Easy Peasy (15 page)

‘What do you think?' I ask.

‘I think … well obviously he suffered. I think he was a very sensitive, a very intelligent, very … beautiful man. I'm sorry now I never met him.' I can tell from the considered and slightly artificial way she speaks that she has planned what to say.

‘But
I
never knew him. Not
that
him.' I cannot keep the wail out of my voice. ‘If
you
had met him you wouldn't have seen those things.'

She purses her lips and shrugs. ‘Maybe.' She pauses. ‘Or maybe familiarity breeds contempt?'

‘That's not true, that's not fair.' I smash my hand down in the water and splash her immaculate blouse.

‘Oi!' she moves away. ‘All right. Sorry.'

The water laps against me, through the wet white skin of my left breast I can see the faint beat of my heart. ‘I could have known him better,' I say.

‘Maybe, but Zel, it was up to
him.'

‘I never asked him anything about … about his past. I never …'

‘But
he
was
your
father.'

‘… even looked at him properly, not for a long time, if ever, I never …'

‘He was the adult. He should have set the agenda.'

‘… even took him into account as a
man
, do you know what I mean? An individual, an individual with a separate …'

‘There's no way you can blame …'

‘… identity, personality. Separate from being my father, I mean … and even that …'

‘Hey … Zelda … calm down.'

I give up, smile weakly, and slide further into the water so that it tickles the lobes of my ears. I shut my eyes against Foxy's concern. I can feel a laugh stuck in me like a bubble in a coiled-up hose-pipe, thinking of what she said.
He should have set the agenda
. That jargon. I can just imagine his face if I had said that to him. ‘Father, it's up to you to set the agenda.' No. I can't imagine his face, I can't picture it at all. And I will never see it again.

‘Sweet-pea?' The laugh crawls silently through the coils. Sweet-pea. A legume. Hazel and I called each other Old Bean. Another legume. Pulse. Nothing but a slight coincidence, not amusing. But coincidences are part of it. The texture of it. Of what? Life, experience.
It
. Coincidences, correspondences. Correspondences – letters, diaries. I correspond with you. Respond to me. Oh shut the hell up. I snap open my eyes.

‘All right?' Her face is creased with concern.

‘Oh Foxy.' I am exasperated.

‘What?'

‘Nothing.' How can I say, stop caring? I do want her to care but not like this. I don't want her concern, her kindness, certainly not her pity. I want her genuine passion, not her compassion. Genuine passion or nothing at all. But I can't say that because I
do
need her now.

‘I've put the papers back in the envelope. Maybe you should take them with you?'

‘Yes, no, maybe, I don't know.'

‘Show them to your mother, Hazel, Huw?'

‘Maybe.'

‘Sit up,' she says, leaning over to squeeze a sponge in the water. ‘I'll do your back. Then we really must hit the road.'

TICKLE

1

Screams in the sky, slits in the dark, streamers of shrieking light. A rocket plummets over the cliff edge and into the sea. In next door's garden the bonfire has relaxed down to a glow of embers; the children with their excited shrieks and scribbling sparklers gone to bed – and the last remains of the paper-faced man turned to cinders or blown away in ashy flakes. I press my forehead against the cold window and my breath mists the glass.

Mummy doesn't know them very well, next door. If they had known today was the day of Daddy's cremation, as Hazel indignantly pointed out, surely they would have had more tact than to burn their Guy just where we could see? But Mummy hadn't told them. The funeral was kept very low key, family only. Because of the inquest, result: death by suicide, as if we didn't know, as if we needed the stress of awaiting the verdict, the funeral was delayed for several weeks. Because Daddy took his own life, Mummy invited no one, wanted no party, wake, whatever you call it, wanted no funeral meats. I think that's why. And now it's over and done with and night has come, and as usual I am left awake. Mummy, Hazel, Colin and Huw all voted for an early night and left me to watch a late film and now, to drift about the house, to summon up the resolve to go to bed.

The crematorium was lined with brown veneer. The flowers weren't real, nor the arrangements inside, white blossoms of silk or polyester. Hazel clutched my hand as the coffin slid behind a Dralon drape and I had an urge to laugh, not that it was funny, but there seemed something absurd about the automatic swish of the curtain, the discreet swallowing of Daddy.

While we were inside there was a hard fleeting shower which had splashed the real flowers, the wreaths and sprays of white roses and carnations, the chrysanthemum golf-bag from the golf club, with mud. Because Mummy had invited nobody, I was startled when we got outside, blinking in the wet sunshine, to see Wanda.

‘Have I missed it?' she said. ‘Fucking taxi-driver … oh I am sorry.' Her face went scarlet and I thought she would weep with embarrassment. She threw her arms round Mummy, who stood stiffly allowing herself to be embraced but giving nothing back. Colin shuffled his feet, waiting for an introduction. Hazel took his arm, ‘An old family, sort of, friend,' she whispered.

Wanda's hair is black, newly black. I wonder if she dyed it for the occasion? And she was wearing a black brocade coat. She's lost weight, I'm sure, and looked sallow – maybe black's just not her colour. If it wasn't for her earrings, a long silver cat dangling from one lobe, five graduated rings of silver in the other, she might have passed for conventional. She gave me a hug. ‘Hello stranger,' she said into my ear. Her smell has changed: more musk than patchouli now.

‘Well, what a surprise.' Mummy collected herself. ‘We're not having a … a do,' she said, ‘but if you'd like to come back for a cup of tea?'

‘Gasping for one.'

‘Come with us.' Huw beckoned and led the way to his car. It was nearly an hour's drive home. Mummy went with Hazel and Colin. The wet road glittered through the dusty windscreen and caused my eyes to water. I was upset, holding back my feelings, not just about Daddy but about Foxy too, gritting my teeth against them, forcing them down and out of the light of my consciousness. Because they … well they would wait.

Dustbins were being emptied on the outskirts of town. It seemed a terribly ordinary day. We got stuck behind a tractor and trailer and had to crawl for miles. A yellow sycamore leaf drifted on to the windscreen, the sky was blandly blue.

‘Where are you living now?' I asked Wanda.

‘Felixstowe, back to my roots.' She leant forward and waved her hand between us. ‘Look.'

‘Nice.'

There were two rings on her wedding finger.

‘You're telling me. Engagement: zircon, my birthstone,' she waggled the finger so that the stone flashed, ‘and wedding, white gold. Yes. I'm an honest woman – at last.'

Huw glanced down at her hand. ‘Who's the lucky chap?'

I laughed. Huw has a lucky dip of such stock phrases, always at hand. I was surprised to be laughing on this day, checked myself.

‘Stan,' Wanda said. ‘Stan the man. Younger than me – but what's ten years? He make me … he make me happy.'

‘I'm very glad.' I smiled over my shoulder at her.
Happy
. I thought, he makes her
happy
.

But her smile fell away, her face suddenly bleak. ‘I can't believe he went and topped himself.'

I could sense Huw stiffening. We both looked straight out through the windscreen. We passed a couple of gaudy Lycra-clad cyclists hunched over their handle-bars.

‘No,' I said.

‘Still, I don't suppose it make much difference in the long run, how you go,' she tried, but her voice faltered, unconvinced.

‘It'll all be the same in a hundred years, eh?' Huw squirted the windscreen washers and switched the squeaky wipers on to swoosh away the dust.

After a mile or two of awkward quiet Wanda began to talk, about Vassily, about his architectural firm, about his wife and daughter. I was glad my face was turned away. I could hardly believe what she was saying. That that boy, that dog-bellied spook, had become a success, made me tremble with shame at the way I had been. Never cruel before or since. That episode a shadow on my childhood. I did not know if she knew about my cruelty. I never knew if Vassily told on us. ‘He's a born father,' she was saying, ‘none of you …?'

‘Not as yet.' Huw sounded very firm.

I sit at the desk in the room that Daddy called his study. I slide open the top drawer and take out the contents: a tobacco tin full of red, blue and yellow golf tees; a chrome lighter; a pad of blue Basildon Bond; a small electric screwdriver; a packet of wine-gums – and Daddy's best fountain-pen, a fat gold Parker 51. I put a wine-gum in my mouth, a long green one,
CLARET
it says on the top in raised letters. Claret? Green? My mouth floods with sticky childish juice. I take the top off the pen and hold it poised in my hand as if I'm going to write. It looks a very important pen, I used to think that, for writing important letters with, business things, things that required his stern cramped signature. Children weren't allowed to use it, you'll spoil the nib, he said. I try it. No ink. But there is a bottle of blue-black Quink by the blotter. I suck ink through the snout and inside the cavity, wipe the precious nib on the blotter making a sideways smudge amongst the mysterious blots and squiggles; numbers, names, the trying out of spelling – obssesion, obsession, ocassion, occassion, ocasion, occasion. It makes me smile, they are just the sort of words
I
can never remember how to spell. Daddy. I make a blot into a man, the profile of a man in a bowler hat.

I will write a letter, a letter to Foxy.

‘That's obvious why you moved here,' Wanda said to Mummy when we were home. We were all standing in the sitting-room with cups of tea all gazing out of the bay window at the sea. ‘What a view.'

‘Yes, we bought it for the view.'

‘Not the wisest decision,' Colin added, ‘in terms of the coastal erosion.'

Hazel gave him a look.

Mummy took a sip of tea and sighed. ‘Well, Ralph was set on it … a good price … and it's near the golf club.'

‘Him and his golf!' Wanda gave a throaty laugh.

‘Yes.' Mummy's voice tight. I had a sudden start, looking at Wanda, something occurring to me. Not Daddy and Wanda? Surely not. I tried to catch Hazel's eye but she was busy brushing something off Colin's shoulder.

I stepped back and sat on the arm of an armchair. Now I was the audience and they were the actors, but their backs were to me. The funeral tea. Widow, family and possible mistress sipping tea from china cups. Widow a head taller than mistress, elegant beside her daring.

No, it was not possible, surely. Daddy and Wanda. And yet, and yet … possibly it made a sort of sense? No. But not impossible…

‘A little semi, not much but it's our own,' Wanda was saying, she glanced up at Huw who had put down his cup and was lighting a cigarette for himself. He saw her eyeing it and held out the packet. ‘Thanks. Not what the doctor ordered, but still. How are you doing?'

‘Can't complain,' he said. He held his cigarette between his finger and thumb just like Daddy had done. His profile was Daddy's too.

‘He's going great guns,' Mummy said. ‘Lots of auditions.'

‘Ads mainly.'

‘And Coriolanus, not like you to hide your light …' Hazel smoothed her hair.

‘Well, as I said, can't complain.'

‘And Vassily?' Mummy sat down in the armchair beside me. Her face, under its powder, was pale and sweating, not like Mummy, not like Mummy to look defeated.

Wanda began recounting Vassily's success story and I went out of the house and wandered away to the backs of the cliff-top shacks and caravans. They had a neglected tatty air and most of them had wildly optimistic ‘For Sale' signs in the windows. A sign: DANGER: LARGE AREAS OF CLIFF CAN GIVE WAY WITHOUT WARNING was stuck to a gate-post. I went cautiously to the edge, the place where the last shack had tumbled, and looked down. A bit of drain-pipe still dangled from the cliff and on the beach there was some debris, part of a brick chimney stack. The sea swirled below me, a dark cloudy brown as it dissolved the cliff. I stepped back, suddenly dizzy.

Daddy and Wanda.

Yes. Like a new beam shone down the corridor of my past, fresh details were illuminated, fresh shadows cast.

Wanda here at the funeral. What else could it mean? Had Mummy invited her? Why would she? I walked past the shacks and down a sloping footpath to the beach. Not dressed for it, not planning for it. I went for a long walk, walked until the light was flat pewter on the sea and the shore darkening, walked with my hands in my pockets, the salt ruining my black suede shoes. As I walked, faster and faster, I let go of all my control. I let furious thoughts well up inside me. I shouted, raged at the sea-gulls and the greedy sea, dashed tears from my eyes, not tears for Daddy now, tears for myself, overwhelmed by the faithlessness of husbands and lovers, wrenched by the pain of betrayal. I walked until distant fireworks began to scratch the sky and the sea smell became tinged with woodsmoke. And when I returned, Wanda had gone.

2

If it had not been for my ants, I might have spent less time in the tree-house. Somehow, as a refuge, it was spoilt now that Dog-belly was always in and out of it.

One Sunday afternoon, from my bedroom window, I saw Daddy holding the ladder while Dog-belly climbed up and then, once the thin legs had disappeared inside, he began to climb up himself. A shout of protest stuck in my throat. I could not believe it. He had
never
been into the tree-house. Even Mummy did no more than occasionally pop her head through the trap-door to talk to us. It was
ours
. Hazel's and mine.