A Bit of Earth (18 page)

‘I'm sorry, Felix, I haven't had time to finish decorating it. Can you put this star on the top for me, and these little angels, and these chocolate pocket-watches?'

After he had done that he still couldn't sit down. Everything was too interesting.

‘Would you like a proper look round, Felix? I think the cats are a bit overcome with excitement, they'll be asleep somewhere.'

Everything made him laugh and exclaim. Everything smelt nice.

‘Hey, Dad! Judy's got squirty soap made of green tomatoes.'

‘Dad! phone for You!' Felix thought it was exciting and important to get phone calls. He had leapt to answer it (it didn't ring often). Guy had the answering machine permanently on, and would never have picked it up. Whenever he could Felix intercepted the machine by answering before the sixth ring. He occasionally remembered to ask who was calling. Guy would often be fetched to talk to some poor soul in a call centre. They were all important to Felix, but they didn't come much more important than this one.

‘Dad, phone!' he yelled up the stairs. ‘And it's someone called Nicole from the swimming pool.'

There were lessons to be had and they started on Saturday. Felix wrote in his Black n' Red book:

I am going to do swimming!!!! It is on Saturdays for ten weeks. Not half terms. At 9.45 a.m. SHARP. We are getting some trunks at Tesco on Friday. I hope they have got some. I told Dad that Asda is open 24 hours if they haven't. I've seen an ad that tells you all the things you
can get there, but Dad has not. I told them at school that I was doing swimming now. I hope I am fast straight away. I hope you don't have to jump in at the deep end.'

‘Wasn't like this when I learned to swim,' said Guy. At Guy's school there had been an outdoor pool, in use from April to October, a watery grave for a billion insects, or quite possibly a gillion or a squillion. The bright turquoise lining had wrinkled under the children's feet. Guy had worried that he might accidentally tear it, and that the water would all leak out. How wonderful if it flooded the dinner hall, and all the tables and chairs and the dinner ladies with their huge pots and pans floated away…

The changing rooms were outdoors too, made of fencing panels. The walls were permanently WET! DO NOT TOUCH! because applying creosote each week was the main pastime of Mr McGull, the school caretaker. Swimming lessons had been a peculiar mixture of exhilaration and misery for Guy, and he wondered how Felix was feeling now. It was hard to tell much, the parents had been instructed to wait in the café. There was a huge wall of glass between them and the pool. Guy could see Felix doing what he was meant to be doing, but he was too far away for his expression to be read.

What varied shapes and sizes the children in Felix's group came in. Felix was, Guy saw now, quite puny compared to most of them. Some of the children looked so tough, with their muscly, tanned torsos, and their shoulders always back. How at home they all seemed in their bodies, and in the world.

Guy sipped his vending machine coffee; it was really rather good.

There was a girl from school who had always stuck in his mind – Sharon Coleman. Everybody always had to be very kind to Sharon Coleman. There were things about her that had annoyed him slightly. Sharon Coleman didn't have to write as much as everybody else because, the teachers said, her writing was so small. Sharon Coleman got changed separately from everybody else. She was very quiet and very good and very odd-looking. Thinking about it now, the poor girl must have had some terrible syndrome. She was what was then called ‘a bit simple', and had some mysterious things wrong with her that nobody was allowed to ask about.

He hoped that, wherever Sharon Coleman was now, she was happy. Perhaps it had been the sort of syndrome that you went through, and that then sorted itself out. Perhaps it was just a matter of time. Guy also hoped that the Medical Experimenter in the Sky would forgive him the mean thoughts he'd once had about her. He realised now, watching Felix's swimming lesson, that those mean thoughts had all started beside the school pool.

Sharon Coleman's mum had always come – even when swimming was in the middle of the day – to help her get changed. Her mum had waited by the pool with a special poncho/robe-type thing with elastic at the top. It was made from towels sewn together and looked like a giant, bottomless PE bag. He could still remember the pattern of seventies flowers in shades of avocado and olive against an orange background. There must, he supposed, have been armholes or sleeves because her mum also brought a
flask of something hot, and Sharon had stood there drinking a plastic mug of it whilst she dried inside her towelling tent. They could all smell her drink, even from across the pool – hot Ribena, tomato soup, hot chocolate – how they all longed for that hot chocolate. He wondered whether Sharon had told her mum which one to bring, or whether her mum just planned to surprise her. Perhaps the decision depended on the weather. Sometimes it was hot Bovril, but Guy wouldn't have cared much for that. (His own family sometimes drank cups of hot Marmite with squares of dry toast floating in it. He had never been sure whether he was meant to like this, or if it was a punishment for being ill.)

Sharon Coleman must also be past forty now, unless premature death had been another part of the package. He downed the last of his coffee. The lesson was nearly over, and he headed back to the changing room to meet Felix.

Felix appeared, freezing but happy, with cruel red weals under his arms where the floaty polystyrene pole had rubbed. Guy realised that they should have brought shampoo. Felix didn't like showers much anyway. Guy noticed that some of the children were wearing latter-day versions of the towelling tent. They had special robes in either red and white or blue and white stripes. Other children were using special kids' towels with funky designs of sharks or pirate flags. Felix was just using one of the towels that had arrived as a wedding present, getting on for ten years ago now. Susannah's brother had once called them the ‘towels of the newly married'. Guy still thought of these towels as plush, luxurious and new. He saw now, in the harsh lights
of the changing room, that they were showing their age, worn in some places and with long loose threads in others. He would bloody well get Felix one of those towels for kids in time for the next lesson.

‘Professor Lovage. Hi! I came a bit early to show you the Action Man.'

‘Max, how delightful! Did you really find one?'

‘Yup. Here he is.'

Max pulled him feet first out of his rucksack. A tiny shower of sand fell onto Judy's office floor. She smiled.

‘He looks a little pale,' she said.

‘Well, he's had a long journey. I'll show you if you like.'

Max took his laptop and a turquoise transparent folder out of his bag. It all looked, Judy thought, much better presented than his academic work. She didn't mind. She loved to find out where her students' hearts lay. Out came a blue and green map of the world.

‘The Action Men went overboard here, off the coast of China. Some of them are still at sea, maybe for ever. Plenty have washed up, all along this coast. I can show you how it all works.'

He pressed the button to switch on his laptop. A cheery little tune rang out to indicate that it was ready. It startled Judy, who had yet to have need of a laptop.

‘Do you like or hate that little tune?' she asked.

‘I dunno,' said Max, ‘I've never really thought about it before.'

With a few clicks, or really pokes, at what Judy surmised must be the mouse, the screen lit up in more blues and greens. She read ‘Surface Drifts and Currents of the Ocean'.

She liked the idea that it was all just one ocean.

‘Warm currents are brown,' said Max. ‘Cool ones are dark blue.'

She put on her glasses and peered at it. How clever it would be if the lines started moving. Another click and they did.

‘There aren't any in the Mediterranean,' she said.

‘Well, there is a current past Gibraltar, but it pretty much just slooshes around in there. That's why it's so vulnerable to pollution, algal blooms and so on.'

‘Mmm,' Judy nodded.

‘One of my first ever finds was a sea-bean. You can see how they get here. Look. They come from the Amazonian rainforest, maybe go towards Africa, or straight up here and across from Mexico.'

‘So,' she nodded and peered some more, ‘Chile is in a very different system to Brazil.'

‘Yeah. But I guess if you chucked something off the very tip of South America it might end up here. From Chile it would be more likely to go towards Australia or New Zealand or Japan.'

‘I see.'

‘Of course these currents are vulnerable to change. It hasn't always been like this. And then there are factors such as El Niño.'

‘Does everything wash up eventually?'

‘Nah, that's one of the problems. This patch here,' (he pointed to a spot halfway between California and Japan) ‘that's called the North Pacific Gyre. It's like an ocean landfill site. Things get in there and the currents mean they can hardly get out. It's like eternal plastic soup. Environmental nightmare. It's huge. Seems impossible to clean up.'

‘If seven maids with seven mops …' said Judy.

‘At least,' said Max. ‘But who knows, things change. Like our own Gulf Stream. Might get switched off at any moment.'

They nodded morosely. They had both seen enough
Horizons
to know that the polar bears would be arriving in Glasgow any day now.

Now Felix had something to write in his News Book every Monday morning. Bulbs were coming up. Spring had sprung. Mrs Cowplain had begun to look forward to his entries. She was a ham-fisted gardener, a buyer of boxes of bargain bedding plants, chosen by their price and size, rather than their variety or even their colour. She would stick them in the ground in very neat rows, and just hope for the best. She was an avid watcher of gardening shows (but more for Monty Don than for any information she might glean), a buyer of ornaments and statuary rather than perennials, a non-propagator. But she loved seeing Felix's little descriptions of what he had done.

She was quite disappointed the week that he wrote about his birthday instead.

My birthday was on Saturday. Dad and Erica and me [‘I, Felix, I!' she wrote in red pen] went to the Blue Reef Aquarium where I have always wanted to go. I wanted to go in Erica's car but Dad said we had to go in ours.
What we saw:

sharks
rays that you could touch
stingrays
pipefish
seahorses
velvet swimming crab
turtles
pufferfish
domino damselfish
fox face which is also called badger fish and can turn

completely black

clownfish
blue face angel
convict fish
We had lunch in the café. Chips but not fish and chips! Then we went to Judy's house for tea and she had made my birthday cake. It was a fish tank with green icing seaweed and smaller than usual smarties for gravel and blue background icing and the fish were plastic toy ones to keep. One day I am going to work at the Blue Reef Aquarium.

Mrs Cowplain wrote, ‘What a nice birthday, Felix. Well done!' even though she suspected that he had made up some of the fish names.

The next Monday was even worse. Felix wrote of how his dad had been digging up the whole of the garden. She was horrified. Did that mean all of his seeds? His raspberry canes? The three conker trees he had been growing?

‘Oh no,' said Felix, ‘that's just the garden at home. My garden's at the university. In the botanical.'

‘Really? I didn't know it was there. Imagine that. Lucky you.'

‘You can come and see it after school one day.'

‘Well, you'll have to ask your dad, won't you?'

‘He won't mind.'

‘Well, I'll talk to him at home time.'

‘He never comes.'

‘Really?'

‘I just go straight there. I don't mind if you want to come too.'

‘Thank you, Felix. That would be very nice,' she said, and gave him what was intended to be an extra kind smile.

Felix often hated the way that grown-ups and, most of all, teachers talked. But when school finished, he hung back.

‘Is it tonight you're coming, Miss?'

She hadn't actually meant it to be tonight, just at some unspecified time in the future. She had some steak in the fridge which she feared was dripping blood through its bag onto the coleslaw beneath. She had a feeling she had forgotten to put a plate under it. But why not?

‘Felix, you mustn't go in other people's cars without telling your dad.'

‘It's all right, Miss. We can't go in a car, we can only walk.'

‘Even so, I do think I should talk to your dad about it first. Shall I ring him up?'

But the boy's father proved to be uncontactable. It was all getting more and more complicated.

‘It's because he'll be in the greenhouses, Miss.'

Why was it that for the last hundred years children had called teachers ‘Miss'? She was a divorcee, but she still liked to use ‘Mrs'. Being called ‘Miss' really got on her nerves. She could remember being told off for doing it herself.

What was worse, she wondered, setting off with a child without his parent's permission to make an out-of-school-hours, off-site visit, or letting the child wander off by himself to find an uncontactable parent in some vague and quite possibly lonely place. Blow the dripping steak, she was on thin ice either way. She might as well go with him.

Mrs Cowplain stumbled a little on the pebbles.

‘Watch out, Miss, it gets slippery here.' As they went down the cinder paths Felix held back brambles for her. Damp ferns were speckling her skirt and her tights with diamonds. Soon she could see the silhouette of a man in one of the greenhouses. She jolly well hoped that it was Mr Misselthwaite.