Snow Garden (15 page)

‘No!’ gasp the nursing staff. They had no idea he’d met Obama.

‘Yes,’ says Sylvia. ‘Obama flew him over to the White House for a private concert. They’re huge fans.
Huge
.’ And then she says it again, because she is so enjoying the word. ‘Really huge.’

‘Sylvia, dear, who is X?’ pipes up her mother.

‘X is Tim, Mother. Remember?’

‘Why is Timothy called X?’

‘Because he is a very famous pop star.’ Sylvia is aware she is talking loudly and everyone is listening. She is aware her voice doesn’t sound quite like her own, but a new and brighter, more brilliant voice. ‘He is recognized all over the world. He can’t even go to the shops.’

‘He
never
went to the shops,’ says Mary, reappearing with the hostess trolley and the drinks. ‘He never left his bedroom.’

‘So why isn’t he called Timothy?’ asks Sylvia’s mother.

‘We have been through this, Mother. We’ve been through it a few times. Tim was Timothy, but now Tim is X.’ Suddenly she sounds less shiny and more like her old maths teacher. ‘So we don’t call him Tim any more. We call him X. You see?’

‘As opposed to Y,’ snarls Mary, passing bottles of beer to the aged uncles. ‘Do any of you lot want straws?’

‘Tim is called Y?’ asks her mother.

‘You’d better take a napkin with your Twiglets,’ says Sylvia.

The doorbell rings.
Ding dong!
Everyone freezes.

‘Oh my God,’ shrieks someone young and female. ‘It’s X!’ The dog wags its tail and cocks an ear in the direction of the front door.

‘Does everyone have a party popper?’ calls Sylvia in a rush, ‘Mary, have you got the welcome banner?’ Mary gives a twisted grimace as if someone has stamped on her foot, and Sylvia wishes she had given the welcome banner to someone less complicated, like her mother.

Oh, but her mother’s paper hat has slipped down over her head and now she is wearing it like a neck brace. She also seems to be falling through the gap between the two nursing staff.

Sylvia is aware, as she moves to the door of the sitting room, as she opens it and sees the outline of her son at the front door, as she turns back to the sea of expectant faces, as she reminds herself to be calm, keep calm, that she has never felt so significant as she does at this moment. All her life she has been overshadowed by her sisters. They were the ones who were clever at school, who had naturally good figures – Sylvia was always inclined to store weight on her hips and tummy – they were the ones who dated clever boys from the grammar school and each married a lawyer. She turns to the crowd and puts her finger to her mouth for quiet and to her amazement they fall silent like a choir waiting for the first drop of the baton. She makes her way down the hall to welcome the most famous son in the world. Her heart beats so hard it is like a thing in her hands.

X stands at the door in a pair of torn jeans and a soft grey T-shirt. He leans against the doorframe, as if he is about to fall asleep. There is something different about him, yes, but it is not the thing she expected and it is so familiar she can’t even put her finger on it. ‘Hiya, Mum,’ he mumbles. He gives a shy smile and so does Sylvia. When she had imagined this scene, she was going to embrace X and somehow everyone would cheer. As it is, she doesn’t quite know what to say or even what to do. She slips off her party hat.

A thickset woman wearing another of the record company red fleeces shoves out her hand and grabs hold of Sylvia’s. Behind her stands a row of suited men so huge and wide they block out the light. They have no necks to speak of, and they stand in a respectful way with their feet wide and their hands crossed over their genitalia. On
Sleep
mode.

‘Hiya, Mrs X,’ says the woman in her red fleece. ‘I’m Potts. How’s things?’

‘Good,’ says Sylvia. She realizes she is still holding the bowl of Twiglets.

Potts says, ‘It’s great you could have him. X really needs the rest. He’s been … you know.’

What? thinks Sylvia. He’s been what? Singing a lot? Travelling a lot? She hasn’t a clue. And where is his suitcase? He has no baggage whatsoever. He doesn’t even have a coat.

‘Kinda crazee,’ says Potts, supplying the answer. She pulls a face as if she is balancing something tricky just between her eyebrows. Before she can explain any further the sitting-room door swings open and a young woman – Sylvia hasn’t a clue who she might be – claps her eyes on X, gasps, and bursts into tears.

‘Is she OK?’ asks Potts.

The sitting-room door opens a little further. A pair of dismembered hands reaches for the sobbing girl and guides her out of sight. The door snaps shut.

‘Do please come inside,’ says Sylvia in her best voice.

Potts replies that she has a few things to sort out but she’ll be right back, then slides her mobile phone out of her back pocket and consults it – two hours to take X to the airport.

‘Why? Is he doing something at the airport?’ asks Sylvia.

Potts laughs as if this is terribly funny. ‘He has a flight to catch at nine p.m. The TV crew will be here in an hour.’

‘The TV crew?’ Side by side with the devastating news about him leaving soon sits this other detail about the television crew. Sylvia has no idea what to say.

‘They don’t want to do anything
special
. They just wanna film you, like – being normal. It’ll be cute.’ Potts puckers her mouth as if that last word is spelt
quewt
. ‘You don’t have to dress up or anything.’

I
am
dressed up, thinks Sylvia.

She says, ‘Would any of you …?’ (What do you call a bodyguard? How do you address a set of them? Her sisters’ children have never had bodyguards.) ‘Would any of you
fellows
like to come in?’

‘Nah thanks, Mrs X,’ says one. ‘We’ll just keep an eye on things out here.’

As Sylvia turns to her son, she realizes what is different about him. It shocks her, because the thing that is different is that he is
not
. Different. He is not different in any way whatsoever. If anything his skin looks slightly grey and oily, a few spots on his chin. His mouth is small and chapped. His face is nothing like the one on the magazine cover. You could walk past X and not notice him.

Potts strides towards her car – it looks more like a tank with black windows – parked in the middle of the street so that nothing can pass. It is only when she is halfway down the path that she turns, apparently remembering a joke. ‘Oh, Merry Christmas, yeah?’

Something happens in the doorway between the hallway and the sitting room. X becomes the boy Sylvia has seen on the television. As she reaches for the door, as she explains that a few of the family have popped by, is that all right, and he says nothing, he only shuffles, she wonders how on earth this is all going to work. But the door swings back, the crowd cheers and suddenly X overtakes her with a fast skip, waving his arms above his head and calling, ‘Hiya.’ The assembled relatives gasp and touch his sleeve and ask, ‘How you are, X, how are you doing?’ and he gives an infectious laugh and says that he is
cwool
. ‘No shit,’ says Diana. (
No shit?
thinks Sylvia. Since when?)
Pop, pop, pop
, crack the party poppers, spewing multicoloured streamers. Whilst everyone else in the room is a dull monochrome, X exudes energy, as if he has been plugged into a generator. Even his hair zings. His fingernails. You can feel the heat coming off him.

And maybe a little of his shine falls over Sylvia too, because as she moves behind him, people step back and lower their heads.

I am the mother
, she thinks,
of the most famous boy in the world.

My sisters are not.

She takes them a bowl of oriental snacks. ‘The bodyguards are going to stay outside,’ she says.

Her sisters look eaten alive with curiosity. Linda’s eyebrows leap so far upwards they disappear in her slanting fringe. ‘
Bodyguards?
’

‘Yes. They need to watch out for the camera crew.’

‘
Camera crew?
’ In her excitement, Diane’s new jacket pops open.

Meanwhile, X signs the arm of the girl who sobbed earlier, and then another, and another, and another. He kisses his aunties Diana and Linda and compliments them on their clothes and hair. (‘Oh, this old thing!’ remonstrates Diana; ‘Oh, my awful mop!’ giggles Linda. They are reduced to girls.
What about my hair?
thinks Sylvia.) X poses for selfies with all the teenagers, one after another. He pulls faces, just like they do, only instead of appearing foolish, gawky, he looks even more delightful. Reaching Sylvia’s mother, he simply holds her hand.

‘Who is ready for the buffet?’ calls Sylvia, but this time no one turns.

Malcolm watches his son’s progress around the room with his arms crossed and a look of bewilderment, as if the sun is in his eyes.

It is true that something happens to X when he is put in front of a crowd, but it is also true that something happens to the crowd when it is put in front of X. It is a sort of electric combination that amounts to something bigger than its individual parts. But what Sylvia cannot work out is how it has happened. She saw him in the hallway. He was so plain he looked like blotting paper. And now he seems to mean something different to everybody. He is a cool kid to the teenagers; he is a lover to the girls; he is a nice boy to the older relatives; he is a bit of a lad with his aunties. He carries so much baggage, and none of it is his own. And suddenly she can only picture her son buried beneath so many suitcases he is lost to her, which is an irony considering that he appears to travel these days without one of his own.

‘Aww, hiya,’ croons X, spotting the dog and bending down. Even the dog wags its tail and behaves like a proper TV dog. A wave of mobile phones lifts above paper-hat level and click.

Mary marches up to him. She holds out her arms stiffly. It is hard to tell if she is welcoming him or pushing him away. ‘Remember me?’ she asks in her tight, difficult way.

X looks up at her from the floor. ‘Hiya, sis.’

‘
Sis
?’ she barks. ‘Who
are
you now?’

X looks around the crowd. ‘X,’ he laughs. And everyone else laughs too. He is X. Of course he is X. What is Mary talking about? The room crackles with a new tension.

‘Do you want a beer?’ she asks.

‘That’d be nice. Cwool.’

‘So go find the fridge,’ says Mary.

X pales and gives a frightened glance around the room as if he has no idea any more how to do something so simple as finding a fridge. If he seemed before to be plugged in to an invisible source of energy, he seems now to have been disconnected.

‘Tim?’ calls Mary.

His face is grey, then ashen. He reels, losing his balance. Even his head looks too heavy. His eyelids flicker, open and shut, open and shut. His body gives a jolt.

‘Tim?’ she repeats.

He crumples, like something folding up on itself, and falls in a heap to the floor.

Sylvia fills a pan with water and sets it on the stove. Her son sleeps at the kitchen table with his head cradled in his arms.

It is Mary who has saved the day. It was Mary who cleared a space around X and called to her parents to help him to the kitchen. It was Mary who made a joke about pop stars not being like they used to be in the old days and had all the ageing relatives laughing into their napkins. It was Mary who shouted, ‘Who likes charades?’ and caused such an uproar when she acted out
Carry on Camping
that several of the elderly uncles had to be escorted to the bathroom. It was Mary, too, who handed round plates and Christmas napkins and galvanized her aunts into helping her dish out the buffet lunch. It was even Mary who called on her father to fetch his drum kit and found her old guitar in X’s bedroom and led a singalong of Christmas hits. The last time Sylvia popped her head around the door, even the dog was wearing a paper hat and howling in unison.

An hour and a half has passed and Sylvia has just sat with her boy in the kitchen whilst he sleeps. When the door eases open, she springs forward to block the way, but it’s only Malcolm.

‘How is he?’ he whispers.

She thinks of the way her husband gathered his son in his arms and lifted him over his shoulder, bearing him out of the sitting room like the tenderest scrap of a child.

Sylvia says, ‘OK.’ Then she asks how things are in the sitting room and he laughs.

‘Mary’s having a ball. Everyone is. Nobody seems to mind that he isn’t there.’ He collects a few more bottles from the fridge and as he reaches the door he says, ‘I think there’s a TV crew. They’re talking to your mother.’

Sylvia blows Malcolm a kiss and he slaps his cheek as if he has just caught it, and then he slips her kiss into his trouser pocket for safe-keeping.

As the water comes to the boil, Sylvia lowers an egg into the pan and sets the timer. She turns to her son, with his head on the table, his mouth a grey O.

‘Wakey, wakey,’ she whispers. ‘I’ve boiled you an egg for your Christmas dinner.’

He says sleepily, ‘I was meant to do a photo shoot. In a garden of fake snow. I flipped. I said I wouldn’t do it. It was just some photos in a garden of paper. Why couldn’t I do that?’

‘You’re tired. You’re very tired.’

‘What am I doing, Mum?’ He doesn’t move his head. He just rolls his eyes to show that the thing he doesn’t understand is all around him. From the sitting room comes the sweet voice of Mary singing that she wishes it could be Christmas every day. Sylvia smiles.

She thinks,
Thank God it isn’t. Thank God for the ordinary days.

Sylvia fetches the bread and carves off the heel. She butters two slices. ‘When I was a girl I was always following my sisters. Everywhere I went, it seemed they’d already been there. I had to find something they couldn’t do. But what? They could do everything.’

‘So what did you do, Mum?’

She pulls the egg out of the boiling water. She places it in the eggcup and cracks it open with a knife. ‘I became a singer.’

‘
You?
’

She laughs. ‘Yes. Me.’ She cuts the bread into soldiers and arranges them in a fan-shape on the plate.