Come and Tell Me Some Lies (7 page)

Before the flash of anger in his eyes I saw panic and fear, and I was angry too. Why should we have to look after our parents? Why should we have to worry about them? Small and sad, Brodie and I sat at the Formica table, food untouched, ashtray full, a dreadful shared, unspoken fear heavy in the air between us.

Louise parked the embarrassing green van outside the school. We were late, so no little girls stood gazing curiously and sniggering as I arrived. Mummy took me in and handed me over to Miss Neilson, whose browny-red face and knot of white hair reminded me of an onion.

My new school was wonderful. Light bow-windowed classrooms, different coloured exercise books for each subject, a huge playing-field surrounded by chestnut trees, order and punctuality, and best of all, girls. I had never experienced undiluted female company before. I frisked in the soft scented air which surrounded the sixth-formers, and studiously copied the fourth-form fashions in folders and satchels.

On the first day at Rec, the new name I had to learn for playtime, I sat stiff at my desk, willing someone to come and talk to me but at the same time praying for invisibility to observe the bonds of friendship forming between the others. A sturdy girl with the face of a refined bull terrier approached. ‘I've seen you at Pony Club,' she said, and I cringed. I recognized her from a day when Shalimar demolished the doughnut stand at a horse show and Mummy laughed so much that she lay down
on the grass next to him, her dress beaded with sugar from the doughnuts. Humiliated by both pet and parent, I had walked away from the scene.

‘I'm Amelia Letson,' continued the bull terrier. Searching her face for mockery, I found none, and replied, ‘I'm Gabriella Lincoln.'

Another girl, big-boned, blonde, skin the colour of rich cream, moved towards us. ‘Hello. You ride at my aunt's stables, don't you? I've seen you when I've been to tea at Grandma's house.' I recognized her as Sasha Warton and smiled gratefully. We talked about ponies until a bell shrilled in our ears and classes began again.

Each day, after assembly in the hall where wafts of lunch and beeswax polish mingled with teachers' scent and pupils' nail varnish and hairspray, I examined my timetable. Terrified of being late, I ran to the classrooms. The chemistry lab was my favourite room in the school even though I was not good at science. High mahogany tables ran in rows and on each table Bunsen burners were umbilically tethered to hidden gas pipes by yellow tubes. Test tubes gleamed in neat ranks, half-filled with peacock-bright crystals of blue, violet and sulphurous yellow.

Chemistry was like cooking in a well-ordered kitchen but more fun. My chocolate-brown chemistry exercise books were immaculate. I relished their pristine perfection and lost marks for writing on only one side of the page. I left the facing page blank because it looked nice. At the beginning of my third year, the school opened a new three-storey science block and I lost interest in chemistry. The subject had no charm when we sat at plastic-topped desks and worked at low white benches round the
wall. The brown exercise books became blotched and crumpled like all the rest of my work, and I found no pleasure in mixing formulas. The possibility of inventing Frankenstein's monster had evaporated like burned-off copper sulphate in the new sterile surroundings.

Briefly inspired by botany, I made a garden at Mildney. I dug a small patch by the kitchen wall and planted it with mint and tulips. Each day I weeded and tended my patch, gaining satisfaction from the regimental rows of flowers and my manicured expanse of earth. It was a hazardous pastime. The path leading from my garden to the back yard was the boundary of the conceited cockerel Cedric's province, and its prettiness belied the danger lurking in the lupins. Cedric was a bantam. He had long russet feathers which glistened copper and green when he preened. He had a blood-red comb as plump as an ear lobe and a very high opinion of himself.

But like all braggadocios, Cedric was a coward. Camouflaged, he hid in the flower-beds awaiting his victims, the amber bead of his eye glowing malevolently from the foliage. He watched me toiling in my garden and, when my back was turned, sprang, neck extended and wings akimbo. His hooked beak jabbed my ear, his horny spurs scrabbled against my spine and I screamed and ran for the back door. Cedric let go and vanished, a ball of fire tumbling into a distant clump of nettles where he knew he was safe.

Brodie came out with a stick to chase him but Cedric crouched invisible until Brodie turned his back and then he repeated the ambush. He was Brodie's bird, but he ignored the rules of fealty
and attacked his master as much as anyone else. He deserved a gruesome punishment, but the massacre effected by the dogs was too great a price to pay.

Returning from a family outing we bumped up the drive, opening the doors of the car before it had stopped. I ran to greet Honey and my puppy, Miriam. They were newly back from the muck heap. ‘Ugh, you dogs stink.' I edged past them towards the field. Looking back at the house, I noticed dark bundles littered across the grass, inert heaps which from a distance looked like stones. I approached one and gasped. It was Cilla Black, the mother of the Pop Stars, one of our bantam families. Cilla Black's beady yellow eyes were closed, her beak was half open and her little pink tongue protruded pathetically. She lay, her neck twisted awkwardly on the glistening black bulk of her body, dead but still warm. A few yards away, Gary Glitter and Rod Stewart, a pair of young roosters who had been inseparable in life, were heaped together in death, their long tail-feathers trailing like a widow's weeds.

I stood appalled, my mouth a screaming square. No one came. No one came. From all over the garden I heard the shrilling yells and bellows of my brothers as they discovered more corpses. Mummy was crouched over something by the washing line. Leaning over, I saw what she was looking at. Emerald the tame hen, who laid her eggs on the doormat for our convenience and ate from our hands, gently, not with the darting movements which frightened small children, lay panting and trembling at Mummy's feet. Relief washed over me. At least one of them was alive.

Mummy was crying. ‘Those bloody dogs. Those
bloody
dogs.' Miriam loped up, kissed Mummy with her soft tongue and whisked off again.

‘I think she was saying sorry,' I said.

‘Don't you believe it.' Mummy's tone was grim. ‘She's deranged. Honey would never have done this. It's all that puppy's doing.'

We took Emerald into the coal shed and made her a bed on Flook's anorak. We gave her bread and milk and she fluffed up her feathers and regained her low crooning voice. Daddy appeared in the door of the shed with a spade. ‘I'm going to shoot those goddam dogs,' he muttered, ‘but first we must bury the dead.' He stomped off to dig a grave. Brodie and Flook, a drooping hen under each arm, trailed after him to the Wilderness. Twenty-five hens died. Only Emerald and Cedric, whose cowardice had protected him, survived. Cedric was roosting high up in the lime tree squawking hoarsely every two minutes as though he had been hypnotized. He did not come down until the next day. The hens had been frightened to death by Miriam's game. She pranced and barked around each one, whipped into further hysteria by the flying feathers and squawks as the poor foolish hens ran round in circles trying to escape.

Mummy said we had to give Miriam away, and sadly I agreed. She could not go on living in a house with hens, even dead hens. Miriam was taken. Mummy felt a twinge of conscience as she was driven off by her proud new owners, a pair of pigeon-fanciers from Wisbech whom we had told nothing of her crime.

Emerald recovered but the shock had affected her hormones.
Hearing a strangled cry a few days later, I ran out and found her perched on a log trying to crow. Every day she ritualistically made the attempt and, as her crowing improved, long tail-feathers sprouted and her comb grew raspberry red and large like Cedric's. In three months her transformation was complete and Emerald became a cockerel, a fit sparring partner for the insufferable Cedric.

Patrick loved getting up early and he made runny porridge on the Aga. Va Va heard loud classical music blare from the wireless on the kitchen windowsill and ran down to beg Patrick to draw faces on her porridge with trickles of golden syrup. The children knew that Patrick was susceptible to a certain look, eyes wide and innocent.

‘Daddy, can we have biscuits for pudding and then go and buy some sweets at Mr Cardew's?'

‘Anything, loves, anything,' he agreed absently, leaning over the white, cold washbasin in the cloakroom as he shaved.

After breakfast he kissed their sticky faces and shut himself in the study. The children knew they must not disturb him, but would creep to the door and crouch outside on the flagstones, listening as he played back poems he had read into a tape recorder. He sounded different when he talked to them, and Va Va asked why.

Patrick looked grave, but he winked and said, ‘Now my love, you are getting serious.' She had no idea what he meant.

The study was exciting. It was warm and smelt of cigarettes; it was usually forbidden territory, piled high with books and
papers. Va Va sat on Patrick's knee and talked into the tape recorder while Brodie wrote wispy letters in a notebook. Patrick liked the children's interruptions, but one day, when the milkman, the man who drove the Sunshine Bread van and the butcher had all waved cheery good-mornings to him through the window, he took his books and his green chair upstairs and made the big spare room his study.

He hated talking to anyone during the day. He once went to the village shop, and only once. Mr Cardew, the shopkeeper, jaunty in his Camp Coffee apron, greeted him with delight. ‘Mr Lincoln, come for some gaspers, have you?' He rubbed his hands together, beaming. ‘Can't write those poems without something to light the fire, can we?' and he cackled mightily.

Patrick was horrified. He never went to the shop again, but drove five miles to Aylthorpe to buy his cigarettes.

Sasha Warton and I were in the same stream for all classes. To my relief we became friends in the maths class, where my confusion at the problems set was as deep as my surprise at finding myself in division one. For a time my academic career flourished, and I played in the lacrosse team and swam in the swimming team. I conceived a satisfactory notion of myself as prefect material, and sustained it by always standing up when staff came into a room and by smiling winningly at anyone who addressed me.

Sasha's parents were divorced. She lived with her mother during the week, in a small, very clean house near the school. Sometimes I stayed the night with her, revelling in the decadence of central heating and a duvet on the bed. Best of all I avoided the long bus journey home and the punishing dawn rush to catch the bus to school from Aylthorpe. I was envious of Sasha's ordered existence. At weekends, her father collected her from school and drove her to his house. It was near Mildney, so he dropped me off on the way. This was a big worry. Mummy told me it was polite to ask him in, so I did, every time. He always said no, but I was terrified that one day he would say yes, and see
how very different our kitchen was from the shiny bright new one I had seen in his house.

Richard Warton was the only son of Lord and Lady Warton. He lived in a moated red-brick mansion a mile from Mildney and drove a blue sports car. An admirer of the arts, he filled the medieval rooms of his house with contemporary paintings, and textiles woven from the wool of his own sheep. He invited my father to give a reading there. Mummy and Daddy took me with them, and we arrived at Felt Hall in Mummy's mini-van, puffing black billows of smoke like a smouldering dragon. I was very pleased that my parents were visiting a school friend's parents, but my knees shook with fear in case Daddy shouted at Richard Warton. In the Great Hall Mummy and I pressed together, embarrassed and nervous in the yawning space. We moved towards a wall, its polished panelling scarred by deep scratches. I traced my fingers down the wounds, imagining marauding knights hundreds of years ago.

Beside us was an open fireplace surrounded by delicate blue and white tiles, and in the near distance a squad of grey plastic chairs huddled in the middle of the flagstoned floor. Daddy sat at a table facing the chairs. Whispering and scraping the floor, a tide of scrubbed women and overweight men seeped on to the chairs, corduroy-covered bottoms overflowing. Others, hesitating over where to sit, caused an eddy in the stream before plunging to a chair stranded on the perimeter of the group. Some of these people I recognized as other parents from school, and pride, mixed with resentment at their gazing at Daddy as though he were an exhibit, choked my lungs.

Richard Warton sat next to Daddy at the little table, leaning
towards him and talking while people sat down. I watched Daddy's face anxiously, waiting for his brow to furrow and his mouth to turn down at one corner in anger. But he was laughing. He put his cigarette out in his glass. Richard leapt up to find him an ashtray.

When all the chairs were full, and some people were standing at the back, Richard stood up. His grey wavy hair curled down to his shoulders, and he wore brown plus-fours and thick patterned socks. He looked like Lord Emsworth showing off the Empress of Blandings. Mummy and I, sitting together at the front, giggled nervously.

‘We are delighted to have with us this evening Patrick Lincoln, one of the greatest poets of this century. Many of you may know him already as a neighbour, for Patrick lives a mile from here at Mildney with his family,' and Richard beamed a big-toothed white smile and sat down.

Daddy stood up. He came round to the front of the table, leaned against it and crossed his feet. ‘This is a beautiful house,' he said. ‘Now let's get this reading lark over and done with. I shall read to you from a new poem.' Daddy reached into the top pocket of his jacket and took out a notebook. The audience tittered uneasily, stopping abruptly when Daddy raised his cupped hand to shoulder height. He began to read.