Human Croquet (9 page)
‘It’s beautiful,’ I say, fingering its snowy falls. ‘A shawl, for my sister’s first grandchild,’ Mrs Baxter says. ‘You remember, Rhona in South Africa.’ Mrs Baxter always looks sad when babies are mentioned, perhaps because she’s lost several babies herself. ‘Never mind,’ I try to comfort her, ‘you’ll be a grandmother one day, I expect,’ and Audrey, who’s standing at the cooker making unseasonable convalescent hot chocolate, accidentally knocks over the milk pan, sending it crashing to the floor.
caw-caw-caw
. Maybe they’re afraid of being transformed into something else if they don’t get back to the tree in time, before the sun dips below the horizon that saucers blackly beyond the tree. Perhaps they’re frightened of shifting into human shape.
What’s it like to be a
caw-cawing
crepuscular rook ripping through the sables of night? A black bird flying high over the chimney-pots and blue-slate roofs of the streets of trees? The last rook, a straggler, dips its wing in salute as it flies overhead. What do we look like from the air? A bird’s-eye view? Pretty insignificant, I expect.
‘Shape-shifting,’ Charles says dreamily, ‘that would be interesting, wouldn’t it?’
‘Shape-shifting?’
‘Into an animal or a bird or something?’
‘What would you like to be, Charles?’
Charles, still wretched at having lost the shoe, shrugs his shoulders indifferently and says, ‘A dog, maybe,’ and then adds hastily, ‘a proper dog,’ as he catches sight of Gigi squatting indecorously in the middle of the lawn.
‘Maybe people can shape-shift into replicas of themselves,’ Charles says after a pause, ‘and that’s how you get
doppelgängers?’
‘Oh, do shut up, Charles, you’re giving me a headache,’ I say irritably. Sometimes Charles’ ideas are just too complicated to bear thinking about.
‘Do you think the aliens are already here?’ he carries on relentlessly.
‘Here?’ (On the streets of trees? For heaven’s sake!)
‘Living on the earth. Among us.’
Wouldn’t we have noticed? Perhaps not. ‘What do they look like – little green people?’
‘No – just like us.’
Just because you feel alienated, I explain to Charles, it doesn’t mean you’re actually an
alien
, but he turns his face away, disappointed in me.
It’s quite dark by now, the moon pale and distant, a white coin flipped up into a sky the colour of washable ink. The stars are all out, sending their indecipherable messages. Starlight, starbright. Debbie comes out into the garden and asks us what on earth we are doing out here in the dark and Charles says, ‘Starbathing.’ Really, the sooner he can hitch a ride back to his own planet the better.
prut-prut-prut
as they snore their way to oblivion. The other occupants of Arden sleep less soundly. I can hear Charles’ restless dreams – silver-suited spacemen wading through the nothingness of space and riveted tin rockets landing in the dusty craters of the moon, like something imagined by Méliès. Vinny’s dreams are less audible, the noise of unoiled hinges, and Gordon isn’t dreaming at all, but Debbie’s baby dreams echo emptily around the house – fluffy, pink marshmallow dreams of stuffed rabbits and ducks, romper suits and pudgy putti bodies.
‘Where’s Charles?’ Gordon asks, as he passes me on the stairs. ‘He seems to have disappeared.’ He’s incongruously cheerful for having just made such a statement.
‘There’s somebody at the back door,’ Vinny says to me when I sit down. She leans forward and gives the fire a vicious poke. She’s probably imagining sticking the poker into Mr Rice’s head. Mr Rice has gone a-wooing and Vinny, who has got it in her head that there’s some kind of ‘understanding’ between her and Mr Rice, is very, very annoyed. This understanding – or, more properly, misunderstanding – has arisen from a casual compliment from Mr Rice to the effect that Vinny would ‘make someone a wonderful wife’. He might have meant the bride of Frankenstein’s monster but he certainly didn’t mean himself.
‘There’s someone at the back door,’ the bride of Frankenstein’s monster repeats irritably.
‘I didn’t hear anyone.’
‘That doesn’t mean there isn’t somebody there.’
Reluctantly, I go and investigate. There
is
a strange scratching noise coming from the back door and when I open it, a hopeful whine directs my eyes downward to a large dog which is lying Sphinx-like on the threshold. As soon as I make eye contact with it, it leaps up and launches into its canine routine – head cocked to one side in a winning way, one paw raised in greeting.
It’s a big ugly dog with fur the colour of a dirty beach. A dog of uncertain genetic origin, a touch of terrier, an ancient whisper of wolfhound, but more than anything it looks like an outsize version of the Tramp in
The Lady and the Tramp
. It has no collar, no name tag. It’s the essence of all dog. It is Dog.
It keeps waving its huge heavy paw around in a determined effort to introduce itself so I bend down and take the proffered paw and look into its chocolate-brown eyes. There’s something in its expression … the clumsy paws … the big ears … the bad haircut …
‘Charles?’ I whisper experimentally and the dog cocks one of its floppy ears and thumps its tail enthusiastically.
I suppose a better sister would have set about weaving him a shirt from nettles and throwing it over his furred-over body so that he could be released from his enchantment and resume his human form. I give him some cat food instead. He’s absurdly grateful.
‘Look,’ I say to Gordon when he comes into the kitchen.
‘Have you seen Debs anywhere?’ he asks, scratching his head like Stan Laurel.
‘No, but look – a dog, a poor, lost, homeless, hungry, lonely dog. Can we keep it?’ and Gordon, who looks as if he might have been playing the game of Lost Identity from
The Home Entertainer
says vaguely, ‘Mm, if you like.’
Of course, I know the Dog isn’t really Charles under an enchantment and anyway he comes back from wherever he’s been in time to drink Horlicks with Gordon. Neither Vinny nor Debbie are speaking to Gordon having simultaneously discovered the usurper dog finishing off the remains of supper in the kitchen. It will eat anything, it transpires, even Debbie’s cooking.
crack!
(I imagine it’s Richard Primrose’s head.) Life at the level of the minutiae is fairly teeming in Arden – the fleas, the dust, the tiny fruit flies. And the invisible world, of course, is even more crowded than the visible one.
‘Vitamins!’ Vinny says. ‘Who needs them?’ ‘Everyone?’ I murmur. ‘Molecules!’ Charles says. ‘Who understands them?’ ‘Scientists?’ I venture. (Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t important.)
Vinny is so scrawny, and probably cold-blooded, that no flea ever bothers biting her. Debbie, however – plump, warm-blooded and fine-skinned – is a banquet for them, a moveable feast.
Debbie blames the Cats (there’s a musical waiting to be made), always a source of contention between the warring mistresses of Arden
(A
Word about the Cats:
There were no cats in Arden until the arrival of Vinny. Vinny used to have her own house, a dingy little terrace on Willow Road, but when our parents disappeared so thoughtlessly she had to give it up and come and live with us. She’s never forgiven us. She brought the First Cat with her, the begetter of the Arden dynasty – Grimalkin, a bloodthirsty, belligerent grey female from whom we have bred many a fat fireside companion.)
Debbie is not the only person who dislikes the Cats. Mr Rice is not above administering the odd kick catwards when he thinks no-one is looking, unaware apparently that Vinny has radar in her ears and eyes on revolving stalks.
Sensing her unpopularity
à la
lodger, Elemanzer, Grimalkin’s youngest and fiercest daughter, goes out of her way to annoy him, sleeping on his pillows when he’s out and lying in wait on the stairs to trip him and even going to the length of getting pregnant and delivering her litter in Mr Rice’s sock drawer.
For days after, we are entertained by the idea of Mr Rice delving into his drawer in the bleary light of dawn, expecting to come out with a blue and grey Argyle and screaming in horror as he discovered his socks have come to life – wriggling, damp and furry, in their little nest. And one very, very large, silver-grey tabby sock sinking its angry maternal teeth into his hand.
By the time summer comes one of those mewling socks, a handsome young kitten called Vinegar Tom, has gone missing and Vinny has become obsessed with the idea that Mr Rice had somehow had a hand in this disappearance.
Debbie and I are agreed on one thing (and one thing only); we loathe Mr Rice. We loathe the way he eats with his mouth half-open and the way he grinds his teeth when he’s finished eating. We loathe the way he whistles tunelessly through those teeth when they aren’t eating or grinding. We particularly loathe the way, at night, those same teeth grin out at us from a glass on the bathroom shelf.
I’m repelled at having to share a bathroom with him, not just because of the teeth but for the overwhelming smells he leaves behind – of shaving-foam and Brylcreem and the unmistakable (but not to be dwelt on) smell of male excrement. Once or twice I’ve encountered him coming out of the bathroom in the morning, with his dressing-gown hanging open and something slack, like a pale fungus, flopping out from its lair. ‘Oops,’ Mr Rice says with a leering grin.
‘Death of a Salesman,’
I fantasize grimly to Charles.
‘Men,’ Vinny mutters with feeling. (Vinny was herself once married, but only briefly.) It seems men fall into one of several categories – there are the weak fathers, the ugly brothers, the evil villains, the heroic woodcutters and, of course, the handsome princes – none of which seems entirely satisfactory somehow.
is
the marketplace, that much is clear – the market-cross stands where it always does, in the middle of the square and Ye Olde Sunne Inne is there on the other side, no words announcing its name any more, just the sign of the sun on a wooden board – not the present one, a garish yellow thing, but a muted, old-gold kind of sun. I expect it’s not called Ye Olde Sunne Inne any more either, just the Sun Inn probably, because we’re obviously back in the days when it was new, as it’s just a hovel of its former self. Indeed, we seem to be back in Ye Olde Glebelands if the evidence of my eyes is to be believed.
Wooden carts barrel across the cobblestones, fish-wives in sixteenth-century fustian are yelling their wares. A couple of dandies in velvet preen themselves on the street corner and when I approach them I catch a smell of something rank and unwashed. Will they look at me and scream? Can they see me? Can they hear me?
When I was in a time warp last time (not often we get to say things like that, thank goodness) the man I met in the field seemed to be able to communicate very well indeed, but this pair stare right through me and no matter how much I shout and jump up and down it seems I am invisible. Of course, if the laws of physics have been overturned there’s no reason for things to remain constant from one experience to the next. Chaos could break out at any moment. Probably has.
I push open the door of The Sun, or Ye Sunne, I may as well see what it used to be like. This is, after all, the underage haunt of Carmen and myself (how confused my tenses feel), we have spent many a shadowy hour lurking in the Snug when we should have been in science class. If only I had paid more attention in Physics instead of dropping it for German. The front door in 1960 is a bright shiny red one, but in this unknown year of Our Lord it is a two-part wooden stable affair. Perhaps I should introduce myself with ‘I come from the future’?
Maybe this is my own form of the moon illusion, maybe I’ve got the wrong set of references and am misinterpreting the phenomenal world?
There are only a couple of people inside, looking like extras from
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex
, only a lot scruffier than is usual in Hollywood. They’re all staring gloomily into their pewter tankards as if they don’t know the Renaissance has ever happened.
In the shadows, in the corner of a high oak booth, there’s a man with his eyes closed, he’s quite young, in his twenties somewhere, and there’s an odd familiar feel to him as if I’ve met him in the present – or what was the present in my immediate past but is now the future, if I ever go back there. Dearie, dearie me.
The man opens his eyes and looks at me. Not
through
me, like everyone else, but
at
me and he gives me a smile, sort of lop-sided and cynical, a smile of recognition, and he raises his tankard to me and I have an overwhelming desire to go over and talk to him because I think he knows me, not the everyday, exterior me, but the interior Isobel. The real me. The true self. But just as I take my first step towards him everything vanishes, just like before.
It isn’t opening time yet and Ye Olde Sunne Inne seems to be deserted. It’s definitely the present again – beer mats and beer towels and pineapple-shaped ice-buckets. I leave the Snug and wander through the Lounge and the Public Bar and finally find the back door of the kitchens open. I come down a passage full of dustbins and open a door and find myself on the market square again and see Eunice coming out of Green Man’s Ginnel looking puzzled and I hail her from the other side of the square.
‘Where did you go?’ she asks crossly when she’s negotiated the traffic. ‘Gephyrophobia,’ she says unexpectedly.
‘Pardon?’
‘Gephyrophobia – fear of bridges.’
‘Right,’ I say vaguely.
‘Dromophobia – fear of crossing the street? Potamophobia – fear of rivers? Perhaps,’ Eunice says airily, ‘some deep-seated terror in your past is coming back to revisit you.’
What is she going on about? ‘What are you going on about, Eunice?’
‘You can have a phobia about anything, fire for example – pyrophobia – or insects – acaraphobia – or the sea – thalassophobia.’
Eunicephobia, that’s what I have. I walk quickly across the road and jump on a bus without looking at the number of it and leave Eunice weaving in between cars, trying to follow me. I personally, for no discernible reason, have discovered a rip in the fabric of time, free-falling through its wormholes and snickets as easily as opening a door.
Are there other people who are dropping in and out of the past and not bothering to mention it in everyday conversation (as you wouldn’t)? But let’s face it, if it comes right down to it, which is more likely – a disruption in the space-time continuum or some form of madness?