Wendy Perriam (4 page)

We sit on the grass, to recover. The sun’s gone in and where everything was bright before, now it’s flat and grey. And the clouds seem tired, sagging in the sky above the hill. I don’t know how we’ll get home. We haven’t got a car. Kenneth drove us to the Centre in his Range Rover. We haven’t even any money for the bus. We’ve left our rucksacks behind and Mum’s had her purse in it. And her new wild-flower book that cost £10.99. And her lucky mascot key-ring.

Miss O-L’s a liar - today
wasn’t
the Eighth Wonder of the World.

“I’m sorry, Mum,” I whisper.

“That’s … OK.”’

“But what about Kenneth?”

“What about him?”

“You love him, don’t you?”

She doesn’t answer, just wipes her forehead with the back of her hand and looks at me for what seems ages. Then she says, “I love
you
, Tilly.”

I don’t want to start crying again, so I sit quite still and watch a tiny insect crawling up a blade of grass. The grass must seem awfully high and steep, but it just keeps going up and up. I wonder if it’s scared.

Mum unlaces her new trainers and rubs her feet. I think they must be hurting. “I’m sorry you lost Panda,” she says.

“That’s … OK,” I say, copying Mum’s words, and the sort of slow, sad way she said them. “It was time I gave him away. Pandas are for babies.” When Dad comes back, he’ll give me something more grown up - roller skates, or a radio.

There’s another long silence and I try to think of radios: what sort I’d like, what colour.

Mum’s still looking at me. “But why did you take the orchid, Tilly? I mean, what on earth were you going to do with it?”

I bite my lip. I can’t explain - not yet. I’ve got to work things out: how to find Dad, how to make him fall in love with Mum again, even without the money.

The insect’s half way up. As I watch it, a thought jumps into my head: if it reaches the top, Dad will come back; if it doesn’t, he won’t.

I hate the thought - it’s frightening. But inside I know it’s true. Things work like that: a secret voice is telling you and that voice is always right. I’ve proved it loads of times.

I can hardly bear to watch as the insect moves another centimetre, then stops again, to rest. I think it’s tired like Mum and me.

Get
on
! I hiss. Crawl faster. You’ve got more legs than us.

But it pauses, like it’s lost its nerve and is just clinging on for its life. And then it lifts a feeler and I’m sure it’s begging me for help.

You’re nearly there, I whisper. Don’t give up. You’re doing well.

I keep as still as a stone, so I won’t put it off or scare it. I’m even trying not to breathe.

It creeps up a little bit more, but it’s going slower and slower, then suddenly it falls off and lands on its back.

I touch my cheek. It’s throbbing and feels hot.

“Is that hurting much?” Mum asks.

“No,” I say. If I tell her the truth she’ll only be upset. She’s lost Kenneth now, as well as her bag and all the other stuff.

I pick the insect up and put it back on the blade of grass. It needs a second chance. But it doesn’t even try this time. It just slithers down and tumbles to the ground. I cup it in my hand and feel it tickling my palm. Dad used to tickle me sometimes when he was drying me after a bath, and then we’d have a pillow fight and he’d chase me round the room. I smile, remembering.

“What’s funny?” Mum asks.

I take her hand and squeeze it and somehow manage another smile. She needs me to be brave.

Because now I know Dad
isn’t
coming back.

O
n three nights out of seven Mr Chivers dreamed of purple candlewick. Sometimes they wrapped him in it as his winding sheet; other times it formed the fabric of the universe and everywhere he wandered little purple tufts tripped him up or clung to him like burrs. Occasionally they served it up as bacon with his rubberized fried egg. He often woke screaming. He switched his torch on underneath the blankets and prayed to a purple God that Miss Lineham hadn’t woken up as well. Miss Lineham slept with her door open. Maybe she didn’t sleep at all, but she retired to her room at ten o’clock sharp, with a purple hairnet and a cup of cocoa, and demanded silence until seven.

Mr Chivers crept out of his tangled bed into the bathroom. There it was: living, breathing candlewick - no dreamstuff this. Purple candlewick bathmat lying exactly parallel to the cold white bath; purple candlewick toilet-seat cover asking the shameful business that went on underneath it. Even the toilet roll was ruched and frilled in purple candlewick.

He stumbled to the basin and inspected his tongue in the mirror. It was shaggy grey, as if a fine mould had settled on it in the night. His bladder was kicking him in the gut, demanding to be emptied. He hitched up his pyjama bottoms and tied the cord more tightly. He dared not risk the jet of urine on white porcelain, not at three a.m. Even in normal daylight hours he preferred to use the public convenience. Miss Lineham’s lavatory was a decorative item. He doubted if she even used it herself. She was too refined to pee. He presumed she must evaporate off her waste products in some noiseless, odourless form of osmosis. Even the cistern was shrouded in candlewick. She had turned a cesspool into an ornamental lake.

Little matching doilies, hand-crocheted in purple, smirked at him from every surface, standing guard beneath the Harpic, cushioning the Vim. The bathroom boasted little else. Toilet articles were strictly banned. No toothbrush was permitted to flaunt its dripping nakedness in public, no bar of soap to wallow in its own slime. Aftershave was decadent, bath salts an indulgence. Flannels, toothpaste, sponges, razors - all must be locked away in strictest purdah. In the early days, before Mr Chivers realized the perils of exposure, he had rashly left his nail-brush by the basin. Miss Lineham had said nothing. But four mornings running he found the damply accusing object cringing by his breakfast egg. Four mornings running he suffered with indigestion and tension headaches.

Now, he never quitted the bathroom without a thorough scrutiny, going down on his hands and knees in search of slops of water or stray hairs. Still on his knees, he would reposition the bathmat, making sure it was dead centre - not that he ever dared to take a bath. His feet might print obscene naked splodges on the purple candlewick or his city dirt leave a tidemark impossible to remove. The cleaning rag was folded so squarely on the canister of Vim it would be sedition to disturb it.

He ran just a piddle of water into the basin. If he turned the taps full on, the geyser roared in accusation: Miss Lineham’s private spy. He dabbed at his face, then at his private parts, gazing upwards at the prim white ceiling so that he wouldn’t get excited. Arousal made the bed creak. He couldn’t even eat an apple in bed. The very first bite brought a warning cough from Miss Lineham’s open door. There were ways and means, of course, if you were desperate. It was dangerous to chew, but you could graze your teeth very gently, up and down, up and down, against the skin, until the flesh gradually succumbed. Then you held it in your mouth and sucked. The saliva did the rest. It took an hour to dispose of one small Cox’s Orange Pippin, and Granny Smiths were more or less impossible.

“I do not consider it hygienic, Mr Chivers, to store perishable foodstuffs among your underclothes. Nor would I have deemed it necessary to supplement the more than adequate diet I supply.”

He couldn’t even hide a Cox. Miss Lineham inspected everything in his room, including his underpants. (Cleaning, it was called.) She lined his cufflinks up in twos, sprayed his shoes with foot deodorant.

“Tabloid newspapers, Mr Chivers, are not encouraged in this establishment.”

“I have found it necessary, Mr Chivers, to invest in a new front-door mat, and I should like to draw your attention to the fact.”

He never saw her smile. The nearest she got to it was at nine o’clock every evening when she fed her angelfish. The bevelled tank stretched its tropical turquoise luxury along a table in the hall. Jungle plants trailed soft green fingers through the water. Broad-backed leaves and ferny fronds rippled in an effervescent spume of bubbles. And through them glided the fairy fins of three exotic angelfish, one gold, one silver, one marbled black and cream. Their glowing opalescence seemed almost blasphemy in Miss Lineham’s fawn and frowning hall. No one else in the house was indulged as were those fish. While the lodgers shivered in their fireless rooms, the angels basked in a constant eighty degrees Fahrenheit. Mr Chivers ate frugally off melamine, but the twelve varieties of super-enriched fish-food lorded it on a silver tray.

Feeding time was a sacred ritual: hall lights turned low, front door locked, parlour blinds firmly closed. Mr Chivers watched through a crack in his bedroom door, peering down through the banisters, awaiting that magic transformation in Miss Lineham’s granite face. As the angelfish darted to the surface and nibbled at her dead white fingers, her face turned from stone to petals; the corners of her mouth lifting slightly, so that he could see the tips of plastic teeth.

“My pretty angels,” she whispered, sprinkling Magiflakes like manna.”’My pretty, pretty angels.”

Mr Chivers’ pulse raced. There was something about the way her cold eyes sparked and softened, the flirtatious flurry of her hand across the water. He never heard that velvet voice at any other hour; it was sackcloth and hessian when she was snapping at her lodgers.

“Some of us are born to work, Mr Chivers, and some are born to idle.”

“I do not wish Princess Margaret’s name to be mentioned in this house again.”

She was even uncharacteristically generous with the fish-food, flinging in fresh pink shrimp and bite-size worm almost with abandon. Everyone else was rationed. Mr Chivers’ scant teaspoonful of breakfast marmalade was apportioned out the evening before and sat stiffening in an egg-cup overnight. He never saw the jar. Bacon rashers were cut tastefully in half. And when he had swallowed the last morsel of his one barely buttered piece of toast (thin-sliced from a small loaf), Miss Lineham whisked every comestible swiftly out of sight. Not a crumb nor tealeaf remained to give promise of future sustenance. Even the smell of food crept cravenly away at the touch of Miss Lineham’s Airfresh. Five minutes after breakfast the kitchen looked like a morgue or a museum - shining tiles and dead exhibits in sterilized glass jars.

Mr Chivers started eating out. He sprawled in Joe’s caff or Dick’s diner, elbow-deep in chips, baked beans tumbling down his chin, wallowing in ketchup, gnawing chicken bones. (‘Dogs eat bones, Mr Chivers, not Civil Service gentlemen.’) He ordered both cream and custard on his syrup sponge and slurped it down, savouring every mouthful. Delirious contrast to those tight-lipped breakfasts when Miss Lineham jumped and blinked her eyes every time his teeth made contact with the toast.

He spent more and more time away. He added the public baths to the public convenience, running the bath full to overflowing and shouting above the Niagara of the taps. He set up floods and cataracts, slooshing water over the side of the cracked white tub. He bought a plastic duck and spent reckless hours torpedoing it with the bar of municipal soap. He flung in whole cartonsful of bath salts and turned the water as blue as Miss Lineham’s fish-tank. He left hairs in the plug-hole and a rim around the bath. Nobody cared. Nobody pinned crabbed little notes on his door, saying “Water costs money, Mr Chivers, were you aware?” No one slipped a purple crocheted doiley underneath his soapy bottom.

He discovered a bath with a toilet beside it, for only tenpence extra. Now he ruled the world. He jetted his urine at the stained, un-Harpicked bowl, aiming at the central ‘C’ in the maker’s name, his own initial. Sometimes he took risks or invented games, standing further and further back and still not missing, or stopping and starting the stream, or tracing patterns with it, as if the jet were a golden pencil. That done, he sat on the cracked and germy toilet seat (which had never known the chastening caress of candlewick) and strained and groaned in thunderous ecstasy. He even returned to prunes.

Whatever his excesses in the baths, he was always back in the house by 8.55. Nine p.m. was the angels’ feeding time: the high spot of his day. Miss Lineham was often prowling by the door.

“Good evening, Miss Lineham. Lovely weather.”

“Good evening, Mr Chivers. It won’t last.”

“Good evening, Miss Lineham. Nice bit of rain for the garden.”

“Good evening, Mr Chivers. They forecast floods.”

Formalities over, he fixed his whole attention on the fish as he walked slowly, slowly past, watching their perfect gills pant in and out, their dramatic ventral fins flowing like fancy ribbons from their underbodies. There were other inhabitants of the tank, inelegant and drably coloured small fry, creeping things that slimed and gobbled on the bottom, the proletariat of snail and loach. He scarcely noticed them; he was too absorbed in the angels: their wide wings and golden eyes, their steady, soothing motion as they meandered in and out of each other’s shadows, haloed by their own enchanted fins. He longed to know more about them - what sex they were, what age, their parentage, their origins - but dared not ask; indeed, dared not even loiter by the tank. Only in his fantasy did he lay his cheek against the cold compress of the glass and feel his fingers caressed by foraging mouths, the tickle of peacock tails against his palm.

Cold reality shoved him briskly up the stairs, to cower all evening, a prisoner in his room. He could watch the feeding only in breathless secrecy, craning his neck and peering through the crack, rigid with terror that Miss Lineham’s eye might swivel in its socket and meet his own. It never did. She had eyes only for her angelfish; her concrete brow flushing and softening as they flicked their fins and flirted with her hands. Mr Chivers’ heartbeat almost cracked the walls. He could feel his supper singing through his veins; jam on the semolina centre of his soul. This was his finale, his golden climax to a sallow day, his after-dinner port, his nuts and wine.