Toast (17 page)

The trips to the lay-by had become a nightly thing. I'd grab my Walnut Whip, the dog and head off to the lay-by. Fridays and Saturdays were busiest, so much so I had to make up stories about the dog refusing to ‘go' to explain my ever-lengthening trips. Once, when the occupants of every car seemed to be going at it, I was so long I had to tell them the dog had run off and I had spent the last hour looking for him.

Saturday afternoon, late summer, and Dad tells me to come for a walk. He does this, every now and again. No doubt another futile attempt to get me to accept Joan, to let her into my life.

‘I want to know what's up with you. Joan does everything she can to make you happy,' he says as we get to the end of the garden and start to climb up towards the reservoir. ‘She looks after you like you were her own son. Yet
you mope around with a long face if she asks you to do anything, you don't speak to her unless she speaks to you first, and you didn't even remember her birthday. She's very fond of you and you just throw it back in her face.'

I have heard it all before. He just doesn't get it. He is so in love with this woman he can't see anything but good in her. He doesn't see her piercing eyes and mean little mouth, the way she used him, and me, to claw her way out of her tawdry little life. How she has taken over, pushing me around, trying to model me into some creep who keeps his sock drawer tidy and carries a clean handkerchief. He doesn't see, cannot see, her cold, calculating eyes or the unnatural demands she makes of a teenage boy (‘tidy your room, tidy your drawers, don't put pictures on the wall, don't play your records so loud, do your homework, polish your shoes, use a plate, use a coaster, use a napkin, use a hanky, don't slam the door, don't tease the dog, rinse the bath, wash your hands, STOP MAKING SMELLS'). This man is so besotted he hasn't even noticed she has changed our soft, cuddly cotton sheets for easy-care polyester cotton. All he sees is warm ironing and apple crumble.

I don't say anything for a while. I'm not sure what there is to say. I am a nuisance, a thorn in the lovebirds' sides. His own son is in the way. A constant reminder of the wife he so dearly loved and yet so desperately wants to forget. ‘I don't know what you mean, everything's fine,' I say quietly. We are up by the woods now.

‘Just try a little bit, will you? I know she's not Mummy, but she's here and if you don't like it you'll have to go into care.'

Into care. I'd heard him say that before, many years ago, when we were walking across the fields and I thought Mum was telling him she was going to have a baby when she was actually telling him she was going to die. Getting rid of me has apparently always been an option. ‘Everything's fine,' I repeat, head down now.

‘One more thing and that's it, all right,' he warns. ‘I've had enough.'

Suddenly Dad swings left into the lay-by. We walk along the tarmac towards the stile that would lead us into the long field. Half of Worcestershire is laid out before us; the churches and their ancient cemeteries, little clusters of cottages, acre upon acre of hop fields. Such a magical, secret place at night, by day the lay-by looks shabby, and shockingly real. Dad's eyes drop to the ground and suddenly his brow puckers like someone has drawn a hot iron over a pair of silk knickers. I can feel the colour working its way up my neck and into my ears; hot, red, embarrassed. In the cold light of day there are no twinkling stars and distant lights, no naked bottoms, no spread legs, no muffled cries. Just hundreds of used condoms, little piles of dog shit and dozens upon dozens of Walnut Whip wrappers.

Dad honestly believes he has created a storybook happy family, that lives in a pretty cottage with roses round the door. A neatly dressed, polite teenager, a ‘mum' who cooks like an angel and a dad who does dad-type things like bringing home the bacon, chopping logs for the fire and filling a greenhouse with tomatoes and begonias. Dad, you are living in a fantasy world.

I would dearly like to take him aside and point out a few facts that seem to have escaped his attention. Like the fact that his neatly dressed, polite son has never been so lonely in his entire life; that the woman he thinks loves him just used him to escape from the poor hand she was dealt; that the happy family he imagines he has created is nothing more than a sham. I would also like to bring up the fact that this woman of his (yes, his, not mine) is making my life a misery with her ever-increasing demands for tidiness, cleanliness, punctuality and general good behaviour. (This is more like life in the army than a normal childhood.) That the more I agree to her ridiculous demands (apparently she plans to tell Dad I should look for a part-time job so I can pay ‘rent' to live in my own home) the more obscene her demands become.

In passing I might also mention the small fact that she hasn't a good word to say about anybody, including my dad, her own daughters (one of whom has stood by her through thick and thin), all of our relatives, who she thinks are
‘snobs', and certainly not the neatly dressed and polite little boy she was originally employed to look after. And if I could ever get his attention I might just point out that listening to records and watching TV and spending time in my room is what I do because there is nothing else to do in this sodding, wretched wilderness he has brought us to.

I could bring up a few other matters:

1. Farting is perfectly normal in a boy of my age, as is burping and leaving ‘snail-trails' on his sheets.

2. Normal boys of my age do not have to empty the bin in their bedroom every day, fold the towels in the bathroom perfectly after use or put their dirty clothes in the laundry basket.

3. It is not normal for boys to rinse their wellingtons every time they take them off.

4. No other boy I know has to do either the washing up or the drying after every meal; take the dog out every day; collect the eggs from the farm; get back from school at exactly the right time and help with the gardening after school.

5. All the other boys I know are allowed to make a mess, be untidy, run around, make noise, have friends round and put posters up on their bedroom wall.

6. Most of the boys I know are just allowed to be boys.

Here, Dad, is a list of the things she says get on her nerves: me kicking a ball against the garden wall, me watching
TV when it's sunny outside, me drinking my pop too quickly, me burping after drinking my pop too quickly, me wiping my mouth with the back of my hand after drinking pop too quickly, me putting on clean clothes every day, me not putting on clean clothes every day, me sitting down and talking to her when she's having a cigarette, me not sitting down with her when she's having a cigarette, me not helping when she's cooking, me getting in her way when she's cooking, me hanging around when she's trying to work, me going out to play when she's trying to work, me going up to my room, me not going up to my room, me being in all the time, me being out all the time.

I can do NOTHING right for this woman Dad has brought into our lives. I hate her and I hate him for loving her. And what is more, I don't think slippers were a suitable birthday present for a fourteen-year-old.

Joan's acts of kindness came at you like car headlights, momentarily blinding you on a long, dark, lonely road. Like when she hid from my father the fact I had got 9 per cent in my mock maths O level. ‘He doesn't need to know, I don't think he's very good at maths either.' Or the time she helped me search for Dad's new Parker fountain pen which I had borrowed and lost on the way to school. When we found it, its shiny maroon cap smashed to smithereens
on the roadside, she lent me the money secretly to buy a replacement.

One morning I went up the garden to feed my rabbit to find his cage door wide open and two of the dogs from the farm playing tug-of-war with him. I didn't look too closely, I just saw one dog at either end of the long white body, growling, teeth bared, the rabbit's fur already smeared on one side with blood. The two dogs, Jack Russells, just pulled and pulled like they had either end of a bone. The rabbit seemed so long now, even longer than the ones hanging on the three iron hooks outside the butcher's. I ran back indoors, shaking. I wanted to shout and shriek, but knew Joan would get cross if I raised my voice in the house. Instead, I just ran upstairs, knocked on her door and told her what was happening.

Joan ran up the garden path in her dressing gown, lashing out at the dogs with the plastic broom. I saw them run off and watched in tears as Joan picked up two separate lumps of white body. She came back, the broom still in her right hand, and wrapped her left arm around my shoulder. She had never done that before. Later, when I was still too upset to bury the pieces, she dug a hole under the horse chestnut tree and dropped them into it, covering the mangled remains with soil. ‘We'll get a rose and plant it on top,' she said. Then she got out the white paint she used to cover the moss on the outside wall and I wrote his name in neat letters on a piece of wooden apple crate. The first few letters were too large, and frankly a bit wonky, and
though the letters got smaller there was no room to finish the inscription. Dear old Ringo Rabbit ended up being buried as Ringo Rabbi. ‘Never mind, we'll get him a bigger gravestone tomorrow,' she said, but we never did.

‘It isn't just about making scones for tea,' said Miss Adams, straight-backed, cold and rather old for her years, as she introduced the cookery syllabus to the Wednesday class. Beverly Brown, kind, round and pumpkin-faced, deflated instantly like a burst balloon. The lovely Dee Hanratty whispered ‘Good' behind her hand, ‘I hate sultanas.' I suddenly got nervous, wondering just how difficult my first cookery lessons were going to be. Did Miss Adams mean we were going to be boning whole lambs and making soufflés then? ‘We will be doing everything from cooking rice to costing entire meals,' she warned, her voice getting higher with every word. The word rice put the fear of God into me. I'd never even eaten the stuff, let alone cooked it. The first lesson, a week later, couldn't have been easier. My Victoria sandwich rose like a dream and had, according to Miss Adams, a perfect ‘crumb' and a fine flavour. Even Beverly, who was obviously born both to bake and eat the results, was impressed. I lowered my sugar-topped success into a Peak Frean's biscuit tin and squeezed it into my duffel bag for the journey home.

I couldn't wait to show my father, who for all his disinterest couldn't fail to congratulate me. He was late as people always are on occasions like this. I kept looking at the clock, desperate for him to come home. To see and smell my cake. To eat it. The cake had been sitting on the kitchen table, Joan sitting next to it smoking Embassy after Embassy, occasionally glancing in the direction of my cake.

‘Look at that!' said my father, obviously as proud as punch despite everything. ‘Isn't that a beauty?'

‘Hmm,' said Joan abruptly, swishing her head to the left and blowing out a last cloud of smoke. She then tightened her lips into a straight line and stubbed out her cigarette in the Royal Worcester ashtray like she was trying to squash a cockroach.

The following week we all took damsons to make jam. I had picked mine from the tree that overhung the maze of hedges around the water pump. It was pure coincidence that it was my father's favourite, not to mention mine. Miss Adams had made us read the preserving chapter in
‘O' Level Cookery
by Phyllis Abbey, the red one with the pie on the front. I knew it almost word for word. While the girls got away with as little as they could, I read everything in sight. After all, I had three years of missed lessons and the Fablon-topped coffee table I made in woodwork to make up for.

We strained the jam, thick and royal purple, into warm jars, let it cool, then cut out perfect discs of greaseproof
paper and smoothed them on to the surface of each jar. We stretched over tight little cellophane covers and held them in place with blue rubber bands, then neatly wrote out our names and the date and the proud words ‘Home-Made Damson Jam'.

The bus took ages to wind its way through Wichenford, Broadheath, Broadwas, eventually pulling up outside the Talbot Hotel at Knightwick. ‘Can't go any further today,' boomed Mr Chater. ‘Brakes are a bit funny. You'll have to walk up the hill yourself.' A full satchel and a duffel bag full of jam is enough to carry down the aisle of the bus let alone up a one-in-six hill. The pots clanked in my bag. I got to the top, hot and anxious that some of Dad's precious jam might have spilled.

Joan had been busy in the garden, the drive and lawn swept of last week's fallen leaves, the edges of the lawn trimmed like a choirboy's fringe, every blob of green yuk scooped from the top of the pond. It wouldn't have surprised me if she had polished the orange berries on the cotoneaster. Inside, every surface shone; there were spider-petalled dahlias, bright yellow and maroon and white in a jade green vase on the table. The smell of baking hung in the air like a soft, warm blanket. There were jam tarts, lemon curd tarts and butterfly cakes. There was a lattice-topped mince pie as big as a plate, and in the bottom tier of the stackable see-through cake ‘tins' was a sponge, light, golden and sparkling with caster sugar. It was filled with a thick layer of damson jam.

Wednesday now became Joan's baking day. Each week I would proudly come home from school with a flask of vegetable soup, a sunken fruit cake, a box of eclairs (hideously squashed by Roger Mountford's satchel) or, on one occasion, an apple meringue pie whose filling had run out over the bottom of the tin, to find the house full of warm ironing, a freshly brushed dog and enough cakes, tarts and pies to feed the entire village.

Joan is sitting on the garden hammock, swinging back and forth under its tasselled shade. She's been crying. I ask her what's wrong and she shows me a birthday card from one of the disabled women she used to visit. It says simply:

I hope you are happy with your new life

From your friend Sarah

And then in brackets:

(Not dead, but forgotten.)

Joan is clearly hurt. The truth is that she hasn't forgotten Sarah or any other of the disabled people she used to go and see. She talks about them all the time, and I know she would go and see them if she could, but she doesn't drive
and Dad doesn't seem to want to take her back there. Not even for the day. I am not sure he wants to let her out of his sight. Later, I see the card in the bin, torn in two.

Joan has been quite pensive of late. I know she is hurt by the fact that two of her daughters haven't spoken to her since the day she came to live with my father and that she hasn't seen any of her sisters for at least four years. She is aware, I know, that none of my dad's friends likes her. It suddenly occurs to me that she is probably as lonely as I am.