The Kindness (4 page)

Mira barely cried all day. You’d have to be a fool, or just plain spiteful, to suggest she was hungry. Julia was so strung out by her parents’ presence that a twitch started at the outer corner of her eye.

Everyone wanted their photograph with the baby, he had to leap in to shield her eyes from their flashes. Turn them off, he said. His own mother in a black dress and glittery tights arrived bearing armfuls of bright tulips and Michael, his hand proprietorially resting on the small of her back, was beautifully courteous in his weekend tweed with leather patches on his elbows.

Un-Godmother Freda brought her guitar as well as the pear tree and in her thin breathy voice sang a song she’d written for Mira. It was from the point of view of the tree and made Julian want to laugh and Julia cry. ‘Mira, my dear, a golden pear just for you . . .’

From a poster on the wall beside his desk a cartoon Skye terrier with heartbroken, improbably fringed eyes looks out from beneath the scarlet petticoat of his Queen.
Geddon, Her Majesty’s Best Friend
. Julian shakes his head at him. His knack of giving family pets daft accents and acerbic opinions was never supposed to have become this:
Geddon
and a whole pack of historically well-placed pooches all at your service, book after barking book.
Hello, how lovely to meet you
– and screenplays, many more than ever got made,
Fletch le Bone
,
Laika’s Moon
, a remake of
Greyfriars Bobby
–
yes, I’m the one who writes in dog voices
.

Children cried when they read Geddon’s story and for this Julian was applauded.

He had read Antonia Fraser on Queen Mary Stuart and wrote in the evenings after work: laughing at his own jokes and typing in fingerless gloves. They were still in Burnt Oak then, and despite all four rings of the gas cooker sputtering away there was frost on the inside of the glass. Julia reading her plant manuals at her end of the table, rocked back in her chair with a blanket hanging from her shoulders and her hair tied back with one of her raggedy scarves, him typing away.

To be honest, at that point,
Geddon
had been little more than an enjoyable retort to the slush he waded through day after day at Abraham and Leitch. He never would have dreamt that
Geddon
, along with the swiftly imagined
Mrs Pericos
in his wake (written in the treacherous vernacular of Elizabeth the First’s lapdog), would so heroically light their way out of Burnt Oak.

And open the door to Cromwell Gardens, a short, leafy walk from Waterlow Park. Julia loved that flat. Who wouldn’t? At Cromwell Gardens there was an original fireplace in the sitting room, picture rails that had survived the conversion, plaster fruits along the cornicing which she painted in luscious colours. They woke each morning in a room she had stained deep raspberry with dark velvet curtains shining like cordial in the morning sun. He loved it too.

At Mira’s Naming Day when Gwen sidled up to him – ‘I hope my daughter’s garish taste doesn’t give you a headache’ – he had to step away from her rather than reply. Freda’s singing pear tree was being politely applauded and next up was William.

It should have been Karl doing the godfatherly honours that day, not William, but Julia had vetoed him: ‘Absolutely not!’ her vehemence stopping him in his tracks. Mira had been suckling and let out a cry. ‘I mean, why him? Oh look, now you’re interrupting the flow,’ she said, stroking Mira’s head.

So William, who he’d never especially thought of as his best mate, was there instead, going on about Larkin’s poem for Sally Amis, ‘Born Yesterday’. Bloody cheek! Julian wouldn’t wish for his daughter to be anything other than extraordinary: for her, kingdoms would be renounced, incurable diseases cured, world records broken. Mira whimpered and Julian shushed her with her head snug as a nut between his shoulder and cheek, whispering: ‘Oh, darling, don’t listen.’ People recharged their glasses and drank to Mira’s health, all except Julia, who remained perched on the arm of a chair, looking out at the street, stray strands of hair catching the light from the window.

He remembers it all: Julia’s breasts leaking milk through her thin silk dress; a big fruitcake; his mother’s eyes rarely leaving his face – trying to read him – as he hands plates to and fro; people spilling things and dropping crumbs; Julia’s dad stumbling into a lamp, breaking it; Julia’s nieces lolling on the floor; Mira at the breast and him longing for everyone to leave so that it would be just the three of them again in the milky fug of their bedroom.

Three

Cromwell Gardens seems as unreal as a dream to him now and it’s an effort to snap himself out of it. He wills himself to stay at his desk while a wasp frays his nerves, traversing the inside of the window, smacking against the glass, zigzagging itself into a tizz and drunkenly falling, resuming angrier than before.

As a boy Julian would have knocked that noisy hooligan into a cup, imprisoned it with clingfilm in the soporific cool of the fridge with a few of its friends. Before the chilled wasps regained consciousness, and though it was fiddly, he tied threads around their prone bodies and waited until they warmed up and took flight so he could soar behind them, momentarily shrunken and almost drunk with happiness, making them dance to his tune, a devil-winged coachman tugging at the end of their silken reins. Their harnesses were the gossamer threads of Queen Mab’s coach. Or was it Thumbelina’s?

Wasps were readily available for cryogenics that summer; people talked of them as a plague. Sometimes they seemed to be stinging children just for the fun of it. Nobody went near the fig trees that grew alongside one of Jerry Horseman’s hay barns and sometimes the wasps’ meat-lust became so severe that people gave up flapping and shrieking and telling each other to ignore them and took their Sunday roasts back indoors.

At the height of their frenzy his mother was stung on the foot while doing nothing more aggressive than working on some pots in the granary. She took a pause from the slip she was mixing, came crashing into the house to change into something less spattered and drove to the farm shop where she bought the last three wasp traps they had in stock. Others she made from jam jars. Together she and Julian filled the traps with a mixture of golden syrup and water and lined them along the sills, where soon they sweetened the deaths of multiple invaders. At the kitchen window he spent many a pleasant evening watching as they fought the inevitable, the sinking sun turning their fool’s paradise to living amber.

But still more came. They nested in the shrubbery behind the granary. His mother was in there dreamily emptying her kiln of a week’s work when he came to alert her. ‘Hmmmm,’ she said. ‘OK, will you do something about it?’

So he did. He didn’t ‘ask someone’ as she suggested with her gaze already on a new pot. There wasn’t a ‘someone’ to ask.

‘So is it OK,’ he said, ‘if I siphon the petrol out of the lawnmower?’

‘Ummmm-hmmm.’ Jenna wasn’t listening, as he knew she wouldn’t be. So, what did she expect?

He was stunned and elated by the magnificence of his Molotov cocktail, almost starstruck by the great orange
woomph
that bloomed from the shrubbery, sending a swirling mass of smoke and wasps and bits of rosebush into orbit.

To escape Jenna’s wrath, he tucked his air pistol into his shorts and cycled three miles to his friend Danny’s house. A couple of other similarly armed boys were already there and as usual they all ended up in the woods out back taking pot shots at each other – and woe betide any bird – dodging in and out of the trees, lucky, really, that nobody lost an eye.

When it came, the attack was as sudden as someone tipping a carton of wasps straight over his head. They arrived in one vicious stinging cloud, savaging him as he hid in a dip. He ran in his shorts through the trees, batting them off, arriving breathless back at Danny’s with wasps fizzing at his legs and clinging to his hair. Systematically he began killing the ones on his shins, waiting until he could feel their stings going in so he’d be sure of getting them, which only made their compatriots nastier. His skin was blazing as he careered into Danny’s bathroom. There was a strange itching at his throat and in the mirror he could see red lumps across his neck and wondered stupidly if it was heat rash. Within minutes the redness spread. He stared in wonder at this map unfurling across his arms and chest and, pulling down his shorts to check, yes, down there too. Short of breath and with a whistling in his throat, he insisted that he was fine when Danny’s doctor father ran out of his study and told him to lie down.

Dr Andrews saved his life that day with a shot of adrenaline before Jenna arrived, breaking every speed limit taking him the eight miles to Casualty. He remembers the blaring of horns at roundabouts. He was unable to reassure her. His throat contained a balloon that was being slowly but surely inflated, his swollen skin was the colour of ripe plums, but he felt so lightheaded he found the whole thing only novel. At the hospital he was fitted with a mask and nebulised, then kept in overnight in case his breathing took a turn for the worse. He was told that he must never ever be without an EpiPen.

Naturally Julian never carried an EpiPen.

It was on a languid day post-exams that he was stung again. His assailant got him, with Exocet precision, right on his Adam’s apple. He’d done nothing to provoke it. Sunshine and cheap plonk, the pages of his book fanning gently over his face as he breathed in the smell of the mown grass and the girls’ Ambre Solaire. William was there too that day, helplessly in love with Cara, a girl from their course with a sexy gap between her front teeth. There was a radio nearby and a noisy game of rounders. Cara was being mildly irritating: ‘Here’s a bunch of flowers,’ pulling grass through her fingers and casting the seeds into the air. ‘Now here’s the April showers.’

The entire college seemed to have chosen this spot to celebrate the end of exams. This time last year he’d gone straight back to Firdaws – his mother’s cooking and the warm folds of his girlfriend Katie were hard to resist – but this year he decided to stay on in the town, which pleased neither Katie nor his mother.

He had only recently given up being faithful to Katie. The summer stretched before him. A couple of the girls he’d not been faithful to Katie with had just wandered over holding hands and plonked themselves in front of him not wearing much in the way of clothing and he felt the warmth of the sun concentrate pleasantly at his groin.

And then it got him. ‘Shit.’ He leapt to his feet, trying not to panic, rubbing at his burning neck. The pain subsided quickly and he told himself that everything would be fine.

‘Bastard wasp!’

‘I got stung on my bum at a very embarrassing moment,’ said one of the girls.

‘Haha, pain in the arse,’ said someone else. Julian hoped he was imagining the tingling itch already creeping from his neck.

‘Shit, I need an EpiPen, I think,’ he said, attempting to stay calm.

‘An epi-what?’ Cara looked up from picking grass seeds out of her bra. Everybody else propped themselves on elbows and stared at him.

He spelt it out. ‘I may go into anaphylactic shock. I need to get to a hospital.’

He could feel the warm rash spreading, a new tingling sensation across his stomach.

‘A and E is at the back of the cathedral, isn’t it?’ William said, slowly.

‘Actually, this may be urgent.’ Julian began walking away from them, the act of putting one foot in front of the other already making him woozy. It wasn’t the wine, sadly not that. Something about his mother’s constant entreaty had made him stubbornly irresponsible on the subject of the EpiPen.
I am immortal
, he teased when she nagged.

His breathing was growing shallow by the time William sprinted ahead to the road trying to spot a taxi, the others scooting round the park calling frantically for a doctor, an EpiPen, a lift to the hospital.

His throat was tightening, every breath shallower and more whistly than the last, his tongue swelling. The road beyond the park was becoming a blur. As he reached the gates he heard a shout and stopped.

A shortish man in a flurry of rumpled clothing flew into view, panting and waving a syringe.

‘You’d better let me get to your thigh,’ Karl said and as Julian fumbled with his belt he felt himself fall.

‘Never mind.’ Karl was kneeling over him and stabbed him straight through his jeans with the needle.

‘Now we have to get you to a nebuliser.’ Karl had already alerted a friend with a hospital pager. ‘I’m not sure I can quite manage a tracheotomy today,’ he said, propping him up, a grin twitching at his lips.

The others caught up as Julian staggered to his feet, Karl lending him an arm, saying: ‘Take it easy. There’s an ambulance on its way, they’ll be here any minute.’

Julian was still finding it hard to breathe. He stared at Karl, trying to remember if he’d ever met this calm, mild-voiced man with John Lennon specs and tufty hair before. Karl’s face seemed to go in and out of focus: beneath thick quizzical brows his brown eyes were humorous, which made Julian feel less panicked.

The sound of the siren was deafening as blue lights flashed across his saviour’s face.

‘Here we go,’ Karl hefted him upright, while William and the others milled uselessly. ‘I’ll come with you, if you like,’ Karl said, taking his weight. ‘Don’t worry. You’ll be OK now.’