‘Why’s it called Lob’s Hill?’
‘Dunno. I keep meaning to look it up, but there’s so many other things to do. We’re not unpacked yet.’
They’re driving through Summerfield. Here the streets run in parallel lines down to the river, to the boarded-up armaments factory, like a row of piglets suckling a dead sow. Before the First World War 25,000 local men worked in that factory. Now it employs a few thousand who drive in from estates on the outskirts of the city.
He never gets used to this, no matter how often he drives through it. Floorboards in the middle of the road, broken glass, burnt-out cars, charred houses with huge holes in the walls as if they’ve been hit by artillery shells. Beirut-on-Tyne, the locals call it.
The traffic lights are on red, but he doesn’t stop. Nobody stops here. You slow down, but you don’t stop. It’s difficult not to slow down, there are so many traffic-calming devices: chicanes, bollards, sleeping policemen. Law-abiding motorists creep through at fifteen miles an hour. Joy riders, knocking the guts out of other people’s cars, speed along this road like rally drivers.
Leaving it behind now, thank God. He picks up speed on the hill, the houses on either side increasing in prosperity with every mile that separates them from the estate. Huge Victorian houses built by iron magnates, shipbuilders, armaments manufacturers, well away from the sight and sound and smell of money. Most of them are divided into flats now. Lob’s Hill is one of the few houses left that’s still a family home.
As he turns into the drive, branches from overgrown bushes on either side rattle against the windows. The house is big, ugly, late Victorian, the turrets at either end surmounted by faintly ludicrous towers. Nick turns off the engine. He can feel Miranda not liking it.
‘It’s better inside,’ he says.
She gets out, and stands on the gravel looking lost while he hauls her suitcase out of the boot. It’s suddenly very quiet. Even the cawing of rooks from the copse behind the house seems to drop away.
A climbing rose covers the front of the building, though the white blooms are fading to brown, seeming to be not so much decayed as melted on their stems. It hasn’t been pruned for years. At some stage a honeysuckle’s been trained over the lower branches, but now it’s died back to form a huge ball of dead wood and leaves, defended by the sharp thorns of the rose.
Yesterday Nick had spent the whole morning snipping away with the secateurs, hauling out dead twigs by the handful, tearing the skin on his arms till he looked as if he had some horrible disease. Once, thrusting his hand deep into the mass, he pulled out a blackbird’s nest, full of dead fledglings. ‘Gollies’, they used to call them when he was a child. He looked at them, at the black spines of feathers pricking through the purplish skin, the sealed, bulbous eyes, the yellow wavy rim around the beaks, and then, with a spasm of revulsion, he threw the nest on to the wheelbarrow. But at least he’d managed to expose the lintel with its carved name and date. He looks up at the house now and points it out to Miranda.
FANSHAWE 1898
‘Like Wuthering Heights,’ she says.
Nick catches a movement behind one of the upstairs windows, a flash of light. Gareth’s staring down at them, the sunlight glinting on his glasses. He doesn’t smile or wave.
‘Right, then,’ Nick says, picking up the suitcase and putting his other arm around Miranda’s shoulders. Together they go in.
TWO
Fran lifts saucepan lids, prods vegetables, each blast of steam leaving her hotter, stickier, more harassed than before. The potatoes have boiled dry; not disastrously, but they’re going to taste ‘caught’. There’s something you can do about that. Mash them? She reaches for the Cheat’s Cookbook. Yes, transfer them to a clean saucepan, mash them with full-cream milk and a knob of butter – she has neither, they’re bad for Nick’s heart – and cover lightly with ‘an aromatic cloud of freshly grated nutmeg and a sprinkling of freshly chopped parsley’.
She can’t help thinking anybody who could lay that on at a moment’s notice had probably managed not to burn the potatoes in the first place. What she has is half a packet of mixed herbs, grey with age. The nutmeg’s at the bottom of a packing case and the pots of fresh herbs got left behind in the flat. ‘Shurrup, you,’ she says to Jasper, ruffling his hair, amazed by the warmth of his scalp under her fingers. He’s sitting on the floor at her feet, going ‘broom broom’ as he drives a dinky car up her leg. You wouldn’t think he’d been awake half the night. Normally she’d have gone to bed with him, when he had his afternoon nap, but today she couldn’t because of having to get bloody Miranda’s bloody room ready.
Though she ought to be grateful there’s a room to get ready. In the flat Miranda had slept on a camp bed in the living room. It was odd, that in the first days after the move, even though she had all this extra space, Fran tended to confine herself to a few rooms: the kitchen, the bedroom, the living room. Like a prisoner who takes one look at the sky and shelters in a shop doorway. She’s getting more used to it now. The final months in that flat had almost broken her. It had been all right when Jasper was a baby because he didn’t cry much, but as soon as he became a toddler the trouble started. The woman in the flat downstairs – nicknamed The Grum – was always banging on the ceiling. Fran went down and tried to talk about it, but she wasn’t having any of that. Miss Hardcastle, her name was. She’d taken to tranquillizers in a big way after her mother died, and then, against her doctor’s advice, had gone cold turkey on them. And poor woman, she was to be pitied, she was climbing up the wall. The slightest noise had her shouting and screaming and hammering on the ceiling and complaining to the landlord. On wet days, when Jasper had a cold, Fran would run a bath and sit in it with him, singing songs and reading stories and playing with boats. For hours, sometimes, because it was the only way to avoid another row. Once Nick came in from work to find her sitting in tepid water with tears streaming down her face. That was all behind her now, though. In this house Jasper can make any amount of noise. He can run about and trundle his car up and down the corridors to his heart’s content. OK, it’s a mess, there’s a lot to do, and not much money to do it with, but they’d been right to move. Even when all the dashing about had sent her blood pressure sky high, she’d never doubted that. And they’d get through the decorating gradually, and at least in a house this size Miranda and Gareth won’t be continually bickering. No, it’s going to be good. She’s looking forward to it.
Voices in the hall. ‘Come on,’ she says, picking Jasper up. ‘Let’s see your sister.’
They’re in the living room, looking out into the garden.
‘Hello, Miranda.’
There’s a moment when Miranda clearly contemplates the hypocrisy of a kiss and rejects it. ‘Hello, Fran. How are you?’
God, she’s cool. Fran always thinks she remembers how cool Miranda is, and yet obviously she doesn’t, because every time it comes as a shock. ‘Not so bad. Glad the move’s over.’
Miranda holds out her hand to Jasper, who pulls away from her, hiding his face in Fran’s neck.
‘He’s tired,’ Nick says quickly, to cover the slight awkwardness.
‘Well,’ says Fran. ‘What do you think?’
‘It’s a lovely big room.’
‘Of course we haven’t started yet.’ She nods at the wallpaper. ‘That’s the first job. I mean, can you imagine living with that? Enough to drive you –’
She stops abruptly, obviously remembering that Miranda’s mother has just gone into a mental hospital, and Miranda, who wouldn’t have dreamt of resenting the casual remark, notices her confusion and hates her for it.
Recovering quickly, Fran says, ‘I wish I could make myself like it, because it’s the original paper.’
A short pause. Miranda tries to think of something else to say and fails. Dad’s gasping for a fag, she can tell, but Fran won’t let him smoke in the house. ‘Stupid little cow,’ Mum said, when Miranda told her. ‘That won’t last.’ And to show what she thought of Fran
she’d lit one herself, and coughed.
Normally Miranda’s good at smoothing things over. Good at hiding her feelings.
‘Tea’s just about ready,’ Fran says. ‘Nick, will you give Gareth a shout?’
Gareth’s died three times in the past hour.
He can’t see any way of getting through the enemy’s shields without taking at least one direct hit and draining his reserves. Though if it wasn’t for a certain stupid bitch who should remain nameless – look at all that sunshine and you cooped up in here have you done your homework why don’t you try reading a book for a change blah-de-blah-de-bloody blah – he’d’ve wiped the buggers out long ago.
Nick puts his head round the door.
‘Don’t you ever knock?’ Gareth asks, not taking his eyes off the screen. He has to nerve himself to say it, because Nick’s sheer size sometimes frightens him. He’s never hit Gareth and he never will – Mum’d go ballistic, for one thing – and yet the fear’s still there. Ver-y in-ter-est-ing.
‘I did, you didn’t hear me. Tea’s ready.’
‘I don’t –’
‘Yes, you do. Come on, switch it off.’
‘Just till the end of the game.’
‘No. C’mon, Gareth, we’re all waiting. Apart from anything else, it isn’t very polite to your mother.’
He always says that when he means it isn’t very polite to him. ‘I haven’t brushed my teeth.’
‘You brush your teeth after meals.’
‘And before. The main acid attack –’
Gareth can go on like this for hours. ‘All right, but be quick.’
You’ve got to hand it to him, Nick thinks, as Gareth sidles past. It’s virtually impossible to tell a child off for paying too much attention to dental hygiene. He looks round the room, thinking how typical of Gareth it is that while every other part of the house is in chaos from the move, this room is orderly. Games, neatly stacked by the computer: Crash, Fighting Force, Mortal Kombat, Shock, Riot, Alien Trilogy, Rage, Streetfighter, Return Fire, Warhawk, Nightmare Creatures, Shadowmaster, Exhumed. In the school holidays Gareth spends, probably, forty hours a week playing these. They know they ought to stop him, and they don’t, because they’re only too bloody pleased to have him out of their hair. Once or twice Nick’s tried, but as soon as Gareth becomes seriously upset – and of course he does, it’s like taking the teat out of a baby’s mouth – Fran switches sides. She’ll never ever back Nick up. And he’s left feeling… neutered. Yes, that’s the right word, neutered. He’s so powerless in the situation he wonders why Gareth bothers to dislike him.
Behind the locked door, Gareth starts to clean his teeth. No scrubbing up and down, no wearing away of the gums. ‘Like stencilling,’ the dentist says. Done properly, it takes a long time. Flossing next. And then another go with the brush at all the places where he’s drawn blood.
When he’s finished he spits, rinses his mouth, spits again, then turns on the tap and watches the pinky-white splats swirl away.
Lastly, he gets Nick’s toothbrush from the rack, runs it several times round the lavatory bowl, under the rim where the germs lurk, inspects it for too obvious bits of shit, and restores it neatly to its place. Then, exchanging a glance with his reflection in the mirror, he dabs the last flecks of foam from his lips and goes, slowly and carefully, downstairs.
Miranda eats the burnt potatoes stoically, making no comment. Gareth spits them out. Nick takes a deep breath, opens his mouth, thinks better of it. The meal proceeds in silence except for Jasper’s good-humoured babble.
‘Is he talking yet?’ Miranda asks.
She’s only trying to make conversation, but Fran, undermined by the table manners of one son, doesn’t feel like discussing the linguistic inadequacies of the other. ‘Would you like baked beans instead?’
‘No, he wouldn’t,’ Nick says. ‘He can eat what he’s given like everybody else.’
Fran glares at him. Why, Nick thinks, is he continually goaded into acting like Gareth’s father – his ‘real’ father, whatever that means – and then choked off the moment he attempts it? Even when they’d gone to see the educational psychologist together he’d scarcely been allowed to say anything. He’d had to sit and listen while Fran propounded her theory that poor little Gareth was being bullied at school. Perhaps he is. But what precipitated his referral to the school psychology service was an incident in which he and another boy had upended a four-year-old and rammed his head into a lavatory bowl, which they then proceeded to flush.
Which hardly counts as being bullied.
You don’t like him, she’d said, when Nick finally exploded.
No, I don’t, he thought, looking at the gob of spat-out potato. Who could?
‘Can I get down now?’ Gareth asks.
‘Yes, all right,’ Fran sighs. ‘Off you go.’
Clearing away the table a few minutes later, Nick says, ‘He warmed up to Miranda, didn’t he?’
‘Jasper?’
‘I didn’t mean Gareth.’
‘More than she did to him.’
‘She’s not used to babies.’
‘Christ Almighty, Nick, will you stop defending her before she’s attacked? She doesn’t have to like babies. I wish I didn’t.’
‘You don’t.’
‘What?’
‘Like babies. You like the idea of them.’
‘Oh, very bloody clever. I just wish I wasn’t too tired to appreciate it. I was up all night, remember?’
‘Fran, what do you want me to do? I’m doing the bloody decorating –’
‘Don’t make it sound like a favour. You live here too, you know. And Miranda.’
‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ A pause. ‘You knew I had a daughter. I took Gareth on.’
‘No, you didn’t. You’re a lousy stepfather, you know you are.’
Nick starts to speak and checks himself. ‘Well, whatever I am, at least I’m here.’
‘Meaning? No, go on.’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
‘Meaning his father wasn’t?’
‘Let’s not have a row, Fran. Not tonight.’
‘We’re not having a row!’
‘Well, he wasn’t, was he?’
‘All right, he wasn’t. So what else is new?’
Nick sighs and puts his hand on the bulge. ‘How’s number two?’
‘Three. You might at least get the number right.’
‘It’s going to be all right, you know. It’s bound to be awful at the moment because the house is in such a mess, but it will get better.’
Made jealous by the intensity of the conversation, Jasper pushes between them, crying to be picked up. Fran bends down and lifts him into her arms. ‘I’ll take him up.’
‘OK. I’ll finish this.’
At the top of the kitchen steps she turns. ‘I thought we might get a video tonight.’
‘Yeah, fine. Whatever.’
Miranda curls up on the cushions, and draws the curtain half across, wishing she had a book to read, like Jane Eyre, with pictures of birds and frozen wastes, but Gran hadn’t let her pack any books because they weighed a ton, she said, though Miranda carried them, she didn’t. Instead she presses her face against the glass, misting it with her breath, feeling like a prisoner in a tower, but a nice feeling, not like a real prisoner – and then she remembers her last sight of Mum, standing at the end of a long corridor in the hospital, hugging herself, sunlight from the tall windows showing up all the wrinkles and grey hair.
She didn’t go in voluntarily, she was ‘sectioned’, a horrible word that makes Miranda think of dissecting small animals.
Unable to bear thinking about it, she jumps up, and starts brushing her hair, pressing down hard till it crackles and clings to the bristles. If you do that long enough and then tear paper into tiny bits and drag your hair across it, all the bits fly upwards and stick to the ends. Angie showed her how to do it when she slept over once, and afterwards they brushed their hair in the dark and you could s
ee the sparks. And then Angie said, ‘What’s wrong with your mum?’ And she said, ‘Nothing.’ She wanted to ask, ‘Why?’ but didn’t dare.
‘Somebody’s been putting green fly on my roses.’ After they were sprayed the buds had millions of dead flies all over them, like caps of grey scurf.
A knock on the door. It’s Gareth, blinking in that awful way of his, like a cat when it wants to be friends, though with Gareth it means the opposite.
‘Come on, then,’ he says.
‘Come on where?’
‘I’ve got to show you the garden.’
She starts to close the door. ‘Seen it.’
‘Your dad said.’
Miranda hesitates. Probably Dad had said it: he was keen on her and Gareth ‘getting on’. ‘All right.’
She’s taller than he is, but the extra height only makes her feel exposed, like a giraffe with a pale soft belly walking with a hyena. She doesn’t know how to deal with him, he’s so unrelentingly horrible, all the time, and she hasn’t done anything. It would be better if they just avoided each other, but Dad won’t let them do that. They’ve got to be friends, because that makes him feel better.
So they go on outings. She and Gareth sitting in the back of the car, separated by Jasper, sticky, screaming, smelly Jasper, who keeps bashing them in the face with plastic toys covered in spit, and at the end of the day Fran asks in her tight voice whether they’ve enjoyed themselves, and Miranda says politely that she has, and Gareth says no, it was a load of crap, he’d rather have stayed at home, and the back of Dad’s neck goes red.
‘The garden,’ Gareth says, opening the door.
The terrace, a stretch of overgrown lawn, flower beds with roses – roses everywhere – and behind them the humped dark shapes of rhododendrons.
Gareth’s staring at her. ‘Are you going to be here all summer?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Mum doesn’t want you here.’
‘That’s all right, I don’t want to be here.’
‘So why are you?’
‘My mother’s ill. She’s in hospital.’