Truestory Page 7

  Duncan and Larry fought with the huge sheet as the wind played with it. They struggled on for some minutes.

  ‘There is a leaf blowing along the ground,’ said Sam. ‘The wind has increased to a four on the Beaufort scale.’

  The wind was now getting under the sheet and making an almighty racket. I rested one foot on my fork to watch. Sam had his eyes squeezed shut and his hands clamped over his ears. In slow motion he began to bend double, looking scared to death.

  ‘Grab it!’ shouted Duncan from the other side of the tunnel. ‘FOR FUCK’S SAKE, GRAB IT!’ The sheet gave a great crack and snapped into the air. ‘You’re worse than FUCKING USELESS,’ yelled Duncan over the wind.

  I dropped my fork and ran across the grass and lunged for the sheet. As it came back down I grabbed it and heaved as hard as I could. The three of us struggled for another few minutes until the sheet was firmly on the hoops and had been wedged down at the corners with paving flags.

  Sam was curled up on the grass counting aloud to block out the chaos.

  Duncan and Larry were both sweating by then and they started to laugh.

  ‘We were nearly blown to Kingdom Fucking Come,’ said Duncan.

  ‘Aye, you’re no’ wrong there. I could have been halfway hame to Scotland by now.’

  I squatted down beside Sam. He stayed curled. ‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘It’s done. Let’s go inside.’

  Larry strode over. ‘Do you want to help bury the edges of the sheet in the ditch, son? I bet you’ll be good at that.’

  ‘No, he’s coming inside with me.’

  Sam lifted his head. He opened his eyes a chink and whispered:

  ‘I did not know it was a joke. A joke is something that evokes laughter. The wind and the sheet did not evoke my laughter. I did not know it was a joke.’

  Larry held his hand out to Sam and I scowled at him. I helped Sam up.

  ‘Come on, son. I’ll show you.’ Larry looked at me and I nodded. I knew he was right – it would be better for Sam to face the tunnel again straight away or it’d turn into yet another terror on his ever-growing list.

  ‘Come on, Sam.’

  Larry showed Sam how to bury the edge of the sheeting to hold it in place.

  ‘Stamp on it, like this, see. Stamp on it.’

  ‘An earthworm,’ Sam said, poking among the folded plastic to rescue it. He held it gently then placed it on the grass. ‘An earthworm needs to be in the soil or it will dry out and die.’ He watched it slither out of sight to safety.

  When the sheeting was taut and secured all the way round, Duncan started messing with the washer.

  ‘Okay, time to clean it off.’

  ‘I dinnae think it’s a great idea – ’ said Larry again. Duncan ignored him and brought the washer closer. ‘It’s best to use a sheet tied wi’ two ropes – ’.

  ‘You said Larry was the expert,’ I said. ‘So why don’t you listen to him?’

  ‘Nah, this is quicker,’ said Duncan. ‘Let’s give it a good blast’. He twisted the nozzle then turned the motor on. A hard jet of water shot out. He pointed it at the plastic tunnel and the water battered into it. Sam was backing off, hands on ears, clutching his hat. Larry took a step back too.

  ‘You’ve got the nozzle too – ’

  ‘FOR FUCK’S SAKE, it’s effing ripped it!’ Duncan kicked the power washer.

  I stamped my foot. ‘For God’s sake, you’re ripping the stupid mouldy thing to bits.’

  Duncan spun round still holding the power washer and a blast of water got me across the shins soaking my jeans. I screamed and jumped back.

  ‘Don’t come interfering here, we don’t fucking need your help,’ he said. ‘You said you wanted nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Well you certainly need somebody’s help,’ I said, pulling my wet jeans away from my legs. ‘Larry told you not to use that washer. And turn the bloody thing off before you do any more damage.’

  I kicked the power washer too and a pain shot up my foot. As I rubbed my toe I glanced up to see Sam hurtling towards the house, a look of pure terror and misery on his face.

  ‘Sam?’ I pressed my ear harder to his bedroom door and hoped the sound of my beating heart wouldn’t drown him out. I could hear him counting, going resolutely up through the four hundreds.

  ‘Four hundred and twenty-four, four hundred and twenty-five, four hundred and . . .’

  ‘Sam?’

  His counting was muffled – he must be under his quilt, probably with his fingers in his ears, along with the cotton wool and possibly still with his hat on.

  ‘. . . twenty-six, four hundred and twenty-seven, four hundred and twenty-eight . . .’

  ‘Sam, I’ll make you pasta for lunch. Nineteen pieces. How’s that?’

  ‘. . . Four hundred and twenty-nine . . .’

  ‘I’ll go and do it now . . .’

  ‘Four hundred and thirty, four hundred and thirty-one . . .’

  He didn’t come down for lunch. I made his pasta plain – how he likes it when he’s really stressed and I wasn’t even going to nag him to have any pesto on it, or tomato sauce or anything. I shouted upstairs two or three times: ‘It’s ready now. It’s on the table. It’s getting cold.’ But he didn’t come down.

  I went upstairs and grabbed his door handle but I stopped myself. Going in and talking to him, or God forbid trying to wrestle that quilt off him, would only make it worse.

  If plain pasta wasn’t going to lure him down, nothing would.

  Duncan and Larry came inside and made their own lunch; I wasn’t volunteering to do it after that shambles. They hacked big lumps of bread, getting crumbs everywhere and taking gouges out of the worktops, and then slapped thick wedges of cheese and pickle on top.

  ‘Larry fixed it with insulation tape,’ said Duncan through a mouthful. I ignored him. ‘Tunnel’s good as new now eh, Larry?’

  I went and got the hoover. I turned it on and banged the hose along the bottom of the units and into the top corners and clanged the pans hanging from the rack until they couldn’t hear themselves think. It worked. They cleared off.

  Duncan went off to his mate’s to borrow a rotovator and Larry disappeared outside. I was in the washroom watching him walking round the polytunnel smoothing it down and sticking more and more bits of tape on it. Larry moved slowly as if he had all the time in the world – which maybe he did – and he was very thorough going round and round, checking it over and over.

  Then he went and sat in his caravan – I watched him from the landing window – reading and rolling fags and smoking. He took deep drags and tapped off his fag ash without looking up from his book.

  What was he reading? What did a man like Larry read? An adventure story probably; spies, maybe, or soldiers or something.

  Every now and then when he gazed out of the caravan and across the orchard I stepped away from the window and back into the shadows.

  It was heading for teatime and there was still no sound from Sam so I went back and listened at his bedroom door. Not a peep. At least he wasn’t still counting. I knocked softly: still nothing.

  ‘Sam?’

  I knocked again.

  ‘Sam? There’s a cheese butty here. Eat it. You’ll feel better.’ I put the butty down by the door. I felt like crying.

  He was nearly twelve years old. Surely I could talk to him about leaving Backwoods? And not leaving for the day but leaving for good. We needed to get away – but I couldn’t break away until he could. I needed him to be brave for both our sakes.

  ‘Sam, please come out or say it’s okay for me to come in.’

  Still the deafening silence. I wiped my face on my jumper and pushed his door open.

  He’d gone again.

  The same old images of him panicking and crying somewhere, alone and frightened, probably curled up in a ball, possibly hurting himself reared into my head. Common sense told me he’d be at Jeannie’s but it’s hard to use common sense when you’ve as many bad memories as I have.
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  I once found him under the sink in the washroom, his sweatshirt damp with tears and his arms covered in so many bite marks they looked like cup rings on an old coffee table. That was because he’d got an ink splodge on this favourite soft sweatshirt. Or the time I found him scratching gouges out of his arms when the TV aerial blew away and all we could get was white noise. Or when he was really little and he banged his head against the door and the floor for no reason that I could tell until it was covered in bumps and blackening bruises.

  Having those experiences under my belt made it hard not to panic.

  I’d taken Sam to the doctors about the head-banging thing – that was in the days when I was still making him go in the car to town. The doctor smiled and asked him some questions: What was his favourite toy? What did he like to eat? What was his favourite television programme? And when Sam looked straight at him and didn’t answer the doctor sent him to the nurse for a hearing test. Sam was interested in the little beepers and the headphones and passed the test with flying colours.

  Satisfied that Sam was not deaf the doctor said all children went through phases and not to worry about it, he’d ask the health visitor to pop by.

  A few days later I found a leaflet shoved through the letterbox, ‘Adjusting to Parenthood’. The health visitor had managed to get the leaflet through the door and leave without my hearing her. She must have tiptoed. Even Bess didn’t hear her. Anyway, the leaflet said: ‘Some people find parenting easy! Some people don’t! Try not to worry if you are finding it hard. Some people take longer than others to adjust!’

  I looked on the back of the leaflet for the helpful stuff, but there was no helpful stuff. The message seemed to be: If your child was ‘playing up’ it was probably a phase but if it wasn’t a phase it must be your own fault. ‘Change your parenting, change your child,’ was the message. ‘Is your child playing up because that is the only way he can get attention?’

  The health visitor had jotted a note inviting me to join a parenting course. I went. ‘Your child is the way they are because you have made them that way,’ was the opening gambit from the very pregnant instructor. ‘Boundaries!’ she said. ‘You must set boundaries and make it very plain what is acceptable.’

  I asked if she already had kids and she stroked her bump and gave a big cheesy smile and said: ‘Not yet, but I can assure you that my child will be brought up with boundaries.’

  When I got home from the course I found Sam, quiet as a mouse, absorbed in rearranging all the tins from the kitchen cupboards in the colours of the rainbow, placing them in a perfect arc across the hearth rug. I knew he’d go berserk when I had to use one, or when I moved one even by an inch. And there’d be no fooling him – he’d remember exactly where each tin went; he had that sort of memory.

  But unless we were going to live with the tin rainbow forever I knew with a sinking heart that we’d have to move them sometime and then what would he do? Hide? Throw a day-long tantrum? Stop breathing altogether?

  For the time being though he had been absorbed in his own rainbow world. ‘Hello Sam’, I said, but he didn’t hear.

  He is what he is, I thought. He does what he does. All the course-leader’s waffling about ‘boundaries’ was like telling me to fight a forest fire with a tea cup. I decided there and then I wasn’t going back on that stupid course. He was a weird kid but if I let him be himself maybe he’d grow out of it. Maybe he’d calm down and, left to his own devices, he’d gradually turn into a kid like everyone else’s. If I poured enough love into him, surely that would make everything all right, wouldn’t it?

  That was six years ago and I was still waiting.

  When I got to Jeannie’s I leant on one of the crosses (In sweet remembrance of my darling Spoon, buried here until the daybreak), while I got my breath back. There were two hard-backed chairs outside in what had probably been a patch of sun, with a view of the cows grazing in the field opposite.

  I tapped and went in. Jeannie and Sam were at the kitchen table.

  ‘It’s you,’ Jeannie said and took a mouthful of cake covered in icing sugar that stuck to her nose and chin and fell off onto her cardi. ‘Want some cake?’ She took another bite. ‘Help yourself.’ She nodded towards the dresser. ‘Sam, bring me a bit more will you? I’m having cake for my main course and cake for my pudding today.’

  There was flour on the floor with animal tracks in it. The cupboard surfaces were covered in cake tins and bags of sugar and mixing bowls and on the dresser was a cake – well, two cakes really, glued together with a thick layer of jam oozing out and dribbling down the sides. The cake was bright pink; Jeannie always put food colouring in her cakes to stop them from being yellow and burning Sam’s eyes and throat.

  I pulled a chair out and plonked myself down. Sam looked right at home in here, cosied up with all these mangy cats and dogs and Jeannie with her dusty old skirt who was more than likely filling his head with all sorts. He had his pot of green pens out – like the ones he had at home – and was drawing a map.

  Sam got up and cut himself and Jeannie a slice of cake each and, balancing them on a hard-backed copy of Alice in Wonderland, he took them to the table.

  ‘Here is 45 degrees of cake,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks, Chucky-Egg.’

  I tried to get a look at Sam’s arms to see if he’d been hurting himself but the sleeves were pulled right down. He still hadn’t looked at me since I arrived. He took a big bite of cake and munched solemnly

  ‘The Hoover,’ he said.

  I clapped my hand to my mouth. ‘Oh, Sam, I’m so sorry.’ I knew the Hoover freaked Sam out if I didn’t warn him yet I’d forgotten one of the most basic rules of Living-with-Sam. I must be going mad. How had I done that? He found the Hoover terrifying – the wriggling pipe, the long nozzle, the roaring motor, the way it bashed into everything around it – the whole thing. I always warned him when I was going to switch it on so he could wear his headphones and watch a DVD about outer space or the Amazon jungle or something, but I’d been so angry with Duncan I’d forgotten.

  ‘I flew to Jeannie’s,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, that was a good idea,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry I forgot.’

  ‘Isaac Newton was a genius but, as regards flying, I do not think his laws of motion fully take into account the power of magic.’

  ‘No. Right,’ I said

  The cake looked soft and sticky and sweet. I cut myself a slice and we ate in silence, but Sam obviously had something on his mind.

  He looked at Jeannie. ‘Have you got a Wish List?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Jeannie.

  ‘What’s on it?’

  ‘Well, today I wished for cake for my main course and cake for my pudding and now look.’

  ‘Larry has given me a map.’ Sam took another bite of cake. ‘He says I should make a Wish List of the things on the map that I want to see in real life.’

  ‘Mmm . . .’ Jeannie said. She brushed the sugar off her cardi and onto her skirt. ‘What’s on it so far?’

  Sam gazed through the window and over the hedge opposite at the grazing cows. He frowned. He put his cake down and looked a bit sick.

  ‘A Wish List is only wishes though, isn’t it?’ said Sam. ‘You do not have to do the wishes on the Wish List? It is not a binding contract, is it?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Course you don’t – ’

  ‘Wishes have a mind of their own,’ cut in Jeannie. ‘Sometimes they come true and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes we wish they would and they don’t, or we wish they would and they do and then we wish they hadn’t but they won’t go away again. Or they do.’ Jeannie nodded. ‘They’re funny things, wishes.’

  ‘Where is your wish list?’ asked Sam.

  ‘It’s not written on a piece of paper,’ said Jeannie.

  Sam frowned.

  ‘It’s written on my heart,’ and, before Sam could give her a lecture on human biology, she added: ‘If it was good enough for Queen Mary, it’s good enough for me.’<
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  ‘Don’t worry about writing a wish list,’ I said, but was interrupted as a cat leapt from the dresser onto the work top and sent a baking tray clattering to the floor.

  Jeannie had finished her cake and settled back nicely in her chair.

  ‘On my wish list is visiting outer space,’ she said, ‘and seeing all the planets in our solar system. Then I want to travel to other galaxies.’

  She licked her finger and dabbed some of the sugar off the dust jacket of Alice in Wonderland, then licked her finger again.

  We all pondered this.

  ‘It takes twenty-three years and a hundred and two days to reach Pluto,’ said Sam. ‘You would not live long enough to reach it.’ Jeannie dipped up more sugar. ‘Also,’ said Sam, the temperature is minus 375F and the atmosphere is methane and so it would be uninhabitable and you would die upon arrival.’

  Jeannie didn’t seem to hear these details.

  ‘And after finishing my space travel I would like to do some time travel,’ she said. ‘I would like to dance at the wedding of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII.’ There was a pause. ‘Possibly on the arm of Geoffrey Chaucer.’

  ‘Geoffrey Chaucer died in 1343, ninety years before Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn,’ said Sam.

  Jeannie waved her hand. ‘Geoffrey Chaucer was an alchemist and a time traveller; a mere ninety years wouldn’t stop him. I also want to sail on the seven seas in a galleon with purple sails and a poop of beaten gold.’ She smacked her lips to catch the last grains of sugar. ‘Like Cleopatra.’

  ‘There are in fact five oceans and a hundred and ten seas plus five landlocked seas,’ said Sam.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ she said. ‘I want to sail on them all. And when I’ve finished I’ll visit both Poles and selected spots around the equator.’

  Sam looked excited at that: ‘I know the names of all the cities within a hundred miles of the equator.’

  I nodded enthusiastically, thinking this might take us onto more predictable territory.

  ‘So which are you going to visit?’ she said, at which Sam shrank in his chair, the smile crashing from his face.