Black Swan Green (29 page)

‘So while
I
’m neck-deep in shipping notices, stock inventories, mailing lists and artistic temperaments,’ Mum adjusted the mirror to perfect her lipstick, ‘
you
get to swan around Cheltenham all morning like Lord Muck! All right for some, eh?’

‘I guess so.’

Mum’s Datsun Cherry smells of Mint Imperials.

‘Ah, you’ll have a
whale
of a time! Now, Agnes says
Chariots of Fire
starts at twenty-five to two, so grab yourself a sausage roll or something for lunch, and get back to the gallery by…’ Mum checked her watch. ‘…a quarter past one.’

‘Okay.’

We got out of the Datsun. ‘Morning, Helena!’ A crew-cut man marched by to where a van was docking into a delivery bay. ‘Proper scorcher we’re in for, today’s forecast says.’

‘About time we had a bit of summer. Alan, this is my son, Jason.’

I got a crooked grin and a jokey salute. Dad wouldn’t like Alan.

‘Being as you’re sort of on holiday, Jason, why don’t I…’ From her purse Mum unfolded a crisp five-pound note.

‘Thanks!’ I don’t know why they’re being so generous at the moment. ‘That’s as much as Dad gave me in Lyme Regis!’

‘Silly me – I meant to give you a ten…’

Back went the fiver and out came a tenner! That made £28.70.

‘Thanks very much.’

I’d need every last penny.

‘Antique shops?’ The woman in Tourist Information began memorizing my features in case a robbery was reported later. ‘Why do you want antique shops? The best bargains are in the charity shops.’

‘It’s my mum’s birthday,’ I lied. ‘She likes vases.’

‘Oh. For Mum? Oh! Isn’t Mum lucky having
you
as a son?’

‘Uh…’ She made me nervous. ‘…thanks.’

‘Lucky,
lucky
Mum! I have a son as lovely as you, too.’ She flashed me a photo of a fat baby. ‘Twenty-six years ago, this, but he’s still as adorable! Pips doesn’t always remember
my
birthday, mind, but he’s got a heart of gold. That’s what counts, at the end of the day. Father was a waste of space, sorry to say. Pips hated the pig as much as I did. The
men
’ (she made a just-swallowed-bleach face) ‘just fire out their snot, roll over and that’s
it
, goodnight. The men don’t
grow
sons, feed them with their own milk, wipe their botties, powder their,’ she cooed at me but the bird of prey was back in her eyes, ‘little
snails
. A father will
always
turn on his son in the end. Only room for
one
cock-of-the-walk in any farmyard,
thank
you very much. But
I
showed Pippin’s father the door when Pips turned ten. Yvette was fifteen.
Yvette
says Pippin’s old enough to be living on his own, now, but
that
miss has forgotten who’s the mother and who’s the daughter since she got a pay-in-instalments wedding ring on her finger.
Yvette
forgets it’s thanks to
me
that
that
little Jezebel from Colwall didn’t get her sharp little claws into Pippin. Seduce him into some en
tang
lement.
Yvette
’s still thick as thieves with
that
’ – the foamy lady nodded at the empty doorway – ‘
clot
. Her father. The pig. The
dolt
. Who else put the idea into her head? Poking her pointy beak into where Pips keeps our little pick-me-ups? A mother needs a little pick-me-up occasionally, my pet. God made us mothers but He didn’t make it
easy
for us to stay on top of things.
Pips
understands.
Pips
says, “Let’s call these pills
yours
, Mum. They’re
our
secret, but say, if anyone asks, they’re
yours
.” Pippin’s not so nicely spoken as you, my pet, but his heart’s twenty-four-carat. But do you know what Yvette did to our pick-me-ups? Turned up uninvited one afternoon and without so much as a by your leave, she flushed them down the lavvy! My, Pippin turned the air
blue
when he got home and found out! Hit the
roof
! It was “my
effing
stock” this, “my
effing
stock” that! Never
seen
the boy in such a state! Went round to Yvette’s and, well, did
he
put
her
pointy beak out of joint!’ Her face clouded. ‘Yvette called the coppers. Shopped her
own brother
! He’d only biffed that froglet of a husband of hers a
little
bit! But Pips just disappeared after that. Days on end now, neither hide nor hair. All I want is a phone call from my son, my pet. Just to tell me he’s looking after himself proper. Some nasty types keep knocking our door down. The police are just as bad. “Where’s the
effing
gear
this
? Where’s the
effing
money
that
? Where’s your son gone you
effing
old bitch?” Oh,
filthy
language, they’ve got. But even if I
had
heard from Pips, I’d rather
die
than breathe a
word
…’

I opened my mouth to remind her about the antique shops.

She shuddered out a sigh. ‘I’d rather
die
…’

‘So, uh,
could
you give me a map of Cheltenham with the antique shops marked on it?’

‘No, pet. I don’t work here. Ask that lady behind the desk.’

The first antique shop was called George Pines, out on a ring road, wedged between a betting shop and an off-licence. Cheltenham’s s’posed to be posh but posh towns’ve got dodgy areas too. You cross a boomy rusting footbridge to get there. George Pines wasn’t what you have in mind when you think ‘antique shop’. The doors and windows had grilles. A note was Sellotaped to the (locked) door saying,
BACK IN 15 MINS
but the ink’d gone ghostly and the paper’d faded. A notice said,
BEST RATES FOR HOUSE CLEARANCES.
Through the grimy window it was all ugly big sideboards you get in grandparents’ bungalows. No clocks, no watches.

George Pines was long gone.

As I was walking back over the footbridge these two kids came towards me. They looked my own age but they’d got red-laced Docs. One wore a
Quadrophenia
T-shirt, the other an RAF T-shirt. Their footsteps boomed in time,
left-right left-right
. If you look kids in the eye it means you reckon you’re as hard as they are. I was carrying a fortune in cash so I kept my eyes sideways and down, on the fumey river of loud trucks and slow tankers flowing underneath us. But as the two Mods approached, I knew they wouldn’t go into single file to let me by. So I had to squeeze myself against the sun-hot railing.

‘Got a light?’ grunted the taller one at me.

I swallowed. ‘Me?’

‘Nah, I’m talkin’ to Princess
fuckin
’ Diana.’

‘No.’ I gripped the rail tight. ‘Sorry.’

The other Mod grunted, ‘Poof.’

After the nuclear war, kids like them’ll rule what’s left. It’ll be hell.

Most of the morning’d gone before I found the second antique shop. An arch led into a cobbled square called Hythloday Mews. Wails of far-off babies spiralled round Hythloday Mews. Lacy curtains blew over window boxes. A sleek black Porsche lay waiting for its master. Sunflowers watched me from their warm wall. Here was the sign,
HOUSE OF GILES.
The dazzling outside hid the inside. The door was propped open by a droopy pygmy with a sign round his neck saying,
YES, WE’RE OPEN!
Inside smelt of brown paper and wax. Cool as stones in streams. Murky cabinets of medals, of glasses, of swords. A Welsh dresser bigger than my bedroom hid the deepest quarter from sight. From here, a scratchy noise started up. The noise unfogged itself into radio cricket.

The noise of a knife on a chopping board.

I peered round the dresser.

‘If I’d known I’d end up with
this
mess,’ the dark American woman purred at me, ‘I’d have gotten the freakin’ cherries.’ (She was sort of beautiful but too off another planet to be fanciable.) In her sticky hands dripped a greeny-red fruit the shape of a strange egg. ‘Cherries are the fruit. Pop ’em in, slide out the stone, masticate, swallow,
finito
. None of this…spatter and gore.’

My first words to a real live American were, ‘What fruit’s that?’

‘Know what a mango is?’

‘No, sorry.’

‘Why apologize? You’re English! You don’t know real food from freakin’ polystyrene. Try some?’

You can’t take sweets from pervy men in parks, but exotic fruit from antique shopkeepers is probably okay. ‘Okay.’

The woman shaved off a fat sliver into a glass bowl. She stuck a tiny silver fork into it. ‘Rest your feet a moment.’

I sat on a wicker stool and lifted the bowl to my mouth.

The slippery fruit slid on to my tongue.

God
, mango’s
gorgeous
…perfumed peaches, bruised roses.

‘So what’s the verdict?’

‘It’s absolutely—’

The cricket commentary suddenly went crazy. ‘—
entire audience here at the Oval is on its feet, as Botham notches up another superb century! Geoffrey Boycott is running over to congratulate
—’

‘Botham?’ The woman went to red alert. ‘That’s
Ian
Botham, right?’

I nodded.

‘Shaggy like Chewbacca? Broken Roman nose? Barbarian eyes? Masculinity wrapped in cricket whites?’

‘That’s probably him.’

‘Oh.’ She crossed her hands over her bosomless chest like the Virgin Mary. ‘I would walk on burning embers.’ We listened to more radio applause as we finished the mango. ‘So.’ She carefully wiped her fingers on a damp flannel and switched the radio off. ‘Can I sell you a Jacobean four-poster bed? Or do the tax inspectors keep getting younger?’

‘Uh…have you got an Omega Seamaster please?’

‘An “Oh
meega
Seamaster”? That’s a boat?’

‘No, it’s a watch. They stopped making them in 1958. It has to be a model called a “de Ville”.’

‘Alas, Giles doesn’t do watches, honey. He doesn’t want people bringing them back if they don’t run.’

‘Oh.’ That was it. Nowhere else in Cheltenham.

The American woman studied me. ‘I
may
know a specialist dealer…’

‘A watch dealer? Here in Cheltenham?’

‘No, he operates out of South Kensington. Want me to call him?’

‘
Would
you? I’ve got £28.75.’

‘Keep your cards closer to your chest than
that
, honey. Let me see if I can find his number in this bordello Giles calls his office…’

‘Hi, Jock? Rosamund. Uh-huh. No…no, I’m playing shop. Giles is out vulturing somewhere. Some duchess with a big country house has died. Or a countess. Or a largesse.
I
don’t know, we don’t
do
queens where I come from, Jock, well, not queens who dress like they’re serving life in
fashion prison
…What’s that? Oh, Giles
did
tell me, it was someplace quaint, in the Cotswolds, English-sounding…Brideshead – no, that was the TV series, right? It’s on the tip of my tongue – Codpiece-under-Water…No, Jock, I’d
tell
you if…What’s that?…Uh-huh, I
know
there are no secrets between…Uh-huh, Giles loves you like a brother,
too
. But listen up, Jock. I have a young man here in the shop…Oh,
hilarious
, Jock, no wonder you’re such a pin-up with the London arthritic…This young man is after an Oh
meega
Seamaster’ (she checked with me and I mouthed ‘de Ville’ at her) ‘“de Ville”…Uh-huh. You’re familiar with that model?’

The pause was somehow promising.

‘Oh, you
are
?’

The moment before you win you know you’ve won.

‘In
front
of you? Well, how fortunate I called! Uh-huh…
Mint
condition? Oh, Jock, this is getting
better
…so serendipitous…Listen, Jock, about the shekels…we have a budgetary situation here that…Uh-huh…Yes, Jock, if they stopped making them in the fifties they
must
be hard to come by, I see that…I
know
you’re not a registered charity…’ (She mimed me a yapping yapbird with her hand.) ‘If you didn’t breed like a buck-rabbit with every she-bunny who raises her fluffy tail your way, Jock, you wouldn’t
have
so many children on the brink of starvation. Just give me your best price?…Uh-huh…Well, I think it might…Uh-huh. If he does, I’ll call you back.’

The phone pinged in its cradle.

‘He
had
one? An Omega Seamaster?’

‘Uh-huh.’ Rosamund looked sorry. ‘If you can stretch to £850, he’ll courier it to your house once your cheque has cleared.’

Eight
hundred
and fifty pounds?

‘More mango, honey?’

‘So let me get this straight, Jason. You broke this freakin’ watch of your grandfather’s – quite by accident – in January?’ (I nodded.) ‘And you’ve spent the last eight months scurrying around for a replacement?’ (I nodded.) ‘On the resources of a thirteen-year-old?’ (I nodded.) ‘By bicycle?’ (I nodded.) ‘Wouldn’t it be a whole load easier just to confess? Take your punishment like a man, then get on with your life?’

‘My parents’d
murder
me.
Literally
.’

‘
What’s
that? They’d
murder
you?
Literally
?’ Rosamund sealed in a mock scream with her hands. ‘
Kill
their own offspring? For breaking a freakin’ watch? How did they dispose of your siblings when
they
broke things? Flush them down the john, joint by joint? Doesn’t the plumber find their bones when he unblocks the pipes?’

‘Okay, not
literally
murder me, but they’d go
mental
. It’s like…my greatest fear.’