Various Pets Alive and Dead (9 page)

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Yes also.’

‘Sunday?’

‘What you want, Sergei?’

She swivels round abruptly in her chair and their eyes meet. She has that disconcerting way of smiling and not smiling, which he finds irresistibly sexy.

‘A drink? A meal? A film?’

This is at the very clean end of the range of things that he wants, but it’s a start.

‘Okay.’ She turns back to her screen.

Maybe she’s having her period. Women often get ratty at that time of the month. Babs, his last girlfriend, was like that – wouldn’t let him near her. He’ll try again, when she’s had a chance to calm down.

But at six o’clock sharp, before he can finalise any arrangements for Sunday, she pulls on her jacket and heads towards the lifts at full speed. Why the hurry? Most people won’t be leaving for another hour or so. He hangs around for a while, reluctant to go home just yet. The floor is humming with Friday night vibe, like the whole world is going out to celebrate the end of the working week. During the day English is spoken on the trading floor but, as everyone begins to relax, their talk breaks up into a babble of languages. The three blond Aussie guys have palled up with the two blonde American girls (let’s hope they have a friend) and they’re going out to get seriously wasted. The dapper-suited Japanese bond traders are laughing their heads off quietly in their corner. There are a couple of Singaporeans on that team too, but they tend to hang out with the Chinese, in their palaces of excess on Gerrard Street. Even the slightly stiff Indians on Currencies are heading off to a bar with Lubkov the long-haired Russian mathematician and Ishmail al-Ali the smiling Palestinian ex-aeronautics student who is reputed to have lost FATCA £5 million through a computational error. He doesn’t look as if it bothers him.

Above the hubbub, Tim the Finn’s voice warbles, ‘I’m forever blowin’ bubbles …’ and one or two others join in.

Serge can’t sing, but he feels the lightness bubbling up in him. He has something to celebrate too, and though he can’t discuss it with anybody he decides to tag along with the two French guys, both in their late twenties and darkly good-looking in that louche Gallic way, and the older fairer Hamburger, who are all heading off to a bar to drink to the beauty of life, the Hamburger’s baby daughter and Carla Bruni’s smile.

‘…
hyper mignonne
…
plutôt baisable
.
Qu’en pensent les Anglais
?’

‘Like a …
Comme une gazelle
?’ he volunteers.

They laugh and he laughs too, suddenly engulfed in a warm gloopy wave of at-oneness with this beautiful young high-flying free-floating no-baggage global elite, whose title is wealth, whose passport is brains, whose only nation is money.

On the car radio, they’re playing Bob Marley – ‘By The Rivers Of Babylon’
–
as Clara sits tapping her thumbs against the steering wheel in the Parkway traffic jam driving back into Sheffield on Friday night. It was her favourite song when they lived at Solidarity Hall, and it leads her thoughts back over the half-forgotten trails of her childhood.

… there we sat down, yea-ea, we wept …

After the death of Fizzy the hamster, and her pasting by those horrible boys, she withdrew into herself; she stopped putting her hand up for the teacher’s questions; everything came to seem so muffled and far away, she just couldn’t be bothered. As time passed, she began to stumble over her reading. She often had earaches and skipped school to stay at home at Solidarity Hall, where there was always something interesting going on.

‘I want to go to a different school,’ she told Doro one day.

‘Why, darling?’

‘I haven’t got any friends.’

‘We have to learn to make friends with all different kinds of people,’ said Doro.

‘Why?’

‘Because we believe in cooperation.’

How come nobody had told her this before?

‘Why?’

Doro shrugged and gave her a hug. ‘Because it’s the sort of people we are.’

… when we remembered Zion …

She sings along, remembering.

People at her junior school used to pity them – the commune kids – because they wore each other’s clothes and wolfed down their free school dinners. Although they weren’t actually hungry, she remembers how they yearned for meat and for puddings, which were seldom on the menu in Solidarity Hall. What the other kids didn’t know, what they could never explain, was the advantage of having several parent-adults who looked after them in a benignly haphazard way, whom they could play off against each other. They didn’t know the freedom they had in the commune playroom, which they called Thinlandia because it was the ex-isle of Lennie the Leader. And Clara was its queen.

… carried us away … captivity … required of us a song …

Once, when she was nearly eight, a couple of years after the hamster incident, she overheard Mrs Wiseman, her class teacher, telling the Head, ‘They’re all from singing parent families.’ She said it in a whisper, hiding her thin lipsticky mouth behind the pages of the register, as though the phrase was too shocking to be uttered aloud, but to Clara it sounded magical.

Her confidence must have bounced back enough for her to put up her hand and ask, ‘What’s a singing parent family, miss?’

‘I wasn’t talking to you, Clara,’ she replied.

That night, over dinner around the long yellow-painted table in the kitchen at Solidarity Hall, she asked, ‘What’s a singing parent family?’

As usual, there were several conversations going, and everyone was talking so loud it was hard to get a word in edgeways. She had to repeat her question a few times and bang her spoon on the table to get attention.

‘Don’t shout, Clara,’ said Marcus. He and Fred the Red were discussing pirate property. (For some reason, they seemed to find this topic endlessly fascinating.)

It was Moira Lafferty’s turn on the cooking rota, and she was a vegetarian who believed in balanced proteins, so beans and brown rice were on the menu again. Otto and Serge started flicking their bullet-hard beans at each other – they were bullet-hard, because no one ever remembered to presoak them. Serge ducked to avoid a flying bean and toppled backwards on his chair on to the floor. Everybody ignored him apart from Doro.

‘Are you all right, Serge?’ she said. ‘You’re always tumbling. Anyone would think you were dyspraxic.’

Clara banged her spoon again. ‘Why doesn’t anybody listen to
me
?’

‘Speak out, Clara,’ said Nick Holliday.

‘What were you saying, darling?’ asked Doro.

‘The teacher said we’re a singing parent family. So why don’t you ever sing?’

‘Arise ye starlings from your slumbers …!’ Fred the Red’s deep baritone rolled from the end of the table.

‘Arise ye criminals who won’t …!’ Marcus joined in.

‘It’s not singing parent, it’s single parent, Clara,’ Nick Holliday explained in his quiet teachery way. ‘It’s when children have just a mother or just a father …’

She felt a small prick of loss at the dullness of it.

‘The reason in the vault of thunder …!’ thundered Fred, waving the ladle for attention and weighing into the discussion. ‘I would say a family means whatever you want it to mean. Historically, it has taken a number of different forms, including –’

‘Are we a single parent family?’ squeaked Serge.

‘Course not, pratt stick. We’ve got loads of parents.’

‘Don’t call me a pratt stick.’

‘Doro says you’re a pratt stick!’

‘Clara, Serge, please …’

‘She started it …’

‘Oh, shut up!’

‘Great dinner, Moira.’ Marcus grabbed the ladle from Fred and helped himself to more stew, which apart from the beans contained only chopped onions, tinned tomatoes and several of Moira’s long auburn hairs. ‘Shouldn’t one of you feminists explain to Clara that the family’s a patriarchal construct to facilitate the subordination of women and enslave them within the domestic sphere?’

As he spoke, a light clicked on in Clara’s brain. She stirred the words around in her head like a magic potion. She committed them to memory. She practised saying them out loud when she was on her own. They tasted of power.

Then, one day, she got her chance to use them.

‘Now, I’d like you all to write a page about your family,’ said the class teacher, Mrs Wiseman.

It was her habit to set some work, then leave them to it while she sneaked off to the staffroom to smoke a fag. The kids could see her through the staffroom window, puffing away.

Clara put her hand up. ‘Miss, the family’s a pastry ark construction to fascinate the sobbing nation of women in Domestos fear.’

Everyone stared at her in amazement. The teacher fixed her with a stony look.

‘Those are very big words for a very little girl.’

Clara just smirked and lowered her eyes, letting the words work their magic.

There was a ripple of shuffles and whispers around the classroom. Sensing a rebellion, Mrs Wiseman ordered them to get their books out and disappeared into the staffroom for a fag and a sulk. She didn’t return until just before lunch, by which time a full-scale riot had broken out and kids were running around the room yelling, ‘Sodding nation!’ while others were banging their desk lids and chanting, ‘Pase-tree! Pase-tree!’

… how shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? …

From then on, the other kids, even the hamster girl, started to treat her with respect. They consulted her about spelling, sex, smoking and other essential information. She always answered their questions fully and freely, inventing the things she didn’t know. At home, in front of the mirror, she practised the Look.

That’s how she discovered the joy of teaching.

It was Nick Holliday who’d encouraged her to become a teacher, with his weird shouty partner Jen, Otto’s mother, before she decamped to another commune where all the kids were called Wild. Sometimes she misses all her weird co-parents. Chris Howe and Fred the Red, who’d chosen Oolie-Anna’s name, theorised about developing the socialist personality. Fred the Red wore the same dung-coloured jumper and a black knitted cap pulled over his ears year in year out, and smelled of cheese and drains, but he played the guitar and told thrilling bedtime stories about Lennie’s adventures in Thinland. Chris Howe, plump and pink like an uncooked sausage, paraded around wearing just a T-shirt and made the kids giggle. Moira Lafferty with her lovely hair and Capiz shell jewellery showed them how to make masks and finger puppets. Chris Watt introduced vegetable carving into the commune in order to disguise the vegetableness of vegetables, so the kids who turned their noses up at anything green or crunchy could pretend they were something else (Clara finds the magic still works for her, and it obviously works for Jason too). And for a while there was Mystery Megan – that’s what the kids called her, because she never said anything.

So many mums and dads to fuck you up with their good intentions. She sighs, remembering the grubby intimacy of the playroom at Solidarity Hall, with its sky-blue ceilings and rainbow walls and stacks of dusty books piled up in one corner, and the mad belief put about by the Groans that they were on a mission to change the world.

… yea-ea, we wept, when we remembered Zion …

Maybe Doro’s right – maybe it would be fun to get everyone together again one more time. A few fat raindrops splat against the glass from a heavy purple cloud hanging over the city skyline. The air smells humid and close. She flicks the windscreen wipers on and prays it will clear up in time for Community Day tomorrow.

There’s rain in the air as Serge follows the flow pouring out of the office at home time; occasional drops splat on his head, but the breeze is warm and they dry quickly. He wonders where Maroushka has vanished to. The French guys and the Hamburger are up ahead, and he keeps a distance, ready to abandon them should she materialise.

Still trailing them, he crosses the square in front of St Paul’s, heading towards a wine bar which according to the Hamburger stocks the ultimate burgundy. Then his eyes are caught by a flash of yellow in the milling Friday night throng. Yes, it’s Maroushka. Strangely, she’s in almost exactly the same place he saw her when he was having a coffee with Doro. A coincidence? A pattern?

He breaks away from his group and heads off in her direction. She’s weaving in and out of the sweaty home-time throng and the tourists bunching around the cathedral. She disappears. Then he sees her again. It’s easy to spot that yellow jacket. It draws him like a beacon. Poetry pulses in his veins.

Princess Maroushka!

Hear the song of Serge!

Don’t you feel the urge

To be with me beneath the starry skies?

Faint Fibonacci spirals in far-off galaxies.

We’ll hold our breath

Waiting for lightning strikes

And run along the beach in our Nikes.

Okay, not the Nikes.

Suddenly someone shoves past him, a thin tall woman with streaked blonde hair and a classic Vuitton over her arm.

‘Steady on, lady,’ he mutters, but she’s already out of earshot, barging her way in Maroushka’s direction. Seems like she’s on her tail.

As she gets close, she lets out a long low wail, sort of halfway between a moan and a war cry. Maroushka hears, stops, turns, sees the woman and breaks into a run. The woman starts to run too. He follows, weaving through the crowd behind them, keeping them just in sight.