Alligator Playground (11 page)

B
EST NOT TO ASK
how old she was. Her letter had said eighteen, but she could be anywhere between twenty and thirty. Her reference had sounded all right, so Jane thought she would give her a try.

She wore a red Fair Isle jersey, tartan skirt and lace-up boots, a woollen coat over all with a slim fur collar. Maybe that was how they dressed up North. Yellowish hair straggled both sides of her face below a flowerpot hat of many colours.

‘You’d better come in.’ The last au pair had shot off at no notice to do a tour of Europe with a boyfriend, so Jane wrote to Greta whom she had previously turned down. Beggars can’t be choosers, she said to Tim, so here she was coming up the steps, thin lips tightening as she lugged a suitcase fastened with a trouser belt.

Jane led her into the kitchen, moving the Sunday papers for her to sit down while coffee was made. ‘Are you hungry? There’s bread and cheese. We don’t eat till two.’

Greta’s eyelids were almost closed, as if she hadn’t had enough sleep on the way down. ‘I am ‘ungry.’ She looked around, perhaps hoping for a bed to lie on. ‘Where’s the kids?’

‘In Holland Park, with my husband. They’ll be glad to see you when they get back, I know.’

‘I’ope so.’

Jane put a full spoon of Instant in the mug. ‘The reason you’re here is to keep them amused while I do my work. That’s the main thing. I’m working to a deadline on a book, and can’t have them scratching at my door all summer wanting to be let in.’

Greta cupped her coffee and stared at the steam. ‘My sister’s got
three, so I’m used to kids. Where’s that bread and cheese, though?’

‘Oh yes, I’d forgotten.’ Too late to say she might not want her. ‘Then I’ll show you your room.’

In the lounge after dinner Tim said: ‘Where did you find that funny little thing?’

They had been married seven years, and such questions always implied that she had made a mistake. ‘Why?’

‘Doesn’t look up to much. Not like the last one.’

‘She ran out on us, remember? And I have to work, remember?’ He had been redundant for three months, though was to begin a new job on Monday – funnily enough for a bigger salary.

‘Touché,’ he said.

If she put back half a bottle of wine on her own she felt cheerful, and if he did the same while alone he turned benign, but a bottle between them always brought on a skirmish. ‘Anyway, listen to them laughing and screaming upstairs. They’ve never taken to anyone so quickly.’

‘Now then, kids, we’re going to play a game called ‘‘Washing Up’’, and the one who don’t break any pots can come to the sink and squirt in the detergent.’ Greta had lost her sleepy aspect. Her bustling body and shining eyes showed that she liked the game as well.

Jane looked in from her work. Sturdy blond Ben had the dreamy and cunning eyes of his father, while malleable and well-behaved Angela could suddenly break into hellerdom, like herself at that age. By the end of the game the kitchen was brilliant. If they were all like that from the North she couldn’t have enough of them.

‘Oh, mummy, thanks a lot,’ Ben said, when she gave Greta ten pounds to take them out. ‘You’re wonderful.’

‘Where to?’ Greta fitted them into their coats.

‘Anywhere you like.’ As long as you get them off my hands. ‘Just pop into the kitchen and make them something to eat. You needn’t
come back for lunch. Then I’ll give you a map of the Underground.’

Greta made Ben leave his plastic gun. ‘Yer don’t want that.’ He would normally have argued, but put it by without a murmur. ‘We aren’t going to rob a bank!’

Funny how she could get twice as much done when the house was empty. At this rate the deadline would be easy. Then the resident neighbourhood pneumatic drill started up, and the first car alarm went off. Still, you couldn’t have everything, and double glazing cut most of the noise.

‘Mummy! Mummy!’ Ben screamed when they came in at six, a little late but better that than too early. ‘We went on the Circle Line, round and round, and played counting the stations. We passed Notting Hill Gate
three times
.’ He showed a pencil scrawled Tube map. ‘I went up and down the
exerlators
, and Angie got caught in a door.’

Greta took them upstairs for a bath, then asked would it be all right if they ate in her room? It certainly would. Jane had noted how snappy Tim was at such family meals, especially since Greta was as far from a so-called sex object as it was possible to get.

‘We’re playing ‘‘Restaurants’’.’ Ben scooped up knives and forks. ‘We’re in a caff on the M1, and Greta’s serving us.’

‘Isn’t she wonderful?’ Jane and Tim sat down to a quiet supper. ‘What a rich fantasy life they’re having.’

‘They’ll probably turn into writers.’

‘Don’t be so contemptuous.’ The arrangement was so good he was hoping to spoil it, but at least he was laughing.

Next day Ben ran to her. ‘Mummy, can we have those big boxes the stereos came in? Me and Angie want to play “Cardboard City” in the garden.’

She frowned. ‘How do you know about that?’

He squeezed her hand, as always when wanting something badly. ‘Greta took us doing hide-and-seek at the South Bank, and I saw ‘em. All those beggars in cardboard boxes! Me and Angie want to
play beggars, don’t we, Angie? You can come by and give us five pee now and again.’

‘You certainly can’t play “Cardboard City”.’ Jane talked about the unfortunate people who had to live there, mostly through no fault of their own. ‘And don’t say “Me and Angie”. It’s “Angie and I”, as you know.’

Ben’s tears dropped on the sleeve of his blazer. ‘We still want to play it, though. It’s only a
game
.’

‘All right, but don’t make a noise.’ She looked for her purse: no use moaning about what the world was coming to when it had come to it already.

Obsessive Ben found Tim’s hiking gear and lay in a sleeping bag by the nettles, while Angela, wearing a filthy old jacket, stooped at the unlit camping gas as if cooking his stew. Greta walked by and threw them a coin. They couldn’t wait to get in the garden after breakfast, but their passion for the game came to an end, and Jane had to squash the cardboard flat and jam it in the dustbin a few days later.

‘And what are you going to do today?’

‘I’ll take ‘em to Battersea Park.’ Greta was adept at finding places on the map – considering she hadn’t got to within shouting distance of O Levels.

‘Take this, then, for ice creams and whatnot.’

She felt guilty, but work was getting done. She’d never seen them so happy and excited, on coming home from wherever Greta took them. Sometimes you would have thought they had been down a coalmine, but she soon had them naked and laughing in the bath. ‘They got over the railings and into the flowerbeds before I could pull ‘em back,’ she explained, though with no apology.

Jane soon stopped imagining there were any mysteries about her, as she had with all the au pairs till she got used to them. She was happy enough to sit in her room, sure now of meeting the deadline of her own long story. Needing more background one
morning she had to go to the London Library. It was a bother, but she liked to be accurate in social and scientific details.

Traffic was piling up at the roadworks as she went into the Tube. Students from language schools mingled with countless tourists, and she had to stand all the way. A pathetic old tramp held out a hand so she gave him a pound, her vagrant tax for the day.

She could have walked the quarter mile instead of changing lines, but pushing along pavements would have been even more tiresome than the confusion of corridors and escalators. The crowds carried her along on the outside flank, by a woman with two kids at the bottom of the steps before turning left to the platform. Some good souls were clattering money into their tins, so Jane was glad not to bother because a train was ready to go.

She stood by the open door, hearing but not seeing the poor headscarfed beggar and her children calling out for money even though there was little chance from people hurrying to get in before the train left. Their voices startled her, and on bending down to look she caught a two second photo-flash before the doors closed. When she tried to see more the way was blocked by people on the steps.

Those around her must have thought she was another poor mad woman wandering the Underground looking for an unoccupied platform to leap from. She banged the door to get out, then turned her glassy eyes at the communication cord. Her grimace caused a man to lift his newspaper, either to hide behind or keep her off his territory.

Sturdy Ben, hand holding the tin, had the starvo hard-done-by pitiable face of Tiny Tim. Angela was sitting on Greta’s knee, chalk-faced and hungry, as if she hadn’t long for this world. As for Greta, Grim Greta, she dared people to go by and not drop something into a tin.

Jane thought she would faint. I’ll kill her. Her impulse was to
go back from the first stop and throw her under a train. But the carriage was squeaking on its way, and as during her panic the day after marrying Tim, she told herself it would be better to have a cup of coffee somewhere and think about it calmly.

Hard to decide, she was paralysed. Minutes went by, before walking along Piccadilly and down to St James’s Square, imagining that everyone passing had seen the woman and her beggar kids in the Underground. She didn’t feel fully sane till searching for her books in Science and Miscellaneous. On her way back they had gone, probably to a scene of better pickings.

Words shied from being corralled into sentences. Luckily she was close to the end so could rehearse the grand telling off to Greta the second she came in. Sentences formed for that all right, so many that she hardly knew which to let out first.

She was making a tisane when the door was kicked open and Ben fell in. ‘Mummy! Mummy! We’re been playing beggars again!’ He wrapped himself around her legs. ‘Oh, it’s such good fun. We love playing beggars, don’t we, Angie?’

Greta came smiling up the steps clutching Angela’s hand. ‘It was all I could do to keep ‘em quiet. They saw a woman and two kids the other day on the Embankment, and gave me no peace.’

Jane’s vitriolic phrases melted. Whose fault had it been, after all? ‘Well, you aren’t to play that game again.’

Ben was ready to cry.

‘Never, you understand. Never.’

‘How long has it been going on?’ Greta was packing her case after supper. Where would she go at this time of night? Apart from that, who told her she had to leave? ‘We’ll send them to RADA,’ Tim had said, taking nothing seriously.

‘Only a few times.’

She was curious. ‘And what about the money you collected?’

‘We was saving it, to go to Southend.’

Inventive and stalwart were the words that came. It was impossible not to laugh. ‘Only to Southend?’

‘Well, I couldn’t take ‘em to New Zealand, could I?’

She laughed again. What else could you do? ‘All right, but you don’t have to leave.’

‘Don’t I?’

Was she happy to hear it, or wasn’t she?

‘I just don’t like black looks, that’s all.’

Jane took her arm. ‘Nobody does. So just stop your packing, and go up to see that the children are all right.’

‘W
ELL, CHILDREN,’
the plummy voiced teacher said, ‘this morning I’m going to tell you a story about King Arthur and his Knights.’

Ron Delph was five at the time – or was it six? – and looking back he supposed it must in any case have been very early on. What nights? he wondered, leering from his favourite place on the back row.

‘His knights,’ she said, and it felt as if her voice was right inside Ron’s head. Nights were dark, even in summer, and he would rather hear about King Arthur’s days, because in daytime everybody could see what they were doing, so their antics were bound to be more interesting.

‘King Arthur had twenty-four knights.’ The teacher walked to the blackboard and wrote the number in blue chalk. ‘Twenty-four stalwart knights.’

Twenty-four nights wasn’t long, just over three weeks, even less than a month, and if each night was stalwart it must have been darker than an ordinary night. In any case what was a king doing, even if his name was Arthur, going round at night? A king should be in his castle at night talking to his queen or courtiers about boiling the oil for when another king attacked the castle. If she wasn’t going to tell us about King Arthur’s days, Ron Delph thought, I’d rather hear the story of Robin Hood and Maid Marian.

‘King Arthur,’ she said, ‘ruled England in the olden days.’

He wanted to groan: not them fucking olden days again. We’re allus getting them rammed down our chops. But he didn’t groan,
because teachers with plummy voices could have very sharp knuckles. He didn’t need to have been in school more than a few months to sense that. He was only five or six. He wasn’t born yesterday.

‘And in those days’ – they were almost listening – ‘everybody was happy, because King Arthur was a good king.’ She screamed at somebody. ‘If you fall off your seat again I’ll send you out. Yes, you. You! It’s
you
I mean, you!’

He realised with a shock that the ‘you’ was him, the most important connection he’d made in his life up to then, though it had become his safeguard ever since to know that you and me were the same person, especially when a policeman decides that’s how it is. If only he had known how quick he was learning he could have kept it and become a millionaire instead of a poet.

‘King Arthur was a just ruler.’ If he was just a ruler why not say straight out he wasn’t bent? Nobody expected a king to be bent. Only old men and old women were bent. They were bent when they walked, so they could never be rulers. That was why the king wasn’t old. He had to be straight to be a ruler.

‘His people loved him. The Romans had left, and the Saxons had not yet arrived, so for a hundred years there was peace and prosperity everywhere.’

He didn’t believe her. If you had a king he lived in a castle, and in a castle the oil was always on the boil to stop people capturing it. You had battles, with lots of killing.

‘He pulled a sword called Excalibur out of a stone.’

There was a picture in the book, and she passed it around for them to look at so that they would believe her. The sword was long, like a cross, and there was this bloke with a helmet on and a skirt round his waist heaving the sword out of a slab of rock. The next picture showed that he’d done it, but how can you pull a piece of steel out of a stone? You can’t. First of all, how can you push it in? You can’t. And if you can’t push it in, then you can’t
get it out. So Ron learned something else, that you can’t believe anything you see in a book, even if it is a picture.

He didn’t go back to that school after the second day because he stared too long at the sword and rock when the teacher pushed the picture under his nose. He was unable to stop looking, his fixed eyes trying their best to see how such a thing could be done as pulling a sword out when it was stuck fast in a rock. Staring and staring, his eyes got so hard that he didn’t feel they belonged to him anymore. They became stones. The colours of the picture glistened and swam, and his mouth locked and his legs shook, and he fell to the ground, ripping the book to pieces. The teacher was very clever to notice that he was having a fit, and to send for his mother.

‘It’s nerves,’ the doctor said, ‘that’s all,’ but he screamed it was that bleeding picture the teacher had tried to melt into his brain. She had opened his skull with a sword and poured the book inside and stitched him up again, and the headache made him fall into a fit, because how could a man even though he was a king pull a sword no matter how strong he was out of a piece of rock almost as big as a cliff? They’d told him a lie and he didn’t like it. King Arthur was a tricky bastard just like the rest, though maybe he had never pulled a sword out of a rock at all and people only said he had. People said all sorts of barmy things to kids.

His mother believed him, yet he could tell she didn’t, and only said she did till he was better. Then she found another school for him to go to, so that he would have preferred it if she hadn’t believed him in the first place.

But everybody had to go to school. He learned arithmetic, which wasn’t lies. He learned to read and write as well, and liked it. It was a special school for kids who weren’t quite proper in the head, but he didn’t mind. He opened a book and saw a camel. In history he saw a horse and chariot. Every morning there was free milk and then dinner, and in the afternoon they slept. There was more play than learning, but whenever he turned a page he felt his heart
bump and his lips twitch and his legs quake in case he suddenly saw that rock and sword and King Arthur heaving for all his guts were worth to get it out. At that school he never did, because they were all a bit mental already and the teachers knew better than to do anything what would send them outright crackers. King Arthur was for kids who believed every word about it.

The closest to reminding him of that picture was one day when a boy at the chair in front lifted his finger for Ron to look at. The finger had a rusty nail through the middle, which was worse than seeing a sword in a rock. Dirty blood seeped through a bit of hanky, and Ron couldn’t understand why he had only a sombre look on his face and not a squint of agony.

Poor sod, Ron thought, look what’s happened to him. He must have said summat while having his porridge that morning that his father didn’t like, so his father had tried to nail him to the ground, but he had pulled his finger clear and escaped to school, wrapping a bit of old rag round it before getting here.

It was the most horrible thing he’d seen in his life, and what made him do what he did he didn’t know, but he gripped the kid’s wrist and with the other hand took the end of the nail and pulled as hard as dotty Arthur must have tugged to get that sword out of the rock. What had started as a joke, a trick nail hooked around the finger to look like real, became a bitter tug o’ war with Ron pulling one way and his pal (a pal no longer) almost dragged along the floor, howling with rage, and pain from a sprained finger.

No wonder they thought he was insane from a very early age, but he was merely gullible and easy-going, wanting to believe the world was nothing but good, which it was far from and so no laughing matter. The teacher saw his error but was frightened at his intensity. He had only wanted to get the nail out of his mate’s finger and suck the wound better so that he wouldn’t go on suffering.

He stayed six more months at that school, but every morning
they expected him to run amok or go berserk, and kept such an eye on him, talking to him only as if he was a baby and giving him everything he asked for (within reason), that he felt himself turning into an eternal puppy dog.

When his parents left to live in another house they couldn’t be bothered to get up early and put him on the bus anymore, so he went to a normal school near where they lived, by which time he was convinced he had left that rock and sword world forever.

Life was normal, and he lived like any other kid and loved it. One Christmas his sister Molly got a present from Aunt Dolly, and when she opened the book there it was as large as life, a story about King Arthur and a whole-page picture of him pulling that shining sword from the green rock. They were sitting on the bed, and he jerked back so quick from the shock he rolled over his brand new fire engine and bent the ladder.

When he tried to snatch the book Molly laughed and said she would make his nose bleed if he didn’t pipe down and leave her alone. ‘It’s my book, but when I’ve read it twenty-seven times I’ll let you have a look,’ she said. ‘Till then you’ve got your own toys, so you’d better not nick any of mine.’

What could he do? That book haunted him for days. He’d never thought to see one in the
house
. Molly knew he felt something special about it, so read it aloud to torment him, and though he pressed his fingers to his ears he couldn’t help but hear the words she spoke. His mother told Molly to stop tormenting him but she took no notice. Father laughed and egged her on: ‘Now we know what to do when we want to get some life out of him. He looks half-dead most of the time.’

The anguish wore off, fingers at his ears relaxing till, little by little, he got the whole story of King Arthur and his loony knights. Even at school the tale came up too often for him to ignore, or think for a minute he would ever stop hearing it. The trouble was that the others in the class lapped the yarn up. They loved every
word. They wanted the story over and over again, and the teacher – a man now – would open the book for the last period on Friday afternoon, and begin to read where he had left off the previous Friday, with such pleasure on his face and tremors in his voice as if he was an actor on the telly that the whole world adored, one adventure rolling into another. And when King Arthur was mortally wounded (he relished that word
mortally
) and when his sword was slung into the lake, and his body was carried away in a boat, you would have thought the whole class was about to burst into tears the room went so quiet.

But I ask you – chuck a sword into the water, and a hand comes up and makes a grab! It’s as far-fetched as a man pulling it in the first place out of a slab of rock. I reckon a swimmer underwater just happened to be there at that moment and had the gumption to lift his hand up when he knew the sword was going to be thrown in. He caught the handle a treat, yanked the whole fucking lot under, swam to a quiet part of the reeds, and made off with it hidden in his cloak to a town market where he got a good price and was blind drunk on the proceeds for weeks afterwards. What other explanation can there be?

When the teacher got to that place in the book Ron laughed out loud. You’d have thought a firecracker on Guy Fawkes night had burst among them. Everyone jerked their necks and looked around. Teacher stopped reading, and stared.

‘Come out, Delph,’ he shouted.

Well, of course he would say that, wouldn’t he? Ron thought. You can’t have your mam write a note to the teacher telling him I wasn’t to hear anything about King Arthur or I would go off my head. His hands twitched as he stood up.

‘Come out when I tell you,’ the teacher screamed, glasses joggling up and down on his winkle picker nose, as if his long hair was going to fall off. Ron was fixed to the spot, and it would have been as hard to pull himself free as to get that tinpot sword out of the
rock. Then the notion came to him, at the worst possible moment, that the rock hadn’t been rock but cardboard, and tricky King Arthur had only made a show of pulling his guts out to get it free. This made him laugh again, a screeching hee-haw as if from a horse whose head was trapped in a door.

The teacher smashed his fist on the desk, because the others were starting to laugh. ‘Come here when I tell you, donkey, oaf, nincompoop, fool,’ or words like that, only worse. All Ron’s troubles sprang from that sword and rock of batty King Arthur, otherwise he would have had a blameless life. He had stopped the teacher dead from reading his favourite story, which was bad, he knew, since that was his only way of keeping them quiet. But Ron didn’t go. He couldn’t move. His feet went right through the floor to the middle of the earth. The teacher came to him, pushed him back into his seat, rattled him over the head, and went back to his desk holding his hand for pain.

From then on Ron stopped hating King Arthur and his Knights, because he thought they were just funny. There was nothing else to do but laugh, and make up his own daft bits to wile away the boring time when the book was being read to them, knowing or at least hoping that on going to another school after he was eleven all that stuff would be a thing of the past.

On opening his book again after making Ron’s head ring the teacher couldn’t get the same shaky tone to his voice that he’d had before. His reading went dull when it wasn’t shaky, which served him right, Ron thought, for feeding us too much of that old King Arthur rammel.

The trouble was that though he considered it funny in his waking time, Ron dreamed about King Arthur and his Knights, and didn’t think that was good for him at all. When Arthur pulled the sword out it was human flesh instead of rock, and when the sword was thrown into the lake a snake’s mouth caught it, the long coiling body locked around Ron who was held in the slime below the
surface. Evil Merlin the witch doctor led him in chains through crimson blood-dripping caverns to chop him up and cook him in a cauldron for the Knights’ supper. An eagle pecked his eyes out, and when he wanted to wake up he couldn’t even open the holes that were left.

He was still dreaming when he thought he was awake and blind, and saw the words – even though by now he had no eyes – written in fire in the sky which said: ‘You are having a
knightmare
.’ His mother and father were shaking with fright when he woke up screaming instead of laughing. The dreams went on for weeks, and his sister had to live with Aunt Dolly till he didn’t have them anymore, and she could stand to be in the same house again without having bad dreams herself even during the day.

Ron soon learned that you can never get away from King Arthur. Everybody in this country thinks he was the greatest king of the olden days, he told himself, when everybody ate apples and honey and drank mead, and the sun shone except when rain poured down to water the crops, and the men had a bit of excitement now and again when they went off singing to have a shindig with the Saxons. In other words, a marvellous time was had by everyone, especially if you were a knight.