The Bluebird Café (11 page)

At 7.15 Lucy and Fennel discovered Paul on the bathroom floor, lying under a towel. His head was resting peacefully on the scales and weighed one and a half stone. Fennel licked his salty face and headbutted him. Lucy knelt down and put her hand on his cheek.

‘I think you'd be more comfortable in bed,' she said.

All he could say was: ‘Gnu.'

She went to the all-night garage, Vir's being out of the question, and bought milk of magnesia, Tums in five fruit flavours, some Alka-Seltzer and a packet of Clorets for them to share.

‘There,' she said, tipping her haul on to the bed. ‘Which would you like first?'

‘Alka-Seltzer,' said Paul, ‘and tea?'

‘It can't be anything you ate,' Lucy told him, a note of impatience in her voice. ‘I'm perfectly all right.'

‘I'm not being ill on purpose,' he told her hostile back as she stomped away to make the tea. She brought him the tea in his favourite yellow mug, not considering how like the colour of cauliflower curry it was, and a piece of dry toast. Her own fat wedge was smeary with butter and Marmite.

‘I do feel a bit funny too,' said Lucy. ‘Perhaps we shouldn't open today, we might poison the customers.' She knew it was the thin end of the wedge, the first step on the slope of only opening when she felt like it, but she didn't care.

John Vir heard sirens in the night. They called to him through the darkness, luring him to the window. He leaned out and craned his neck to see where they were. There were lights on at the Bluebird Café, but no ambulance arrived. ‘Damn,' he said, and cracked the back of his head on the window frame. A fox was tearing open the bin bags and strewing garbage across the pavement outside the shop. Its coat glowed double orange under the street lights. Leftover catfood and stale samosas made for sleek, fit foxes. John Vir wondered whether it preferred the meat ones or the veggie ones. Meat probably; they were spicier.

Paul's attack of food, poisoning lasted for two days. It left him paler and thinner.

‘My belt's on the third notch,' he told Lucy for the fifth time. Lucy wished she'd had it. She thought that she ought to lose half a stone. She'd been thinking that since she was nineteen.

Paul refused to go into Vir and Vir for a week, too
embarrassed to say thank you for the meal that he thought had nearly killed him. Lucy went round with a bunch of anemones for Shreela, but she was too late. Shreela had gone back to London.

‘Oh, you keep them,' she told John Vir. ‘I can't take them away again.'

‘Get a vase or something, Gurpal.' He jabbed at his daughter with the flowers. Gurpal came back a few minutes later with an empty Hoist curry powder tin and plonked the arrangement on the shelf behind the till, in front of the Rizlas and the Red Band. Lucy knew that a bunch of desiccated stalks would mock her for ever.

John Vir knew that something must have happened to Paul. Nobody could eat that much MSG and not be ill. For a while he hoped that Paul might have died and Lucy not have realised or bothered to do anything about it. Then he spotted Paul cycling past. It seemed that he'd have to think of something else. He started to make a list on the bottom of his Cash and Carry one.

1. Run him over with the van.

2. Different poisoning.

3. Push him off a train or a cliff.

4. Fight in a pub.

5. Bribe him to leave.

It occurred to him that perhaps he didn't have to get rid of Paul; perhaps he could come between them, lure her away, get her out of that café and into his arms. Gurpal plonked herself down on the counter.

‘Fat chance,' he said.

‘What?'

‘Nothing.'

‘Dad, can I have 50p?'

‘No.'

‘Why not?'

‘Just no.'

‘What'd'ya bother having me for if you won't even give me 50p?'

Perhaps she'd like to go and visit her mother. Without noticing what he was doing he punched the Cash button. Gurpal's hand shot forward to grab a few coins.

Summer was good for business. Despite Gilbert's continual presence the Bluebird was flourishing. The tables were sometimes full, and they were making a bit more of a profit. They bought another freezer and began to sell ice creams through the window. Lucy found the supplier with the prettiest of flavours and chocolate-lined cornets, New Forest Ice Cream. They wished that the pavements were wider so that they could put some tables outside. Teague kept pointing out that they were selling ice creams on one of the oldest roads in Wessex. It had been a Roman road, and a Saxon one too. Lucy needed more help. Paul was being elusive, in demand at the Badger Centre, covering for the centre manager who had now moved to East Anglia, having been off sick for a month with a suspected slipped disc, probably caused by trying to move the beehive all by herself. Abigail was at a crucial stage, so she said, with her research. Lucy made a notice on some cardboard, cut in the shape of a fat pigeonish bluebird. PART-TIME GENERAL ASSISTANT AND ICE-CREAM SALESPERSON REQUIRED. APPLY WITHIN.

But the first applicant was already inside and had watched the notice go up.

‘Is that a new notice, Paul?'

‘Er, yes, Gilbert.'

‘For some more artists to bring their pictures in for you to put up?'

He read the ad to Gilbert. He had noticed that Gilbert was a bit hazy around words.

‘Paul,' said Gilbert, ‘I can certainly help you out some more. I'd like to work for you some more. Would I be good enough for the job?'

‘Well, I'll have to ask Lucy. I'm not sure what she's looking for, the hours might be wrong for you, it is her café, she's the boss of it …' He put the notice up in the window and strolled nonchalantly into the kitchen, where out of sight, he knelt on the floor and banged his head again and again against the chiller. Lucy came in carrying an ice-cream scoop.

‘Mr Heathcliff, I presume,' she said, then knelt beside him and cradled his head in her arms so that he had to stop. Paul looked up at her. She was flooded with love. He reminded her of Fennel.

‘What's wrong?' She hardly ever asked him that.

‘Gilbert wants the job.'

‘No way,' said Lucy. ‘Just no way. Absolutely not.'

They told Gilbert that he'd have to wait – it was only fair – someone unemployed might need the job, someone with children or animals to support. Gilbert said that he'd wait and see. He made sure that he wiped the tables extra thoroughly. He brought Lucy his collection of Shippam's Fish Paste jars (with labels) for extra vases. He brought
What to Look for in Autumn
and
Keeping Finches
for Paul to read. Paul put them in a carrier bag under the counter. The question of employment for Gilbert was put on ice. They were waiting for more applicants. But no more applicants came.

‘What we are looking for,' said Lucy, ‘is someone very good-looking, dark, tall, possibly Mediterranean.'

‘What you are looking for,' said Abigail,' is someone capable, with clean fingernails, who won't cough at the customers.'

Gilbert had a very persistent cold and a rather chesty cough. Lucy gave him a sticky bottle of Benylin that Mr Snooke had left behind. It didn't seem to work. The job poster was taken down and not mentioned, and then Paul finally got around to looking at
What to Look for in Autumn
and saw the inscription: ‘To Gilbert, on your 10th Birthday, from Mr Dove.'

There could only be one Mr Dove. Paul asked Gilbert about it and found out that they'd been at the same school. About ten years separated them, but they were both alumni of Penshurst Village School (C of E Maintained).

Mr Dove built the weather station himself to his own design. It looked like a bird table. There was a maximum–minimum thermometer, a barometer, a funnel and a beaker for catching and measuring rainfall, and a weathervane. He hung up long tails of seaweed and pine cones too. The weather had been monitored every day (in term time) since his first week at the school in 1960. A rack of grey and buff exercise books held records of the prevailing conditions in a corner of the school field outside the science-block window. Mr Dove hadn't missed a single day of his teaching career through sickness. He had been asked several times if he was a Christian Scientist. He wasn't. He just never seemed to suffer from colds or upset stomachs the way his colleagues did. He was the only male teacher at Penshurst School, and he sometimes wondered if women were more sickly than men, or took time off work more lightly, but he would never have been ungallant or provocative enough to voice these thoughts. Instead, he was punctual and reliable. He poured oil on the troubled waters of many staff meetings. He championed underdogs. He organised the teams for cricket, rugby, football and rounders, and pinned his selections on the green baize noticeboard beside his classroom door. Every morning he swapped his soft green tweed jacket for one of the crisp white lab coats that his wife laundered so nicely. There was always a spare one waiting in his carefully locked science cupboard along with the pencils and exercise
books, the rulers and rubberbands, the lime water and copper sulphate solution, the magnets and iron filings, the batteries (which he called cells) and the circuit boards, and the test-tubes, beakers, pipettes, funnels and other pretty glass instruments with their carved wooden racks and metal clamps.

Mr Dove never showed favouritism, but there were some children whom he thought about very often and whom he would remember. Paul Cloud was one of them. Paul Cloud, aged nine, had noticed the pawprints of a fox in the mud beside the weather station and had spent his lunch hour making a plaster cast of them. Paul Cloud found the body of a female wood-boring wasp and brought it in to show him. He had never seen one before. It had taken them all of morning play to identify it. Paul Cloud was a very reliable weather monitor.

Ten years earlier Gilbert was shown how to be a weather monitor. Mr Dove helped him to read the thermometers and measure the rainfall (although the beaker had been practically empty). They'd written down the wind direction (W) together and looked at the clouds (cumulus). A few weeks later Gilbert went to take the day's readings all by himself. Seven inches of rain. The temperature had ranged from –2 to +28. The wind was blowing from the south. Gilbert wrote it all down and put the ‘Weather Journal' in the special tray on Mr Dove's desk, hoping for some words of praise, a Well Done in front of the whole class.

‘What is this, Gilbert?' For once, Mr Dove could hardly conceal his irritation. ‘Come here!'

Gilbert dragged his sad feet towards Mr Dove's desk. What had he done now …?

‘Your weather report,' said Mr Dove. ‘These figures cannot be accurate.'

‘But, sir …'

‘Did it rain last night, Gilbert?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Minus two, Gilbert. Has it been cold enough for ice to form? And twenty-eight degrees. Was it the hottest day of the year? What was the weather like yesterday and last night?'

‘I don't know. Was it just plain weather?'

‘Plain! What is plain weather? It was cloudy and mild. It was not hot or freezing. I am almost certain that it didn't rain. Now, Gilbert, tell me the truth. Did you bother to check the weather station or did you just make these readings up?'

‘I did check it, sir. I tried my best to.'

‘Well, Gilbert,' said Mr Dove kindly. ‘Either you need more practice as a weather monitor, or somebody unkind has been playing a trick on you.' Mr. Dove scanned the classroom. Thirty-two heads were bent over their books. Two pairs of shoulders were shaking. Sheila Pye and Theresa Welch. A spiteful pair.

‘Sheila and Theresa, what are you finding so funny?'

‘Nothing, sir,' they spluttered. How could old beaky Dove know that they'd been there after netball practice with an ice cube, matches, a cup of water and Sellotape for the weather-vane?

Gilbert would never forget those words, would now always doubt what his senses told him.

‘Either you need more practice as a weather monitor, or somebody unkind has been playing a trick on you.'

Gilbert's teeth were a chipped, yellow monument to a life alone, a life without love. A Stonehenge To Neglect. He had a huge, scruffy, pinkish toothbrush with splayed bristles. It had given years of faithful service. It hadn't occurred to Gilbert that he had no dental records to be used in the event of the Wayside burning down or his body being fished out of the Itchen. His last brush with the dental health services had been twenty-nine years ago: a stern school dentist had urged more frequent brushing, and given him a free toothbrush, some paste and a number of fillings. Vestiges of these remained. Sometimes a bit of filling or tooth would break off and cause him some pain for a while, but it generally went away.

Gilbert had never known his father, but he took after his mother, Lily Runnic, as far as teeth went. Her brittle teeth had led indirectly to her early death. She'd been on her way home from the chemist with the week's supply of oil of cloves when she collided with a milk float, banged her head on the kerb, and never regained consciousness. The air at the scene of the accident had hung heavy with the scent of cloves for days afterwards, she'd been getting through three or four bottles a week. It turned the milkman's stomach at that corner every day until he had taken early retirement. The dairy had sent a wreath of milky-white chrysanthemums to the funeral. It had been the only one, no lilies for Lily. Gilbert hadn't known about floral
tributes and things like that, and nobody told him how things were normally done.

In Mr Dove's classroom, the science room, there were posters of molecules in liquids, solids and gases. Gilbert read it as ‘mole cures', medicine for moles. They did experiments with felt pens and filters (paper chromatography it was called), and lime water and carbon dioxide. This was before there was a hole in the ozone layer. Science and Nature were Gilbert's favourite lessons.