Goggle-Eyes

3

I’ll tell you this, I’d made a big mistake complaining to Mum that she was going out too much. To please me, she started staying in. But since I’d been daft enough to say that I didn’t really mind Gerald Faulkner, she’d twiddle the telephone cord around her fingers whenever he phoned to invite her to something, and say: ‘Oh, I don’t know, Gerald. We had a really busy day at the hospital, and I’m a bit tired this evening. Why don’t you simply come round here?’

I hated having Goggle-eyes about. I hated the whole house whenever he was in it. I can’t describe exactly what it was, but it just didn’t feel like home any more if he was ambling from room to room in search of a pencil to do the crossword, or slipping out of the downstairs lavatory leaving the cistern hissing behind him, or lifting my school bag off the coffee table so he could lean back on the sofa and watch the news on the telly. I hated Mum for being happy and relaxed, and nice to him. I hated Jude simply for answering whenever he asked her a trivial little question or said something casual and friendly. And sometimes I even hated sweet furry Floss for taking advantage of the fact that Goggle-eyes wasn’t the most active of men, and settling on his trouser legs to moult and purr and dribble away contentedly.

But most of all, of course, I hated him.

And he knew, too. He wasn’t stupid. It can’t have escaped his notice that during all the evenings he spent in our house, I never once spoke to him willingly, never began a conversation, and only answered when he spoke to me if Mum was in the room to see and hear. If she was busy on the phone or in the bathroom when he said something, I’d just pretend I hadn’t heard, or I’d walk out of the room, or start to play ‘The Muppet Show Theme’ on Jude’s descant recorder as loudly as possible. It sounds rude and childish, but that’s how I felt. Each evening I’d hear the tell-tale noise of his car engine cutting out at our kerb, and I’d glance out of the nearest window to see him heaving himself out of the driver’s seat and reaching his thumbs in the waistband of his trousers to hitch them straight before he strolled up our path. The very sight of him used to annoy me so much I’d make some excuse to slip upstairs, and I might even stay there the whole of the evening, pretending to read or be doing some homework, rather than come down and be forced to be civil and friendly.

Mum saw – but didn’t, if you see what I mean. Oh, she knew I wasn’t exactly crazy about him. She knew I’d probably just as soon he fell under a bus, or pushed off to Papua New Guinea or Kuala Lumpur, or took up with someone else’s mother instead. But I don’t think she had the faintest idea how strongly I felt, how much he got on my nerves, how much I loathed him.

And I couldn’t talk to her about it at all. Each time I tried, I found myself standing fishing helplessly for words, and we’d just end up with her peering into my face, a little concerned and expectant, and me saying irritably: ‘Nothing! It doesn’t matter, honestly. Forget it.’

Once, when she was out, I tried to talk to Dad, but he wasn’t very helpful.

‘What’s wrong with him, sweetheart?’

I twisted the coils of green plastic telephone wire around my little finger, and pulled hard.

‘He’s horrible. That’s what’s wrong with him.’

‘What do you mean, horrible?’

‘He’s slimy.’

‘Slimy?’

‘Yes. He’s slimy and creepy and revolting. He makes me absolutely sick. I only have to glance in his direction and I want to throw up.’

‘What does Jude think of him?’

There’s no point in telling actual lies. They always catch you out in the end.

‘Jude sort of likes him.’

There was a silence, then:

‘As a matter of curiosity, what does this Gerald Faulkner look like?’

‘Horrible.’

‘Kitty, I bet this is nonsense. I bet this new friend of your mother’s doesn’t look horrible at all. I bet he looks perfectly normal – middle-aged, getting a bit thick in the middle, going a bit thin on top…’

He might as well have been describing himself. I expect he’d turned round to admire himself in his hall mirror.

‘I suppose so.’

I pulled the plastic wire even tighter, to make the tip of my finger go blue.

‘And I expect he has a normal face too, hasn’t he? I mean, if people saw him coming down the street, they wouldn’t shriek and scuttle up the nearest alley.’

‘I would.’

My finger was bright purple now.

‘But what’s wrong with him?’

You could tell from the tone of his voice that he was getting as frustrated as I was with this phone call.

‘Apart from the fact that he’s horrible and slimy and creepy and revolting and makes me absolutely sick?’

‘Yes. Apart from all that.’

‘I don’t know,’ I wailed desperately down the telephone wire and all the way to Berwick upon Tweed. ‘I just don’t know.’

And I didn’t, either. I couldn’t work out what it was about Gerald Faulkner that kept me lying awake in bed imagining all those dire accidents in which I made him the star, night after night. On Monday I’d arrange for a huge industrial chimney to topple on his head. On Tuesday he’d succumb to a grisly and incurable disease. Some drunk driver might run him over on Wednesday. On Thursday he’d lose his footing strolling with Mum along the path beside the reservoir, slip in and drown. Honestly, I spent so much time thinking up fatal accidents for Goggle-eyes that sometimes when he turned up at our house on Friday with the customary box of chocolates under his arm, I’d catch myself feeling astonished he looked as fit and healthy as he did.

He’d step inside and scoop Floss up into his arms.

‘Is Scotland playing Brazil tonight in your hall?’ he’d ask, nodding at all the lights blazing away. ‘You know, Kitty, a clever anti-nuclear campaigner like you ought to go round this house and switch off a few lights. Take the pressure off your local reactor. Make Torness redundant.’

I’d scowl. He’d smile, and stroll on past me into the living room, where Jude would be waiting with the Monopoly or the Scrabble all set out ready on the coffee table. Sometimes he’d switch off a couple of lights on the way. He had a thing about wasting electricity, you could tell. Sometimes I’d catch him in the hall on his way back from the lavatory, peering at our meter, watching the little wheel spin round and round.

‘You must have left something running,’ he’d tell me anxiously. ‘Perhaps your washing machine is stuck on spin. I can’t believe it’s going round this fast just for the lights!’

Jude would come out and giggle at him until he gave up his fretting, and turned round to lead her back to their game. I’d stamp upstairs to my bedroom, flicking down every single light switch I passed on the way. And down is on in our house – that’s how much he annoyed me.

And I annoyed him, I know I did. I was a little turd, to tell the truth. I made a point of never passing on his phone messages. I pulled snide little faces whenever he spoke. I acted as if everything he brought into our house was either potentially explosive or deadly poisonous. I wouldn’t come near the fabulous shell collection he brought round to show Jude when she finished with Ancient Rome and moved on to The Sea Shore, and I wouldn’t be caught dead eating any of his chocolates. Oh, yes. I don’t deny it. I got on his nerves as much as he got on mine.

And I was just as bad if we went out. I’d drag behind, desperately hoping that no one I knew would walk past and see him arm in arm with my mother, and think for a moment that he might be my dad. If we went to a restaurant, I wouldn’t speak to him. The waiter would stand with his little pad in hand, and ask Goggle-eyes,

‘Have you decided, sir?’

Goggle-eyes would lean across the table, and ask me, ‘Have you decided?’

I’d turn to Mum and tell her what I wanted. She’d turn and tell him. He’d turn and tell the waiter, who’d look as politely interested as he could, given he’d already written it down on his pad. It was ridiculous, but it was important to me. And I wouldn’t even taste anything Goggle-eyes ordered, or change plates with him if my meal turned out to be horrible and he was the only one willing to swap. Mum noticed. One time, when she was paying, she even leaned over suddenly and whispered sweetly in my ear,

‘I’m warning you, Kits. Leave that bowl of tagliatelle in black olive sauce just because you’re too stubborn to swap it for Gerald’s crispy chicken, and I’ll charge you £4.99 plus the V.A.T., and I mean it.’

She would, too. I know Mum. So I was forced to chomp my way down to the bottom of the vile lumpy sludge in my bowl, while he sat smirking at me over each golden delicious mouthful. I was so cross that when the trolley of desserts came by, I peeled the label off one of those exotic Ugli fruits and stuck it on the back of his jacket, so everyone in the restaurant would see it and snigger. And when we got home I slid his newspaper out of sight under the rug, and dropped dead leaves off the houseplants into his beer out of spite.

He tried really hard to be patient, you could tell. He spent an awful lot of time pretending he wasn’t even noticing how rude I was to him. He only really let his anger show once, and that was when I left one of my essays for Mrs Lupey lying on the arm of the sofa where he would see it the moment he sat down. I’d got a really good mark for this essay. ‘I hope that some parts of this, at least, spring from your very vivid imagination!’ she’d written at the end. It was the essay we had to write on Something I Hate, and I had really gone to town. Something I hate comes round to our house regularly, I wrote. Flabby and complacent, it acts as if it owns the place. When it breathes, all the little hairs that stick out of its nostrils waggle. Its teeth are going yellow from encroaching old age, but under its thinning hair, its scalp is mushy pink, like boiled baby. It has a really creepy way of looking at people, like a dog drooling hopefully over its food bowl. That’s why I think of it as ‘Goggle-eyes’.

I don’t think he can have read any further, because it was only a matter of seconds before he ripped the paper from top to bottom, and flung the pieces in the waste basket.

I didn’t mind. I’d made my point. But the look in his eyes warned me not to go so far so openly again. Oh, I kept handing in my little masterpieces at school: my Ode to An Unwelcome Guest, my notes for a class talk entitled Divorce Should be Forbidden Until the Last Child has Left Home, my descriptive essay called An Old Man Ageing. But, for home, I kept to another, safer way of bugging him, something that I could do quite innocently in front of Mum, and no one could even tell me off.

Chattering away about Simon.

It’s interesting, once you’ve decided to bring someone’s name into the conversation, how easily it can be done. And I became an expert quite fast. In fact, I got so good at it that, after a while, there was barely a topic in the world that I couldn’t, somehow, bring round to Simon. Imagine. It’s evening, and Jude has finally packed up the pieces of the game that Goggle-eyes has patiently been playing with her, and gone to bed. While Mum was upstairs tucking her in for the night, he’s gone through to the kitchen and made some coffee. Now Mum’s down again, and he’s trying to persuade her to leave the debris of the day lying all over the carpet, and sit down beside him on the sofa to drink it. Of course, Mum has to lean over in his direction to pick her cup off the little table. And, goggling away as usual, he starts to lay it on with a trowel.

‘That blouse completely changes the colour of your eyes, Rosalind. They’ve gone the most extraordinary violet.’

Op, plop. Pass the mop. I’d pluck at Mum’s skirt to make it perfectly clear that I was talking to her, and not him.

‘Do you remember that violet shirt of Simon’s? He often wore it when he came round here. Do you remember when he took us to the pantomime? He wore it then. And when we went to the stock car race, and the art gallery, and the flower show. And when we visited Granny last time.’

Goggle-eyes leaned back on the sofa, raised his eyes to heaven, and let out a barely perceptible sigh. Mum said,

‘Have you got any more homework to finish, Kitty?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve done it already. I did it after I helped Jude with hers. She’s stuck on fractions now. Do you remember when Simon used to help her with her homework and you said he had the patience of a saint?’

Mum gave me one of her looks. To be quite fair to her, she’s not at all the soppy sort of woman who goes around trying to pretend that she lived in a shoe box until the man at her side happened along. But still I could tell that she was getting really fed up with me going on and on and on about Simon, blowing it all up and stretching it out until it practically began to sound as if the two of them had broken it off about two feet away from the altar.

‘And have you finished your music practice?’

‘You heard me. I played Minuet in D and “Gladly my Cross I’d Bear”. Simon says when he was very young in church, he always thought that they were singing “Gladly, my Cross-eyed Bear”.’

Simon says, Simon says… Behind Mum, Gerald Faulkner narrowed his eyes at me, and drew two fingers slowly and steadily across his throat. From the look on his face I could tell it was more of a joke than a real threat. But I pretended otherwise, and stood up at once.

‘All right. I’ll go,’ I told them in a quiet, shaky little voice. ‘I see I’m in your way. I’ll leave you together. I’ll go upstairs and think of something to do…’

I let my voice trail off, trying to create the impression that I’d be sitting miserably twiddling my thumbs in a cold lonely room until bedtime, and you could practically hear the guilt in Mum’s voice when she said, ‘Don’t be silly,’ and patted the sofa beside her.

‘Come on. Sit down. We want you to stay. Don’t we, Gerald?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Goggle-eyes evenly, looking at me with an entirely expressionless face. ‘We want you to stay. It’s your home, after all, not mine.’

You wouldn’t think so. After a few weeks of polite sofa sitting, he practically dug himself in. He started to act as if he were one of the family. You know the sort of thing I mean. There’s all the difference in the world between a guest and someone who has a right to be in your house. Guests stay where you’ve put them, and carry on doing whatever you suggested they do, until you suggest they stop and do something else. If you leave them drinking a cup of tea and looking through your holiday slides, they’re supposed to sit tight till you ask them to come and string beans in your kitchen. They’re not supposed to get up the moment they feel like it and wander all over your house, rooting in your tool cupboard for hammers and wrenches, and nosing around people’s bedrooms.

‘Kitty, could I come in your room for a moment?’

I kept the door as tightly closed as I could, without cutting my head off.

‘What for?’

He swung the hammer and the wrench.

‘I’m searching for an airlock in the pipes. I think it’s probably in there with you.’

He nodded towards my door. And since he had his shirt sleeves rolled right up, and oily stains on his fingers, I had to believe him.

‘I suppose so.’

I pulled the door back as far as it would go.

He stood and waited.

‘Well?’ he repeated. ‘Can you open the door?’

‘I have,’ I told him. ‘This is as far as it opens.’

‘What’s wrong with it?’ (Oh, you could see it in his eyes: Goody! Another little job to help me suck up to my lovely Rosalind.)

‘Nothing is wrong with it,’ I snapped. ‘It’s just that there’s one or two books lying behind it on the floor.’

‘One or two books.’ He whistled. ‘You must have the whole National Scottish Collection behind there, to jam it that much.’

I said nothing. I think he knew perfectly well what I meant by my silence. But I did pull the door back a little, till all my English Literature books splayed up on top of one another with their spines cracking.

He slotted himself in sideways, and peered through the gloom.

‘Why is it so dark in here?’ he asked. ‘Why haven’t you opened your curtains?’

I stepped back, tripping on wires from my computer and my hair crimpers tangled all over the floor.

‘I haven’t had time yet.’

‘Time? It’s practically evening. If you don’t open them soon, it will be time to close them again.’

I ignored him. He lifted a foot and slid it gingerly between my plastic bags full of spare wools and some dirty old tea cups. You could tell he was trying really hard not to tread on the clothes that I hadn’t had time to hang up yet. But there was not much actual carpet showing, and he tipped a cereal bowl with his heel. Luckily Floss had drunk most of the milk, and the cornflakes had dried up.

He flung the curtains open. Light flooded the room.

There was stunned silence, then:

‘Dear gods!’ he whispered softly in some awe. ‘Designer compost!’

He gazed about him in amazement. And it did look a bit slummy, I admit. Blackened banana skins don’t look too nasty dropped in a waste-paper basket, but when you see them spread on your crumpled bedclothes, coated with cat hairs, they can be a bit off-putting. And the tops were off most of the make-up and hair stuff. And the playing cards would have looked neater in a pile. And if my dresser drawers had been pushed in, none of my underwear would have been spilling on the floor.

He stopped to pick up a mug with two inches of stone cold coffee inside it, and a layer of thick green scum over the top.

‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Bit of a rarity, this particular mould.’

‘I think you mentioned an airlock in our pipes,’ I said coldly.

Notice that? Not the pipes. Our pipes. I always hoped that if I managed to make him sound enough like a trespasser in our house, he might go away. It never worked.

‘Oh, yes.’

He made a space for the coffee cup on my desk, between my furry slippers and a large tin of cat food I must have brought up from downstairs one night when Floss seemed hungry. There was a metallic clink as he put down the cup. We both heard it. He brushed a couple of letters from my dad aside, and picked up something lying underneath.

Scissors.

‘Kitty,’ he said. ‘Are these the scissors your mother spent three days searching for last week?’

I flushed. I knew that he’d been at her side each time she pleaded with me to scour my room one more time, because her precious sharp hair-cutting scissors couldn’t have been anywhere else but there. He’d heard me insisting I had looked under absolutely everything, thoroughly, twice, and they were most definitely not there.

He laid the scissors down beside the wrench with a sigh, and turned away. Brushing aside a tell-tale nest of crinkly wrappers from the last box of chocolates he’d brought to the house, he knelt down on the floor.

‘Do you mind if I prise a few of these odd socks out from behind your radiator?’ he asked politely. ‘Principles of convection, you understand.’

‘I’ll get them out.’

I wouldn’t have seemed so keen to cooperate, but you know how it is when someone starts rooting around the more impenetrable areas of your bedroom. You never know if they’re going to turn up something so embarrassing you’ll die of shame.

As I reached in the top of the radiator, he tapped the bottom sharply. Two shrivelled apple cores shot out.

He frowned.

‘That pinging noise,’ he said. ‘It’s making me just a wee bit suspicious.’

I thought he meant my radiator must have sprung a leak. But when he’d fished behind the metal casing with a stick he found in my Stop Trident collection, he managed to bring up four house keys tangled together with string.

Dangling them from his fingers, Exhibit A, he looked at me gravely.

‘Now these will set your mother’s mind at rest,’ he remarked. ‘She’s been wondering what on earth happened to all the door keys.’

He tapped the radiator again, a little harder. Another apple core shot out, stuck to a chocolate that I didn’t like much, and there was a rich-sounding gurgle as water welled freely along the pipes for the first time in days.

‘There.’ He sat back on his heels. ‘I think that might well be the problem solved.’

Brushing green eye-glitter from the knees of his trousers, he stood and took one more slow, marvelling look around my room. His eyes, I noticed, came to rest on my pot plant.

‘Fascinating,’ he said. ‘Look at it. No water. No fresh air. No sunlight. And still it lives.’

‘Is that it?’ I asked coldly. ‘Are you finished?’

He turned and pulled the door back as far as it would go against my heap of English books.

‘Miss Kitty Killin,’ he said admiringly, edging as best he could through the narrow gap. ‘The only girl in the whole world who can make litter out of literature!’

Before I could stick out my tongue at him, he had gone.