Tying Down The Lion (2 page)

Although he’s nursing the car along like an old man in a flat cap, Dad is a live wire fizzing with electrical current. Every time we knock the kerb, the stern contours of Grandma’s curls quiver like a dozen dead field mice perched on a pink iced bun. Victor makes racing-car sounds and also commentates, holding his fist to his mouth. “Scarfiotti wins at Monza with his amazing braking...”

“Can’t I be Jackie Stewart?” Dad asks.

“OK. But we’ll have to switch to Monaco.”

“Boys are peculiar,” I tell them, closing my eyes as a cyclist swerves out of our way in the nick of time.

“Here we go then,” Dad says. “Motoring towards our dreams, Bridge.”

“You shouldn’t follow dreams,” Grandma announces.

“Why?” I ask her.

“Because it’s a road paved with disappointments, that’s why. People should get on with what they’ve blinking well got at home.”

“You can’t tell people what their dreams are meant to be.”

“I can. But they never listen, do they?” She raises her voice. “Your father should just tinker about with his daft car on a Saturday afternoon like any other bloke. And your mother ought to take on a few hours at the mop-and-brush. Then back across the road to put her apron on before you get home from school. It’ll stop her becoming a lard-arse. They run to fat, Germans do.”

Mum and Dad ignore her, too busy dreaming.

“What did slick Mick-the-mechanic charge you for fixing the car then, Roy?”

“Don’t ask, Ma.”

“A bloody monkey would know more than him and only charge you peanuts. I reckon he’s stuck it together with sellotape.”

“Don’t spoil things, Ma.”

“I can hear cardboard.”

“No one can hear cardboard.”

“I can.”

“Give over and let me dream.”

I’m wearing two twin-sets because the spare won’t fit in the case, so this is a bloody hot dream. The seats are like boiling jam. I concentrate on my notepad, but even a Cold War project feels limp and tired in this heat.

Victor says you aren’t even allowed to look at the Wall without the East Berlin police leaping across and arresting you at gunpoint. He says even licking those bricks is like asking to be shot at. I don’t know why anyone would lick them, but that’s how boys think.

Every morning after Dad goes to work, Victor quietly play-fights with himself on the front-room carpet, whispering, “Aargh, not my guts again. Christ, not my guts.” After rolling about, he machine-guns the enemy from the trenches behind the settee. If he survives, he teeters on the rope-bridge of the fireplace fender before parachuting into the ironing-pile cornfield where he bleeds almost to death, writhing and moaning, “Got a last fag for me, Ginger?” The Cold War is a lukewarm affair to a seven-year-old who digests blood-and-guts for breakfast. Victor, like Grandma, is unimpressed by Khrushchev.

He is wedged between Mum and me in the back. Victor, that is. Not Khrushchev. After a manic session of bouncing up and down, electrified that we’re on the move at last, he realises Dad’s driving is less Stirling Moss, and more Stumbling Mouse. The car vibrates if he goes over thirty, so he creeps along in the gutter. Even ancient delivery-men on bicycles have to overtake. We can’t open the windows because the draught blows Dad’s hair over his glasses. The car fills with smoke and swear words.

Ever since his first lesson, and even after he passed the test at last, Dad has never sat still at home. In his lumpy old maroon armchair, he rests his feet on a small tin of stewing-steak, acting as the accelerator, and a brake in the guise of a Heinz potato-salad can, while we shout out hazards for him to avoid.

“Watch the Panzer!” yells Victor.

“There’s an overturned lorry ahead with a load of venomous spiders jumping into cars,” I shout.

“Hark, is that woodworm gnawing at your timber frame?” Grandma sniggers, helpful as always.

But now this is the real thing and progress is not much faster. The brake pedal might work better if it actually was a tin of potato salad.

After making Messerschmitt noises in my ear, Victor resorts to walking Trevor-Keith, his ancient Action Man, over my legs and mumbling, “Smithy bought it at Dunkirk. I’m afraid, old boy.” His boiled-sweet breath is nauseating. Victor’s that is, not T-K’s.

“Move over, can’t you?”

“Why should I?”

He kicks my ankle and I kick him back, hooking our buckles together. Our conjoined footwear flails against the back of Dad’s seat until his hand reaches round and flaps at the air.

“What?” we chorus.

“I’ll not have your great clod-hopping feet on my centre console, if you please.”

Clod-hopping’s the word. I should be wearing white patent boots and a Biba dress. I should be a model called Tuesday. But Mum thinks fourteen is the gateway for geriatric twin-sets, nylon bell-bottoms, square nautical blouses and, worst of all the horrors, navy driving-shoes with rubbery soles that creep up over the toe to prevent scuffing, a hideous decorative buckle and a punched-hole pattern to make them…groovy. Being designed, if that’s the right word, especially for women-drivers, we found them piled a mile high in the Freeman-Hardy-Willis bargain tub. Mum dived straight in.

“Mum, no.”

“But they are so sensible, dear.”

Yes, and she’s so German. When Grandma saw my feet in these monstrosities, she said, “Strike-a-bloody-light, Jacqueline, a pair of ruddy shoeboxes would look daintier.”

“
Pass auf
, Roy!” Mum yells, relapsing into German. It sounds like pass out, but I think it means pull your finger out and do an emergency stop at the traffic-lights. Fortunately we are travelling at eight miles an hour.

“Lawks,” Grandma says, lighting a Senior Service. “You’ll have us joining Jayne Mansfield in her grave before we’re much older, son.”

When the lights turn green, the car stalls time and time again. The back of Dad’s neck changes colour beneath the straight edge of yesterday’s haircut.

“Pink,” whispers Victor.

“Red.”

“Maroon.”

“Blushing red salmon.”

“Boiled bloody beetroot. I win!”

Grandma stuffs in so many mints her cheeks swell into hamster’s pouches, but she manages to mumble, “Give it some choke, lad.” And, at the ninth try, and with at least nine cars beeping behind us, the engine starts. Dad pats the steering-wheel as if all the attempts and accompanying swear words are normal procedure. On the move again, he rasps his leathery hands together.

“Pass us a sweet, Ma.”

“Keep your daft hands on the wheel. You’re getting cocky now, son,” Grandma says, crumpling the empty bag.

Mum’s face is like starched linen. She keeps pressing her hands to her grumbling appendix and moaning like the wounded badger that once crawled into our shed. Dad was pacing in the garden on one of his Bad-Moon nights and heard it. It was also a bad night for the badger because it was dying on our collapsible deckchair. But it turned out well for Dad because, instead of staring into the dark, he could kneel on the shed floor and call us to bring an old towel. Grandma opened a new bottle of milk and poured some into a saucer. Not the cream on the top. She always keeps that for herself, hidden in her denture mug.

Dad spent the night in the shed and buried the badger the next morning. But when he asked me to give it a name, I said no and slammed back indoors. I stormed up to bed and pressed my face into the pillow because we hadn’t been able to draw him out of the Bad-Moon girls’ horrible clutches when this battered and stinking old creature could. No reference to Grandma intended.

The Bad-Moon girls, Dad calls the slatterns in his head. I imagine washed-up can-can dancers, older than they should be, with crêpey eyes and wizened breasts, high-kicking on a stage with a worn velvet curtain.

They appear on days when Dad doesn’t know what he is thinking, or even if he is thinking. Those days can weigh less than air or more than an ocean. He has blank thoughts without feelings, followed by heavy feelings without thoughts. Time means nothing. A minute ticks by in the same rhythm as an entire day.

He can look at one thing for an hour without moving. He can see me or Victor without knowing we are in the room, peering at us as if we’re underwater, moving in warped slow motion.

After the nothingness, he wades through a stagnant lake with the moon reflected in it, waiting for daylight to rinse it away. He almost drowns while time ticks on. The sky is filled with black milk. No stars. Two days can pass before he surfaces.

Dad’s brain-switch, the focusing thing that the rest of us flick on to make things look better, is a bit buggered. Those are his words, not mine.

The Bad-Moon girls whisper evil in Dad’s ear, the sort of women who would set their own mother on fire if there were no other way to light their cigarettes. The trouble is, they can follow. Just as we were setting off to Clacton last autumn, they hunted him down.

***

The Bad-Moon Holiday

The leaves were turning to cornflakes, and the sun was bulging like a blood orange. A coach smelling of other people’s ham sandwiches was waiting at the end of Audette Gardens to take us to the guest-house with brown oil paintings of dogs and fruit and an ancient sticking-plaster over the light-switch.

In the family-room that smells of shrivelled grapes and prehistoric board-games, Mum and Dad never argue. Other people do and it is better than television. One time, we were all waiting in there for breakfast, savouring the prospect of salted porridge and boiled prunes, when the family hogging the better settee, the one with a stain the shape of Sweden on the arm, rowed about their Caroline’s bosoms.

“I sewed up the front of that bathing-suit, Caroline. I sewed it double. How come you’ve unpicked it? They’ll look like two spaniels in a sack.”

“Why do you always spoil my fun, Mum?”

“Just you sew it back up, lass. I won’t have the world and his wife getting an eyeful of what our Caroline ate for breakfast. If we ever get any.”

“Oh Dad, I’ll look a right sight. Might as well keep my cardigan on. And a muffler. How about an overcoat as well?”

“Fine, lass. As long as there’s nothing bobbing.”

Grandma stayed at Elsie and Stan’s last year because she refused to go near the seaside. “Bloody daft season to be paddling,” she said. “They lock up the conveniences at the end of August, you know. And I’m not broiling my ankles in a sea of someone else’s widdle.”

Victor was planning to fish for crab and be reunited with an old Action Man he’d left in the trouser-press. But we couldn’t leave the house.

Mum and Victor went as far as the pavement to tell the coach-driver we weren’t going. From the front-room window, I watched the fine drizzle stain Victor’s new gabardine coat. Afterwards, the rain never stopped.

Dad was sitting on a chair in the box-room, staring at nothing, his head filled with concrete. The light left his eyes. I stood near him, my hands still full of fruit pastilles for the trip.

“You go. You, Mum and Victor,” he said, sounding like a stranger. They were the last words he spoke for three days.

“But the holiday won’t feel like a holiday without you,” I said, knowing home wouldn’t feel like home either.

Mum came in and said the coach had understood. Because I imagined the coach nodding, I let out a stupid laugh, like a hideous, echoing bark.

We couldn’t even reassure Dad he would feel better, because there was no knowing how long it would last. When Grandma trod on Victor’s Messerschmitt in her new suede Norvics, we didn’t promise to glue the shattered pieces together. We distracted him with a box of Pontefract Cakes. With Dad, it would be like trying to mend a burst balloon. We crept out of the room and he didn’t notice.

Victor and I found a handful of Rich Highland Shorties and played Battleships way into the night. We shared a flattened Wagon-Wheel Victor found in the lining of his dressing-gown and made shadow-rabbits on the bedroom wall.

“A boy at school’s dad sometimes goes away,” Victor said, destroying my last submarine. “His mum and dad are always shouting about a barmaid. The dad knows her shoe size. But the mum doesn’t think he should.”

We never wonder out loud whether our mum or dad might storm off one day, but the colour always drains from Victor’s face when they argue.

While I destroyed his patrol-boat, he announced he didn’t believe in God anymore.

“I’m going to believe in someone real, like the Beatles,” he said. “Even Ringo.”

“It won’t change anything, Victor.”

He looked haunted after that, so I didn’t tell him how the wolf spider from Kauai Cave is no longer born with eyes because in the dark caverns where it lives and hunts and dies, it has grown used to eternal night. If Dad ever stays in his darkness and gives up waiting for a light to guide him out, I don’t think even George Harrison could help us.

A non-holiday is almost as much hell as a real one. Mum played Newmarket with us once, but it lasted five minutes because Victor hid a halfpenny in his mouth and turned blue. Even
Opportunity Knocks
seemed horrible. I put on my sun-dress, but changed back to slacks. Bare arms and legs felt awkward in the silent front-room with the curtains half-drawn.

Every lunchtime, Victor said, “Rissoles and mash taste like bird-seed and glue.” And he knows because he’s tried them.

The trouble was, we only had ancient potatoes, a tub of custard powder and three tins of Spam, but we couldn’t go shopping because Grandma didn’t know we were still at home. It would have upset her to see Dad that bad. Plus, Mum became extra-German and said, “If there vill be no holiday, I vill at least have a rest from Her Ladyship.”

In case we bumped into anyone, we had to stay in, creeping about the house and hiding when the doorbell rang. It never looked like anyone interesting, just people in long coats with Bibles or in sports-jackets with encyclopaedias. But crouching at the top of the stairs and seeing their sawn-up shapes through the ridged door-glass, I still felt we were missing something.

***

Today the Bad Moon is not in sight. Soon we’ll be flying along the autobahns, if the Traveller stays in one piece and if flying is another word for thump-grunt-rattling.