Human Croquet (18 page)

‘And?’

Gordon shrugs helplessly. ‘He prescribed her some pills, said her nerves were frayed (frayed nerves, what an idea). Poor Debs,’ he adds sadly, ‘it would all be different if she had a baby.’

To make up for not having a baby, Gordon (the person pretending to be Gordon – who knows, she might be right, after all, Charles and I have had our doubts) does the best he can and takes her out for a meal to the Tap and Spile.

Charles has taken the Dog for a walk and Vinny and I are watching
Coronation Street
(Vinny’s a member of the Ena Sharples fan club). She’s preoccupied during the advertising break by the disintegration of her roll-up and keeps picking out shreds of tobacco from her mouth so that she looks like a tortoise trying to eat brown shredded lettuce. She’s got a piece of cigarette paper stuck to her lip as well. She really ought to go back to smoking Woodbines.

‘There’s someone at the door,’ Vinny says without taking her eyes off the television screen.

Vinny is covered in Cats, like someone in a surreal film – three on her lap, one draped around her shoulders, one at her feet. I half-expect to see one on her head in a minute. She could make a tippet out of the next two to die, that would be unusual. (Why do cats sleep so much? Perhaps they’ve been trusted with some major cosmic task, an essential law of physics – such as: if there are less than five million cats sleeping at any one time the world will stop spinning. So that when you look at them and think,
what a lazy, good-for-nothing animal,
they are, in fact, working very, very hard.)

Catskins Vinny picks up a toasting-fork and looks as if she’s about to spear Gigi with it. ‘There’s someone at the door,’ she repeats impatiently.

‘I didn’t hear anyone.’

‘That doesn’t mean there isn’t somebody there,’ she says. (Isn’t this the way the Dog was introduced into the story? I must be having
déjà vu,
one more alarming little snag in the fabric of time, I suppose.)

‘All right, I’m going, I’m going,’ I say when she starts waving the toasting-fork at me.

I open the back door cautiously, you never know what might be walking abroad – it’s nearly Hallowe’en and there is still the vivid memory of Mr Rice to contend with. I’m half-expecting there to be another dog on the doorstep, Arden is all exits and entrances, its thresholds the places where the interesting things happen. It isn’t a dog, however, it’s a cardboard box. Inside the cardboard box is a baby.

My poor heart’s turned into a little rib-caged bird, there’s something exhilarating about finding the baby – like spotting fish in rivers (or foxes in fields or deer in woods) but at the same time finding the baby is terrifying (tigers in trees, snakes in the grass). And the baby isn’t just a mysterious mis-delivery by the baby shop, it brings with it myth and legend – Moses and Oedipus and the fairy’s changeling.

Gingerly, I pick up the whole box, I don’t really want to handle the baby in case I damage it (or vice versa).

‘Look,’ I say to Vinny, holding out the cardboard box for her inspection.

‘Whatever it is, we don’t want any of it,’ she says, pushing it away.

‘No,
look,’
I insist. She lifts one of the flaps of the box and her mouth falls open in disbelief. ‘What is it?’

‘What does it look like?’

Vinny shrinks away from the cardboard box in the same way other people shrink from rodents. ‘A baby?’

‘Yes.’

She shakes her head in bafflement. ‘But why?’ But this is not the time for existential questions, the baby has opened its new eyes and started to bawl. ‘Take it away,’ Vinny says quickly. I place the box on the floor between us so that we can get used to it slowly.

Charles comes back with the Dog and we show him the baby, which has given up crying and gone back to sleep. The Dog sticks its head inside the box and wags its tail enthusiastically but then, unfortunately, starts to lick the baby and it wakes up and starts bawling again. Maybe the Dog can look after it, ‘Like Romulus and Remus?’ Charles says. ‘Or Peter Pan.’ (He knows, he is a Lost Boy himself.) The baby’s crying has reached a critical level but unfortunately the Dog is the wrong sex to succour it.

Charles lifts the baby out of the box as if it’s an unexploded bomb and holds it out from his body with his arms stiff so that the baby, thinking it’s about to be dropped from a great height, starts to scream horribly. Vinny has a tentative go, jiggling it around in a self-conscious way, with a rictus of a smile on her face, but, as you might expect, this only makes matters worse. Luckily, just then Debbie and Gordon come home and although there are a few minutes of complete disbelief, followed by hysteria and ending in furious discussion, the end result is that Debbie ‘will keep the kid’.

‘You can’t
keep
it,’ Gordon says, horrified.

‘Why not?’

‘Because you just can’t. It’s not yours.’ Debbie waves the ruled paper around under Gordon’s nose. ‘What does that
say,
Gordon?’

‘I know what it says, Debs,’ he says gently, ‘but we have to take the baby to the police.’

‘And what will they do with it? Put it in an orphanage that’s what. Or,’ she adds balefully, ‘a prison cell. Nobody wants this baby, Gordon, and somebody has asked
us
to look after it. “Please look after me”, it says so right here.’

‘And what are you going to tell people?’ Gordon asks incredulously.

‘I’ll just say it’s mine.’

‘Yours?’ Gordon asks.

‘Yes, I’ll say it was a home delivery [which I suppose is true]. Nobody will know.’ Debbie
is
fat enough to have had a baby without anybody knowing and you do hear about people giving birth without expecting to – standing at the cooker heating milk one minute, the next – a parent. ‘People believe anything you tell them,’ Debbie says. ‘And we’ll just say, “We’ve been so disappointed in the past that we didn’t want to talk about it too much and spoil our luck.” And look how lucky we are,’ she adds, and starts to make baby talk to the baby that’s such drivel that it drives Vinny from the room. The baby looks as though given half a chance it would be off as well. ‘People don’t
care,
Gordon,’ Debbie says crossly when he starts objecting again, ‘nobody cares what anybody does, not really. You can get away with murder and nobody would notice.’ Gordon flinches and stares at the baby.

I suppose, in a way, it
is
like murder – for every one murder that’s discovered there are probably twenty that pass unremarked. The same is probably true of babies, for every one you hear about that’s been abandoned on a doorstep there are probably twenty taken in with the milk.

‘He’s hungry, poor chap,’ Gordon says, visibly softening.

‘It’s a
her,
silly,’ Debbie says (in her element now), unwrapping her baby gift to show Gordon, for the baby did not come naked to the doorstep of Arden, it came carefully gift-wrapped in a shawl as white as snow and as full of cockleshells as the sea.

Everything dies, but gets transformed into something else – dust, ash, humus, food for the worms. Nothing ever truly ceases to exist, it just becomes something else, so it can’t be lost for ever. Everything that dies comes back one way or another. And maybe people just come back as new people – maybe the baby’s the reincarnation of someone else?

The molecules of one thing split apart and team up with different molecules and become something else. There’s no such thing as nothing, after all – unless it’s the great void of space – and perhaps even there are more things than are dreamt of in our philosophy. (Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.)

Perhaps there are molecules of time that we don’t know about yet – invisible, rarefied molecules that look nothing like ping-pong balls – and perhaps the molecules of time can rearrange themselves and send you flying off in any direction, past, future, maybe even a parallel present.

Eunice is waiting for me at the corner of the street, looking pointedly at her watch – the usual dumbshow of punctual people who want to display their moral superiority to their unpunctual friends (how much easier if the punctual people just turned up late). The clocks have recently changed, a day late in our inefficient household where we never know whether time is going forwards or backwards. ‘Spring forward, fall back,’ Eunice chants. ‘Daylight saving’ – what an amazing idea. (If only you could, but where would you keep it? With the time that’s found? Or the time that’s kept? A treasure chest, or a hole in the ground?)

‘You’re late,’ Eunice says.

‘Better than never,’ I reply irritably. Audrey’s already waiting at the bus-stop. ‘Look,’ I say to her as I spot a red squirrel helter-skeltering around one of the solid sycamores and Eunice is prompted to explain to us in great detail why this is impossible as there are no red squirrels in Glebelands. (Perhaps it’s Ratatosk who runs up and down the great ash Ysggadril?)

Eunice launches into a lecture about the differences between red and grey squirrels when Audrey absent-mindedly ventures, ‘Not just the difference between red and grey then?’

I watch a red-gold leaf drift down and catch on Audrey’s hair. It gives me a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach. I have to say something to Audrey. I have to say something about the baby, about the cockleshell shawl which Debbie handed swiftly over to our waste disposal unit (Vinny), to be burnt on a bonfire and which my memory now questions ever having seen. (‘What happened to that lovely shawl you were knitting for your niece in South Africa?’ I ask Mrs Baxter casually. ‘Oh, I finished it,’ she says, pleased at the memory, ‘and sent it off in the post.’ So there you go.)

‘Here’s the bus,’ Eunice announces as if we can’t see for ourselves the red double-decker steaming up Sycamore Street towards our bus-stop, its final outpost before it turns around and heads back into town.

And then I watch it disappear before my eyes.

‘Hang on a minute,’ I say, turning to Audrey in amazement to see if she’s witnessed this extraordinary vanishing act but, lo and behold, she’s gone too. And Eunice. And the bus-stop and the pavements, houses, trees, aerials, rooftops … the past has come crashing through into the present again without a by-your-leave.

I’m standing in the middle of an impenetrable thicket of Scots pine, birch and aspen, of English elm and wych elm, common hazel, oak and holly, stranded in the middle of a great green ocean. It might not be the past, of course – instead of time-travelling I might simply have travelled – been picked up by some giant, invisible hand and deposited down again in the middle of a great wildwood. But it feels like the past, it feels as if the clocks have gone right back to the beginning of time, the time when there was still magic locked in the land. On the other hand, I can’t have gone back much more than twelve million years, give or take a second or two, if Miss Thompsett’s history of photosynthesis is correct. (
Most of the trees we know today were in existence by twelve million years ago.)

I pick up a leaf skeleton. It is autumn in the past too. The mouldering mushroom smell of decay is in my nostrils. A dark blanket of green ivy covers the ground. It is incredibly quiet, the only sound is birdsong. Even the sweet birds singing hidden in the trees only contribute to the peace in their great forest cathedral. Perhaps I’m not at the beginning of time, but at the end, when all the people have gone and the forest has reclaimed the earth.

I like it here, it’s more restful than the present, wherever that is. I shall gather nuts and berries and make myself a nest in the hollow of a tree and become as nimble as a squirrel in my great sylvan home. Does this forest have an end, does it have distinct boundaries where the trees stop, or does it go on for ever, curling like a leafy shawl around the earth, making an infinity of the great globe?

But then, sadly, I am ripped out of my new Eden by the number 21 bus smashing through the wildwood in a great cracking and splintering of branches, sending leaves flying up in the air. The bus rolls towards me and stops. The ancient wood has vanished. I am back at the bus-stop.

‘Izzie?’ Audrey says, stepping on to the platform of the bus. ‘Come on.’ I climb on board and listen to the conductor ringing the bell and the engine revving noisily and proffer my fare with a sigh. How phlegmatic I am in the face of unravelling time.

I look at Audrey sitting next to me, reading over her French grammar, and say nothing. We all have our own secrets to keep, I suppose.

Why am I dropping into random pockets of time and then popping back out again? Am I really doing it or am I imagining I’m doing it? Is this some kind of episte-mological ordeal I’ve been set? I should never have tried to kill time. I wasted it and now it’s wasting me.

If I had more control it might be useful – I could go back and put all my money on the three o’clock winner at Sandown or patent the electric lightbulb, or any one of the usual fantasies of would-be time-travellers. Or – more thrilling – I could go back and meet my mother. (‘You could meet her now if you had her address,’ Debbie says, rather sarcastically.) I finger the leaf skeleton in my hand – it wouldn’t really stand up as evidence in court, it looks exactly like one I could have picked up a minute ago on the streets of trees.