The Generation Game (15 page)

Once Bob’s make-up has been removed, he looks older and when he bends down to tie up his shoe lace, I notice his shiny patch has visibly grown. But Wink is a new woman.
You’d think all the strain and excitement would be too much for her but tonight, when the after-show party has finished, snaps taken of the contestants with Larry and Isla, and the car has
taken us back to the hotel, along with all the prizes, Wink walks straight-backed and with a skip in her step into the lobby where she orders nightcaps all round (except for the Inscrutables
who’ve vanished, presumably back to Inverness, never to be seen again).

It is only when we get home, back home to Torquay, that catastrophe comes looking for us.

The next morning, Raymond and I share one last bottle of Coke.

‘We could be pen friends,’ I suggest, regretting it immediately as he looks like I’ve offered myself to him in marriage. His horror gradually dissipates after a slug of Coke
and he manages to pull himself together.

‘Alright,’ he says.

I hand him a beer mat procured as a souvenir while the barman is busy filling up the optics. He produces a pen (also procured with sleight of hand from the hotel reception desk) and scrawls his
address. A street and a town that might as well be in a foreign country. That might as well be in Manitoba or Alberta or Inverness.

And I write down my address for him. Bob’s News. My home.

I am leaving London again, this time in a car. I’ve merely sniffed at all that lies in store in the capital; it has been snatched away too quickly from under my nose, for
a second time.

Wink is full of it, regaling yet more Larry Facts she’s gleaned from Amber and Imogen. How Larry was born out of wedlock. Put up for adoption. Brought up in a foster home. She looks at me
as she is telling us all this, partly because I am the one stuck in the back of the car with her gammy leg on top of my lap. But I wonder if she is making comparisons with my life. After all, I was
born out of wedlock too. Unfortunately there the similarity ends as I’ve never been put up for adoption. Where would I be now if I had? Not on my way home from BBC Television Centre
that’s for sure, so I should be grateful for my unofficial foster home (but I am almost a teenager and gratitude is not in my repertoire).

Eventually Wink shuts up and I am able to sleep, the tiger in my arms, dreaming of a tall boy called Raymond. My pen pal. Another friend I’ve had to relinquish all too soon, as
Linda’s Maxi speeds me away, back to the likes of Christopher Bennett and Terry Siney. Not that I’ve seen Terry in a long time though I’ve heard he is now known as T-J. However,
something tells me we’ll be seeing something of Auntie Sheila in the not-too-distant future if she switches on her television set on Saturday evening.

We arrive home to find Torquay in the midst of another power cut. Wink says I can keep the tiger in return for all my supportive shouting. She says she could pick my voice out
from the audience and it had kept her going, which surprises me as Wink looked the picture of self-containment. But then you never know what’s going on inside someone else, as Wink’s
always telling me.

She also gives Bob and Linda the golf clubs (‘something for you to take up together, all that massaging can’t be healthy’) and the bottle of Champagne because it gives her
heartburn something chronic. She tells us she is going to give the toaster to Miss Goddard who still makes do with a grill (someone should tell her the Japanese have surrendered) and Mr Taylor has
earned himself the set of suitcases so he can take his proud wife and his knobbly knees on a second honeymoon. Christopher Bennett will get the digital alarm clock so he has no excuse for being
late for his paper round. His time-keeping is shocking and Bob is possibly beginning to see through his flimsy veneer of Nice Young Man.

This will leave Wink with enough luxury goods to keep her happy for a long time to come – though something about the way she is so keen to hand out the prizes makes me dread she
hasn’t got as long as I’d like. Surely she isn’t trying to tell us something?

The next morning we get a wake-up call, early, even before the paperboys arrive. Bob is still in his dressing gown as he lets himself out into the frosty morning where there is
a commotion going on in the street. I am a deeper sleeper than Bob and it is only the sound of sirens that wake me up. In those first few seconds I try to calculate which emergency service it is. I
am sure I’ll see an ambulance as I draw back the curtains, the Cavalier sneering at me before I yank him to one side. But it isn’t. It is the fire brigade, busy at work outside
Wink’s house, where thick orange-black flames swarm around her bedroom window. I can almost kid myself I’m watching television but for the now unmistakeable crackle and smell of smoke
and the heat I can feel as I push up the window, scanning the people outside… but there’s no sign of Wink. Wink, who can sleep through anything, even fire. Even fire!

‘Wink!’

No-one hears me screaming. There’s too much noise going on. I sprint from my room, leap down the stairs three at a time and am outside, out on the street in my pyjamas, running to her
house when a fireman grabs hold of me.

‘Oh no you don’t,’ he says. ‘It’s hot in there.’

And as I find myself on the floor, the scene of the street party, the tug of war that Wink judged, there are familiar arms helping me up again.

‘It’s alright... ’ Bob coughs ‘... Captain got her out.’

Thank God for the Fire Captain! He must’ve rescued her in a fireman’s lift, down a ladder, out of that blackening fire. I love the Fire Captain. I want to kiss him and thank him but
Bob is leading me away from the fire crew, taking me round the corner, where there is indeed an ambulance parked up, a dirty old lady sitting inside with a blanket wrapped round her as if she
hadn’t got hot enough inside her burning house, an oxygen mask over her face. And a parrot perched on her shoulder.

Captain got her out.

So Wink’s chance of a lifetime goes up in flames though somewhere there could be a recording of her and Bob unless it has been taped over by someone in the Corporation.
All she has left is a charred photo of Larry with his arm around her. Otherwise it could all too easily have been a dream. It could never have happened.

But I have proof of it. I have the tiger which I offer to give back to her but she won’t have it. So, he goes everywhere with me.

Bob offers her something too. ‘Come and stay with us, Wink. Stay as long as you like.’ So that’s what she does. She stays as long as she likes. In fact she never leaves.

‘Just don’t go playing with matches,’ he has the nerve to say that first evening. ‘Next time there’s a power cut, use a torch.’

And this time she does have her walking stick to hand.

Fran is back to check on us. Does she pay every new mother this much attention or am I in the maternity equivalent of the Slow Readers? She whisks you away, ordering me to get
my head down. Do I look that hideous? That old?

So I am actually alone, completely alone, when the doctor tells me. The young doctor with the proficient hands. Pianist’s hands. Surgeon’s hands. Hands that can suture and examine
and deftly poke and prod. A simple wedding band shines on the appropriate finger and I want to ask her if she has children because for some reason I need to know that she understands. That she can
realistically put herself in my shoes (well, in my Totes Toasties).

“Are you sure you don’t want your husband here?” she asks. I swat that idea away. “Alright, then,” she says. “I’ve got the results of the blood test. I
hurried them along because I know what agony waiting can be.”

(She does! She does understand!)

“Thank you,” I say politely but, from the grim expression on her face, somehow I don’t think I’ll be thanking her in a minute.

“It’s her heart,” she says.

Her heart. My beating heart.

I am right about Auntie Sheila. That Saturday evening she does switch on her television set instead of going and doing something less boring instead. And there he is. The man
who was once almost a significant part of her life. The almost-man: Bob. Acting the buffoon in front of the nation. But it is her Bob. My Bob. And watching him do that tango, she imagines it is her
in his arms, not the dummy.

So, a week after the fire, when Wink has filled Helena’s old wardrobe with a new set of nylon clothes from Newton Abbot market and Captain is once again beginning to pass comment, Sheila
turns up at the shop. She is allegedly after a
Western Morning News
and a packet of Extra Strong Mints but really I know she wants to see Bob. And, as her luck would have it, there he is,
propping up the counter.

‘Sheila!’ he says, genuinely thrilled to see her again. ‘You look well.’

Yes, Sheila does look well. A slick haircut and a slim line body that makes Bob straighten his spine and pull in his stomach.

Linda is out, on the road, flogging stationery, and so Bob makes Sheila a cup of tea. One cup of tea leads to another and before you know it Sheila is once again ensconced back in our lives,
rolling up her sleeves and lending a helping hand.

Two years on and the situation is largely the same. At school, I’ve crawled my way to the top stream but one. Cheryl continues to shine above me but has the good grace
never to mention it. We are still best friends but can’t spend as much time together in the way that we’d like, memorising the pop lyrics in
Smash Hits
and crimping each
other’s hair, as we have revision for our mocks. (If only the events of the Industrial Revolution would stick in my brain as firmly as the words to
Ant Music
.)

At home, it’s hard to remember a time when I didn’t live with Bob and Wink and Andy and Captain. Linda is still on the scene though since her promotion to area manager she’s on
the road even more than ever. Over the next decade she will become one of those women inspired by Margaret Thatcher and Alexis Carrington into wearing power suits with shoulder pads that Captain
could roost on. But, for the time being, she settles for Lady Di ruffs and flicky hair. In fact, Linda is so keen on Lady Di, hoping fervently for the engagement to be officially announced, that
she uses ‘Princess’ as her CB handle. She’s become obsessed with her CB radio and whiles away the hours motoring all over the south west, imagining she is in
Convoy
.
Driving, for Linda, is now a greater pleasure than ever.

One Saturday evening, Auntie Sheila asks us all round to a dinner party. Bernie, who is still behaving himself, will be there. Terry (T-J), who still lives at home, might or
might not be there, depending on his ‘plans’ (primitive plans involving pints and pubs and mates). Toni, on the other hand, is still in Hampstead, working her way up through the rank
and file of the estate agents and has bought herself ‘a nice little flat’ in Belsize Park where she sometimes has her mother to stay so they can ‘take in a show’. I remember
my trip to London where I barely got above ground level and feel overwhelmed briefly by jealousy. Toni may not have become a member of Pan’s People but she does have her own flat in London
and can take her mother to see
Evita
, when I have to make do yet again with taking Wink to the pantomime at the Princess Theatre.

At the last minute Linda has a crisis at work and calls Bob from the office to say she can’t make it. So there is a spare chair at the table which T-J is persuaded to fill before going
down town. Unfortunately the spare chair is situated next to mine and so I am not looking forward to the meal although Auntie Sheila has pushed the boat out and done steak and chips followed by
Arctic Roll. I am even allowed half a glass of Chianti as I am fifteen and well-and-truly a teenager and should be given the opportunity to learn how to handle alcohol in a responsible manner.
(Little do they know I’ve already learnt the hard way.)

T-J and Bernie have lager, as wine is for wimps. Wink joins them but Bob risks being branded a lesser man as this is favourable to Auntie Sheila necking back the entire bottle of Chianti (bar my
measly half a glass) all on her own. He obviously hasn’t managed to blank the whole sorry David-Essex-Hold-Me-Close fiasco. Unfortunately this isn’t the only bottle of Chianti; it turns
out there’s a whole cellar full of the stuff thanks to Auntie Sheila’s wine club.

The evening drags by and I have to sit listening to T-J chew his steak that could still possibly be breathing it’s so rare. (I must’ve been a vegetarian in a former life.) Auntie
Sheila has tried. She’s got out the best dinner service and cut glass and has painstakingly polished the cutlery. She’s even concertina-ed the napkins into fans which impresses Wink no
end though T-J leaves his on the table in preference for his sleeve. I wonder how anyone as sophisticated as Auntie Sheila could have brought up a philistine like him. But then I look at Bernie
chewing his medium-rare with his mouth open.

The conversation isn’t flowing as freely as either the wine or the lager. Auntie Sheila does her best to kick start things.

‘How’s Linda?’ she asks Bob through gritted teeth.

‘Oh, you know, busy,’ says Bob.

‘Poor Bob,’ says Auntie Sheila as if he’s announced that Linda has run off with one of the paperboys. She puts her hand over his hand and leaves it there. Bob looks at it, as
if it might spontaneously combust. Bernie takes a slug of his lager, and undoes the button of his Farah slacks, oblivious to his wife’s treachery. After gallons of Italian vino, Auntie
Sheila’s skills as a hostess (and wife) have gone awry.

T-J, meanwhile, is also untuned to the radar of his mother’s attentions. He’s spent the first half of the meal looking at his watch and the second half looking at my chest. My chest
has grown somewhat since I last saw him (hurrah!) and it is finally dawning on him that I am well-and-truly a teenager now. He even attempts to make conversation with me. But what is more
surprising is that his sudden interest is not unappealing. I find myself talking in a strange voice and feeling strange things. The draw of the pub is too great, however, and as soon as T-J has
finished his last shovelful of Arctic Roll, he is splashing Brut all over and heading for the door, shrugging into his leather jacket and shouting a cursory see you later over his shoulder, which
it has to be said is quite a nice shoulder.