Enchantment (22 page)

Valerie's laugh made even Colin raise the black loops of his eyebrows and say mildly, ‘Valerie …'

‘Trouble with you,' Val kept on at Tim, ‘you don't meet people.'

‘How do you know?'

‘You don't
go
anywhere or
do
anything.'

‘I do!'

He was goaded to tell them about Enterprise and about Warfare, exaggerating as much as he thought he could get away with. When he told the truth, no one believed it. They never had. As a child, it had not been worth not lying.

‘In three of the battles, I was the one who ran for the flag. They're sniping at you from all round see, and you got to kill 'em off and grab their flag and –'

‘Why?' Val, short and sharp.

‘Why grab the flag?'

‘No, moron. Why did you want to play that kind of pseudomacho nonsense?'

‘It was fun,' Tim said stubbornly.

‘
I
bet.' Colin was giving him a calculating look.

‘I was good at it. I – I excelled.'

‘So would Barry McCarthy, if he had played it,' Colin said. ‘I'd keep quiet about that weekend, Timothy, if I were you. After a massacre like Green Ponds, people begin to watch the loners.'

‘Colin, friend, sometimes my feeling is that you go a little bit too far.'

If anyone was going to insult her brother, Val could do it herself.

Zara, who had been asleep on the grass, woke up to see Tim jerk clumsily out of his chair and lurch into the house.

‘What have you been saying to my little Timmy?'

‘He's in bad shape,' Val said in her psychological voice. ‘He's got real problems.'

‘Who wouldn't, in this family?'

‘He needs some first-class counselling.' Val and Colin both nodded sagely, as if they were prepared to take on the job.

‘He needs love,' Zara said.

She took Tim out for a drink before he went home. He wanted a second, so Zara had to have one with him, and then another, because quite suddenly, while they were dreaming fantastic schemes about living and working together, he started to weep, in a back booth at the Stag.

Zara did not know what she was going to do. It was all she could do to cope with herself. How was she going to cope with Timmy?

He would join a cult. He would live like a tribal man, guided, sheltered, exploited, brainwashed. Might be worth it. This poor old brain could do with a wash.

He would become a monk. He would join the Army and send Sergeant Joe a postcard: ‘Wish you were here.' He would go down the mines, pack fish in a Grimsby freezing plant, march with a demo, join a riot, anywhere, for any cause.

Term had started at the Hall School again. Tim went down there one afternoon, and saw Helen shepherding children over the street crossing, with the absurd pole and lollipop sign, which wouldn't stop a bicycle, let alone a car, the way some maniacs drove in this town.

Since he had lost Buttercup, Tim had switched sides again in the pedestrian-driver conflict.

Helen was wearing a green fluorescent vest back and front, and the high-peaked cap that made her face severe. When the parents and the children thinned out, Tim went over to her.

‘Studying my style?' She lowered the top of the pole to the ground, like a lance. ‘You must be hard up for something to do.'

‘I am.' Tim wanted to put his arms round the lime green vest and kiss her under the harsh peak of the hat, which might have excited the mothers and children, if not Helen. ‘Left my job.'

‘Oh, Tim, I
am
sorry.'

‘I'm not. I was sick of it.'

She left him, to beckon across some older children.

‘What happened?' she asked when she came back.

‘Slight difference of opinion. Can't tell you now.'

‘No, of course not.' She looked into his face, and what she saw made her say, ‘Come to my place, can you? Will you come back with me now?'

‘I'd rather come on Saturday – when Julian's there.'

‘Well!' She made a surprised face. ‘That's nice of you. We'll both like that.'

When Tim went to Helen's flat, he did not want to talk about Webster's. How could he explain it to her? By now, fact and myth had become so interwoven that he was not sure exactly what had happened.

After Helen opened the door, Julian refused to walk back upstairs, but he allowed Tim to carry him without making a fuss. This felt to Tim as great an achievement as if the boy had said, ‘Hello, Timothy Kendall, how are you?'

When he put him down, Julian made one of his dancing runs over to the bottom shelf, and pulled out some tattered books, casting them over the floor as if he were sowing seed. Tim sat down and pulled the child towards him.

‘I'll read to you.' He picked up a book and started to read the babyish words, but Julian flipped over the pages, and then threw the book away and went to the corner to turn his basket of toys upside-down. He sat with the empty basket over his head, sending out a monotonous chant through the plastic slats.

‘Come and sit on the sofa, Tim,' Helen said. ‘Tell me about the job. I thought you wanted to make a career in retailing.'

‘There's other things in life. Time to make a change.'

‘Why? Did something – Julian!' She dived across the room, as Julian, still wearing the basket, lifted the big coloured top above his head to hurl it at the window. She fetched his soapy sponge, and left him lathering his arms and his naked stomach under the shirt that was hanging round his neck.

When she came back to Tim, she knelt down in front of the sofa and leaned on his knees.

‘Tell me,' she said. ‘Did you leave, or did they sack you?' It was not coaxing or sympathetic, just a practical request for information.

Tim put a hand on her dry oatmeal hair. ‘Are you still my oppo?' He had called her that in bed.

‘If you want. Tell me what happened.'

He sighed. ‘I clobbered Lilian.' He had not told anybody that, although he thought that Jack might know, from store gossip.

‘Oh well,' Helen said briskly, and got up. ‘I daresay she asked for it.'

Dribbling and waving his arms, Julian came over to Tim and climbed painfully on to his lap, kicking his shin with his shoes. He leaned against Tim's chest, breathing heavily, forced open his lips and tried to pull out his teeth. When Tim pretended to bite, Julian screamed and clutched a handful of Tim's hair, jerking his head sideways. Tim screamed too.

‘Here.' Helen put down plates with slices of cake. ‘This should keep you both quiet. He usually behaves better at the table. The school's strict about that.'

Julian would not touch the cake until Helen had also put down a banana which he moved to a certain precise spot, touching it again and again until he was satisfied it was exactly right.

He grabbed for Tim's cup of tea, and Helen said sternly, ‘No. If you want a drink, you must ask for it.'

‘How, if he doesn't talk?'

‘Talk,' Julian echoed obediently.

‘At school, they teach them signs for things like please and thank you, and I'm supposed to make him use them. Drink.' She raised a cupped hand to her mouth. ‘Julian – look. Drink.' The child kept on grabbing and whining.

Feeling self-conscious, Tim made the ‘drink' gesture. He and Helen must have looked like a couple of pantomime fools.

‘He'll never sign for me,' Helen said. ‘I'm a failure. Shall I give him his tea anyway?'

‘Yes.' Tim felt in control. ‘Look, Prince Julian,' he said. ‘I brought a picture for you.'

It was a magazine colour photograph of a swan reflected in a lake, steering a gliding course among flowing white water lilies.
Tim had taken an old photograph out of its frame, and fitted the swan picture into it. He held it up, moving it as Julian moved his eyes sideways away from it. ‘It's yours.' He put it on the table.

‘Make the sign for thank you,' Helen said hopefully.

‘Listen.' Tim sat opposite the beautiful boy, who was picking his piece of cake into its component parts of raisins and cherries and crumbs. ‘I'll tell you a story.' He looked fixedly at Julian, as he had looked at Norman to hypnotize him, and pretended that Julian was looking at him.

‘There was this prince, you see …'

On the journey to Helen's flat, with its irritating wait and change of buses, he had thought about the legend of the Sleeping Beauty, and the kiss that broke the spell.

‘This prince, he'd, like, been asleep for a hundred years. Lovely dreams, he had, of rivers and swans, and about how one day he would be a king with his own golden boat, and be the most clever and important and best-loved person in the whole land.'

The dreams were Tim's. He could see them pass behind his eyes. What hidden dreams flickered behind the child's averted eyes?

‘They wanted him to wake up and be the king, only nobody could budge him. Want to know how they got him to wake up in the end?'

Julian pressed his wet finger on to the last crumb of cake, then hammered the edge of the plate on to the swan picture, breaking the glass.

Tim did not know whether Helen wanted to go to bed with him again or not. She did not say anything about meeting during the week when Julian was away at school, so Tim did not suggest it. He did not think his wobbly confidence could stand up to hearing her say no.

Quite suddenly, Tim's father became ill. He was in a bed in the hospital, and the doctor told Annie that it might be lung cancer and that he needed an operation.

‘Does he know, Mum?'

‘No, dear. Better he doesn't.'

But was it better to rob Little Hitler of the triumph of knowing that he was right and they were wrong about his chest?

Tim went to the hospital with his mother. He did not want to go alone, and have nothing to say.

‘Shall I pretend I've found a job?' he asked his mother, while they were waiting outside the ward for visiting time to start.

She smiled. ‘It would please him.' (Tim had thought of it as a defence, not an offering.) ‘What shall it be, then? Computer firm, local paper, school caretaker, secretary to a rich old lady?' Annie plunged into the game. ‘No.' She dropped her smile. ‘He's very ill, but I'm afraid he'd still see through you.'

Tim was at 23 The Avenue with his mother and Sarah (she had gone back to that name when she started drinking again), when the hospital rang to say that his father had not survived the operation.

Tim stayed the night in his old room with the spooky trap door, while Sarah slept in the big Hitler bed with their mother. In the kitchen next morning, Sarah, looking ghastly, as she did these days without make-up, said, through her first cigarette, ‘How awful to die being someone that nobody liked.'

‘Mum liked him.'

‘Do her a favour.' Sarah pushed back her sleep-tangled hair. ‘She's got better taste than that.'

Tim got home to find one of Harold's little cards on the mat. ‘I got my i on U,' and a crude drawing of an eye.

Leave me alone. Tim threw the card into the waste-bin. I'm busy. I'm upset.

He was surprised by the effect of his father's death. He felt absolutely rotten for a few days. Now that it was too late, he liked his father better, and the sadness was for all the wasted time when they might have been friends. He unlocked Wallace's workshop, and helped himself to a couple of the small woodworking tools, which were to be sold as a set, and put them criss-cross on the shelf over his bed at the flat. He began to build a little fantasy around
the phantom of Wallace Kendall as a dependable father-figure, and himself as a deprived and grieving orphan.