The Boat (26 page)

‘What about when you first met her? Was she like that then?’Johnny asked.

Frank raised his eyebrows, rubbing the back of his neck, his face full of some sweet sadness. ‘ I heard her before I ever saw her, you know,’ he said. ‘I heard her singing – singing like an angel – this voice so heavenly it stopped me in my tracks. It quite derailed me, the sound of her unhappiness. Then when they unlocked the door, there she was, this beautiful, tormented creature lying on the floor all strapped up in a white jacket.’

Johnny stared at him. ‘I thought you met in a pub in Islington?’

Frank looked at him askance and frowned. ‘A pub in Islington? No, she’d been done for assault, found wandering naked in the high street. I met her in Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum,’ he said, flicking his cigarette far out into the water.

The next day, on the way home from the seaside, Clemmie’s dad kept tapping the dashboard with his knuckle. He seemed to be in a different mood from yesterday. He was all quiet and serious and annoyed by things, particularly other drivers and the dashboard. He’d asked her not to mention almost falling out of the Waltzer to her mother and she promised that she wouldn’t – though it seemed a little unfair not to be allowed to talk about the most dangerous thing that had ever happened to you. He was in no mood for argument. She tried not to do anything that might irritate him. She was slowly working her way through the pear drops in the glove compartment and staring out of the window, watching the way the wind flung itself through the trees and the fields instead of in the litter and the dustbin lids like you see in London. Then, not even an hour into their journey, the car began to judder and her dad began to say rude words and eventually the car ground to a halt in the middle of a long, straight, empty road with barely enough room for another car to get past. Her dad banged the steering wheel so hard that the crows in a nearby tree all flew away and his hand went red. She knew better than to say anything.

He got out of the car, slamming the door, which made the smelling fern tree hanging round the rear-view mirror spin in circles. She watched as he took off his Starsky sunglasses and his suit jacket and had to open the door again to place them neatly folded on his seat. He didn’t look at her at all. Then he went to the bonnet and opened it up. She pinched a sneaky handful of pear drops and stared at the shiny blue of the bonnet, which was now the windscreen. After a while her dad reappeared from behind it and walked round to the boot of the car and clanged about a bit before coming round to her side and opening the door. He was holding a plastic red petrol can.

‘Fuel gauge has had it. We need petrol. We’re going to have to get back to that garage on the main road.’ He was looking up and down the road. She did too, for supportive reasons.

It was a beautiful blustery day and she felt as if they were on an adventure, walking down the centre of the deserted road. She had Monkey in one hand and was swinging the petrol can in the other. Her father was still huffing and puffing, turning this way and that, looking for cars and checking his watch. She was jogging a bit to keep up with him and she kept getting distracted by the high tops of the cornfields surrounding them and the way the green leaves waved about angrily in the wind. If she shut her eyes, they sounded like roaring monsters. Her dad said they were sweetcorn. She’d thought sweetcorn was made in a sweetcorn factory by the ho-ho-ho Jolly Green Giant. But it made sense. A giant could easily hide in these dark fields. She peered into the blackness beyond the thick stalks and quickly trotted to catch up with her father, putting Monkey in the can and taking a firm hold of his hand.

After a while, her dad seemed to relax a bit and actually started talking and looking about the countryside. He knew about everything; if there had been a cleverest person in the country competition he would have won it. When they came across a squashed rabbit in the road, he pointed out all the bits of blood and guts, told her what the different things did, how the little heart worked, whether the rabbit had been a smoker or not, all sorts of things. Then he told her how the pylons took the phone calls all over the country, how they laid Tarmac on the roads, how birds sometimes used human hair to make their nests. They were talking so much they missed a car drive past and her dad ran after it. He was cross about that and when she caught up she joined in with his crossness though she didn’t really mind. They were a real team.

‘I might as well tell you now, Clemmie,’ he said after a long, happy silence. ‘I was going to stop somewhere nice for tea and tell you…’

He stopped to pull his cigar tin out of his pocket and she saw that there were only two left. She noticed how his hand was all trembly as he lit up, cupping his hands together. She liked the way the smoke slithered up into his nostrils like a slippery blue snake. She wondered whether he was going to tell her she could keep a pony in the garden. She took his hand again, squeezing it, and they walked onwards. ‘I’m going to be living somewhere else for a while.’

She looked up at him and followed his gaze. He was watching some birds flying in the V formation that Miss Bradley had taught them about in school. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

‘Just me, love.’ Briefly he looked down at her.

‘And me,’ she said, sure that that was what he had meant to say.

‘No. You and your mum will stay in the house.’

‘Oh. Does Mummy know?’ she asked. It seemed a rather odd arrangement.

He nodded. ‘I’m going to Somerset.’

‘What’s Somerset?’

‘It’s a place.’

‘What’s so good about Somerset?’

‘A friend of mine lives there.’

‘Well, why don’t we come with you?’

He took another drag. ‘You just can’t.’

She stopped then and so he had to as well. ‘Well, I want to. How long are you going for?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘A weekend?’

‘Look, your mum and I… we’re not going to be together any more.’

‘But if you stayed in the house then you would be.’ She smiled at him but he didn’t smile back. He looked away, over her shoulder, down the lane and sighed.

‘We’re getting a divorce, Clemmie,’ he said.

‘What’s a divorce?’

‘For God’s sake, you know what a divorce is.’ He suddenly sounded irritated by her. ‘Like Uncle Tim and Sandy. We’re splitting up.’ He started smoking in a rush, sucking and blowing. She stared at him. She was confused. He must have made a mistake. ‘But Uncle Tim and Sandy don’t like each other. Sandy threw Mark’s Etch A Sketch right through the window. You and Mummy, you don’t throw things.’

She expected him to agree, to say,
Yes, that’s right, I’m just playing a trick on you
. But he didn’t. Instead he kept looking down the lane, this way and then that.

‘I’ll still see you,’ he said and he flashed a smile at her but it wasn’t a relaxing smile: it was too quick. Besides, of course he would still
see
her, he was her dad. His words began to worry Clemmie and she didn’t like the way he was looking at her in a sad slopey-eyed kind of way. Somewhere inside of her she could feel a horrible falling away, as if she was losing her grip, just like yesterday on the Waltzer. She knew she had to cling on hard.
Don’t let go!
She grabbed his hand in both of hers, the panicky feeling taking over.

‘Is it me? Is it all the mess I make? My collecting boxes? Don’t go to Somerset! I can stop collecting things…’

His eyes had gone all watery in the wind and his voice sounded different. ‘No, darlin’. It’s not that. You keep collecting things.’

His hand wasn’t responding to hers, it felt all clammy and lifeless and the wind whipped the smoke out of his trembling lips. Then he looked straight at her and she didn’t like it because in his eyes she could see the ending of things. She got it then. All the dots suddenly joined up to form a monstrous unrecognizable shape. ‘You’re leaving us,’ she said.

He didn’t deny it. He just stood there, looking down at the road, his fingers still curled around hers. Then when he looked at her again she could see, just for a second, that he was afraid of her. But that was it. That was all the power she had. Whatever else she said or did meant nothing and would have no effect: her opinion, her needs, her feelings were not relevant. He had already decided.
They
had already decided. She dropped his hand.

‘It’s going to be all right, Clemmie,’ he said, going down on a bended knee as if he was a prince about to ask her to marry him. She stepped back, away from him. He was not a prince at all.

‘I hate you.’ She spat the words at him and then turned and ran away as fast as she could, her shoes click-clicking like mad on the Tarmac of the road. She could hear him coming after her, walking, then starting to run as she darted off into the cornfield on her right, the rough green leaves towering over her head, not caring if the giant lived there or not. She could feel the wetness of her tears running down her face. Deeper and deeper she ran into the watery darkness still clutching Monkey in the petrol can, darting through the stalks as swift as a little bird, the mud cloying on her Start-rites, slowing her down. She could hear him calling. ‘Clemmie! Clemmie! Come back!’

The man from the RAC spent ages looking at the engine and twisting things and taking lids off and putting them back on again. Then after all that he couldn’t fix it anyway and he had to tow them back to London. Clemmie could tell that he didn’t want them in the van. He kept looking at the state of their clothes. She had managed to get the red mud from the cornfields all over herself and her father. The RAC man gave them his newspaper to lay out on the floor and seats of the Cortina so Clemmie had her Start-rites on a naked lady’s bosoms all the way home.

Her dad was sitting in the driving seat, his hands on the wheel, but he wasn’t driving. It looked as if he was pretending to drive. Just as he’d been pretending to be happily married to her mother and pretending to be having a wonderful time with her at the seaside when all the time he had wanted to be in Somerset.

She sat back and stared out of the passenger window, watching the raindrops squiggle this way and that, joining up, forming fatter drops, when a thought suddenly struck her: what if
everything
was pretend? What if a great big trick was being played on her and everyone else was in on it? She pressed her face to the cold window pane, looking through the droplets out into the darkening sky. She started to watch the people in the cars overtaking them. Yes, all the drivers were staring at her in a strange way. She could see their lips moving, making comments about her. They all seemed to know something about her. In the back of a red car a little boy stuck out his tongue and laughed. He knew too. It was all a set-up. What if the trees weren’t real and the road wasn’t real and what if it was all there purely for her benefit, for the big trick against her? She shut her eyes and opened them very quickly, hoping to catch the world out. She blinked quickly but everything remained in place. It was a good trick. The organizers would have planned for this – she thought the best time to check might be in the middle of the night when they took everything down or were doing repairs.

By the time they passed the building with the pouring Lucozade bottle on it another thought was dawning on her: on the journey to the seaside she had forgotten to do the breathing task with the lamp-posts and sure enough, something terrible
had
happened and what was more, today was Friday the thirteenth, just like the lady with the man-voice had said.

‘Wake up, Clemmie. We’re nearly home.’

‘I’m not asleep,’ she said, forgetting her promise of never speaking to him again. But she had been asleep. All that crying had made her tired.

He’d carried her back to the car on his shoulders through the cornfield. How different the view had been from up there, the air had felt fresher, the world much bigger. She could see other fields and the patterns the wind was making through the corn. She could even see the shiny blue roof of the Cortina, which was disappointingly close; she thought she’d run a lot further than that. It had certainly taken him ages to find her; she’d run right through this field, through another and on to a steep road. Then she’d stopped crying and got more involved in her own lostness. It was a surprising feeling, being lost. It was her first real taste of freedom and she had liked it very much. She’d looked up at the puffy white clouds whizzing through the sky, the trees shimmering and shaking around her, and she had felt the thrill of the wild as she wondered which way she should go. She tried to imagine what Jesus might have done in her position and decided he would have turned right because he was right-handed. She didn’t know that for certain but it seemed most likely because in the painting at church heaven and the angels were all on the right of him, presumably so he could shake hands and sign fan-mail, and hell and the devils were all on the left. She thought Jesus might wander down into that village she could see at the bottom of the hill, where kindly people would wash his feet and praise him. She wasn’t expecting that exactly but perhaps a nice old lady might take her in as a mysterious orphan. She didn’t think Joseph would have gone to Somerset. Joseph probably liked to be with Jesus and Mary when he got home from a hard day’s carpenting; they probably played Scrabble with wooden pieces that he’d made especially. Just then her father had ruined her chances of being orphaned by shouting her name loudly from the field. Then the next thing she knew he was on the road behind her waving frantically. She legged it down the hill as fast as she could, clickety-click-click, but she didn’t stand a chance, he was a really fast runner – he’d won the fathers’ race at Sports Day. He’d caught her up and grabbed her, scooping her up into his arms from behind, whether she liked it or not. She made her body go rigid but still he clung on to her, not minding the mud she was getting all over his suit and the thumps she was giving him.

When they got back to Putney Clemmie scuttled into the house past her mother, who was standing in the hall looking anxious. ‘Look at the state of her, Jim!’ she heard her say as she ran up the stairs and into the loo, bolting the door behind her. It was the only safe place, the only room in the house with a lock on it.