Various Pets Alive and Dead (19 page)

Serge can almost hear the tick-tick-tick of Otto’s brain as he thinks aloud. He likes a technical challenge.

‘So you’re guessing he keeps the same passwords for all his transactions? Even his bank accounts?’

‘Don’t
you
?’ says Otto.

‘Yeah, but I can never remember passwords.’

‘Nor me. I’ve got too much other useless crap in my brain. Heh heh.’

Otto’s voice – confused, comic, cocky – does not inspire confidence. Underneath it all Serge can hear the same lost boy, shivering inside his crocheted blanket. Except that now he needs Otto to rescue him from the mess he’s in.

‘D’you remember what the Groans used to say, in the commune – private property is robbery?’

‘Send me the file, Soz. I’ll have a play around.’

Mr Philpott is as good as his word. Clara opens the door of her classroom to be greeted with the familiar whiff of foetid pee and a whirling rattling sound which takes her by surprise till she realises it’s the sound of the hamster wheel spinning furiously. The new arrival in the hamster cage is a bit darker in colour than Hamlet, and much slimmer and livelier. He’s already overturned his water bowl and flung his bedding all over the place (
Musclebound Hamster Champ Brings Terror to Local School
). But none of the kids notice that the hamster is different. They’re too busy chattering about their weekend’s exploits.

Jason Taylor and Robbie Lewis are sitting next to each other, passing something between them under the desk, nudging and grinning.

She mouths, ‘Stop it!’

They shuffle shiftily, and she smiles inwardly as she gives them the Look. She hasn’t forgotten her stolen purse. But in their childishness she sometimes catches a glimpse of the adults they will become – in and out of trouble, unemployed, hanging around the streets unless … That ‘unless’ is why she’s still here.

At lunchtime she goes down to the boiler room to thank Mr Philpott.

‘You like ’im, eh?’ he beams. ‘Better than t’ last bugger.’

‘Have you got a name for him?’

‘’Oratio. The philosopher.’

‘Mm. That’s good. What would hamster philosophy be like, d’you think?’

‘If a ’amster could speak, we could not understand ’im.’

‘Very profound. Shakespeare?’

‘Wittgenstein.’

‘Really?’

‘I told you I should’ve been an intellectual.’

Come four o’clock, the quiet that fills the classroom is still framed by shrill voices outside in the playground, the slamming of car doors, the hum of engines gradually fading into distance. And this is when she notices that the silence is more intense than it should be. An unobtrusive noise that’s been rattling away in the background all day is suddenly still. The hamster wheel has stopped. She’s about to investigate when there’s a knock on the door.

‘Come in!’

She expects it’ll be Jason or one of the other kids who’s forgotten something, but the door opens and in comes Oolie-Anna.

‘Oolie! What’re you doing here? How did you get here?’

She runs up and gives Clara a hug. ‘Edna dropped me off, din’t she? I telled her Mum and Dad was out, and you was looking after me.’

‘You shouldn’t have, Oolie. Mum’ll be worried sick.’ Clara puts on her Leviathan voice, which makes Oolie giggle.

‘No, because you’re gonner drop me off at five o’clock.’

‘But why?’

‘Cos I want to talk to you.’

Oolie starts wandering around the classroom, looking at the drawings on the walls and the display in the nature corner. She’s wearing, for once, a short-sleeved blouse, and Clara notices with a shock the scars on her arms which are usually covered up.

‘I wish you was my teacher, Clarie.’

‘I’m glad I’m not. You’d be naughty all the time.’

This makes Oolie laugh, throwing up her little round chin and closing her eyes.

‘No, I wouldn’t.’ She points. ‘I like that picture.’

It’s a drawing by the class swot, Dana Kuciak, of sunset over Doncaster Cathedral, copied from a photo.

‘What d’you want to talk about, Oolie?’

‘I want to go and live in my own flat.’ She sits down opposite Clara with a sulky face, and starts fiddling with the coloured pencils. ‘Mr Clemmins says it’s all right. But Mum won’t let me.’

‘Who’s Mr Clemmins?’

‘He’s the social worker in charge of me. Mum don’t like him.’

Clara’s eyes widen. This could be interesting.

‘Why not?’

‘She says he thinks he knows everything and he don’t.’

‘Hm. But why do you want to live on your own?’

‘Cos Mum makes me work on the allotment and Dad farts all the time.’

‘It’s because they love you, Oolie.’

Oolie looks unconvinced. ‘I don’t want to work on the allotment. It’s boring.’

‘So what d’you want to do?’

‘I want to watch filums but they won’t let me.’

This is new. Can Oolie even follow a film?

‘I’m sure they will.’

Unless Doro has dreamed up some new rule. Her behaviour has become so erratic recently. Surely it’s not still the menopause. Or maybe incipient Alzheimer’s.

‘What d’you want to watch, Oolie?’

‘Filums.’

‘Like what?’

‘
Girls at Play
.
Unin’abited
. This lad at work give ’em me.’

‘Oh, you mean they’re like DVDs?’

‘Yeah. Filums.’

‘Oolie, can’t you talk about this with Mum yourself?’

‘No. Cos soon as I start she goes on about you know what and she thinks it’s going to happen again if I live on my own, but it in’t, cos I’m older now, and not so daft.’

Clara has never heard her sister utter such a long sentence before. In fact, she can’t recall ever having heard Oolie allude to the long-ago fire which almost killed her and blew the commune apart.

‘What’s going to happen again?’ she prompts gently.

But Oolie shakes her head and clams up.

All of a sudden, a sound of rustling paper over by the book corner breaks the silence. A couple of books have slipped on to the floor, and an invisible hand is leafing through the pages. They stare. A brown furry head peeps round the corner of a page, rips it off and stuffs it into its cheeks.

‘Hey …’ Clara whispers.

‘Hey!’ shrieks Oolie, and dashes off in pursuit.

But he’s quick, this Horatio. Before Oolie can get there, he’s already round the other side of the room. Clara tries to intercept him, but he slips between the cupboard and the wall, and re-emerges by the waste bin.

‘Quick, Oolie! Over there!’

Oolie isn’t so nimble. She stumbles over a chair, stubs her toe and squawks with pain. The hamster disappears. Clara tiptoes over to the spot where he disappeared and silently gets down on her hands and knees.

But Oolie doesn’t do silent. ‘There! There!’ she yells. ‘The little bugger!’

They’re both down on their hands and knees now. The hamster is back in the book corner, staring at them through beady eyes. They crawl towards him. He watches, still busily chewing up
Horrid Henry
and tucking the shreds into his cheeks. When they’re about a metre away, he vanishes again. This time Clara saw where he went. There’s a space between the bottom of the bookcase and the floor. He scuttles along it, dives round a corner, then he’s gone again. Oolie races after him, knocking chairs over in all directions. The hamster is heading towards the door, with both of them after him on hands and knees, when the door swings open and in walks Mr Philpott.

‘What –?’

‘Quick!’ she shouts. ‘Quick! He’s run away!’

She races out into the corridor, just in time to glimpse a ginger blob slipping round the corner.

‘This way! He’s on the loose!’

The three of them break into a run, but the hamster is quicker.

At the end of the corridor, where it widens into the entrance hall, they stop and catch their breath. There’s no sign of the hamster. Then the door of the school office opens and earthy-but-godlike Mr Gorst/Alan emerges.

‘What’s going on?’

‘’Amster on the run!’ cries Mr Philpott.

‘Call the coppers! Quick!’ shrieks Oolie (she likes men in uniform).

Mr Gorst/Alan follows them out into the hall. They fan out in different directions.

‘There ’e goes! Little bugger!’

Oolie hares off through the double doors towards the playground, running and shouting at the top of her voice. She comes back, pink-cheeked and breathless.

‘’E done a runner.’

The hamster has completely disappeared.

‘You’re quite a runner too,’ says Mr Gorst/Alan.

She laughs. ‘Not as fast as ’im. ’E were reyt quick!’

‘I had a hamster once.’ A dreamy look has come over him.

Clara gazes deep into his twinkly eyes, and hears herself putting on a low mellifluous tone to murmur, ‘Really? Tell me about it, Alan.’

But no words come out of her mouth.

Oolie is full of excitement on the way back to Hardwick Avenue.

‘’E were nice, ’im.’

‘Who?’

‘’Im what said ’e ’ad t’amster. I wish I could ’ave a ’amster.’

It’s past five o’clock when she drops Oolie off. But something is snagging in her mind as she drives back towards Sheffield. Before the encounter with Mr Gorst/Alan, before the chase for the runaway hamster, there was something else Oolie had let slip.

‘I’m older now, and not so daft.’

Clara’s always assumed that Oolie never talks about the fire because she’s forgotten. But obviously something’s still there, buried in the storeroom of her mind, and if she’s ready to talk, maybe it’s time to exhume those old ghosts and lay them finally to rest.

After Clara has left on Monday evening, Doro resists the temptation to reprimand Oolie for not coming straight home, and busies herself in the kitchen. Fish pie of cod, prawns and smoked haddock, topped with dauphinoise potatoes, is what she has in mind as she watches the brown coils of potato peel tumble into the sink under the blade of her peeler.

Marcus and Oolie are curled up together on the sofa in front of the television. She regards them fondly through the open door, observing how alike they are, despite Oolie’s distinctive Down’s physiognomy. There’s a funny way they both have of wrinkling their noses when they laugh. She’s never noticed that before. They say people can grow alike through spending time in each other’s company, the way some people come to resemble their pets. Though Doro sometimes thinks she catches a trace of Bruno in Oolie’s features, and wonders whether maybe that’s why she finds it so easy to love her.

Where does biology end and nurture begin? In the commune days, they’d tried to escape the whole oppressive nuclear family set-up, drawing inspiration from the communal childcare on Israeli kibbutzim. After all, weren’t shared beliefs and commitments a much more logical basis for love and parenting than a mere accident of biology? It’s strange, but kind of nice, that after all these years Marcus wants to get married. They must get around to talking to Oolie about it. She’s never questioned – why should she? – that she’s just as much their child as Clara or Serge.

Does Marcus ever question where Serge’s looks come from? She wonders. Neither she nor Marcus are small and dark, and his maths ability is not inherited from them, that’s for sure. He was always a strange, moochy little kid, sneaking off up to the attic to play with his pine cones and snail shells. Clara and Marcus, on the other hand, are similar in looks and personality – serious, earnest, impractical. Which is why she’s in here peeling the potatoes and he’s in there watching the Channel 4 news. To be fair, Marcus did ask whether there was anything he could do, but his way of peeling potatoes is to cut thick slabs off each side. You’d have thought someone who can manage the history of the Fifth International could master a potato peeler, but apparently not.

‘Come and sit, Mum!’ Oolie pats the space on the sofa beside her. ‘Dad says it’s about the cries of Catty Lizzie.’ She tries to tickle Marcus. ‘Catty Lizzie!’

‘Ssh! I’m listening. Scarper!’ He wriggles free and turns up the volume.

‘I wanna watch telly with you!’

‘Collapse of a major American bank,’ he calls to Doro through the open door. ‘Crisis in the world’s financial markets. Just as we predicted. What a sight – look!’

She puts her head through the door and sees on the screen a procession of men in suits, carrying boxes.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Staff at Lehman Brothers leaving the building carrying their possessions in cardboard boxes.’

‘Why?’

‘No one will do business with them. Their assets are all tied up in toxic loans. Capitalism eats its own children.’

‘She never!’ says Oolie.

‘I’m sure they won’t be the last. According to Kondratieff’s theory, another slump was long overdue.’

‘Mm.’ Doro slices the potatoes, arranges them over the fish and puts it all in the oven. Then she joins them on the sofa.

Marcus is sipping in excited gulps from a bottle of lager. ‘What I fear is that a depression will once more bring the ugly spectre of fascism to our streets.’

‘Really?’

Doro tries to picture what fascism in Doncaster would look like. Gangs of blackshirts goose-stepping around the Frenchgate shopping centre? The idea seems a bit ludicrous.

‘When people feel insecure, they look around for someone to blame – Jews, immigrants, gypsies. That’s what happened in 1929 after the crash – governments everywhere slashed public spending. There was chaos. The Great Depression. Then Roosevelt came along with the New Deal in 1933. Spent millions on infrastructure. Created jobs for the unemployed. Turned the whole thing around.’

‘But how could he spend, if they’d run out of money?’

‘He borrowed. You have to borrow to invest. Keynes argued we should do the same in Britain, but they were saved by the Second World War. Of course war is the biggest public spending spree of all.’

Marcus is the only person she knows who talks in fully formed sentences, but his cleverness is sometimes a tad irritating. It’s strange how someone so bright can be so unaware of this. Dear Marcus. The spark that used to flash between them has long since given way to a cosy glow, warm but not exactly incendiary. She finds her mind drifting back to the fish pie, whose delicious smell is stealing in through the open door.