Tying Down The Lion (6 page)

Dad grapples with the steering, his feet dancing all over the pedals.

“Christ, lad.”

“Oh,
mein Gott
, Roy!”

“Dad, watch out!”

“Fuck me.”

Number Three.

He jerks up the handbrake an inch from the car in front. Everyone lets their breath out.

“Wow, Dad, a perfect pit-stop,” Victor shouts.

More like a resurgence of everyone’s picnic.

“Hey, Dad,” Victor goes on, “did you know you said…”

“Yes, son. All right. No harm done.”

“Yes there is. Every time you say that word a dormouse dies.”

There’s the proof. Victor is not like other boys.

Dad lights three cigarettes at once and passes one to Mum and one to Grandma.

Mum has avoided answering my question and I can’t ask again because her face is like candle-wax. When she turns to look at Dad, I can see tears swelling. But she doesn’t let them fall. She just whispers, “I should have been there with them,” as if the subject is a gob-stopper wedged in her throat. And I know that’s painful because it happened to me in a hockey lesson. Gillian had to bash me on the back to get it out before Miss Monger saw, and it flew on an impressive trajectory from deep-field straight into the shin-pad box.

When Mum talks about the past, she usually starts with the part about meeting Dad in Berlin after the war and moving in with Grandma in Oaking.

“I felt like an intruder,” she always says. “When I first arrived, wearing the perfume your father had found for me, the one unbroken bottle in a ruined shop in Berlin, Grandma sniffed the air and said the toilet must be blocked. When Dad and Grandma went to work, I listened to the noise of his motor-cycle until it disappeared. It took an age. Afterwards, the only sound was the tick of the clock. Grandma taught her first parrot, Winston, to turn his back on me as soon as she left the house.”

It seems that Dad and Grandma were forever in the prison. Either A or B-wing, Dad was then. I can’t remember which. It was high security anyway because he had to wear the clip-on tie. He’s a warder and Grandma became a cleaner there after she was widowed during the war. My grandfather didn’t fight. “Too pickled,” Dad told me once. “When he had a blood-test, the syringe was filled with pure Three Barrels. He fell in the river one night, and when the police were searching for him, they said the hedges alongside the road to The Slug and Lettuce were bristling with empty bottles.”

So Mum left a privileged family with a grand piano and a shiny floor, or at least that was the case before the house and the city were blown to pieces, to live in a pebble-dashed terrace with, shamefully, a shed for a porch.

“An old English dictionary and an even older radio kept me company,” Mum often tells us. “I never dared to sit back against the cushions for fear of denting them. After translating the newspaper into German and back again, I folded it exactly as Grandma had left it. I could hardly wait for your dad to come home. I ran into the yard the second he zoomed in through the back-gate, even before he had a chance to lever Grandma out of the side-car.”

New English words and half a Lincoln Cream were Mum’s only nourishment until dinner, because she was confused by Grandma’s cantankerous cooker and terrified of disturbing the contents of the biscuit tin. Words, she says, became her Sustenance and her Salvation. I imagine she worked through the dictionary alphabetically.

I wish she would talk now, but she seems niggled and tense. It seems useless trying to help people troubled by the past, because you can’t go back and change anything for them.

The car clatters through the miles until we’re on the stifling ferry at Dover. The boat smells of chips and eau-de-cologne. Dad is perspiring after a spectacular hand-brake turn into the parking bay. Stacks of moist people in their brand-new holiday clothes pack the steps to the restaurant deck. Dozens of Belgian teenagers are eating potato-crisps, then blowing into their empty packets and bursting them in people’s ears. Grandma, nose in the air, sniffs the salty air in a stiff British way, as if no one foreign understands how to behave.

The boat is shabby and noisy, and looking through the grimy portholes at the grey sea rocking and rolling us along is making me queasy, but being out of the car is a relief. We sit down to eat even though all our stomachs are heaving with chocolate. But there’s not much else to do, and we don’t know when we’ll next have a meal after Ostend.

“Once we’re back on the road, there’ll be no stopping unless you’re dead and I have to tip you out to get rid of the stench,” Dad tells us. “And even then I might just bung you out the window.”

No one laughs. I feel sorry for Dad, but he is being a bit pathetic.

“That handbrake must be feeling the strain by now, eh, lad?” Grandma says. “And what about those beetles nibbling the wood? I can hear them, you know. The floor’s about to fall through. Sounds like Pinky and Perky are trapped underneath.”

“I’ll set the Cybermen on you,” Dad whispers.

There’s an end-of-tether note in his voice, so we all fall upon the dog-eared menu for distraction.

“Blood and sand, there’s gammon and pineapple-ring,” Dad announces, brightening. “I fancy something exotic.”

“Now that’s just mixing your dinner with your pudding,” Grandma says.

“No, it’s high class grub, Ma. The pineapple juice cuts through the grease.”

“Like Vim then.”

“I had it last year after we won the World Cup and I went to that posh restaurant with D-Wing.”

“Can they eat with handcuffs on, Dad?” Victor asks, balancing T-K commando-fashion across the cruet set.

Seven-year-olds have brains the size of walnuts, the shrivelled kind.

“If you save the pineapple, I’ll wrap it in a serviette,” Grandma says. “And when we get home I’ll have it with a drop of custard. I’ll make it myself, Bridge. Don’t want my bowel stopped up for a fortnight again, do I?”

We carry on looking at the strange menu while Grandma trundles off to find the Ladies, casting terrifying glances at anyone remotely foreign, even a tiny French nun on crutches.

The man at the next table is busy spreading out leaflets and maps of France. He looks up and smiles across at Dad. Dad smiles back, rasping his hands together in their driving-gloves. He keeps them on, but he takes off his car-coat, all excited about his glamorous meal. He’s wearing his sagging cardigan with the weighty leather buttons like big toffees and for a moment it feels like home.

The waitress explains we have the wrong menu. Cooked dinners are not available for the afternoon crossing. Dad seems to shrink inside his cardigan at the non-appearance of our tropical meal, worried he’s let us all down. We all stare at the faded photograph of the pineapple-ring until it looks like a clapped-out life-belt from the Lido. The holiday mood darkens again.

We listen to other people’s rustling and crackling, the clink of glasses and the rasp of tongs in the metal bowl of sugar-lumps. No one speaks. Victor doesn’t even dare to eat the sugar lumps because Mum is still quiet and Dad is holding her hand. We sit like stuffed dummies, not looking at each other and awfully interested in the scribble patterns on the melamine table. A money-spider is attached to the serviette-holder, springing up and down in a wild dance. It’ll be a dance of death if he falls in the milk-jug.

The woman at the next table is wiping her daughter’s mouth. She looks too old to be fussed over, but acts as if she’s still a baby. Her coarse hair is like a shock of fuse-wire, shorn as short as a school-boy’s. She turns towards me, her mouth gaping like a cut plum. Her teeth are as jagged as a row of tilting gravestones.

She stands up and points at me, but the patient mother catches hold of her daughter’s cotton frock, bunching it in her patient hands, trying to restrain her.

But the girl breaks free, her large open sandals, brand new Clark’s with a rubbery sole like a thick sandwich, clacking on the smooth floor. Even I was allowed to stop wearing those when I was eleven. This girl could be fifteen or more, although it is hard to be sure. She lurches to our table and holds out her dress like a ballerina.

“Bwa, bwa,” is all she can say. Her voice is deeper than Dad’s.

Black hair smothers her arms and legs, as if she is a wild animal in a frock.

Bwa-Bwa is wearing a white dress with cornflower sprigs, a large version of a child’s party-frock, the sort that comes with matching frilled pants. I wish I was still young enough to wear those, although when Peter proposes to me by the Danube, or it might be the Severn, depending where our jet-set life has taken us, my Biba maxi will be fluttering in the breeze. But not enough to show my underwear, matching or otherwise.

“Bwa-bwa-bwa.”

Desperate to pull the girl away, the mother scuttles across. It becomes quite a tussle, but she doesn’t shout or lash out. The father pretends not to be involved. He folds one leaflet and opens another. Perhaps they take it in turns to be the one who sits with a patient smile while the other dashes and sweats and grabs, hoping to attract less attention that way.

The mother wears a full apron and solid shoes. Her hair is wound into a tight bun. She must stud it with a thousand pins like the Christmas oranges we decorate with cloves. She probably sits in her quiet bedroom for the ritual, taking as long as she can to push in the last pin even though her arms are tired, until she hears “Bwa-bwa” through the keyhole. Then she sighs, but not loud enough for anyone to hear.

A family with sensible matching hair-cuts all stare at the mother trying to lever the girl’s fingers off the edge of our table. She’s gripping so hard they turn bluish and she barks, “Bwa-bwa!” the whole time. I’m staring too, not at the girl’s strangeness, but at her elegant nails, each one filed to a perfect arch and buffed into oval pearls. I feel ashamed that her beautiful fingers and her feminine dress shock me.

The pudding-bowl-headed parents, whose pudding-bowl-headed children sit up straight with their elbows tucked in, begin talking as if this is the Ritz.

“Do you think there’s an alternative dining-room, dear?”

“Possibly. I’ll call our waitress.”

“Which is ours—that one with the bushy eyebrows?”

“I didn’t notice her face, dear, but she had rather sturdy legs. I can’t see her. Shall we just toddle back in half-an-hour?”

They say nothing about Bwa-Bwa, but that somehow warps their well-spoken sort of politeness into plain rudeness. Bwa-Bwa’s parents keep their smiles glued on. They have to. It’s a performance and they must keep up the show.

Mum is stroking the girl’s hand and inching her chair towards her, marvelling at the exquisite nails, tracing her own finger-tip around them. Bwa-Bwa quietens down, surprised.

“How pretty they are, dear,” Mum says. “Look at mine. A mess!”

The girl’s eyes never leave Mum’s face.

“And mine,” I say, picking up Mum’s thread in a kind of human weaving. We present our ordinary nails, comparing them with the flawless set clutching the table. The girl burrows her face into her mother’s apron. Saliva froths onto it. I’m willing Victor to keep quiet.

“Thank you,” whispers the mother. “You’ve made her happy.”

Mothers, I realise, are kinder to strangers’ children than their own. When Gillian’s mother arranged for me to win pass-the-parcel at her fifth birthday party because I’d only just recovered from measles, Gillian spent the rest of the afternoon on a mission to steal my dot-to-dot book prize. Her mother eventually found it behind the toilet. But it was no good. Gillian had sat in there joining all the bloody dots with permanent felt-tip.

The mother shepherds Bwa-Bwa back to their table, where the father cups her face in his hands and presses a kiss on her nose. “Sit by me and eat this peach,” he says. “I’ll pare it for you.”

She plays with the fuzzy trimmings while he posts peach segments into her mouth. Afterwards he wipes her lips with his blue handkerchief. All this time, the mother eats her own peach in peace. When they walk up the steps to the deck, Bwa-Bwa holds everyone up while she tucks the whole of her dress into her knickers. The smile never leaves the mother’s face.

“How come we don’t get peaches?” Victor grumbles. At least he doesn’t stare. He just thinks about his own stomach. As usual.

“I think that family’s got it all sorted down to a fine art, Victor,” Dad says, reaching across and holding Mum’s hand again. “The parents know the girl likes peaches so they packed their own.”

“Does that mean you’ve brought me a slice of Manor House cake and a cream-soda?” Victor asks.

Anything would be better than wrestling with the hard butter and flabby slices of toast our waitress calls High Tea. The toast is more like face-flannel, the worn grey kind.

“What was wrong with that girl?” Victor asks.

“Nothing,” Mum says.

“But she can’t talk properly.”

“No, but her feelings are the same as anyone else’s,” Dad says, folding his toast over a spiral of butter and posting it into his mouth. “Maybe she thinks there’s something wrong with us.”

Victor thinks about this, but seven-year-old boys have heads like coconuts—ungainly, tufty-haired and weighed down inside with ghastly senseless liquid brains. “She’s as hairy as…”

“Pipe down, son,” Dad says.

“But when we went to the zoo, Dad…”

“Now hold the bus. I’m warning you.”

“But they’ve gone now, so why does it matter?”

“Because other people are listening and they’re prejudiced enough,” Dad manages to whisper through his toast.

Victor looks blank and tries to stab an icy butter curl with T-K’s crampon. The spider panics and falls into the milk just as Mum pours it into her coffee.

“Something shifted in her brain before she was properly created,” Dad says. “But she’s as human as we are.”

“Created? Isn’t that what God does?”

“Well, yes, that’s right, Victor. God created her the same as he created us.” Dad looks pleased with this, certain he’s off the hook now. But Victor is still dangling bait.

“She’s not the same as us though, is she, Dad? I think her Mum’s egg must have gone off.”

Dad has no idea how many facts circulate in the junior playground in these enlightened days. He almost chokes on his crust. Not that it’s actually crusty. It’s as soggy as bread left out in the rain on a bird-table. He lights a cigarette and Victor’s face lights up too because he got the last word.