Man at the Helm (13 page)

I came up with the following plan for rescuing Bufo. I made sure I walked home with Melody on her latchkey day, which was Tuesday when her mother was at
Lecciones Espanioles
, her father was on his way to the Charles Keene College for his advanced accounting class, and Miranda was at sports club. And then I’d ask if I might pop in to see the Sindy fashion house she’d been telling me about.

Although Melody was nice, she had some minor defects. Mainly that at only eleven years old she already had silly adult preoccupations. For instance, she always commented on how much things cost and dabbed herself like mad if she dripped anything down her clothes at lunch. Also, she gossiped constantly about her family, inane things, as if they were of great interest to me. Such as how her father always kept an umbrella on the back seat of the car for use in sudden downpours. As well as more unusual things such as the fact that her mother had to keep her pubic hair trimmed right back to prevent the sensation that insects were creeping up her legs in bed.

A suitable Tuesday came and Melody and I reached Orchard Corner – which was the name of the Longladys’ home, it being on a corner and having assorted fruit trees in the garden – and I asked if I might pop in. And Melody said, ‘Of course.’

It was an added bonus that I got to see Melody in full latchkey mode, a thing I always liked. Approaching the house, she’d look around to check that no one could see her, then fumble down her collar for the front-door key which was on a string
round her neck, hanging under her vest. The string was that bit too short, though, and she’d have to bob down to keyhole height to give herself enough string to work with. I always wondered why she didn’t just take the key-on-a-string off.

‘Wouldn’t it be easier to just take it off?’ I wondered out loud that day.

‘You never
ever
take your door key off,’ she said importantly, ‘it’s the number one rule of having a door key.’

Inside, Melody said she was starving. She tore off her coat and taking something from a wooden dish, placed it on the sideboard and halved it dramatically with a cleaver. In a different story, this might have been a worrying image. It was a pomegranate and, rather than worrying, it was puzzling – a person claiming to be starving, then eating fruit seeds painstakingly with a pin. She pushed the other pomegranate half over to me. I said, ‘No, thanks,’ suspecting it might be more ornamental than edible.

Then she showed me the Sindy fashion house, which was Sindy in a polo neck and shorts and surrounded by more clothes on little home-made mini coat-hangers in a cardboard box. It was pathetic really, but I said how great it was, obviously.

‘The box came with the tiles for the new shower-room,’ she explained.

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘We’re having a shower-room built,’ she said.

And then I heard about Mrs Longlady’s shower unit, which was being installed in what had been a fourth bedroom. Melody tried to tell me the reasons for its installation, but I really needed to get on with finding Bufo before the other Longladys got home.

‘Mum can’t have baths … poor thing,’ said Melody, grimacing.

‘I’d love to see round your house,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you give me a speedy guided tour while we chat.’

So Melody showed me around upstairs and told me the intimate reasons for Mrs Longlady’s incompatibility with baths and the necessity of the shower. I looked as closely as I could without it seeming that I was looking for something. There was no sign of Bufo anywhere. And I’m afraid I left Orchard Corner without him.

I didn’t come away empty-handed, though. I had the knowledge that Mrs Longlady couldn’t take baths due to unwittingly sucking up the bath water and it seeping out again afterwards for the rest of the day and this causing wetness and all sorts. And that she’d tried bathing at night, but it wasn’t much better and she’d needed an incontinence pad in the bed.

At home I told my sister that I’d tried and failed to rescue Bufo, and she’d changed her tune. She said I was making a pointless fuss because our mother had absolutely zero interest in Bufo. I reminded her that Bufo was our mother’s last remaining memory of her beloved father. My sister contradicted me and mentioned the lock of hair.

‘There’s the lock of Grandpa’s hair,’ she said, ‘with the poem in the frame.’

I’d forgotten about the gruesome lock of hair that our mother’s mother had cut from his dead head just after he died and wrapped in a cigarette paper. Our mother had been horrified at the time, but had taken the thing anyway and later at home set it down in a little glass dish. We’d all had a look at it and found it a bit morbid and horrible. Our mother contemplated it with a glass of whisky and inevitably started writing a poem about it, focusing on the way the hair grease had turned the cigarette paper translucent.

The poem was called ‘Murray’s Superior Pomade’ and it mentioned Bufo, now I think about it.

The poem seemed to be saying that his hair was always neat and well behaved. My sister said it was about a spaniel dog, not his hair. Whatever, it was written beautifully in looping brown ink on yellow paper, illustrated and framed with the lock of hair behind the glass.

In spite of my sister and the existence of the poem, I decided it was time to own up about Bufo – if nothing else, to get it off my chest – especially now that I could hide it behind the revelations about Mrs Longlady’s pubic hair and seepage anecdotes.

Our mother told us she was pregnant. This was an enormous relief to me as it meant I didn’t have to own up about Bufo, not yet anyway, and probably had a good year before I had to make another rescue attempt – with a baby on the way. Everything stops for a baby, I find. She seemed highly tense but excited and overall happy. In fact, this was the absolute happiest she had ever been to my knowledge – ditto my sister’s – and it seemed I was justified in postponing Bufo’s rescue for a while.

Our mother wasn’t sure whether or not we’d realized that she and Charlie were intimate in that way. We did realize – my sister and I had seen the two of them. Charlie with his hairy bottom going up and down on top of her, as she lay on the rug in front of the fire, fast asleep. Just as we’d seen it when Little Jack’s teacher, Mr Dodd, came round (as previously mentioned) and they’d done a similar thing on that same rug, only our mother had been wide awake that time.

‘We must keep it a secret – we mustn’t talk about it,’ our mother said, meaning the baby, and immediately began reviewing her name choices.

‘I think I’m going to call it Jack,’ she said.

And my little brother said, ‘B-but that’s my name.’

And she said, ‘No, it is not. Your real name is James. We call you Jack because I like the name Jack better than the name James. You’ll have to go back to being James or start being called Jim or Jimmy.’

But my brother Jack didn’t like Jim or Jimmy, so he stopped speaking.

‘What if it’s a girl?’ my sister asked.

‘Phoebe,’ said our mother. ‘But it won’t be, it’ll be a boy.’

‘Is Charlie the father?’ I asked, and she said, ‘Of course he is.’ But in such a way that meant ‘probably’ or ‘possibly’ or ‘I don’t know’ or even ‘no’.

We had to keep it absolutely secret. We weren’t allowed to speak about it, even at home, just in case anyone was around. We had a secret code for it among ourselves. It was Bluebell the baby donkey. How silly – it makes me sad to write it – Bluebell the baby donkey.

We’d say, ‘When Bluebell comes, I’m going to knit him a little jacket.’ And Little Jack would frown. He wasn’t looking forward to Bluebell the baby donkey arriving and having to switch over to being called Jimmy or Jim.

‘Mother,’ my sister said one day, ‘should we perhaps start calling Little Jack “Jimmy” now so we get used to it before Bluebell the baby donkey arrives?’

She said it to upset Little Jack even more. Isn’t it funny how siblings do that to each other? Really, my sister’s heart was breaking for Little Jack having to give up his name for Bluebell, and yet she felt compelled to poke around in the pain of it.

The pregnancy was wonderful, though – if you didn’t count Little Jack’s reluctance to become Jimmy. It was, as previously stated, the happiest we’d seen her. And she confided in us that she experienced butterflies in her pelvis from dawn to dusk, which is one up from butterflies in your stomach excitement-wise, and is a woman-only thing.

I longed to tell someone – well, Melody. It wasn’t worth it, though, because however nice Melody was, she was only really interested in her own family and if I told her about this secret
pregnancy she’d be bound to tell me some sickening secret of her own. I’d confided in her once before over a previous thing to do with our mother, only to have her blurt out that
her
mother had taken to wearing a loose kaftan with no underpants and sipping cider vinegar in a bid to combat moistness in her undercarriage. Remembering that and the bath thing, I decided against telling her anything that might in any way lead back to anyone’s undercarriage, especially our mother’s, which I always wanted to keep private.

Then, a few months into the pregnancy, our mother began to have a miscarriage in the middle of the night when Charlie was at home in his bungalow. It went on and on and there was endless blood and pain. My sister rang an ambulance and they took our mother on a stretcher. As they left the house I said, ‘Don’t drop her.’ I said it so that our mother would hear and know that I cared.

And the ambulance man said, ‘Don’t worry, love, we never drop people on Wednesdays,’ and gave me a reassuring smile.

Later, I realized with a panic that the ambulance had arrived at past midnight, meaning it wasn’t a Wednesday at all, it was a Thursday, and therefore they might have dropped her. I let myself cry then, making out it was that silly worry, when really it was the whole unexpected horror.

At five o’clock in the morning my sister and I decided we’d make Mrs Lunt’s pot-dots to cheer ourselves up, but it was harder than we thought and we gave up before the pastry dough had ‘come together in a soft ball’ and chucked it in the bin. So instead we rang a few people up, people we knew, whose numbers were in our book. We dialled and hung up as soon as they answered. The phone would ring and ring and then someone would say, ‘Hello?’ groggily, with a question mark. We fell about laughing at the groggy hellos. We almost wet ourselves.
We even rang our dad and he did the funniest groggy hello. So we did him again but it made us sad the second time. So we decided to phone Charlie, but not to hang up.

A woman answered and said Charlie was asleep and was it an emergency. I said our mother had gone into the Royal Infirmary. There was a pause while the woman and I had realizations about each other.

‘I’m sorry, wrong number,’ I said.

‘I hope things turn out all right, dear,’ the woman said.

Then my sister cleaned up the dreadful bed and the blood-soaked towels and didn’t even ask me to help – she let me lie on the settee with Debbie. She cleaned the kitchen and fed Debbie and at eight o’clock we got Little Jack ready and set off for school. He dawdled and cried and knew something was up.

‘Is Bluebell here?’ he asked, waiting at the zebra.

‘Bluebell might not come after all,’ said my sister.

‘We don’t know that,’ I said, ‘not for sure.’

‘Bluebell’s definitely not coming,’ she said (to me).

The smell of pepper filled my nose, which usually meant tears would come. I’d got my heart set on Bluebell: he was real to me and hearing so definitely he wasn’t coming – that he’d died – I felt my heart break, I really did. I felt a small but definite crack. But I did a couple of coughs and we crossed the road, all holding hands.

I upset my teacher that morning. She mentioned that I looked ‘particularly unkempt’ and I said I was sorry but our daily help had let us down.

‘Could your mother not get off her backside?’ she muttered.

‘She couldn’t, actually,’ I said rather rudely.

‘And why is that?’ asked Miss.

‘She’s temperamentally unsuited to doing laundry,’ I said.

We did needlework after that and my embroidery stitches
took a bad turn. Miss, who was already cross, said she wasn’t surprised by my sloppy stitching when our mother was such an irresponsible woman. Which I thought a coincidence, bearing in mind that our mother was – that very morning – at Leicester Royal Infirmary miscarrying an unknown man’s baby. Maybe even Mr Dodd’s. And Mr Dodd himself was just along the corridor, teaching Little Jack’s class leaf-rubbing with wax crayons.

Our mother came home from hospital later that day. She was wretched and awkward, with bluish rings around her eyes. It was very embarrassing. She lay in bed moaning through clenched teeth and wouldn’t look up from her pillow. She didn’t cry as such, but moaned like an injured and forlorn animal in the forest. And my sister and I knew we had our work cut out.

What good does crying do?

None. Not unless you’re prepared to cry very loud and in front of people. And we weren’t.

OK, there was no Bluebell but, on the plus side, our mother bought a puppy to cheer herself up – a miniature poodle called Honey. Honey took our minds off Bluebell and did all the usual puppy things like shaking a teddy and being sweet with Debbie. It was a help in the happiness campaign, although fairly short-lived because our mother soon got fed up with Honey and stopped finding her delightful. For one thing, she whined and made a horrible noise when eating (like a starving rat), and for another, she had a dodgy leg which popped its socket every now and again and it made our mother feel funny. We liked her, though (Honey): she had a sweet character, was very loving and not aloof like another poodle we’d known (Katie).

Also, still on the plus side, Charlie reappeared and was romantic in his behaviour. Our mother asked why he’d stayed away for so long and he explained that he’d been so short of money he
couldn’t afford to pay anyone to do the plastering etc. on the two bungalow shells he was doing up, and that meant spending all God’s hours doing it himself. Our mother was appalled that such a stupid thing had kept them apart and gave him three hundred pounds to take someone on immediately.

Later, I asked our mother if Charlie might be married. Not that I minded, just that it was as well to know these things.

‘Men like him are always married,’ she said.

‘So will he stay married?’ I asked.

Our mother explained that Charlie was stuck in a dreadful rut. And although he was keen to get out of the marriage, he was less than halfway through some major kitchen renovations he started in 1969 and felt he couldn’t leave Mrs Bates until it was finished.

‘Can’t Mrs Bates do it herself?’ I asked.

‘She’s not 100 per cent compos mentis since an accident with a train door,’ she said, ‘and she’s like a limpet clinging on.’

‘Can’t Charlie just get on with it, then he’d be out of the rut?’ I asked, meaning the kitchen.

Our mother reminded me that Charlie was already renovating two bungalow shells and hardly had a minute. But was doing his best.

I was keen to solve this conundrum and irritated by the shortsightedness of the main players. ‘Well, couldn’t you get someone like Mr Lomax the Liberal candidate to fix the kitchen?’ I asked.

Our mother didn’t say anything for a while, but said eventually, ‘I did lend him some cash a while ago to get it done, but he’s so busy.’

One day our mother asked me to go to Charlie Bates’s home – which was in the next village – and sneak a look at the kitchen renovations. It was a strange thing to ask me to do, but I did it.

‘It’s number 12, Bradshaw Street,’ she said. ‘Don’t be seen.’

I went on my Raleigh Rustler. I could cycle no-handed by then (no other girl could). So I emphasized it by folding my arms across my chest. This gesture had the added bonus of making me feel purposeful, a thing I’ve always liked.

I arrived at Bradshaw Street and cycled past number 12 a couple of times. It was a pretty bungalow with a greenhouse-style porch at the front, full of leggy plants and old pots. I went round to the back and peered through the kitchen window. It was a state. No cupboards or sideboards, just bare breezeblocks, all lumpy with bits of cement. A trolley with a teapot and a tin of Marvel. I saw our old Potterton in the corner. I recognized its distinguishing features. And I saw her, Mrs Bates, with a short grey bob, in the next room, smiling at the telly and perhaps even talking to it.

‘So did you see the kitchen?’ our mother asked when I got home.

‘It needs a lot of work,’ I said.

‘Sketch it out,’ she said. ‘I want details.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘For Mr Lomax,’ she said.

Our mother became impatient with Charlie regarding his half-finished kitchen renovations.

‘I’ve a good mind to pay someone to go in and complete the work,’ she said, testing the water.

‘I thought you’d have got it sorted by now,’ said Charlie.

The next day our mother told me to put on my lilac-leaf dress (it looked like hearts but it was leaves), brush my hair out nicely and put a little bow in Honey’s head curl.

‘Where are you going, all dressed up?’ my sister asked.

‘We’ll be back soon – we’ll bring chop suey – look after Jack,’ was all she’d say.

And we got into the car and roared off. She told me she was going to face up to Mrs Bates and ask her to have mercy on her and Charlie’s love. It made her cry a bit just saying it. And I was infected.

‘Wow!’ I said, full of pride.

‘And offer her some cash to get off his back,’ she added. ‘I wonder what she looks like,’ our mother wondered.

The truth was she looked nice. Nice round face and a happy smile, even though she was on her own and had no one to smile at except the telly.

‘Plug ugly,’ I said.

‘How do you know?’ said our mother.

‘I saw her that day I went spying on the kitchen.’

‘Why didn’t you say anything? Jesus!’ she said, and glanced at me. ‘Short or long hair?’

‘Short.’

‘Good,’ said our mother. She drove one-handed while she arranged her own (long).

We arrived outside the bungalow and Mr Lomax (the Liberal candidate) was there in his van. Our mother spoke to him through the window.

Honey the poodle jumped out of my arms and ran around the candy-tufted garden, stopping every now and then to worry her hair ribbon with her front paws, like a curly rodent. Our mother knocked and Mrs Bates finally opened the door. Our mother began in a straightforward fashion.

‘May I come in, Mrs Bates? I need to talk to you.’

We went in and were ushered into the living room. ‘Come through to the lounge,’ said Mrs Bates. Our mother winced at the word (lounge) and we all sat down. Honey took an immediate liking to Mrs Bates and vice versa, and though I’m sure Mrs Bates sensed it wasn’t going to be a joyful encounter, she fussed
Honey and gave her a fig roll off a flower-shaped plate on the arm of her chair.

Mrs Bates told us about the tabby cat called Hilda she’d had for seven years. It had started out all right, but Mrs Bates said that Hilda had totally ignored her for the last five years until one day Hilda went to live with a man at the end of the street. I wondered whether, hearing that sad tale, our mother might have qualms about the message she was about to deliver.

‘Dogs are more companiable,’ said Mrs Bates.

‘Companiable?’ said our mother. ‘Is that a word?’

‘I think so, it means they’re more of a companion,’ said Mrs Bates.

‘Oh, yes, I see, they are indeed,’ said our mother.