13

That same night was warm and prickly, so Mal and I erected a small green tent in the garden. It was old, Dad had first used it in South Africa, and when you tugged loose the drawstrings of the bag it kicked out a moth-eaten funk that tasted like old dust and made your whole face pucker. The groundsheet had long since rotted to tatters, so we took a gingham picnic blanket from the posh hamper Mum had won in a raffle and never used. We flapped it in the air before laying it flat and inviting on the grass.

Like the house the garden was small, and surrounded by other small gardens attached to small houses. We were to whisper because even the slightest rise in the volume would guarantee the complaints of Mrs Gee.

Mrs Gee lived in the bungalow next door. If you were to shave it, her head would have been perfectly spherical. With it sat atop her rotund midriff she took on the silhouette of a cartoon snowman. Barely five feet tall, you’d see her in the summer shuffling about the garden, her feet never leaving the floor. The constant tch tch tch of her slippers grazing the path served as warning she was coming and meant it was time to dash inside. She wore stretchy dresses that hugged her lumps, the only things that ever held her.

Now in her seventies she’d lived alone for almost half a century, polishing the taps, feeding the cats. Dad told me she’d been married to a postman on her seventeenth birthday, but that he’d left her that very night when she’d refused to consummate the relationship.

‘She’d been returned unopened.’

That evening Mal and I hid behind the relative sanctity of the tent’s damp canvas wall and spied her shadow in the yard. Tch tch tch. She stood motionless, watching the clouds cut across the sky with sourness daubed on her face, sucking on a piss-washed thistle. It seemed she was angry at them for being late, or at the sky for hanging high. Curved bones hunched her shoulders upwards to buffer her neck. Her hands were permanently fists. The world was ignoring her until she disappeared. She was one of those people. So we ignored her until she disappeared. Tch tch tch. Tch tch tch. Gone.

We clicked our torches on and hung them from the dented metal bar that formed the tent’s spine. Neither of us was cold or tired enough to climb inside our sleeping bags, so we lay atop them and the cheap polyester gripped sticky to our skin. We played travel versions of popular games. We didn’t have the full versions. We never really travelled.

‘Oh,’ I flinched.

We’d been playing the game for over an hour. I had pins and needles invading my left leg through my big toe and I’d slobbered down my right arm where I’d propped my sleepy head upon it.

‘I forgot to tell Mum, at school, they are going to give me trumpet lessons.’

‘Tell her tomorrow.’

‘I’ll tell her now,’ I insisted.

I got up slowly and unzipped the tent.

‘Play another game of Connect 4,’ he moaned.

‘I won’t be long. And I’ll get us something to eat, crisps or biscuits or something.’

I gently pushed open the back door and made my way through the kitchen, which shone with after-dinner soap suds snail-trekking their way down clean pots. In the living room the curtains, heavy and old in thick purple felt, were open so as to be able to watch us and the TV-chanted quiz-show mantra. Host says catch-phrase, audience reply. Mum and Dad loved but were not united by it, each of them sitting on opposite sides of the room, communicating in random but perfectly understood hand signals.

Turn it up a bit.

Turn it down a bit.

Thingy is on the other side.

What’s this?

What was she in?

Is that him from . . .?

Then they were watching Ray Darling. Newscaster Ray Darling reporting on the issues of the day, his charm tinged with a great unease, his hair a surreal thatch atop the crescent of his powdery face. Dad ticked with frustration as he watched. He had never liked Ray Darling, and by association neither had I. His scripted authority, his wavering interview technique, his flirtation with the poor weathergirl. His reek was one of a man petrified of being found out.

Sometimes I suspected Mum and Dad only loved each other during the advert breaks. I waited for one for fifteen minutes. Neither acknowledged me but both knew I was there. Like being on hold.

I returned to the tent. Malcolm was asleep.