The Generation Game (9 page)

‘It’s Bernie,’ the woman says. ‘He’s in Torbay Hospital.’And, seeing Sheila’s face, she adds: ‘Don’t worry he’s not dead –
it’s been a close shave, mind. A heart attack, I’m afraid. A big heart attack.’

She waits a few moments, letting her news sink in, surreptitiously casting an eye over the magazines on display.

‘He’s been asking for you,’ she goes on. ‘And to be quite honest, he needs you more than me. He needs his family.’

She moves towards the door and, before leaving, turns and says: ‘This is a bit awkward, you see. I’m going back to the Bay. Tiger Bay. I’ve had enough of this one. I’m
sorry. It was a bit of a mistake, really.’

Then she exits the shop, the half-hearted bell tolling her departure.

I do not like Orville Tupper. He hardly notices my presence at all, rarely bothering to look down from his dizzying height to the land where I live. I don’t matter one
iota to him. And I don’t matter to Helena either, for late one Saturday afternoon, when I return from the Bone Yard, falling into the shop in my normal Philippa way, Helena isn’t there.
Helena has gone. She has vanished. Vamoosed.

I call up the stairs for her. I look in her room, the one next to mine. It is unusually tidy and I can see straightaway that she isn’t there either. I even look in Bob’s room in the
attic, where he relocated after we moved in so we could have our own floor. There is an assortment of cardies lurking in his wardrobe, but not my mother. She is nowhere to be seen.

She has gone. But she is not lost. She is not even mislaid. She has flown away, not on a cloud to Heaven like Lucas, but on a Boeing 747 to Canada, according to Bob who has to break the news to
this seven-year-old girl. ‘Maybe she’s been kidnapped by Orville Tupper?’ I ask, hopefully. But Bob says nothing which tells me everything. Instead, he pats me gently on the head
and gives me a packet of Opal Fruits which I do not have the stomach to eat.

I will never buy Vicks Sinex again. Not as long as I live. However blocked up and full of cold I become, I will not be reminded of the man who stole my mother.

We have been removed to a side room. To give us some peace and quiet because it’s mayhem on the ward. Too many breasts and babies and bemused-looking men. And I’m
an old mother. Old.

“Please can we go home?” I beg Fran.

“All in good time,” she says before going home herself for a well-deserved sleep (what about my sleep, haven’t I deserved one?).

And now he’s here. Outside in the corridor. I can hear him pacing up and down the lino, his footsteps squeaking like an injured animal. I know it’s him though I haven’t
actually seen him. A nameless nurse pops her head round the door, primed by Fran, to inform me that my husband has turned up with a teddy bear. Yes, a teddy bear. For you. He won’t get around
me that easily. I will not be bribed.

That name, label – ‘husband’ – attaches Adrian to me in a way that makes me feel sick. All those images conjured up by that word, tumbling round my stomach, surging
through my blood, tingeing my milk with a nasty taste so that I am petrified you will never want it.

To have and to hold.
Where was he when I was pushing you out?
To love and to cherish.
Where was he when he was supposed to be with me?
Till death us do part.
I feel like
killing him right now.
Forsaking all others.
Yeah, right.

“Tell him to go home,” I bark at the nurse the next time she dodges in, and I get an angelic sympathetic smile in return.

“Are you sure?”

“Quite sure.”

So he leaves, my husband, quietly. A squeak that grows faint and then the distant thud of a door closing. He doesn’t even bother to kick up a fuss.

I don’t know where he’s gone. Not to our home. But I have you and your home is with me.

These days I would be taken in by Social Services and fostered out to a family with a clutch of other abandoned children. But at this moment in time there is no question of
that; I stay on at the shop with Bob. Neither of us really believes this arrangement will continue forever. Surely Helena will come back and resume her rightful place at the counter at some point
in the near future? Maybe she’s just gone on holiday and forgotten to mention it in all the dizzy rush of packing and organising a foreign trip. Maybe she’ll send me a postcard of a
Mountie sitting proudly on his horse and bring me back a racoon’s tail hat (á la Davy Crockett) as a souvenir.

But it isn’t a postcard that flutters through the shop letterbox onto the Embassy doormat. It is an airmail letter with a row of stamps Lucas would have spent his pocket money on. It
arrives one Saturday morning a few weeks after Helena’s departure. I am on my way to Auntie Sheila’s when the postman hands it over to me in such a gingerly fashion that I wonder if it
is one of those letter bombs. My name is on the front in Helena’s school girl handwriting (which is much neater than my school girl handwriting as she spent several hours a day practising it
in her boarding school in Wales and Miss Mothball isn’t particularly bothered how neat our writing is as long as we ‘get on with it quietly’). I peel open the seal very carefully
and unfold the tissue-thin letter, catching the faintest whiff of Helena’s perfume-mixed-with-cigarettes.

My reading has suffered without the benefit of Lucas’ tuition. So I hand the letter over to Bob, lurking nearby, shuffling some packets of tic tacs on their stand. He coughs dramatically
(for this is most definitely a dramatic moment, my future hanging there amongst the Sherbet Dib Dabs and
Daily Mails
) and then begins:

(At this point Bob chokes up and has to blow his nose.)

And there it is: the truth of it, there in that name, Helena. I see that she is as confused as I am. She has never been a fully-fledged Mummy. There has always been such a strong part that has
remained Helena. And that is the part she is now embracing in Orville Tupper’s small condominium (flat) in Toronto, while the Mummy part is kept at arms’ length. Kept over the
ocean.

Bob smiles at me with that smile which completely passed my mother by.

‘She thought she was doing the right thing by you,’ he says. ‘She thought you’d be better off here, with me.’

He looks as bemused as I feel, his hands searching inside the pockets of his baggy cardigan as if he’ll find the answer in there. But somewhere deep down, that niggle returns. Maybe Helena
is right. Maybe I am better off with Bob.

Bernie toes the line now he is invalided by the weak heart that over-exerted itself one too many times in his philandering days. He can pay more attention to matters closer to
home including why all his bamboo canes are missing from his dilapidated greenhouse. He doesn’t dare exert himself these days. He doesn’t dare do anything more strenuous than a bit of
pottering about the garden, weeding the alpine rockery and dead heading the roses. He’s given up his Lot. There was a retirement party at (appropriately) the Berni Inn where men in greasy
ties made feeble jokes about dodgy tickers and faulty starter motors. But the biggest change in his lifestyle is his avoidance of women. On the cusp of his twentieth wedding anniversary, he has at
long last forsaken all others.

Sheila can’t give up Bob though. She still hankers after him, his good heart and his warm smile that came out all wrong when he aimed it at the true woman of his dreams (Helena/Mummy).
Sheila comes into the shop, like the old days, under the pretence of purchasing a
Western Morning News
or a packet of Extra Strong Mints, but really to be with Bob, to check up on me and to
keep an eye on Patty.

Patty is a school leaver that Bob has procured to roll up her sleeves and lend a helping hand, though Patty does it in return for a paltry wage that she spends on clothes and make-up. It is
these clothes and make-up that worry Sheila because when Patty is kitted out in them she could easily be mistaken for a member of Pan’s People (to Toni’s annoyance). Patty has
giraffe-length legs and a Marie Osmond smile. Sheila needn’t worry though. Bob is quite oblivious to Patty’s charms; he is relieved to have her cheap and efficient labour. And as for
me, Patty is another longed for big sister, the other one being Toni of course – which is just as well because unfortunately I am soon to lose Toni. All that ballet practice has led to her
being accepted by the Royal Ballet School. She is leaving for London next week (lucky thing).

I am invited along on a final shopping trip to Tip Taps, a dance shop in Paignton. It is a small shop packed out with pink tights and leotards of every shade you can think of. Some of the
costumes look like they’ve been hanging there since before the War. The elderly gentleman who owns Tip Taps is less like a dancer than you could possibly imagine with his thick-set frame,
Dennis Healey eyebrows, handlebar moustache and Harris Tweed. He’d be more at home in the cockpit of a Spitfire. Sheila hands over the list she’s been sent from the ballet school and
each time Toni pirouettes out of the changing room – a flimsy curtain in the corner behind a stack of shoeboxes – Auntie Sheila has to reach for a fresh hanky (she’s come well
prepared) and the elderly gentlemen blushes the colour of the red ballet shoes hanging above the counter. Toni has sprouted into womanhood and no-one has noticed until we are brought face to face
with it in this small corner of Paignton. She is a woman and she is going to London and poor Auntie Sheila is beside herself. But I do not feel sorry for her. I feel cross and angry and worried
that there will be no-one to fret over me when it is my time to up and leave. Or maybe I am destined to stay forever by the seaside.

Two years on and the situation has changed very little (apart from a new
Doctor Who
). I still have no mother but I do at least belong to a gaggle of girls at school. I
am officially accepted into their circle – though perhaps somewhat on the circumference – mainly because they are short of some muscle when it comes to confrontations with the boys who
rule the playground with their football and their spit. I am no longer Poor Lucas’ Friend. Somehow I have swallowed Lucas up into my persona and give off the aura of quiet strength that he
had. I am Philippa, the Tough Nut.

I also have a badge of honour: Library Monitor. This is somewhat ironic considering my illiterate beginnings but all that hard work in the Bone Yard amongst the tombstones must have finally paid
off and I am at long last reading like a veteran. I have read so many books that I can help the little ones with their book choice and try to steer them away from the B section (Blyton) and towards
such modern books as
Stig of the Dump
or
James and the Giant Peach
. For those who haven’t yet mastered the mysteries of reading there is always Dr Seuss further down by the
leaking beanbag.

I am not left alone in my duties. Miss Parry, who looks like she could have been a Tudor queen in a former life, is the archetypal librarian: she is stern and quiet and knows her books inside
out. She defends the Dewey Decimal system to within an inch of her life and would burn heretics at the stake in the defence and upkeep of the library rules. The library rules – NO TALKING, NO
RUNNING, NO EATING, NO DRINKING – are pinned up in bold print at several prominent points in the small library so there is no excuses for them not to be known off by heart by anyone passing
through (except of course if you can’t read which is where the rules usually fall down).

‘Philippa, please can you deal with C section. The infants have been on the rampage again.’

‘Yes, Miss Parry,’ I nod like an eager Jack Russell, an image of little savages with woad smeared across their cheeks running bare-chested across the dangerously-polished boards of
the library spurring me on.

And I have to agree with Miss Parry here. The infants are a disgrace when it comes to filing. Ca’s and Co’s and Ci’s all over the shop (as Wink would say).

And then I see it.
The Penguin History of Canada
, a single red maple leaf fluttering on the cover as I flick through this grownup book that has somehow made its way into the school
library. And I feel my legs weaken, all my strength sapping away like tapped Maple syrup.

‘Philippa, are you all right?’ Miss Parry rushes over to me in an unprecedented fashion and touches the back of her cool hand against my forehead. ‘Low blood sugar,’ she
diagnoses with confidence. ‘Deep breaths, Philippa,’ she urges, as if the Armada are attacking. ‘Don’t move,’ she orders, sitting me down on the library’s one
and only comfy chair, ‘I’ll be two ticks.’ And she disappears, leaving me alone with my head in my woollen skirt, listening to the distant thud of children being let out to play,
little feet storm-trooping down the corridor and out onto the tarmac beyond. The shriek of scattering seagulls. A teacher’s whistle. A heavy door closing with finality. Then all sound stops
and it is just me, alone, in the musty library, the smell of old books and beeswax. The warmth of the chair beneath my legs, my head upside down, the sickness in my stomach, a pain in my chest,
feelings inside me that have been gurgling for so long, ignored and unnamed, but that are now set to explode.
Canada
…
Orville Tupper
…
Helena
.

‘Sit up now, Philippa.’ Miss Parry shouts across the room, rushing over with a half-full glass of milk and a Rich Tea biscuit that she has procured from an unknown source (thereby
contravening all the golden rules in one fell swoop, the whole gamut of library law smashed to smithereens by this Tudor queen). When I’ve nibbled at the biscuit and sipped at the milk, I
look at her face trying to find a trace of motherhood. She clearly finds this awkward, examining her wristwatch as if she’s forgotten how to tell the time.