Tying Down The Lion (18 page)

“No. I don’t want her coming in here in that black shiny dressing-gown like a killer whale.”

“She’ll be nude by now.”

“Oh bloody ugh.”

As he falls asleep, his teeth grind like thirty cheese-graters scraping a blackboard. I resign myself to staying awake.

I want to forget Mum and the project, so I think about Grandma’s fear of loneliness forcing her to come on this trip. It may be less the dread of being alone and more the dread of missing out. While your back is turned, other people invade your territory. Gillian’s always terrified of losing my friendship if Lynette invites me for tea.

Now I can’t help remembering the things Gillian said about me the other day, things I denied because I thought I knew exactly who I was. It was the day we sold the Sunny Smiles. Sunny? So-bloody-called.

***

Sunny Smiles

Lynette, Gillian and I go out in a scorching shaft of evening sun to sell Sunny Smiles around Audette Gardens, but not with much actual smiling. It’s more like pistols at dawn.

Because her mother is chairwoman of the charity, Gillian demands control of the Sunny Smiles booklets, which are filled with greyish photographs of children from a Home. All of them are beaming, some with teeth and some with gums; wide hopeful smiles designed to knot up people’s throats.

“I hope they’re all given a proper home soon,” Lynette says.

“Oh for God’s sake, Lynette,” Gillian says. “They’re probably all about forty-eight by now.”

It’s true. They’re all wearing those ancient cross-over cardigans that feature on Grandma’s prehistoric knitting patterns.

Lynette rattles her tin in the shape of a kilted soldier. She’s already put in a washer and a Polo mint so the first person will suffer guilt if they don’t give. The rattle is a trigger, not just for the first victim to find their purse, but for the Battle to Be in Charge—bloodier than The Little Big Horn and just as tribal.

“I should hold the tin, Lynette,” Gillian says.

“But we’ve only just started.”

“You had it the whole time last year.”

“That’s absolutely not true, Gillian. I didn’t hold it at all. It was a Saturday, remember?”

Lynette has a deep, sultry voice like Lauren Bacall. Gillian says it’s a Jewish voice. I practise it sometimes, sitting elegantly like Lauren does on top of a piano, except I’m just on my quilted stool with the foam-rubber bursting out. I have to do it when Victor’s not in our room. He listened at the door once and thought I had Patrick MacGoohan in there.

“Oh Christ,” Gillian says. “You and your bloody Sabbath. What with no pressing doorbells or carrying anything, I’m surprised you’re allowed out at all.”

“Please don’t bloody it,” Lynette says, clutching the soldier to her chest.

“And what else did you tell us you can’t do on the Sabbath? Oh yes, no slaughtering, no fire-lighting, no winnowing. What’s winnowing when it’s at home anyway?”

“You wouldn’t understand, Gillian,” Lynette says in her huskiest tone. And although Gillian is my best friend, I silently support Lynette for defending what is hers. Plus, her mother makes fabulous bread. Gillian’s always first in line for a bite of the challah.

“Well, let me carry the tin then,” I suggest. Lynette hands it over and links arms with me. Gillian’s face darkens. The battle-lines are drawn. Three’s a crowd, they say. Mind you, if this were Victor and two other boys, they’d just punch each other, roll in the dust and forget it.

“Just because you’re Jewish doesn’t make you special, Lynette,” Gillian says after we’ve rung the first bell and been told all the loose change in the house is already sealed in the football-pools envelope.

“I don’t see it like that,” Lynette says as we walk on.

“Well, I do. It makes you think you can get out of things, like the assembly last year about the Varto earthquake. I had to read out three Bible passages, stamp on Paul Postlethwaite’s verruca to stop him singing “All Shook Up” and ended up with my eye blackened by a flying bouzouki.”

“Bouzoukis are Greek…”

“And
you
didn’t have to cut up your mother’s velvet curtain to make a fez and stuff balloons down your trouser legs.”

“But Gillian, you volunteered,” I point out.

“No, Miss Whipp made me because Mother always has spare curtains. We have new ones every year. It’ll be the fibre-glass sort next. Dirt can’t cling. Falling-leaves pattern. Green and orange with yellow shadows. Drip-dry. Forty-three and six.”

When I tell her it’s clear she lives at the posher end of Audette Gardens, she smiles her dimpled cat smile and grasps my other arm, forcing me to give up the soldier tin. She grips it so hard her thumb dents his sporran.

A man, dripping and shiny from his bath, opens the door of the next house, a towel tied round his huge hairy stomach. His little girl comes running up behind him, slips on the bathwater puddle, clutches the towel and pulls it clean off. The man slams the door in our faces, saying he can’t donate without his trousers.

We call back later, desperate after a run of door-bells echoing in apparently empty houses, but like most of the others, he pretends to be out.

“Let’s look through the window at the top of his door,” Gillian says.

No one can reach it, so she stands on his ornamental bullfrog.

“I can see a shadow behind his cocktail cabinet,” she hisses.

We all hear the toddler laughing and saying, “My turn to hide, Daddy!” And then the trouser-less man, presumably trousered now, whispering, “Sh, Verity. You haven’t found me yet.”

We cover the Gardens from the crummy semis at our end to the new horseshoe of buffed red-brick villas at the other, each with a long central channel of shingle beach set into the driveway.

“My mother says we have to be persistianent,” Gillian announces.

“Let’s see how much we’ve made so far,” Lynette says, wrenching off the soldier’s busby.

“You’re abscessed with money, aren’t you?” Gillian says.

“I’m not obsessed. I just thought we’d see how it’s going.”

“Well, we’ve only sold two and at least three of the pennies are Scottish, which won’t even buy the orphans a Jamboree bag. I think I should have the tin now. Mother’s watching out the window and she’ll be tired of seeing you in charge of it.”

“All right.”

I can hear the rusty cogs of Gillian’s brain creaking, working out how to continue the sparring. It takes a while, but the gears crank up again.

“Why don’t you come into assembly, Lynette?”

“I come in for the notices, just not the hymns and prayers.”

“Why?”

“You know why, Gillian.”

“Well I’m glad I’m not Jewish. Aren’t you, Jacqueline?”

I don’t want to speak. I know Lynette isn’t actually my friend in the way Gillian is, but she already has a bad enough time being teased by the prefects who supervise the pupils sitting out assembly. There’s a Jehovah’s Witness, a girl with her neck in a surgical collar and a boy with low blood pressure who can’t stand up for longer than it takes to sing a hymn with three verses, and even they snigger about hooked noses. I don’t know how they get away with it because the Jehovah’s Witness has a conk like a Conference pear.

I think Gillian is scared of Lynette being different and is trying to tease her out of our Sunny Smiles evening as if she’s a spider cutting a stray leaf from her lair.

“Jacqueline?”

Under the baking sun and with Gillian staring, I can’t think straight. But Lynette’s deep, rich voice speaks for me.

“I’m sure Jacqueline’s glad. She’s glad because everyone just wants to be whoever they are, don’t they?”

I breathe out, but I’m still doomed. Gillian will start on me now.

“So how come you’re going to Germany then, Jacqueline?”

“Because my mum’s family are there.”

I swear she thinks I’m about to march through her front-door and annexe the settee or set fire to her father’s newspaper.

“We’ve prepared for World War Three under the stairs,” Gillian says. “We’ve got twelve cans of luncheon meat, three of my dad’s army-blankets and a bottle of tonic-wine.”

We wouldn’t have such a good time. Our under-the-stairs cupboard is stuffed with depressed-looking plimsolls and a thermos flask that smells of evil.

“Did your mum have brothers or a father in the war, Jacqueline? Because one of them could have killed my Uncle Dirk.”

“She just had Beate and Ilse.”

“Were they actually in the war?”

“They had a bad time in it, yes.”

“But they were still in it. They were against us, weren’t they? It was Germans against English.”

“You make it sound like the World Cup final,” Lynette chips in.

“We beat them at that as well.”

“It’s really not the same thing,” I insist. “Beate and Ilse had a terrible time. They’re still having a terrible time now Berlin’s got the Wall.”

“Wouldn’t fancy a holiday there then,” Gillian says.

“It’s not a holiday. It’s just being with family.”

“Even when they were on the other side?”

“There weren’t sides for ordinary people.”

“How come she came over here if her sisters stayed behind?” Gillian asks, turning her face to me in a bid to block Lynette.

“My dad found her. He sort of rescued her when it was all over.”

“A bit like Geoff Hurst striking the final goal just as the crowd charged onto the pitch,” Lynette chips in.

“Shut up about football for God’s sake,” Gillian says.

“Well it was only a minute before the end of play. The West Germans were frantic. They sent all their defence forward to try for an equaliser, but Bobby Moore got the ball and passed it to Hurst. People were already sprinting onto the field while he was busy scoring.”

Gillian, not usually much of a match for Lynette, uses the commentary time to think especially hard.

“If your dad had to rescue your mum, Jacqueline, she must have been in a concentration camp or something.”

Miss Whipp taught us about the camps, but she had to take Gaye Kennedy to the sick-room in the middle of it. Lynette was offered the chance to leave the lesson, but she stayed. She claims it was because the alternative was an hour in Mr Finch’s Language Lab and she didn’t want him rolling his ‘R’s in her headphones. But I think it was because she’s incredibly brave.

“My mum isn’t Jewish,” I tell Gillian. “I would know.”

I flick through the booklet and dozens of Sunny Smiles grin at me.

“My cousin works in a library,” Lynette pipes up before Gillian can start again. “He says people use Sunny Smiles as bookmarks. And he’s also found a rude postcard from Colchester, a black banana skin and a dried-out slice of continental liver-sausage.”

Gillian strides ahead.

“You can’t go off on your own, Gillian,” we shout. “We have to stick together, don’t forget, in case we knock on the wrong door.”

Keep at least one to run, Miss Whipp always says.

“I’m going home,” she says. “I’ll sell the rest to my mother.”

We catch up in Gillian’s driveway. A whistling delivery-boy has just dared to trample through the sandy channel Dad calls the death strip, so Gillian’s mother is combing every grain back into place with a toasting-fork. It appears she’d rather impale him on it.

Lynette tries to take her tin back.

“I need to count the money. Let go, you spastic,” Gillian says.

Gillian is not cruel. She just has an under-developed imagination. But her mum looms up, marches her inside and upstairs to the pink vanity unit in the bathroom.

Their soap is the expensive kind with a gold label. Gillian’s mother prises the bar from the rubber suction-pad that looks like a cross-section from a pink squid. She froths it up with the loud squelch that only men make when they wash their hands. She is built like a man, I suppose. She pushes the bar into Gillian’s mouth.

“Stick out your tongue, Miss,” she says, lathering until Gillian makes gargling noises. The tears stream down her face while her mother runs a soapy finger over her gums. Lynette and I try to make ourselves part of the long raised grasses of the hall wallpaper. We are pampas. The tin soldier lies forgotten on the shingle driveway.

The soaping shrinks Gillian and turns her eyes into boiled gooseberries, hot and tight with tears. A horrible thrill of what Mum calls Schadenfreude squirms in my stomach.

It is an actual disorder, not just me being vile. I saw Gaye Kennedy smirking when her best friend told the history teacher Martin Luther King was a German monk.

Woven through my years of friendship with Gillian, throughout the endless games of Knock-Out Whist during wet half-terms and the bottling of fallen petals to make eau-de-cologne-de-Oaking, is Gillian’s long grisly battle for supremacy.

She is primed to attack and snaffle as many honours as she can. Whether it’s Hungarian dancing exams or a game of Canasta, she aims to trump me. If she loses, I relish a shocking sense of triumph. Gillian has the disorder too, but the other way round. She can’t bear it when I do well.

I’m not a battler. I coast along, cheering other people’s victories. I’m happy to be in the House that never wins at sport and don’t mind being the hockey team’s last choice along with the girl who needs binoculars to see the blackboard.

But Schadenfreude stitches its way like a black thread through the plaid of girl-friendship. Only half of me is a good friend. Half is bad. I’m composed of too many halves.

***

Thinking straight is impossible during the cacophony of Victor’s teeth-grinding, Mum’s loud, rhythmical breathing and the clashing soprano and contralto of the snore-sisters. But more disturbing is the lack of sound from Dad. Wakefulness foreshadows a night-terror.

I hear him get up, not gasping for breath this time, just sighing deeply. Poor Dad, with everyone concentrating on Mum coming home, we have forgotten that Berlin is where he had to kill a young man.

I slide out of bed and follow him into the kitchen. Axel sits bolt upright. He might need one of Sebastian’s dummies when the terror launches. The kitchen door clicks shut. Not like ours at home, which needs a firm back-heel to slam it.

I whisper, “Sh, Dad” a few times, hoping we don’t hear the thump of beached whale in the passage.