true.

‘Wow,' said Erica, ‘you're pretty good. That was as big as a rainbow!'

‘Do you want a turn?' Felix asked politely.

‘OK.'

Each time one of them made a great hit they would shout as loud as they could, ‘Rainbow!'

Erica worried that there were quite a few things that Felix might never learn to do. Swimming was one of them. Was riding a bike another? She wondered if she could mention it to Guy without seeming to be critical or interfering, two
things that she definitely thought she was. Also, why was Felix in the garden nearly every afternoon? Shouldn't he be going to tea with people, or having them to tea? Or doing some activities. Perhaps she would invite him to tea again, or make a picnic for him and some of his friends in the garden.

‘Felix,' she said, the next time she saw him, ‘would you like to invite someone to tea in the garden? I could make you an autumn picnic. With maybe a friend or two. Or even three,' she quickly added, remembering how two could gang up on one. It wasn't that long since she had been at school.

‘The other children are all always busy,' he said. ‘They get collected and go to each other's houses and drama club and football, and piano lessons, and tennis, and cricket, and cubs, and Kumon maths. And the girls go to other stuff too.'

‘Don't you want to go to any of those things?'

‘I don't know.'

‘You could ask your dad, I could ask him for you.'

What were the other mothers playing at? Why weren't they constantly inviting this motherless child to things? Suddenly she quite hated Guy. He was failing this child, big time.

‘Do people invite you to things?'

‘Sometimes. I just say I can't go.'

‘Oh Felix, you could go! Of course you could go!'

‘I just say I can't.'

‘Why?'

‘I don't know.'

The truth was that some of the mothers didn't even know
about Felix's plight. It had happened four years ago now. Nobody gave it that much consideration any more. Their swoops on the Junior School playground were too swift for them to take much in. Those who had previously tried with Felix had been met with so many rebuffs that now they no longer bothered. By Felix's age most children were dictating their own social lives. The enforced inviting of other children to tea was over.

It occurred to Erica that Felix might not be very popular. Some people just don't have many friends. After all, she had hardly any that she actually liked.

At least she had a gingerbread man in her bag for Felix, and one for herself. They sat on the badger house and ate them. Felix was kind of odd-looking, she supposed, compared to most contemporary children. He always looked pale and what her mum called ‘peaky', despite all the time he spent outdoors. His shoes were lumpy and too sensible, and why were his cuffs always so frayed? Other boys of his age wore trainers with integral stopwatches. Their hair was in styles, and the girls, well, they were something else.

‘You know, Felix,' she said, ‘there are lots of things you could do, things in clubs, or by yourself. You could collect things, or be a metal detector, I mean someone who finds things. You could have your own garden.'

A coffee break in the lab. Erica and Guy didn't usually speak, just sipped in silence and looked out of the window, across their corner of campus to the waving trees that bordered the garden. Today, Erica had decided, things
would be different. She pulled a sheaf of leaflets out of her rucksack.

‘I was at the pool today and I picked up these for you. I hadn't realised that they did all this stuff for kids. There's lots here that you and Felix could try, and it's right on the doorstep. Very reasonable too. Does Felix like swimming?'

‘Er,' said Guy, ‘um.'

‘I loved it when I was a kid. Often the kids who aren't that good at other sports are strong swimmers. Not that I'm saying Felix isn't good at other sports. He's really good at tree climbing and so on …'

‘Um, yes,' said Guy, which wasn't actually an answer. He took another sip of his coffee and then looked back out of the window. ‘I'm interested in hailstones,' he said. ‘I wonder if anyone has studied their properties. And the air around hailstones. Have you ever noticed how peculiar it feels? Everybody knows about the importance of lightning in fixing nitrogen in the soil. I wonder if anybody has studied hailstones …'