Fruit and Nutcase (16 page)

Nan said, “It’s the only way. They’ve got to learn. It’s high time they grew up and started to behave like responsible adults.”

But I loved my mum and dad just the way they were! I didn’t want them to be any different. I hated Nan for taking me away from them. I felt that it was my fault. I felt like I’d let them down.
If only I’d tidied up the place before Nan had come! I could have made it look ever so nice. Really spick and span. Then maybe she wouldn’t have got so mad. And I could have told her I wasn’t really on my own, I could have told her old Misery was keeping an eye on me, or that I’d been over to Deirdre’s, or just
anything.
Anything that would have stopped her having a go at Mum.

That first night when I said my special prayer, I added a bit at the end. After “For ever and ever” ten times, but before “Amen”, I added, “And please let me go back to them soon. PLEASE!”

I just couldn’t see how they were going to manage without me to keep an eye on them. I kept having these nightmares that Mum would do something daft and ruin Dad’s tea and Dad would rise up in a rage and say that that was it, he’d had enough. And then he’d walk out and Mum would be on her own and she wouldn’t know what to do, and she’d be so lonely, poor Mum! ‘Cos we’re the only people she’s got in the whole world, me and Dad. And Dad would jump on a ship and go to Australia, which was what he was always threatening to do, and I
wouldn’t ever see him again.

I wasn’t going to see them again for ages and ages, anyway. Nan had said she wanted them both to stay away until they had got themselves sorted. She said, “I want this girl given a fair chance. I don’t want you coming round and upsetting her.”

And Mum and Dad were ever so meek. They just did whatever Nan told them. She’d gone and scared them by saying how old Misery could go to the Social Services. Even Dad’s scared of the Social Services, even if he does call them snooping do-gooders.

That first week at Nan’s I said my prayer over and over, not just when I went to bed but when I woke up in the morning and lots of times in the day, as well. Once I was doing it, with my eyes screwed tight shut, when Nan started to say something to me. But I still went on doing it! Nan got angry and said why didn’t I listen when she spoke to me? She said, “Are you sulking about something?”

I said, “No. I was thinking.” Nan said, “Well, you just stop thinking and pay a bit of attention! It’s very rude to go on thinking when someone’s talking to you.”

I could have told her it was rude to interrupt a person when they had their eyes closed, but you can’t argue with Nan. She always likes to have the last word.

Grandy isn’t so bad, but he is what Mum calls “under Nan’s thumb”.

He just likes to come home at tea-time and light his pipe and have a quiet life. During the day he is on guard in a bank, wearing a uniform and keeping an eye open for armed robbers. It is a great responsibility, guarding all that money, and I think Nan ought to let him rest when he comes in instead of keeping on at him the way she does.

What she mostly keeps on about is
me.
At least, that’s what she kept on about while I was
there. All about my manners and my language and how I hadn’t got any decent clothes and look at my hair, it was just a mess, and “How am I supposed to take her anywhere?”

And Grandy just sat there and grunted, and puffed on his pipe, and you could tell he didn’t really want to be bothered. Or maybe he didn’t think I was quite as bad as Nan made out.

I thought at first I would never survive. I worried all the time about Mum and Dad and how they were managing without me and whether Mum was still crying and whether Dad was flying off the handle. And then at the weekend they telephoned me. I spoke to Mum first. She was still a bit tearful but she also giggled quite a lot as well.

She said, “Guess what? You’ll never guess! We’ve gone back to school! Me and your dad … we’re going to parenting lessons. Learning how to be good parents.”

She said that Cat had called round, and when she’d heard what had happened she’d arranged for Mum and Dad to take these classes.

“They’re ever so good,” said Mum. “I’m really learning how to do things properly.”

And then Dad came on and said, “How about
that, then? Your mum and dad doing lessons! We’ll be different people, Mand, when you come home. You won’t recognise us! We’ll be model parents, we will.”

I told this to Nan and she just sniffed and said, “That’ll be the day.” But then she added that any improvement had to be better than none.

After that, I began to feel a little less despairing and to believe that perhaps Nan really might let me go back home sometime. I still said my prayer with the special bit added, but now I only said it twice a day, once when I woke up and once before I went to sleep. I thought that if Mum and Dad were learning how to be model parents, perhaps I ought to make a bit of an effort to be a model granddaughter so Nan wouldn’t be ashamed of me any more.

So I tried. I really, really tried! But Nan wasn’t in the least bit grateful. Like, for instance, when we went shopping I said to her, “I’d better check your shopping list. Make sure you haven’t forgotten anything.” That’s all I said, just trying to look after her, like I do with Mum. She nearly jumped down my throat!

She said, “What do you mean,
check my shopping list,
you bossy little madam? I’ll check
my own shopping list, thank you very much! I don’t need your assistance. I haven’t gone senile yet, you know.”

Then another time I caught her doing sardines on toast for Grandy’s tea. Sardines on toast! At the end of a hard day’s work, guarding the bank! I knew I had to warn her. I said, “You really ought to give him a proper man’s meal, Nan. They don’t like just having bits of stuff on toast.”

Whew! If I hadn’t have had this really thick skin, her eyes would have bored through me like lasers. I’d have had all holes.

She said, “Are you presuming to tell me how to feed my own husband?”

She really didn’t like me trying to help her, so after that I thought I’d help Grandy, instead. But even he didn’t seem to appreciate it. Like one Saturday we went into town together and he was going to get some paint for doing the inside of the house and he actually bought
three different colours.
He got this goldy colour for the ceilings and green for the windows and white for making little lines round things. He said that Nan had chosen them.

“She likes the place to look nice.”

I was horrified. I said, “But Grandy, it’s ever so much more expensive using all those different colours! It’s really wasteful. You ought to stick to just one. It works out far cheaper. And if you went down the market you might even find a bargain!”

That’s what Dad did last year. He staggered home with simply gallons of paint that nobody wanted on account of it being a strange sort of orangey-browny colour. (A bit like sick, really.) So far he hadn’t actually got around to using it, but he reckoned there was enough there to do the whole place with. And the colour wasn’t actually
too bad. I quite liked it, myself. I thought it was cheerful. Mum agreed. She said it was “eyecatching”. But when I told Grandy about it he just chuckled and said, “Yes, I’ve heard about our Barry’s orange paint. Your Nan would have a fit if I came home with something like that.”

I said, “But think of the money you’d save!”

Grandy said, “Young lady, if your Nan wants her house painted three different colours, I think that’s her business, don’t you?”

You can’t help people if they don’t want to be helped. Another time when we went into town Grandy said he’d just got to nip in and place “a bob or two each way” on a horse. I don’t know what a bob is, whether it’s a lot of money or a little, but I remembered Dad going into the betting shop and spending all Mum’s housekeeping money, and so I grabbed hold of Grandy’s arm and said, “Grandy! No!”

Grandy looked at me in surprise. He said, “No what?” I said, “Don’t go in there, Grandy! You’ll only regret it! You’ll spend all the housekeeping!”

Grandy didn’t freeze me out like Nan had, but he did sound sort of … irritable. He said, “Good heavens, child! I’ve been having a little flutter
once a month ever since I got married. I’m not going to stop now!”

It’s odd that even though Nan and Grandy don’t seem in the least bit worried about money, not really, I mean they don’t fly into a panic when brown envelopes land on the mat and they’ve never once had their telephone cut off, they don’t ever seem to
do
anything. They’ll never suddenly jump up and say, “Let’s have fun!” the way we do at home. They’re like two stodgy dumplings, sitting in a stew.

One day when Nan was wondering what to give Grandy for his tea
–
“And kindly don’t tell me that he needs a man’s meal!”—I said, “P’raps we could go out somewhere.” Nan said, “Out? Out where?” I said, “Anywhere! We could go for an Indian meal.”

Nan shuddered and said, “No, thank you! You won’t catch me eating that muck.” She said that she and Grandy didn’t care for Indian food: “It doesn’t agree with us.”

So then I said, “Chinese?” and Nan said, “Chinese gives me a headache. Besides, you never
know what they put in there.”

“Burgers?” I said. But Nan said burgers weren’t proper food and in any case, what did we want to go out for?

“It’s a sheer waste of money. You can eat far better staying at home.”

I said, “Yes, but it’s not nearly as much fun!”

Nan just snorted and said, “There’s more to life than just having fun. That’s a lesson we all have to learn.”

I didn’t actually say it, ‘cos I knew she’d tell me it was impertinence, but what I actually thought, inside my head, was, “I hope it’s not what Mum and Dad are learning.”

Mum and Dad and me always had fun. No matter what. Even if the house was falling down and we hadn’t got any money and sometimes Mum cried and sometimes Dad yelled, we always, sooner or later, had a kiss and a cuddle and a bit of a laugh.

I think that is what life is all about.

This next chapter is going to be the very last one! It will be Chapter Number Eight, and I think that is enough for anybody. It must be extremely exhausting for Cat’s mum, typing it all out.
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