The Laments (18 page)

This surprised Will. The conker king? Awful? Everybody admired Digley. All the girls sighed over Digley as he walked by, and he knew it. If Digley wanted your chips or your Mars Bar, you gave it to him. Doing so was an honor. Digley was a charmer, all right. He got away with murder. Sally was the first to say it.

“Yes,” said Will, “he is awful, isn’t he?”

When she laughed, it was a rude little snort. Another thing he liked about her.

WILL SAW DIGLEY
a week later in the bog. He had pissed a good five inches past Magnus Hobb’s famous initials—a chalk “MH” about six feet above the urine trough. Now Digley was conker king
and
master of the bog.

“She’s only a girl, isn’t she?” said Digley.

“Yes,” agreed Will.

“What do you do with her?”

“Talk. Play games. Have a laugh.”

“Can’t be as much fun as with a bloke.”

“I suppose.” Will shrugged. “Well,
you
know. You have a sister.”

Digley cringed. “I never played with me sister. Her bum’s too big and she’s always having to run to the loo to fix her eyelashes.”

“Well, think of playing with your sister: that’s me and Sally,” said Will.

Digley rolled his eyes. “You’re a daft one.”

Sally turned up in Will’s dreams. Once, he soared through the boughs of a massive oak tree with tendril branches and Sally Byrd soared with him. Once he dug his way to China; when he broke through, Sally appeared, a blanket of stars behind her. As Will took her hand, the Midnight Chinaman galloped toward them atop his funeral carriage, a look of fury on his blue face, the fire-snorting steeds stamping their hooves. Will reached for Sally, but her arm snapped off like a piece of porcelain; he fell back through the tunnel, feeling her fingers turn cold and hard.

JUST TO PROVE
the dream wrong, Will held Sally’s hand when they walked home together one day. She smiled at him, her grip tight, as if she’d never let him go. But when they came in sight of a house with a brass shingle that read
DR. BENJAMIN BYRD, DENTIST,
Sally shook his hand loose with a cheery nod.

“See you tomorrow, Lament,” she said.

He hesitated.

“Can I see your house?”

“No, Lament,” she said. “I have a violin lesson today.”

Will walked home wishing he’d feigned a toothache. She might have invited him in for a quick dental exam.

They walked home together every day, even in the rain. Their chatter was breathless; they told jokes and interrupted the punch lines to share silly thoughts and scandalous stories about classmates. Time seemed to race by when they were together—Will decided this was the surest sign that he was in love. One afternoon he arrived home two hours late.

“Where’ve you been?” squawked Digley over the phone.

“With Sally.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” said Will defiantly. “Talking.”

“About what?”

“Nothing,” said Will. How could he possibly explain his affection for Sally? He’d told her all of his secrets: Sally knew all about Ruth and the Midnight Chinaman and even about how awful the twins could be—something Will could never tell his mother.

“
IT’S A NASTY COLD
,” Julia said the next morning, pulling the covers so tightly around him that he couldn’t move.

“Why can’t
we
be sick?” screamed the twins when they saw Will with the thermometer in his mouth.

“I’m fine, really,” Will croaked.

“Nonsense,” his mother said.

“I’ve got a fever, too,” cried Marcus.

“I’ve got blackwater fever!” insisted Julius.

Will faded in and out of consciousness. Meanwhile, the twins were told to be silent and banned from stamping up the stairs. The next day he slept, barely aware of the passing hours until he woke to see the reflections of a wintry sunset streaming across his wall. When his fever lifted, another day had passed.

WILL’S EAGERNESS TO GET BACK
to school was tempered by a fear that somehow things had changed in his absence. Traveling does this; one day out of the routine and one prepares for the possibility that the physical world has been reorganized. Nevertheless, he passed the wrought-iron school gates and observed that they were still an overpainted and chipped forest green; the same rusty arc on the pavement marked their daily path. The acrid stench from the boys’ bog was familiar, and the Quonset hut classrooms hadn’t changed position. The ghastly odor of institutional gravy still emanated from the canteen, and the air-raid shelter that had resisted Hitler’s bombs had survived his absence, too. Relieved, Will practiced his smile for his first sight of Sally. Digley waved to him from the distant end of the playground. Will waved back and looked for Sally standing with the girls, but there was no sign of her. Perhaps she had been sick too. But as he scanned the faces, he felt an uneasy twinge of recognition.

He turned back to Digley. The conker king was holding a girl’s hand.

“
YOU WERE RIGHT
,” said Digley, “it’s not the same as playing with a boy. Girls are sweet.”

“Yes,” said Will.

They were in the bog. Magnus Hobb’s mark had been removed, and Digley, standing on the porcelain rim of the trough, was chalking his initials up on the wall—the new master of the bog.

“No hard feelings about Sally, right?”

Will attempted a smile, but his mouth seemed to resist.

“I mean,” said Digley, “you said she wasn’t your girlfriend. If you hadn’t said that, I wouldn’t have asked her to be mine.”

“But I didn’t know you liked her.”

“Well, after everything you said about her, I couldn’t help myself.”

Then Digley smiled gratefully at Will, as if he’d found another championship conker in Will’s yard.

The Second Holiday

Pan-Europa had a poor year. There were problems in the Middle East causing supply difficulties, and a company tanker had spilled its guts off the coast of Brittany, ruining scores of beaches and killing thousands of birds. The cost to the company would be enormous. Howard was told not to expect a raise. He explained this to Julia, relieved, in a way, to be able to point to the pictures of oil-soaked birds in the newspapers. It wasn’t his fault they couldn’t afford a proper holiday.

“Well, we have to do something for the children,” said Julia.

“Of course,” said Howard, nodding. “I have a plan.”

He proposed a beach trip to the south coast of England.

The Morris 1100 was ten years old; between its squeaks, its rattles, and its smell mingling with the odor of picnic food in the hamper, the Laments were sharply aware of the economy of their trip. The twins squabbled for hours, then dozed off, while a crackling radio issued a succession of increasingly frightening storm warnings. Julia tried to put a positive aspect on the trip by thinking of their last one, but she couldn’t resist asking Howard about his work again.

Howard’s jaw stiffened. “Work is absolutely fine,” he replied in a measured tone that struck Julia as both condescending and hostile.

“Howard, sometimes I feel as though you think I’m incapable of understanding your world.”

“Of course not,” he replied without elaborating, which only proved Julia’s point.

“Then tell me something, Howard. Anything will do, since I know absolutely
nothing
.”

“It’s just an office job,” he protested. “There’s nothing to tell.”

Howard tightened his grip on the wheel, but what leaped out of his mouth was beyond his control.

“All right,” he said. “It’s
horrible
. I hate the job. I’m bored to death. I wish we’d never left Rhodesia. It wasn’t a perfect world, especially from a political point of view, but we were happy there, as a family.”

Julia stared straight ahead for an interminable period and Howard instantly regretted his confession. Then she glanced back at the children to make sure they were still asleep.

Julia replied softly. “Howard, we were both worried about the children, remember? We both wanted to leave.”

“So we did. And this is the price of a good conscience, isn’t it?” said Howard. “A cut-rate holiday and a dead-end job in bloody Denham.”

Julia looked at him.

“Are you saying you want to go back?”

“No, of course not. I . . . I just regret my, I mean
our
decision.”

With his eyes facing forward, Howard realized he had never admitted to such unhappiness and doubt. He had always prided himself on being positive, on coping. He resolved to be stronger in the future.

Startled awake by the horn of a passing car, Julius and Marcus opened their eyes. Their faces were beginning to look more distinct. Julius was getting his father’s high forehead, and the reddish tinge to his hair was more pronounced. Marcus’s hair had darkened and turned curly over the last year, and he had developed Julia’s freckles. They found something to argue about almost as soon as they woke up.

“I know what Jesus looks like,” Marcus declared suddenly. “Long hair, beard, blue eyes.”

“Nonsense,” retorted Julius, who loved a bluff.

“What does he look like, then?”

“You’re right about the beard, but he has curly black hair and weak eyes, glasses probably,” said Julius. “Looks like Rolf Harris, on the telly.”

“What, the Australian fella who paints?”

“Swear to God,” said Julius. “Spitting image of Rolf Harris. Look in any church. Beard, curly hair, black glasses.”

“I never saw a Jesus with glasses!” said Marcus.

“Keeps ’em in his pocket. Look closer next time.”

Marcus nudged Will awake.

“Does Jesus look like Rolf Harris?”

“I dunno—he lived two thousand years ago.”

“He
does,
” Julius insisted, winking at Will. “Jesus came from Australia.”

“Get off. There are no kangaroos in the Bible.”

“There’s one. In the Book of Job. Job trips over a kangaroo.”

“Mummy, did Job trip over a kangaroo?”

“Not now, Marcus—I’m talking to Daddy,” replied Julia, though, they were not, in fact, talking anymore.

Until the twins’ argument, Will had been dreaming of Sally. She had turned to face him across the classroom with that rude smile, but now it made him feel unbearably sad. When he woke, he was relieved to see the thin blue line of the sea ahead. To forget Sally, he imagined a sandy shore—swarthy men throwing beach balls to each other, children with windswept hair and careless smiles running through the water hand in hand with their parents. Oh, harmony. He had some faint memory of a sandy beach. He thought of sand castles, and sea foam, and laughter.

Howard tried to rest his hand on Julia’s; he wanted to make up before they got out of the car. He wanted to retract his admission, because even if it was true, he admired Julia’s strong conscience and, ultimately, he thought he could live with his regret. But the opportunity to say this had been missed now that the boys were awake.

In the last fifteen minutes, the car descended abruptly through Sodham, a steep, cobblestoned wedge of a town. They rolled past hotels, restaurants, and souvenir shops; the air turned thick, moist, and pungent with fish-and-chips smells and the salty damp; the twins reached a fever pitch of excitement, peering past their parents to get a desperate view of the sea ahead.

“I see it!”

“No, ya don’t, I do!”

Then all of a sudden Julia’s fury seized her. “Why did you wait this long to tell me you hated your job? Why didn’t you tell me
ages
ago? Why can’t you ever tell me what’s going on, Howard? What are you afraid of?”

“I’m not afraid of anything!”
Howard shouted. “Instead of attacking me, why don’t
you
get a bloody job? Then you’d understand what it’s like.”

Suddenly Marcus burst into sobs. Julia now felt her fury rise in defense of the children.

“That’s quite enough, Howard!”

The sharp words spoken up front, along with a precipitous descent to sea level that had the Morris creaking and jiggling violently, put everyone in a panic that the car was about to burst apart, and the family with it. At last, Howard pulled the emergency brake, signaling the end of the journey and, the children hoped, the end of the argument.

Waves pounded the surf just ahead of them. The family staggered out. Will breathed in the sea air and cast a cautious glance at his parents, wondering if they could even be persuaded to sit together for the return journey.

“What’s that awful smell?” Julia was gasping.

Will peered into the back of the car. The food hamper had tipped over; sardine sandwiches, pieces of ham, boiled eggs, and cubes of warm Swiss cheese were smeared into the fuzzy lining of the trunk, their smells tainted by those of oil, transmission fluid, and the rubber pungency of the spare tire.

“It’s the food. Bloody car’s going to stink forever,” Howard muttered.

“What about our lunch?” Julia climbed out. “Is it edible?”

“Have a look yourself,” snapped Howard.

Julia circled the car and examined the damage.

“Christ,” she said.

“Mummy, did you know Christ looks like Rolf Harris?”

“Quiet!”
said Julia.

Howard started picking lint off the sandwiches and carefully shaved the oily parts off the boiled eggs with his penknife. Observing this, Julia closed her eyes with revulsion.

“Howard, this won’t do.”

“What’s wrong?” said Howard, casually popping a half-mashed boiled egg (stained with a big oily fingerprint) into his mouth. “It’s fine.” He grinned.

“It didn’t look like that when I packed it,” replied Julia.

“It’s not a pretty sight in your stomach, either.”

“We’ll eat at a restaurant.”

“At seaside prices? Not likely!”

Julia looked at Howard in disbelief.

Meanwhile, the twins had a revelation about the shoreline; their faces froze in stricken dismay.

“Where’s the sand?” asked Julius.

“There’s no sand!” wailed Marcus.

The beach, that glorious winding ribbon along the water, was in fact as hostile to the local visitors as it had been to the Romans twenty centuries ago. The shore was a bed of stones.