The Kindness (14 page)

Julia was clapping her hands as Mira went lolloping around the hillock, still singing her song.

‘Have you ever squished a mistletoe berry in your fingers?’ he said, leaping for the branch but not quite high enough.

‘Not that I remember,’ said Julia. ‘Should I?’

‘I used to use it as glue. For glitter and stuff. When I made Christmas cards,’ he said. ‘It goes all stringy like semen.’

She pulled a face. ‘Such a wholesome childhood.’

‘The ancients worshipped it as a symbol of the testicles. That’s why we kiss beneath it . . .’ he said, gathering her to him at the trunk of the tree, Mira leaping at their legs. ‘What about me?’ she cried, her catchphrase making them laugh. ‘What about me?’

He jumped again for the end of the branch, grabbed it. ‘. . . because of its appearance and the texture of the juice, which is, you know, a bit viscous . . .’

‘Yes, I get it,’ Julia said.

He brought the branch close enough for her to reach up and snip off a few pieces. He took a sprig from her basket. ‘Divine male essence,’ he said, holding it aloft, and, as she leant in to kiss him, he burst a berry between his finger and thumb and anointed the tip of her nose. She shrieked and leapt away. ‘What about me?’ Mira cried.

When they got back they stapled wishbones of mistletoe over every door. Mira raced round the house pursing her lips. She said: ‘Ooh, la la!’ in that saucy way she’d learnt from who-knew-where when he and Julia kissed at the door to the bathroom.

Jenna cuts into his thoughts. ‘Darling, I really can’t talk about any of this any more.’

‘Huh?’ He’s not aware of saying anything out loud. ‘I was just thinking about the mistletoe.’

‘Please understand,’ she says as they skirt the woods, passing a field of horses that trot hopefully to the gate, kicking up dust, flies feasting at their eyes. Jenna stops to talk to them, to smooth the flies away and blow into their noses. Michael fills the gap. Julian keeps walking, staring at each foot as it falls to the scuffed ground.

‘I know it’s hard,’ Michael is saying, striding beside him. ‘But you don’t want to fall behind on your payments.’

His mother catches them up. ‘It’s too easy to lose your sorrows in the bottom of a gin bottle,’ she says. ‘I know what you Vale men are like. And I’ve seen all the empties around the back.’

If there was a door in this field he’d run at it and slam it.

‘Remember your father was a drinker.’

‘Oh really? I didn’t know!’ Thinking he’d like to just turn around, to stomp away. She bumps him with her hip and gives him a squeeze but he shakes her off. She’s been wielding his potential alcoholism since the first time he came home drunk from a party. He sends a clod of dry mud and grit bouncing. It was only a matter of time before he’d be found dead behind the wheel too. His father had
chosen
the bottle over his wife and child, wasn’t that what she said? He finds a stone and kicks it into the nettles, startling a bird and sending others squeaking.

‘Well, at least you’re not hiding the empties,’ she says. ‘And the place doesn’t look too bad. To be honest, I was expecting it to look like a slum.’

Good boy, you’ve cleaned your shoes, tidied your room; he waggles his head from side to side inwardly making up words for her while she goes on.

‘Are you managing any work at all?’ Michael asks.

‘Katie came to see me yesterday, she cleared up a bit.’ He ignores Michael’s question. He doesn’t like to say that Katie ambushed him, let them believe he invited her round, if that helps.

‘That’s good,’ his mother slips her arm through his. ‘I’m glad you’re not locking yourself away. Is she back down here for good now?’ His head is thumping in the heat, the ground is stones and baked dust beneath his feet.

‘For now anyway, I think. She’s supply teaching. Thinks she’s got a good chance of a job at Woodford Primary.’

‘That’s a long way for What’s-his-name to have to travel to see his kids,’ Jenna says, tutting.

Julian shrugs. ‘What’s-his-name is living in the marital home, there’s not much else she can do right now.’

‘Still, Penny must be over the moon to have her grandsons at home,’ Jenna says, stumbling then pressing her head into his shoulder, and they amble on like this for a while, the walking wounded, his arm slung along her back.

‘I remember the very first time you brought Katie home,’ she says.

Julian can’t help but smile. A July day, as burning hot as this one. The last school bus of the year, his hand creeping inside her skirt. Her skin very soft on her inner thighs and a little sweaty from where she’d had them pressed together and Katie staring through the bus window as though nothing was happening, her school bag clasped to her lap, gradually unsticking them and allowing his hand to wander.

‘After school, one look at her and I knew it wouldn’t be long before someone should talk to you about condoms.’

‘Yeah, well,’ he snorts, batting her away for embarrassing him. ‘Raph sorted me out, you didn’t need to worry.’

‘You could always have asked me,’ Michael says, making Julian wince. ‘Instead of some stranger, some hippie.’

‘Raph wasn’t a stranger,’ Julian says. ‘He wasn’t even really a hippie.’

Jenna looks thoughtful for a moment. ‘He’s around again, by the way,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes when we passed his van on the verge. He must’ve been coming here for, what is it? Fifteen years now?’

Julian does the maths on his fingers. ‘I think I was fifteen the first time,’ he says.

‘OK, almost fifteen years,’ she says. ‘You were a bit moody that summer and prone to wandering off for hours on your own. I never knew what you were doing. You were with him more than you were at home. You showed him our place to swim in the river and after that I felt a little like an intruder when you were there with him.’

Julian gives her a squeeze. ‘I’m sorry about that, I never knew,’ he says. ‘But I liked him. We read a lot of the same books.’

‘It’s OK,’ she says. ‘Everyone always said you’d need to find some sort of male mentor.’

Michael clears his throat but she interrupts whatever he was about to say. ‘But I didn’t like that you shaved your head after the first summer he was here. It made you look quite thuggy.’

The summer of ’83. Raph’s van on the verge, an eyesore of slats painted bright purple and brown, terriers running around dangerously close to the fall of an axe, a shaven-headed muscular man leaning to pull against the blade, his boot to a stump of wood.

Raph was shirtless, baked brown, his tattoos flashing as he disarmed Julian with a smile that made a sunray of his face. He gestured for Julian to come over. The stubble was darkly etched over Raph’s scalp. His lustrous curls would not be revealed until the following summer. His eyes had glitter.

He threw the axe so the blade stuck into the turf and wiped the sweat from his face with a red and white spotted scarf unknotted from his neck. Over his shoulder Julian could see the interior of the van, its brightly slatted shelves crammed with stuff: books, papers, pottery hanging from hooks. ‘I was wondering if you could tell me the best place to swim,’ Raph said as he grasped Julian’s hand in greeting.

‘So, he only came in August? Where did he go the rest of the year?’ Michael wants to know as they walk on.

‘Oh, everywhere, Devon, Dorset, Glastonbury, Wales. But with the whole convoy. He said he needed to take August for himself, that’s why he came here.’

Michael clears his throat with a slight harrumph. ‘Must’ve been a blessing for the village that the whole rabble didn’t turn up. Can’t see anyone around here liking that much.’

‘Yes, there was always a hoo-ha whenever a bit of machinery went missing,’ Jenna says. ‘Can’t have been nice for him every time the parish council got its knickers in a twist. And I admit it, I worried sometimes, the amount of time you spent hanging around with him. Once I came looking for you across the fields at night and there you were, like a pair of gypsies, cackling away, beers in your hands, a little fire burning. You never saw me. I remember standing there thinking it looked quite an appealing way of life, almost wishing I could join you.’

‘I couldn’t stand not being able to have a bath,’ Michael says, slightly short of breath.

‘He’s the happiest person I’ve ever met.’ Julian smiles just thinking about Raph. ‘He hadn’t been on the road very long when he started coming here. He only joined the Convoy when he discharged himself from the Navy – he was there at the sinking of the
Belgrano
. Did his head in . . .’

‘Bloody Thatcher,’ Jenna says. ‘No wonder he joined the Peace Convoy.’

‘Yeah, and straight away into another battle. Do you remember the state of his van after the Battle of the Beanfield?’ Julian shudders to think of its leaking water tank, the glass of the door taped up with cardboard, the curling frills of metal where the crowbars had ripped through the side of the cab.

‘I couldn’t believe it still drove. They’d smashed every window and kicked in the doors. The Convoy was just trying to get to Stonehenge, there was no need for that. And poor Raph’s face.’ A livid line of proud flesh scored his cheekbone, the result of having been pulled out of his lorry through the windshield.

‘I watched it on the news,’ Jenna says, and grimaces. ‘That bloody woman flexing her muscles. They were really laying into them all. I mean, the police just looked like uniformed hooligans. Some of the buses were on fire, smoke everywhere, and I’ll never forget the sight of this pregnant woman in a white dress standing among the bean plants, begging to be allowed to leave, and terrified children running and screaming around her.’

‘Raph had to have stitches,’ Julian says. ‘He was trying to negotiate with the police. They wanted to turn back but they’d been cornered in the field. It was like they’d been told not to let them go until they’d given them a beating and burned their homes.’

Zeph drives a pheasant from the hedge, flapping and squawking, and they stop to watch its ungainly ascent. Julian shoots at it several times with pistol fingers.

They reach the river and Jenna takes the picnic rug from Michael, shakes it out on the bank. Canada geese have been shitting everywhere. They kick sausages of green turd into the water. Dirty things, always making a nuisance of themselves, and not even decent to eat. ‘Like tough, greasy fish,’ Jenna tells them.

‘Will you invite Katie over again while we’re here?’ she asks. ‘She looked so pretty at Christmas, hasn’t lost her figure, which, given how fat her mother . . .’

‘Can’t have been very pleasant for Julia to find your ex holed up down the road like that, that’s what I thought,’ Michael interrupts, plonking himself on to the blanket with an
oooff
. Julian turns on to his front, rests his head in his arms and wishes he’d stop. No such luck. ‘And with Julia always having to go to London. Not easy at all,’ Michael says, and though his eyes are closed Julian can feel his mother trying to shush him with a look.

Michael was present the second time Julia and Katie met. It was Christmas Eve. Heralded by singing. Julia, cheeks flushed with wine, barefoot, scraping the remains of their lamb dinner into Zeph’s bowl, hair escaping from a green and white paisley rag. Michael at the Christmas tree, swilling a glass of red, wearing his festive yellow waistcoat that made Julian think of a cartoon fox. Mira running to the window: It’s Father Christmas! Lanterns twinkling in the lane. ‘Hark the Herald Angels’ getting closer. Jenna skipping across the hall in her latest pair of Chinese slippers and flinging wide the door to the raggle-taggle choir from St Gabriel’s. Among the cluster of men, women and children Katie was quite something in her full-skirted coat, its fur collar like mist framing her face. Her boys, blond in bobble hats, were cherubic as a Christmas card, their faces illuminated by candles in jam jars that hung from shepherds’ crooks. Michael with his hearty baritone stepped out to join them, extending his arm like Pavarotti. Behind him, in a huddle in the hall, Mira bounced up and down and Julia pressed herself to his back, hissing into his ear, ‘That’s Katie, isn’t it?’

Jenna had eyes only for her old friend Sue, who was waving and grinning while she sang with a torch in her hand. Jenna mouthed: ‘You look fantastic!’ and when they finished asked if they’d come in and sing another in front of the fire. She offered to find sherry and mince pies, with only a quick look at Julian to check she wasn’t overstepping the mark. ‘You haven’t changed one bit,’ she said, clasping Sue on the threshold, and Sue came inside saying: ‘Ooh, and Firdaws looks just the same. Like you never left.’ Jenna reached for Julian: ‘Yes, I suppose it does. Though it’s his place now . . .’

Julia was standing there right next to her. ‘And Julia’s,’ he said sternly, extending his hand. ‘Mine and Julia’s.’

The choir traipsed in, leaving their boots at the door, though Julian told them there was no need. Mira leapt at Billy and Arthur. The firework boys, she called them. ‘Yeah, and then we went home and Granny had more rockets just for us,’ Arthur boasted, wiping his nose along his sleeve, Julian wishing that Katie wasn’t flushing from her fur collar to her blonde roots, and that she hadn’t just called him ‘Jude’, making Julia raise an eyebrow. He shot from the room when his mother called to him to find the brandy butter.

Much to Julian’s relief Christmas Day dawned with Katie  seemingly forgotten and he and Julia stumbling together, wiping the sleep from their eyes, the cockerel not yet crowing, past the guest room and Michael and Jenna’s gentle duet of snores, to Mira calling to them and cooing over her stocking. They gazed at her from the door, their grins growing ever wider as her delight became their own. Mira, surrounded by wrapping paper, pronounced every little thing perfect like a polite maiden aunt: ‘Oh, I say. Just what I wanted.’ Blowing a train whistle, squeaking the new duck for her bath, making the little wooden cat dance on its elasticated legs, making them laugh.