Our Picnics in the Sun (29 page)

A
DAM
’
S
B
IRTHDAY
1990

“A
dam, how many times do we have to go over this? One of the reasons you’re being home educated is precisely because we don’t believe in that kind of institutional straitjacket. It’s not about holidays versus term-time. You should be learning
every
day of your life,” his father said, with his wise eyes fixed on the wall behind and above Adam’s head. As usual, he sounded sad.

“Yes but I just want to be off school at the same time as Kevin and Kyle,” Adam said. “Please, Dad. It’s my birthday.”

He held his breath. His father began to knock rhythmically on the kitchen tabletop with his knuckles. “In fact, we
reject
that kind of regimentation. It’s archaic, outmoded, and discredited. Do you understand?”

“Yes but it’s my birthday.”

His father sighed. “Listen, Adam. In the past, children only got the summer off because they had to go and help their parents bring in the harvest. Not even
their
harvest, the landowner’s! And the whole system supported it. We don’t have to follow those rules anymore.”

“Yes but they’ve been off five weeks already. They’re going back soon. And it’s my birthday.”

Howard sighed again and smiled. “Oh, all right. We’ll just do two hours and then you can go. But remember, getting six weeks off in the summer isn’t really a holiday, it’s just a remnant of oppression.
You shouldn’t think of it as a good thing. Wait, where do you think you’re going?”

Adam was already at the door. “I’m just going to tell Kevin and Kyle to wait,” he said. “They’re outside. Back in a minute.”

When he went outside he found Kevin and Kyle slouched in the yard, peering through the windows of the weaving studio where his mother, with her back to them, was bent over the loom.

“All right?” Kevin said. Adam kicked at the ground, and a sudden flutter of knowledge came to him:
there’s nobody watching us
. He gazed back at the house. Then came a second one:
I am not going back in a minute
. Kevin and Kyle caught on at once; glances were exchanged; the agreement to flee was made among them with eyes alone, not a single word said. With no other signal they took off running out of the yard. Kevin, the oldest and biggest, hit the track first and with a long skid turned left up toward the moor. Kyle followed, skinnier and faster than Adam, who panted behind. He didn’t think to shout to them to wait, or to drop back and let them race on without him. In permanent and abject need of their company, he’d chase after them anywhere. He was afraid they knew this.

By the time he caught them up at the stile, the brothers’ mood was already changing. The wind off the moor blew through the silence that descended. Kyle wanted to go home and play on his bike and Kevin suddenly didn’t feel like doing anything. Adam felt his morning of freedom drifting away with them, and he had nothing with which to lure them back. He tried, nevertheless.

“My dad, he’s got all these knives for wood-carving. They’re dead sharp. If we go back to my place he might let us have a go of them. Anyway, I know where he keeps them.”

Kevin considered. “So what? My dad’s got a gun.”

“Two guns,” Kyle corrected him. “He’s got this really big one that’s just for deer. If you tried to shoot a rabbit with it”—he made a loud exploding noise—“you’d blow it to bits. The rabbit wouldn’t even ’xist no more.”

“Yeah, and we’ve got to come back to yours this afternoon anyway, haven’t we,” Kevin said, wearily. “My Mum says. You’re having a
party
or something.”

The way he said
party
conveyed the inferiority of any party of Adam’s in comparison with any of theirs. It was obvious. At their parties there were always lots of kids their age making lots of noise, and proper party food from a supermarket, the kind you actually wanted to eat, and their mum shrieked a lot and was funny. They didn’t have homemade decorations and nobody asked you to read a poem or sing a song. Best of all, their parties were indoors. Gloom swept over him.

“It’s not a party, it’s a picnic,” he said.

“Don’t you want a proper party, then? Aren’t you allowed one?” Kevin said slyly. He knew. Adam’s parents didn’t do proper stuff.

“There isn’t any girls going, is there?” Kyle said. Kevin gave his brother a shove and they broke into squeaky laughter.

“My mum bought you this present we’ve got to give you when we come to the picnic,” Kyle said. “Want me to tell you what it is?”

Adam did want to be told, but he shrugged the question off. Any talk of presents might lead to questions about what else he’d had for his birthday, and he was so ashamed of the homemade wooden scooter he’d got from his parents he had to keep it a secret. For the rest of his life.

“ ’Course there isn’t any girls coming,” he said.

Kevin didn’t say any more, but Adam had lost ground and he knew it. There weren’t any other people coming on the picnic except for Callum and Fee, friends of his parents who talked and dressed the same kind of way, and they didn’t have kids. They always came on his birthday. Adam had the feeling that Callum and Fee were sorry for his parents and his parents were sorry for them.

Kevin spat out the grass stalk he was chewing. “Okay, gotta go. See you later. C’mon, Kyle.” He set off down the lane and Kyle shambled after him.

Adam climbed up and sat on the stile and watched them go. They conducted a kicking and tripping-up contest as they went, which had Kyle upended and yelping on his back every few yards. Back at their house the telly would be on. They were allowed to have fizzy drinks and help themselves to Pop-Tarts whenever they felt like it. They were so lucky.

Adam couldn’t go back to his house and the moor was too boring to absorb the next four hours, so his pride would have to give. He ran after Kevin and Kyle and tagged along behind at a distance, saying nothing. They didn’t object, and after a while he drew level again. Then Kevin took them on a detour up the fields to see if they could find the place where his dad had turned up a rats’ nest the day before, but they couldn’t. When they got to the boys’ house an hour later their mum, Louise, was in a bad mood. She told Adam his dad had been on the phone three times and he was to go straight home.

Back with his father, Adam tried to work some more on his model of a dinosaur but no matter what he did to it, it still looked like just a lump of clay. He’d forgotten the name of the dinosaur he was supposed to be making and he’d stopped looking at the picture he was supposed to be using for inspiration (“And don’t just copy it, Adam, try to be
original
”). He sneaked a look at his father working at the pottery wheel, his hands wet and gray and gnarled, cupped around the clay. Like a dinosaur’s, he thought, staring with pleasurable disgust.

His father looked over and frowned. Adam dropped his gaze. Running away from lessons had been the biggest act of rebellion of his life so far and, although it hadn’t felt it at the time, a calculated one, trading on the birthday goodwill and cheerfulness that had to be kept up for the picnic. Inside him there burned a lovely, hot little bead of satisfaction that his father was angry with him today and could not show it.

“Adam. You’re not concentrating,” he said.

Adam picked up a fork and drew a few squiggly tracks down the dinosaur’s back.

“I can’t do dinosaurs,” he said. “Can’t I make a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle instead?”

His father sighed. “What, imitate some American mass-market commercial rubbish instead of creating a figure from your own imagination? Is that what you’d rather do? Really?”

Adam nodded slowly. “They’re only turtles,” he said quietly. For the first time, he was beginning to think he could get to enjoy wanting the wrong things.

His father sighed again. “Oh, all right, then, Adam, we’ll leave it for today,” he said. “I suppose you want to go and play on your scooter, eh? Off you go, son.”

Adam was glad to be reminded about the scooter. If he played on it now he stood more chance of not being made to get it out and show it to everybody when they arrived for the picnic. He wheeled it outside and made at least twenty circuits of the yard on it, in view of his father, who remained at the pottery wheel, and his mother in the kitchen. It was more fun than he thought it’d be. Then he pushed it into the old pig shed and propped it against the pile of old timbers that filled one end. The back wheel was already wobbly.

It was still only about eleven o’clock. His mother came into the yard with the hens’ bucket and the egg basket and he followed her down the vegetable garden to the poultry pen. As she lifted the latch of the wire gate and stepped in, he stayed outside. She emptied the bucket into the feeder and at once, as he knew they would, the hens came shrieking at it with smacking wings and stabbing beaks, their eyes unblinking in their jerking heads. He watched, fearful for his mother, as she collected the eggs from the coop and waded back through the cackling mob around her bare legs. She was actually laughing and clucking back at them. Couldn’t she see they hated her for stealing the eggs?

“If a hen pecked you really hard would it make an actual hole in your leg?” he asked on the way back to the house. “You’d lose loads of blood, wouldn’t you? You’d have to go to hospital.”

“What?
Oh
—oh, Adam, I don’t know. I’m not sure about that,” she said. “Look, we got five today. Do you want to help me hard-boil them and make sandwiches for the picnic?”

He didn’t. He couldn’t bear the smell of hard-boiled eggs, he reminded her. He didn’t like egg sandwiches. Also, if they were made with her brown bread (which they were going to be), he didn’t like
any
sandwiches. She smiled vaguely and went back inside.

Adam got the scooter out again and trundled round and round the yard, thinking. His mother had always been that way, ignoring or forgetting things, never being sure what she knew or didn’t know; it didn’t bother her that she couldn’t untangle even the simplest thing
for him. When he was five they’d found all the hens dead one morning and he’d cried and cried and asked why foxes didn’t sleep in the night-time like everybody else.
Oh, they’re just not sleepy, I suppose
. Another time he wanted to know why they couldn’t get a tractor, so he could have rides on it.
Oh, well, imagine! Then we could grow a whole field of beans instead of just a few rows. But maybe it’d be unkind to the earth
. When he asked what was unkind about growing a lot of beans instead of a few, she seemed not to hear and only much later, half in a dream, said,
Well, a field of beans. What harm could that do?

Now there were times, like today, when there was no point in asking her anything. He could see from her face she couldn’t really see
him;
she seemed to be elsewhere, listening to a conversation he couldn’t hear. When she did pay him some half-attention she’d only say more of her stupid things that were vague and prone to her sudden changes of mind, that began
Oh, I’m not sure
or
Ah, though maybe
or
Well, I just wondered
. Sometimes she’d read her poems aloud at the table, or worse, try to make him write some. Adam sped angrily around the yard. She did it on purpose, making everything wishy-washy and slippery so that nothing she ever said was really true or not true and you couldn’t ever argue about it. When he took the scooter back to the pig shed, he flung it down and let it fall over.

Later, he was pleased that Kevin and Kyle’s dad brought them to the picnic instead of their mum—Louise hadn’t been very nice to him that morning—even though Digger stayed on the edge of it all, pouring out most of his tea on the grass and saying he only had time for a half-cup. Then he stood in the bracken instead of sitting on a rug with the others while Adam opened his presents.

There was a bag of marbles from Callum and Fee—they were nice colors, and Fee said they were made of special hand-blown glass; Adam wasn’t sure what that meant or that he knew how to play marbles. But Kevin and Kyle’s present was brilliant. Just
brilliant
, so brilliant that at first all he could do was gasp. Then he tore the rest of the paper off so fast that Callum had to go off down the hill after it. It was a M.A.S.K. vehicle, one of the best ones, the Razorback—it
turned into a mobile weapon platform and it came with a Brad Turner figure
and
an Eclipse mask. Adam yelped with delight. Kevin and Kyle were grinning. He did high-fives with them, and the excitement spread—Kevin turned red and whooped and clapped and Kyle made both his hands into fists and shook them around his head as if they held dice. Adam had seen the M.A.S.K. videos at their house; Kevin and Kyle had loads of the other vehicles, too. They, or Louise, must have seen how much he absolutely loved them. He’d been given something he really
wanted
. Suddenly he wished everybody could disappear. He didn’t want them to watch him gazing at his Razorback and touching it and getting used to it being
his
, in case he cried. Then his mother broke in with one of her
Well, now!
s and told him to say thank you. Then she went very quiet, and he could not look at his father for the rest of the picnic for fear of catching his eye.

After that, doing the cake was real fun, even though the cake had dried apricots in it and his mother and Fee clapped their hands a lot and made too many thrilled noises. Kevin and Kyle’s dad had gone by then. Everybody else huddled up together on one side to keep the wind away from the candles and he pretended he couldn’t blow them out without making loud raspberry noises that made everybody laugh, especially Kevin, until his father told him to get on with it or they’d still be there when it got dark. On the way back down the hill he ran around shouting and chasing Kevin and Kyle and laughing so hard he felt sick by the time he reached the bottom.

That night he lay awake in bed, amazed to think he’d been so happy. He wondered how it was possible that a day could be as happy as that, and yet before it was over turn into the complete opposite. Because after everybody had gone home and he was sprawled on his front in the hall playing with the Razorback, he was suddenly aware of his father towering over him. Adam shrank back; for a moment his father’s head, silhouetted against the antlers behind him on the wall, sprouted a gigantic, jagged halo of thorns. All at once his Razorback was scooped off the floor. Adam scrambled to his feet yelling, but it was already beyond his reach.