Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel (5 page)

He filled a glass for himself and we stood and watched his Adam’s apple bobbing while he drank. He filled the glass again and held it out to us, but Becky, breaking from the spell we were under, grabbed my hand and pulled me back down the hall and up to my bedroom.

“Who was that?” she said, flinging herself onto my bed.

“Just my dad’s friend, Oliver Hannington.” I stuck my head out of the window to try to breathe cooler air. “He’s staying with us for a bit.”

“He looks just like Hutch.”

“Who’s Hutch?”

“You know,” said Becky, “the blond one from
Star-sky and Hutch
.” She had pushed off her shoes and was propping up her bottom and cycling her legs, her school
skirt falling around her waist, revealing regulation blue knickers. Just looking at her exercising made me feel hot.

“Anyway, where have you been? You’ve got loads of catching up to do.”

“What do you mean? I’ve been here.”

“Mr. Harding keeps asking me where you are. We’ve been doing right angles. I said I didn’t know, maybe you’ve been poorly. Have you been poorly?”

“Not really,” I said.

From the garden we heard Oliver shouting something about ice. Becky crawled across the bed, pulling herself along with her arms onto the carpet and letting her legs flop behind her. The two of us crouched at the window and watched Oliver lying full out on the swing seat, reading a book. He had bent the cover back so he could hold it in one hand, and he had swapped the towel for a pair of shorts.

“Well, you’d better come tomorrow,” said Becky. “It’s the last day of school.”

In the garden, my father appeared with two glasses filled with an orange drink. He handed one to Oliver and they chinked them together.

“I’m going to bring in Buckaroo,” Becky said.

In the morning, I dressed in my grey skirt, white shirt, and blazer, made a packed lunch, and went back to school. Everyone was already at their desks when I arrived. Mr. Harding peered at me over the top of his glasses but made no comment as I sat in my chair.

“What game did you bring?” whispered Becky.

“KerPlunk,” I said, and she nodded her approval.

Mr. Harding must have written a note in the register, because when we were setting up our games Mrs. Cass, the school secretary, came and said the headmaster wanted a word with me. I had been expecting it and, anyway, I was embarrassed to discover that most of the straws were missing from the game I had brought in.

“So, Peggy Hillcoat, where have you been?” Mrs. Cass asked as she marched me down the corridor. It smelled of sweat and plimsoll rubber. She didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ve telephoned your house at least four times in the past two weeks, trying to get hold of you or your mother. I even came round once and it’s not exactly on my way home.”

We turned the corner, where the smell wasn’t as strong and the floor changed from linoleum to thin green carpet, indicating that we were approaching authority.

“You can’t take holiday willy-nilly, you know. You’re in a lot of hot water, young lady.”

She told me to sit on one of the comfortable chairs outside the headmaster’s office. The fabric showed the tears and stains of years of pupil and teacher distress. Through the frosted glass door, I caught a glimpse of the headmaster sipping at his teacup, making me wait until called for.

“I understand from Mr. Harding that you’ve been absent for two weeks, without your mother informing the school,” said the headmaster after he’d called me in.

“She died,” I said, without a plan.

“Your mother?” said the headmaster. His eyebrows rose and plunged madly, and he managed to look both desperate and surprised. He pressed a button on his desk, which set off a buzzer in the office across the hall.

“She was killed in a car accident in Germany,” I told them both when Mrs. Cass had responded to the headmaster’s summons.

“Oh my gooodness,” Mrs. Cass said, her hand going to her mouth. “Not Ute. Oh no, not Ute.” She looked around and behind her as if she wanted to sit down, but became distracted and instead said, “You poor, poor child.” She clasped me to her, pressing me into her soft bosom, then took me back to the chair and brought me thick, sweet tea in a cup with a saucer, as if it were me who had just learned of the car crash and not her.

Through the door, the headmaster said, “Surely we would have heard. Isn’t she that famous piano player?”

Mrs. Cass’s answer was too quiet to hear but it involved a lot of gasps, head shaking, and hand clasping.

When I had finished the tea, she guided me back to my classroom, her hand on my shoulder, both caressing and propelling me forward. She took Mr. Harding aside and had a whispered exchange with him; his expression moved from boredom to shock to a crinkled face of sympathy when he glanced at me, waiting at the front of the class.

On the first row, Becky mouthed, “What did you say?” and I tried to mouth back, “I told them she died in a car crash,” but the words “car crash” were too difficult to communicate without saying them out loud. Rose Chapman nudged and leaned toward Becky, who, in a hiss, translated my words into “Tabitha died in a rush!” The whisper spread from group to group, where children gathered around marbles, counters, and dice. Mr. Harding told me I was excused; I packed up KerPlunk and left.

At home, I saw little of my father and Oliver. Once, they went down to the high street and brought back fish and chips, which they laid out on plates and ate with knives and forks at the dining-room table. Oliver got out the cutlery with the ivory handles and selected Ute’s
crystal Spiegelau goblets from the sideboard for the red wine they had bought at the off-licence.

“Prost! Toast! Der Bundespost!” shouted my father, and both men laughed in a slurred way while the crystal chinked. I carried my dinner, still wrapped in newspaper, into the sitting room and ate it in front of the telly. I went up to bed soon after. I lay still with my eyes shut, but sleep didn’t come and I worried I had forgotten how to do it. I hummed the theme music to
The Railway Children
and imagined that Ute was downstairs, conquering the piano, while at the kitchen table my father was flicking through the newspaper. Everything and everyone were where they were supposed to be. But I was still awake when my father and Oliver stumbled upstairs, calling goodnight to each other.

If the two men weren’t laughing, they were arguing. With all the windows in the house open to try to let in a breeze, I heard their shouting no matter which room they were in. They sounded like a Retreater meeting for two—the real ones had been suspended for the summer; apparently even survivalists took holidays. I tried to ignore them, but would find myself straining to make out each word. My father shouted the loudest, lost control first; Oliver’s voice remained a steady measured drawl that sliced through the other’s fury. The
arguments seemed to be the same ones, going around and around again: the best bug-out location, city versus country, equipment, guns, knives. The noise would reach a crescendo, then a door would be slammed, the flare of a match as a cigarette was lit in the dark garden, and the next day all would be forgotten.

One evening I heard a noise from the hall, and it took me a moment to realize it was the phone. When I picked it up, Ute was on the other end.

“Liebchen, it is Mutti.” She sounded a long way off. “I am sorry I haven’t called earlier. It has been difficult.” I thought she must mean that there weren’t many telephones in Germany.

“Papa and I have been living in the garden.”

“In the garden? That sounds nice. So you are OK, and are you happy now that school must be finished for the holidays?”

I was worried she would ask about the lessons I hadn’t been to, but instead she said, “Has the weather been warm in London too?” She sounded sad, as if she would rather be at home, but then perhaps trying to make me laugh, she continued, “Last night, a fat lady fainted from the heat when I was on the second bar of the Tchaikovsky. I had to start again from the beginning; it was absolute shambles.”

“I’m very brown,” I said, rubbing dust off my legs and realizing I hadn’t had a bath since the day Oliver had arrived.

“How lovely it must be to have time in the sunshine. I am inside every day, in the car, or in the hotel and then in the car again to get to the performance.”

“Do you want to speak to Papa now?” I asked.

“No, not yet. I want to find out more about what my little Peggy has been doing.”

“I’ve been cooking.”

“That sounds very helpful. I hope you’ve tidied the kitchen afterward.”

I didn’t answer her; I didn’t know what to say.

After a few seconds, in a voice I had to strain to hear, she asked, “Perhaps you could get Papa now.”

I placed the receiver on the padded seat beside the phone and saw that my hands had made dirty marks on the yellow plastic. I licked my fingers and rubbed at the smudges.

When I told my father who it was on the phone, he jumped up from the swing seat, where he had been lying in the sun, and ran into the house. I went down to the bottom of the garden, where I had been baking burdock roots in the hot ashes of a fire I had made by myself. Without understanding why, I thrashed at the
embers with a stick, scattering them like glow-worms into the evening. A few landed on the tent, burning black-rimmed holes through the canvas and the liner. When the fire was a grey blotch on the threadbare lawn, I walked through the house and up to my room.

An argument between my father and Oliver was building in the kitchen. It moved to the sitting room and on into the glasshouse; I put my head out of the open window. Below me were two shadows, lit by the lamplight that spilled from the sitting-room door. When I put my fingers in my ears to block out the sound, the black shapes became silent dancers, their movements choreographed, each action planned and rehearsed. I pressed my fingers in and out again in quick succession, which made the argument come to me in bursts of noise, disjointed and staccato.

“You f—”

“—ker. What—”

“—itch. How cou—”

“—you’re pathet—”

“—an anima—”

“—ucking ani—”

And then Oliver laughing, like a machine gun, jerky and uncontrolled. A dark object, an ashtray or a plant pot, broke off from one of the man-shadows and flew
past the other into the glass roof. There was a pause, as if the glass sheet were holding its breath; then it trembled, rippling outward and splitting apart with a tremendous noise. In a reflex action, I ducked even while the glass rained down on the men below. The father-shadow crouched, his hands over the top of his head. Oliver yelled, “Whowwaa,” as his shadow backed toward the sitting-room door and disappeared inside. My father’s shape stayed bent, so that from my position above him, he stopped being a man with arms and legs and a head and became a crow with a beak and wings. He made a noise like a crow too. I watched him with my hands on the window sill and my eyes just above them, while the sound of Oliver moved through the house—to the kitchen and upstairs to the guest bedroom. I heard drawers being opened and closed, the long rasp of a suitcase zip. Then Oliver burst into my bedroom and I saw myself as he must have seen me, crouching by the window in the dark.

“Seen enough, have you, little girl?” he spat. “Get a kick out of spying on adults, do you? Well, don’t worry, I’ve seen enough too. Of you and your dear papa.” He laughed bitterly. “And let’s not forget the remarkable Ute. It seems I’ve given them both a present they won’t forget in a hurry.” He left and went downstairs.

For a second I was frozen; then, thinking he was going back to the shattered glasshouse, I spun around and looked out of the window again. But the front door slammed, shaking the house, and below me, my father’s crow-body jerked as though it had been caught in one of our traps, and then it slumped. I crept back to bed and lay with my eyes bulging into the darkness and my ears straining to hear the next sound, which never came.

In the morning, I was woken by three short blasts of the whistle. My father stood at the bottom of the stairs, legs apart, head up. The backs of his hands had plasters stuck on them in several places, and there was another over the bridge of his nose.

“Pack your rucksack, Peggy,” he said, using his military voice. “We’re going on holiday.”

“Where are we going?” I asked, worrying what Ute would say about the broken roof and the glass all over the floor when she returned.

“We’re going to die Hütte,” said my father.

5

London, November 1985

At breakfast, I agreed to sit at the kitchen table to eat, instead of in my bedroom or on the floor of the glasshouse, where I could escape the stuffy warmth of the other rooms. Ute and I negotiated, and she said if I sat down with her and took time with spooning my porridge she would stop asking questions. I told her I would, because my father’s face was tucked away in a secret place. I knew she would continue to ask questions. She couldn’t stop herself.

The kitchen table had shrunk since I had been away, but everything else had multiplied and I found the kitchen was the most unsettling room of all. The quantity of things, the overwhelming choice of what to look at,
pressed me to my chair and made me shut my eyes. The row of pots with always available tea, coffee, and sugar; larger containers marked SELF-RAISING and PLAIN; a blender gathering greasy dust; a roll of soft paper on a wooden stick; a shiny toaster that I avoided eye contact with; hooks with assorted mugs; a white fridge made multicoloured by magnets. I couldn’t understand why a family of three needed seven saucepans when there were only four rings on the cooker; why the utensil pot held nine wooden spoons if there were only seven pans; and how we could ever eat the amount of food available in the cupboards and the fridge.