Come and Tell Me Some Lies (9 page)

She needed an ally. The nursery she still shared with Brodie and Flook offered no peace for her to read at night. Flook rolled from side to side for an hour after bedtime, droning ‘Dilute to taste, dilute to taste', and Brodie built armies and flung them across the floorboards and into Va Va's no-man's-land bed. She turned her face to the wall and closed her eyes. When the girl baby came, everything would be different. There would be white socks and shiny buckled shoes next to a lacy cot. The guns and soldiers would retreat before swarms of dolls and handbags, earrings and hairslides, and Eleanor would call the Girls and the Boys in for supper, instead of the Boys and Va Va.

Patrick woke them early on a still summer morning. ‘Darling hearts, you have a new baby brother.' Va Va burst into tears. Her mother had betrayed her, the infant had deceived her. Brodie and Flook bounced out of bed. ‘Can we call him Pansy?'

Va Va sobbed. ‘Daddy, we all wanted a girl baby. Are you sure we haven't got a girl?'

Patrick sat down. ‘Angel, this tiny new baby needs you all to look after him. He's longing to meet his big brothers and sister. We can't make him unhappy with tears, can we?'

Dan came home from hospital a day later. He was big and placid, and he smiled straight away, flaunting his happiness in his new world. By the time he was six weeks old he slept through the night, his appetite was huge, and Va Va was reconciled to his maleness. He looked like a Renaissance cherub, sturdy, dimpled and golden. Eleanor called him Angel Delcare and basked in the radiant ease of his infancy. Va Va dragged him around by the neck and called him her baby.

Dan was a golden boy. Va Va, Brodie and Flook, uniformed in red boiler-suits like miniature Chinese workers, had big knees and long mud-daubed legs. Black hair tangled down their backs and their smiles were gap-toothed in filthy faces. Dan, round and brown, haloed with yellow curls, was their delight. He wore a red baseball cap rakishly askew and rolled on the lawn while Patrick lay reading beside him.

August 1988

Dan was almost seventeen when, one August Sunday, he rode a motorbike a hundred yards down the road to the pub. He hit a car and destroyed his future as an athlete. His right leg was smashed, the bone splintered into tiny pieces. He came home from hospital six weeks and seven operations later in a plaster cast. His leg, though damaged, was saved, but complications and fifteen further operations followed, and for years he limped a fine line between amputation and recovery.

I rang him in hospital the day after the accident, struggling to keep my voice steady as I listened to him. ‘I hate it here. I want to go home. It hurts so much and I can't sleep. Everyone else here is old and one man just died in the bed across from me.' Dan sniffed, melancholy and alone.

I had not seen him yet and I could not imagine my tall, strong brother hemmed by plaster into a hospital bed. Dan had never stopped growing. He was still the baby of the family because he liked to be the baby, and Poppy wanted to be grown-up. He would perch on Mum's knee, cracking the chair and falling with her on to the kitchen floor, but every afternoon until his accident he trained for three hours with the Junior County
football team. Dad was very proud of this. Mum struggled to scrape the money together for a specially made pair of football boots (Dan's feet were too big for regular ones), and Dan and Dad sat in the sun and got brown while discussing football tactics.

Dad insisted that he too had played top-class football, although Brodie and I, jealous of Dan and Dad's exclusive sport, doubted it. Stung by our scorn, Dad produced a photograph, small, sepia and crinkled, of young men with voluminous shorts and Charlie Chaplin smiles.

‘Which is you?' But before Dad answered I saw Flook's face in the team. At nineteen they were identical, the same bones building the same features, more than fifty years apart.

Dan could never play again after his accident. His pride and his easy-going, happy nature made it impossible for the rest of us to see how much he minded. We guessed, and heaped guilt upon ourselves, secretly offering our own sound limbs to the gods in exchange for the return of Dan's. We had to make do with visiting him after his operations, bearing three Big Macs at a time. They vanished in seconds.

Poppy was a pale, delicate baby with the huge eyes of a hungry waif. Va Va was nine when her longed-for ally was born. Another girl. She was no longer the only girl. Now the boys had a sister who didn't boss them around and scream at them, but lay smiling dreamily as they played with her. Brodie and Flook, with two-year-old Dan trailing behind them, were a warrior tribe from which Va Va was excluded. She had not anticipated their interest in the new baby and was jealous of their doting glances at the cradle.

It was Easter when they first saw Poppy at the hospital. In the morning Va Va and her brothers loped round the garden, voices tossed away on the April breeze, collecting bright foil-covered rabbits left by the Easter Bunny. Gathering to compare booty, Va Va stiffened when Brodie announced, ‘I'm going to take my second-best bunny to Poppy.' ‘Yes. So am I,' said Flook, and they laid aside two red-wrapped rabbits.

Poppy lay like an amphibian exhibit in a glass box by Eleanor's bed. Blue veins meandered across her brow, her domed head bristled with fine hair, and Va Va felt sorry for her. She couldn't help being a girl. Va Va went home to make silver stars for
Poppy's bedroom ceiling. Her virtue suffered a setback when, planning to use the foil for a rainbow star, she went to look for her Easter eggs. On the windowsill the cosy cluster of fluffy chicks and bunnies had gone. In their place was a smear of chocolate carnage. Ripped foil tinkled in the draught and under the table Dobe chewed his toenail, dark eyes gleaming with guilt. ‘How could you?' Va Va stamped her foot. ‘This is all because we went to see the new baby. You're jealous of her, aren't you?' Va Va felt better; cleansed of her fury at the baby and martyred by the loss of her Easter eggs.

Poppy seemed a changeling child. Among her robust siblings she was like a china doll, white-skinned, hair peaking in a furry crest along her head. Her tapering fingers squelched in her food and she crowed with laughter as yoghurt dripped blotches on to the floor. Eleanor dressed her in lawn frocks and floral aprons and Poppy learned to walk using Dobe as support. They left home together every morning, tripping down the drive to nowhere. Nervous of her apparent frailty, Va Va refrained from dragging her around by the neck as she had done with Dan.

As school manacled me ever more firmly to timetables and order and concentration, I began to rail against the lack of boundaries at home. Sitting on the bus beside Brodie's silent misery I watched the smear of car headlights quiver and flash past in the shrouded winter evening. Flook was spending the night with a friend. Brodie crouched in his blazer, his mottled knees poking from grey flannel shorts. His face was masked, half by the stiff collar abutting his chin, half by his loathed school cap. ‘Why don't you take it off?' I asked.

‘I can't bear even to touch it. You know, I'm supposed to raise it every time I see Mummy and Daddy or anyone else's parents or a master from school.' He shuddered, his voice hard and cold, small with dislike.

Brodie was good at games and excelled in his work, but he hated school. His intense shyness and wayward humour set him apart from his peers; he never mentioned any friends to us, far less brought them home. Mummy worried that he might be unpopular, and asked his form master. ‘Archibald is an unsual boy' was all she got out of him. At home Brodie simmered on the Aga, reading, and hunted with his airgun through ploughed
fields and clumps of woodland around the house. At night he slunk up to his attic bedroom to do his prep. He painted the attic black and daubed it with red gloss motifs copied from his shelf of books on Red Indians. He set his alarm clock for 3 a.m. so that he could wake, be conscious of the fact that it was not time for school, and slip back into luxurious slumber.

Mummy met us in Aylthorpe. She was late. We huddled by the bus-stop, shifting our feet to arrest the cold which gnawed the soles of our shoes and bit our bones. ‘Who's at home?' I climbed over into the back through the only working door in the car. Brodie didn't speak; he drew a yellow exercise book from his satchel and began to mutter conjugations under his breath.

‘Helen is back from Ireland, and she's brought a peculiar character called Rex. She's moving to Norwich.'

‘Does that mean there won't be any supper?' Brodie scowled.

‘Of course there's supper. We're having the rest of yesterday's corned beef hash.'

I sank down against an uncoiled spring in the back seat of the car and sighed. ‘I hate Drinking Evenings.'

Our parents were poor. They had always been poor, and it had always been fine. We had animals and space and clothes and food; none of us was aware of money as a means towards anything but sweets on Saturday. But now Brodie, Flook and I were at school with children who lived in warm houses with carpets. Their fathers went out to work, and their mothers collected them from school in gleaming, silent cars which always worked. I led two lives, a day-time one of order and conformity followed by evenings of chaos.

Most of the time, the chaos was warm and familiar and comforting. In front of a bright fire, we sat with Mummy and read M.R. James ghost stories, or helped Daddy polish the old pewter jugs and tankards he picked up in junk shops along the coast. The thick walls of the house leaned inwards, welling heat, soporific and indulgent. Supper bubbled in the kitchen and the dogs yawned, curled like oversized shrimps in front of the hearth. Even going upstairs, through icy corridors where layer upon layer of cold heaped upon me until I reached the warm heart of my bedroom and the glow of the electric fire, was bearable.

But on Drinking Evenings the house smouldered angrily. The fire fizzed and belched smoke, no heat was given off by the wet logs. The kitchen cupboard sagged open, wafting a hint of old cheese and nothing else except some packets of lasagne corrugated by milk spilt long ago. The dogs scratched and the cats leapt on to the table, stealing anything, even raw potatoes, to express their anger. Brodie and I were clenched over our prep at the end of the kitchen table, ears closed crossly to the wine-stained voices of our parents and their friends. Upstairs, the corridor to our rooms was dark because the bulb had gone, and the chill air slapped my face as I hurried towards the snug haven of my room. But there the shock of cold was worse. My fire had not been turned on, and the little room lay forlorn, its private dignity struggling beneath neglect.

Helen sat next to us in the kitchen. She reeked of brandy, and her voice was deeper and more husky than usual, but her conversation thawed our frozen outrage. She was only five years younger than Mummy, but she never really seemed
like a grown-up. Helen had almond-shaped eyes which flashed stone blue when she was angry, and her voice purred with the resonance of bass chords on a church organ. She drank too much for my teenage puritan taste, but I loved her mad bad stories and the wicked slant of her eyes when she laughed.

Long ago, Helen had met an old man on an aeroplane, and she bewitched him with her sorceress charms. When he died, he left her a legacy which took her and Zoe and Vinnie to Ireland. There the money slowly evaporated in a haze of whiskey and oysters, and the rent of a beautiful house. Helen returned to England, pregnant with her son and escorted by a musician called Rex. Rex's fingers were long, yellowed at the tips by nicotine, and his face was pitted and pale. He sat at our kitchen table drinking Guinness with whisky poured into it, silent until the spirits ignited his smouldering rage. Daddy tried to talk to him, but became angry and went to bed. From my room above the kitchen I heard the house go quiet, and I fell asleep. Hours later, the still night was broken by crashing doors.

‘You are the devil's whore!' Rex screeched at Helen in the room below my bedroom. I shivered in my warm bed and hid my head under the quilt. I listened breathless for a scream or a thump. There was nothing, and in the morning, Rex and Helen sat at breakfast unscathed.

Feeding the new batch of hens, I glanced covetously at Zoe's pink leg-warmers. She and Vinnie had missed the beginning of term, and they were not going to school until after Christmas. This was also enviable. We finished feeding the hens and went up to my room. Vinnie leaned towards the dusty mirror and plaited her hair into tiny braids while Zoe and I sat on the bed
and she told me about Ireland. ‘Mum took us to a fair there. There were gypsy caravans and fiddlers. We stayed for three days, and we had to sleep in a tent.' Zoe twisted the silver rings on her fingers as she talked and puffed expertly on a cigarette she had stolen from her mother's bag.

‘Zoe had a boyfriend in Ireland,' said Vinnie, her wide smile the only part of her reflection visible through the decay of my mirror. Zoe, smoking, wearing make-up and carrying a handbag, seemed almost grown-up. Helen confided in her as an equal, and between them they looked after twelve-year-old Vinnie, sharing the responsibility of clean clothes, food and attendance at school.

Helen loved her daughters, but she was sometimes ill, and often depressed. She and Zoe argued and made up, while Vinnie bottled up her feelings and escaped to ride ponies whenever she could. I knew that they had different fathers, and that Vinnie's had been a West Indian musician. Camouflaged in the safety of two parents, I pretended not to notice that they never mentioned their fathers. I didn't know if they even knew them. I took Vinnie riding, and Zoe read a story to Poppy. She was looking forward to Helen's new baby. They stayed for the weekend and then drove off in Rex's grey van to the new house Helen had rented in Norwich.

Patrick's sixtieth birthday was commemorated by a book, and his party was written up by three newspapers. Va Va, Brodie and Flook thought they had become famous when they saw their photographs in the papers. ‘What a pity Dan and Poppy were asleep,' said Va Va piously, having made certain there was no mention of them in any of the articles.