Black Swan Green (18 page)

Nick Yew hasn’t come back to school. Dean Moran saw him in Mr Rhydd’s shop buying a box of eggs and Fairy Liquid, but Moran didn’t know what to say. Moran said Nick’s face was dead.

Last week the
Malvern Gazetteer
had Tom Yew on its front page. He was smiling and saluting at the camera in his ensign’s uniform. I pasted it in my scrapbook. I’m running out of pages.

When I got home on Monday there were about ten lumps of granite blocking the driveway, plus five sacks labelled
CRUSHED SHELL FILLER
.
Plus
a giant turtle shell that turned out to be a pre-cast fibreglass pond lining. Mr Castle was on a pair of stepladders clipping his hedge, which divides his front garden from ours. ‘Dad’s recreating the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, is he?’

‘Something like that.’

‘I hope he’s got a JCB stashed away in his garage.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Over a ton of rock you’ve got there. Nobody’s going to be shifting
that
little lot on a wheelbarrow. Cracked the tarmac something chronic, too, they have.’ Mr Castle smiled and winced at the same time. ‘I was here, watching the men dump it.’

Mum got home twenty minutes later, absolutely
apeshit
. I was watching the war on TV, so across the hallway I heard her phone up the landscapers. ‘You were supposed to bring the rocks
tomorrow
! You were supposed to lay them in the
garden
!
Not
just dump the things in the middle of our drive! A “mix-up”? A “mix-up”? No.
I
’m calling it
criminal stupidity
! Where are we supposed to
park
?’ The call ended with Mum shrieking the words ‘instructing my solicitors!’ and hanging up.

When Dad came home at gone seven o’clock he didn’t mention the rocks on the driveway. Not a word. But the
way
he said nothing was masterly. Mum didn’t mention the rocks either, so we had a stand-off. You could hear the strain in the room, like the squeak of cables. Mum boasts to visitors and relatives how, no matter what, we sit round as a family to share an evening meal. She’d’ve done us all a favour if she’d given this tradition a night off. Julia did her best to spin out a story about today’s World Affairs A-level paper (she’d got all the questions she’d revised for) and Mum and Dad paid polite attention, but I sort of
felt
the rocks outside, waiting to be referred to.

Mum served up the treacle tart and vanilla ice cream.

‘I don’t want to be accused of nagging, Helena,’ Dad began, ‘but I was wondering when I might be able to park my car in my garage?’

‘The workmen will be putting the rockery in place
tomorrow
. There was a misunderstanding about delivery times. They’ll be finished by tomorrow evening.’

‘Ah, good. It’s just our insurance policy clearly states we’re covered for
off-road
parking only, so if—’

‘
Tomorrow
, Michael.’

‘That’s fantastic. This is a lovely treacle tart, by the way. Is it from Greenland?’

‘Sainsbury’s.’

Our spoons scraped on our dishes.

‘I don’t want to be accused of interfering, Helena—’

(Mum’s nostrils actually went stiff, like a cartoon bull.)

‘—but I hope you haven’t actually
paid
these people, yet?’

‘No. I’ve paid a deposit.’

‘A deposit. I see. I only ask because you
do
hear horror stories about people handing over quite large sums of money to cowboys in these fly-by-night businesses. Then before you can even phone a lawyer, the director’s done a Ronnie Biggs off to Costa del Chips or wherever. And the poor old customer never gets to see a single penny of his hard-earned money again. Distressing, how these con-men can swindle the gullible.’

‘You
said
you’d “washed your hands of the whole affair”, Michael.’

‘I did, yes,’ Dad can’t hide satisfaction to save his life, ‘but I didn’t count on not being able to park my own car on my own drive. That’s all I wanted to say.’

Something silent smashed without being dropped.

Mum left the table. Not angry, and not tearful, but worse. Like none of us were there.

Dad just stared at where she’d been sitting.

‘In my exam today,’ Julia twisted a strand of her hair, ‘this term I’m not totally sure about, “pyrrhic victory”, came up. Do you know what a “pyrrhic victory” is, Dad?’

Dad gave Julia a very complicated stare.

Julia didn’t flinch.

Dad got up and went to the garage, for a smoke, most like.

The wreckage of dessert lay between me and Julia.

We watched it for a bit. ‘A
what
victory?’

‘“Pyrrhic”. Ancient Greece. A pyrrhic victory is one where you win, but the cost of winning is so high that it would’ve been better if you’d never bothered with the war in the first place. Useful word, isn’t it? So, Jace. Looks like we’re doing the dishes again. Wash or dry?’

The whole of Great Britain’s like it’s Bonfire Night and Christmas Day and St George’s Day and the Queen’s Silver Jubilee all rolled into one. Mrs Thatcher appeared outside 10 Downing Street, saying, ‘Rejoice! Just rejoice!’ The photographers’ flashbulbs and the crowds went
crazy
; she wasn’t a politician at all, but all four members of Bucks Fizz at the Eurovision Song Contest. Everyone sang ‘Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves, Britons never never never shall be slaves’, over and over. (Has that song got any verses or is it just one never-ending chorus?) This summer isn’t green, this summer is the red, white and blue of the Union Jack. Bells’ve been rung, beacons lit, street parties’ve broken out up and down the country. Isaac Pye had an all-night happy hour at the Black Swan last night. In Argentina riots’re being reported in the major cities with lootings and shootings and some people’re saying it’s just a matter of time before the junta’s toppled. The
Daily Mail
’s full of how Great British guts and Great British leadership won the war. No prime minister’s
ever
been more popular than Premier Margaret Thatcher in the entire history of opinion polls.

I
should
be really happy.

Julia reads the
Guardian
, which has got all sorts of stuff not in the
Daily Mail
. Most of the 30,000 enemy soldiers, she says, were just conscripts and Indians. Their elite troops all raced back to Port Stanley as the British paratroopers advanced. Some of the ones they left behind got killed by bayonets. Having your intestines pulled out through a slit in the belly! What a 1914 way to die in 1982. Brian Hanrahan said he saw one prisoner being interviewed who said they didn’t even know what the Malvinas were or why they’d been brought there. Julia says the main reasons we won were (a) the Argentinians couldn’t buy any more Exocets, (b) their navy stayed holed up in mainland bases, (c) their air force ran out of trained pilots. Julia says it would’ve been cheaper to set every Falkland Islander up with their own farm in the Cotswolds than to’ve gone to war. She reckons nobody’ll pay to clean up the mess, so that much of the farmland on the islands’ll be off limits until the mines’ve rusted.

A hundred years, that might take.

Today’s big story in the
Daily Mail
’s about whether Cliff Richard the singer’s having sex with Sue Barker the tennis player, or whether they’re just good friends.

Tom Yew wrote a letter to his family the day before the
Coventry
was sunk. The letter made it back to Black Swan Green, just a few days ago. Dean Moran’s mum read it, ’cause she was Tom Yew’s godmother, and Kelly Moran got the details out of her. Our navy men thought the Falkland Islanders were a bunch of inbred bumblers (‘
Honest
,’ Tom wrote, ‘
some of these guys are their own fathers
’), like Benny the dimwit handyman from
Crossroads
on TV. They even started calling the islanders ‘Bennies’. (‘
I’m not making this up – I met a Benny this morning who thought a silicon chip was a Sicilian crisp
.’) Soon everyone in the lower ranks was saying ‘Benny’ this and ‘Benny’ that. When the officers found out, an order was issued to get the men to stop using this name. The men stopped. But a day or two later, Tom was hauled over by his lieutenant, who demanded to know why the crew were referring to the locals not as ‘Bennies’ but as ‘Stills’. ‘
So I told the lieutenant “Because they’re still Bennies, Sir
.”’

Dad was half wrong, half right about the landscape gardener doing a runner. When the company stopped answering their phone, Mum drove to Kidderminster but there was only a broken chair in an empty office. Wires stuck out of the walls. Two men loading a photocopier on to the truck told her the firm’d gone bankrupt. So the rockery rocks stayed on our driveway for two more weeks, until Mr Broadwas got back from his holiday in Ilfracombe. Mr Broadwas does some gardening work for my parents. Dad sort of elbowed Mum out of the rescue operation. At eight o’clock this morning (today’s Saturday) a lorry with a fork-lift truck pulled up outside our house. Out of the cab got Mr Broadwas, and his sons Gordon and Keith. Mr Broadwas’s son-in-law Doug drove the fork-lift truck. First, Dad and Doug took down the side gate so the machine could lug the granite to the back. Next, we all got stuck in digging the hole for the pond. Hot and sweaty work, it was. Mum sort of hovered in the shade, but men with spades put up an invisible wall. She brought a tray of coffee and Dutch butter biscuits. Everyone thanked Mum politely and Mum said ‘You’re welcome’ politely too. Dad sent me to Mr Rhydd’s on my bike to get 7-Up and Mars Bars. (Mr Rhydd told me it was the hottest day of 1982 so far.) When I got back me and Gordon carted the buckets of topsoil to the end of the garden. I didn’t know what to say to Gordon Broadwas. Gordon’s in my year at school (in a dimmer’s class) and here was my dad
paying
his dad. How embarrassing’s
that
? Gordon didn’t speak much either, so maybe he felt embarrassed too. Mum was looking stonier and stonier as the rockery in the garden and the rockery in her blueprint got more and more different. After the pond’s shell was lowered and we stopped for toasted sandwiches, Mum announced she was going into Tewkesbury to do some shopping. As her car pulled out and we got back to work, Dad did a jokey sigh. ‘Women, eh? Banging on about this rockery for
years
, and now it’s off to the shops…’

Mr Broadwas did a gardener’s nod. Not an ally’s nod.

By the time Mum came home, Mr Broadwas, his sons, Doug and the fork-lift truck’d gone. Dad’d let me fill the pond with water from the hosepipe. I was playing Swingball by myself. Julia’d gone out to celebrate the end of the A-levels at Tanya’s Night Club in Worcester with Kate, Ewan and some of his friends. Dad was nestling little ferny claw plants into the chinks between the rocks. ‘So,’ he waved his trowel, ‘what’s the verdict?’

‘Very nice,’ said Mum.

Right away, I knew she knew something we didn’t.

Dad nodded. ‘The boys didn’t do a bad job, eh?’

‘Oh, not bad at all.’

‘Best garden pond in the village it’ll be, Mr Broadwas said, once my shrubbery’s got a grip. Have a pleasant tootle round Tewkesbury, did we?’

‘Very pleasant, thank you,’ said Mum, as a tubby man with joke-shop sideburns trundled a large, white, lidded wheelie bucket round from the front of the house. ‘Mr Suckley, this is my husband, and that’s my son, Jason. Michael, this is Mr Suckley.’

Mr Suckley gave me and Dad a ‘How do’.

‘That’s the pond,’ Mum said to him, ‘please, Mr Suckley.’

Mr Suckley wheeled his bucket to the edge of the pond, balanced it there, and raised a sort of gate. Water sluiced out, slooshing with it a pair of enormous fish. Not the tiddlers you get in plastic bags from the Goose Fair. These beauts’d’ve cost a
packet
. ‘The Japanese revere carp as living treasures,’ Mum told us. ‘They’re symbols of a long life. They live for decades. They’ll probably outlive us.’

Dad’s nose looked very,
very
out of joint.

‘Oh, I
know
your fork-lift gizmo was an unexpected expense, Michael. But think what we saved by using granite instead of marble. And surely the best pond in the village should have the best fish? What’s the Japanese name for them again, Mr Suckley?’

Mr Suckley emptied the last dribbles into the pond. ‘
Koi
.’

‘Koi.’ Mum peered into the pond like a mother. ‘The long gold one’s “Moby”. The mottled one we can call “Dick”.’

Today’d been so full of stuff that Mr Suckley should’ve been the end. But after tea I was playing darts in the garage when the back door slammed open. ‘Get
a-way
!’ Mum’s shriek was
mangled
with anger. ‘GET AWAY, you dirty great
BRUTES
!’

I ran to the back garden in time to catch Mum
hurling
her Prince Charles and Princess Diana mug at a
gigantic
heron, perched on the rockery. Tea floated out like liquid in zero gravity as the missile passed through a belt of sunlit gnats. The mug exploded when it hit the rockery. The heron raised its angel’s wings. Quite unhurriedly, one mighty flap at a time, it climbed into the air. Moby was flapping in its beak. ‘
PUT
my FISH
DOWN
!’ yelled Mum. ‘You
damn
BIRD!’