Tying Down The Lion (7 page)

I keep thinking about Mum’s kind voice when she held the girl’s hand. I wish I could tell her how nice she is. But, apart from in sickening films, no one talks to their parents like that. I can’t remember her being as nice as that to me since I was small. So I sip my tea and try to eat the strangely round Dutch toast from a packet. Dad almost breaks his front teeth on it. “Call this food?” he says, staring at the toast. “I could use it as a tension pulley for the fan-belt.”

Conversations around us heat up. Cutlery clatters. Without Bwa-Bwa’s gruff voice and clacking sandals, people relax. Her world rotates on a different axis from ours, their smug knives and forks say. The two collided for a moment. Now we’re spinning properly again. Normal service resumed.

I wonder if Bwa-Bwa can actually feel angry or sad or homesick. Or if she even understands what home is. Is she ever at home anywhere? And how would she cope without her parents and their aprons and peaches? I don’t know. I reckon they cope with her because they have to, but I suppose it’s mostly because of love.

“What’s this flat sausage?” Victor asks, poking at the round of grey stuff on his plate. “It looks worse than school dinner. Are we going to have to eat this stuff in Germany?”

“It’ll be better there, son,” Dad says, unravelling the plastic rind off Victor’s slice of pâté. “When I first met Mum in Berlin I made us a picnic. We ate it on the banks of the Spree. Blood-sausage from a butcher in a dark alley whose shop survived both the war and the Soviets, and hot tea from the NAAFI mobile canteen.”

Mum takes his hand and she’s talking only to him when she says, “Oh Roy, I thought my stomach was being pulled out of my back.”

“And that was nothing to do with the pickled gherkin,” Dad says. “What was it, Bridge, you always said? Your insides turned inside-out and became all heart.” He kisses her hand.

“Parent-love? Bloody, bloody ugh,” Victor whispers.

“Better than arguing,” I mutter.

“We danced by the river under the moonlight and he…”

“Please don’t tell us any details, Mum,” I shriek.

“I only wanted to say he trod on my toe and thought the German word for sorry was
Mistkäfer
. That was the moment I fell in love with him.”

“What does it mean then?” Victor asks.

“Dung-beetle,” Dad says, mortified. We all have to put up with Mum ruffling his hair and making horrible fluttery cow’s eyes at him.

Gillian says words are not needed for love. It’s all about looking and trembling and one tongue circling round the other. When we played Do, Dare, Double-Dare, Love, Kiss, Promise in the second year, she had to twirl tongues with Gaye Kennedy and said it tasted of junket gone hard.

“Can I go on the deck?” Victor asks. “That lot over there are eating semolina. It’s got rats’ droppings in it.”

“They’re prunes, Victor,” Dad says.

“You shouldn’t call people prunes, Dad,” Victor replies.

Grandma comes back and chuckles to see Mum and Dad clinging to each other and I remember the time in Clacton when she snorted her top teeth into a samovar. I can’t stop laughing and the holiday seems more bearable now everyone is slightly bouncier, although that could be down to the choppy sea stopping us putting one foot in front of the other without cannoning off the High Tea trolley.

Up on deck, we lean on the rails and watch the ship cutting through the endless water, which is so different from the seaside. Rinsed of colour, it blends with the sky. Gulls circle and squeal, livelier than their murky surroundings. Eventually, the solid mass of the sea seems to heave us along while the ship becomes static.

The wind whips the side-wing of Dad’s black glossy hair out of its Brylcreem and he struggles to smooth it back. He gives up, pulling on his cigarette as if he’s about to face a firing-squad. The dream he’s living at last seems to be weighing him down. He catches my eye and I see fear. Either that or he’s about to throw up the Dutch toast. No. It’s fear. This is how he looks during the night-terrors.

Grandma offers him a nip of her brandy. Trouble is, she’s not really used to alcohol. She’s only brought it to ward off sea-sickness. And for every nip she offers Mum or Dad, she has one for herself. When Victor’s hamster was ill she gave it a nip. By the time it revived, she couldn’t see straight to put it back in the cage and it disappeared. Dad took the entire settee apart before he found it comatose under the antimacassar.

We try to enjoy the strong cooling wind on the deck, but all the wet wooden seats are occupied and Grandma keeps saying, “Oh bugger, there go my curls.”

After the seagulls quieten for a minute, Mum, her face flushed and girlish, says to Grandma, “I’m so excited, Nell. Soon I’ll be home at last.”

“I wish I bloody-well was, Bridge. All I want is a cup of English tea. Not this foreign gnat’s piddle. And I tell you what, I’m worried sick about Berlin.” Her face looks white and withered and her mouth is folded in as if her teeth have fallen out. I can see her silver moustache. She’s doing her ‘frail old lady’ impersonation, which doesn’t suit a woman built like a Sherman tank.

“Germany is just an ordinary country, Nell,” Mum says.

“What, with all that sausage?”

“Oh Nell, listen. My family are people like you and me. They laugh and cry. Their sky is blue. Their rain makes puddles. Some work in prisons. Some keep pigs. They have dreams.”

Grandma sniffs. “German pigs have dreams?”

“Oh, Nell.”

“Anyway I’ve seen that sausage sliced up in the delicate-nessan, Bridge. Great white lumps of green in it. I don’t trust green.”

“Nell, those are peppercorns.”

“Pepper’s white, Bridge.”

The sea-spray and rain are driving people below again. But in her determined we’re-English-and-won’t be-beaten-by-a-shower way, Grandma unfolds her plastic bonnet, and Mum helps tie it under her chin. The rest of us go back inside. Dad, fortified by the brandy, is trying to pick up the holiday spirit in the way fathers do. While mothers fuss over flasks and wet feet and finding toilets, fathers make it fun. Dad discovers a pack of cards someone has abandoned. They’re a bit battered and damp, but have been designed by fashion-gods.

“Fab, Dad, they’re Biba.”

“I aim to please, Jacqueline,” he says, giving my name a French accent. “Is this what they call a gas?”

“This is definitely a gas, Dad.”

The backs of the cards are decorated with the Biba black and gold pattern and the fronts are all coloured drawings of impossibly beautiful model-girls in not very many clothes. It’s a bit embarrassing to see Dad blinking away at them while we play Newmarket. He holds some of the girls very close. I can actually hear them brush against his glasses. And he looks a bit agitated when he lays down the Queen of Clubs in her frilly white swimsuit, especially when he has to put his threepenny piece on her. But better these girls than the Bad-Moon variety. I hope Mum and Grandma stay on deck for ages. I hope they get swept over… No, maybe not.

Bwa-Bwa and her parents pass by, wild-haired and red-nosed from the deck. Even though she is restrained by a harness and reins, she lunges at us, determined to touch the cards. She pulls free and snatches them, knocking Victor’s money to the floor. She barks. She yelps. She wants Trevor-Keith. While Dad picks up the scattered cards and I lob T-K into the tartan bag, we all launch into endless rounds of English-style apology.

“I think she likes the shiny colours, dear,” the mother says. “I’m so awfully sorry about this.”

“No, no. Not at all. Sorry to spread ourselves all over the shop like this. Er, would you all like to play?” Dad asks. “The stakes are reasonable.”

“It’s all right, Sir,” the father says, looking pleased to be asked, but sad that it could never be possible.

“You’d be welcome,” Dad insists through a cloud of smoke, shuffling and smiling like mad.

“She wouldn’t understand, I’m afraid,” the mother says, trying to prise Bwa-Bwa’s hand off the elegant lady-joker wearing one red and one black shoe.

I can see what has to happen. There is a sticky old pack of cards from Clacton in our bag. The ace of spades is missing and the jack of hearts has a bent corner, but isn’t that always the way? I give the Biba cards to Bwa-Bwa. I have never done anything as nice as that before. I would never have given them to Gillian.

“You can have them,” I tell Bwa-Bwa. “To keep.”

And after the no-we-couldn’t-possibly and the-pleasure’s-all-ours rituals, they accept the beautiful Biba cards. The smiling father looks back at us and his face shows he’s thinking, “How nice and ordinary they are. I’ll never have that.”

Once the ship drones towards the Belgian coast, we return to the deck. The spray leaps up, stiffening our faces and turning our hands wet and cold on the metal railing. Dad holds his cigarette to Mum’s lips and she breathes hard, leaving her apricot lipstick on the tip. Her hair is trapped under a blue scarf with an anchor pattern, a few blonde wisps flying free in the briny wind.

“I am so nervous, Roy.”

“Have another drag, love.”

“Beate resents me for leaving Germany,” she says. “Was I wrong?”

I imagine Mum as a dragonfly skimming past a spider’s web, while the ordinary insects are caught.

“Hey, hold the bloody bus, love,” Dad says, trying to push the escaping hair under her scarf. “I found you hanging on by a thread. I took you away to start again. That’s not scarpering.”

“But I left them,” she says, her smoke snatched by a sea-breeze. “They had always tried to make me safe, but I made no difference at all. I was always just a…ach, what is that odd sea-creature that stands on its head and eats with its toes?”

“I can roly-poly underwater with a beach-ball between my knees,” Victor suggests.

“A barnacle, love, do you mean?” Dad asks her.

She nods. “Yes, something that always must depend on someone else.” And she frowns at the bleary crayon-line of the horizon, unwilling to leave the no-man’s land of the boat yet.

The thrilling discovery of land excites everyone else on the ship. We all turn into Vasco da Gama. Children are held up to see it and put down again, disappointed with the dun-coloured streak in the distance.

“When I first saw England,” Mum says, “I wanted the ship to turn round and take me back.”

“I feel like that now, Bridge,” Grandma says.

The sight of land doesn’t mean stepping off the ship. It takes ages to actually reach it, longer than it took to cross the everlasting sea. Dad takes Grandma and Victor to look at the shop while Mum and I squash into seats scattered with pastry crumbs at yet another scribble-patterned table in a smoky bar, surrounded by crowds of clammy, yawning people.

“So, Jacqueline, I’m going home at last,” she says, sounding more German than ever.

I grit my teeth, but this business about going home is the gist of the project, so I’ll have to grin and bear it, if it is possible to grin through gritted teeth. It must be, because that politician, Edward Heath—the one who wants to sail round the world and Dad says he blooming well should and take as long as he likes about it—manages it.

“Mum, for this project, we used pictures for inspiration. And I found one of a factory in Berlin.”

I want to say how I saw the little building, what’s left of it, and thought of Mum. “I thought of you.” Do daughters say that to mothers?

“I...thought…it would be good,” is what burbles up instead. Pathetic. But she is looking at me as if no one could have told her anything better. She even holds my hand for the first time in ages. Sort of awful in public, but all right too.

“It’s about how things are. And how things were. Miss Whipp says we have to show contrasts,” I explain. “Something with a shadow. She wanted me to do Sandie Shaw.”

“Well, Berlin is built on sand.”

Heaven help me. Mind you, shifting sand sounds about right for Berlin. Or quicksand. The entire city might sink without trace before we get there.

Mum is staring into the distance now, disconnected from our stumbling conversation. She often detaches herself and wanders to the front-room window to watch the women streaming off the bus for the early shift at the mop-and-brush when she’s meant to be giving Victor and me our breakfast. She unhooks the enamel let-down in the kitchen, but I have to set it with bowls and spoons, cut the grapefruit and find Victor’s tie. Once I found her cutting our shredded-wheat in half thinking it was toast. And she’s always watching the women climb onto the bus again when we come in from school, even when she’s meant to be minding one of her beery slab-cakes in the oven.

“You are still so young for knowing the sad things about Berlin,” she says at last.

“Fourteen isn’t young anymore. Maybe in your day it was.”

“It was,” she agrees. “I was happy to still wear dirndls and white socks.”

Blimey, this won’t be a good moment to ask her for a Berlei Gay Slant. Especially at thirty-two and six.

I must find a way into the project, even if everything I ask sounds unkind. “How does it feel, Mum, to be treated as foreign?”

“Not easy, Jacqueline. ‘Oh, I’ve always wanted to meet a German,’ a mother said to me last week at Victor’s school, peering at me as if I have a disease that has left interesting scars, but thankfully not something she would catch.”

“And do you actually still feel as foreign now as you did the first day you came to England?”

“I have always felt foreign, Jacqueline.”

She is staring at nothing again. She isn’t on the Maid-of-Bloody-Kent at all. She is lost somewhere else. I may be listening and writing beside her, but she is absent.

“Can you tell me about running away, Mum?”

With my notepad soaking up coffee spills from the table and passengers jogging my arm, I keep writing Mum’s story, leaving out her grammar mistakes.

At long last we return to the car and merge with the swarm raring to roll down the ramp. We rattle out into the cold dusk of Ostend, which smells, according to Grandma, of rotting fish, with Dad’s feet balanced on the clutch and accelerator as if he’s on a tight-rope fifty thousand feet above the Grand Canyon. While he side-steps the brake, I copy up the heart of Mum’s story, a stranger’s tale, and if I didn’t feel her sadness between the words, I would be made of stone.