Kitabı oku: «The Rise and Fall of the Wonder Girls», sayfa 2
4
Still high, Saskia drifted down between the rows of netted redcurrant bushes able to feel every crevice and ridge beneath the thin soles of the sandals she’d bought at a market in the south of France. Mel and Tony were pre-divorce friends of her father’s. Richard Greaves had known Mel since university and the Greaves stayed in their villa at St Julien most Julys. During the first week, before Ruth arrived, Mel drove Saskia to the local market—a girls only trip—and for a whole two hours she’d tried to be Saskia’s mother, then she got bored with the idea and moved onto something else. Before she got bored she bought Saskia the sandals she was now wearing—had worn all summer, in fact—and a bracelet made of bottle tops that African immigrants were selling on blankets, which Ruth had admired when they picked her up from the airport in Montpellier. Saskia had been so pleased to see her she’d almost given it to her before changing her mind and deciding to keep it.
A plane passed overhead. She watched its shadow move solidly over the ground and redcurrant bushes, her eyes following it as it ran over the rows—until she saw Mr Sutton. Was that Mr Sutton from school—picking redcurrants just like her, approximately five rows away? She wasn’t convinced it was. Saskia believed in UFOs; she believed in ghosts, parallel universes and monsters like the Yeti that evolution had stranded, and sometimes she got confused and saw things out of the corner of her eye that never quite materialised when she really concentrated.
No—Mr Sutton was definitely there. He was waving at her.
Saskia didn’t wave back, she just carried on staring.
He hesitated then made his way over to her row.
‘Hey,’ he said, pleased to see her. Saskia was one of a handful of pupils going on to study art at degree level, and he kept this coterie of girls close.
Saskia finally emerged from what her grandmother used to refer to as one of her ‘brown studies’—lapses of attention that had induced her mother to have her tested for epilepsy as a child—and smiled back at Mr Sutton.
He was wearing shorts and a yellow polo shirt. The effect was stodgy and preppy and just not him at all. Her dad wore polo shirts; they’d been bought for him by his ex-wife, who was also Saskia’s mother, because he never knew what to wear when he wasn’t wearing a suit. Now her mother was dressing a different man, and although her dad made an effort—post-divorce—not to wear the polo shirts, he also made the mistake of not throwing them away. He came across them when he was looking for something to decorate in and after that they once more became fixtures in his casual wardrobe even though they were covered in paint stains and smelt of white spirit.
For this reason, although she didn’t know it, Saskia had always associated polo shirts with helplessness, and seeing Mr Sutton wearing a yellow one confused her because he’d never struck her as helpless before. It was like somebody had got to him before he could get to himself, and it made her feel sorry for him.
He must have read something of what she was thinking in her eyes then because he paused, suddenly awkward. ‘What are you picking?’
‘Redcurrants.’
He held up his punnet. ‘Me too.’
She nodded, gesturing to the redcurrant field they were standing in the middle of. ‘Yeah—’
‘I can’t believe I just said that.’
She nodded again. ‘Yeah—’
He laughed. ‘So—how’s it going?’
‘Fine. How’s your summer been?’
He had no idea how his summer had been. ‘I went to South Africa.’
She didn’t ask him who he went with—if anybody. ‘How was it?’
‘I can’t remember.’
Saskia laughed.
He twisted his neck like it might be stiff. ‘What about you? What have you been up to all summer?’
‘I went to the south of France with my dad.’
‘Get any painting done?’
She shook her head. ‘I had some ideas—made a few sketches.’
‘I’d like to see them.’
She nodded, aware that she had no intention of showing him the sketches she made after seeing Tony and Mel in the kitchen that night when she’d got up for some water. ‘We were staying with some friends of dad’s,’ she blurted out, trying to distract herself from the memory of Mel bent over the marble kitchen surface, her breasts pushed into a pile, her hands gripping the edge of it, and Tony behind her. It had looked fierce and ugly with about as much choreography involved as taking a crap, and now she was scared of the whole thing. ‘They had a pool and stuff.’
‘Sounds great.’
‘Yeah—the first couple of weeks were, then my dad and his friend Tony sort of remembered that they never really got on and that my dad’s always fancied his wife.’ Saskia heard herself saying it and couldn’t believe she was saying it, but couldn’t stop herself. ‘And Tony, who’s been holed up in paradise for about two years too long, was like drunk the whole time and then dad got drunk and then they started rowing.’ She paused for breath, horrified. She hadn’t told anybody this—not even Ruth, who’d actually been there—so why was she telling Mr Sutton in the middle of a field of redcurrants?
He was staring at her, about to say something when suddenly there was a woman standing next to him wearing black wraparound sunglasses that made her look like a beetle. She’d appeared from nowhere, had her hand on his arm, and was smiling at them both.
Behind the glasses, Saskia recognised Ms Webster who’d taught her Physics in Year 9. For a moment she wondered what on earth Ms Webster—who also coached the Burwood Girls’ Netball A Team—was doing at Martha’s Farm as well. Then she realised: Ms Webster was here because Mr Sutton was here; Ms Webster was here with Mr Sutton.
He’d been to South Africa with Ms Webster. They’d lain on the beach together, swam in the sea together, and had sex in a hotel—and other places—together. Now the yellow polo shirt—Ms Webster was wearing the same one—made sense.
‘Typical,’ Ms Webster said loudly, triumphantly, holding a basket full of redcurrants up in the air.
Saskia stared at her, her mouth hanging open awkwardly.
‘So much for his contribution to jam making.’
Saskia didn’t know what to say—she’d never had a jam-making conversation before.
‘I just saw Grace as well,’ Ms Webster carried on.
‘Grace works here,’ Saskia said without thinking. It sounded mean—when all she’d meant to do was say something because she couldn’t carry on standing there with her mouth hanging silently open, feeling like she’d just got drunk in high heels.
‘Well—we’d better be going,’ Ms Webster said, her hand still on Mr Sutton’s arm, turning him round, steering him away. ‘Enjoy the rest of your holiday.’
‘I will.’ Saskia was jabbing the front of her sandal repetitively against a ridge of earth and now the crust cracked and crumbled.
Mr Sutton turned back towards her. ‘I’m in and out of school the next couple of weeks—if you’ve got anything you’re working on or want to show me before the beginning of term.’
‘Thanks—’
Another tug on the arm and he was led away again, only to break free a second time.
‘Oh—and I hope that’s not permanent.’
Saskia stared at him. She had no idea what he was talking about.
‘Your neck. The scorpion.’
Her hand went to her neck. ‘No, it’s—no.’
He smiled, paused, then turned and walked away with Ms Webster.
Saskia kept her hand on her neck, covering the temporary tattoo that had come free with one of her music magazines. Her eyes followed Mr Sutton and Ms Webster in their matching polo shirts and South African sun tans all the way to the weighing-in hut.
They were arguing.
By the time Vicky and Ruth reached Saskia, standing inert still in the field of redcurrants, the black Peugeot convertible belonging to Ms Webster had left Martha’s Farm in a loose trail of dust. Neither the driver, Ms Webster, or the passenger, Mr Sutton, looked like they were going home to make jam.
‘Did you speak to him?’ Vicky asked, breathless still from the Valium-induced attack of vertigo.
Saskia nodded vacantly.
‘And?’
‘What?’
‘What did he say?’ Vicky was beginning to lose patience.
Saskia was about to mention his reference to her tattoo when she decided not to. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Sas—’ Vicky insisted.
‘He went to South Africa—on holiday.’
‘South Africa?’
Saskia sighed, her hands dropping to her sides. ‘With Ms Webster.’
‘Webster?’ Vicky screamed, the screams echoing across the fields. ‘No—fucking—way. Are you sure?’
‘She was standing right here in front of me, Vick. They were wearing matching clothes.’
‘Like—how matching?’
‘Yellow polo shirts, shorts and Birkenstocks.’
‘That is so depressing. How come we didn’t know anything about this? How did she get to him?’
‘End of last term,’ Ruth said.
Vicky turned on her. ‘Why didn’t you say?’
‘I don’t know that—I’m just guessing. Staff drinks and stuff.’
‘Staff drinks and stuff? They went to South Africa together, Ruth—they’re practically married.’ She paused. ‘Webster. Why didn’t I see this coming?’
‘Webster’s okay,’ Ruth ventured then paused. ‘Isn’t she?’
‘Webster’s not okay, Ruth. She’s like the wrong side of healthy, like too healthy, like under all that lycra she wears she’s got no genitals or something.’
Nobody said anything.
Saskia’s hand remained over the temporary scorpion tattoo as they trailed slowly over to the weighing-in hut, expecting to find Grace there—only to be told by the boy in the ice cream van that she’d already gone.
‘She had to leave early—something about a puncture. I offered to take her home in the van, but—’ His eyes moved curiously over all three of them as Vicky emptied her raspberries into Ruth’s already full container and stepped away from the hut, crushing the ones that fell beneath her sandals. She stood, bored and dizzy, aware of the ice cream boy’s eyes on her, but too overwhelmed by the thought of Mr Sutton and Ms Webster to react.
The ice cream boy stared at the red spots in the dust and tried hard to think of something to say. He was still trying as the girls walked back up the field towards Tom’s car.
‘Webster’s totally wrong for Sutton,’ Vicky started up again then broke off, staring into Saskia’s punnet. ‘Why did you pick redcurrants?’
Saskia stared at the redcurrants, trying to remember.
‘I wanted to paint them. Remember that triptych I did of the rotting quince?’
‘No.’
‘I was thinking about doing another one with redcurrants.’
‘Morbid.’
‘It’s only fruit.’
They got to the top of the field where Tom was sitting in the sandpit, banging on an old plastic cup with a lolly stick and making a child with blond curls laugh.
‘Looks like I’ve got to go, little man,’ he said when the girls arrived. ‘See you around.’
Vicky glanced at the toddler without interest as Tom handed him the plastic cup and stick and watched him try to reproduce the sound he’d been making.
‘Did you manage to meet up with Grace?’ Tom asked as they got back in the car.
‘No—she already left—had a puncture or something. We’ll probably catch up with her on the road. Can we get some windows down?’
5
They caught up with Grace about a mile down the lane where it left the fields and sank into forest.
Tom slowed the car when he saw her up ahead on the opposite side of the lane, pushing her bike.
‘Isn’t that your bike?’ Vicky said, staring.
‘I sold it.’ Tom threw the rest of the joint he was smoking out the window.
‘When?’
‘Last summer.’
‘To Grace?’
‘You know I did.’
They pulled up alongside her.
Vicky leant out the back of the car and gave a slow, exaggerated wave.
‘You should have said,’ Tom called out.
‘About what?’ Grace called back.
‘Needing a lift.’
‘I don’t need a lift.’ She smiled at him.
Saskia and Vicky were leaning out the car, waving.
‘You’ve got a puncture.’
‘I know, but I didn’t want to leave the bike.’
‘Come on, get in,’ Tom said, ‘I’ll put the bike on the roof rack.’
Without waiting for a response, he drove past her and carried on for a couple of hundred yards, until he got to a passing place where he pulled in, got out the car and jogged back to where Grace was.
‘There’s some rope—’ he called back to Vicky, who was hanging out the window still, watching him ‘—in the boot.’
She pulled her arms and head back into the car and let her head flop against the back seat.
‘Are you getting the rope out the boot?’ Ruth asked.
‘No—I’m too depressed about Sutton and Webster.’
‘I’ll get it.’ Ruth got out of the car, stretching herself. She poked at the junk in the boot, looking for the rope.
Through the open hatchback, she saw Vicky climb between the two front seats and get into the driver’s. The next minute, Vicky started the car up and put it into gear. It jolted forward then stalled, the boot flapping.
Tom broke into a run back towards the car as the engine started up again and a basketball rolled out of the back onto the lane.
Saskia got quickly out of the car and joined Ruth as the engine started to grate.
‘Vicky!’ Tom yelled, sprinting now, his footsteps loud on the tarmac. ‘You’re flooding the engine.’
Grace was wheeling her bike towards Saskia, Ruth and the car when there was a series of sharp splintering cracks in the woods to their left and two deer broke suddenly out of the dense line of trees, passing so close their flanks grazed Saskia and Ruth before they swerved, hooves slipping on the hot road surface, stopping Tom in his tracks, vaulting the basketball then disappearing into the woods on their right.
They were gone, leaving behind them an unsettling silence that hadn’t been there before.
Tom, shaking, hadn’t moved. ‘Shit—’
‘I never saw deer so close before,’ Ruth said, breathless. ‘I mean, I felt them—they actually touched me.’
Grace dropped her bike on the side of the road and went up to Tom. ‘You okay? Something must have scared them—in the woods.’
Vicky got out the car and walked towards them. ‘What was that?’
‘Deer,’ Grace said.
‘They passed so close, they actually touched me,’ Ruth said again.
Ignoring Ruth, Vicky said to Tom, ‘I think you’re out of petrol.’
‘Out of petrol? You just flooded the fucking engine.’ He was angry with himself for being so shaken by the deer.
‘I didn’t flood the engine—you’re out of fucking petrol.’ Vicky turned and started to walk off up the lane.
‘Where are you going?’ Tom called out after her.
‘Home.’
‘How?’
‘The bus—there’s a stop at the top of the lane on the main road.’
‘So you’re just going to leave my car in the middle of the fucking road?’
‘It’s your fucking car.’ Vicky carried on walking.
Tom didn’t say anything. He picked up the basketball and started to bounce it rhythmically on the road.
Ruth, Saskia and Grace hesitated, uncertain how the argument between brother and sister had started or how it had got to this point. Vicky had already disappeared round the bend and out of sight.
After a while, Ruth shut the boot. ‘You want help pushing it or something?’
‘No point—we won’t get it started in second without a hill. I’ll come back later with dad and pick up some petrol on the way.’
Just then the ice cream van from Martha’s Farm came up behind them, sounding its horn. The boy inside leant out of the window. ‘What happened?’
‘The engine’s flooded or something,’ Saskia said, diplomatic.
Tom carried on bouncing the ball.
The boy in the ice cream van turned to Grace. ‘They caught up with you then.’
‘Yeah.’
‘D’you want a lift?’
‘My bike.’
‘We’ll get that in the back no trouble.’
Grace hesitated and glanced at Tom, who kept his eyes on the ball and didn’t look up.
‘I’ve got room for one more,’ the boy said, pleased.
‘I don’t mind getting the bus,’ Ruth put in.
Saskia drifted slowly towards the ice cream van. ‘You sure?’
Ruth nodded as Grace turned back to Tom. ‘How are you getting home?’ she asked over the soft rhythmic beat of the ball on the road.
‘We’ll get the bus—it’s fine,’ Ruth said again, trying not to look at Tom, who didn’t comment on this.
Saskia got up into the front of the van, excited. ‘Can we put the music on?’
The boy didn’t respond—he was too busy watching Grace standing beside the van with her bike.
Tom stopped bouncing the basketball.
‘I think I’ll walk back.’ He paused, looking at Grace. ‘You feel like walking with me?’
She didn’t say anything; within seconds was standing beside him.
‘What about your bike?’ the boy said, quietly devastated, and trying not to sound frantic.
Tom turned to Grace. ‘We can lock it to the roof rack and I’ll take it home with me when I come back for the car later. You’ve got a lock for it?’
Ruth’s momentary decisiveness was gone, and its departure left her looking stranded.
‘Ruth,’ Saskia called out from the ice cream van, and the next minute, Ruth was climbing up beside her as Tom started to bounce the basketball again.
The van pulled away, the boy glancing in the rear view mirror at Grace.
Grace and Tom stood in the road and watched the van disappear, a canned version of Au Clair de la Lune starting up the moment it was out of sight.
At the sound of the music, they smiled suddenly at each other.
Feeling immediately lighter, Tom kicked the ball hard, into the forest.
‘Why did you do that?’
He shrugged, still smiling, then lifted her bike onto the roof of the car. Grace chained it to the roof rack.
After checking the doors to make sure they were locked, he jumped down into the ditch the deer had vaulted earlier.
‘You coming?’ He watched her, waiting for her to change her mind.
‘Which way are you going?’
‘Shortcut.’
She jumped down into the ditch beside him. ‘I’m wearing flip-flops.’
‘You’re not in a hurry for anything?’
She shook her head.
‘So we’ll go slow.’
She hesitated then followed him into the woods.
suburban satire
—autumn—
6
Bill Henderson woke at 5:15 just like he did every morning, including weekends, only at the weekend he didn’t have to get up. Today wasn’t a weekend, and the world was even more silent than usual due to the heavy fog October had pushed over Burwood during the night. Bill didn’t know about the fog yet, but the silence was so intense he woke with the sound of a low pitched hum in his ears that he thought was the under-floor heating they’d had installed downstairs until he remembered that the central heating wasn’t programmed to come on until seven because Vicky said the sound of it woke her up. It was the same sort of humming he heard Scuba diving that summer because of water pressure.
Still puzzled, he executed the neat sideways roll he’d perfected over the years, which enabled him to vacate the marital bed in the early hours without waking Sylvia. Landing softly on the carpet in a stress position, he moved silently out the room. He then crept downstairs to the loo where he peed in the dark because switching the light on triggered the extractor fan.
They’d been in the house over two years, but in the dark mornings, half awake, the layout sometimes caught him out. He aimed his pee as best he could in the glow from the sitting room sidelights that were on timer switches and programmed to come on at five in the morning. Not flushing the chain was also part of the morning’s silent routine, one that contributed to the sometimes overwhelming feeling in Bill that he had in fact died without realising it, and was haunting rather than living in his home.
He padded through to the kitchen, put the cooker hood light on and poured himself a glass of milk, which he drank standing in front of the fridge where there was a diary kept up with magnets that had survival maxims for life as a woman written over them—that Sylvia, drunk, read out to him like he hadn’t heard them a million times already.
He checked the diary every morning, with a fledgling curiosity at this early hour for the insight it gave him into the lives lived by his wife and daughter during the week. There in front of him was a list of cryptic biro scrawls that held the key to everything happening in this house he’d paid for and that he felt like no more than a squatter in. It occurred to him that all he would ever need to surmise about these two people—one to whom he was bound because of a religious ceremony, and the other through genes—was contained here in this diary.
Today’s list was long:
5km / hair @12 / POKER / flowers—Panino’s / Tel. Tom re. nxt w/e—Ali coming?
Then, in caps, with an asterisk either side:
* POKER PARTY *
Then, in lower case and without asterisk:
rem. Bill
It was strange seeing his own name written in the diary. Puzzled, but not particularly concerned, he put his empty glass down on the surface and stared around the kitchen. He was forgetting something. He’d stood in this exact spot the night before and Sylvia had asked him to do something first thing in the morning when he got up; something important, and now he couldn’t remember.
He went through to the sitting room, still trying to recall what it was, and attempted to operate the pulleys that opened the curtains—curtains that had cost them more than a month’s mortgage payment.
They swung heavily apart, not responding to his touch as they did Sylvia’s, and there he was all over again in the pyjama bottoms and T-shirt he wore to bed. The T-shirt infuriated Sylvia, who couldn’t understand why he refused to wear both parts of the two-part sets she bought him. Even when he explained that he didn’t like to end his day in the same way he began it by doing up a row of buttons. She still didn’t understand.
He enjoyed observing himself hovering above the lawn’s dark outline while simultaneously suspended in a fragile replica of the sitting room.
This morning he looked like he was standing in a cloud and it took him a while to realise that nothing untoward had happened to the outside world; it was only fog.
He waved at himself and smiled, then, suddenly embarrassed, went back upstairs to the spare bedroom where he kept his minimal wardrobe of mostly suits, clothes to play golf in and a couple of outfits he wore when they went out socially as a family. These were the outfits he stood in while listening to people whose names he forgot as soon as they told him, talking about operations they’d had or cars they drove. Sylvia’s people.
He dressed without looking at himself in the mirror, shaved in the downstairs bathroom where he kept his shaving soap and cologne, then left the house, tiptoeing across the gravel that marked the threshold between him and the dawning day.
Two Fridays a month he went up to London to do a day’s auditing at Pinnacle Insurance’s Head Office.
Today was one of those Fridays.
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