A Bit of Earth (5 page)

A saucer rattled against the milk bottle as she put the tray down.

‘Oh, he came to us with it, he was adopted, you see. It didn't seem right to change it. It was all he had. We'd given up hoping for any of our own. It was often the way. But then along came Jenny.'

‘I have a sister called Jenny too. Your Jenny, she must have been devastated, I mean about the accident.'

‘Well, they've never been that close, and she's very busy with her career. She's a hospital administrator, and not even married. No grandchildren for me.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘She lives in Reading. They said it's not that far if you can drive, but I can't. Now I wish I'd stayed in Swansea. At least I knew people there. And I had my own garden. All I've got here is my balcony…'

‘I've seen. Those are nice Alpine carnations.'

‘Thank you. Here's your tea.'

‘My sister used to collect those little china animals. They had a name …'

‘Whimsies.'

‘Oh, yes. Whimsies.' Guy sipped his milky tea. ‘Mrs East, my wife was in the car with your son, in the accident. She died too.'

‘I'm sorry for your loss too.'

‘Thank you.' Guy stirred his tea, even though he didn't take sugar. ‘Mrs East, did your son ever talk about my wife? Her name was Susannah. Susannah Misselthwaite. She worked in the university library. You see, I'm trying to find out. I don't even know why she was with him in the car. I don't know …'

‘Susannah, you say?'

‘Yes, Susannah.'

‘No. I didn't know about any Susannah. I don't remember anyone called Susannah.'

‘Did he bring his girlfriends to meet you?' Guy asked. How could he be asking this? He winced, closed his eyes for a few seconds, felt his stomach lurch. That tea.

‘He did have lots of girlfriends, but they didn't really come to see me. But you said this Susannah was your wife.'

‘Yes, my wife. People always remembered her if they'd met her. She was very pretty. Half-Swedish.'

‘Oh. All his girlfriends were pretty. He was engaged once, in Spain. But they broke it off. I don't know why. I don't know all the answers.' She began to cry, very quietly.

‘Mrs East, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to upset you.' He fetched some kitchen roll, each sheet had a border of purple leaves, but when he tried to give it to her he saw that she already had a hanky balled up in her fist. ‘Would you like me to call somebody to be with you?'

‘No, that's all right. I'm used to being on my own.'

‘I think I'd better go. I'm sorry.'

She just nodded.

‘I'm really sorry,' said Guy.

The lift was still there. Down he went, and out past the aspidistras.

He thought that he might as well go in to work. When he got to the lab, he wished that he had just gone home. What was he to do now? At least as it was the middle of summer there were hardly any students about.

There didn't seem any point in trying to contact East's adoptive sister – he was hardly likely to have confided in a sulky hospital administrator from Reading.

Guy considered his options. He could go sniffing around
Languages, and try to find some friend of East who might know something and be prepared to tell him. He didn't know anybody in Languages. What would he do, email the whole department? Stand in the corridor where they all had their offices and yell?

A mug of tea appeared in front of him.

‘Guy,' said Jeanette. ‘You looked like you could do with this. Are you OK? What are you doing?'

‘Nothing,' said Guy. ‘I am doing nothing.'

When he looked up again he saw that she was gone. A cheese and tomato sandwich had appeared on a paper plate beside him. He ate it and then did some paperwork.

Guy was aware that everybody felt sorry for him. He might as well have had his own pathetic obituary printed in the university magazine. Now he might as well be wearing a sandwich board saying, ‘Yes, I am he.' He might as well have a set of horns attached to his head.

He carried on going in to work when he could, but he kept his head down. He avoided gazes. People came and told him how sorry they were … if there was anything they could do … help with Felix … anything at all. He nodded, dumbly. Colleagues from the Biology department asked if he would like to go out for a drink, or come over for a meal. Sometimes he did, and took Felix with him. They only had to go once to each family.

There were so many things that Susannah hadn't told him. Why hadn't she mentioned that the sandpit lid leaked, and that the sand would become almost instantly green in its stagnant pools of trapped rainwater, that it must be bailed
out regularly with Felix's bucket? She might at least have mentioned, just out of scientific interest, that tiny but many-celled organisms would appear in this water if he neglected his duties for even a week.

She might also have mentioned the tiny flies that would spontaneously generate if one of Felix's flannels was left by the kitchen sink for too long. He decided that flannels were pretty unsavoury things and chucked the lot away. Why had they needed so many anyway? He taught Felix how to wash himself with his paws alone. No flies on us, he thought, ha ha, hollow laughter.

Everything about Susannah had been so pristine, or so he had once thought. He wondered what else he was failing to see.

He made all the mistakes, and forgot all the things that people, and probably Susannah, would have expected him to. He dyed the washing pink and blue and grey. They ran out of everything constantly: cereal, bread, fruit, milk, clean clothes. He was glad that they had no pets. Then one day he remembered Felix's sea monkeys. Oh God. The tank would be a dried-out graveyard or an algae-coated prison by now. He sprinted up the stairs. The sea monkeys were alive and well, perhaps even reaching a demographic crisis. Felix had been looking after them all by himself. He must have been carrying tiny quantities of cooled, boiled water up the stairs, and standing on a chair to keep the tank topped up and feed them. There in a cup from a dollies' tea set was the tiny little algae-scraper-tank-cleaning tool that Susannah had got him mail order. Behind the sea monkeys' tank was the optical screwdriver he had been missing for weeks. He pocketed it and lay down on Felix's bed. What was that crunchiness
under the sheet? He pulled out some minutes of a faculty meeting and three student assignments. Perhaps Felix had drawn on them by mistake and then been too worried to say. Of course he wouldn't have been cross. But no, they were unmarked.

He waited until teatime to talk to Felix about it.

‘Felix, you do know that it is wrong to take things that don't belong to you, don't you?'

‘Yes, Dad.'

‘Well, I found some things in your room, and I wondered how they could have got there.'

‘But Dad, those things weren't stolen out of your bag. They were lost.'

‘Felix! Then you did take them. And what about my little screwdriver?'

‘Lost too.'

‘And is anything else lost?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Felix, if you take something and put it somewhere, then that thing isn't lost, it's taken, stolen.'

‘I wanted them to be lost.'

‘Why did you take them?' Felix started to cry. ‘Oh, come here, have a hug. I'm not cross now.'

‘When things got lost Mummy always found them for us. I thought if some things were lost, she might, she might…'

Guy was crying too now.

‘Felix, I wish it would. But it wouldn't work. She can't come back.'

Just a few weeks later Felix started school, a stumbling start, it seemed to Guy, a terrible parody of what starting school should be like. On the first day Guy waited in the playground to collect Felix, desperately hoping that it had all gone well, that Felix would have been happy and making friends and feeling a part of things. At last Felix appeared, near the back of the line, with his coat trailing on the ground. He looked beyond Guy, stared wildly about the playground, and then burst into tears. Guy knew at once that Felix had been hoping or even expecting that Susannah would be there to meet him.

Several times a week Felix would bring home notes. Often the teachers wrote Guy messages on sticky labels and stuck them to Felix's sweatshirt so that they could not be missed. Perhaps they suspected him of wilfully ignoring the notes.

Clean non-leading water bottle required!

No dinner money! Send in on Mondays for the whole week please!

Plimsoles too small. New ones ASAP!

20p required for biscuit-making!

Small packet of tissues needed for Felix's tray!

Occasionally the notes were complimentary.

Felix made a lovely junk boat today!

‘Well done, Felix. Those Chinese boats are beautiful, aren't they?' Guy said. ‘How did you do the sails?' Felix just looked at him.

And all these exclamation marks! Were they meant to emphasise what was being said, or an attempt to make it appear less bossy?

One day the sticker said,
Please check Felix for little visitors!

What the hell did that mean? Guy accosted the nearest playground mummy.

‘He's probably got nits!'

Oh hell.

But it turned out that this was an eventuality Susannah had planned for. There was an unopened bottle of special herbal shampoo and an electronic combing device on top of the bathroom cabinet. As he stood there electrocuting the tiny parasites, he begged Felix:

‘Please, Felix, tell me when you need something. Tell me when I am meant to do something I don't know about. Just ask! Please! I won't be cross. If they say you have to have something, just tell me. I'll do it. I promise to do it.'

Felix was silent. They both listened to the buzzes of the nit-nuker.

‘Isn't it a bit cruel, Dad?'

‘We have to do it.'

‘If I've got them, you might too.'

‘Were you listening to me just now, Felix?'

‘Yes, Dad.'

‘Say you promise to tell me, and to ask when you need things.'

‘OK. I promise.'

‘Thanks.' Guy kissed him on the shoulder.

‘Well, can you cut my toenails? They keep breaking and hurting. And can we have the video of
Atlantis?'

When Guy sat there late at night, looking and looking at the photos, searching, dredging for clues, it seemed there was nothing. What a dolt he was. A bloody dolt, his dad would have said. And too bloody lazy to have taken many photos. They were nearly all of Felix and himself in locations, and of the locations themselves.

Occasionally he had said, ‘Here let me take one of you.' Sometimes he'd remembered, but usually Susannah had had to ask him to take one of her. The only photos he had taken on his own initiative had been of trees and plants. And these he had kept separately in his own private, selfish little albums. What on earth had he been thinking of? That was how he had recorded holidays and outings. The names, pictures, habitats and exact locations of plants. And he hadn't even needed to write any of it down. He would have been able to recall it all perfectly anyway. He still had all of these notebooks; hateful, self-indulgent little notebooks with waterproof covers.

Back then, Susannah had laughed at him.

‘You are a gatherer, I think, not a hunter.' How he had loved it when her speech had halted slightly, a sign that she was thinking in another language. ‘Your ancestors must
have been the magic herb-finders. Mine too, I expect.' Yes, he thought, her dad was interested in plant chemistry, her brother was a botanist, and her mother had been a botanical illustrator. She must have loved botanists, and thought that they were normal.

There had been a brief time when he had done his fair share of the photography. The albums changed and multiplied suddenly when Felix was born, as though when Felix arrived time had slowed down. From a few films a year there were suddenly dozens. He had taken the ‘mother and baby in the hospital' shots, and those of the very first days, and of when Felix met the few relatives they could muster.

But Susannah had resumed her role as family photographer soon after the ‘first trip out' pictures. First piece of toast, first tooth, first crawl, first steps, first birthday, and so on, and so on. The photographer had been Susannah. Yet another failing on his part. The photos stopped suddenly. And so, Guy realised, had the holidays and the parties and the trips.

Perhaps Felix was old enough for a camera of his own. Felix would love that. Or, Guy wondered, was he just so lazy that he wanted his son to take all the photos of his own childhood?

Guy loved it now if some celebrity admitted to bad times.

‘And tell me,' the interviewer always asked, with a drop in tone to the ultra-empathetic, ‘were there ever times when you considered suicide?'

‘Well, once or twice, in my very darkest hours …' was the invariable reply.

‘Ha!' thought Guy. ‘Once or twice! Once or twice a bloody minute, more like.'

But of course he couldn't. There was Felix.

One night, up late, drinking too many cans of beer again, unable to sleep for tiredness, he watched
Once Upon a Time in America.
There was Robert De Niro, all goodness spent, all alone, lying for days on end on a bed, smoking opium, completely lost and oblivious to the world. That's what I want, thought Guy, a holiday in an opium den, complete oblivion. He fell asleep on the sofa and woke up at 4 a.m., freezing and with a crick in his neck. He shuffled up the stairs, and stood for a while watching Felix breathe. The sky was turning grey. He thought he might just go outside and do a bit of gardening. The realisation that he would look like someone digging a secret grave almost made him smile. He went to bed instead. The next morning he was up again at the usual time, showered, shaved, dressed in the usual clothes, making Felix the usual breakfast. What else could he do?