Happy Birthday and All That (6 page)

‘Uur. Uur. Uur,' from Isobel.

‘I haven't had the luxury of enough time to make tea,' she told him.

‘Mummy's cross with me today,' he told the children, but they'd started arguing over the toy from the cereal packet. He saw that it was actually very desirable, a little credit card type thing with some real stardust under the plastic, lots of information, and a pretty, Hubble-ish picture about where it was from.

‘Wow. That is cool,' he told them. ‘I know, I'll have it.' He did feel a sudden need for it.

‘Aw Dad.'

‘'Snot fair.'

‘I was the one who found it.'

‘I need it for something.'

‘So do I,' said Frank. ‘OK. First one to be completely ready for school or pre-school can have it. The one who comes second can have the next one.' He put it into his back pocket. Isobel was still going ‘Uur, uur'. He lifted her down from her highchair. Posy swiped at her with a flannel, rather roughly, Frank thought. He didn't see the point of endlessly cleaning them up. You were fighting a losing battle. Why not ignore the build-up of snot, yoghurt, crumbs and ickiness during the day and just give them a good hose down at bath time? Posy really could save herself a lot of time if she cut out all the unnecessary stuff. He decided not to say anything though.

It was foggy. Once Isobel stopped moaning he could hear that tune coming at him again. It had been going on all week. He thought it might just be in his head. They often heard the ships' foghorns. He and Posy loved it on New Year's Eve: they would rush outside after midnight to hear them all honking away. This was different though. The notes seemed to have merged and were playing a tune ‘Du da der du doo da da …' again and again. Nobody else seemed to be hearing it.

‘Hear that, Posy?'

‘What?'

But it was gone.

When they had all slammed out of the house for school and pre-school and Music Time he went out into the garden for a smoke. He heard the tune again.

‘Du da der du doo da da …'

Once back inside he saw that the answering machine was flashing. Bound to be some long complicated message to do with some committee, or Flora's merry barking. He listened anyway.

‘Hello Frank, this is your grandad. Hello Posy. Hello children. I wonder if you could pop in today, Frank. I just need a little bit of help with something. I'll expect you this morning, shall I? And could you go to the hardware shop on
the way and get me a new sink-catcher? You know what I mean. Your mother has decided to throw mine away. Thanks. Grandpa.'

Frank liked the way that old people signed off their messages on answering machines, as though they were reading from little slips of paper. They probably were. But Hell's flaming teeth! Sometimes he wished he had a proper job so that he could disappear for hours on end. Perhaps he should invent one. Coming up with the salary to fool Posy might be a problem though.

He knew what else Grandpa wanted. Another two months had gone by. Time for another BettaKleen campaign. Grandpa's legs might not be quite up to it this time. If they could just take the books round, and go back in a few days to collect the orders … perhaps Grandpa would feel up to helping him (helping him - get that!) to do the deliveries too when they came in.

Dear God. He hadn't been put on the earth for this.

Grandpa dwelt alone in the flat above ‘Fancy Ways'. His flat was used by the family as an overflow stockroom, and his views of Portswood High Street were sometimes partially obscured by boxes of ornaments, out-of-use display units, stacks of wrapping paper and out-of-season cards. This wasn't enough to spoil his enjoyment though, there was always something going on, some drama unfolding for him to watch - a pedestrian pensioner vs. student riding on the pavement road-rage incident, a delivery at Peacocks, a shop having a new awning fitted, the endless roadworks, the semi-derelicts on the bench near the library, the traffic wardens hard at work with their ticket books - always something to cheer him up.

Frank left a note for Posy, ‘Gone to help Grandpa with something.' Perhaps that would make her appreciate him a bit more. He could, unfortunately, be down at the shop in less than fifteen minutes.

He managed to delay himself a little by going into Portswood Hardware, one of his favourite shops. He knew that they needed lots of things - there were endless projects and fixings of things that Posy wanted him to do - but now that he was here his mind went blank.

‘Looking for something?' the kindly man in grey overalls asked him.

‘This and that,' Frank said. And a length of hosepipe long enough to reach from the exhaust of an E-reg Volvo estate through the driver's window, and if there are any special clips for attaching it securely, and if you have any maps of the New Forest showing pretty but deserted parking places … What was it that Grandpa had wanted? Frank supposed that he should be grateful that they didn't have a garage. Imagine the constant temptation to top oneself in there. To park inside and let it fill up with fumes, or to hang oneself from the up and over door …

‘Have you got one of those stupid metal things that old people have in their sinks to catch disgusting gunk?'

‘Sinkmate? Just to your left. Eighty-three pence.'

‘Thanks, mate.'

Frank smiled as he remembered a joke that he'd read in James's
Best Joke Book In The World Ever.
‘Did you hear about the ice-cream man found dead in his van, covered in nuts and strawberry sauce? The police think he topped himself.' Posy had said that she thought it was very unsuitable.

Fancy Ways was just along the road.

‘Francis!' His mum looked really pleased to see him. ‘How are you all? We haven't seen you for ages.'

‘Mum, you saw us all last week!'

‘Last week is ages when you only live a few minutes away,' she told him.

‘Well, I'm here now.' She could manage to make him feel guilty within seconds of walking through the door, it got him every time. ‘How's Dad?'

‘Oh not so bad. He was out of breath badly from moving all the new glass pierrots. They are much heavier than they look.'

‘You should have waited for me. I'd have done it for you,' Frank told her, thinking, ‘Send in the clowns, there ought to be clowns. Don't bother, they're here.'

‘How can I wait for you if I never know when you might be coming?' He couldn't think of an answer to this.

‘Grandpa phoned me,' he told her. ‘He wants some help with something.' He hoped that this might win him a few more points, get him off the hook a bit. Luckily a customer came towards the counter with a paperweight and a gift box. ‘I'll just go up and see how he is.' Frank skedaddled for the stairs behind the ‘Staff Only' door.

He knocked on his grandfather's flat door and went straight in. He could hear the TV. Grandpa was watching
Trisha.

‘She's pretty, this one,' he told Frank.

‘Hi Grandpa, you OK?' Frank didn't bend down to kiss the grizzled, unshaven cheek, or to shake his grandfather's very cold, stiff hand. His grandfather's shoulders looked bony through the layers of vest, shirt, pullover and cardigan. His thin knees were pointy and painful-looking through his trousers. Frank was reminded of the skeletons of some of the smaller beaky dinosaurs, Ornithomimus or Compsognathus, the one that was no bigger than a hen. He and James knew all the names of them from
The Big Book of Dinosaurs,
and his other favourite
If Dinosaurs Came To Town.
Don't bother, they're here, Frank thought to himself.

‘Cup of tea, Grandpa?'

‘If you're making one.' Frank would certainly never choose to make a cup of tea in Grandpa's kitchen, which was cluttered beyond even Frank's disorder threshold. Doing the simplest thing involved negotiating a path through trailing flexes, past the Calor gas heater (always on, even on the hottest days), moving piles of dishes (clean and dirty were hard to differentiate),
as well as the boxes of tissues, Scholl ointments, empty glasses cases, letters, Christmas cards and pictures by the children dating back years, and the foot file which was perpetually clogged with pieces of grey debris that always made Frank think, ‘Dust you are, and to dust you shall return.' Frank knew that his mother was up here, several times a day, trying to impose some order on things, but that Grandpa undid it all within minutes, scattering dirty tissues around his feet, filling the bath with cold water and then hurling his bedding in because he thought it needed a good soak, or balancing the two-bar electric fire on the draining board to try to keep his hands warm while he failed to wash up. The possibilities for creating chaos and squalor, and for setting up accidents waiting to happen, were endless. Frank thought that even Flora would be unable to keep Grandpa in check. Eventually Frank returned to the sitting room with two mugs of tea and half a packet of fig rolls that he had found beside the washing-up liquid.

‘No point getting the best china out, eh?' Grandpa said, taking a big slurp from the chipped Garfield mug Frank handed him. Frank's was a Farside Christmas-theme mug, also damaged stock from the shop downstairs.

‘Good for you to have a mugful, Grandpa. Posy told me she heard something on the radio saying that old people don't drink enough.'

‘What's that? What are you saying?'

Frank ignored the question. How could he explain that what he had said was, as so often the case with Grandpa, too banal to merit repeating.

‘So what did you want some help with?' he asked, loud, clear and slow.

‘Them books. In the bedroom. Arrived yesterday.'

Frank found his way back across the room and into the bedroom. The BettaKleen catalogues were piled high on Grandpa's unmade bed, next to a Kleenex Mansize box
stuffed with apple cores, satsuma peel, an empty Digestives' packet, the filmy wrappings of processed cheese slices, and the papers of several packets of Halls Extra Strong Mentholyptus throat sweets: the detritus of Grandpa's most recent midnight feast, which, Frank surmised, must have ended in a coughing fit. Or perhaps he just ate packets and packets of Halls for the taste alone. Frank saw that there weren't just the BettaKleen catalogues to get rid of, but two supplements, a health and diet one (a particular favourite of his) and something new, ‘Your Lucky Magic'. They would weigh a ton. Grandpa would never be able to shift them. Frank cursed the man who had talked Grandpa into this whole network selling thing in the first place. It was despicable. Grandpa had lapped up all the stories about ‘part-time job - full-time money', about people building pyramids of sellers and then retiring in splendour, of people whose sales won them holidays with spending money. As if Grandpa was ever going to attain those dizzy heights. The only person he'd ever managed to persuade to join him in the enterprise was Frank, and that was only because Frank felt so sorry for him and worried about him going up and down the stairs in the blocks that were part of Grandpa's round. It wasn't even a local round. Portswood would probably have been much more lucrative, but that was already somebody else's territory. Somehow Grandpa had agreed to do Weston, bloody miles away on the other side of the city, the most easterly part of Southampton, a huge estate washed up on a green no man's land that dissolved into a pebbly shore.

Frank was often tempted to suggest to Grandpa that they swap BettaKleen for a paper round. It would be less onerous and more lucrative. Grandpa wouldn't even discuss giving up BettaKleen though; he said that he would soon be fit enough to do it by himself again, and if Frank didn't want to help, well, then he'd manage somehow. And of course Grandpa didn't want anyone else to get his round, BettaKleen or a rival
company. Oh no, not after he had spent all that time building it up.

It seemed that there was nothing to be done apart from doing it. Frank began to load the catalogues into the tartan trolley that was their trusty BettaKleen companion. And here's a few kilos of disappointment, pointlessness and futility, Frank muttered as he put the last few bundles in.

‘What's that? What's that?' Grandpa asked.

‘Nothing Grandpa, just checking we had enough.' If only the world, and especially Posy, could have seen that there was something heroic about lugging that trolley down the steps and into the boot of the car, and then going back to get Grandpa and his carrier bag of things he'd need for the journey, the spare glasses, Spaldings catalogue, packet of Tunes and a half-empty box of tissues in case of emergencies, and the little black vinyl purse which contained Grandpa's money as he insisted on paying for the toll bridge and then on giving Frank a pound coin, towards, he said, petrol and tobacco. If only this work was rewarded the way being a hospital consultant was, or an accountant, or a systems analyst. If only ‘Being Frank' was considered to be a proper job in itself.

‘Going well is she?' Grandpa asked.

‘What?' Did he mean Posy?

‘The car. Going well is she?'

‘Like a dream,' said Frank. He always forgot that he and Grandpa had to have these manly conversations about how the Parousellis' car was running. Each time Frank took Grandpa out he resolved to clean the car so that it resembled a more fitting topic of conversation, but every time he forgot. Fortunately Grandpa was too short-sighted to see how dusty and crisp-crumbed the car was, or to notice the Sunmaid raisins (preferred snack of modern middle-class toddlers) that studded the floor and back seats. Frank had no idea why anyone ever bought them. Sure, children liked the cute little boxes, but they
never actually seemed to eat the raisins, just to scatter them in trails wherever they went. Perhaps they were all leaving messages for each other in some sort of toddler raisin morse code: ‘Why can't she just be done with it and give me Wotsits and chocolate buttons on car journeys?' ‘Wibbly is a fat pig', things like that.

They drove off down Portswood High Street, past Safeway, past Wickes, down into the badlands of Bevois Valley, over the level crossing, past the Saints Stadium, finally onto the Itchen bridge. Off peak fifty pence. To the Parousellis the elegant concrete arch, surely the biggest bridge in the South, with its views up and down the river and out past Ocean Village towards the sea was worth much more than that. Frank always wondered why the sides hadn't been made even higher; a suicide would be able to jump quite easily. Could it be that the bridge made people feel so cheerful that they changed their minds?