Man at the Helm (12 page)

‘It’s pricey, but if you want a relaxing lounge to relax in properly, then you need to do something with these bloody walls,’ he said, ‘and Rendezvous would suit marvellous.’

‘It sounds lovely,’ said our mother.

‘It’s hard to source, that particular colour is, but I’ll see what I can do, and you can get that idiot handyman of yours in to slap it on,’ said Charlie.

And so Mr Lomax arrived plus two large white cans with ‘Ronday-View’ penned on the lids. And no sooner was the sitting room blacked out with the darkest paint you can imagine than Charlie announced, ‘You need a piece of Axminster down to finish it off.’

Our mother didn’t agree to that, though, being a hater of carpets, but she did agree to a smart rug, which Charlie provided promptly for fifty-five pounds. And some large fluffy cushions for another twenty.

Soon Little Jack had qualms. He looked out of the window a lot, frowning, and stammered more on the k and m and said things such as, ‘Charlie’s making our world so dark.’ I of course had my own qualms about Charlie. But Little Jack having qualms made more of an impression on my sister. She worried when Jack worried because in spite of never being told anything, he seemed to have a sense of what was underneath and
behind everything. Having Little Jack was like having two brothers really. The boy who knew and detected everything and looked out of windows worrying, and the ordinary little boy who wouldn’t take his coat off and had a George Best lampshade.

My sister, still being largely pro-Charlie, gave Little Jack a project to help soothe his qualms and stop his worries getting out of hand and to give him a sense of purpose. She told Jack of the old saying ‘Know Thine Enemy’, and though she didn’t know why exactly and wasn’t sure Charlie even was our enemy as such, Jack was very excited about having a solo project and set about knowing him via asking him lots of questions.

Jack had soon gleaned all sorts of information pertaining, including that Charlie had lost a finger and a half in the war, his own fault, not a bomb or a gun but a rusty catch on a door. He couldn’t eat spaghetti because of something that had happened in Italy. He’d never in his life eaten a banana and was allergic to a certain kind of tree – a fir or a pine – he couldn’t be precise, only that he came out in hives in certain weather with a certain tree. He didn’t believe in God, a thing that Jack found troubling to begin with, but not as troubling as the fact that the concept of outer space made him feel sick. And apparently he couldn’t even imagine the planets or hear their names without feeling queasy. It reminded me of Bernard the chauffeur and his Apollo phobia. Finally, he didn’t like German people but liked other types, especially Americans.

It was all very helpful in knowing Charlie and kept Jack feeling involved. I, however, was more interested in what our mother actually saw in him, so I addressed my questions to her. The main thing seemed to be – according to our mother – that he’d taken to us.

‘What do you love so much about Charlie?’ I said one day.

‘Well, he’s taken to you lot,’ she said, ‘and that’s the main thing.’

It wasn’t the main thing at all, but thinking about it, there was just enough truth in it – it seemed that in his rough way he did like us. He found us amusing and liked to amuse us and I can’t tell you how nice that was. And even though one man seeming to like us didn’t compensate for a whole entire village thinking badly of us, it was very nice and perhaps explains why we tried so hard to like him.

The kids at school were terribly upset by the news and walked around in gloomy disbelief. The news was that O’Donnell’s funfair was cancelled due to an attempted murder.

My sister and I weren’t all that bothered about the cancellation of the fair and were actually quite pleased about the attempted murder. Firstly, we’d had no experience of O’Donnell’s fair and therefore didn’t know what we’d be missing, but we did like it when anything bad happened in the village, as long as it had nothing to do with us (and since the murder was only attempted and not committed). Looking back, it seems a bit schadenfreudey and mean, but you have to remember the village didn’t like us.

The reason for the fair being cancelled was that Mr Clegg, on whose land the fair always took place, had committed attempted murder. He’d shot his wife, then run away along a canal bank. It was almost a double-death because Mr Clegg flung himself into the water to drown, but it turned out to be no deaths as the wife was only grazed and Mr Clegg was fished out of the canal before he had time to drown by four members of the ornithology club who were hiding out in the bushes because someone claimed to have seen a very rare egret in that spot. And even if the ornithologists hadn’t been there, there was group of civil engineers working on a very long canal tunnel adjacent to the plunge point who would have fished him out, only the ornithologists got to him first. There was also a dog walker and a farmer nearby.

That was the thing about this village: you couldn’t do anything without a whole bunch of people knowing about it. You couldn’t even jump into a canal to drown yourself without people queuing up to jump in and drag you out. The village was furious about the shooting, not only because of the cancellation of the fair but because it ended up on the
Nine O’Clock News
read by Richard Baker and put the village in a bad light. The village blamed the wife for being provocative and wanting too many material things when the poor husband was only on an overlocker’s wage in spite of living on a farm.

While I’m on the subject, other bad things happened around that time, including a spate of gate-liftings which infuriated the village and ended up in the papers (the village still reeling from the non-fatal shooting). Mrs C. Beard said what did you expect in a recession, but took the precaution of chaining her two gates together so that anyone lifting one gate would have the other to contend with.

The village hated being in the news for anything other than dog shows and so forth. And hated anything that happened at night and gate-lifting always happened at night. One night, our own gate was lifted and we were thrilled and our mother refused to ring the constable because she thought he should have better things to do with his time and if he didn’t he might write a play. Ours was one of the few gates to be actually stolen, most being lifted and left to the right of the gate opening. Ours, being pure timber, was taken away and probably used as firewood. We had to have another immediately due to Debbie and this time got a tubular metal one which was very cold to sit on and a bit clangy.

The thing about having siblings is you can find yourself dragged along their paths and tangled in their worries and prejudices – which often seem more reasoned than your own, especially if
you’re unsure of a thing. And so it was with me and my clever, open-eyed big sister.

She in turn was often unduly influenced by Little Jack’s childish inklings and qualms. But then Little Jack tended to be easily fobbed off by me. It was a circle of anxiety, manipulation and reassurances. And never more than over Charlie Bates, about whom we were quite happy to change our minds overnight and back again the next day, with my sister leading the charge and me towed behind thinking more or less what she thought and Little Jack running to the front and then to the rear. After a week of disliking Charlie, he might suddenly show us how to sneak up on someone from behind, say a soldier you wanted to kill or just anyone you wanted to scare the shit out of. And how to open a locked door with two library cards Sellotaped together or a fish slice or anything hard and flat. And that might cause my sister to say, ‘People aren’t either goodies or baddies, they can be a mixture of both.’

And then, a week later, he might teach us how to make a
decent
cup of tea, which was not as easy as we’d imagined because you put the milk in after the teabag and not with it, which made it hard to judge the colour/strength. And how to make a decent Whisky Mac, which was exactly as easy as we’d imagined, using bottle lids (four parts ginger wine to one part whisky). And that might cause my sister to say, ‘He’s no good. He’s a chancer, a bad egg, and once an egg has turned it’s bad for ever, a leopard can’t change its spots.’

Consequently, one minute we’d be vowing to get rid of him and then we’d like him again. And then he’d suddenly stop coming round and we’d worry like hell that it was all over. And then he’d turn up and ask for money and if I wasn’t careful I’d remember that he was a liar and that his toolbox was three-quarters empty and he’d been stripped of his gas fitter’s badge and that he
couldn’t speak eloquently. Not even as eloquently as Mr Lomax, and Mr Lomax was hardly eloquent. But I’d stay behind my sister and push these things out of my mind.

Our mother was no help. She was fully in love with him and no amount of patchy behaviour on his part altered that. We made suggestions about other eligible males but it was as my sister said, ‘It’s tough to topple the incumbent,’ which she’d heard on the telly regarding something to do with the news.

Then something big happened. It was all to do with O’Donnell’s rescheduled funfair which had come to Mr Clegg’s land after all – his wife having not pressed charges and his solicitor being able to show how nice he usually was when not provoked and how remorseful (trying to drown himself).

We asked our mother if we could go to the rescheduled funfair. She was writing a play and listening to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and kept putting the needle back to the big build-up at the start. Charlie hadn’t been over for a while and the play was bilingual and about a broken-hearted woman running away to Holland to grow tiny edible vegetables.

Adele: I geen Nederlands spreken.

Man: You must try.

Adele: I have grown one hundred little lettuces.

Man: But to no avail.

Adele: Ik ben gegroeid 100 stuks.

Man: Laat me tellen.

We asked again about going to the fair and she mistook it for an invitation to come with us and said funfairs made her sick – a thing I find I’ve inherited in adulthood – and she put the needle back to hear the Beethoven build-up again. After it had settled
to the strings, we changed the nature of our request and asked for money. She was still unable to focus and in the end we helped ourselves to a one-pound note from her purse, which lived in the fruit bowl.

My sister and I thought we’d kept the fair secret from Little Jack. We didn’t want him tagging along: he was too little and would need a degree of looking after. We skipped off down the road. Soon Little Jack was calling out a word from his babyhood (which meant: yes, no, what, goodbye, hello, wait and help), something like ‘Nur’, and running to catch up with us. Him saying ‘Nur’ was annoying. He must have been seven by then, but he reverted to ‘Nur’ because he wanted to remind us that he was the youngest and little. We didn’t fall for it, though, and we were cruel to be kind.

‘You can’t hang around with us,’ we told him.

‘We just want to be two girls at a fair,’ I said, as if that was the most reasonable thing in the world, like saying,‘We just want to breathe.’

But he didn’t care. He just wanted to go to the fair – as you do when you’re his age – and he followed us.

So we arrived at the fair just as the sun was going down and soon the dark night showed up the hundreds of on-and-off coloured bulbs and it was wonderful. My sister and I shook Little Jack off almost immediately. Something caught his eye and we walked quickly on. Then we ate candy-floss and went on a sickening ride, linked arms and laughed and spent our one pound. But soon we’d had enough of the smell of spoiled grass and braised onions.

At home, all was dark. Only Debbie was there (pushing her food bowl around on the stone floor with her nose to remind us she’d had no supper). Our mother was out. Beethoven was quiet though the disc, still revolving, crackled eerily. And there was
no sign of Little Jack whatsoever. We trudged back to Clegg’s to look for him. We bickered and the night was ruined.

The fair seemed sinister now. The coloured lights looked like ordinary bulbs roughly daubed. Soft muddy ruts tripped us, a laughing Elvis fell into my sister and made her cry, and harsh voices rang around in the dark. We looked everywhere for Little Jack. We called ‘Jack’ and ‘Jack’ and everyone seemed to be laughing at us. So we went home again, hoping and praying we’d find him there.

Our mother was home. She was upset because a pot of stove-boiled coffee had melted a great hexagon in the middle of her new fireside rug. And she’d scalded her arm trying to rescue it. A smell of singed hair and burnt coffee heightened the sense of something being wrong.

‘Is Little Jack home?’ we asked.

‘He was with you at the fair,’ she snapped.

We looked upstairs and then in Debbie’s basket in the porch and in places he couldn’t even be – like the bread oven, which he couldn’t fit into. He wasn’t anywhere. It had got very late and we assumed he was dead and that if we went back to the fair we’d find his little body slung across one of the dodgem cars being buffeted and spun, surrounded by laughing people and the clumsy Elvis.

Those minutes were dreadful. I felt sick. It was all our fault, like it had been with the guinea pig and the rat hole, and I began to imagine how I’d get through the rest of my life knowing I’d abandoned my brother and let him die at the fair just so I didn’t have to be in a three, with a kid. Our last memory of him being that stupid word (Nur). How could my sister and I ever be happy again, knowing what we’d done?

In desperation and against my sister’s wishes, I rang Charlie’s telephone number. ‘We’ve lost Little Jack at the funfair at Clegg’s,’ I told him.

Charlie met us at the gate by Clegg’s and we set off to look for our little brother properly. Charlie stood in his suit, relit an already smoked cigarette and gazed around with squinted eyes. He seemed to block everything out – all the Elvises and noise and flashing lights. He turned quickly to a row of wagons, flicked the cigarette aside, got down on to his hands and knees and crawled underneath a wagon opposite the Pot o’ Gold, with its fluffy prizes hanging from the panelled roof. A moment later he came out with Little Jack under him, like a baby elephant under its parent.

We crowded round Little Jack for a moment and Charlie walked away. We all ran after him, me dragging Little Jack by the hand.

‘How did you know where to find him?’ I asked.

‘I put myself in his shoes,’ said Charlie.

We saw then what an asset a brute like Charlie Bates could be – for the odd moments of extraordinary peril – and he edged ahead of my sister’s beloved Mr Oliphant. We tried to thank him for helping us and saving Little Jack, but he told us to fuck off home. We hinted that we’d like a lift – our house being almost a mile away – but he zoomed off in Whisper, his white Saab.

Little Jack was too tired to walk quickly. His cloth animal was gone and he was scared of the dark. I piggybacked all three-stone seven of him – with his jaggy elbows and legs – all the way home. I was so happy to have him back, I didn’t care. I vowed out loud in front of my sister that I would never let her or Jack down again. I’d do my utmost to keep them safe and happy. My sister told me to shut up and walk faster. In the end she stomped off ahead.

We didn’t want our mother waking in the night and not properly knowing Jack was found, so I started to write her a note:

Dear Mum. Don’t worry about Little Jack. He’s not lost – he’s home. PS I hate fairs too now.

She half woke while I was writing and she mumbled, ‘Did you find Bufo?’

‘Bufo?’ I whispered.

‘Bufo, my little frog.’ And she went to sleep again, leaving me with a guilty feeling that ruined the happy-ending aspect of the night. I couldn’t believe that after having the initiative to phone Charlie and then carrying Little Jack all the way home and being considerate in not waking our mother, I should be rewarded with a poke in the eye and the reminder that I had outstanding obligations vis-à-vis Bufo.

I lay in bed furious. I made a silent but solemn vow to get the frog puppet back and to punch Miranda Longlady in the face. Not that I ever would punch her in the face, but you fantasize about such things at that age when tired.

Everything suddenly went against me. I knew I ought to get Bufo back as we were way past the three-week maximum imposed by my sister, plus our mother had mentioned him. But like always, when you’re the lender, you feel selfish asking for the thing back.

My sister was unhelpful in the extreme. She said, ‘Oh Lizzie, don’t tell me you’ve not got Bufo back yet.’

This reminded me what it would be like not to have a sister.

And I said, ‘You know I haven’t got him back yet.’

And she said, ‘Well, you’d better sort it out.’

And I said, ‘Could you help?’

And she said, ‘Just ask Miranda Longlady for him back – God, what’s wrong with you?’

So next time I saw Miranda I asked her, in a straightforward manner, for the frog puppet back and she responded, ‘Frog?
What frog? Oh,
that
frog, your little puppet thing, yes, I’ll get it back to you forthwith.’

Then every time I saw her after that, she’d point at me and say, ‘Frog’. And never did give it back to me. So I decided that if we were ever to get Bufo back, I’d have to get into the Longladys’ house and simply take him.