Various Pets Alive and Dead Read online

  Seeing her let her hair down on Friday night at her birthday party was a revelation. They were all in a restaurant in the West End, a classy little joint off Haymarket with antique furniture, an incomprehensible menu and a wine list that started at £50 and ended at £3,000. She was the only girl there, of the seven of them; she must be used to that by now. She could certainly hold her own when it came to eating and drinking. It was incredible to watch someone so skinny putting away such quantities – where did it all go? They were in a private room and, once they’d got past dessert, the cognac and vodka started to flow. All of a sudden she kicked her shoes off and jumped up on the table and started spinning round in her bare feet, red toenails flashing on the white tablecloth, carefully stepping between the plates and glasses, clapping her hands and singing, or more like chanting, in her strange deep-throat language. Then the two French guys on their team got up and joined in, an old Carla Bruni number, and soon they were all dancing and singing and smashing glasses over their shoulders. Maybe a bit of other damage too. Unfortunately, as he started showing off his moonwalk moves, he put his foot on an empty bottle that was rolling on the floor and slid backwards, putting his head through an oil painting on the wall as he went down. When he came to, everyone else had left, apart from a couple of worried-looking waitresses, who bundled him into a taxi as soon as he could stand up.

  What happened next? He’s forgotten.

  It was one of those unforgettable nights.

  He catches her eye through the glass wall and blows her a kiss; she looks away, but he gets a quick glimpse of a smile. What would it be like, he wonders, to take her back to Doncaster, to introduce her to his parents, Marcus and Doro? Hm. Possibly a bit awkward at first. He’ll have to prepare the ground carefully. One slight problem is that he hasn’t actually told his parents yet that he’s packed in his maths PhD at Cambridge, and is working as a quantitative analyst for the UK branch of an international investment bank. And earning … well, quite a lot more than they ever did. When he meets up with Doro tomorrow, he’ll tell her.

  Yes, he’ll definitely do it tomorrow.

  CLARA: Vandalism, pee and the Doncaster climate

  On the first day of term, 1st September 2008, Clara Free turns into a drab crescent of red-brick semis in Doncaster, eases her little Ford Ka into reverse, and lines up the school entrance in her wing mirrors. She looks over her right shoulder. She gives it a bit of gas. The car nudges backwards and scrapes the gate: crunch. Drat!

  Getting out to inspect the damage, she enjoys a moment of smugness. Someone else, probably Miss Historical Postlethwaite, aka Miss Hippo, has done an even bigger crunch. The school sign is leaning over crookedly against the ugly chain-link fence with its frill of barbed wire: eenhills Primary Schoo (the ‘Gr’ and ‘l’ disappeared years ago) curved round a rural landscape of green hills folding into each other, although in fact the school is bang in the middle of a Doncaster council estate.

  Parking is not her strong point, and this morning she’s been particularly distracted. In fact, she’s lucky to still be alive, given that the crunch could have happened while she was on the motorway, trying to drive and simultaneously read the letter from her mother that came in the post this morning.

  I wanted to tell you our very exciting news. Marcus and I are thinking of getting married.

  Hey, what’s going on, parents? After nearly forty years – why not leave well alone?

  Her classroom with its lingering scent of bleach and beeswax polish breathes quietly, waiting for the children to arrive. She pulls her mother’s crumpled letter out of her bag, wondering – why did she write a letter and put a second-class stamp on it? Why not just phone? Probably a sign of general dottiness.

  We’ll have a reunion, get all the old commune gang together, remember old times …

  Can it be nostalgia for the lentil sludge? The green-painted floorboards? The cheesecloth kaftans? The rotas?

  … celebrate our lives together …

  Cooking rota. Housework rota. Laundry rota. Childcare rota. Sex rota. All the rotas were pinned up on the noticeboard in the kitchen beside the shopping list.

  We’d love you to be there, you and Serge and Oolie-Anna. But don’t tell Oolie just yet.

  Ha! It must be something to do with Oolie-Anna. At the end of the letter, squashed up in smaller handwriting, is a postscript.

  And maybe you could contact the other commune kids and invite them too? I’d love to see how they’ve all grown up.

  See, her mother believes she has oodles of spare time. Unlike her brother Serge – who, being a genius, is excused family obligations on the pretext that he’s writing up his PhD. This has been going on for years. ‘Oh, Serge is so clever – just give him time,’ Doro says. For heaven’s sake, how long does a PhD take?

  Squeezed between her brother’s genius and her sister’s disability, she’s carved out a space for herself as the sensible one, the organiser, the one everyone can lean on. Which is all very well, except sometimes it would be nice to have someone to lean on herself.

  She stuffs the letter back in her bag, switches on her phone to call Doro, changes her mind, and texts Serge’s number instead.

  Call me, Soz. Our parents are up to something.

  Then she heads off to the staffroom to greet her colleagues.

  There’s a fizzy new-term atmosphere; everyone’s showing off their suntans and holiday snaps, and swapping information about their new classes with the teachers who taught them last year. From Mr Kenny, she learns that Jason Taylor is a sneak-thief and an endless source of trouble, Dana Kuciak, the Polish girl, is the class swot, and Robbie Lewis masturbates under the desk. Poor Mr Kenny, with his forty-year forty-a-day habit, is a victim of the new head’s ‘no smoking on the premises’ policy, and his hands are shaking uncontrollably as he speaks. Still, she wishes he hadn’t told her about her new kids – sometimes it’s better to make your own judgements.

  At ten minutes to nine, the bell rings in the playground. With a blast of shrill voices, 6F hurtles in, and her day begins.

  They spend the morning finding out about each other, and the undifferentiated mass of children gradually separates into thirty-two individuals, with idiosyncrasies, challenges, complicated home circumstances and mystery gifts. It’s at times like this that she thinks she has both the best and the hardest job in the world.

  By midday, the sun has swung round, making the classroom hot and stuffy. The kids are fidgety after their six weeks’ holiday, itching to get outdoors while the weather is still warm. She’s about to disappear off to the staffroom for a quick coffee before playground duty when Jason Taylor sidles up to her desk. He’s a pale, scrawny kid with dark rings around his eyes and a thin stubble of mousy hair.

  ‘Please, miss, I forgot my dinner money. Me mam says can you lend me some while tomorrow?’

  Close up, the smell of him hits her nostrils – cigarette smoke, stale chip fat and wee. She conjures up an instant stereotype of his mother: neglectful, obese and slightly unclean, the sort of woman who goes to the shop in her pyjamas (Benefit Mum Spent Kids’ Dinner Money on Fags and Booze).

  ‘I’m sorry, Jason. You know I can’t do that.’

  ‘Ple-e-ease, miss.’

  ‘Don’t you get free school meals?’

  ‘No, miss, because me mam’s working up Edenthorpe’s.’

  So her stereotype of Mrs Taylor has already taken a knock.

  ‘What’s up, miss? Don’ you trust me?’ he whines.

  He’s persistent, this one.

  When she arrived at the school three years ago, she was brimming with ideas about the contribution she would make to this poor community, how she would light the small spark that would fire these kids up and propel them onwards, upwards, out of this drab, cramped barbed-wire-and-chain-link little world. At the end of her first week, she planted a fast-growing Russian Vine, hoping it would clamber up and cover the ugly fence in the car park, but even this rampant weed has now more or less given up it
s struggle against vandalism, pee and the Doncaster climate. And like the Russian Vine, she’s finding the local conditions a challenge to her stamina. She opens her plastic lunch box and extracts a chocolate bar to give her a sugar fix that’ll tide her over until her lunch. She snaps it in half, and gives half to Jason. Despite what Mr Kenny told her, Jason is one of those kids whose hopelessness tugs at the heart.

  ‘Don’t tell anyone I did that. Now, go away.’

  Jason pockets it reluctantly. Then as she’s about to close the box, quick as a cat, he dips in and snatches a raw carrot, carved to look like a rocket.

  ‘What’s this, miss?’

  Before she can get her answer out, he’s wolfed down the rocket carrot in three bites. At least he’s still got his own teeth.

  ‘It’s a carrot, Jason. Vegetable.’

  He clasps his stomach and makes vomiting sounds. ‘Oah noah! I’m gonner die of vegetable poisoning!’

  Despite herself, she laughs.

  ‘If I die, miss, it’ll be your fault.’

  ‘You’re more likely to die from not eating vegetables.’

  ‘Mam says if I eat carrots all t’ birds’ll fancy me.’ He gives her a leery bad-tooth grin. ‘Do you fancy me, miss? Cos I reyt fancy you.’

  Of all the no-hope kids in her class, there’s always one that gets under her skin.

  On the way home, there’s been an accident on the M1 and the traffic is almost at a standstill. It’s six o’clock before the bottleneck has cleared and she swoops down into Sheffield, skimming the Parkway roundabout under the curving tram tracks and the water chute from the leisure centre. Compared with the drab bricky thickets of Doncaster, Sheffield seems like a gleaming metropolis pulsing with culture and glamour. She parks her car in her space, turns the key in her door and kicks off her school shoes, like shedding an old skin. Then she puts the kettle on, lights her only cigarette of the day, and looks down from her plant-filled window at the people strolling in the square and the lights twinkling in the water, thinking about the kids in her new class.

  When you’re a kid, you assume the world you inhabit is the only world there is; you don’t realise how temporary, how provisional everything is. How quickly things can change. She wishes she could take Jason Taylor aside and tell him that. ‘Don’t worry,’ she’d say, ‘you can escape. Look, I don’t live in a commune now. I live in a lovely modern flat in the centre of Sheffield with a clean bathroom all to myself and tall windows full of plants overlooking a square with cafés and fountains. One day you’ll grow up, then you can choose your own life.’

  But she’s not sure how true that really is.

  SERGE: Cappuccino

  One, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen … The ghost rabbits are still there, crouching on his bed, as Serge struggles out of his dream. They watch, ears pricked up, noses twitching, sniffing the air, as if to forewarn him of danger. He rehearses – walk, tube, walk, office, hello team, hello Maroushka, work, work, work, quick lunch break. Then he remembers – he’s supposed to be meeting Doro this afternoon.

  Normally, he’d welcome the chance to have a break from the computer and spend an afternoon with his mother – but the trouble is, his two worlds, his past and his present, are so different, so inimical, that like the collision of two subatomic particles, the blast could totally annihilate him.

  How to face this threat? He pulls the duvet over his head and goes back to sleep.

  The rabbits have disappeared, and he finds himself wandering in the crumbly rambly maze of his childhood home, Solidarity Hall. It’s early morning, they’re getting ready for school, their clothes are in a heap on the attic floor. They grab and tussle. If he loses out, he’ll have to go to school wearing something too small, too girly, or just ridiculously naff. His pulses are pounding. He ends up with the crochet rainbow waistcoat. His guts ache with shame and terror. His head feels full of concrete.

  Now the dream shifts, it’s afternoon, and they’re waiting at the school gate. It’s getting late. No one’s turned up to walk them home, so Clara takes charge. ‘Come on! Follow me!’ She strides out into the dusk, singing the slumbering starlings song. The lane is long and winding, overshadowed by gloomy conifers. Clara starts to run and he runs to keep up. His heart is thumping: boom, boom, boom! His breath is quick and shallow. The house is in darkness when they get back, and the man from the electricity board is in the hall, telling them they’ve been cut off. Somebody’s aunty is weeping at the foot of the stairs. All the Groans have disappeared. Then he opens the door of the sitting room, and everyone is in there, lying on the floor, dead. He lets out a howl, and Doro sits up, smiling.

  ‘We’re just acting dead, darling. The Dutch Situationists are here.’

  They all get up and start chattering and laughing.

  He rubs his eyes. Was it a dream, or did it really happen?

  Shower, coffee, walk, tube, walk, office, hello team, hello Maroushka.

  An hour later, he’s sitting in the morning meeting with the six other quants. His head now feels full of polystyrene instead of concrete, so things are looking up.

  At midday, Maroushka leans over his desk. She’s wearing a yellow jacket with a very short ivory linen dress and slingback shoes you could stab kittens with.

  ‘You coming for lunch soon, Sergei?’

  ‘Yes. No. Sorry, Maroushka, I have to … go to the dentist.’

  ‘Oyoyò! Gut luck!’

  His mother doesn’t realise the sacrifice she’s asking of him. In fact, she doesn’t realise that even sneaking away from the office for a couple of hours to have a coffee with her could be awkward. The FATCA building is a self-contained world where employees not only work, but can also socialise, exercise in the gym, get their hair done, buy essentials and small expensive gifts, eat in the cafeteria or, more often nowadays, wolf down a sandwich at their desks – in other words, there is really no reason for anyone to leave the building at all during the day.

  Serge and Doro rendezvous in the Café Rouge opposite St Paul’s on the first Tuesday in September 2008, because Doro refuses to go into Starbucks, which she says is an outpost of American imperialism. He doesn’t mention that the Café Rouge is a wholly owned subsidiary of Whitbread Plc, or they could be wandering around all afternoon looking for somewhere suitable.

  The weather is still hot, and the square around St Paul’s is full of tourists wearing terrible clothes, bumping into each other as they shuffle around peering through their viewfinders at the great gilded Wren dome, glistening up there in the sky-blue sky. They don’t realise it’s an illusion – in reality two domes, supported in the middle by a sturdy brick cone. If he told her, Doro would probably say it’s like the gilded edifice of capitalism supported by the invisible toil of the masses.

  Doro, alas, is also wearing terrible clothes, which is a shame, because she’s a nice-looking woman – tall, still slim, dark wavy hair lightly streaked with grey, and good skin. But no one over forty should wear a sequinned denim gipsy-flounce skirt – in fact, no one of any age. And that green linen jacket might have been okay in its heyday, but that was some twenty years ago. He has nothing against retro-chic so long as it’s worn ironically, but he fears his mum really means it.

  ‘I’ve got some exciting news, Serge.’ She leans across the table, accidentally dipping the sleeve of the jacket into the froth on her cappuccino, then rubs her sleeve with a tissue, spreading the chocolate powder into a brown smudge. ‘Marcus and I are thinking of getting married.’

  ‘So what’s all this about, Mum?’

  Obviously it’s not love at first sight, as she and Marcus have been living together since well before he and Clara were born. But Doro likes her little dramas, so he raises his eyebrows and leans forward.

  ‘Tell me more!’

  She dips a finger in the cappuccino foam and licks it. Thank God they’re not in Franco’s, where someone from work might see them.

  ‘We thought it would be nice to make our love official, after all these year
s.’

  Although he’s quite an expert on unpredictability, his mother’s changes of direction still leave him baffled. Throughout the commune years, marriage was reviled as an oppressive patriarchal institution. Now here she is, getting all dewy-eyed.

  ‘Congratulations, Mum. You’ve caught the old goat at last! Ha ha.’

  For God’s sake, they’re in their sixties! Can his dad still get it up?

  ‘Yes, we’ve got plenty to celebrate. Me and Marcus going legit. Clara’s promotion to Head of Science. Oolie’s first job. The fortieth anniversary of Solidarity Hall. And soon your PhD.’

  Uh-uh. We’re getting on to dangerous territory here.

  ‘Lovely jacket, Mum. Is it a designer label?’ He plays for time, wondering how to break his news.

  ‘Jaeger …’ Doro hesitates. ‘Recycled, of course.’

  She means Oxfam. ‘You and your recycling! The thing is, Mum –’

  ‘We must all learn to live with less, Serge. Less waste! Less greed! Less mindless consumption!’

  Doro has a long list of things she disapproves of, including consumerism, racism, war, Botox, Jeremy Clarkson and trans-fatty acids. Maybe bankers have been added already; if not, it can only be a matter of time.

  ‘It doesn’t work like that, Mum. The economy depends on people borrowing and spending – that’s what creates wealth.’

  He knows this shocking truth must seem counterintuitive to a person of her generation. For them, capitalism was the big no-no.