Millions (3 page)

I didn’t like to tell him I was still awake. I just lay on my side so he wouldn’t be able to see my face. I thought he’d go away then, but he didn’t. He sat on the edge of the bed for a while. Then he tugged the collar of my pyjamas down at the shoulder. He was looking at the scratches. When he finally got up to go, I whispered, ‘Dad, are you OK?’

‘Are you awake?’

‘Yes.’

‘Go to sleep.’

‘OK.’

‘Damian . . .’

‘Yeah?’

‘What happened to your back?’

‘Just some holly, you know.’

‘Damian. Be good, won’t you? Be really good.’

‘That’s what I’m trying to be. That’s what I’m trying to be all the time.’

‘I know it is, son. I know that.’

Then he went. After a while I heard the toilet flush. Then I got back on to the floor.

It’s not as easy to be good as you might think. For instance, on the Monday the doorbell rang just after Dad had gone to work. Now, we’re not supposed to answer the door when Dad isn’t there. On the other hand, it was time to go to school. So it was a moral dilemma – answer the door (disobedient) and be on time for school (good), or don’t answer the door (good) and be late for school (bad). Anthony doesn’t think about these things. He just headed for the door, pulling his blazer on. I stopped him.

‘Dad said not to answer the door.’

‘It’s twenty to,’ he said. ‘ We’re going to be late.’

Then whoever it was rang the doorbell again.

‘But Dad said not to!’ I was shouting now. It was making me panicky. ‘Dad said not to do it and we’re supposed to be being good!’

Anthony took a deep breath and said, ‘OK. This is what we do. Get your bag. We’ll leave for school. If there’s someone outside, then they’re just a coincidence. We’re not answering the door. We’re going to school. All right?’

‘All right.’ Anthony is very good at sorting out moral dilemmas when he tries.

The coincidence was a man in a white shirt with a
South Park
tie and a plastic name badge saying, ‘Terry – IT’. ‘I’m from that one there,’ he said, and pointed at the house on the bend.

Anthony looked at the house. ‘The corner position gives you extra garden, which is an asset, but you’ve no off-road parking, which is a definite disadvantage in this market.’

‘Is your dad in?’

‘Gone to work.’

‘Your mum?’

‘Dead,’ said Anthony.

‘Oh.’

Terry put his hands in his pockets, as though he was looking for something to give us. Anthony watched the pockets expectantly, but Terry didn’t seem to be able to find anything.

‘Can you give your dad a message?’

‘Sure.’

‘We haven’t met. I leave for work before most people get up, but tell him if he wants to come over tonight, about seven o’clock, then cool. Most people will be there.’

‘Can we come too?’

‘Yeah. Sure. Hey, look at this.’ He fiddled with his tie and it played the
South Park
theme tune, which was quite surprising.

‘Who the hell is Terry?’ Dad was getting agitated.

‘Terry – IT over the road. He said to come at seven.’

‘Come what for? A party? Supper? A game of Monopoly? Help him move a wardrobe?’

‘He’s got a tie that plays tunes and he said, “Cool.” We think it’s a party.’

‘Meet-the-neighbours type of thing.’

‘What time is it now? I’ll have to go and get a bottle.’

‘No need. We’re baking a cake. Is that OK?’

‘I’m surprised.’

‘Surprised and pleased? Or surprised and disappointed?’

‘Surprised and pleased that you’ve taken this opportunity to be excellent.’

It was my idea to bake the cake. When we got in from school, I’d said to Anthony, ‘This is an opportunity to be excellent. Let’s bake a cake.’

He was against it on the grounds that we didn’t know how. But I remembered baking cakes loads of times in the past. It was one of the things I remembered a lot. Sometimes I even dreamed about it. I said, ‘Put the oven on to 200º,’ and we got cracking. We’d taken 110 grams of flour with 50 grams of margarine, two spoonfuls of water and a pinch of salt, mixed them and put them in the fridge to rest for twenty minutes, and that’s as far as we’d got. The patron saint of bakers, by the way, is St Agatha of Catania (c 250).

Dad took the bag out of the fridge and said, ‘This is brilliant, but it isn’t cake. It’s pastry.’

I realized then that my memory wasn’t about cakes, it was about quiche. It’s sad and worrying to think that you can forget bits of your favourite memory.

On the brighter side, pastry is more versatile than cake, because you can make it into a tart. We made one using the apples we were supposed to eat after supper. We sliced and sugared them, fanned them out on the pastry base, put them in the oven and went to wash our hair. The smell of baking apples filled the house. We sat at the top of the stairs, just smelling it, while Dad sorted out our smart clothes. Luckily we’d worn them yesterday and they hadn’t gone into the wash yet. Dad spruced them up with an iron and a sponge. He combed my hair, then stood back, looked at the two of us and went, ‘Excellent. Truly excellent. Let’s party!’

‘Can we have a bit of the tart first? Or some toast? Anything? We’re starving.’

‘Hunger is the best sauce. There’ll be food there.’

I carried the still-warm tart across the Close. Terry waved us in and took the pie off me.

Dad said, ‘I’ve been hearing all about your tie.’

Terry made it play the tune again. We laughed, but the tune went on longer than the laugh and we all had to stand for a while listening to the tie.

‘Well, that’s all, folks,’ said Terry when it finally finished. ‘The others are in the living room.’

The others were four very clean men in white shirts and one bald tatty man in an old suit. They were all sitting in a circle, holding bits of paper. The tart was not in there and neither was any other food.

The man in the suit shook Dad’s hand and said, ‘Welcome to the Portland Meadows Homewatch. I’m your community police officer – Eddie. Obviously there is no community here yet, but you know what I mean. I’m here when you need me – whether it’s for advice or help or just a cup of tea.’

Dad sat down and we sat on each side of him.

‘I’ll be honest with you – we’ve got Christmas coming up; these are new houses. Statistically, you are going to get done. When you do, you give me a call. I give you a crime number and you claim on your insurance.’ And he handed round some little cards with his phone number on.

Anthony nudged me, pointed to his stomach, then his head, and made little scissory movements with his fingers. He was miming, ‘My stomach thinks my throat is cut.’ I knew, because my stomach was feeling the same way. To make matters worse, we could still smell the tart sitting out in the kitchen, all on its own.

Terry leaned forward. We leaned forward too. Maybe this was it. But instead of offering us food, he started on about his stereo. ‘You see, this baby cost me close to three grand.’ He pointed to a spaghetti of wires and cables sprawling around the room. ‘I put it together myself. I spent ages deciding what to get, scoping out the best deals. That is part of me. If someone nicked that, I don’t know what I’d do. It’d be like losing part of me. It’d be like a forced amputation. And the same with the computer, obviously. I mean, my memories are in there and my soul. If I lost that, it’d be like a bereavement. They’re part of me, my belongings.’

He didn’t mention any edible belongings.

‘You can get an alarm or a dog,’ said the community police officer. ‘If you make it hard for them, they’ll move on to the next house. In this case, your neighbour’s house. Some of you might feel that that’s a bit antisocial. I don’t know.’

‘Yeah, but I worked for this house, you know. This is me, this house. If I could—’

One of the very clean young men leaned forward and said, ‘Isn’t the problem here that our houses are built on sand?’

Dad sat up suddenly. ‘Sand? They’re not, are they? No, no. I was here when the footings were dug.’

The policeman said, ‘I think we’re talking metaphorically here, aren’t we? It’s in the Bible, isn’t it – not building your house on sand, not putting your light under a bushel, all that.’

‘That’s right,’ said the cleanest young man. ‘Matthew, Chapter 7, Verse 26.’

‘D’you mind me asking,’ said the policeman, ‘is the kettle actually on?’

Terry went out to the kitchen. While he was gone, the policeman said to the clean young men, ‘So, at a guess, Mormons.’

‘Latter-day Saints,’ said one of the men. ‘People call us Mormons, but we prefer Latter-day Saints. I’m Eli. This is Amos and that’s John.’

This was exciting. ‘You’re saints!’ I said.

‘Latter-day Saints.’

‘But saints, though.’

The community police officer starting shuffling his papers and asked if there were any questions.

I put my hand up and asked, ‘What exactly is a virgin martyr?’

Dad coughed and said, ‘It’s something they’ve been doing in school. Damian, why don’t you go and help Terry in the kitchen. Anthony, you too.’

In the kitchen, Terry was spooning instant coffee into a mug. That’s just one mug. The apple tart was on the side. We’d put cinammon on it and some raisins. It smelt like a mixture of Christmas and summer. It was sitting on the side with no one bothering it. It was not going anywhere.

‘Dad said we had to come and help you.’

‘It’s just a mug of coffee. There’s nothing to do.’

It really was just one mug of coffee. My tummy made a noise almost as if it heard him. ‘You could go and ask that copper if he takes sugar.’

Anthony didn’t move. ‘Our mum’s dead. Did we tell you?’

‘Yeah. Yeah, you did,’ said Terry. This time he went for his cupboard. It was stuffed with big party packs of crisps. From somewhere underneath them, he pulled out two Penguins. He offered them to us, saying, ‘Here, take these. Save them for home. I don’t want crumbs on my carpet.’

On the way home, Anthony flashed his Penguin at me and said, ‘Result. Told you. Works every time.’

I said, ‘Are you sure it’s completely honest?’

‘She’s completely dead, isn’t she?’

Of course I knew that already, but no one had ever been so biological before.

When Dad caught up with us he said, ‘You two were great tonight. I’m going to buy you anything you want from the chippy.’

Anthony wanted spring rolls and then chicken in black bean sauce. Somehow I wasn’t hungry. Even when Dad took me inside the chippy and showed me the menu, nothing really caught my fancy. I wasn’t hungry any more.

When we got home, Dad and Anthony started to eat their food straight from the polystyrene trays. I went and got plates and knives and forks.

‘Damian, don’t bother. It’s late. We don’t want to be clearing up. Here, have some rice.’

I just carried on setting the table.

‘Damian . . .’

‘We’ve got to do things properly. That’s the point.’

‘What point?’

‘You said we’ve got to do things properly. We’ve got to be excellent. You said. And now you’re eating out of the trays. We didn’t used to do that before.’ I was shouting now. ‘Sit at the table!’

Dad tried to calm me down. ‘Damian, you think you’re upset, but really you’re just hungry.’

‘I’m not hungry. I just want us to sit at the table like a proper family. And do things right.’

‘I will if you eat a bit – like a proper family.’

‘OK, then.’

Dad came and sat at the table and gave me some chow mein.

Anthony said, ‘Why can’t you just act normal?’

Dad said, ‘Things aren’t normal, are they? So how can we act normal?’ And he took one of Anthony’s spring rolls and gave it to me.

It was horrible. It had cabbage in instead of bean sprouts. But it made me feel a bit better.

I think it was the spring roll that stopped me sleeping properly. I kept waking up from these dreams (which I don’t want to talk about). I even got back into bed after a while to see if being comfortable made a difference, but it didn’t. As soon as it was light, I sneaked off down to the hermitage.

When I looked inside, there was someone there – a tall, bony woman with bright blue eyes. I knew who it was right away. I said, ‘St Clare of Assisi (1194–1253).’

She smiled and said, ‘Is right.’ She looked around. ‘I like a hermitage. Had one myself once.’

‘I know.’

‘Used to go and hide myself away up there. Anyone needed me, I’d send them a vision. Sort them out.’

‘Be good to be able to do that. I could stay here and send a vision of myself to school.’

‘It’s a skill not everyone has. I was unusual. I was like human television. That’s why I’m the patron saint of television. For my sins. Well, for my virtues, shall we say? You see all sorts on there now. Mind you, nothing shocks me any more. Keeps me busy, though. That’s why I like a hermitage.’

‘Our house seemed a bit, you know, inappropriate. Compared to St Simeon’s column or St Ursula and her 11,000 holy companions.’

She gave a snort. ‘The 11,000 holy companions are a mistake in the translation. I wouldn’t let them keep you awake at night. There were only ever eleven of them, if the truth be told.’

‘But there are thousands of people up there with you?’

‘Tens of thousands. Dozens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Millions even.’

‘Only I did wonder if you’d ever come across a St Maureen?’

She thought for a while. But the answer was no. Then again, as she said, it is infinite up there. ‘Absolutely infinite. In my Father’s house are many mansions. John, Chapter 14 .’

I said, ‘Verse 2.’

She said, ‘Is right.’ And then she was gone.

Given the choice, I wouldn’t have picked St Clare for my first vision. But obviously she’s a good saint and she was very interesting to talk to. And any kind of vision is exciting. So, to be philosophical about it, it made me happy.

One of the big changes that has happened to women since the Middle Ages is skin care. St Clare had very dry skin, with little red veins in her cheeks. My mum used to wear a tinted moisturizer. It nourished her skin and it provided a good, light base for make-up. She worked on the Clinique counter in Kendal’s, in Manchester. Part of her job was to look more beautiful than normal mothers. She used to wait for us at the school gates. When we got home she used to take the moisturizer off with a piece of cotton wool. She used to call it ‘peeling her face’. Anyway, one day she wasn’t at the school gates at Home Time. We waited and waited and Mrs Deus, the secretary, phoned one of the normal mothers, who came and took us back to her house instead. After a while, Dad came to collect us and he kept saying thank you and also, ‘She’s in the best place.’