No Place For a Man (9 page)

She put the casserole in the oven, stacked the ludicrously large number of knives and spoons she’d used into the dishwasher and went to switch on her computer again. The girls had started mocking, gleefully saying that the Perfect Son wasn’t so perfect now, was he? Never called, never wrote. But at last he had.

‘G’day folks! Cairns rocks and is cute place, but strangely no beach. The hostel is full of Canadians and smells of socks. Say hi to the girls. Ol.’

Well it wasn’t much but it was something, she thought. Brief, to the point and at least he was alive and presumably well. She wondered about a reply, whether she should tell him that they were all OK too, if you didn’t count his father being suddenly unemployed and having a career change to ‘inventor’, her own job about to change course and his little sister entertaining a strange boy in her bedroom.

The doorbell went just as they were all sitting down for supper. ‘I’ll get it!’ Zoe yelled from the hallway. ‘Hey it’s Grandad! I bet he’s all tanned. Wish I was.’

Quickly, Jess totted up the sausages. There’d just be enough, and there was plenty of mashed potato and a big salad.

‘Lay an extra place for him, Tash,’ she said. ‘You
know he never says no to food.’ He also made sure that if he was going to turn up ‘unexpectedly’ it would be uncannily close to a mealtime. Jess didn’t mind: her father lived alone and since her mother had died three years before had been at the mercy of a determined widow three flats along from his, who he swore was fattening him up for a kill. He preferred, at home, to hide from his predator and eat alone listening to
The Archers
, who he considered a bunch of capitalist incompetents who should be turning Ambridge into a massive collective farm with profits quite literally ploughed back into the land.

‘It’s OK, let me.’ Tom opened the drawer beside the sink and rummaged for cutlery. Jess hoped he’d washed his hands. There was a vague staleness about him today that should, she thought, have made whoever took care of him at home suggest he had a shower. She was surprised Natasha didn’t seem to notice or to mind, for she was a girl who took her own personal hygiene to new levels of high art.

George Colville was dragged into the kitchen by Zoe. Jess hugged him. ‘Hi Dad, how was the holiday?’

‘Less of the holiday, it was a pilgrimage. The last true bastion of Communism in the West.’

‘I thought Cuba was the plebs’ new Caribbean all-sand-and-sangria venue,’ Matthew teased.

George grunted. ‘Only for the culturally bankrupt with no sense of history,’ he said, pulling out a chair and sitting down at the table. ‘Just about to have supper were you? You carry on. Don’t let me interrupt.’

Natasha laughed and handed him a cold beer from the fridge. ‘You always do that, Grandad. Like we’re going to sit and eat round you?’

‘Just so long as I’m not in the way. And who’s this?’
He looked at Tom. ‘I’ve seen you before. Are you a friend of Oliver’s?’

Jess, beating the last of the cream into the potatoes, watched from the corner of her eye as Tom put out his hand to shake George’s.

‘I don’t know Oliver. I’ve only just met Natasha,’ Tom said, shrugging and slouching his hands back into the pockets of his jacket.

George had narrowed his eyes, Jess noticed, and the fan of pale lines that spread far into his temples creased with the effort of thought. He was looking suspicious, as if in the effort to recall the boy his mind was only choosing to run through mildly unpleasant recent encounters with various people. Jess remembered when she was a teenager herself, trying to get away with pretending to be staying over at a friend’s house when there was a party to go to that didn’t start till the time she was normally expected to come home. At that time, when the words she most often spoke to her parents were ‘It’s not fair!’ she’d dreaded her father’s staggering perspicacity: it had been accurate almost to the point of clairvoyance. Tom’s confident grin faltered a fraction as he waited for George to recall where he’d seen him before.

‘No good, son. Can’t place you. You kids all look the same, but it’ll come to me.’ George laughed, letting Tom off the hook for now. ‘Good grief, Jess, what are you doing buying salad? I’ve got lettuces by the dozen running to seed down on the patch. You should’ve sent one of the girls round.’

‘We like them without holes, Grandad,’ Zoe said solemnly. ‘Sorry, but it’s true. Some of yours look like fishnet tights.’

‘Cheeky brat! That’s good organic stuff. It’s what
idiots are paying twice over the odds for down at that fancy deli by the square. Do you know, I was thinking on the plane on the way home, you could keep half this borough in properly grown veg if everyone dug up their back gardens in these smart roads round here. In Varadero there wasn’t a patch of land that didn’t have a dozen tomato plants and a couple of rows of sweet-corn on it. You could have a community shop, or a farmers’ market. Cut out all that flying in of out-of-season stuff from thousands of miles away. No-one needs fresh broad beans in February.’

‘We could dig up the school field and plant cabbages. Everyone hates hockey. I’d rather do weeding,’ Zoe said.

‘You shouldn’t have to buy food at all,’ Tom suddenly said. ‘It should be free, like water, like it’s a right.’

‘Eh lad, nice thinking but you’ve a lot to learn.’ George shook his head. ‘Water’s not free. And if governments could think of a way to charge you for the bloody air that you breathe they would. So, tell me what I’ve missed, what’s been happening while I’ve been away?’

Zoe’s bedroom window looked out over the Grove. It was late and there was no-one in across the road at Angie’s, all the windows were dark, even though the woman who ran Neighbourhood Watch had been round and said they should always leave a light on to make burglars think there was someone in. She wondered where Angie was, and if one of the reasons she’d sent Emily and Luke away to school was so that she could just go out whenever she felt like it. Perhaps she’d thought it would be cheaper than an au pair and
better than having kids around who kept asking her which bloke she’d been out with this time.

Zoe was bored. She sat on the old wicker rocking chair picking bits of ginger fur off her old toy cat and wished Natasha hadn’t found the boy. He was weird. He didn’t say much, as if he thought being mysterious made him interesting. He and Tash were still out in the back garden, down by the shed, probably snogging and groping and pretending they were being really daring. Zoe had done all her homework apart from writing about the dead-pig poem and she really, honestly, didn’t think there was anything she could do about that. Ted Hughes had said everything there was to say about the poor animal, and there didn’t seem anything she could add. It was a strange thing for anyone to write about, a pig lying dead on a barrow. What was the point of analysing the
way
he’d written it, like they were supposed to. He just
had:
enough said. Surely poetry was something spontaneous, just an inspired passing thought, not written so that generations of fourteen-year-olds could come up with guessed-at meanings that the poet might or might not have thought of. He must have been really, really fascinated by the pig and then just written about it straight off, from the top of his thoughts. It was a bit of a cheek of them even to mess about with analysis, though Mrs Gibbs might not have the same opinion when she didn’t hand anything in. Perhaps she should write about why she hadn’t written anything, though you could only get away with that once. There was nothing on television. She’d even had to watch
Goodness Gracious Me
by herself because of Natasha being with Tom. It wasn’t the same laughing all on your own.

Downstairs the front door slammed and then Zoe
heard Natasha’s footsteps thumping on the stairs. Just for a moment she was sure her door would open, that Tash would rush in, sprawl on the bed and tell her all about what she and Tom had been doing in the garden. Zoe had already decided she would pretend she found the whole thing very boring, even though really she’d be zinging with excitement, knowing that one day it would be her sneaking out to make a start on all the sex stuff, just as it must have been Emily with the Giles person. Natasha would have a go at her for not listening but would work out that Zoe had things of her own on her mind and drag out the Emily-thing from her. Then they could sort it out together. Natasha would tell her there was nothing to worry about, there’d been a girl in her year, that she knew a number they could ring, a doctor who wouldn’t say anything, no problem. Zoe waited, staring down at the dark, empty Grove below, but the door didn’t open. Instead she heard Natasha come out of the bathroom and go into her room, heard her flinging her shoes at her wardrobe as she did every night. She might as well go to sleep.

Below, on the pavement opposite, someone looked up at Zoe’s window. Zoe only caught sight of a shadow in the lamplight, a shadow that went behind Angie’s hedge. Angie was coming home quite early really, Zoe thought as she closed her curtains and went and lay on her bed.

‘So what are you doing today?’ Jess, fresh from the shower and feeling an early-day briskness, realized she’d asked the wrong question as soon as it was out, for Matthew let out a long and anguished groan and turned over in bed, pulling the duvet up over his ears.

‘Oh come on, Matt, don’t be so dramatic! I only
wondered. You ask me often enough.’ She leaned over, pushed a hand under the quilt and tickled his ribs. He squirmed and pulled away but then turned back to her, grinning. ‘Actually, I suppose I could just stay in bed all day, couldn’t I, making use of room service and a willing wife.’

‘Whose wife would that be then?’ she asked, towelling water from her hair. She was dripping on him and he sat up and yawned, rubbing the cold drops off his head. ‘Oh anyone’s, I’m not fussy. Just don’t …’ He looked suddenly serious and she felt vaguely foolish, now awkwardly fastening her bra while he frowned at her. Even after all these years it would be nice to have your husband at least pretend to be mildly appreciative at watching a woman dress.

‘Don’t what?’

‘Don’t question me. Stuff will happen. Give it time.’

‘I’m giving it time.’ Jess pulled her cream linen sweater over her head. ‘Did I sound like I wasn’t?’

‘In a way.’

‘Well why don’t you check out that on-line shopping thing you were talking about, that would be useful.’

Matthew flung himself out of bed and slammed into the bathroom. ‘And don’t do that either!’

‘Jesus, what now?’

‘Don’t find me things to do! Stop CONTROLLING!’

Down on his allotment, George checked his purple sprouting broccoli and picked a few of the shoots. The problem with growing vegetables was the glut-or-famine thing. Somehow things were either ready all at once or there was nothing whatever to harvest. He didn’t go in for show vegetables like Dave on the next plot, who pared down his broad beans to the last
perfect pods so that there were none grown on for eating and all the earth’s goodness went into the few cherished samples all plumped and perfected to competition standard. What was the point of that? Only in a nation of affluent careless plenty could anyone who grew food waste half their crop for the sake of the prize specimen. It was almost fascist, somehow vaguely Nazi-like, jettisoning less than perfect (and that was subjective) produce. It defied nature and all common sense. He pulled a snail off one of his own French bean stems, picked off one of the succulent but immature pods and crunched it into his mouth.

‘Nothing like it,’ he muttered to himself.

‘You always talk to yourself?’ George whirled round, flustered at having a private moment of delight observed. The boy, Natasha’s friend Tom, was by the shed, leaning on the side (the dodgy side with the bottom planks going rotten) with his hands in his pockets. He looked impudent, grinning that strange sideways grin and giving him the direct challenging stare of someone who might not be up to any good.

‘I talk to myself whenever I feel there’s something interesting to say,’ George told him. ‘What are you up to here? Natasha’s not around, she’ll be on her way to school by now.’

‘I’m living here,’ Tom said simply. ‘Down there.’ His left shoulder shrugged in the direction of the railway line. ‘Do you want a radio? For the shed?’

George picked half a dozen more of the French bean pods and held them out to Tom. ‘Try these. And no thanks, I don’t want a dodgy radio.’

‘Why do you think it’s dodgy?’ Tom took the beans, broke them all into two and ate them all at once. He was a bit skinny, George thought, and scruffy too, as if
home wasn’t a place he liked to hang about in too long. And where was home? The boy’s accent was a rural one, not local. George would guess at Devon, though a while ago probably.

‘It’s dodgy because you’re a shifty teenager. You are not a branch of Comet with a nice tempting offer pasted up on your huge out-of-town warehouse window, now are you? Do you want a cup of tea? I was about to make a brew before I get going on all this weeding. I’ve been away three weeks and it’s like leaving your cat to be fed by someone else – it’s never done quite the way you like it. Cats and plants can tell.’

‘OK. Thanks,’ Tom said. ‘And the radio, well I haven’t nicked one. I haven’t got one at all, but I can get you one if you want. I just thought I’d offer.’

George unlocked the shed and opened the door. A warm woody scent filled the air, tinged with the scent of dried earth and the oil he used to clean his tools. He loved that smell. It reminded him of his own father and of being a child in a garden, learning the mysteries of how the earth worked, how plants grew and fruited and were reborn simply following the seasons. Nature took and gave no more than was essential for survival and he’d often wondered if that was where his interest in what he thought was the simpler version of politics came from: no-one needed more than enough, greed was an evil that killed off man’s purity. Animals only required food, water and shelter: so why did humans strive for so much more in terms of rubbishy wealth and possessions at each other’s expense?

‘Last night, when you said you’d seen me …’ Tom began as he sipped at the mug of strong tea George had handed him.