Easy Peasy (10 page)

I feel sick from the wine and from crouching forward to read. The gas-fire is scorching my side.

Vince
…
wooden cross … en by ants
, …
imm … ately, such greed seething
…
m the jungle … to sa …… im from agony … the wrong thin …… he right thing … three amputations … do not care now if I d … benign tertian mala … and lost track … cannot hear, quinine
…
bubble it is … htening
…
tapioca but

And on the last page only one word legible:
Vince
.

I walk about the flat, past Foxy's study, up the stairs, past the bedroom door behind which Foxy sleeps, into the bathroom. There I am in the mirror but I am almost surprised to see myself reflected back. It is as if I am not really here. My mind is struggling in a jungle with my young father, struggling to digest him and the fragments of his words. He was between about twenty and twenty-three when he wrote the diary, years my junior. I touch the skin under my eyes where the years are starting to show.

I cannot match what is written with what I know of him. How can it be true? All the death, the filth, the disease, the pain, my Daddy's bone open to the air, somebody kicking him when he was down and in agony? And whatever else he suffered. How can that be true of the man behind the newspaper, the man with the golf-clubs? I wash the gritty sensation of the old papers from my hands and brush my teeth, fiercely, to get rid of the bluish wine stain. I scrub until the froth I spit is flecked with blood but in the mirror my lips are still blue. I reach for a lipstick – Foxy's – and fill them in cherry red. Bright lips in the small hours. Last time I put lipstick on I didn't know that he was dead.

Sitting on the edge of the bath I clip my toe-nails. I rarely remember to cut them and Foxy complains when I scratch her in bed. They are painted maroon, but sluttishly chipped, and there's a pink crescent at the base of each where the nail has grown. The dark slivers lie on the bathroom tiles like some sort of bugs. Daddy detested insects, it comes back to me suddenly how much he loathed them. We abandoned a camping trip in Scotland once because of the mosquitoes that whined around the tents, the swarm of flying ants that settled on the canvas so that we could see the dark moving clusters of them as the sun shone hotly through the orange walls. We went to a guest-house instead which suited Hazel, Huw and me because there was a big colour television – but annoyed my mother who loved camping. She had bought a new Calor-gas stove especially for the trip.

In that respect, Daddy was a coward. If there was a wasp in the room, or a spider in the bath, he would ask Mummy to remove it, or if she was out, one of us. I asked Mummy why he was so scared. ‘It's not rational,' she'd say, a touch of disdain in her voice.

I don't like flies, ordinary black house-flies. I don't like the querulous noise they make, or what they do. They inject saliva into the surface of food to predigest it and then suck it up through their proboscis. I cannot eat anything that a fly has been on. If a pair of flies reproduced and all their grubs survived to adulthood and bred, it would only take a year for there to be a ball of maggots bigger than the earth itself. But I don't mind spiders. I quite like snails. When I was a child, ants and beetles were my favourite things.

When I was very young, before we lived at ‘The Nook', I started a beetle collection – dead beetles. Only sometimes it was hard to tell whether they were dead or alive. There are hundreds of species of beetle. I liked ladybirds, but my favourites were stag beetles with their bright black armour and antlers; smart insects, special and shiny as party shoes. I found a dead one and put it in a match-box with a picture of edelweiss on the top. I found another one floating in the water-butt and because I had no more match-boxes, put it in with the first one. They were identical, just like a pair of new patent-leather shoes, snug in their box. I covered them in a piece of white tissue, slid the box shut – and forgot them. Some time later, it could have been weeks, I opened the box to find that one of the shoes had come alive and eaten most of the other. There were frail bits of antler and leg and empty wings gone dull like scabs. The other one looked dead too. I tipped it out in a bush in case it
still
wasn't dead and threw the match-box in the dustbin. My feet were cold like a dead person's and my tongue was too heavy in my mouth to tell anyone the terrible thing I had done. But in the night sometimes when I couldn't sleep I couldn't help thinking of what had been happening in the match-box on the window-sill while I slept or read or played. The terrible thing that had happened, the beetle waking up to find itself imprisoned with a corpse and the hunger that had turned it cannibal before it died.

How
can
I reconcile the ordinary everyday grumpy man, living an ordinary everyday life, with the man in the diary? I did not know that man. I did not know that he'd had malaria and dysentery and maybe even cholera: that he'd had huge ulcers on his legs; that he'd been beaten; or that his closest friend had died, when he sat at the table with his newspaper, when he hammered the Tabasco bottle with his fist till the fiery droplets splattered his food. I did not know that about him. It is too difficult to assimilate.

Ah, but the dreams.

I look at the pages again. I've grown used to the scale of the writing now, can read a few scraps more. Often there is that name:
Vince
. Who is, was, this bloody Vince? A friend who was injured and died and for whom Daddy felt responsible? I don't know what to do now with what I know. I feel I have gulped down a great uncomfortable meal, full of hard corners and edges, a meal I cannot throw up but will never digest.

I settle back on the futon, wishing I had never opened the envelope, wishing I had thrown it in the bin.

10

One Saturday, after a riding lesson with Elaine, I came home to find Puddle-duck sitting drawing at the kitchen table. My mother was leaning over the manuscript of a story she was working on, crossing out and squiggling with a red Biro. They looked very companionable and I felt that I was intruding, barging in on their busyness, all sweaty and smelling of horses.

‘What's
he
doing here?'

‘Griselda, don't be so rude. Do you think “The Custodian of Pleasure” is a good title? Or too … highbrow?'

‘Don't ask me.' I threw my riding-hat on a chair and got myself a drink of orange squash. ‘Hello,' I said to Puddle-duck who was smiling at me.

‘Vassily's mother's had to go out,' Mummy explained, ‘and I said that of course we'd be glad to have him here. He's staying the night.'

I choked on my squash. ‘Mummy! Where will he sleep?'

‘Well, Hazel's staying at Bridget's and …'

‘She's
always
staying at Bridget's!' I slammed my glass down on the table. ‘Hazel would
die
if he slept in her bed. And anyway I'm not …'

‘All right, but it means clearing out the spare room.'

‘I'll help.'

‘It needs doing anyway – Hazel's having it after her birthday.'

‘Oh.'

‘High time you had your own rooms.'

‘Yes.'

‘It's not as if we're short of rooms … it's just …'

I knew what she meant. There were two rooms that were unused except to store junk, as well as a long dim attic room, but in them all the plaster was falling off the walls and the wiring was ancient. It would take some work to make them comfortable and Mummy was always too busy with Huw and her writing to get round to it. Hazel had bought her an ugly pink blob of plastic for her birthday with A Round Tooit written on it for a joke.

It should have been what I wanted, to have my own room. None of my school-friends had to share with their sisters but … but in the night I liked to hear her breathing; I liked to feel the bunks shift as she turned over – even if it did make her furious when I did the same. It was too babyish to admit, but I didn't want to sleep alone.

‘What's for tea?'

‘Daddy's bringing fish and chips home after golf. What have you drawn, Vassily?' Mummy leant over his shoulder. ‘Oh! That's beautiful. Look Grizzle.' He had sketched a tree with a swing. It was much better than anything I could ever have done. It looked like our apple tree and our swing only seen from above. As I watched, with a deft little flick, he put a bird in the tree.

‘Is it our swing?' Mummy touched him on the shoulder, pointed to her chest and then to the garden. She was catching on fast to a way of speaking in signs. Puddle-duck nodded and beamed. ‘Can I keep it?' Mummy asked. He nodded again. I had never seen him look so happy. At school he was bad at everything and shrunken into himself, but in our kitchen, watching my mother Sellotape his drawing to a cupboard door, I could almost
see
him swell with pride. And something stirred inside me, something like wet dark wings unfurling in my chest, something I didn't want to know.

Huw started to wail from his bedroom and Mummy tutted, paper-clipped her pages together and went to get him up. I took a biscuit from the tin and wandered out into the garden. Puddle-duck followed me.

‘Where's your mum?' I asked.

He pointed down the garden to the windows of their flat.

‘At home?'

He nodded.

‘So why are you here?' But he just beamed at me. I went down the garden and sat on the swing. The sun was warm and shone on the wasp-eaten windfalls in the long grass. I sniffed my hands that smelt gorgeously of pony and leather. I took hold of the greasy, fibrous ropes. At least Hazel wasn't there to be angry that Puddle-duck
was
there.
Not
my fault but she would still have blamed me. I swung for a bit, the branch squeaking above me. ‘One day that branch'll give,' Mummy was always warning, ‘don't go too high, just in case.' An apple thudded into the grass.

Puddle-duck went to the bottom of the tree-house ladder and looked hopefully up. I pretended not to see. I didn't want to be in the tree-house with him again and I certainly didn't want him in it alone. He put one foot on the bottom rung of the ladder, and looked for my reaction. His legs were very thin and his grey socks wrinkled round his ankles. One plimsoll had a little hole in the toe.

‘Would you like a swing?' I got off and offered it to him. He settled himself on the seat. I waited but he just sat there, dangling.
‘Go on,'
I shouted. He gripped the rope tightly as if he thought he might fall off and swayed his body about. I realised he didn't know how to swing. I could not believe it.
Ten
and he couldn't swing! Behind him I pushed. I pushed his thin ribby back and then, as he went higher, the edge of the wooden seat. The branch shrieked and bounced as the swing flew through the air, leaves, twigs and apples pattered and thumped all around him. I closed my eyes and saw him flying off the swing and through the air, flying, flying away. He was making strange high sounds I couldn't understand, a sort of rhythmic yelping. I couldn't tell if it was joy or fear or what. I kept pushing and he kept yelping until my arms grew tired and then I got fed up and stopped. As the motion grew gradually gentler, Puddle-duck lay right back on the swing, his hair falling away from his face, his legs stuck straight out in front. His face had gone dreamy as if he was in a trance.

Mummy came down the garden carrying a crumpled red-faced Huw. ‘That's right,' she said, with an approving smile. ‘You play with Vassily. Only do go easy on that swing.'

‘Vassily says his mum's
there
,' I said. But Mummy only shook her head. She squatted down and chose an apple for Huw to gnaw on.

‘When's tea?'

‘Well Daddy said six, but my guess is it'll be nearer seven.'

‘Can we go for a walk?'

She frowned. ‘Don't see why not. But don't go far – and don't be long.'

We went out by the side gate. Puddle-duck followed behind me like a little dog. I led him round the corner to the big house, part of which was his flat. I pointed to the door. ‘Can we go in?' I asked. I thought that if Wanda was there I could leave Vassily behind, tell Mummy it was a mistake, then I could go home by myself, spend the afternoon reading my
Bunty
in the tree-house alone and enjoy the luxury of shop fish and chips without him spoiling it.

Puddle-duck looked nervous, but he nodded and we went up the path. The front door was enormous, twice as wide as our front door. The floor inside was covered in lino, orange flowers inside brown squares. I'd never seen lino on
stairs
before. There was a smell of not especially nice cooking. On the window-sill was a dead spider-plant in a pot and a pile of unopened mail overflowed the bottom step. We went up the stairs, Vassily in front now, his plimsolls smack, smacking on the lino. The landing was carpeted and cleaner. There were two doors. Puddle-duck approached the farthest one, outside which was a doormat on which the word WELCOME was picked out in red bristles. I'd never been to a flat before. Everyone else I knew lived in a whole house. To my surprise, Puddle-duck took a key out of his pocket and fitted it into the lock. I didn't have a key of my own, it had never occurred to me that I might need one.

The flat smelled of Wanda's weird perfume and incense and bacon. The carpet in the hall was deep and white. I'd never seen a
white
carpet. On the walls were pictures made of silver and gold string wound round nails: a bridge, a church, a windmill. We went into the kitchen. A mobile with brass bells hung over the table – the cloth was an Indian bedspread, covered in crumbs and blobs of jam that blended in with the pattern. Three white wormy bacon rinds lay on the draining-board amongst the cups and plates.

Puddle-duck opened a cupboard and produced a packet of chocolate finger biscuits, the sort of thing we only had at parties, an unopened packet, and he ripped it open, as if it was nothing, and offered me one. I put it in my mouth like a cigar, sucking the chocolate off the end. I thought he must be showing off, that he would get into trouble for opening a new packet without permission.