Dear Doctor Lily (10 page)

His mother's explanation was, ‘Your father didn't love us enough.'

His father did not try to explain. He just told Terry, ‘We'll be together a lot of the time, and we'll still always be the most important people in the world to each other.'

So if that was truly so, what Terry had to do was to act decently, and Dad would one day come back and live at home, and there would be another dog, even Buster back, why not? His father's terrier had gone to a new home, because he could not be kept in the apartment, and Terry's mother had never liked him.

Terry began to behave quite well. No screaming or throwing things. Enough homework to get by. The garbage taken out. ‘You're the man of the house now, Ter.' His mother thought that would flatter him. He explained to Eddie that he had got to lie low for a while, and Eddie understood, true friend that he was, and did not involve him in the riskier adventures. Terry did not
see his father often enough, but it was great when they were together. No arguments. No testing Dad to see how much he would stand. They did things his mother would not approve of, like going to a wrestling match and staying up late to watch a horror movie propped up side by side on the sofa-bed in Dad's apartment, eating Chinese food with chopsticks.

His father usually dropped him off at the house, had a few calm, reasonable words with his mother on the doorstep, and then drove away.

One time, to get him used to the idea of coming back, Terry said casually, ‘Why not come in?'

‘Oh – I don't know that I have time.'

‘Cup of coffee, maybe? A drink?'

‘All right, then. Why not?'

His mother, who was dressed to go out with one of her boyfriends, was annoyed. So Terry made the coffee and his father sat in his usual chair, the one he had wanted to move to the apartment, but it was too wide for the doorway, quite at home. Terry fussed around him, bringing him a cushion, a plate of cookies, lighting the table lamp, showing some new photographs.

‘You want a Polar Bar? We have some in the freezer. Still eat Polar Bars, Dad?'

‘Not without you, I don't.'

‘Let's have one now. Can we, Mom?' he remembered to ask, being virtuous. He brought the ice-cream, unwrapped in saucers, with spoons and paper napkins, and sat on a stool near his father.

‘Gee, this is cosy, isn't it, Dad?'

‘Sure is.'

Terry's mother had not sat down, and was walking about in high heels, the calves of her legs tight and her hair polished like a metal cap.

‘You'll have to go, Paul. I have theatre tickets, and Terry's going to sleep over with a friend.'

‘I don't have to, Mom. I can stay here, if Dad could stay till you get back.'

His mother frowned. ‘I don't think that's a good idea. Your father has to go anyway. How about dropping Terry off at the
Wakes', Paul?' When she was telling you to do something, she often put it as a question.

‘Eddie Waite? You still seeing him?'

‘Yeah. He's my friend. Why?'

‘Nothing,' his father said carefully. ‘Just watch it, though.'

At school, Terry and Eddie still had fun beating the system wherever they could, using their secret code to each other in spelling tests, pushing vile notes through the ventilation holes of enemies' lockers. But it was hidden stuff. No open warfare with teachers, who began to suspect that Terry Stephens might make something of himself after all.

When he showed his father his report card, with three Bs, his father was so thrilled with him that Terry almost jumped in and said, ‘So will you come back home, then?' Only somehow he couldn't say the words.

‘Missed your big chance,' Eddie grumbled at him. Although he did not personally agree with Terry's new image, he was involved in this campaign. His own father would never come back. ‘If he did, I'd walk out,' he boasted.

‘There'll be lots more chances.' Terry was hopeful. People could get undivorced any time. His parents were just being divorced for a bit, like a vacation.

He had never earned any money, except for the odd quarters his father had paid him for doing jobs his mother said he should do for nothing; but when Randy Sparke got fed up with his newspaper route, Terry took over his job.

Three days a week, the van from the local paper dropped bundles at the drug store. Terry counted out his copies after school, slung them over his shoulder in a big orange bag, and bicycled around several streets. It was tedious work, and often wet and cold. In old movies, newspaper boys hurled rolled-up newspapers from a great distance on to porches and front paths without getting off their bikes. The
Clarion
prided itself on personal delivery. Terry had to get off his bike, trudge to whichever door the customer wanted him to use, ring the bell or knock, wait, sometimes for ever, until somebody opened the door, and hand over the paper with the celebrated
‘Clarion
smile'. If nobody was home, you tucked the paper behind the storm
door, and if there was no storm door, you put it in a plastic bag and left it on the step.

It took a long time for not much money, but secretly Terry quite enjoyed the routine and the serious purpose of it. He would not admit that to Eddie, who knew easier ways to get money.

He had to keep accounts, and have the right amount ready for the
Clarion's
Mr Frazier, who called every week, counted the money with a face as if he were going to sneeze, and gave Terry his small share, which he often took round to Eddie, to see what they should do with it.

He had a lot of trouble with Mrs Jukes. She lived with ailing Mr Jukes, who was imprisoned somewhere within and could be heard calling for her feebly and without hope. Their violet-coloured house was fronted by a painfully neat garden, where the stiff bushes stood to even height, like soldiers, and the two square flower-beds had shiny metal edges round them.

For some reason, Mrs Jukes hated Terry. The first time he rang her bell, she stuck her big ugly purple head out of the back door and snarled, ‘Where's Randy?'

‘I'm on his route now, ma'am.'

‘Why didn't the paper tell me?'

Terry shrugged. ‘How should I know?'

‘Don't be fresh. And don't ring the bell again, do you hear? Never. There's sickness here, whether you care or not. Put the paper in the mailbox.'

‘Suits me.'

Her mailbox was on a rustic post near the sidewalk. It was made like a little wooden model of her violet home, with her number on the hinged front door. On Friday, there was no money in it. Mr Frazier gave you a hard time if you didn't collect from everybody, so Terry rang the bell.

Mrs Jukes raged and stormed. ‘I
told
you,' etc., etc. Mr Jukes's voice called very faintly, as if he were bricked up between the walls.

Terry swallowed and looked at his boots. ‘The money, ma'am.' He kept his head down. It was raining. Water dripped off the hood of his rubber poncho. ‘I have to collect the money.'

‘Tell the
Clarion
to send me a bill. That's what they did before.'

‘I don't know nothing about that. Randy told me you paid him direct.' ‘But it's like blood out of a stone,' Randy had added, ‘and she don't tip.'

One Friday, the door of the little mailbox house was swinging on one hinge, and Mrs Jukes swore that Terry had wrecked it. She would get him fired. She'd sue the newspaper. She despised the
Clarion's
politics anyway. She was going to call Terry's mother. He was the worst boy she'd ever seen around here. She didn't want to see his frizzy hair again (rain made Terry's hair curlier) or his ugly grinning face (he was trying to calm her with the
Clarion
smile). She was cancelling the paper.

‘Suits me,' Terry said, and ran off without collecting her week's money.

When Mr Frazier told him he would have to go back, or pay it himself, Terry folded his arms sullenly and said, ‘No way,' which upset Mr Frazier, tired, fussed, always in a stew about the paper carriers and their money.

‘Leave her to me,' Eddie said, when Terry reported all this. ‘I'll fix Mrs Pukes. Meet me at the corner around seven.'

When it was dark, Eddie stuffed paper soaked in kerosene into Mrs Jukes's empty mailbox and set fire to it. Terry watched from the corner. It looked marvellous. Even the varnished rustic post burned up, right down to the ground.

Eddie was caught, because a neighbour saw him. A man in a car saw Terry running away from the corner, and a policeman came to his mother's house. His father was in England, but when he came back, the whole fuss started up again.

‘I told you about Eddie,' he said. ‘I told you to watch it. You've been doing so well, Terry. Why did you have to blow it?'

‘I didn't do nothing.'

‘Anything. You're old enough to speak properly.'

‘Didn't do anything, Dad.'

‘Maybe not this time.' His father brooded at him, his narrowed eyes alarmingly blue.

‘I'm sorry.' Terry dragged that out of himself. It was no fun apologizing for nothing, but maybe it would help.

‘Just watch it, that's all.'

‘Lay off him, Paul. He's not a criminal.' Terry's mother had been giving him a hard time, until his father started.

‘You don't keep an eye on him. You don't know where he goes. What was he doing out there after dark anyway?'

‘Really, Paul, he's not a baby.'

‘You've spoiled him enough to make him into one.'

‘
I
spoiled him! You're out of your mind…' And on and on in the front hall, until his father banged out of the house without calling goodbye to Terry, listening from the top of the stairs.

Things were desperate. After everything he'd done, working, boring himself with being good and not getting into rages, the rotten newspaper route and putting up with shit from stinkers like Mrs Jukes… His father was further away from him than ever.

There was only one thing to do. He would make the supreme sacrifice. ‘I did it for you,' he would say, and his father would melt and smile again, and come back home. How could he resist such nobility?

Terry went to see Eddie. He was in the cellar, doing dangerous things with his chemistry set.

‘Hi!' He looked up and grinned as Terry came slowly down the stairs. ‘C'mon and help. I'm making dynamite.'

‘You're not.' Terry began to back up the cellar stairs again.

‘Wish I could. We could put a bomb under Mrs Pukes's window.'

‘The bathroom window.'

‘Inside, back of the toilet.'

‘In the toilet.'

They giggled and worked each other up as they always could together.

Then Terry stopped abruptly. ‘Look.' He half turned away. ‘I didn't come to fool around. I have to tell you. We can't be friends any more.' He had rehearsed how he would say it, strong and noble, but it came out in a rush, squeaky and feeble.

Eddie's grin stayed on his cheeky, funny monkey face. ‘Oh, yeah?' He grinned at Terry, waiting for the joke.

‘I mean it, Ed. This is it.'

‘Your mother said?'

‘No. I said.'

Eddie dropped the grin into a stuck-out lower lip.

‘Okay.' He shrugged and turned back to the bench where he was mixing little piles of different coloured powder on squares of paper.

If he had raged or cursed or argued… Terry looked at the shoulders of Eddie's torn sweater, raised towards his cup-handle ears.

‘Listen.' Terry's voice reached out like a groping hand. ‘I made almost three bucks last week. You can have it all, if you – '

Eddie's thin brown fingers moved busily, mixing the powders. Terry's head exploded into black despair. He gave a gasp and stumbled up the stairs, dodged one of Eddie's younger brothers and ran out of the back door and through the gap in the hedge that led towards his own street, blindly sobbing.

It was mid-term vacation, so he didn't have to see Eddie at school. Not yet anyway. Terry hung around with some other boys, because if he stayed at home, his mother would say, ‘Given up on Eddie Waite at last. If you have nothing to do, my friend and helper, I have a hundred jobs for you.'

‘Your father called,' she told him at supper, using that quotation-mark voice, as if Dad were not really his father, but only called himself that. ‘He wants you to call him.'

‘He still mad?'

‘He didn't want to talk to
me.
He wants to talk to you.'

Terry made the call. From the depths of his unhappiness, he managed quite a sprightly, ‘What's up, Dad?'

‘I'd like to see you. Want to come round for supper tomorrow night? I've got a piece of steak.'

If he was offering steak, he couldn't be mad, so it was safe to ask, ‘Are you still mad at me?'

‘Of course not. I just want to talk to you.'

‘What about?'

‘Oh – things. My trip to England. Stuff like that.'

‘Did Mom say I could?' The Law said that he was only supposed to be with his father one weekend in three.

‘I didn't ask her. Get her to come to the phone.'

But she wouldn't. ‘Go back and see what he wants, lover boy.'

‘He wants me to go round for supper tomorrow.'

‘Oh, you know? He's supposed to check with me before he asks you.'

‘But you won't go to the phone.'

‘But he asked you before he knew I wouldn't.'

‘Cut it out, Mom!' Terry screamed and stamped at her.

‘Oh, you and I understand each other, don't we, honey?' His mother tipped her chair backwards to put an arm round him, but he retreated to the doorway.

‘Yes or no?' At this point he wasn't even sure which he wanted.

‘I don't see why not.'

‘What took so long?' his father asked when he picked up the phone.

Terry did not say, ‘She wouldn't talk to you.' He would never tell either of them anything against the other, especially now when he was about to break the righteous news that was going to make everything all right again for all of them.