The Generation Game (7 page)

The vicar coughs for our attention the way Miss Pitchfork does. Then he chants a tuneless song in a language I don’t know, but that tells of ancient times in musty monasteries on windswept
hills. He asks us to please be seated and Auntie Nina slumps onto the pew between her parents. A child, their child. Her dead child. And another man’s child, not just her own: Mr Jones, who
has left his own parents behind in London, while he mourns alone, to one side, his fingers still, dead moths in his lap.

Lucas would have liked it here. His family. His friends. It isn’t fair. He is hidden away in a place from which he’ll never be able to escape. Maybe he can hear us from there,
singing ‘Abide with me’. He liked that song. He had the voice of a choirboy and got countless house points for piping up when no-one else knew the words (it helps when you can
read).

Maybe he is knocking on the door of his box with his pale little hand, only no-one can hear him because we are too busy singing.

Or maybe he isn’t really in there at all. Maybe he’s fooled everyone and just run away. Maybe he’ll slip in quietly at the back and listen to the words of the vicar, the musty
chants, the warbles and the tears.

Or maybe not. Maybe I’ll never see him again as long or as short as I live.

My Lucas.

My huckleberry friend.

That night I lie awake in bed. It has been an eventful day to say the least. Not only have I lost Lucas forever but I have also lost my first tooth. I’ve had plenty of
time lately for wobbling and it has only been a matter of days from the first looseness to the final extraction and I’ve accomplished this milestone all on my own, with no fuss. I don’t
bother telling Helena as she has her mind on other things, mainly comforting Auntie Nina and keeping us fed and watered (lots of hard-boiled eggs and ham salads. I am wasting away and no-one has
noticed). I examine the little yellow tooth (too many sweets on tap, what would Mr Jones think?) before wrapping it up in a tissue and sliding it under my pillow. Then I wait for the tooth
fairy.

No-one has remembered to draw my curtains. I can watch the moon which is small and round and might bounce away like a ping-pong ball if the residents of Torquay all breathed out at the same
time. I wonder if Lucas is up there somewhere, a speck of stardust that Auntie Sheila would hoover up if she were an angel on cleaning duty. I decide not to get out of bed and close my curtains, in
case he is watching me, lonely up there without Auntie Nina or Mr Jones.

Sleep comes eventually and shakes itself over me, pouring dreams into my ear. There is the smell of Palmolive. A splash of water. A whisper that mentions a father and a son and (scarily) a holey
ghost. Then suddenly it is morning and, after hunting high and low, it is apparent that the tooth fairy hasn’t put in an appearance. Later that day I find out why: Helena has scared her off.
I know it was Helena because I overhear her telling Bob when he calls round with a box of Milk Tray. I am sitting at the top of the stairs (I’ve spent a lot of time there lately) and
eavesdrop on their conversation in the kitchen below.

‘Are you all right, Helena?’

‘Well, no, actually, seeing as you’ve asked. I think I’m slowly going mad. In some horrible way I feel jealous of Nina.’

‘What do you mean?’ Bob asks, flabbergasted.

‘I know it sounds horrid but nothing can ever happen to her again that will make her feel like this. The worst is over.’

Bob doesn’t say anything but I hear his heavy sigh.

Then Helena goes on: ‘You’ll never guess what I did last night.’

And no, Bob can’t guess, so Helena tells him.

‘I baptised Philippa. I crept in her room in the middle of the night and I sprinkled water on her forehead and said those magic words.’

‘Oh,’ says Bob. ‘Well, that makes sense, I suppose. You could always do it properly, you know, in church.’

‘It’s done now,’ states Helena before excusing herself, saying she must shop for more eggs and ham.

I watch her show Bob out. When he’s gone, she stops in front of the hall mirror and sighs at her reflection. ‘Yes, I know. I’m old before my time,’ she agrees with the
woman she sees there. Then she looks up, feeling me watching her, and I can see that the woman in the mirror is lying to Helena; she is so young, barely a woman. She smiles and I see my own face
reflected in hers and I know she doesn’t want me to die. But in case I do, she wants protection. She wants to know I won’t become a speck of stardust destined to be sucked up by a
cosmic vacuum cleaner.

She is a good mother. She loves me.

But she is wrong about Auntie Nina. Surely the worst is only just beginning.

Auntie Nina has gone. The Movers have been in and packed up all of her things in tea chests and carried them away in a big lorry, back to London. She always planned to go home
eventually but she never expected it to be on her own.

Poor Auntie Nina.

And poor us. Mother and I must move out too as the house is being sold. I wish we could buy it so that we could stay on. So that I could pretend Lucas was still pit-pattering overhead in his
room. Unfortunately there is no chance of that. Mother might be able to find the money for shoes and lipstick and handbags but not for a house.

We pack our own things in cardboard boxes with the help of Mrs Gracie who is becoming as much a part of everyday life now as Lucas used to be, though in a completely different way.

‘Call me Wink,’ she says.

‘Why?’ I ask.

‘It’s my name,’ she says, rolling one of Mother’s few ornaments up in newspaper.

I can’t think what mother would call her child ‘Wink’. Then again, I can’t imagine Wink ever having a mother because she looks like she’s always been an old lady.
Wink seems to know what I am thinking.

‘I’m only sixty-two,’ she says. As if this were young. (Six is young, I know that for sure.)

‘People think I’m much older,’ she goes on, placing the ornament in an orange box from the International. ‘Because of my ruddy Multiple Wotsit.’

Multiple Wotsit is a disease Wink has, a disease which takes it out of her, makes it harder for her to get about and do all the things she used to do like gardening and shopping and the
hokey-cokey. I hope the disease is not lethal like Lucas’.

On the final afternoon, as the sun is heating up the house so it feels like I am going to bake like one of Auntie Sheila’s Victoria Sandwiches, I kneel on the bare boards
of the dining room amongst the dust and forgotten marbles and hairgrips, staring at the place where Mr Jones’ fingers travelled up and down the piano keys. I remember Lucas watching him. I
remember my promise. Or rather, Mother reminds me.

‘This is yours,’ she says. ‘Auntie Nina left it for you… Well, Lucas did.’ And she has to take out her hanky and give her nose a good blow, before handing over a
Quality Street tin.

She lights a cigarette as I take off the lid to reveal, not chocolates, but the contents of the Secret Project. It isn’t quite what I imagined. I pictured all sorts of things in the weeks
leading up to Lucas’ death and then I forgot all about it. Now here it is in my hands. Here I am, taking off the lid…

Inside, Lucas has lined the tin with familiar flowery material.

‘That’s where my Laura Ashley blouse got to,’ Mother says. She is almost cross, for a second, but she soon smiles a sad smile and then inhales deeply on her Consulate.

I slowly pull back the cloth like I am detonating a bomb. And it
is
a bomb of some sort. A time bomb ready to go off at some unknown point in the distant future, one we can only guess at.
I realise what it is even before I read Lucas’ instructions. It is a time capsule, like the one that John Noakes and Peter Purvis and Valerie Singleton buried on
Blue Peter.
Of course,
I should have realised that’s what Lucas was up to. He was fascinated when we watched it together and saw them pack up a
Blue Peter
annual, some photographs and a set of decimal coins
(whose introduction has been tricky for Bob and his sweets, but trickier still for old ladies like Wink who still hark back to rationing coupons).

I open the instructions which are sealed inside a brown envelope with my name in bubble writing on the front. This is what the letter says:

For the first time in weeks I feel happy. Tear drops are falling onto the paper but they are happy ones. Lucas is still my best friend even though I can’t see him or touch
him or breathe in his currant bun smell.

The next day Mother and I (and a disgruntled Andy) move into the Shop. Bob has insisted that this is the solution to our accommodation problem. He has plenty of space in the
maisonette above and he’d appreciate the company. So while he and mother and Wink do their best to make this new arrangement work, I sit in the yard with Lucas’ tin and contemplate
where to bury it. The most obvious place is the Bone Yard but how can I be sure the box won’t get dug up to make room for new residents? So I decide here is as good a place as any. Here in
Bob’s backyard. I add one or two of my own items to Lucas’ precious collection – my booty from the outside lav – before foraging in Bob’s lean-to for a trowel. I find
the perfect spot in a corner under his one and only unidentifiable shrub.

Now I just have to sit back and wait until I am grown up.

So now we’re on the ward, babies either side of us, opposite us, screaming, feeding, sleeping. You, on the other hand, are lying sweetly in your plastic crib. No murmur,
no cry. Surely you must be hungry by now?

Fran has this funny look in her eye that she’s trying to hide from me by scribbling frantically in your notes which are growing more and more copious by the minute, like a barrister off to
defend some beyond-hope criminal from a life sentence.

“Everything alright, Fran?” I ask.

“Time to take your blood pressure,” she says and wraps that vicious Velcro thing round my arm, squeezing it in a Chinese burn – the type that Terry would give me if I set foot
in his garage looking for Toni’s roller skates.

I want to breastfeed you. Fran doesn’t care what I do as long as we get something inside your little body. There’s been whispers of feeding tubes if you don’t get on with it
sharpish. You don’t really seem that bothered. I don’t know why they don’t just let you sleep. That’s what you’re supposed to do isn’t it, when you’re this
tiny? I’d know if you were starving, wouldn’t I? Isn’t that the sort of thing mothers intuitively know? Did Helena know? She plied me with a constant stream of bottles.
That’s why I was so ‘bonny’. You don’t look ‘bonny’. You look scrawny and pale. Dark-eyed and small like Lucas. Maybe Fran’s right. I don’t know.

What would Helena do?

Mother now looks less like Audrey Hepburn and more like Carole King. She has relaxed her make-up and fashion standards in the interests of comfort (it gets hot and clammy in
the shop in summer and she likes to go bare-footed). She has also become proficient at sweet-serving, stock-taking and being polite to old ladies, and performs all these duties (and countless
others) in her stride. Bob says he doesn’t know how he ever managed without her. Mother reminds him that he probably didn’t.

Bob and Mother are becoming a partnership. They move around the shop – and each other – with ease. When one of them bends down to retrieve a sweet wrapper from the floor, the other
will reach over them to restack a shelf. However their paths cross, however busy it gets – and it can get very busy, especially on half-day closing when the whole neighbourhood wants their
pools coupons – they never bump or crash into each other. Their movements are slick and smooth. It is a choreographed dance. A double act. But that is what time does. It makes you find your
place, slot in. Mother and I have slotted into the shop. It has been nearly a year after all. And now this is most definitely Home.

But Mother is lonely. She misses Auntie Nina so much that she contacts Auntie Sheila. Auntie Sheila is so upset about Lucas that she forgives Helena. Mother and Sheila soon slip back into their
old friendship. They go shopping together, to the theatre together, sip gin and orange on a fine summer evening together. Mother is welcomed back into her old circle of friends because the
situation looks somewhat different now. And it isn’t just Lucas and Nina’s departure that has changed things. It is Bernie that has done that.

Bernie has been up to his old tricks. This means that Helena is no longer the slut Sheila believed her to be. It is far more likely that Bernie is to blame.

‘It wasn’t your fault, Helena. It was ruddy Bernard. He’s moved in with that Welsh woman who runs the antique shop in St Mary’s church.’

‘I know, I heard.’

‘She’s welcome to him.’

‘She’ll soon get fed up.’

‘He’s not crawling back to me when she does.’

Sheila often pops into the shop for the Western Morning News or a packet of Extra Strong Mints, an excuse for a cup of tea and a natter with Helena. If Helena isn’t there, Bob is only too
happy to oblige and put the kettle on.

‘Do you take sugar, Mrs Siney?’

‘I shouldn’t but I do.’ She taps her tummy. ‘And please call me Sheila.’

‘You don’t need to worry on that count, Sheila.’ Bob says, the Bobby Dazzler.

And Sheila giggles in a way that makes my heart miss a double beat. My hopes are being dashed before my very eyes.

Then one day another man walks into the shop – and into Mother’s life – and dashes all my hopes. Forever.