Aphrodite's Hat (12 page)

‘No,' Alice's mother Rosemary Armitage said, more sternly than she had perhaps intended. ‘You can't have a cat. I'm sorry, but you know why. Daddy is allergic.'

‘Oh
please
.'

‘Love, we've been through this.'

Alice sighed. She was six years old and an only child.

‘
Please
,
please,
' she said again, knowing no other way but emphasis to convey her extreme need. ‘I'll keep her in the shed so Daddy won't sneeze.'

‘You can't keep a cat in the shed, love. A guinea pig or a rabbit, maybe.'

But Alice didn't want a guinea pig. She wanted a marmalade cat with a white bib. A girl cat.

‘Girl marmalades are very rare, sweetheart,' her father said.

His wife stared at him and baffled he returned the look. What had he said now, for God's sake?

Later, when she had got him into the kitchen his wife explained. ‘George, if we don't want her to have a cat suggesting that females are hard to come by simply gives out a message that if we do find one she can have it.'

Her husband shook his head, confounded by this – perfectly sensible, if only he would think straight, Rosemary irritably said – piece of feminine reasoning.

The remark, as her mother feared, had sunk in. Alice, sitting before the TV watching her DVD of
The Sleeping Beauty
, determined that she would find a girl marmalade kitten herself. ‘To hell with them!' she thought. She had heard this expression used by Mr Job, who had an allotment next to her mother's, and had been storing it up since for use at a suitable moment.

Rosemary Armitage was pleasantly surprised that her daughter had agreed so readily to accompany her to the allotment the following Sunday. As a rule, this took much cajoling if not outright bribery. Alice didn't like the muddy earth which got on her shoes or boots. It was not her opinion that boots were for getting dirty, whatever her mother said. And most decidedly she was not, as Rosemary Armitage was, ‘into' vegetables. And yet she was quite agreeable when her mother, summoning her patience for a fight, suggested that they go to dig the allotment.

Alice had a plan. She intended to sound out Mr Job and if possible recruit him in the cause of the marmalade kitten. He had shown an admirable sense of equality towards her over his use of language and general demeanour, which was that of a large and sympathetic, if slightly unpredictable, child. And luck was on her side. As they arrived at the allotment, they met Mr Job carrying a large, leaking metal watering can.

‘Turning out a nice evening again, Mrs Hermitage.' Mr Job was a little deaf. Or maybe it was that he was a little mischievous. In any case he never quite seemed to manage Rosemary Armitage's name. ‘Hello, Alice.' He had no trouble with hers. ‘Going to pick those runner beans?'

Alice had no thoughts of helping with the beans. She made a half-hearted attempt at collecting a few of the lower ones and then sidled over to Mr Job, who was picking off the tops of his tomatoes. ‘See the little ‘uns here? We have to squeeze them off so these others below grow nice and fat. Want one?'

Alice, who drove her mother to distraction by dismissing tomatoes along with most other vegetables as ‘yukky', sank her teeth into a large firm yellow-and-red-skinned tomato and pronounced it ‘delicious'. This not entirely truthful response was made in the service of the marmalade kitten. Alice had not yet heard of the French Protestant king who felt that Paris was worth a Mass but she shared his essential pragmatism.

‘They've come on grand, that strain of toms this summer,' Mr Job said, collegiately. His tone and manner decided Alice.

‘Mr Job,' she said, discreetly wiping some stray tomato pips from the sleeve of her pink-glitter mermaid T-shirt. ‘I need a marmalade kitten. A girl kitten,' she added with emphasis, lest there be any mistake.

‘A girl ginger? They're not so thick on the ground.'

‘I just need one,' Alice said, with perfect simplicity.

‘Your mum say you can have it?' Mr Job was not unshrewd. For all that he liked to tease Rosemary over her name, he had nothing against her. And he had heard the arguments with Alice over the kitten.

Alice made a split-second decision and set off across the causeway which we must all pass over and which, once crossed, permits no return. ‘She says I can keep it in the shed.'

‘Oh well. Guess it won't know the difference. Tell you what. I'll get you a kitten for a bottle of Newcastle Brown. That's my poison. Is that a deal?'

‘It's a deal,' Alice said, pleased with her newfound powers of negotiation.

Alice was preoccupied on their way home. She answered her mother abstractedly, in a manner which made Rosemary Armitage inwardly pray that the child was not going to take after her father. That night after her bath Alice asked, casually, ‘What is Newscastle Brown?'

‘Newcastle,' her father corrected, just as her mother asked, ‘Why do you need to know that?'

‘It was on TV,' Alice said.

‘It's a kind of beer, love,' her mother said. ‘Not a very nice one.'

‘Do you have some?'

‘Why?' asked her mother again, as her father was saying, ‘No we don't. Revolting stuff.'

‘They said on TV you could use the bottle to make a model,' Alice said, thereby answering her mother and taking a further stride away from the paradise of unquestioning childhood truthfulness.

‘That's life,' she said later to her doll, Fancy Pansy. This was another expression she had been saving up. ‘People believe in stupid models from TV more than in kittens.'

Rosemary was delighted at the way Alice had become so devoted to the allotment. Not that she ever did much when they got there, but, as Rosemary explained to George, the fresh air did her good and it couldn't be bad for her faddiness to be among vegetables. Much of Alice's time at the allotments, it was true, seemed to be spent with Mr Job. But he was a harmless old man, if rather deaf, though oddly he seemed to have no trouble hearing Alice. It was probably a matter of the pitch of the voice and it was nice to see their child befriending an old man.

‘What if I can't get Newscastle Brown?' Alice was enquiring of Mr Job as her mother was enjoying these reassuring thoughts.

‘Then no deal,' Mr Job said. ‘No wriggling. Fair's fair.'

This posed a problem. Grown ups drank beer so it was especially annoying of her parents that they did not drink Mr Job's poison.

‘Why is it called “poison”?' she had asked on one of the allotment visits. ‘Poison's what kills people.' She knew this for sure from
The Sleeping Beauty
.

‘Kind of joke,' Mr Job said briefly. He was tying up his tomatoes. ‘Mind, plenty I've known's killed themselves with drink. Not Newcastle Brown, though. That is the elixir of life.'

Alice was relieved to hear this. She was fond of Mr Job, even without his kitten-providing facilities, and did not want to be the cause of his death. She had been considering at length where she might go to find a bottle of this fabulous elixir that was so precious it was the price of a marmalade kitten. Maybe, it crossed her mind, it was just too expensive for her parents.

After some mulling, Alice settled on her father's younger brother, Steve, as the most likely source of Mr Job's poison. They were due to visit Steve in London, where he lived in a flat which was exactly the kind of place Alice was going to live in when she was older. It was extremely tidy and the toilet seat was a special see-through plastic, with shells and starfish stuck around inside, and the carpet in the bathroom had little green fishes swimming all over it and seaweed. They just had tiles on the floor at her house, which were freezing on your feet if you got out of the bath and missed the bath mat, and Daddy said that he didn't want to sit on a toilet seat with crabs in it, they might pinch his bottom, which was extremely silly of him as there were no crabs and anyway you could see they weren't live.

Uncle Steve lived with his girlfriend, Lulu, who was a dancer and standing up could put her leg behind her ear. Lulu wore perfect clothes and let Alice dress up in them and use her makeup. And best of all on these visits, she was usually left with Steve and Lulu to babysit while her parents went out for some time alone. So the chances of finding Newscastle Brown were fairly high.

‘Don't worry, Mummy, I'll be fine,' Alice said. She knew her mother needed reassurance and it was easy to give since she wanted her out of the way.

‘Of course she will,' her father said. ‘Come on or we'll miss the start of the film. Night, sweetheart. Don't give your uncle and aunty a hard time.'

‘She's not my aunty,' Alice said. On another occasion, she might have added, ‘They are not married,' as this was a controversial point between her and Steve for which she had more than once had to take him to task. But for the sake of the quest for Mr Job's poison she was prepared to be indulgent.

Alice had a bath with plenty of Lulu's ‘Pink Champagne' bath foam. She dried the suds from her pink limbs inside Lulu's pink towelling dressing gown and wore Lulu's mauve and silver high-heeled mules. Then she went and wedged herself between Steve and Lulu – to stop any silly stuff – on the sofa and watched her favourite London DVD which was
Bambi
. Lulu liked
Bambi
too because it made her cry.

After it was over, Steve said, ‘Well, monkey, bed for you, I suppose.'

‘Steve, do you have Newscastle Brown in your house?'

‘What castle?'

‘I
said,
Newscastle Brown.'

‘That's a kind of beer. What do you want with beer, monkey?'

‘Oh, this sand that,' Alice said. This phrase had also been awaiting use.

‘I don't have any, I'm afraid. Now bed for you, or I'll be in trouble with your mum and dad.'

‘They won't know,' Alice said. ‘They're out and I shan't tell.'

‘What you want my tipple for, pet?' Lulu asked. She was from Newcastle herself.

‘It's Mr Job's poison,' Alice explained. ‘And if I get him a bottle he'll get me a marmalade kitten. It's a deal.' It was a perfectly clear arrangement. She looked at her uncle and Lulu with eyes ready to pass an unfavourable judgement.

Luckily, her uncle was a rational sort. ‘I don't have any in, as it happens,' he apologised. ‘But if it's a deal, I daresay some could be found.'

‘Good,' Alice said. ‘I knew I could rely on you.'

Having found a use for almost all her new phrases, she went off to bed, quite contentedly, in Lulu's mules.

Getting the bottle of Newscastle Brown home was tricky but Alice managed it by wrapping it in her Dora Explorer vest and sticking it at the very bottom of her Hello Kitty backpack. Now all she had to do was be sure to unpack her backpack herself and then get the bottle to Mr Job. The first task was easy enough, since her mother was keen on her doing things for herself. The second took some planning but, as heroes often find, she was helped along by fortune.

‘Alice, love, would you mind carrying the bag with the new trowel in it? I've got to carry these steps for the beans,' her mother said when the following weekend they were preparing to go to the allotment.

‘Yes, Mummy,' Alice said. ‘I am glad to help.'

Her father shot her a glance. ‘You all right, sweetheart?'

‘Yes, Daddy,' Alice said. ‘I am very well, thank you.'

She sped upstairs, removed the bottle from deep in her toy box and slipped it into the bag with the trowel.

Mr Job had apparently been waiting for her. ‘I got the kitten,' he said, sounding for him almost excited. ‘Ginger girl, like you ordered. Be six weeks old, near enough. So in another two she'll be yours.'

‘And I,' said Alice, ‘have got you your Newscastle Brown.' With a proud flourish, she presented him with the bottle wrapped in an old copy of
Princess
magazine.

‘Lordy,' said Mr Job. ‘I never meant you to take me seriously. How'd you get your hands on this?'

‘We had a deal,' Alice said, primly. ‘You said “no wriggling”.' She looked reproachfully at Mr Job.

‘You know what, you're a princess, you are.'

‘I am going to be,' Alice agreed. ‘But I have to marry a handsome prince first.'

The next step was breaking the news at home.

‘Daddy,' she said, when her mother was out at a neighbourhood meeting. ‘You know how it is very,
very
hard to find a girl marmalade kitten.'

‘What?' said her father, who was watching the news, which was far from reassuring.

‘A girl marmalade. You said it was very,
very
hard to find one.'

‘‘Fraid so, old girl,' said her father, absentmindedly using for his daughter the title with which he habitually annoyed his wife.

‘Well, I have been very clever and found one.'

‘Well done, old girl,' said her father, with his mind on the spiralling inflation.

‘So I can have her, then?'

‘I expect so. You'll have to ask your mother.'

Alice sighed. So near and yet so far.

She postponed tackling her mother till they were back at the allotment, perhaps because the presence of her ally Mr Job provided moral support. He grinned at them when they arrived, which for him was most unusual. Rosemary Armitage hoped that it wasn't that he was drunk.

‘Evening, ladies.'

‘Good evening, Mr Job. Say good evening to Mr Job, Alice.'

Alice went over to kiss Mr Job. ‘Mr Job's my friend,' she announced. ‘Mr Job has –' here she had to dig a little into her courage ‘– found me a marmalade kitten. A girl kitten. Like I wanted.' She risked a bright smile at her mother.

Rosemary Armitage's naturally anxious forehead wrinkled some more.

‘Alice, love, we've had this conversation. I'm so sorry, Mr Job, but you see my husband is allergic. Alice doesn't really …'