The New Uncanny (18 page)

When I got home, Luke’s paralysis was over and he was moving normally again, except for a limpness at the edge of his mouth that made him slur his words. I hoped that this wrinkle would smooth out again soon, as it had last time.

I hugged Luke, burying my lips into his thick hair and kissing the side of his head, wishing that we lived in a world where kisses could fix brains. I stroked his back, and hoped that maybe I would find a little reset button there, sunk into a hole, something I could prod that would let us start over, that would wipe all the scribbles from the slate and leave it blank again.

Gabby was sitting on the edge of the armchair holding her stomach, like she was in pain.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked.

She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and nodded. Gabby’s biggest fear was that Luke’s problems weren’t just part of her, but part of the factory that had made him – what if every kid we produced together had the same design fault?

The doctors had all said that the chances of it happening twice were tiny, but I don’t think we’d ever be able to fully relax. I knew that long after our second kid was born, we’d both be looking out for the diagnostic signs that had seemed so innocuous at first with Luke.

This fit wasn’t long enough to call out an ambulance, but because the paralysis was still new, our GP came round to the house to check Luke over. Luke hated the rubber hammer that the doc used to check his reflexes. The only way he would allow him to do it was if he could hit me with the hammer first.

‘Daddy doesn’t have reflexes in his head,’ Gabby said as Luke whacked me.

‘Not anymore I don’t,’ I laughed.

Luke has a firm swing. I wonder whether one day he’ll be a golfer.

A letter came home from school banning Tamagotchis. I knew this was my fault. Another three kids’ Tamagotchis had died and could not be resurrected.

‘People are blanking me when I drop Luke off in the morning,’ Gabby said. She was rubbing her fingers into her temples because she had a headache. It felt like everything in the house was breaking down.

‘You’re probably just being a bit sensitive,’ I said.

‘Don’t you dare say it’s my hormones.’

The situation had gone too far. Meemoo would have to go.

I was surprised at how hard it was to tell Luke that he’d have to say goodbye to Meemoo. He was sitting on the edge of the sand pit jabbing a straw of grass into it, like a needle.

‘No!’ He barked at me, and made that deep frown-face of his. He gripped Meemoo hard and folded his arms across his chest.

‘Help me out will you?’ I asked Gabby when she came outside with her book.

‘You can handle this for a change,’ she said.

I tried bribing Luke, but he wouldn’t fall for it, and just got angrier because I was denying him a biscuit now too. I tried lying to him, saying that I was going to take Meemoo to hospital to make him better, but I had already lost his trust. Eventually, I had only one option left. I told Luke that he had to tidy up his toys in the garden or I’d have to confiscate Meemoo for two whole days. I knew that Luke would never clean up his toys. The bit of his brain in charge of tidying up must have been within the damaged area. But I went through the drama of asking him a few times, and, as he got more irate, stamping and kicking things, I began to count.

‘Don’t count!’ He said, knowing the finality of a countdown.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘You’ve got four seconds left. Just pick up your toys and you can keep Meemoo.’

If he’d actually picked up his toys then, it would have been such a miracle that I would have let him keep Meemoo, AIDS and all.

‘Three... two...’

‘Stop counting!’ Luke screamed, and then the dreaded, ‘Sky badger!’

Luke’s fingers curled into that familiar and frightening shape and he came after me. I skipped away from him, tripping over a bucket.

‘One and a half.... one... come on, you’ve only got half a second left.’ A part of me must have been enjoying this, because I was giggling.

‘Stop it,’ Gabby said. ‘You’re being cruel.’

‘He’s got to learn,’ I said. ‘Come on Luke, you’ve only got a fraction of a second left. Start picking up your toys now and you can keep Meemoo.’

Luke roared and swung his sky badger at me, at my arms, at my face. I grabbed him round the waist and turned him so that his back was towards me. Sky badger sunk his claws into my knuckles while I wrestled Meemoo out of his other hand.

By the time I’d got Meemoo away, there were three crescent-shaped gouges out of my knuckles, and they were stinging like crazy.

‘I HATE YOU!’ Luke screamed, crying, and stormed inside, slamming the door behind him.

‘You deserved that,’ Gabby said, looking over the top of her sunglasses.

I couldn’t just throw Meemoo away. Luke would never forgive me for that. It might be one of those formative moments that forever warped him and gave him all kinds of trust issues in later life. Instead, I planned to euthanize Meemoo.

If I locked Meemoo in a cupboard, taking away the things that were helping it survive: food, play, petting and the toilet, the AIDS would get stronger as it got weaker and surrounded by more of its own effluence. The AIDS would win. And when Meemoo was dead, it would either reset itself as a healthy Tamagotchi, or it would die. If it was healthy, Luke could have it back; if it died, then Luke would learn a valuable lesson about mortality and I would buy him a new one to cheer him up.

It was tempting while Meemoo was in the cupboard to sneak a peek, to watch for his final moments, but the Tamagotchi had sensors that picked up movement. It might interpret my attention as caring, and gain some extra power to resist the virus destroying him. No, I had to leave it alone, despite the temptation.

Meemoo’s presence inside the cupboard seemed to transform its outward appearance. It went from being an ordinary medicine cabinet to being something else, something... other.

After two whole days, I could resist no longer. I was certain that Meemoo must have perished by now. I was so confident that I even let Luke come along when I went to the cupboard to retrieve it.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So have you learned your lesson about tidying up?’

‘Give it back,’ Luke said, pouting.

‘Good boy.’ I patted him on the head, then opened the cupboard and took out the Tamagotchi.

Meemoo was alive.

It had now lost three of its limbs, having just one arm left, which was stretched out under its head. One of its eyes had closed up to a small unseeing dot. Its pixellated circumference was broken in places, wide open pores through which invisible things must surely be escaping and entering.

‘This is ridiculous,’ I said. ‘Luke, I’m sorry. But we’re going to have to throw him away.’

Luke snatched the Tamagotchi from me and ran to Gabby, screaming. He was actually shaking, his face red and sweaty.

‘What have you done now?’ Gabby scowled at me.

I held my forehead with both hands. I puffed out big lungfuls of air. My brain was itching inside my skull. ‘I give up,’ I said, and thumped up the stairs to the bedroom.

I tried to read, but I couldn’t concentrate. I put on the TV and watched a cookery show, and there was something soothing in the way the chef was searing the tuna in the pan that let my heartbeats soften by degrees.

Gabby called me from downstairs. ‘Can you come and get Luke in? Dinner’s almost ready.’

I let my feet slip over the edge of each step, enjoying the pressure against the soles of my feet. I went outside in my socks. Luke was burying a football in the sandpit.

‘Time to come in little man,’ I said. ‘Dinner’s ready.’

‘Come in Luke,’ Gabby called through the open window, and at the sound of his mum’s voice, Luke got up, brushed the sand from his jeans, and went inside, giving me a wide berth as he ran past.

A spot of rain hit the tip of my nose. The clouds above were low and heavy. The ragged kind that can take days to drain. As I turned to go inside, I noticed Meemoo on the edge of the sandpit. Luke had left it there. I started to reach down for it, but then stopped, stood up, and went inside, closing the door behind me.

After dinner, it was Gabby’s turn to take Luke to bed. I made tea and leaned over the back of the sofa, resting my cup on the windowsill and inhaling the hot steam. Outside, the rain was pounding the grass, digging craters in the sandpit, and bouncing off of the Tamagotchi. I thought how ridiculous it was that I was feeling guilty, but out of some strange duty I continued to watch it, until the rain had washed all the light out of the sky.

ROUTE A6 WAS drenched in the green of high summer. Stands of oak and silver birch flickered past. Cat’s-tails sprang from marshy ditches. As Dan accelerated out of a bend, a pair of wings, bright as blood, flashed across the windscreen. ‘A cardinal!’ said Mia, turning to the back. ‘Felix, did you see the cardinal?’

He’d been looking in the wrong direction – and it didn’t help that he didn’t know what a cardinal was – but, propped high in his child’s seat, he nodded and grinned for her.

Dan hunched forward in the driver’s seat. The back of his T-shirt was marked by a line of sweat. She leaned across the seat and checked the needle on the gauge. It still wobbled too far to the right. ‘Should we pull over?’

‘We’ll get there.’ The joint of his jaw flexed.

Felix spotted a sign up ahead. ‘Look! Pool! It says “Pool”. But if you take the L off, it says poo!’ Rosie started to wail in her baby-seat. Smoke or steam – Mia and Dan couldn’t tell which – started to escape from the bonnet.

Felix covered his ears. ‘Are we going to blow up?’

Dan swung into the wide drive, switched off the engine and slumped forward. Under the bonnet, the fans whirred like wind turbines.

‘What does it say, Mum? On the grass. What does the sign say?’

‘It says, “The Earl of Pembroke Family Motel. Refreshing Pool and Sundeck. Perfect relaxation morning, noon or night”
.’

‘Yay!’ he chimed, punching the air.

The motel was a sprawling one-storey building with a low sloping roof and a half-timbered facade. She glanced at the print-out: ‘Constructed in the Olde English tradition, The Earl of Pembroke Motel features colourful garden beds and a tranquil duck pond.’ She laughed at the Oldie Englishness, but the space at least was fantastic: wide lawns where the kids could run, picnic tables, a hammock, a barbeque pit, a wood-burning stove and, at the edge of the property, as advertised, a vast duck pond.

‘But
where’s
the pool?’ Felix turned 360 degrees.

‘We’ll ask.’

After the dazzle of the late-afternoon light, the office was dark, cool. It smelled, oddly, of creosote. She could just see a check-in desk at chest height, the shape of a lamp, and a small window covered by a Venetian blind. The slats of the blind were shut.

‘Yes?’ A man’s voice. Out of nowhere, it seemed. At the desk, Felix circled her leg with his arm.

‘We have a reservation for three nights. The Hamlyns. Two adults, one child, one toddler. I phoned last week from England.’

‘You wanted a playpen.’ Their host reached across the registration book and pulled on the cord of the blind, opening it slowly.

‘A crib or a playpen. Either’s fine. Thanks.’ The poor lighting wasn’t helped by the fake wood-panelling and the clutter on the walls. Reproduction brass and copper lanterns gleamed dully.

‘You’ll need to sign.’

‘Of course.’

‘And you’ll need to leave your passports.’

‘Ah.’

‘Law in the state of Massachusetts.’ He passed her two keys on a ring. ‘Room 6. I’ll charge your card for the full tariff now.’

She looked up. ‘Not when we leave?’ But it was easy to imagine he’d had trouble over the years; smiling guests who’d done runners on check-out day.

‘I’ll bring your receipt to your room.’

‘Where’s the pool?’ croaked Felix, inches below the desk.

He addressed a point beyond Mia’s shoulder. ‘In the wooden enclosure beyond Room 23. Sign here, please.’ He switched on the anglepoise lamp, flipped open the registration book and pointed, with a blunt-tipped finger.

Mia took the pen, a ballpoint quill. She could see him better now: a man in his mid-fifties, not tall but broad; tense in his bearing. He had a crop of frizzy hair, iron-grey with touches of black – the kind of hair that doesn’t move in a breeze. His face was tanned, clean-shaven, ordinary. Even so, Mia found it unnervingly neutral in its expression. His features – small grey eyes, grey eyelashes, thin lips, an almost delicate nose – seemed to disappear in the broad planes of his cheeks and forehead.

‘We haven’t been here in years,’ Mia tried. ‘Not since before the children were born. My husband and I love the Cape.’

As if suddenly required, a woman – the owner’s wife, Mia presumed – appeared from the living quarters behind the office, where the light of a TV flickered. She looked tired, washed-out, in an oversized white blouse and faded cotton trousers. A tiny enamelled American flag was pinned to her collar. She smiled weakly at Mia and pushed a strand of brown hair out of her eyes. ‘That’s nice,’ she offered, ‘that you could come back.’ She looked at the cleaning rag in her hand.

‘Sadly, we’re here for a funeral this time. On Saturday. My aunt’s. She moved to the Cape from England in her twenties.’

Mia waited for a standard response: ‘Well, we hope you enjoy your stay in spite of the sad circumstances,’ or even, that peculiarly American form of sympathy, ‘We’re sorry for your loss.’ But the owner simply closed the registration book, straightened the pen on the desk and switched off the lamp. He was like a man in a neck brace, minus the neck brace, and Mia felt a cold charge of resentment explode somewhere within her.

His wife forced another smile. Her teeth were yellowy, almost see-through, their enamel worn down. ‘A take-out breakfast is available in the reception annex from 8 till 11.’ Then she turned to polish a copper lantern.

Outside, Felix shook his arms and head, as if a current had passed through him. ‘Was that The
Earl
?’

She grinned, ruffling his hair. ‘You said it, bunny rabbit. That was The Earl.’