Human Croquet (4 page)

‘I think she was very tall,’ Charles says, forgetting perhaps how very small he was last time we saw her. ‘Are you sure she wasn’t red-headed?’ he adds hopefully.

‘Nobody was red-headed,’ Vinny says decisively.

‘Somebody must have been.’

If my mother was going to come back wouldn’t she come back in time (as it were) for my sixteenth birthday?

It’s as if Eliza never lived, there are no remnants of her life – no photographs, no letters, no keepsakes – the things that anchor people in reality are all missing. Memories of her are like the shadows of a dream, tantalizing and out of reach. With Gordon, ‘our dad’, the one person whom you might expect to remember Eliza best, there’s no conversation to be had at all, the subject makes him mute.

‘She must have been off her head (or ‘aff her heid’) to leave two such bonny children,’ Mrs Baxter opines gently. (All children are bonny to Mrs Baxter.) Vinny verifies, frequently, that our mother was indeed ‘off her head’. As opposed to ‘on her head’? But then if she was on her head she would be upside down – and therefore also mad, surely? Perhaps ‘off her head’ as in no longer being attached to her head? Perhaps she is dead and wandering around on the astral plane with her head tucked underneath her arm like a music-hall ghost, exchanging pleasantries with the Green Lady.

If only we had some maternal souvenirs, some evidence to prove she once existed – a scrap of her handwriting, say. How we would pore over the dullest, most prosaic of messages –
See you at lunchtime!
or
Don’t forget to buy bread
– trying to decipher her personality, her overwhelming love for her children, searching for the cryptically encoded message that would explain why she had to leave. But she’s left behind not a single letter of the alphabet for us from which we can reconstruct her and we have to make her up from emptiness and airy spaces and wind on water.

‘She wasn’t a saint, your mum, you know,’ Debbie says, reducing Eliza to her own pedestrian vocabulary. Eliza (or, at any rate, the
idea
of Eliza), isn’t a cosy person, ‘our mum’. Invisible, she has grown sublime – the Virgin Mary and the Queen of Sheba, the queen of heaven and the queen of night in one person, the sovereign of our unseen, imaginary universe (home). ‘Well not from what your dad says,’ Debbie says smugly. But what does ‘our dad’ say? Nothing to us, that’s for sure.

Who is Debbie? She is the fat, wan substitute that four years ago ‘our dad’ chose to replace ‘our mum’ with. In his seven-year voyage on the waters of Lethe (the north island of New Zealand actually), Gordon forgot all about Eliza (not to mention us) and came back with a different wife altogether. The Debbie-wife with brown permed curls, little piggy eyelashes and stubby fingers that end in bitten-off nails. The doll wife, with her round face and eyes the colour of dirty dishwater and a voice that contains flat Essex marshes washed with a slight antipodean whine. The child wife, only a handful of years older than us. Snatched from her cradle by Gordon, according to Vinny, Vinny who is the Debbie-wife’s arch-enemy. ‘Think of me as your big sister,’ Debbie said when she first arrived. She’s changed her tune now, I think she would rather not be related to us at all.

How could Gordon have forgotten his own children? His own wife? In his lost years at the bottom of the world did he hear Abenazaar’s wicked invitation (‘New wives for old!’) and trade in our mother for the Debbie-wife? Perhaps even now the treasure that was Eliza (greater than a king’s ransom) is trapped in some dismal cave somewhere waiting for us to find her and release her.

It is hard to know what tales Gordon might have spun Debbie in the downunderworld but he didn’t seem to have prepared her very well for the reality of his life back home. ‘So these are your kiddies, Gordon?’ she said with an air of incredulity when Gordon introduced her to us. She was probably expecting two charming little moppets, delighted to be relieved of their motherless state. Gordon didn’t seem to realize that in the seven intervening years we’d become underground children, living in a dark place where the sun never shone.

Heaven only knows what she was expecting of Arden – Manderley, a nice suburban semi perhaps, maybe even a small castle where the air was sweet – but surely not this desolate mock-Tudor museum. And as for Vinny – ‘Hello, Auntie V,’ Debbie said, sticking out her hand and grabbing Vinny’s claw, ‘it’s so lovely to meet you at last,’ so that ‘Auntie V’s’ face nearly cracked. ‘Auntie V? Auntie V?’ we heard her muttering later, ‘I’m nobody’s bloody auntie,’ obviously forgetting that actually she was
our
bloody auntie.

‘I’m just marking time at Temple’s,’ Charles says, in explanation of his remarkably dull outer life. (Ah, but what does he give it? B−? C+? He should be careful, one day time might mark him. ‘Och, without doubt,’ Mrs Baxter says, ‘that’s the final reckoning.’)

Charles also has his hobbies to occupy him – nothing so normal as stamp-collecting or bird-watching, the kind of pursuits that fulfil other suburban youth – but an obsession with the mysteries of the unexplained world – with aliens and flying saucers, with vanished civilizations and parallel worlds and time travel. He’s preoccupied with life in other dimensions, yearning for the existence of a world other than this one. Perhaps because his life in this one is so unsatisfactory. ‘They’re out there somewhere,’ he says, gazing longingly at the night sky. (‘If they’ve got any sense they’ll stay there,’ snorts Vinny.)

Mysterious disappearances are his speciality – he documents them obsessively in lined notebooks, page after page, in his babyish round hand, cataloguing the vanished – from ships and lighthouse keepers, to whole colonies of New World Puritans. ‘Roanoke,’ he says, his eyes lighting up with excitement, ‘a whole colony of Puritans in America disappeared in 1587, including the first white child ever born in America.’

‘Yeah, well that would be because the Red Indians killed them all, wouldn’t it?’ Carmen (McDade, my friend) says, leafing through one of his notebooks – Carmen has no notion that private and property can coexist in the same sentence.

Charles is looking for a pattern. The vast numbers of ships – the boats found crewless on the high seas and the Mississippi riverboats that have sailed off into nothingness – are not accountable to the perils of the sea but to alien kidnappings. The tendency (‘Well, two anyway,’ he admits reluctantly) of boys called Oliver to vanish on their way to the well for water, the number of farmers in the southern states of America observed disappearing in the act of crossing a field – the writer Ambrose Bierce who wrote an essay on one such disappearance entitled, ‘The Difficulty of Crossing a Field’ (‘and then
disappeared himself
, Izzie!’) – are all part of some vast otherworld conspiracy.

The category that excites him most, unsurprisingly given our own parents’ tendency to disappear, are the individuals – the society girl out for a downtown stroll, the man on the road from Leamington Spa to Coventry – people who were going about their ordinary lives when they vanished into thin air.

‘Benjamin Bathurst, Orion Williamson, Dorothy Arnold, James Worson’ – a curious litany of human erasures – ‘just like that!’ Charles says, snapping his fingers like a bad conjuror, one red, red eyebrow cocked in the cartoon position of surprise (whether relevant or not) that he favours for most conversations. People plucked from their lives as if by an invisible hand, ‘Dematerialization, Izzie – it could happen to anyone,’ he says eagerly, ‘at any moment.’ Hardly a comforting thought. ‘Your brother’s a nut-cake,’ Carmen says, sucking a mis-shapen mint so hard that it looks as if her cheeks have just imploded, ‘he should see a trick-cyclist.’

But the real question, surely, is – where do the people who vanish into thin air go? Do they all go to the same place? ‘Thin air’ must surely be a misnomer, for the air must be fairly choked with animals, children, people, ships, aeroplanes, Amys and Amelias.

‘What if our mother didn’t run off,’ Charles muses, sitting on the end of my bed now and staring out at the blue square of window-sky. ‘What if she had simply dematerialized?’ I point out to him that ‘simply’ might be the wrong word here, but I know what he means – then she wouldn’t have voluntarily abandoned her own children (us), leaving them to fend for themselves in a cold, cruel world. And so on.

‘Shut up, Charles.’ I put my head under the pillow. But I can still hear him.

‘Aliens,’ he says decisively, ‘these people were all kidnapped by aliens. And our mother too,’ he adds wistfully, ‘that’s what happened to her.’

‘Kidnapped by aliens?’

‘Well why not?’ Charles says stoutly. ‘Anything’s possible.’ But which is the most likely really – a mother kidnapped by aliens or a mother who ran off with a fancy man?

‘Aliens, definitely,’ Charles says.

I sit up and give him a good hard punch in the ribs to shut him up. It’s such a long time ago now (eleven years) but Charles can’t let Eliza go. ‘Go away, Charles.’

‘No, no, no,’ he says, his eyes alight with a kind of madness. ‘I’ve found something.’

‘Found what?’ It’s still only eight o’clock in the morning and Charles is in his pyjamas – maroon-and-white striped flannel that say ‘Age 12’ on the label on the collar, but which he has never outgrown. If the aliens kidnap him will they believe what he tells them or what his label says? He seems to have forgotten that it’s my birthday. ‘It’s my birthday, Charles.’

‘Yeah, yeah, look—’ From his striped breast-pocket he takes something wrapped in a large handkerchief. ‘I found this’, he says in a church-whisper, ‘at the back of a drawer.’

‘The back of a drawer?’ (Not my birthday present then.)

‘In the sideboard, I was looking for Sellotape.’ (For my present, I hope.) ‘Look!’ he urges excitedly.

‘An old powder-compact?’ I ask dubiously.

‘Hers!’
Charles says triumphantly. I don’t need to ask the identity of ‘Her’ – Charles has a particular tone of voice, reverential and mystical, that he uses when speaking about Eliza.

‘You don’t know that.’

‘It says so,’ he says, thrusting it in front of my face. It’s an expensive-looking compact, but old-fashioned – thin and flat, like a heavy gold disc. The lid is a bright blue enamel, inlaid with mother-of-pearl palm trees. The clasp is still springy and snaps open. There’s no powder-puff and the mirror is covered in a thin film of powder and the powder itself – a compacted pale pink – has been worn down in the middle to reveal a circle of silver metal.

‘There’s nothing at all to prove it’s hers,’ I tell him crossly and he snatches it back and turns it over so that an almost invisible shower of powder falls out on to my eiderdown.
‘Look.’

On its golden underside, striated in fine circles, there is an engraving. I hold it up to the square of blue and make out the stilted message: