Easy Peasy (2 page)

The night is terrible. Thoughts are more urgent, fears are greater, the darkness muffles me, it makes me helpless, breathless. The landing light is on. Foxy likes it dark but she lets me leave the landing light on and it shines through the little strip of glass above the door. The door is closed. I would have it open – but for the landing light to be on and the door closed is a compromise. The stuff of our relationship. I would prefer the window and the curtains to be open, she'd like both closed. So we have the window open a little, but the curtains pulled.

It is midnight, just gone. All the hours of the night. I keep my eye on the strip of light. Foxy is beside me, I can feel her warmth, the feathers of her breath, but she is sealed away in sleep. I must not wake her. When someone is asleep they are not
there
. It is not fair. Was she going to tell me it is over between us? I do not know if this is better.

The swing was made of thick twisted rope with a slab of wood for a seat. The rope was greenish in its twist as if the green from the apple tree had run down it. I would hardly have been surprised if the rope had sprouted leaves and apples. The apples from the tree were sour and covered in scabs. Mummy made chutney from them and apple sauce and baked apples sometimes, from the biggest of them. I did not like to eat the skins, the scabs were like the crusts of grazes on our knees but inside the flesh fizzed soft and hot and sweet with golden syrup.

Food was complicated. Daddy was funny about it. He ate too much. He'd get fat, diet until he was gaunt, get fat again. He took pills to help slim and when he was taking the pills he was angry. He'd roam round with a spanner looking for things to tighten up. I preferred him fat. When he was fat he was quiet, unless he'd been drinking then he was scary. At least I was scared of him, Hazel too, I think, although she'd never admit it to me. Not scared because he would hit us or hurt us, only scared because … just because the air crackled and we sat on the edges of our seats and our nails dug into our palms … just a feeling … just because.

Daddy liked spice. Chilli powder, curry powder, hot-pepper sauce. ‘I can't taste it,' he'd complain, trying one of Mummy's concoctions and putting down his fork. Mummy would get up sighing and fetch the Worcester sauce, the chutney, the Tabasco, and watch him smother his food.

But Mummy had her own funny ideas about food. She is Swedish, so we used to eat things with dill and soured cream, raw pickled herrings, gravadlax, things that no one else I knew would ever eat. Sometimes we went vegetarian, but none of us could manage without bacon for long so that would founder. Food should be fun, she used to say when we would not eat as children. Once she got us to eat our dinner blindfolded to see if we could tell what it was by taste and smell alone. It was something with red sauce I remember because of the mess on the tablecloth. Daddy was not there that time. He didn't believe that food was fun. He was often away when Mummy had her ideas, but if he was at home he'd eat alone, boiling up something from a tin and sloshing in half a bottle of Tabasco.

Tonight we didn't eat. I cannot believe the rage that swept through me, the way I flew at Foxy and beat her to try and beat away the truth: as if the news of my father's death was a buzzing thing, a dreadful fly, and if I screamed enough and fought enough it couldn't settle on me and his death could not be true.

We didn't go to Buster's and we didn't eat. We sat on the bed, her arm round my shoulders, until I was shivering. She helped me out of my underwear but we did not make love. I almost thought we would. I almost wanted to but she pointed out that I was chilled and made me put on my white satin pyjamas. We went downstairs and sat by the gas-fire drinking brandy. Metaxa, bought with the last Greek money at the end of our holiday, hot gold. Foxy brought in a tray of cheese and biscuits but I could not think of eating. It was like Christmas night after too much lunch, the brandy glasses warmed by the fire, the cheese, the crackly wrappings of the biscuits. Only no joy and no presents and no tree in the corner winking.

‘I feel useless,' Foxy said, rolling yet another cigarette. ‘I don't know what to say.'

‘There's nothing.' The first shock was like the sea, like waves rolling in like I suppose labour to be. Engulfing waves of grief, of physical trembling and sickness and then a lull, a moment of reflection, even momentary forgetting as the mind gathers itself for another wave of grief. In one of these lulls I studied Foxy's face trying to read her thoughts. If she had been planning to finish with me, then she'd be feeling thwarted, frustrated. Because how could she finish with me now? Maybe that hadn't been in her mind at all. Maybe she loves me, maybe she needs me as much as I need her. But her face was inscrutable and all I could read in her eyes was concern.

I had tried to ring my mother back but every time there was just the engaged tone. Later on I rang Hazel, just in from dinner with Colin, and I had to tell her. I just said it straight: ‘Dad's dead … Mum found him hanging … it looks like it … yes … no.' Hazel's voice faint, a little drunk, already thickening with tears. Hazel wouldn't rage or beat Colin with her fists. Hazel would accept. We made arrangements. Both of us would go to Mum first thing. I'd be there by lunchtime, Hazel, who lives further north in Durham, by mid-afternoon. We said good-bye.

‘What did she say?' Foxy, avid for detail, as ever.

‘Nothing much.'

And that is so. She'd said nothing much and nor had I. And nothing of any significance had been said between Foxy and me. The only significance, my violence and the tenderness of her response.

But there should be significance in words. There should be words that are profound. There should be more than train times and the beep beep beep engaged-tone of a mother's phone. There should be more.

All so ordinary and so strange. Foxy eventually giving way to hunger and snacking, apologetically, on biscuits and cheese. Both of us drinking too much Metaxa. The sound of next door's television through the wall, a commercial jingle, the sea-roar of laughter.

3

After seeing his face between the curtains peering at me in the tree-house, I met him. He was the new boy at school: Vassily Pudilchuck. He stood in front of the class, narrow shoulders hunched, a frightened smile on his yellow face, long teeth crossed at the front as if they were too tightly crammed in his mouth. His jumper was too big, rolled up at the wrists. Because he was deaf he had to sit at the front to make sure he could at least see. He had a funny smell, and big hearing-aids in each ear with wires going down his neck to a bulky rectangle under his sweater.

‘Because Vassily is hard of hearing', Miss Bowen said, ‘you must make sure he can see your lips when you speak to him. And enunciate your words clearly', she stretched her own lips as she said this to demonstrate, ‘so that Vassily can lip read. Perhaps Vassily would teach us all a bit of sign language?' She looked at him but he had his head bent over the lid of his desk.

‘What's sign language, Miss?' said someone from the back.

‘It's a system of hand signals,' Miss Bowen explained, and there were sniggers as some boy did a V sign.

My desk was behind Vassily's. The knobbles of his spine showed right through his jumper and shirt as he leaned over his desk. The hearing-aids were pink and stuck out so that from behind he looked like some kind of robot with wires in its head. Later I was to learn that he hated the hearing-aids – that did little good anyway, but then they seemed an absurd, deliberately peculiar part of him. I didn't recognise him, then, as the face that stared out of the window into our tree-house, down into our garden. But I disliked him in the fierce way children can dislike weaklings or misfits – with a sort of fear.

By the end of his first day he had been christened Puddle-duck, a name that suited him because of the way he walked with his too-big feet splayed outwards and his head down. He was ten but he couldn't read properly. Not hearing makes reading harder, Miss Bowen said, but still, he
was
ten. When he spoke it was very loud and sounded as if he had a bath sponge stuffed in his mouth soaking up the edges, the points and angles of his words. By the look of it, he never washed his hair. It looked solid like brownish clay and sat on his head like a dull corrugated lid. He made friends with a boy called Simon, or maybe not
friends
, but they stood together in the playground and shivered. Simon had eczema absolutely all over him and wore glasses with pink sticking plaster over one lens. He'd never had a friend before. But even Simon called Vassily Puddle-duck.

I didn't recognise him as the boy who spied on us from his upstairs window until, a few days later, something terrible happened. Something that jolted me into recognition.

Puddle-duck hadn't got a PE kit.

‘Never mind,' said Miss Bowen, leaning towards him and enunciating, ‘just strip down to your underwear.' It was a rainy day and we were doing indoor PE–throwing bean-bags, climbing ropes and apparatus, jumping over wooden horses on to spongy green mats. If we had no kit we were not let off but made to show off, to all the other boys and girls, our pants and vests. Fear of this humiliation ensured that we never forgot. Miss Bowen was wearing a short navy skirt and white ankle socks for the lesson. She jogged up and down on the spot waiting for Vassily. Her big red legs were haloed with white fuzz. He handed her his hearing-aids, great handfuls of pink plastic and curly wires that seemed horribly a part of him. Miss Bowen took the aids and stopped running.

‘Take off your jersey, Vassily,' she said. He looked down at the floor. Miss Bowen put a hand under his chin to make him look up. ‘Take it off.' She plucked at his sweater. His face went dark red. I thought he would refuse, but he took off the sweater. Everyone was ready now, gathered round him watching and that made it worse. Under his sweater he was wearing a crumpled and much-too-big shirt tucked into his shorts. ‘And this,' said Miss Bowen, touching his shoulder. I think Miss Bowen was cruel,
now
I think that. Everyone was staring at Vassily. She should not have let us all stand and stare at him like that. He undid his shirt and took it off. He had no vest on and what we saw, we could hardly believe. Nobody said an audible word but there was a stunned murmur.

‘Griselda, perhaps you'd be kind enough to fetch Vassily an Aertex shirt from Lost Property,' Miss Bowen said. I hurried off, important. I was picturing his chest as I went down the gloomy, dinner-smelling corridor and I can picture him now. A puny boy with a flaming face and six nipples on his skinny concave front. It looked like the belly of a dog. Among the odd plimsolls and the rain-hoods in the Lost Property box I found a shirt for Vassily and took it back to the hall. Miss Bowen was holding Vassily's hand and peeping her whistle between her teeth as my oddly quiet classmates scrambled on the apparatus and queued for the ropes. I handed Puddle-duck the shirt and made myself smile. He smiled back, a grateful narrow smile that made me queasy. And that is when I recognised him as the spy.

If nobody liked Puddle-duck very much before, that day confirmed it. Puddle-duck was scarcely even human.

The brandy has given me a thirst. It's hot in the bedroom with the door closed. The window is open but muffled behind thick curtains. So the air in the room is still. The room is filled with breath. Foxy's breath is slow and even and rises up the walls until I fear I will drown in it. My own breathing is fast. I should relax. Breathe deep, breathe slow. But all I am inhaling is old breath. It is stale air. The room is full of dead air. Now I am starting to panic. Stop that. Stop. Breathe. The air is fine. The window is open. You cannot drown in Foxy's breath. You will not drown. Lie still. Oh my heart.

Like the nights of Daddy's dreams. Having to be still, hearing that scream but having to be still for Hazel. Having not to speak of it at all.

Breakfast after those nights was awful. My father would sit with his hands clasped round his cup of tea as if he thought someone might snatch it. His chin would be rough and his curly hair wild. There would be a greasy sheen on his glasses so you could not see his eyes. The breakfast room was sunny with windows on two sides, but however much sun streamed into the room on mornings after a dream, the room would contain a cloud, a chill. My mother would be the same as ever, serving up poached eggs or bacon or kippers, the sun bright on her blonde hair, but she would seem like an actor on those days, someone on the stage with rouge and spiky lashes while the rest of us were grey. But even she didn't speak to Daddy, just topped up his cup with tea and kept a nervous eye on him as she chatted to us.

I am angry with my father for dying. For choosing to die. How dare he? It is the most selfish thing.
Dad! How dare you? Eh?
I was going to know him. There are things I do not know, secrets. There are things I wanted to ask him. I wanted his story from him. I wanted to know what was in his nightmares, what was the fear behind the screams, the fear that threaded itself into my own sleep and into me.

The nightmares were never spoken of. Until I talked to Foxy I didn't think that strange. They were a part of my childhood, not normal perhaps, but not strange. No stranger than my mother's food fads, or the time she made us go barefoot for weeks to strengthen our arches. No stranger, I suppose, than the things that happen behind the curtains and the doors of every house in every street in every town.

But Foxy said ‘What? You never asked him what he dreamed about?'

‘No,' I said, ‘you couldn't.'

‘Why?'

I shook my head.

‘What about your mum? What did she say?'

I tried to think. My father had been a prisoner of the Japanese for five years. He'd worked on the building of the Burma-Siam railway. I didn't think that was a big deal. I had seen the film
The Bridge on the River Kwai
and vaguely associated it with Daddy. Strong men, sweat and stiff-upper-lips. Daddy as Alec Guinness. Did I know the nightmares were about that? No, I didn't. Terrible things happened in the war, but the war was over. It was nothing to do with me. It was history. He was whole. My dad.