Everlasting Lane (3 page)

‘Peter,’ he said, smiling, ‘have you seen this trick?’ He moved to the opposite side of the table and—

‘Peter?’ I flinched. My mother’s eyes were scorching me, a whisper of smoke rising from my hair. ‘What is it?’

A sip of lemonade washed down the last stubborn bite of biscuit. I shook my head. ‘I’ve been here before.’

‘Peter,’ she frowned at my confusion, ‘why don’t you remember?’

‘Who lives here now?’ I demanded.

‘We do.’

‘Yes, but whose house is it?’

‘Well, your grandma lived here awhile,’ she said. ‘But now it’s ours.’

‘And we live here?’

She nodded.

My mother clunked my suitcase up the narrow stairs. If the downstairs was small, the upstairs was smaller still and the wooden chair onto which she sank filled most of the landing. I nearly toppled backwards but she seized my wrist. The shadow of the gloomy, green drape hanging behind her slid across her face.

‘You nearly had a nasty fall,’ she said.

She produced a brass ring from which rattled an assortment of keys. She removed four. ‘Bathroom,’ she said, handing me the first. I fitted the key, unlocked the door and returned the key to my mother. ‘Mine,’ she said, and I repeated the task a second time. ‘Yours.’

I twisted the third key into its lock. As the door opened the room coughed out a puff of stale, stuffy air. My mother jerked back the curtain and pushed open the tiny window. ‘Oh, Lord,’ she said as a triangle of light fell across the room and its contents. ‘This,’ she said, shuffling an armful of clothes from the pink eiderdown, ‘is, apparently, where your grandmother decided to store all her junk. She was a devotee of
Woman’s Weekly
,’ my mother went on, a stack of magazines threatening to slip from her grasp, ‘and clearly reluctant to throw away a single edition.’ Sniffing the bedding she said, ‘And a change of sheets is in order, methinks.’

She winced as she lowered herself to her knees. She reached beneath the bed and began tugging free toys and books. ‘Your old Action Man,’ she cried, ‘your Robin Hood set, your Rupert annuals. Oh, and look who we’ve got here!’ It was a piggy
bank, pink and smiling, forgotten pennies rattling around inside. And then a tattered glove-puppet. ‘Goodness me, Peter, you were always “Pinky-this, Perky-that”. You drove us to despair.’ She slipped the toy onto her hand and wiggled it as if it were talking. ‘Pinky-Perky-Peter we used to call you,’ she said in a squeaky voice. ‘Don’t you remember?’

I shrugged and scowled at the pig. I wondered whether I wanted to remember.

‘Look,’ she sighed, removing the puppet from her fingers and reaching back under the bed, ‘I know it’s not much, but sort out your pictures and things, it’ll be just like …’

She now held a skipping rope. It looked nearly new. She caressed its silky strands and wrapped it around her fingers like beads.

‘That’s a girl’s toy,’ I said.

Alone in the living room, afternoon sun speckling the air, I counted porcelain animals roaming the shelves in packs or lurking alone between the spines of tattered books. A clock squatted on the mantelpiece, its hands still. Kneeling before the TV I scrawled my name across its dusty screen.

I studied a row of photographs that sat along the sideboard. They made me feel happier. Photographs always did. It was like I could pretend that they were real and the room around me was the picture. Like when you look in a mirror and see the world where everything is backwards, so that your right hand is your left hand and all the writing looks funny and mysterious. It’s like another world where the things that happen are opposites and if you’re sad in the real world, then you’d be happy in the mirror, and if you were lost in one world, then you’d be found in the other. And the people who were dead might be alive and everything would be different and better.

Some of the photos were black and white, others pale and coloured. Some I’d seen before at home, stacked in a box in the garage, damp-dry at the corners. Others I hadn’t seen before, like this one with my father and mother sitting side by side and smiling for the camera but the picture was torn like a third person had been removed.

I couldn’t guess who.

‘What are you up to?’

I jumped. ‘Nothing.’

My mother held a lemonade in each hand, bubbles rising. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, passing a glass to me and tugging a duster from her back pocket. ‘It just needs a good clean.’ The yellow cloth swept across the television’s blank eye, erasing dust and signature in a single swipe. She went to the window and glowered at the tangle of weeds that had once been a garden.

I stared at her. She’d changed her clothes. She was all made up like a younger person, with pink cheeks and a storybook smile. She wore a T-shirt, red, white and blue like an American flag; and proper jeans, flared ones, almost like a teenager. But her eyes, when she turned to smile at me, were the same smoky shade as always.

‘Where is she now?’ I asked.

‘Who?’

‘My grandmother.’

My mother shuddered as if tasting something sour. She fiddled with an earring. ‘Maybe, when you know me better,’ she said.

‘I
do
know you.’

‘Oh, Peter,’ she said, joining me on the sofa, ‘you don’t know me at all.’ She took my hands in hers. ‘I was thinking about what you said. You know, about not wanting to live with me.’

‘But I—’

‘No, it’s all right. I was wondering what it would be like if you could live with someone else. Someone who wasn’t cross all the time.’

And then she explained. We were going to play a game, she said, a game of the imagination. She told me how she was going to be my Aunt Kat (with a ‘K’) and how my mummy had gotten very tired and had decided to take some time to sort herself out because I knew what it was like when
I
was tired and how grumpy
I
got, didn’t I?

I nodded. I didn’t want to make her cross.

‘Do you know why people play games, Peter?’

‘Because it’s fun?’

‘Well, yes, sometimes, but sometimes it helps them discover something too.’

‘Like Hide and Seek.’

The game had rules, of course—just like with that man in
It’s a Knockout
who tells everyone the rules before he blows the whistle—but in this game you could change, you could be anything or anyone you wanted because the past and the things we’d done, which I’d always thought were carved in stone, might as well be carved in water. And it was a strange game, yes, but a good one because, as she explained, if you were losing, you just returned to ‘Go’ and started all over again.

But then she said how she wanted us to keep ourselves to ourselves and that people in a village had big noses and would want to poke them into our business given half a chance and I wasn’t to tell anyone anything and even when I went to school—‘Yes, Peter, school. Did you really think you wouldn’t have to go?’—I needed to be careful because the game, she said, and the rules were secret. ‘And if people ask questions,’ she said, ‘never answer.’

‘Why?’

She groaned and then laughed. ‘Do you know something, Peter Lambert?’

‘No. What?’

‘
You
ask too many questions.’

‘But
what
do I call you?’

‘I told you: you can call me Kat—’

‘Why?’

‘—with a “K”.’

‘But why? It’s not even a proper name.’

‘Of course it is. You are your name,’ she explained, ‘and your name is who you are. It’s just sometimes you need another name to make yourself something more, something better. Your dad understood that,’ she said, ‘but I let him down. And now I’m making up for it. Well, what do you think?’

Well, sometimes, I didn’t know what to think.

‘Let me look at you,’ she knelt down. ‘Oh, Peter, your daddy would be so proud,’ as if seeing me for the first time. Her fingers teased my hair. And then, ‘Oh, Peter,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry.’ And then, ‘It’s all right,’ as she reached for me. ‘Don’t cry. Big boys don’t cry.’ And I didn’t.

Hardly at all.

‘Listen, Peter,’ she said, her smoky eyes filling the room, ‘can you keep a secret?’

‘Yes.’

She put a finger to my lips. ‘Then keep it.’

A butterfly fluttered among the thick, green leaves of the overgrown garden. Gardens at home were mirrors, reflecting other gardens, other houses and other small boys, but this garden backed onto trees. Not like the skinny trees at home either. These trees were thick and old with dark stories stuffed into the lines of their rugged faces.

Having turned it onto something big, thumping and full of summer, Kat, as I was supposed to call her, slipped a radio onto the seat of the rusty garden chair. ‘There used to be a scythe,’ she said, squinting at the chaos before her, ‘but I’d hate to take you home with less legs than when you arrived.’ And then, turning her back on the jungle to survey the rear of the house, she cried out: ‘Oh, no. Look! The local yobbery have put a brick through a window.’ A jagged black hole gaped from the first floor. ‘Oh, Peter, is nothing sacred?’ she sighed. ‘I won’t rest until I’ve done something about that. Can you entertain yourself, Peter? Yes?’

‘What about Doctor Todd?’ I said.

Kat sighed again, ‘Ooooh,’ as if I’d stuck her with a pin. ‘Listen, Peter, my suggestion to you is that you don’t worry about Doctor Todd. In fact, that’s not even a suggestion,’ she said. ‘It’s pretty much an order.’

That seemed too easy.

‘Okay?’

I nodded.

‘I’ll not be long,’ she said. ‘Now be good.’

Left alone I couldn’t resist plunging into the overgrown garden, like Doctor Livingston, I presume, or Doug McClure, fully expecting to discover the ruins of some dark forbidden temple or one of those Japanese soldiers that never know the war is over. I had to keep my wits about me, of course. You never knew what dangers might be lurking deep within the undergrowth: lions, probably, ready to rip your throat out; snipers, a pot-shot from the shadows; maybe aliens.

I tightened my grip on my gun and, with my walkie-talkie pressed to my ear, I could communicate with HQ and keep them alerted to my progress: ‘I am approaching the nest,’ in a
whisper, twisting the dial. ‘Over. I must be absolutely silent,’ I went on. ‘Over. Who knows what I might find,’ I concluded. ‘Over and out.’

There was a burst of activity. I crouched and gazed in wonder at the mighty beast rising in to the air, leathery wings beating over the land that time forgot. Awed by its ancient beauty, I—

‘What the hell are you doing?’

The pterodactyl vanished. My gun, I discovered, was only a stick, and the voices of my comrades were static crackling from Kat’s wireless. It took a moment to remember where I was and a moment more to find the source of the question.

A pale, freckle-faced girl was leaning over next-door’s fence. She had long, golden blonde hair and big ears. I had the uneasy feeling she’d been watching me for some time.

The girl frowned at me with serious eyebrows.

‘What the hell,’ she repeated, as if I was retarded, ‘are you doing?’

‘Playing.’

‘Playing? Is that what you call it? Is that why you’re muttering to yourself like a demented baboon?’

‘I …’ I stared at my feet, blushing.

‘I asked you a question, dimwit.’

I prayed she wouldn’t climb over the fence. But she did. One long, spider-thin leg appeared and unfolded itself. And then a second. She slid down into the overgrown flowerbed. ‘Thanks for your help,’ she said, straightening her dress and glaring at me with pale blue eyes. ‘Frankly, it’s nice to know that chivalry is so far from being dead.’ Her knees were grazed and dirty.

My heart thumped and bumped like a body falling down stairs. I studied the buckle of my sandal and the earth beneath my feet with a sweaty concentration that would have delighted my teachers. I finally looked up past her grubby knees and faded yellow dress. She was a year or so older than me and a head taller. Of all the challenges I’d faced that day, she was the toughest.

‘I’m Anna-Marie,’ said the girl. ‘Anna-Marie Liddell. And,’ she said, as if discovering something hairy in her salad, ‘who the hell are you?’

‘Peter.’

‘Peter?’ she said with disgust. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I … I live here,’ I said. ‘With my … with my … my aunt.’

‘Since when?’

‘Since … today.’

‘Oh.’ She considered this information whilst using her little finger to free something green from between her teeth. ‘You’re not Oliver Twist, are you? I mean, you’re not some awful, Victorian orphan?’

‘No.’

‘Why don’t you live with your mum or dad, then?’

‘I … My dad’s dead.’

Anna-Marie looked away. ‘My dad is in sales,’ she said. ‘He’s away a lot, but it’s very lucrative. So what’s she like, then, this aunt? She’d better not be a horror like Mrs Winslow. Mrs Winslow hates me.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s a long story,’ said Anna-Marie. ‘Anyway, now she says I’m “bad news”. That’s what Tommie says. Do you know Tommie?’

‘No.’

‘He’s at his dad’s for the holidays and who can blame him,’ said Anna-Marie, pausing to chew a nail. ‘I say that Mrs Winslow is an ugly old trout. And she is.’

‘Oh!’

‘Mrs Winslow is Tommie’s mother,’ she explained. ‘Tommie’s a bit of a spud but his dad doesn’t live with him so I look out for him. To be kind.’ She looked at me again. ‘You’re a bit of a non-entity, frankly.’

‘What?’

‘Are you simple?’

‘No.’

‘You must be if you don’t even know what a non-entity is. Perhaps you were dropped on your head as a baby. That would explain why you run around talking to yourself and don’t even know what the simplest words in the English language mean.’

My lips were tight, my face hot with shame. So I kicked her. Hard. On the shin.

‘Fuck-a-doodle-duck!’ she cried. ‘What was that for, you lunatic?’

She sat down, flattening the tall grass, and unrolled her grey sock. ‘I think you must be deranged,’ she said. She tapped the faint mark with her finger. ‘Good kick, though.’

The sun tickled my head and the bare skin of my arms. A cat appeared, smooth and black, following the flies and raising a curious paw. Bees bobbled up and down between the weeds, stalks swaying beneath their weight.