Mr Toppit (2 page)

In the second book,
Garden Green
, in which Mr. Toppit’s influence begins to be felt, this is what happens:

Luke Hayseed was not sure if night was drawing to a close or if day was drawing to an open. At any rate, he sat bolt upright in bed. He knew that Mr. Toppit had been in his room
.

Mr. Toppit had not come through the window. Luke had left the window closed—he always did, not that Mr. Toppit would ever have been so obvious as to come through the window. But he had been in the room—Luke knew that. He knew it because of the bee. On Luke’s bedside table, beside the goose-necked lamp, was a dead bee with one wing off, its body
curled up, its zebra-striped fur looking dull and dusty. Now, there were often dead insects lying casually around the house without a care in the world—flies or woodlice or silverfish or earwigs or sometimes even butterflies. But this particular bee did not have the air of not having a care in the world. It had a curious preciseness. Not for this insect was there the spontaneity of lying down and dying where it felt like it. This bee had been positioned for effect
.

With Mr. Toppit nothing was ever simple, and normally there was more than one clue to what he wanted. Luke got out of bed. The room was cold, and in his pajamas he felt rather exposed, even though he knew that clothes alone were no particular protection against Mr. Toppit
.

The giveaway—not that Mr. Toppit ever precisely gave anything away—lay in the doorway and Luke found it in a second. Too easy, he was already thinking, but he could not help bending down and picking up the sprig of lavender that lay on the carpet. He brought it up to his nose, and smelled what was left of its smell, which was nothing much
.

It clearly purported to have been lying there for some time, as if it had dropped casually from a vase of old flowers that was being cleared out of his room. Except there were never flowers in his room—actually, there were never flowers in the house, even though the garden was full of them. The flowers did not seem to travel well, certainly not into the house. The garden was a different world, and too close—for Luke’s liking—to Mr. Toppit’s domain of the Darkwood
.

But Luke knew what he must do, for by this time he had begun to know what Mr. Toppit wanted from him, even though he did not always know why. He knew what the connection between the bee and the lavender was. It came to him, as he stood in his pajamas, as he stood in the doorway, as he stood knowing what danger he was in
.

   Actually, this is one of the most famous moments in the books—one that defines the warm glow of collective memory,
particularly when shared between strangers on long-haul flights unfortunate enough to be hijacked by terrorists.
“Hayseed
Kept Us Sane, Say Plane Hostage Survivors,” one headline ran, after the plane that had languished on the runway of a disused military airstrip in the desert for three days had finally been liberated. And on the news the two survivors in question, a vet from Portsmouth and a lay preacher in a Seventh-Day Adventist church, their faces shiny with relief, told the camera crew how they had coped with their ordeal.

“Christ, I thought we were done for,” the vet whoops, his face blurring as the cameraman tries to hold focus. The Seventh-Day Adventist composes himself amid the airport pandemonium and just manages to check a little grimace at the use of “Christ,” although I imagine being stuck on a plane for three days alongside 280 other passengers in ninety-degree heat with four clogged lavatories would be enough to test the faith of any preacher, lay or otherwise.

“When Mustapha—that’s what we called the head guy, the one with the big gun and the orange mask—took the old woman and shot her in the cockpit, we thought it was over for all of us. Everyone was screaming and Jonathan,” he nudged his new friend, so we would know who he was talking about, “Jonathan turned to me, we hadn’t talked much, nobody had talked much since … you know, and he said, ‘Do you remember Luke Hayseed and the bees?’ and it kind of broke the ice and we both laughed. It was just the way he said it.”

Jonathan, anxious for his moment in the sun, cuts in here: “Whenever I’m tested, I think of that moment when he’s crossing the lawn with the bees in his hand”—the vet’s head bobbing up and down, “Yeah, yeah”—“and somehow things don’t seem so …” What, Jonathan, what? I need to know this, but at that
very moment a stretcher, carried by a gang of medics, crashes into the frame at some speed, almost knocking the two men over.

You can’t hear what the interviewer says next, even though the boom is hovering at the top of the frame like a mangy cat. The vet leaps into action: “My family, my kids, see my mum and dad. Have a bath. And I’m going to get that video—show my kids.” Then Jonathan and the vet beam at each other, friends for life, linked by their shared recollection of brave Luke and the Bees.

I watched gobsmacked: while it was true that the bee sequence in the television series was frightening—much more so than in the book—it seems to me, as the one who did the transporting, that, in perspective terms at least, a group of terrorists strutting up and down the aisle of the stranded plane brandishing a prodigious amount of firepower, which they had not hesitated to use, both on the old lady in the cockpit and on two hapless Dutchmen whose bodies had been dispatched through the emergency doors, marginally had the edge over the bees.

But what do I know? I’m only Luke Hayseed—and it’s true that when the video of the TV series was first released, there had been a brief flurry of excitement when a national newspaper had taken up a crusading teacher’s campaign to ban any videos that contained sequences disturbing to children. Her blacklist included the
Hayseed
videos, at which her anger was particularly directed because her six-year-old son had apparently been stung by a bee
while actually watching that episode
. The absurd coincidence of this seemed to escape her, but the boy now screamed uncontrollably if he saw a television set because who knew what beast might come out of it next and attack him?
“This could happen to any child,”
she told an afternoon chat-show host, her voice trembling with indignation.

I loved it. Lila, our self-appointed archivist, scanned the papers daily for all references to this extraordinary debate and Xeroxed them in quadruplicate: a copy each for Martha, Rachel, me, and one—most importantly—for what Lila called “The Big Book of Hayseed,” leatherbound and stored always in her apartment. I basked in a warm glow: at last, some justice in the world—years of expensive therapy for a generation of children weaned on the video, hands over their eyes, just a crack open between their pudgy fingers, screaming, “They’re going to sting him! They’re going to sting him!” as the buzzing reaches a crescendo on the soundtrack, if not in the very room they are sitting in.

And on the screen, Luke 3—let’s get the pecking order right: I am Luke 1, Lila’s version is Luke 2, and Toby, the boy actor whose career took such a spectacular downturn after the series ended and who now has AIDS rumors circling around him like vultures (“Gaunt Appearance of TV’s Luke Hayseed—Shock Pictures”), is Luke 3—teeters through the garden, his brave-but-frightened face intercut with closeups of superbees the size of rats, whose stings could clearly fell a giant.

Spot the difference, spot the mistake. It is this: plucky, spunky Luke 3 overcomes his natural fear (knowing what danger he is in) to perform this terrifying and thankless task for the unsatisfiable (as it turns out) Mr. Toppit.

Luke 1, for whom pluck and spunk are strangers from beyond Venus, performs this task without either bravery or fear. He does it because he knows it to be right, and the very certainty of the act gives it a dignity so lacking in Luke 3 that it takes your breath away.

But the point for me is this: they were my bees and I do not remember offering them up to the world.

• • •

There was a family. There was us. My father and mother, and Rachel and Luke, the Hayman children who became the Hayseed children. Rachel handled it quite differently from me but, then, her problems were quite different from mine.

The last time I saw Rachel properly, when she was in one of the many clinics she had got to know so well, taken like a favored diner in a restaurant to her usual table, when she was in denial or in recovery or in remission or in relapse or hovering in a place she had made uniquely her own—the cusp between all of them—she had at last reached a state of complete impasse: she had stopped doing anything at all.

What she wanted, I think, was to stay in one place in her head. Claude said once, “Rachel has drug dealers like other people have accountants or dentists.” He knew because he had introduced her to them. For years, she was always going down or up, taking drugs to feel good or taking drugs to stop feeling bad, conscious like a chess player of each move, and each move beyond that, trying always to second-guess her body and altering her moves to achieve the perfect combination that would keep her in that one place. I think the permutations finally became too many for her to cope with, spinning off into space, dividing and subdividing with terrifying rapidity. Everything altered everything else—a cigarette smoked, a dress worn, a line snorted, a door opened, a preference stated, a road crossed—until the only way she could see of just
being
was to do nothing at all, to sit in a chair absolutely silent.

The nurse who took me to her room told me she was quite cooperative over feeding—would allow herself to be fed, that is—and was lifted in and out of bed with no resistance.
However, she would not look at anyone, or answer a question directed at her. If forced to do something she did not want to do, she would cover her eyes and ears with her hands and curl up in a ball, but make no sound. I did not ask about the lavatory arrangements because I suspected that nappies might come into it.

It had been a long time since I had seen her. She was sitting in a straight-backed armchair staring out of the window, but when I knelt down in front of her and took her hand, I could see that her eyes were not really focusing on anything. “Are you going to talk to me, Rach?” I asked her. “You don’t have to.”

Clearly, she was not going to, but maybe she made some small acknowledgment that I was there, a gentle squeeze of my hand. Or maybe not. It was hard to tell.

What a consummate theatrical pro, I suddenly thought. I knew and she knew. We were back playing a game—who can stare longest without smiling: a game we had often played as children. But this was clearly not to be acknowledged now she was surrounded yet again by a phalanx of shrinks trying to coax her back into some semblance of normality, paid for—to my mother’s fury—by the cascade of royalties from the books, the pencil boxes, and the eggcups.

“We could call this chapter of your life ‘Homage to Catatonia.’ What do you think?” I said. No response. “ ‘Portrait of the Autist as a Young Woman’ ”?

Did the corners of her mouth turn up a little? I considered tickling her ribs—she had always been responsive to that as a child—but then I thought she should be allowed to keep her dignity, if that was the word for it.

Then I saw something odd. Under her chair, the corner of a book was peeping out and I recognized it instantly from the bit
of the jacket I could see. It was
Darkwood
, the last of the series, with Lila’s illustration of Luke’s back and head bathed in a celestial yellow light, dwarfed by a huge and menacing wall of trees parting in front of him to reveal a strange glow in the darkness.

I picked up the book and brought it to Rachel’s face. “Is this yours? Are you reading it?” She did not reply. Now, this raised an interesting question: was Rachel only in her mute and immobile state behind closed doors? The moment the shrinks and doctors left the room, did she dive into a secret life, reliving happy
Hayseed
days, turning the pages of the book with the kind of fervor she normally reserved for her other secret lives?

Or had one of the relief nurses, not knowing Rachel’s precise condition and believing she was dealing with an amnesiac, tried to surround her with familiar things to jolt her memory? If it had been somebody else, it might have been a favorite song, say, or a recording of a loved one’s voice on permanent loop, like a saccharine-speaking clock, a selection of family photographs placed close to the bedside so that when those unseeing eyes eventually focused, their gaze would fall on brightly colored images of this summer or that Christmas, smiling babies or loving parents.

But Rachel did not want to wake up to her old life. The state she was in now was the good bit. She wanted, if she could, to wake up as someone else, somewhere else. Surround her with familiar things—straitjacket her under the
Hayseed
duvet and pillowcase set, blast the excruciating “Luke’s Theme” down headphones into her ears, force-feed her through a tube from the
Hayseed
cereal bowl and mug combo—and you probably couldn’t kick-start her to save your life. Put her on a spaceship, people it with beings from a different solar system who speak no known language, and you might have a chance.

Up the corridor there was a kind of recreation room where I waited to see Dr. Honey, Rachel’s doctor. At the other end a circle of people was sitting on chairs. One of them was weeping rather noisily, and the others were staring at him in silence. I hated this place.

As I watched, a boy looked up at me from his chair. He must have been about eighteen. “Group,” he said, with an apologetic smile.

“Sorry?”

“Therapy.”

He was staring at me and I turned away. Behind him, on the wall, was a large pinboard. I couldn’t quite make out what was on it, but as I moved closer I saw that it was filled with neatly arranged rows of Polaroid mugshots.

“Rachel’s there. You’ll see her if you look,” he said.

I scanned them and, sure enough, there was one of Rachel. Her face was overexposed and drained of color. Her eyes were closed. A chill came over me: she looked like a corpse.

“Before,” the boy said. I turned back to him, unsure what he meant. “When we come in they take one. It’s the clinic version of being fingerprinted. They take an After one when you leave. There’s not always a lot of difference.” He indicated the chair next to him. “You can wait here if you want. I’m Matthew Sumner.”