Lifesaver (11 page)

And that, there I was, driving down on a hazy August morning to that place to meet his father, and to help stick bits of broken tile onto a board. I wondered again if Max was going to be there too.

Life could be very strange.

Despite Adam’s directions, Moose Hall was far more difficult to find than the college had been. Perhaps because I had expected a large impressive edifice, with at the very least a stuffed moose head trophy outside, I drove past it at least four times without seeing it.

Moose Hall—the name reminded me of a book from my childhood, some surreal story about minced moosemeat, or maybe moosed mincemeat? Odd how gruesome that sounded as an adult, when it had been just funny words to me as a child. A bit like Shock-Headed Peter, I mused, as I drove like Miss Marple, nose an inch from the windscreen, peering at the houses along Devizes Road.
Strewelpeter
, to give Shock-Headed Peter its correct untranslated title, was full of hideously frightening tales of girls being burned to ashes after playing with matches, or boys having their thumbs cut off for sucking them. You’d have thought it would give a child nightmares. But perhaps a child didn’t attach any significant meaning to the words. They were just words, and pictures. They had no resonance or impact on the things which really mattered to them: family, television, toys, sunshine.

I thought of Max, and how nightmarish much of his own short life must have been. I hoped he had just seen it like the words of a frightening story—something to take in his stride, to let wash over him. Perhaps he succeeded in making his own reality, of chemotherapy, needles, pain, exhaustion, no different to reading about minced-up mooses or thumbless and bleeding storybook children.

Bloody hell, where
was
that bloody hall? For a brief moment I wondered if it had all just been a story too, a yarn Adam had spun to get rid of me, the madwoman on the telephone desperate to be creative…If so, I’d swallowed his fairytale as easily as a child would have done.

I pulled up next to a old man walking a toffee-nosed hairy little dog.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, through my open car window. ‘Do you know where Moose Hall is, please?’

The man barely glanced at me, but instead gazed back in the direction I’d just driven from, as though the hall would come shimmering up the road to meet me. His dog stared, too. Then the man lifted a slow heavy arm and pointed the same way.

‘Down there, on the right.’

I was puzzled. ‘I just came from there.’

He shrugged. ‘On the right. Down there.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, and pulled away. I must have been too busy thinking about minced moosemeat and chemotherapy to spot it. I did a three-point turn in the road - much to the irritation of a teenager in a souped-up red Escort, who was then stuck behind me - and drove at five miles an hour back the way I’d come, craning my neck at all the houses on the right hand side of the street.

There it was, after all, in the middle of the terrace. I couldn’t believe I’d missed it, although it wasn’t at all what I’d been expecting. It was one of those tiny, neglected Victorian halls that every town seemed to possess, uncared for and tucked away. The grimy paintwork was flaking off the front in huge jagged strips, and the once-impressive portico over the door crumbling and dangerous. An easel with a large wrinkled sheet of paper pinned to it stood outside the front: ‘Mosaic Workshop—Open to All’ it said in faded, blurry crayoned letters.

I found a parking space and squeezed into it, wondering if the foot or so at the front of the car which overhung the neighbouring bus stop would constitute a parking violation. But there was nowhere else to park, so I left it there. Taking a deep breath, I walked up to the heavy wooden door and pushed it open.

I registered the children first, four or five of them, racing around the hall in a blur of skinny legs in shorts, brandishing felt-tips at each other and fighting over a chocolate biscuit. My heart nearly stopped—which one was he? Which one was Max?

A woman yelled: ‘Orlando and Spike, stop it! Millie, give Spike his biscuit back. And you, Petra, stop being such a troublemaker. If you can’t all work quietly, you’ll have to go home.’

No Maxes. In a way, I was relieved—I didn’t think I could have handled meeting him with no preamble like that. The prospect of introducing myself to Adam was nerve-wracking enough. I did another quick scan around the hall, to try to identify Adam. There were three men present: a rather good looking black man in tiny denim shorts, an older, softer, balding man with a small beard, and a rake thin hippie with three rings squeezed into one hole in the side of his very protuberant nose. He looked like a misplaced Dickens character, and had the faint air of surprise to go with it; as if Uriah Heep had been forced into a Little Feat t-shirt and couldn’t figure out why. They were all wearing white stick-on name badges, but I was too far away to read what they said.

A trestle table in the centre of the room was covered with a large board, at which the men, plus four or five women, were working. Boxes and boxes of tiles lined the walls of the room, all shapes and sizes and colours, some already broken into pieces, most whole. Dust and chips of tile carpeted the worn floorboards, and the children’s shouts mingled with the sharp crack of tile cutters.

On another, smaller table near where I stood were plates of sandwiches with curled up corners, a tin of Rich Tea biscuits broken like the tiles, and a bowl of sugar with several teaspoons left in it, staining the sugar brown with stirred tea. Beth Orton’s plaintive, tremulous voice was wavering out of a boombox, and a kettle rattled and steamed on the floor nearby, warming my shins with its fresh boil. That’s dangerous, I though, with those children tearing about. I had to suppress an urge to move the kettle to a safer place.

The woman who had shouted at the kids detached herself from the group of adults, and came over to greet me in the doorway. At first I thought something traumatic must just have happened to her, because her mouth was open in a pained sort of rictus as if she were walking against a particularly biting wind. But when she spoke, she seemed perfectly normal.

‘Come to help?’ she asked, far more cheerfully than her appearance suggested, and I nodded. She was younger than me, I saw, hippyish but not offensively so. She wore a lot of heavy amber jewellery, her long straight brown hair was shiny, and her teeth white. It was just that expression which made her look a bit unfortunate.

‘I’m Serena,’ she said. ‘Let’s get you signed in, and then I’ll introduce you to the gang. What’s your name?’

‘Anna,’ I said. ‘Anna, um, Valentine.’

I watched as she wrote A-N-N-A on a sticky label, peeled it off, and handed it to me on her fingertip, where I duly stuck it above my left breast. I signed the clipboard she held out to me, adding my fake address, glad that I’d had the forethought to make one up, even if I hadn’t thought I’d be needing it.

‘Ooh, you live in Wealton?’ said Serena, looking at me with what appeared to be respect. ‘It’s lovely out there, isn’t it?’

I panicked, momentarily. ‘Well, I haven’t been there long but, yes, it certainly is lovely.’ I supposed I ought to have been relieved that she hadn’t looked puzzled and said something along the lines of, ‘So, what’s it like living right next to the nuclear power station/sewage plant/maximum security prison?’

Please don’t ask me exactly where in Wealton, I prayed silently. But she had already turned and was gesturing me to follow. ‘Come and meet everybody else.’

When we got to the work table, one of the men had disappeared, and I saw from their name badges that neither of the other two was Adam.

‘This is Ralph,’ confirmed Serena, nodding towards the black guy. He waved and smiled at me, brandishing a pair of tile cutters, before replacing the plastic goggles he’d pushed back on his head, and breaking a terracotta tile into quarters with two efficient cracks. ‘And this is Paula, Mary, Margie, and Mitch.’

I instantly mentally rechristened the last three Mary, Mungo and Midge. Midge—Mitch—was the hippie, and somewhat belatedly I realised that he was sticking out a dusty hand for me to shake. ‘Hi,’ I said, taking it. ‘I’m Anna.’

There was an awkward silence.
Whenever you meet a man,
I chanted in my head,
always try and find something nice to say about his physical appearance
. This was a mantra that Vicky and I had always sworn by. Men loved you for it, especially the ugly ones—and Mitch really was almost disturbingly ugly. His hair was a pale gingery colour, long and wispy, and his nose dominated him as though it had been intended for a different and bigger man’s face. His lips were so thin they were non-existent, and the rings in the side of his nostrils looked scummy at the edges. What on earth could I find that was complimentary to say about him, I wondered?

Just then, a shaft of sunlight came though one of the dusty skylights.

‘Haven’t you got lovely hair on your arms?’ I blurted; and indeed, it did look nice at that moment, sort of golden red and shining. Mitch looked ludicrously flattered, and I knew that I’d made at least one ally. The other women exchanged glances they thought I hadn’t noticed, so I decided not to focus on them just yet. Those types of tricks never worked on women. Obviously. And thankfully.

‘This is amazing,’ I said, in Ralph’s direction. ‘Did you do this little girl skipping? You’ve captured her expression perfectly.’ I thought of telling him he had lovely pecs, but decided that it would probably be over-egging the pudding somewhat.

Ralph, too, looked pleased. ‘Thanks. Adam and I did it together.’

‘Adam’s the man in charge, isn’t he?’ I fished. ‘Is he here today?’

‘Yes. He was here a minute ago—where is he?’

So that had been Adam. The older, softer one. I felt a second’s stab of disappointment, overtaken immediately by the thrill of having seen Max’s dad.

One of the women—Paula—lifted up her head. She was the only one wearing a protective mask, and when she spoke her voice was a little muffled.

‘He’s just popped out for some milk,’ she said. ‘It’s his turn to make the tea.’

I noticed then that she was very pregnant, her belly huge and high and round inside baggy dungarees. My heart sank, and I dropped my gaze to study the half-completed panel of mosaic.

It was beautiful. Like a sort of flawed miracle, in fact - I was amazed at the way that the barest of sketches in charcoal on the baseboard just sprang to life in the finished coloured sections. A woman sitting on a bus, watching a girl skipping outside, fish in a pond, birds flying in a ceramic sky, the yolky whorls of a yellow sun. I couldn’t believe that such detail had been created just from clumsy shards of broken tile. For the first time since I’d arrived I actually briefly forgot about Max, and was consumed with a desire to contribute towards this hard coloured and fractured world.

‘It’s fantastic,’ I breathed, and the women relaxed a bit. ‘Are all of you experts at this? I’ve never done it before, I hope that won’t be a problem.’

‘Nor had I,’ said Mary, who was a neat middle-aged woman in a stripy chef’s apron. Her hair, although beautifully coiffed, was covered with a thin layer of dust.

‘You get the hang of it really easily,’ added Margie, who was younger, with a Dutch accent.

Serena handed me a pair of plastic goggles, which I self-consciously donned. ‘I’ll show you how to use the cutters’ she said, passing me a pair. ‘You place them on the edge of your tile, at a ninety degree angle to it, and just press. Don’t put them too far over the tile or it’ll shatter. Do it over a tray so we don’t get bits of debris in the picture. And if you want to make a circle, just ‘nibble’ around the edges, like this.’ She demonstrated, and then gestured for me to try.

I picked up a red tile, applied the cutters, and pressed. Nothing happened. I pressed harder, and it broke into about fifteen pieces in my hand. ‘Never mind,’ Serena said. ‘That’s the joy of it—we can always use different sized pieces. Just put them in that box over there.’

‘Who wants tea, then?’ said a voice from the back of the hall.

I turned, and there he was—Max’s father. Coming towards me holding a two litre bottle of milk and with a broad smile on his face. ‘Hello’ he said enthusiastically. ‘A new recruit—excellent! I’m Adam.’

I felt inexplicably weak at the knees. ‘Anna Valentine,’ I managed. ‘We talked on the phone.’

‘Yes, of course, I remember—great that you could make it.’

When I looked at him close up, I saw that he wasn’t as old as I’d thought—late thirties, perhaps. It was just the fact that he was balding and slightly paunchy that had given me that impression. He wasn’t exactly good looking, but his remaining hair was ebulliently curly, he was strong and broad-shouldered, his eyes were astonishingly blue, and his smile was one of those joyful ones to which you couldn’t help but respond. It hurt my heart, knowing how much pain there must have been in there—but then I felt a little ashamed at my deception. I oughtn’t have been privy to that kind of information, not without announcing my identity. It was voyeurism, in a way. I was already watching Adam, without him knowing.

‘Hello, Anna,’ he said now, putting the milk down on a bare section of the mosaic board, next to a half-finished overalled builder leaning on a charcoal sketch of a shovel. ‘Nice to meet you. Where did you say you lived?’

I looked him straight in the eye and pretended that he was my lead man and that we were on stage at the Crucible: ‘I’m new to the area,’ I said without flinching. ‘I’m just renting a little place in Wealton.’

‘Lovely,’ Adam said, in the same slightly reverential tone as Serena had. I thought, I must drive out there and have a look at the place—I appeared, inadvertently, to have chosen well.

‘I trust Serena’s shown you what to do?’

‘Well, she’s told me how to do it. Which bit should I start on?’ It seemed presumptuous, to think that I’d ever be able to add anything creative to such a beautiful mural.

Adam pointed at an empty corner of the board, which had a rough sketched outline of a basket with what looked like a baguette sticking out of the top of it.