Sex and Stravinsky (7 page)

It’s just that her dad really dislikes Gran, Zoe can tell, so he doesn’t ever want to get there – and Zoe’s not that great on Gran either, but just occasionally she has to stay there overnight when her parents are out and if there’s some reason why she can’t go to Maggs or Mattie’s, which is what she usually does. It’s always been pretty boring at Gran’s house, especially now that she’s outgrown the album of Invisible Janet’s wedding photographs, and the musical box with the ballerina on top that she used to like so much, but these days Zoe can tell that the way she’s got her arms and legs is all wrong. And then Gran has got all these little china figurines on shelves that Zoe used to like, especially the one of a lady wearing a china mob cap and lying in a little china bed, with a man in a china wig and china knickerbockers standing alongside her and holding her hand.

‘Since you’re so fond of that, I’ll give it to you one day, when you’re good,’ Gran said, but Zoe was always good and Gran never gave it to her, so eventually, one day when she was a lot younger, she stole it. But then she felt so much like a thief that she had to keep it hidden in a box under her bed all the time, and she never had any fun with it.

The French boy’s name is Gérard. Zoe knows this because on both sides of the Channel the children have had to spend a double language period writing letters to their partners, each in the other’s language. They have had to introduce themselves to their partners and say things about themselves and their families and their hobbies. By the look of the letters, they have all been written with heavy dependence on the dictionary. Zoe knows that her own letter was crap, but she’s pretty sure it wasn’t quite as crap as Gérard’s. And at least hers was quite a bit longer.

Dear Zoe

I am a tall merry fellow with brown hairs. The hairs, which are curled, are also short. I have twelve years and my sister has sixteen years. She is Véronique. She likes much the music pop but I like much to make the hunt with my father and with my dog also, which is called Mimi. I like also much the football and also much the football player Zinédine Zidane, which is called Zizou. Indeed to you.

I am your friend, Gérard.

The Tall Merry Fellow has sent Mattie and Maggs into fits.

‘He sounds like a stilt walker in a stripy top hat,’ Mattie says.

‘He sounds like a total nerd,’ Zoe says, secretly wondering if Mattie and Maggs’s insides are also turning to jelly over the French exchange, or if it’s only her. ‘And I bet his sister’s a cow,’ she says.

Caroline, as well as getting the maps, has gone to the trouble of buying Zoe a torch the size of a cigarette and she’s soon made that list of ‘useful phrases’, which she pastes to the inside of Zoe’s little backpack. Zoe wishes her mother wouldn’t always be so keen to enter into the spirit of school trips and outings, like the way, when they walked the Ridgeway, e.g., her mum went and bought her
Puck of Pook’s Hill
because it had Wayland’s Smithy in it. And then, whenever Zoe gets home from anything ‘educational’, she always wants to know about it. Like when they went to Cirencester on the coach, to look at the Roman ruins, and all Zoe could really remember about it was how she and Maggs and Mattie had got the giggles because there was a used condom in the amphitheatre, as well as lots of old crisp packets. It always ends up leaving Zoe feeling a bit stupid and inadequate, like she was letting Caroline down.

The class goes to France by coach, leaving at 7 a.m. with all the mothers to wave them off. Zoe wishes her dad was there so that at least she could say goodbye to him because she knows he’s going off to a conference in three days’ time. It’s in South Africa, and then he’ll be away for nearly a whole month, so there’ll be no sense in trying to phone home to ask him to rescue her from the Tall Merry Fellow and his sister Véronique. Anyway, she hasn’t got a mobile phone and she won’t understand how to use the call boxes, even though Caroline has taped the code for the UK inside her backpack along with all the useful phrases and she’s got Zoe some phone cards as well.

But Zoe knows that if she tries to use the cards there’ll be a recorded voice talking to her in French that she won’t understand, because that’s exactly what happened when they went on a school day-trip to Boulogne to practise ‘shopping’ in French. In the event, everywhere was self-service, so you never had to ask for anything. You just put your things on the counter and handed over whatever money it said you owed on the screen.

Zoe is always the last to get stuff like a mobile phone and she hasn’t even got a personal stereo, because Caroline thinks it’s not good for ‘the young’ to have things that rob them of their resourcefulness. Plus they’re much too expensive, and a mobile phone will fry your brain and a personal stereo will give you hearing loss and tinnitus later on, when you’re about a hundred and three.

And her clothes aren’t usually that OK either, though grown-ups are forever saying, ‘Oh Caroline, your Zoe’s got such beautiful clothes. She always looks so elegant.’ This is because Caroline finds these designer bargains at jumble sales and in charity shops, usually in snot green or chocolate brown, or black, just when Zoe is longing for baby pink and sparkles, but she’s never had the nerve actually to refuse to wear Caroline’s tasteful finds. ‘That green is so wonderful with her hair,’ they say.

‘But it’s Moschino, darling,’ Caroline says, about this black bomber jacket thingy. ‘Zoe, it couldn’t be more stylish.’

And then, just as her peers are beginning to get the black habit, Caroline will suddenly do an ironic take on Barbie gear and she’ll come back with a pastel fur-fabric dolly coat, or with little rhinestone shoes. Fortunately, right now, the black Moschino bomber jacket has really come into its own and Zoe can wear it with pride on the French exchange trip. She has to hand that to Caroline, but, even so, she knows she’ll never, ever be able to forgive her mum for that one-time floral take on Birkenstocks. Not ever.

All the cases go in the hold, while the backpacks with the packed lunches go with you in the coach. As well as her packed lunch, Zoe has a roll of freezer-bags with sealer clips in case of being sick, because she’s always sick on trips, which is another thing to be worried about. Once Zoe said to Josh that being car sick was her ‘cultural heritage’, because it’s true she gets car sickness from her dad, along with being short and having too curly chestnut hair. But her dad said that nausea on coach trips couldn’t be a person’s cultural heritage; it was more of a genetic heritage. He said that ‘culture’ has to do with beliefs and customs, so it had to be things like plate-smashing at weddings and wearing corks around your hat, and having to marry your second cousin when you’re twelve.

Right now, at least Zoe really likes her luggage, because her things are all in a beautiful black hat box with old luggage labels on it that she’s persuaded Caroline to give her for keeps. The labels say things like ‘Kaiser Hotel, Baden-Baden’ and ‘Deutsche Europäische Linie’, because the hat box once belonged to a piano teacher called Lottie Kirschner who came to England as a refugee in 1933 and started a bookshop. Then, when she was eighty, she put this spidery little notice in the newsagent about selling up her possessions because she was moving into a retirement flat. Caroline went along with Zoe, and they met this dainty, beautiful old lady, who gave them coffee and walnut cake and pressed a little brooch upon Zoe, which made her wish she could’ve had Lottie Kirschner for her grandmother, instead of Gran, who was a bit of a pain; and her other grandparents – that’s her dad’s parents – who sound a lot nicer, are both dead.

And she didn’t really know them, anyway. She just sort of feels she knew them from what her dad’s told her about when he took her to see them in Tanzania when she was just a baby and from a book of photographs she’s got that Josh’s mum gave her. And also, she used to send these funny little story books sometimes before she died that had been written for African schoolchildren – like her favourite one,
A Little Red Bus Called ‘Take Me Home’,
about this old bus driver called Mr Tumbo, who was sad because he’d been made redundant, but then he and this boy called Jonah find a little bus in a scrapyard and they secretly fix it up for weeks and weeks, and it becomes the village bus, so Mr Tumbo’s got a job again and so has Jonah, because he’s the ‘turn boy’, which means he puts all the bicycles and sacks of mangos and chickens and stuff on to the roof rack, and everyone in the village is really pleased to have their own bus.

Her dad’s mum died quite suddenly, when Zoe was five. She just went to bed one night and then in the morning she was dead. It made her dad go very quiet for a long time and, after he got back from her funeral, he used to go for really long walks all by himself for ages and not talk much.

It’s quite hard to pack a case that’s round, but Zoe’s case is very neat. That’s because she gave up and let Caroline do it and her mum’s a packing genius. She’s even remembered to slip in a flat-pack zipper bag, because she knows that Zoe most probably won’t be able to fit her things back in the hat box when she comes home. When Caroline packs, she tessellates, like in maths, leaving no spaces at all, while Zoe and her dad use the ‘stuff’ method.

Each child’s case contains a small gift as instructed by Mrs Mead.

‘A small gift for your hostess,’ she says. ‘Nothing expensive or flashy, please.’

So Caroline has starched and pressed two antique white-linen guest towels with handmade lace trim that she’s wrapped in pink tissue paper from Paperchase. Zoe is really worried because she doesn’t think that a present should be second-hand and it must be that her concern is showing in her face.

‘Maman will love them,’ Caroline says firmly. ‘The French appreciate good linen.’

She’s also made the family a batch of fudge, which she’s bagged in Cellophane and tied with a gold ribbon, saved from last year’s Easter egg, but Zoe decides to pass the fudge round the bus, once they’re beyond the ring road, because presents, as well as not being second-hand, aren’t supposed to be home-made either. It’s that lovely crumbly fudge like you get in Scotland because Caroline has got the recipe from Gran, who says she’s Scottish, even though Josh says that she sounds like Dame Edna and she’s only ever been to Scotland once, in the year that Zoe’s parents got married. Bonnie Scotland is her heritage, she says – though she sometimes calls Zoe ‘
ma petite
’. Her name is Mrs McCleod. Mrs Catriona McCleod.

‘Your mum’s brilliant,’ Mattie says. ‘Your mum’s cool.’

Mattie and Maggs are Zoe’s two best friends, and they’re sitting together just behind her in the bus. Meanwhile, she’s got revolting Sadie sitting beside her, whom nobody else wants. The trouble is, if you’re just a little bit sweet and kind like Zoe, then you always have a moment of feeling sorry for people like Sadie, because everyone else is giving them the brush-off. But as soon as you weaken and let her in, then she starts patronising you and ordering you about, just as if she was doing you a favour by sitting next to you. So Sadie starts being a spoiler almost as soon as they’ve got under way. The class has begun singing, but when Zoe joins in Sadie shuts her up by putting her hand across Zoe’s mouth, which is horrible, because it’s kind of clammy and it smells like old dishcloths that have been left to dry in a ball.

‘You really shouldn’t sing with a voice like that,’ she says.

‘Like what?’ Zoe says, all mumbly, from under Sadie’s hand, and she looks at Sadie indignantly but Sadie just laughs and says, ‘You should see your face. You look all gawky and stupid like that.’ Then she lets her go.

Zoe slumps silently in her seat. She knows what’s going to happen over the next four weeks.

Mattie and Maggs are good friends of hers, but it’s kind of understood that they have a prior claim on each other, because they’ve been friends since the preschool playgroup and their mums met in the antenatal class and they do Pilates and Book Club together. Sometimes the families even go on holiday together, and now Mrs Mead has gone and partnered them with a pair of French girl twins in that downtown apartment, so they’ll be in and out of the shops and cafés together, as a foursome, while she’ll be stuck in no-man’s-land with the Tall Merry Fellow and his sister Véronique, and most probably having to do all those crappy outdoor boy things like whittling, and cataloguing how many yellow Lego bricks you’ve got. Thinking about it is just too excruciating.

And any time when she’s actually free of the Tall Merry Fellow – like on the class outing to Versailles or somewhere – then Sadie will be there, insinuating herself, which will make all the others run away; Sadie, who is right now chewing her packed lunch with her mouth open, but Zoe knows better than to tell her not to, because she’s the kind of person who’d think it’s hilarious to stop chewing and open her mouth really wide, so that you can see all the mushed-up food and saliva swishing around on her tongue.

Behind her, she can hear Mattie and Maggs giggling softly together about nothing and everything and, every now and again, either one of them will lean forward and whisper something in her ear, but if ever she turns round, then she right away starts to feel car sick, even though she’s wearing her special pressure-point wristbands. Once, a few years ago, for the outward-bound trip to Glasebury, Caroline had got her these amazing little sticking plasters from the doctor that you stuck behind your ears and they worked brilliantly, but now you can’t get them any more, because the way they worked was to leak toxins into your ears or something. Anyway, right now Mattie and Maggs are having a giggle about their sandwiches.