The Queen of Bloody Everything Page 6

  But now I am chewing slowly on my third walnut – which I have cracked using a rolling pin, sending shards that will linger for years skittering under kitchen cupboards – and staring out of your bedroom window waiting for something to happen. And I feel a prickle of excitement when I realize that something is the car. Because not only has it stopped outside our house, but someone – a man – has got out and is walking up our path.

  ‘Edie,’ I stage-whisper, spitting nut onto the window, ‘Edie, there’s a man coming.’

  ‘What sort of man?’ you reply from the bed, from which you have not moved except to get the jar of peanuts and a vodka and orange.

  The man is tall and thin, with the gaunt face of a cadaver. ‘An old man. With a hat,’ I manage.

  ‘What colour hair?’

  It’s hard to tell but I manage, ‘Darkish and greyish.’ And that, it seems, is enough. Because when I turn to you for more guidance – on whether he might knock at the door and if he does should I let him in and do you think it’s Father Christmas in a sort of normal suit – you have paled and shrunk somehow, an ink blot seemingly swallowed by pillows.

  I look back out of the window. The man is on the doorstep now, his leather-gloved finger poised on the doorbell, a brass button that I love to push for its thrilling click. But it has long since lost its ring and it takes him a minute to realize this and try rapping sharply on the door instead.

  ‘Shall I go?’ I ask after the third round of rat-tat-tatting.

  You shake your head, put your finger to your lips.

  But your shushing is in vain. Because the man looks up – by chance or design – and sees me. And I, the guileless child you have encouraged me to be, wave at him.

  ‘Dido?’ he shouts up, cupping one hand round his mouth like I’ve seen in films.

  ‘Yes!’ I cup my hand back, both terrified and charmed that this stranger knows me, as if I am a TV star, or, better, baby Jesus. I am so famous my notoriety has spread to towns far and wide.

  ‘Christ, Di,’ you say, breaking the bubble. For someone who does not believe in Christmas, I notice Jesus comes into your conversation on a regular basis.

  ‘What?’ I ask, turning to you, your practised belligerence now painted across my face, for what can I possibly have done now? This man knows my name so he’s clearly not an axe murderer or rapist (the two Daily Mail demons who haunt Harry’s and my daymares, and populate our games on an increasingly frequent basis). But when our eyes meet there is a moment of something strange, a crackle of meaning, and I feel a scattering of butterflies in my stomach as I realize the obvious.

  I’ve been waiting for him after all. Wondering. Praying to the God you don’t believe in and the goddesses you do to send him to me. Only it is fair to say I was expecting someone younger, with more of a beard and a T-shirt and flared jeans instead of a suit.

  ‘It’s him. It’s—’

  But I can’t say it. Can’t get the word out. Can only stammer a single letter ‘D’ and let you insinuate the rest.

  ‘Oh, Dido, no.’

  You are behind me now, a moth-eaten mohair jumper, maddening as itching powder, barely covering your man’s pyjamas. You pull me into its tickling scarlet embrace as you look down at the visitor, and he up at you.

  ‘It’s not your daddy, Dido.’ You pause while the significance of that stress on ‘your’ sinks in, and then clarify. ‘It’s mine.’

  The day unfolds in such a dizzying cavalcade of new people and new places that I recall only snapshot moments now, and few of them feature you. Though you were there, I know you were – you wouldn’t let me go alone, although that was suggested when you refused to get dressed, and then refused to get into the Daimler. But in the end you came, in your pyjamas and jumper with a tutu skirt pulled over the trousers. Though you spent most of the day lying on a bed, or smoking in the bitter cold of the garden in a coat reluctantly borrowed from your mother.

  So these are the things you missed out on, and the few you might recall:

  * The electric windows in the back of the Daimler that I was allowed to play with all the way from our road to the bottom of the High Street, when Grandpa said they might get stuck and if they were stuck on open we’d all die of exposure.

  * The presents: wrapped not clumsily in brown paper but neatly, with bright forest scenes and pictures of kittens wearing red ribbon and bells, and topped, every one, with a nylon chrysanthemum bow. And, inside, new gloves, a hat, another recorder – but that one wasn’t chipped and didn’t have a plastic horse wedged inside it.

  * Two dogs: a red setter called Sasha and a Scottie called Othello. Sasha I didn’t mind but Othello’s breath smelled and he rubbed his willy on the carpet, which I noted in my head to tell Harry later so we could gasp and secretly wonder what that would feel like.

  * More food than I had ever seen on one table. And a confusing number of knives and forks and plates, all of which I used at the wrong time, because I was copying you, and you, Uncle Lawrence said, were being deliberately obtuse.

  * The morning room, for its name only. Because until then I had assumed rooms were for all times of day and anyone. But there, there were rules over when and who, and it was usually not me. Which was a shame, because the potential for portals and secret passageways in a house like that was quite enormous.

  * The chequered tiles that decorated the hallway floor, like a vast chessboard, forcing me to pick a colour and tread only on that as I made my way to and from the downstairs toilet, which I did several times for the unique experience of weeing in what I now know is a bidet, but which I then assumed was a toilet made especially for children.

  * Rotund twin cousins – Hugo and Giles – dressed in matching red-velvet trousers and yellow cable jumpers, so that the overall impression was of four-year-old versions of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. They followed me round the house while I blew tunelessly on my new descant, and I felt for all the world like the Pied Piper, and the power, while it lasted, was intoxicating.

  * The curve of the wall in the drawing room, in which I stood, back snug against it, for nearly forty-four minutes, until I was forcibly removed.

  * Your bedroom, in which you lay in for hours that day, but you were staring stubbornly at the ceiling through a fug of smoke and incense, and couldn’t or wouldn’t see what I did: the concert tickets drawing-pinned to a corkboard; the postcard from Manchester – a wish you were here from Toni, postmarked July 1970, the month of my birth; a threadbare rabbit; a porcelain doll; a crystal ball with a crack down the middle. And the whole effect I see now is of a shrine, or a room left exactly as it was abandoned, awaiting its occupant’s return.

  I am in there, sitting on the edge of the bed, when he comes – Grandpa. He crouches down so that he is almost as short as me, and hands me a package – beribboned like the others, but this time the paper is flecked with shining silver and I decide the contents must be the prize of all prizes: gold, frankincense and myrrh rolled into one. And when I open it, it is all that and more: a stuffed toy monkey, dressed as a prince.

  ‘He’s come all the way from India,’ Grandpa tells me. ‘To keep an eye on you.’

  I look at the monkey. He looks blackly back, above his cold plastic nose and his sewn-on smile. And I decide Grandpa is not lying and this monkey may well have secret powers, ones that must never be questioned or tampered with, or, as with an ancient curse, a terrible fate may befall me.

  ‘What’s his name?’ I ask.

  ‘Whatever you want,’ says Grandpa. ‘What do you want to call him?’

  I press my palm against the nap of his still-stiff fur, my head wheeling with the possibility, the responsibility of this task.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I ask eventually.

  He pauses. Then, ‘Charles,’ he says. ‘But I’m sure you can do better.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  I look up, startled, as if caught in some act of betrayal, only I have no idea who I am betraying or how. But Grandpa doesn’t flinch.


  ‘Giving my granddaughter a gift,’ he says, and winks at me.

  I wink back, eager in my complicity.

  ‘She’s already got the bloody recorder,’ you say.

  Grandpa’s face lines with disapproval. ‘There’s no need to swear,’ he says.

  ‘I’ll fucking swear if I fucking like,’ you reply. ‘I’m not a child any more.’

  ‘Well, Dido is,’ he says, nodding at me.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I say. ‘I’ve heard it all before.’

  But these are not magic words, I realize. And this is not about a monkey in any case. This is about a list of things, a scrawled roll call of misdemeanours, minor and major; some I already know of, some I cannot begin to imagine, but the greatest of all right now is Great-Aunt Nina.

  ‘I suppose it was you, wasn’t it?’ you spit. ‘Took the Hockney?’

  ‘Your brother, actually, not that that matters. It wasn’t in the will so it seemed only fair.’

  ‘Fair?’ You snort with such incredulity it is as if he has just announced he is a wizard, or a woman. ‘Fair would have been letting me know she was ill. Letting me know there was a funeral.’

  He pauses, as if summoning patience. ‘We didn’t know where you were,’ he says. ‘Your mother had to write to the university to get an address for Antonia’s parents. It was quite a merry dance letting you know at all. Perhaps if you’d kept in touch . . .’

  ‘Perhaps if you’d given me reason.’

  ‘Is it the money?’ he says then. ‘Is that what this is about? It’s not worth that much, I can assure you. Lawrence had it valued.’

  ‘Unbelievable,’ you spit. ‘It’s not about bloody money. I don’t give a shit about money. It’s about her.’

  Grandpa is fascinatingly silent at this, and I will him to make some enormous revelation – that she was a spy, a princess, a hobbit. But I am to be disappointed.

  ‘You never could stand her, could you?’ you continue. ‘Embarrassing you. Shaming the family name. Is that why you hated me too? Did you think I’d end up like her? Well, I hope I do. Rather that than any of you bloody lot.’

  ‘I think you’ve had too much to drink,’ Grandpa says then.

  I nod sagely at this. Because I’ve seen you drink a coffee, half of my orange squash, four sticky yellow things in round glasses, and two of something called Port, at which I wondered where Starboard had gone.

  ‘Why did you even bring us here?’ you ask. ‘To torment me?’

  He shakes his head. ‘Because the child needs grandparents. She needs a father figure. Your mother thought that and I agreed.’

  ‘She needs neither,’ you snap. ‘She’s fine. We both are.’

  ‘Do you even know where he is?’

  ‘Her father? I’d need to know who he was for a start.’

  ‘Good God!’ His forehead is damp with sweat now, so that I can see the light bulb reflected in it. ‘At least the child seems oblivious,’ he adds.

  ‘Oblivious,’ I think to myself. ‘I am oblivious.’ It sounds like a good thing to be – expansive and important.

  You grab my hand and pull me to my feet. ‘Give it back,’ you say. ‘The monkey thing. Give it back to him.’

  ‘No,’ he says, standing now. ‘Keep him, Dido. I insist.’ And it is clear that those are his last words on the matter.

  And so I do keep him, because I want to please all the new grown-ups today with my manners and obedience and ability to recite the kings and queens in order, which I have learned especially lest such an occasion as this should arise.

  ‘I’ll drive you back when you’re ready,’ he adds. And as he walks back down the landing, his shiny shoes making not a sound on the carpet, as if he is Jesus himself on the water, I clutch the monkey tight to my chest, and chant the names silently in my head, willing him to hear my telepathy.

  ‘God, I can’t stand this bloody place,’ you say then. ‘Wolves in the walls.’

  At that my heart leaps and I glance longingly at the fireplace in case that is the passage to France and this Willoughby Chase.

  But it isn’t. It’s not that special; just another old house with skeletons and sour memories.

  Grandpa drives us home from Cambridge, the car heaving with his silence and your smoke, windows rolled tight because, as you sarcastically insist, ‘God forbid we should die of exposure.’ And as we pull into West Road, I know with unwavering conviction that this will be our one and only Henderson-Jones picture-perfect, plucked-from-the-catalogue Christmas. But strangely, I do not feel cheated.

  Because someone is watching us from her front garden as she drops a picked-clean turkey carcass in the dustbin. The same someone who sees me wave with my new white gloves in my new red hat with my new fur monkey, face pressed against the glass. Someone who assumed, last night, that I was the poor child who should get the second-hand presents from the church service. Only in less than a day I have all the riches in the kingdom, or at least some new clothes and a recorder. And so as you turn away, lean your head against the window and sigh, I wave and wave and wave like the Queen of Bloody Everything until my hand hurts and we disappear from view and become a snapshot ourselves.

  And that is the scene of my greatest victory. Even though I throw up pink sick three times that night from ‘all that disgusting meat’; even though I don’t get to lord it over my fat cousins ever again; even though we will spend the next Christ knows how many Christmas Days just you and me and my monkey, and a box of Toni’s Turkish delight. Because on the following fourth of December, an invitation plops ripely onto our doormat, on cream Basildon Bond and written in blue ink, not biro.

  We are cordially invited to spend Christmas Eve 1979 at the Trevelyans’.

  Charles and I RSVP in less than two minutes, and in breathless, bright-eyed person.

  Because that, I decide, with uncharacteristic clarity and conviction, is what I will name my monkey. A decision that you argue against for at least a week, coming up with an absurd roll call of your own possibilities – Toto, Mr Fidgett, Constantine – as bewilderingly desperate as Rumpelstiltskin. But none of them works, none of them feels right in my mouth, none of them has the precision and importance of ‘Charles’, and so the name sticks.

  And so we slide from one decade to the next, still an awkward pair, an odd couple: the slip of a mother barely more than a teenager herself, and her oblivious child. But I have a monkey by my side and a best friend and a whole surrogate family on the other side of the garden wall, while the squat and its revolving cast, its chaos, its damp that crept into every crack and crevice, are fifty unbreachable miles down the M11. And, with that slip of cream paper, our place in neat, box-hedged, flint-walled Saffron Walden society is assured.

  For now.

  Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret

  April 1980

  Your feelings on God were clear from our days in the squat; from the joy with which you slammed the door on Jehovah’s Witnesses, and scoffed at the faithful in their hats and coats outside the gospel churches on a Sunday morning. ‘It’s oppression,’ you would tell me. ‘Opium for the masses.’ And though I had little idea what oppression was, still less opium, I would nod, and scurry in your still-dressed-for-bed wake down to the corner shop to buy baked beans and biscuits and litre bottles of cheap wine.

  Maybe that’s why, later, I tried so hard to find Him. Because, if you won’t tell me who my father is (and I have asked, on a regular basis), I will claim this other one whose exile you are so very keen on.

  Besides, the Bible has all the best stories, and I write myself into them on a regular basis: brave Esther, bereaved Ruth, the blameless, nameless daughter brought back from the dead; casting you as Eve and Mary Magdalene in turn. But who was our Messiah? Our saviour?

  You knew even then. And I, fool for fiction that I am, wrote the part for him.

  The Brethren chapel is Harry’s idea. She’s heard from Tina Fraser who heard from her brother Darren that there’s a stereo, a pool tabl
e, and a tuck shop with flumps and flying saucers, and mostly it’s playing shipwreck, making things with felt, and kumbaya. ‘We have to go,’ she informs me. ‘Everyone else is.’

  And so, the irony not lost on me even then, I tell a fat white lie in order to meet God.

  ‘It’s a youth club,’ I tell you.

  ‘In a church?’

  I nod, praying to the God I am hoping to purloin that she will not see through my paper-thin ploy.

  ‘On a Sunday morning?’

  ‘They have a service after but you don’t have to do that bit. And Harry’s dad will take us and pick us up and I can stay for Sunday lunch. It’s lamb.’ Which is, of course, the crowning glory of this plan. Because you are back in a vegetarian phase, but, in your determination to allow me freedom over my body (though I note this does not extend to the ear-piercing I so desperately crave, or, in a few months’ time, leg-shaving, which I have to do at Harry’s house with a borrowed Bic), have told me I am allowed to eat meat at school and at other people’s houses if I choose. And I do choose, with regular and wild abandon.

  ‘Well, only if you go straight back to Harry’s,’ you concede. ‘And if they start bloody yapping on about Jesus you can tell them you believe in Karl Marx. Or Sweet Fanny Adams.’

  ‘OK,’ I say, another fat fib falling from my lips. Because, even if I’d known who Karl Marx and Fanny Adams were – definitely if I’d known who they were – I would have told them no such thing. Instead, when the oily-haired preacher, Mr Matlock, asks if I believe in our Father, I will nod vigorously, and without guile or guilt. Although this is, really, only a half-truth. Because, while I want so very badly to believe, I am unsure that there is enough evidence to warrant my faith.

  ‘How do we know God exists,’ asks Mr Matlock, ‘if we can’t see him?’