Mr Wrong (9 page)

In the street, Mrs Bracken grasped, rather than took Fern’s hand and they plodded sharply on to their first bus towards home. She was completely silent, which was worse
than her immediately talking, Fern knew, because it meant that when she
did
talk, she would talk more. ‘If only she’d leave me alone,’ Fern thought, and then tried not to
think of anything else.

It wasn’t until they were in front on the top of the bus, that Mrs Bracken began.

‘. . . getting clumsier every day. I don’t know I really don’t know what you’re coming to. You might have broken all those knick-knacks and then where would we have
been?’

‘I did cry when you told me to. I cried a long time.’

‘You did that, and it may, I don’t say it will, but it
may
have made that tiny difference that makes
all
the difference.’

‘I can’t do that silly dance and song any more. I’m too old for it.’

‘None of that from you. You’re eight, and don’t you forget it. I wish you’d stop trying to grow up all the time. It doesn’t suit your type at all. You still look
podgy on top in that smock.’

Fern scratched one of her painfully bandaged breasts – they always felt bruised and itchy these days – and wished that she went to a children’s acting school like the rest of
them, and didn’t just have classes with her mother there all the time. ‘When I have to do my “O” levels they’ll have to know,’ she said, as childishly sulky as
she could manage. The only way to bring her mother round was by acting like a baby. Her mother snorted.

‘Only the people concerned will have to know. The agency won’t say anything, because they won’t really know, and if they look like finding out, we’ll move.’

‘I want my tea,’ Fern wailed quietly. It was true, she did want it, she was always hungry, because her mother wouldn’t ever let her have bread, or potatoes or even sweets or
ice cream. It would be cold stewed apple and two slices of ham, and one triangle of processed cheese with a glass of grapefruit juice. She was so hungry now, that if she had her piece of gum with
her she would have chewed it. But as usual, she had left the gum on the third banister from the right just under the rail – a place that combined being easy of access with being difficult to
find for anyone who didn’t know it was there. But her mother would notice if she chewed gum. Her mother noticed everything, like people said God did, but her mother was never friendly and
helpful in the way that some people said that God sometimes was.

‘. . . money doesn’t grow on trees . . .’ her mother was saying. If God wanted her to believe in him, all he would have to do would be to put some money on the bare plane trees
– nothing to him, if one was to believe a word he said – and her mother would be proved wrong, and then nothing would ever stop Fern from believing in God
all the time
and taking
no notice of her mother.

‘Fern’s hungry!’ she wailed again, more childishly than before.

‘Fern will get her nice tea as soon as she’s home.’ From her mother’s mollified tone Fern knew that she was thinking of her own nice tea as well.

Her mother’s nice tea consisted of three crumpets, toasted on both sides and soaked in butter and celery salt, a huge piece of Viennese chocolate cake bought from the local
pâtisserie
and a cream doughnut. This was washed down by three cups of sweet, hot tea with the top of the milk in it. Fern always sat opposite her at meals and the table was sharply
divided down the middle in the sort of food that was displayed upon it. On Fern’s side would be the protein and the Vitamin C; on her mother’s, the carbohydrates, fats, and sugar. Fern
knew so exactly how bad everything that her mother ate was for her, that she, Fern, was sometimes dully surprised that her mother never seemed to get ill or weak – seemed rather to wax larger
and heavier month by month; a box on the ears was no light punishment these days, and as she grew older the boxes had become more frequent as well as more painful.

Now, her food finished, having asked for and been refused more, she sat, not allowed to get down, watching her mother munch her way through the doughnut, licking sugar and cream off her fingers
and wondering which bit of her mother was going to bulge more as a result. The trouble was that her mother didn’t seem to bulge with fat, but simply with hard, heavy, muscle; she became
steadily more formidable rather than formless.

After tea, Fern was allowed to ‘play’ for a short time until she had to do her exercises. Usually, this meant sitting on the floor with dolls or a picture book. Her mother varied,
but for days at a time she would seem to pretend that Fern couldn’t read, and only give her books for babies. Fern had got to the point where she really didn’t know whether her mother
was pretending or had actually forgotten: arguing invariably produced a rage, and taking no notice was usually easier. Sometimes Fern wondered, quite indifferently, whether her mother was mad. For
instance, she encouraged Fern to read in French, which seemed dotty, as they had hardly any French books in the house.

Tonight, when she had got down, and was listlessly looking at a huge book about an elephant (which she knew by heart) there was an odd noise coming from the back door – a kind of
scratching scuffle. As her mother was out of the room, she went to see.

It was a small black, brown and white dog – not any particular kind of dog as far as she knew. It was sopping wet, cold, and extremely friendly. Fern let it in, and then quickly got a
tea-cloth to dry its wiry wet fur. It licked her repeatedly – its tongue felt boiling beside its icy nose. It had kind brown eyes and was very thin. Her mother came into the kitchen just as
Fern was finishing the drying process, or rather just as the cloth had become so wet that there was no point in going on with it. Before her mother could say anything, Fern rushed up to her mother,
flung her arms round her and said, ‘Please, Mummy, darling Mummy, let’s keep the poor doggy for one evening. It’s so dreadfully hungry and I promise to take care of it –
Mummy?’

‘The child’s face was transfixed – transformed,’ Mrs Bracken quoted hurriedly to herself: ‘Well, just for one evening, then,’ she said aloud, smiling so that
Fern could see the top gums of her artificial dentures as Fern called them, having been told not to say teeth – it was common.

‘Can I give it some supper?’

‘If you must.’

‘What shall I give it?’

‘Well – there’s some milk, and some stale bread in the bin: otherwise it would have to be your breakfast ham . . .’ The telephone rang, and Mrs Bracken went purposefully
off to answer it. Nothing was ever allowed to come between Mrs Bracken and the telephone. She would sit in her telephone chair – nice and soft – and light a cig with one hand while she
was picking up the receiver. She had a voice she kept specially for the telephone. There it was now: ‘Hailloagh?’ it had begun.

Fern got some milk out of the fridge, and then decided to take the chill off it. She poured quite a lot into a saucepan: the dog was looking at her and making little mewing noises of ravenous
gratitude. It knew she was making it a meal. She got the old loaf out; it was
so
stale that she had to run it under the warm tap before she could break it up, and by the time she had done
that the milk was warm enough. She got a bowl, poured the milk carefully over the bread and set the bowl by the fridge. The dog gulped it down so fast that there was nothing left in a few seconds,
but feverish licking went on and on round the dry, shining bowl. Then the dog looked at her, wagged its tail, walked over to where she sat on her heels the other side of the table, and sat down in
front of her, at the same time thrusting a paw into her delighted hands. In the next room Mrs Bracken was saying things like, ‘Why
should
you? I should pay no regard to
that
,’ and ‘Well – they know who to blame then, don’t they?’ Fern put her arms round the dog’s neck – he had no collar and he was a he – and hugged him. He
responded with heartfelt enthusiasm. When she asked him whether he was hungry, he instantly looked agonizingly hungry. ‘You shall have my ham,’ she promised him, and he kissed her with
several kisses getting faster and faster. She gave him both slices of ham in the end, but she broke it up into pieces to make it last him longer. He simply loved ham. He kissed her a good deal when
it was finished, and then uttering a sigh so deep it almost sounded theatrical to her, lay down, put his head casually on his hind legs, and slept.

By the time Mrs Bracken had finished her telephone conversation (her friend had a daughter called Pearl and had been having trouble with a manager over panto) and had pretended aloud to Fern
that she would find Fern doing her exercises in the Studio, Fern had also fallen asleep – leaning against the dog in the kitchen. ‘Well I never!’ said Mrs Bracken, whose
better-tempered remarks always sounded as though they were being made to several people – none of whom were Fern. ‘And what’s become of our exercises, may I ask?’

Fern woke up, saw her mother, and then felt the dog, who had woken up the moment Mrs Bracken appeared.

‘Can he come too?’ she pleaded, and pleaded was the word.

‘Just for this evening,’ Mrs Bracken allowed, while further noisome clichés and catchwords (‘Inseparable! Her dumb friend’), churned about in her mind for possible
future use.

The dog sat quite quietly watching Fern do her bar work, and her general limbering up which ended with doing the splits: if she spoke to him, his tail wagged gently and at once; otherwise, he
endured the metronomic records that Mrs Bracken put on a small box-gramophone, and her shrill commands or incitements to do things harder, more slowly, or again.

The Studio was below the flat where they lived, and although it belonged to them, Mrs Bracken had to let it out for dancing and drama classes. Many a child had been taught to put its hands on
its knees before it smiled in that room; to repeat questions on such a shrilly upward inflexion that it masked the total lack of incredulity; to produce ‘expressions’ at the drop of a
cue and to get slick with continental clichés. It suited Mrs Bracken very well: it meant that Fern had nearly all her classes in safe custody, as it were. Mrs Bracken had once tried running
classes herself, but had stopped quite soon for lack of pupils. It was in any case far easier simply to let the place than to try to teach kids anything.

When she had taken Fern through her evening exercises, Mrs Bracken sent her up to bed with her supper, which consisted this evening, as nearly always, of an orange, an apple and a banana.
Tonight, however, there was also included the dog. Mrs Bracken knew so little about animals of any kind that the basic implications of keeping the dog escaped her. Fern could take it to bed with
her – why not? Anything to keep her quiet was often Mrs Bracken’s motto, particularly as it got near her own supper-time. So Fern unobtrusively let him out among the two dustbins and
privet that filled most of the garden, and then took him up with her.

Her room was small, dreary, and uncluttered by personal possessions. Fern got no pocket money, and, seeming to have no relations (her father was dead, not, Mrs Bracken had added with mysterious
venom when telling her this, that it would have made any
difference
) and she not only had no aunts or cousins, she had also no friends. Mrs Bracken saw no point whatever in friends: she had
a few people she chatted to on the telephone and met in the agents’ office – other mothers, like herself – but otherwise knowing people any better would have meant having them in
the home, feeding them, and embarrassing things like that. You didn’t want to get too familiar, she said to Fern, who by now had little or no idea what she meant. So there was nothing in
Fern’s room but a bed, a huge wardrobe with very few clothes in it, and one or two children’s books. The evening ritual began with Fern having a bath, during which time her mother
usually left her alone, although, if she had been ‘bandaged’, as Mrs Bracken put it, her mother would undo them. Tonight, however, Fern had the idea of bathing the dog to make him nice
and clean for bed, as he had a slight smell of railway stations about him, and she was willing to put up with bandages until after supper if she could get the bath over before her mother found
out.

She made the bath much cooler than she liked it, as she felt the dog would probably dislike hot water. She had imagined them both in the bath together, one at each end, but when it came to the
point, she realized that it would be more practical if she put him in by himself. She lifted him up and dumped him as gently as she could. He gave a strangled squeak, his tail went between his
legs; he looked at her and shivered. She kissed him and then began the battle of washing him. This could only be done by fits and starts and with one hand, because if she did not hold his neck fur,
he made spasmodic but frantic plunges for freedom. He looked more waifish and ratlike than ever when he was thoroughly wet, but she felt that beneath or inside his appearance, he was really quite
pleased to have so much attention. Rinsing him was awful; hundreds of tooth-mugsful of clean water were poured over his quivering body before she felt that she had got the soap out. Then there was
the frightful job of drying him. She was soaked through in no time, while he remained extraordinarily damp. In the end, she finished him off on a clean towel she took from the cupboard. By the time
he was done and snugly wrapped up in her dressing-gown at the end of her bed, delicious smells of Mrs Bracken’s TV fry-up were rising (the kitchen, like the studio, was on the ground floor).
Tonight, Fern could smell onions, sausages, tomatoes, eggs, and, she thought, chips. Oh Golly! Tonight she was not the only one. The dog’s nose was oscillating with the keenest appreciation,
and he cast her one or two urgent glances to see what she proposed to do about it. When Fern asked him if he was still hungry, there was no doubt about the answer: extremely hungry. Eventually,
Fern felt that for his sake she must be brave. She put her dressing-gown round her shoulders, told him to stay on her bed, and tip-toed down. Her mother stood with her back to the gas cooker, her
feet turned slightly outwards, so that her unexpectedly narrow ankles looked even more extraordinary with the huge calves flexed above them.