The Children's Writer (11 page)

At the door, on the top step, he did not look back, nor would he have seen her if he had, because she had already left, stumbling by, out the back to the bails, since the cows were calling and she was one herself.

I went into the kitchen. Someone had left a chair by the back door, so I sat to think. And when my heart returned, or my head, I remembered Rory, waiting, and left.

It was strange to see the cherry tree in full bloom in the front yard, not a flower fallen, not a petal. And no hint of a veil, not a wisp.

So when Rory asked, ‘Are you okay?’ I lied, because all that I had seen was made up, no more than imagined
(except for the house itself, and the cherry tree, of course, whose fruit I would give her, all those years after). Hence my mother’s rape (and my connection as her groom, her lover) was no more than an affirmation of myself as fat-arsed loser, which was not entirely untrue, any more than entirely imagined.

Lootie was asleep by the time Rory dropped me home on the Sunday night. I wasn’t worried. Having other things on my mind, I sat in the front garden. After a glass or two of red, the flaming ladder came again.

Charlie Bloome stood at the bottom in his monkey suit. He saw the black bird at the top, but since the red-hot rungs prevented his ascent, he dropped to his knees and, looking up, observed the bird more closely.

He saw that this was not a bird, but three persons, then again, one.

The person the bird became was my mother, a queen on her throne, her black moustache bristling. In her left hand a cherry (her orb?), in her right a willow sprung bat (her sceptre?). On her head a circle of white plastic daisies (her crown?), their centres yellow as the sun.

‘Charlie,’ she said, reaching down, ‘don’t send me away.’

But Charlie refused the offered hand, taking it for a claw. ‘I must,’ he said, ‘since that is the way of things. The way of becoming adult. Of growing up.’

And in that moment the fire engulfed him, consuming his monkey suit, allowing Charlie Bloome to stand up, dressed as a man.

N
ext morning being Monday I left for work before Lootie got up. When I came home that night and saw that she hadn’t been out, and no dinner was on the go, I was piqued.

‘Are you doing dinner?’ I called.

‘I thought we might have Chinese,’ she said. She was on the sofa, watching TV.

‘Haven’t you been home all day?’ I said.

‘So?’ she said.

So indeed. Why should I be surprised?

I had a shower, pulled on some clean clothes, and decided that a walk to Ho’s would calm me down.

I saw some kids there. The rough boy and the girl who had made the soy sauce circles. I hadn’t seen them for a while. I put in my order and said ‘Hi.’

The boy said, ‘I seen you in your front yard last night. Pissed.’

‘I’ve got a lot on my mind,’ I said.

‘Don’t you go to work?’ the girl said.

‘I’m a student,’ I said. ‘I go to university.’

‘Must be tough, hey,’ the boy said as he left, rattling the plastic fly strips. The girl gave me a sympathetic look. On her way out she turned sideways and slipped through the fly strips like a shadow, making no sound.

When I got home Lootie was still on the sofa, the TV still on.

‘Are you going to help me serve this?’ I said.

She didn’t answer.

‘Lootie,’ I said, louder.

She came to the table, leaving the TV on. The show was rubbish. Ordinarily I might have got a beer and watched for a laugh, but I wasn’t up to it.

‘Yours is the lamb,’ I said.

‘I hate Ho’s lamb,’ she said. ‘You know that.’

I couldn’t resist. ‘Then why didn’t you go yourself?’ I said. ‘You’ve been home all day.’

‘And you went away for the weekend with your boyfriend,’ she said.

To make out that there was something between Rory and me was low. So I came back at her. ‘Which gave you the chance to see
your
boyfriend,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘So now I’m not allowed to have friends?’

I slapped the Chinese on a plate. ‘You started it,’ I said.

Lootie laughed. ‘How childish are you?’ she said.

‘Pretty childish,’ I said. ‘Which is why you liked me. Once.’ I wasn’t proud of this comeback, but how could I tell her that all I wanted was for everything to go back to the way it was before Chanteleer? That I wanted life to
stay that way forever, even if it was childish. Even if it did mean that I was led by the nose. (So much for the vision of my mother’s claw. My resolve to cast off the monkey suit.) So I said, ‘Would you like my chow mein?’

Lootie gave me a sad look, much the same as the little girl who slipped out of Ho’s. ‘You’re crazy,’ she said, and resumed her chewing.

When the meal was over, I did the dishes and sat on the sofa to watch TV. Lootie was already there. No sooner had I sat down than she turned the TV off. ‘We need to talk,’ she said.

‘I’ll get a beer,’ I said, and went to the fridge.

When I came back she said, ‘Something’s wrong. I’d like to get it out in the open.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Something is very wrong.’

That being out in the open, maybe our worries were half over. Maybe more than half. Maybe now we could change things. Get rid of Chanteleer. Get Lootie back into Education. Maybe she would say, ‘I’m going back to Education. I’m going to find a part-time job so you can give up riding for XPress and spend time writing.’ Maybe…

‘Thanks for admitting it, Charlie,’ she said. ‘Now I’m going to do something about it.’ And leaning over, she kissed me.

‘Admitting what?’ I said, confused. ‘I need to know what you think is wrong first.’

She sat back, lifting her feet under her, and looked at me. ‘I’m what’s wrong, Charlie,’ she said.

‘Lootie,’ I said, ‘you’re perfect.’ And I put my beer aside, ready to hold her.

She pushed me away. ‘I was silly, thinking that I could teach,’ she said, ‘that I liked kids. I’ve given up that idea forever. And uni too. The librarian idea. I intend to work for Sebastian.’

‘Sorry?’

‘You heard me. He’s been thinking about it for a while, and that’s what I want to do. With my future, you know.’

I sat forward, taking her hands in mine, holding them, stroking them as I’d done with my mother. When I was losing her.

‘You know that I’ve been seeing him,’ she said, ‘and I’ve mentioned that he’s interested in my future. My career, you might say. I don’t want things to be secretive. I mean, I don’t want to have secrets when there’s nothing to be secretive about. It’s not like there’s anything going on, you know.’

‘I didn’t think there was,’ I said. ‘Not that I’m such a great lover…’

‘Charlie,’ she said, which might have meant anything.

‘He’s so much older than you,’ I said. ‘And different, you know…’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t.’

‘He’s famous,’ I said, floundering. ‘His lifestyle isn’t ours—yours—what you like. Simple.’ I looked at her, lost for words, hoping that she knew what I was getting at. ‘I would have known once,’ I said. ‘I would have taken it for granted.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she demanded, and when I didn’t answer, not right away, she said, ‘Like I want to eat Chinese once a week? Like going to Georgio’s is a
thrill? Like I’m only good enough to be a primary school teacher? Is that what you mean? I’m that simple?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘No! I thought we both liked Chinese. I thought we both liked going to Georgio’s.’ I was grasping at straws. I had never liked Georgio’s. Never liked his sleazy condescension. ‘Lootie,’ I said, desperate.

She stood and started pacing, wringing her hands and pushing her chin forward as she spoke, ‘That’s our problem. We don’t talk. We can’t talk to each other. Not about sensible things. Like my life. What I’m going to do. Sebastian talks to me. We discuss things. He gives me ideas about what I might do. He makes me feel important…’

‘Lootie…’

She shushed me with a wave of her hand. ‘I’m not finished,’ she said. ‘I need to say this.’

I listened.

‘The day of the garden party, Sebastian and I made an arrangement to meet. We wanted to work out a format for his visit to my class. So we met at that University Café on Lygon. We talked about everything. What I was good at, what I wanted to do. He helped me establish my goals. He helped me see everything so clearly. Like I was getting advice from someone experienced…’

‘Lootie,’ I said. (Lame, as usual. Hopeless.) She hated people giving her advice. At least that’s what she’d told me, the notion we’d lived by, and happily.

‘Shush!’ she said. ‘Just listen, okay?’

I listened.

‘He was so cute,’ she said, ‘with his bow tie and his silly socks. He didn’t once make me feel small or stupid. He
didn’t patronise me, not ever. And then he came to my school and I so wanted it to work. I so wanted the boys to learn from him and love him but they didn’t. They were awful to him. Rude and awful, laughing at him, putting him down, and he’d come especially to see them, to teach them something, and him being so famous and he wasn’t even charging!’ By this time she had ceased pacing and stood looking at me, as if in appeal, as if to say,
Can’t you understand?

‘I don’t know what to say,’ I admitted, which was the truth. How would it help if I said what was in my heart? How would it help to say that he was chatting her up? That his real intention was to get her into bed? That it had been from the day he first laid eyes on her? To seduce her? ‘All you think about is sex,’ she’d say. ‘Sex. Sex. Sex.’ So I shut up, waiting.

‘That afternoon, after we left St Xavier’s,’ she said, ‘his girl Eve left us after a few drinks and Sebastian stayed on with me. That was the night he really sorted me out. The night he really explained things…’

‘What things?’

‘About how I was wasting my time being a teacher. How I should put my talents to better use…’

‘But he doesn’t know anything about you. And he doesn’t know anything about kids.’ I felt safe saying this because his own mother had said so, in Lootie’s hearing.

‘Really?’ she said, looking down at me hunched on the sofa. ‘So how come he’s a world-famous children’s writer? Answer me that…’

‘I can’t,’ I said.

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘So don’t chuck off at him. All right?’

‘All right.’

‘So,’ she said, resuming her pacing, ‘how about I tell you my good news?’

‘That would be great,’ I said. ‘Let me get another beer.’ I wanted her to come back to me. To be happy for her. ‘Okay,’ I said when I had my beer, ‘shoot.’

‘Well,’ she said, as if nothing had passed between us, ‘you know that girl Eve, his publicity person? Sebastian has sacked her. She was useless. He’s offered me her job.’

I had no words to express how I felt, but Lootie was looking at me, waiting. On reflection, I suppose that I felt wiser than her. But I couldn’t let on. To say so would destroy us. So instead of telling her what welled inside me, my fears, my distrust of this man’s motives, I said very little, just to tide us over, to keep her happy. ‘That’s nice,’ I said. ‘That might work,’ which was much like putting a bow in my dying mother’s hair, or giving her a bunch of plastic cherries to amuse her. The pity is, had Lootie paid more attention to me, had she known me better, had she watched me grow, she would have seen through this game. She would have known I was lying.

L
ater that week as I passed by the window of the university bookshop, I caught sight of Charlie Bloome walking beside me. It was curious to see him there, especially with the books in the window superimposed on him, on me, indivisible. I wondered how much of Charlie Bloome was no more than a shallow reflection, a goofy Monkey Boy, and how much was substantial.

That afternoon, as I walked home through the park, I saw him again, Charlie Bloome, walking beside me, disguised as my shadow. When I saw him, I straightened myself up, not walking stooped like some simian low-life, not some round-shouldered goof on a lower rung of the evolutionary ladder, but a real man, a worthwhile and creative individual who had marks to make, a voice to be heard, even books to write.

There was no one home when I got there. I was not surprised. As Lootie said, now that we had no secrets, there was nothing to be secretive about. I should accept
the fact that Chanteleer was going to be her boss, no doubt wining and dining her, whispering in her ear, luring her with his fame.

I knew his intentions. I always had.

I went into the study to put my bag down. On the reading desk was a pile of books that had not been there when I left. I saw empty cartons on the floor: assignments, book lists, all the paraphernalia of university. Evidently Lootie had done more clearing out. Putting books on the desk for me to go through was a further statement of her determination to chuck teaching and get kids out of her life. Forever, as she had said.

But when I sat down to take a look at the day’s leavings, as she knew I would, I understood there was more to this than getting rid of the past. In putting the books on the desk for me to vet, for me to decide what I would keep and what I would not, Lootie was making me responsible for both her past and her future.

In some ways I should have been flattered that she still thought enough of me to vest this responsibility in me; in others ways I should have been afraid. If her decision to cut and run from Education failed, she could hold me responsible since I was the one who had gotten rid of the books that might have proved the very basis of her success. If the Education books were disposed of, some might argue that she wasn’t responsible and nor was Chanteleer, the decision had been mine. On the other hand, if her future as Chanteleer’s PR person proved rosy, only he was responsible for that; all I had done was clean up the leavings.

Such meanderings aside, being a hopeless bibliophile, I pulled in the chair, and began thumbing through. By nightfall, I sat back, overcome by a deep irony.

When we were studying Dickens (I
do
study), I noted that he had challenged the use of coincidence in his fiction, not so much as being unreasonably high (as some have claimed), but as a ‘question of degree’. In looking at the books Lootie had left, this thesis came rushing back.

Among the titles were Birkin’s
J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys
, Cohen’s
Lewis Carroll, A Biography
, and Wullschlager’s
Hans Christian Andersen The Life of a Storyteller
.

Serendipity or coincidence? I cared little. To read the lives of three children’s writers, and at this time, was an opportunity too remarkable to miss.

Barrie had always annoyed me, and reading Birkin didn’t alter my opinion. Barrie might not have fooled around with the little Llewellyn-Davies boys, but he sure stuck his nose into their lives, and all uninvited to boot. As I saw it, his Peter Pan by-product, the so-called ‘boy who would never grow up’, was no more than the personification of his own underdeveloped and puerile self who would have preferred to remain a child, always playing with children, rather than growing up.

Lewis Carroll fared little better. I don’t care if nineteenth-century Victorian England did harbour ‘the age of innocence’, I wouldn’t allow a grown man who got his rocks off photographing naked girls to take my kid for a punt on the river, even if she did grow up to be Alice in Wonderland. Cohen’s
Lewis Carroll A Biography
featured
page after page of naked girls, all of whom had been photographed by Carroll (alone in his study!), or Dodgson, I should say, his curiously conservative alter ego. As Cohen notes, here was a man who annotated his diary with the line, ‘I mark this day with a white stone’ every time he met a new model. And yet, Carroll looked so cute with his page-boy haircut and his bow tie. Shades of Sebastian Chanteleer, I shouldn’t wonder, as Lootie had no doubt observed.

For all of his mawkish effeminacy, Andersen was the one who got me in. Yes, he was physically repulsive; yes, he was socially ingratiating, and yes he needed his ego stroked daily, if not hourly (if not more), but for all of his failings as a human being, Andersen’s writing demonstrated the most honest portrayal of humanity in the work of all three children’s writers. Labelled as a teller of fairy tales, whereas the others are not, what struck me most about Andersen was the darkness in his stories: people die, people are executed—and the fact that he so rarely referred to children. Barrie’s children’s story (since there is really only one, that being
Peter Pan
) is teeming with lost boys and little Darlings, while Carroll’s work boasts Alice in her pristine pinny, the epitome of upper-class Victorian childhood. But Andersen used ducks, and tin soldiers, and mermaids, and old ladies, and murderous dogs, and witches—children hardly enter into them. I wondered if he respected kids too much to condescend to them. That he was saying, ‘Listen kids, you’re not the centre of the universe. Life happens to adults too and you had better get used to that.’ It was not for Andersen to state, ‘Nothing
much happens after the age of twelve,’ as Barrie so rashly declared, or like Carroll, to go into raptures over every little girl he happened upon half-naked at the beach.

One chapter in Wullschlager’s
Hans Christian Andersen The Life of a Storyteller
, entitled ‘The Shadow,’ struck me more than the others. As I read, I thought again of Dickens, and coincidence, and why Lootie had put these books here, and why I had seen my reflection among the books that morning, and my shadow walking in the park that afternoon. And here I was reading about shadows, and other selves, and doppelgängers, and I thought of that stooped and simian Charlie Bloome who had walked beside me, and I wondered who I might become.

Might I come out ‘in full maturity’, as the shadow of the learned man in Andersen’s tale? Or might I cower and crawl away, my monkey suit at the ready, to hide beneath my mother’s bed? Or worse, in it?

Filled with these ideas, I put the books to one side, and late as it was, decided to write. A children’s story, you know, such as these men had done. But I had only drawn some circles, doodles if you like, golden soy sauce chains if you prefer, when I heard Lootie at the front door, and gave up.