Moon Pie (20 page)

‘Martha?’

‘Yes?’

‘What’s a scrambler track?’

But Martha didn’t tell him. She was thinking. ‘I think he’s written us lots of letters,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I think he’s written to us every week, telling us what he’s doing, and asking us what we’re doing. And Grandma’s kept all the letters from us.’

‘It was very,
very
naughty of her, wasn’t it?’ Tug said.

Martha was still thinking. ‘I think something else too.’

‘What?’

‘I think he’s stopped drinking.’

E
very day after that they looked for Dad at the park gates on their way home from school. He wasn’t always there, but when he was he would sit with them on a bench for a few minutes, or on the swings in the play area, and talk to them about what he was doing – all the things he had told them about in the letters they never received.

‘Have you written every week, Dad?’ Tug asked.

‘Twice a week.’

The first thing he told them was that he had stopped drinking. ‘Since that night last summer,’ he said. ‘That night the penny finally dropped.’

‘And are you all right, Dad?’ Martha asked.

He shook his head. ‘No. It was right, what you said once. I don’t like it on my own.’

They knew then that he didn’t have another family.

Dad wanted to know what they had been doing, and Tug told him, very honestly, how many flamingos
he had broken (three, so far), and listed, very carefully, all the reasons why he hated Grandma.

‘You shouldn’t blame her, Tug,’ Dad said.

‘Why?’

‘You should blame me.’

Dad wanted to know what Martha had been doing too, and one afternoon she told him about acting in Marcus’s speed films.

‘Acting now?’

‘Yes.’

He looked thoughtful. ‘Which film are you doing at the moment?’

‘Brief Encounter.’

‘Show me.’

‘What, here?’

He nodded.

‘All right. Do you know the bit at the end of the film, when she nearly throws herself in front of the train?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you can hear her thoughts?’

‘Yes.’

She walked away across the play area, past the climbing alphabet, the roundabout and the see-saw, and stopped and turned, and stood there for a
moment. She gathered herself together until she looked different: taller, older and much sadder. She cocked her head on one side and stared at the ground vacantly, as if lost in thought, then slowly lifted her face towards Dad and stared at him. She stared so hard he felt the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. Suddenly she ran towards him, with a look of pure terror on her face as if she were about to throw herself on the ground in front of him, but stopped at the last second and stood there, swaying backwards and forwards, as if she were trying to balance on the edge of something and at any moment might fall. Gradually she became still. Her face was white and dazed, her eyes unfocused. In a voice quite unlike her own – agitated, posh and tender – she began to speak: ‘I meant to do it, Frank. I really meant to do it. I stood there trembling right on the edge. But I couldn’t. I wasn’t brave enough. I should like to be able to say that it was the thought of you and the children that prevented me. But it wasn’t. I had no thoughts at all. Only an overwhelming desire not to feel anything ever again. Not to be unhappy again. Then I turned and went back into the refreshment room.’

And Martha turned, slowly, sadly, but self-controlled, and walked away as far as the climbing frame.

‘What do you think?’ she asked.

Dad just looked at her. She had never seen him look so serious.

‘Wasn’t it very good?’

He said quietly, ‘It’s extraordinary. You’ve got it. Just like she had it. You’re a natural.’ He went over and hugged her.

‘Do you like doing it?’ he asked.

She shrugged. ‘I suppose so.’

‘Why?’

Martha had never thought about that before.

She frowned. ‘It’s odd. When I pretend to be someone else, it feels
right
somehow. As if that’s who I’m really meant to be.’

Throughout April they continued to meet Dad in the park. But their meetings had to be secret. Dad still wasn’t meant to see them.

‘Why?’

‘Well, Tug. There’s a court order. Do you know what a court order is?’

‘Yes. Grandpa didn’t read it. It’s a sort of prison.’

Dad explained about court orders. ‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘You can’t trust me yet. You don’t know me.’

‘When can we trust you?’

‘I don’t know. It takes time.’

‘But when? Next week?’

‘I think we’ll all know when it happens.’

They kept their meetings short, so Grandma and Grandpa didn’t become suspicious. One afternoon, in fact, Grandma and Grandpa unexpectedly came into the park and nearly discovered them, and Dad had to escape behind the café.

(‘Who was that man you were talking to?’ Grandma asked. ‘That man with a beard.’

‘Just a stranger,’ Martha said, and Grandma warned them against talking to strange men with beards.)

Bit by bit Dad told Martha and Tug more about himself. He had spent six months on an alcohol counselling course, he said, and several weeks working with the ‘Children in Need’ team at the Social Services. Now that he was coming to the end of his courses, he had applied for a renewal of his visiting rights. He was also trying to get a job. His life seemed quiet and small and stable.

Martha tried to imagine it. She wanted to believe he’d stopped drinking. She wanted him to be like he used to be, before the drink. But when she saw him in the playground, bearded and frowning in his baggy suit, when he looked at her in that new peering way,
or spoke to her in his new soft voice, he still seemed to be a stranger. She wasn’t sure he would ever truly be Dad again.

Tug’s view was different. He was always asking Martha how soon they could leave Grandma and Grandpa’s and go home, now that Dad was back.

‘Don’t think about that, Tug.’

‘Why?’

‘We don’t know what Dad’s like now. He might not be the same.’

‘Because of the beard?’

‘I wasn’t thinking of that.’

‘But he can shave it away.’

‘Don’t get cross, Tug. It’s nothing to do with the beard.’

‘Then
why can’t he keep it
?’

These conversations often ended in tears.

Tug complained to Dad himself, but Dad was not sympathetic.

‘You have to stay where you are, at least for the time being,’ he said. ‘And you have to do as Grandma and Grandpa tell you.’

But Tug wouldn’t.

‘Soon we’ll be allowed to see each other properly and more often,’ Dad said.

He explained that his application for visiting rights was already submitted, and a decision was due. ‘I’ve had my interview with Alison,’ he told them. ‘And my Alcohol Counsellor has written a recommendation. Now they just need to consult Grandma and Grandpa. So long as they agree, soon we can see each other every day, and you can come and stay at home with me several nights a week.’

But Tug wanted to stay straight away.

‘Good things come to those who wait,’ Dad said. ‘You just have to be patient.’

But Tug could not be patient. Over the next few weeks he was naughtier than ever at school, and at Grandma and Grandpa’s he was openly rebellious. Even Martha told him off. He refused to eat his salad, and watched television after tea, and complained ceaselessly that he was hungry, and helped himself to biscuits from the biscuit tin. He broke a fourth flamingo. When Grandma talked to him, he answered back. And if she sent him to his room to consider Behaviour and How to Improve it, he escaped and went into the garden and climbed trees. He cried and shouted, and spilled more milk on the rug, and every night he wet the bed.

And at last he ran away.

I
t was a Saturday night in the middle of May. Just before going to bed, Grandma found the sole remaining Swarovski flamingo lying on the dining room floor. It wasn’t the whole flamingo. Just the head. It looked up at her from the carpet with a snooty expression.

Carrying the head on the palm of her hand like a relic, she went upstairs in a fury, and into Tug’s room.

‘Young man,’ she said. ‘I would like to know the meaning of this.’

She switched on the light and saw then that the bed was empty.

‘Christopher!’ she called sharply. ‘Come out from there.’

There was silence.

‘Christopher?’ she said.

At that moment she saw the note pinned to the pillow with something else she recognized with horror: a pair of slender rose-pink legs.

‘Christopher!’ she said a third time, very loudly.

Grandpa came hurrying into the room, wearing his dressing gown inside out, and when he had removed his glasses from his dressing-gown sleeve they read the note together. It was not a long note. It said:

Grandma lifted her head and called for Martha.

They searched in Tug’s room and found nothing except for the middle bit of the Flum Mingo in his waste-paper basket. Then they searched the rest of the house, and after that the garden, though this was difficult because it was dark. Grandma’s fury rapidly turned to anxiety.

‘He has left the premises,’ she said. ‘What time is it?’

Grandpa informed her that it was eleven o’clock.

For the twentieth time she asked Martha if she knew anything at all about any of this, and looked at her disbelievingly when Martha said she didn’t.

‘Obviously he has taken himself off,’ she said with a panicky gesture towards the road.

‘Please,’ Martha said. ‘Can we phone the police now?’

They hurried inside, and as they reached the dining room the phone in Grandpa’s study began to ring.

Grandpa answered it. ‘Hello. Ah. When? Yes, right away. One thing before you go. I’m bound to be asked if you had anything to do with any of this. I see. Two minutes.’ He put the phone down.

‘He’s at his father’s house,’ he said. ‘He arrived there just now with nothing but a rucksack full of biscuits.’

‘I didn’t think Christopher could have organized this on his own,’ Grandma said.

‘His father says he had nothing to do with it.’

‘His father says!’ Grandma looked at Martha. ‘Please go and put your clothes on.’ She turned her gaze on Grandpa. ‘Get the car out,’ she said shortly.

At first Martha didn’t recognize their old house. It had been painted. The hawthorn tree was neatly pruned and the wheelie bin was housed in a smart wooden shelter. When Dad let them in, she saw that the inside of the house had changed too. The old carpets had been taken up, and the floorboards sanded
and polished. They glowed with a golden waxy glow. The walls were freshly painted: buttermilk in the hallway, sage green in the front room and cornflower blue in the kitchen. The kitchen had completely changed: there were new terracotta tiles on the floor, and blue-and-white ornamental tiles on the walls above the work surfaces, and new pine cabinets which matched the new pine table. Outside, at the back, the patio was lit up, and through the window Martha could see that it had been rebuilt with pretty sandstone flags. Standing on it was a set of smart wrought-iron furniture painted green.

She didn’t recognize Dad at first either: he had shaved off his beard and he looked much younger: lean-faced and sombre.

Tug was sitting at the new kitchen table. There was pie round his mouth. When he saw Grandma and Grandpa, he got up and came across to them and said gruffly, ‘I’m sorry, Grandma, for running away. It was wrong of me.’ He gave Grandma a box, and looked at Dad, and Dad nodded at him. Then they all went into the front room and Dad brought out a pot of coffee.

Grandma still looked cross, though Martha could tell that the newly-decorated house had impressed her.

She put on her glasses and opened the box. Inside was a Swarovski flamingo.

‘Well,’ she said, and it was impossible to tell what she meant.

Dad said, ‘I bought it some time ago. I had a feeling one might get broken. Now it seems we owe you another.’

‘Well,’ Grandma said, more quietly this time.

Dad began to talk to Grandma and Grandpa, and after a moment Martha asked to be excused and went upstairs with Tug.

‘I want to check something,’ she whispered to him.

‘What thing?’

They went into Martha’s room, and, as she had guessed, it was newly decorated and furnished. There was a high bed above a neat little desk, and a new wardrobe with a big mirror and a sign above it saying
Here’s Looking at You, Kid
. On the desk were some new maths puzzles of the sort Martha liked, and some other games. There were new books on the bookshelves too, and on the wall several large framed black-and-white photographs of film actresses: Audrey Hepburn playing Eliza Doolittle in
My Fair Lady
and Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa in
Casablanca
, and various others. One of them Martha didn’t recognize
at first. She was a strikingly pretty woman wearing tennis whites and holding a racket, and after a moment Martha realized that it was Mum in her role in the television soap opera.

‘Come and look, Martha!’ Tug called excitedly, and she went down the hall to him. His room had been decorated too. The walls were JCB-yellow, and the new carpet was handily earth-coloured. There was a big string bag full of toys in the corner and a pile of books about How to Do Things, and a model kit of a jet aeroplane.

Tug grinned crazily as Martha looked round.

‘But where’s the bed?’ she asked.

‘I knew you wouldn’t find it,’ he said happily. ‘I found it.’ And he pulled a handle in the JCB-yellow wall, and the bed folded out smoothly into the middle of the room.

They heard Dad calling, and reluctantly went downstairs.

He was still talking to Grandma and Grandpa. The conversation was awkward – about court orders, among other things – but Martha noticed how calm Dad was. He was friendly to Grandma and Grandpa, and said how much he appreciated them looking after Martha and Tug.