Tying Down The Lion (4 page)

“Her head came off.”

“Nell, I’m warning you...”

“I’m just saying. Clean off.”

“Nell!”

“What’s wrong with the charabanc?”

“They don’t bloody exist now. That’s what’s wrong with them!”

We all gasp. Mum never bloodies. Since car squabbles seem to stew with more violence than quarrels at home, I concentrate on the display of Nudit for female moustaches in Woolworth’s window.

“Getting the hang of the lingo at last, Bridge, are you? Ooh, remind us again, what were the only English words you knew when Roy first found you?”

“Angry monkey, peach-stone, Horlicks and May I become the little donkey. I had a terrible start at school. My English teacher believed he could levitate. He was carried from the gymnasium roof on a stretcher. And then came Hitler.”

“What, into the school?” Victor asks. “Did you have to do the salute?”

“No, Victor. Thankfully not. I have always avoided him. Oh, I hope Roy is quick. I’m like a boiled spring.”

“Coiled, Mum,” I tell her. She ignores me. She has shown me her frosty face since last night when Dad had one of the night-terrors, which he’s suffered since the war. He pushes Mum away and I help him instead. The next morning, she seems to push me away. As Grandma always says, families aren’t all about clean white shirt-fronts, unscratched bannisters and beaming over the cornflakes.

“Nell, we must not spoil Roy’s dream,” Mum is saying. “All he wants is to drive.”

“I know that fine well, Bridge. Been driving me mad for years.”

Chortling, Grandma reaches into her bag and pulls out a bacon sandwich.

“He has always wanted to take me home, Nell. Our two dreams are joining together.”

I clench my jaw when Mum says Berlin is home.

Grandma’s eyes screw themselves back into their sockets as if rummaging for her imagination. “No idea what you’re on about, Bridget. Why can’t we just take a coach to Clacton like everyone else?”

“Because of Dad wanting to be king of the road, master of all he surveys,” I tell her, trying to be helpful.

“
He’s
not German.” Grandma says, rolling up her bacon rind and cramming it into her mouth. She passes Victor a Tupperware pot of last night’s pudding.

“He promised me Berlin,” Mum says. “It will kill him if we do not arrive.”

“It’d take more than that to kill my Roy. Your lot didn’t manage it, did they?”

“But what will happen if the brakes fail, Nell?” Mum dabs at her damp forehead with the hem of her cardigan. “Oh, I do hope Roy can take me home.”

“He won’t.”

“Oh, Nell, can you not let me dream?”

“If hopes and dreams were big ice-creams, the world would be right sticky. Now come on, Bridge. Pull yourself together. Jesus wept, look at the state of you. You’re as much use as a knitted knife.”

“But if the car breaks down, what will we do?”

“Go on the bloody train, Bridget, like anyone else,” Grandma says. “And then walk onto the ship. How’s he to get this heap of kindling across the bloomin’ sea anyhow?”

“Oh Nell, he will drive onto the ferry.”

“You’ll be telling me he can walk on water next.”

“Can he, Mum?”

“Of course not Victor. Eat your Instant Whip.”

“Oh,
Sieg Heil
,” mutters Grandma.

“Bum it,” Victor whispers. “Bloody Butterscotch.”

While we wait, I look out of the window. I’m not a sky-gazer, but being trapped makes a person desperate. According to the calendar, there will be a new moon tonight. I picture the unlit half as a round of damp white cheese sandwiched between the earth and the sun. Carved into it is the evil smirk of a Bad-Moon girl, or maybe Mum’s face.

2.
New Moon

Some Saturdays, I’m still waiting for Dad to emerge from the betting-shop an entire packet of strawberry sherbet later, complete with scarlet tongue and fingertips. But today, he nips in and out in record time.

“Just put a bob each way on an odds-on favourite, love,” he tells her. “It’s called Midsummer Night’s Dream. That’s the tune you like, isn’t it? Couldn’t pass that one by. Trixie’ll hang on to my winnings.”

“I bet she will,” Grandma says, disentangling a cavalry soldier from her necklaces.

Mum reaches out and squeezes Dad’s hand. “Thank you,” she says, for once not making a complaint about him betting. “Thank you for all this.”

“A bob each way won’t make your fortune. Not at five to four on,” Grandma says. But Mum ignores her and lights Dad a cigarette while he tries to close his window. The handle falls off and he roars with laughter. The holiday clouds are lightening from purple Quink to the grey-white of school mash. Hours from now we’ll be on the transit roads that syphon us into East Germany and through border controls bristling with guards.

“They’re sons of Nazis who don’t want to miss out on being Nazis even though the war’s over,” Victor tells us.

“We can see your drawers, Jacqueline,” Grandma chips in, busy sucking Dolly Mixtures. She unsticks a domed jelly, lime and shining like a bogey, from her bottom denture and drops it in the pull-out ashtray.

“Victor, don’t drum your feet on the back of Dad’s seat. And Jacqueline, pull your skirt down,” Mum says, turning round and talking through a needle between her teeth. She’s sewing a trail of white running-stitches around an old navy dress. Her idea of fashion, they look like broken lines dividing a long dark road. “You are not recent,” she tells me.

I tug at my skirt. “You’re spot-on there, Mum. These twin-sets make me look like someone from the Dark Ages. But, decent or not, minis are meant to be in fashion. I’d show you if I was allowed a proper magazine.”

Mum would love to still see me skipping on the pavement, jumping over the rope and singing “I’m a Little Bubble Car”. But I should be sitting in a little bubble-car, courting a gorgeous young man in winklepickers and wearing a silk headscarf and a girdle. That’s me wearing those, not the gorgeous fellow.

“And guess what?” I say, pushing my luck. “My skirts are this short because I’ve worn them since I was ten, and my legs do actually grow.”

“Mind you, Bridge,” Grandma says, her corset creaking as she delves in her bag for
Woman’s Weekly
and a quarter of liquorice comfits. “If I had legs the length of our Jacqueline’s, I’d wear a skirt as small as a cake-frill. And Victor duck, I can well believe there are still Nazis about. Indeed yes. They get everywhere. Comfit, love?”

“Nell, I’m warning you…”

“I was only referring to Mrs Pither, Bridge. Who did you think I meant, dear? She’s putrefied of anyone made different,” Grandma says, tapping off her ash. “‘Oh, do we have Ten Ton Tessie staying?’ she said when I hung out my smalls. Tch, the cheek of it. I’ll go back to hanging them out after dark and then up at the crack of dawn to fetch them in.”

Grandma scared Victor half to death last winter when he found her wrestling with a rigid, frost-bitten girdle. He launches into a re-enactment, earning a slap from Dad for trespassing on the centre-console. The East Germans couldn’t possibly protect their border with greater efficiency than Dad’s hand patrols his treasured strip of territory.

“Why won’t Mrs Pither say our name properly?” Victor asks Grandma, waggling his hands behind his ears and sticking out his tongue at Dad’s back.

“Out of spite, love. She just won’t say Bishop. ‘Oh, Reginald, Mrs Bitch-op’s underpants is blockin’ my light’, says she, loud-as-you-please, to her stoat of a husband.”

“She’s made a hide in the hedge,” Victor says. “For when her laundry’s on the line and I’m in the yard with my catapult.”

“Oh, I can imagine her crouching in the lavender, waiting for you to blast her silken bloomers. Nothing’s allowed past her boundary.”

“Oh, and have you seen how she paints her mouth?” Victor asks. “It goes over the edges?”

I’m sure normal seven-year-old boys shouldn’t know about lipstick.

“Oh indeed. And if she stands with her left cheek facing the sun, you can see black hairs sprouting from a mole the shape of a Scottie dog. Yes, a terrible thing, spite.”

Mrs Pither’s Nazi-spite seems to brighten our cloud even more. Dad bursts our eardrums with occasional bouts of yodelling. Mum unfolds maps, saying such unhelpful things as, “Should you not be on this wavy blue line, Roy?”

“Doubt it, Bridge. That’s the Thames.”

Eventually, Victor tires of the yodelling and even of the drive. His bare legs are stuck fast to the seat and one of T-K’s has pinged off and flown into Grandma’s foot-well. I did try to tell him men couldn’t do the splits.

“It’s like driving to a funeral, Dad,” Victor says.

“And we’ll be heading straight to yours if you don’t pipe down.”

“Blood and sand, lad,” Grandma adds. “Any slower and we’ll be in reverse. I’ll be back in Audette Gardens in time for
Crossroads
.”

“Is this trip one-hell-of-a-gas, Mum?” Victor says, watching a Lambretta buzz by. “Because Dad told me it would be.”

“Can you not drive faster, Roy?”

“Oh, hoity-toity,” Grandma says. “Your patience is wearing thinner than a cream cracker, Bridge. Ooh, have you been eating your calves-foot jelly again? I swear I can smell hoof. Beats me why you don’t have a British bacon buttie like the rest of us.”

Mum ignores her. “How are the brakes, Roy?
Mein Gott
, I think sometimes we will not set a toe in Berlin.”

“Ooh, if only Hitler had said that about the Sudetenland.”

“Ma, stop it. Bridge, just hold the bus, love. Climb down from your Panzer. The brake’s as sweet as a nut. It’s your appendix I’m thinking about. Softly, softly, the doctor said last time, didn’t he? Not too much excitement. If I go haring off like a rocket it could give you a relapse. You’ll never get there then.”

“Mum,” Victor pipes up, “your appendix is a hand-grenade. If the pin is pulled out you’ve only got seconds. You don’t want to detonate it, do you?”

“Spot on, Victor,” says Dad, who has coached him. “Think of it that way, Bridge. A hand-grenade inside your guts. No wonder I’m sticking to twenty miles an hour.”

“More like two,” Grandma says, pulling her knitting apart to pick up a dropped stitch. “And to think I was terrified. I’d be more scared on a milk float.”

Everyone except Grandma is too hungry to be pleasant. When Mum asks Dad if he definitely picked up the Deutschmarks from the hall table where Grandma keeps her battalion of china ladies and he says he asked her to put them in his wallet, the stew really starts to simmer. It’s all how-am-I-supposed-to-find-anything-among-that-crinoline-mob? And you-know-I-would-never-touch-your-wallet. Reasonable enough. Then we have why-is-everything-always-left-to-me? Followed by some-of-us-were-busy-unblocking-the-toilet. Inexplicably, this leads to it-wasn’t-me-who-forgot-to-defrost-the-turkey (four Christmases ago). But it reaches the point where Grandma has to tie her headscarf around Victor’s ears and I hear the German word for arse-hole.

Tears are burning my eyes because my parents actually do love each other. Dad doesn’t really think Mum’s a know-all who blames him for everything. And Mum honestly doesn’t hold Dad responsible for Victor ending up in Casualty last Christmas. It was all the fault of the Space-Saving Easy X-tend table.

We only use it once a year because it’s a nightmare to unfold. The flaps must be released at the same precise moment or else they jam. Last year, Dad lost patience with them and instead of getting his toolbox out, he drank a lot of Bristol Cream. While we were eating the turkey at the sloping table, Victor’s drumstick glided into his lap. He had just coated it in steaming gravy.

Until nine o’clock that night, almost to the end of
The Black And White Minstrel Show
, we waited in Casualty with his sizzling thigh glistening from the butter Grandma had plastered on. When we came back, our abandoned dinners were shrunken and black in the oven like yesterday’s coals. Grandma was asleep in front of the blaring television with a box of jelly-babies under her feet, her slippers in her hand and Deborah shrieking “Mammy.”

Victor and I ate Ritz crackers and cheese on our laps with a jar of pickled onions wedged between us and him crying all the way through
The Ken Dodd Show
.

When they row, Mum and Dad always stir the silt at the bottom of the grudge-pool.

“All families do the same, duck,” Grandma keeps saying. She holds one of Victor’s hands and one of mine while we glance inside the other cars on the road as if hoping to see all their insults flying about.

“At least your mum and dad never throw punches,” Grandma adds. And, as if this is a souped-up version of I-Spy, Victor and I look out for black eyes too.

Was it Neville Chamberlain in his “peace for our time” speech who said we should go home and get a nice quiet sleep? Well, I wish he was here now. I don’t want to be one of those car-people who fall asleep with their mouth open and their head thunking against the window-pillar.

I’m tired because of Dad’s terror last night. Grandma reckons the war shredded his nerves like a cheese-grater. He had to shoot a very young German, not much older than me, who spun round three times before he fell, like a dancer in a terrifying ballet.

***

Night-terror

I wake up to the gasping. It explodes through the wall into our room. The luminous hands of my clock, evil in the dark, point to half-past one. Half-past one on a Thursday should mean I’m halfway through my warm school mince and lemon-curd tart, but the night version is a time I shouldn’t see, or hear.

Victor and I used to stay in bed and plug our ears with plasticine, but now I’d rather be with Dad.

I get up to help, but the room has no shape. I can’t find the door and crash into the dressing-table. My hairbrush and Victor’s Action Man clatter to the linoleum. Why do things that fall never land on the rug?

Victor’s
Commando
slithers off the nylon sheet. How can a half-ounce of paper actually make a thud? He stops grinding his teeth and mumbles, “Argh!” That’s a German soldier. And then “Aieee!” That’s a Japanese one. Nothing to do with terror in Victor’s case. Just comic war.

I stuff his pillow into his ear, but it springs back again because Mum bought the new foam kind. He wakes up.

“Will Dad say the bit about the soldier having a mother?” he asks, as if comforted by this repeating pattern. That’s seven-year-old boys for you.

“Yes, he will.”

“Will he take aim?”

“Probably.”

“Is it a real gun?”

“No, it’s the pole with the hook for hoisting up the Sheila-Maid.”

“What about the trigger?”

“Oh use your blasted imagination, Victor, can’t you?”

There are only so many questions a sister can take.

Dad’s gasps grow louder, more rasping, with a horrific pause between breaths, as if all our good breathable air has been sucked out of the house. Has he died? My heart thumps like a road-drill. Ah, the mattress springs are twanging. He’s alive. His feet are out. I can hear his callouses scraping on the floor. And he’s off.

He gallops across the landing, almost tumbling down the stairs. The first time I heard him, I thought a horse had come into the house. The landing shakes and the bannisters tremble.

I take a deep breath, wishing I could extract it from my lungs and send it to him. Mum used to follow him down. Once, in his desperation to breathe, he thrashed his arms about just as she reached him and caught her with an uppercut. The next morning, Mrs Pither saw Mum putting out the milk bottles, spotted her black eye and threatened to call the police. Not for putting out the bottles. She thought Grandma had thrown a punch.

A while ago, Dad started being nasty to Mum during the terrors. He kept telling her she scared him, but he never remembered it the next day. We were told not to mention it to Grandma. She would never let Mum forget it. Mum could forgive Dad because his mind was so muddled. It was easier than forgiving him for sloping off to the two-thirty at Kempton on the Saturday she turned forty.

She resents me for being the one person Dad tolerates during these hellish nights. She cried about it at first and I tried to say something helpful, but mothers are supposed to mop daughters’ tears, not the other way round. When Gaye Kennedy’s grandfather died, her mum kept reaching for her, all blurry-eyed, and Gaye had to keep one eye on the clock because
Crossroads
was about to start, and she wanted to see Andy and Ruth’s wedding.

Dad is crashing about in the kitchen, fighting to inhale. When I reach him, I try not to touch him or speak first. Either of those can really rattle him and he goes berserk, so I just stand there. Once he’s breathing properly, he starts a conversation with the German soldier he killed, trying to spool back time.

“Oh Christ, don’t fire, son.”

“Shush, Dad.”

“You’re still a boy. Not ready, mate.”

“Come on, Dad. Shush.”

“Don’t shoot. I’m begging you. I’m looking at your eyes. Look at mine. Think of my ma waiting for me.”

A tear drips onto his pyjamas.

“Please, Dad.”

“Mate…it’s you or me. I’m so sorry.”

“Dad. It’s all over now,” I tell him.

“Yes,” he says. “He’s down. That’s it. He’s gone. But his mum’ll be waiting.”

“Yes, I know. But we’re waiting for you too, Dad. Come back to us.”

Eventually, our Dad comes back from the war. After twenty hours that are actually twenty minutes, he trudges back up, just an ordinary, tired man. Mum’s slippers tap across the floor above. Grandma, famous throughout our home-town of Oaking for sleeping through Doodlebugs, is spared the entire trauma.

I fill the kettle and press the plunger on the tea-caddy mounted on the wall. It coughs three times into the pot. The mantelpiece clock chimes two when I take the tea-cups upstairs to them. Sometimes it’s later than that if I forget to fire the gas under the kettle.