Lizzie Vogel 1 - Man at the Helm

22

Little Jack had, some months before, entered a national competition to win a bicycle. He’d answered a few questions about bicycle safety with ease, saying how you had to be aware of the brakes and use hand signals for turning and so on, but had struggled a bit with the tie-breaking slogan as slogans weren’t his thing, so he asked our mother. And she came up with this:

Whether bread, eggs, milk and cheese,

Steak, mince or a lean pork chop,

Beans, lettuce, spuds and peas,

For freshness visit your Co-op.

She just said it without even having to think about it. But Jack didn’t like it. ‘It’s too long, it’s a poem. They only want a slogan.’

And then Jack himself came up with ‘The Co-op – your fresh friend’.

It was good, but he’d never have come up with it had our mother not mentioned freshness in her poem.

Anyway, we’d forgotten all about the competition but it turned out that freshness was indeed the key, and we found out that week (the week of the accountancy realizations) that Little Jack had won a prize. Jack couldn’t go himself to receive the prize because you had to be over eighteen to enter the competition, so our mother had to attend the ceremony and be publicly awarded one of three possible prizes (a bike or one of two hampers, one with assorted cheeses and pale ales and one with chutneys, jams and preserves).

The people who turned up to witness the grand giving away of the prizes by a local councillor seemed upset when our mother was awarded the bicycle and her slogan was praised for its simplicity and for mentioning freshness. One old lady actually shouted out, ‘That woman’s got a nerve entering a competition to win a bicycle – she could afford ten of them.’

And no one clapped as she wheeled it past. A man from the Herald and a woman from the Mercury took a few pictures of her scurrying away and I felt a bit sick. The faces of the little crowd ranged from bored to disgusted. And when we got to the safety of our back garden our mother dropped the Raleigh Superbe, put her fluttering hands up to her face and stood a moment like that. We all stood still as if to respect her. Then, just as she was recovering, Mr Longlady called round to ask how things were going, accounts-wise. Our mother put the coffee on and they sat at the kitchen table.

‘Well, Little Jack won a bicycle,’ she told him, ‘so it’s not all hardship.’

And then the door buzzer sounded again. It was Mrs Longlady this time and, hearing her voice, Mr Longlady slipped into the utility room.

‘Congratulations on your luck,’ said Mrs Longlady,

‘It wasn’t luck – it wasn’t a raffle,’ said my sister. ‘It was a competition.’

‘Well, congratulations on your skill,’ said Mrs Longlady.

We waited a while for Mrs Longlady to speak. But she didn’t and for a while neither of them did. Our mother understood the power of silence and knew that the desperation to fill a gap with words could put one at a disadvantage. Anyway, Mrs Longlady must also have known about the power of silence and was on that occasion stronger and annoyingly our mother cracked first. To be fair, she had just gone through the humiliation of winning a bike that no one wanted her to win and wheeling it away from a hundred scowls.

‘So, how can we help you, Mrs Longlady?’ said our mother reluctantly and putting herself at a disadvantage.

‘I was wondering what you planned to do with the Raleigh Superbe,’ said Mrs Longlady with a satisfied sniff.

‘In what respect?’ asked our mother.

‘Well, I assume you won’t keep it, and thought you might want to find a charitable solution,’ said Mrs Longlady.

‘No, I plan to keep it for the time being,’ said our mother.

‘I am surprised,’ said Mrs Longlady. ‘I’d have thought you’d want to give it to someone needy.’

‘Yes, I might give it away,’ said our mother.

‘May I ask to whom?’ said Mrs Longlady.

‘To my son Jack,’ she said, and gestured to Little Jack.

‘But I meant for charity,’ said Mrs Longlady. ‘You know the village thinks it bad form you entering the competition at all.’

‘Does it?’ said our mother. ‘Why?’

‘Because you have so much and it was a chance for someone else to win something.’

‘Well, thanks for calling,’ said our mother. And she ushered Mrs Longlady to the door and closed it behind her with a slam.

Mr Longlady came out of the utility room, red in the face.

A different man might have taken our mother in his arms and kissed her on the mouth. But Mr Longlady’s hands were as shaky as our mother’s had been earlier and he looked as if he might be sick.

The day of Little Jack’s hearing test at the Royal Infirmary came round. Our mother shuddered at the thought of Leicester Royal Infirmary because of all the babies – dead and alive – she’d either had or not had in that place, and all she could think of was either holding a baby or not and being desperate for a cigarette and wanting to phone someone but not knowing who and realizing there was no one to phone. And the memories and the prospect mingled and she was good for nothing but writing a play. Which she did, called The Navy Nurse, about a senior nurse who wears a navy dress.

My sister said, ‘I’ll take Jack to the hospital, Mum.’ And I said, ‘And me.’

And the three of us went into town on the bus, all through the little villages and lanes, and we sat at the back and ate a bag of kali fishes that we’d got at Miss Woods’s, with cash, before the bus came.

It seemed a waste of time just to test out Little Jack’s loopy hearing/eyesight mix-up, and it was an utterly boring day except for the bit where Jack had to wear enormous headphones and press buttons if he heard a buzz. My sister and I couldn’t stop laughing at his serious little face and his slight starts every time the headphones buzzed and his eagerness to do the thing properly. The audiologist asked us to wait outside. Afterwards, she came out and said she’d write to our mother with the results. She seemed a bit cross with us. I hated being thought badly of, so I said, ‘I’m eleven and my sister is twelve. We didn’t mean to be nasty, we’re just making the best of things.’

‘I don’t care if you’re six and seven, your brother was undergoing a serious testing procedure and you were laughing at him.’ And she strode away down the corridor. I was momentarily distraught and considered running after her, but didn’t.

Some days after, the results came through saying Jack had perfect hearing, and though we weren’t surprised, we were relieved. Then our mother asked if he’d closed his eyes during the test and he stupidly said he hadn’t.

Our mother rang Dr Kaufmann and reminded him that Jack’s hearing was only a problem if he had his eyes closed and could he please make another referral for Jack with that in mind. And a few days later an appointment came through for Little Jack to see a paediatric counsellor. Our mother rang the consultant’s number and demanded an explanation. ‘Why, though?’ she kept asking, and ‘But what is it you’re looking for?’

And our mother and my sister went to Dr Kaufmann and asked for an explanation from him. He was quite direct, apparently, and said something along the lines of Little Jack might think he can’t hear with his eyes closed and he might think it so strongly that he’s making it seem as if it’s happening by cutting himself off aurally.

‘So what if he does?’ asked our mother deeply concerned.

‘It might mean Jack is anxious about something,’ the doctor said.

‘Could it be The Hobbit?’ my sister asked.

‘It could be a number of things making him feel anxious,’ said the doctor, ‘and it might help Jack if we knew what it was. If anything.’

Our mother reluctantly agreed to see the counsellor but didn’t in the end. She told Jack to keep his fucking eyes open and told us to go and shake him in case of fire. And we went to the Copper Kettle for a new egg pan. Which was twice the price of Diggory’s but closer and had ample parking.

Then Charlie turned up like a bad penny. He asked to borrow money. Our mother said she didn’t have any; she said it wearily and with a sadness in her voice. Not so much sad at not having it as sad that he was here again asking.

I’m weary writing about it, I think, because her weariness comes back to me. Charlie asked imploringly and with much energy. She said she really didn’t think she could help, she was waiting for a little money to clear in the bank for tax and rates that were overdue. She even repeated some of the stuff Mr Longlady had explained.

Charlie came up with possible ways and means of releasing money but she said no, she really couldn’t help, and told him she was in dire financial straits. She told him that a man from the council had called at the house about the arrears on the rates. And about Miss Woods from the shop and the bill and how it had been all ham and rolling tobacco.

She said, emphatically albeit calmly, that she couldn’t get any more money because our father’s business was going broke bit by bit, and that although she’d only ever known being rich, she now had to start being poor. This was all said with such an air of finality and authority that my sister and I could hardly believe our ears when Charlie continued asking and saying that if she could just find a way to help him, he’d be able to wriggle free of Mrs Bates and be with her, properly and for ever. He took her two hands in his and said, ‘Please, love, please.’

Our mother still said no, she couldn’t help. Eventually she raised her voice. ‘Look, Charlie, you’ve had all I’ve got, and Little Jack’s going deaf with the worry of it. Now, please go.’

He left, slamming the door, and she was upset. We crowded round her and didn’t even pretend we hadn’t been listening.

A day or so later he phoned from a phone box and whatever he told her, it sent her into a spin.

‘I can’t get that amount in one go, there’s a daily maximum,’ she said, ‘but I’ll be there with what I can get today … I’ll get more tomorrow … OK, where are you?’

We all had to get into the car straight away. She drove like a mad thing into town, parked on Horsefair Street, where no one else would dream of parking, and launched herself at a man closing the outer doors of the Midland Bank. She begged him to let her in. And he did.

She returned to the car moments later and she drove fast, heading south out of town, until we got stuck behind someone in a pink car driving extremely slowly. The pink car kept slowing down as if the driver might be looking for a house number or something. It was an unusual colour for a car and my sister wondered if it might be a prostitute’s car and her slowing down to flash her naked body at pedestrians. Our mother became so impatient she roared round the pink car, overtaking on the wrong side, driving over a few front gardens and through some small shrubs.

My sister screamed, ‘God, Mum!’ or something, and our mother explained that she’d had no option and that the driver of the pink car had just proved the well-known fact that driving too slowly was far more dangerous than driving too fast.

‘Where are we going?’ my sister asked.

‘Wharf Way,’ said our mother.

Wharf Way was an industrial area on the edge of town where you might go for a new exhaust pipe or to chuck something unwanted into the canal.

‘Why there?’ asked my sister.

‘Because Charlie’s in danger, they’re going to hurt him if he doesn’t pay his debts,’ said our mother, dissolving, and my sister knew to leave it there.

We got there and she parked overlooking the canal, and we sat quietly for some time while she rifled through her bag. The still, dark water made me feel cold. It turned out that we’d arrived very early for whatever we were there for.

‘Hell, we’re early,’ she said.

Cigarette smoke was building up in the car and no one would agree to have a window open.

‘It’s cold,’ said Jack.

‘But I can’t breathe,’ I said.

‘Oh, shut up, can’t you,’ said our mother. She looked at her watch. Then she smoothed out a scribbled note.

‘Oh God, I think we’re in the wrong place.’ She gazed out of the window and then at her note and then her watch. ‘Nevis, Nevis, Nevis,’ she chanted – and then looked at the note again. I got out of the car and leant on the bonnet. It was so cold and windy, I was about to get back into the car when my sister got out.

‘This is insane,’ she said, and the wind blew so hard we leant into it and laughed.

‘Get in,’ our mother shouted at us.

‘No, it’s too smoky,’ my sister shouted back.

‘Get in, I want to be ready to go,’ our mother shouted from the car window.

‘Go where, though?’ shouted my sister. ‘What are we doing here?’

We carried on leaning into the wind and in the distance I saw the word ‘Nevis’ emblazoned on the side of a building and was about to point it out to our mother when she drove off, leaving us standing there. My sister and I looked at each other for a moment in disbelief. It was a dreadful place to be left, the awful water behind us and the wind wrapping our hair round our faces, and I felt quite panicked. I pointed and we ran, battling the wind, towards the Nevis building.

Things take an unpleasant turn here, I must warn you.

We got to Nevis and walked around it. A temporary giant For Sale sign had blown down and was careering around the empty car park and then a metal bin rolled towards us and I felt under attack. It seemed sensible to go into the building through the little open door.

We entered an enormous open space. The vastness and the sudden calm were difficult to adjust to. It was empty except for a few boxes and quite a lot of litter in the corners. On the steeply vaulted ceiling, which was at least twenty foot high, were lines and lines of tubular lights but only one line was illuminated. And except for the noise of the debris being blown about outside there was just a faint electric hum. I investigated a small flight of stairs and found myself on a mezzanine ledge. My sister followed and, seeing shadows, we stopped.

Fifty yards ahead, behind a low partition, stood Charlie Bates in a sort of kitchenette and Mr Lomax, pouring water from a kettle into a mug. We quickly bobbed down behind a tower of boxes. We were about to see a fight in a kitchen. Another fight in another kitchen. This one, in the Nevis warehouse kitchenette, was going to make the egg-water throwing skirmish of 1970 seem almost quaint.

Anyway, Charlie was leaning on the sink, Mr Lomax was sipping his hot water from a Derby County mug. Charlie was angry with Mr Lomax. It was difficult to hear Mr Lomax’s side of the conversation because of the wind outside.

‘I’ve had to do everything,’ he said, ‘every single fucking thing.’

Mr Lomax looked at the floor and said something inaudible.

‘Right from the start, it’s all been me,’ Charlie shouted. ‘I’ve had to go there and lie and lie, and you ponce around reading maps and patting the horse – this one was supposed to be yours,’ said Charlie.

Mr Lomax looked ashamed.

‘Well, she’ll be here in a minute. I need to look like someone’s set the boys on me,’ Charlie said, ‘so you’d better smack me up a bit.’

Mr Lomax said something we couldn’t hear.

‘Come on,’ said Charlie, ‘punch me in the mouth.’

Mr Lomax slapped Charlie softly on the face.

‘What the fuck was that?’ said Charlie, furious.

Mr Lomax slapped him again, harder this time, and Charlie slapped him back.

‘Don’t slap me, punch me, c’mon,’ said Charlie, and slapped Lomax again. ‘You got to punch me’ – he pointed to his mouth – ‘in the mouth.’

Mr Lomax punched Charlie in the mouth. Charlie staggered back and touched his lip.

‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘Again.’

Mr Lomax lashed out feebly a few more times. Charlie looked at his watch and then inspected himself in the mirrored splash-back of the Nevis kitchenette. He roughed his hair up and agitated his clothing.

‘D’you think I’ll do?’ he said.

Mr Lomax said something inaudible and Charlie said, ‘Do I look roughed up?’

‘You look fine,’ said Mr Lomax.

Charlie looked at himself some more in the tiles, sighed dramatically and picked up a metal spatula from the drainer. He took a deep breath and began hitting himself across the face and head with it, again and again. He grunted and yelled as he did it and then grabbed a small breadboard and began beating himself around the head with it.

Mr Lomax looked away, put his knuckles to his mouth and whimpered. Charlie picked items off the draining board and hit himself with them and threw them down. At last, Mr Lomax lunged forward, flung his arms around Charlie and shouted, ‘That’s enough.’

And they slumped against the sink together, breathing heavily. Mr Lomax sank to the floor. Charlie looked again in the mirrored tiles. He laughed. ‘Ha, ’smore like it,’ he said thickly, and blood bubbled in a line across his handsome mouth.

Mr Lomax got up and, looking as if he was going to fall down again, leant against a wall.

‘Go to the car, I’ll meet you round the back.’

Mr Lomax didn’t move.

We heard a car, it was Gloxinia. I recognized the squealing fan belt. Charlie looked out of a window slit.

‘OK, here we go, El Indio,’ he said, and looking at Mr Lomax he groaned.

Charlie left by the fire exit. Mr Lomax wiped his face and neck with a J-cloth and followed.

We watched as the fire door clanged shut and ran on tiptoe to the door, peeped out and saw Charlie limp out across the pointless lawn. Our mother stood there beside the car. I couldn’t see much and the buffeting wind made it difficult to read the body language. But I saw the hand-over-mouth gesture of horror and I saw her scrabbling in her bag for the money.

My sister picked up a broken umbrella from the warehouse floor and was suddenly running towards them. I tried to follow, but the door swung back and knocked me to my knees. Looking up I saw our mother cradling Charlie and suddenly my sister lashing out at him with the skeletal brolly. Our mother screamed and danced Charlie out of reach, but my sister jumped on his back. Our mother grabbed my sister from behind, but she kicked out hard and caught him on the side of the head and Charlie limped away into the dark like an injured animal.

Our mother tried to run after him but my sister caught her and held her. The two of them were crying like something out of a police drama, their wind-blown hair all tangled together.

‘We need to get out of here,’ I said, but the wind caught my words and no one heard.

‘We need to get out of here,’ I tried again, and they still stood there. ‘Get into the car, we need to get home,’ I screamed, and I must’ve sounded authoritative then because we all got in and our mother started the engine. Little Jack was lying across the back seat, asleep, and I had to shove him along.

‘Can you drive?’ I asked our mother.

‘Yes,’ she said. She wiped her face with her sleeve and drove us carefully home.

At home Jack went to bed early with hot chocolate and my sister asked our mother twice if she’d like us to ring Dr Kaufmann. And after a while my sister asked again and then just rang Dr Kaufmann. He arrived and spoke to our mother for seventeen minutes and then left. On the way out he spoke to my sister and me.

‘It’s very hard when people don’t behave well, especially when it’s people we trust,’ he said. ‘Be very nice to her.’ And we agreed we would.

The thing was, though, I wasn’t (very nice to her). I felt cross and disgusted and that she was nothing but an idiot. So I just ignored her and took money from her purse in the fruit bowl and hung around outside eating sweets. If it rained, I did piano practice to drown everything out. After a day or two, I felt guilty and sorry and back to normal.

I went and plonked myself down on the sofa in her sitting room. She was sitting on the floor reading papers, ghostly with white, dry lips and looking as if she’d been in the bath too long or had died.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘You shouldn’t be sorry, Lizzie,’ she said, and touched my head.

And then because I was back to normal it was my sister’s turn to be nasty and she stayed away and tutted at everything our mother said and took money from her purse etc., but just for one day, luckily. Then, when she’d got over her unkindness, the three of us had a family-size packet of KP nuts and talked things over.

Although she looked like someone out of a horror film, our mother seemed quite calm and sensible. ‘Well, I’ve completely messed everything up,’ she said, ‘and I’ve been stupid and blind … and now we have to think about the future.’

It occurred to me at that point, and not before, that she was about to say, ‘And I’m very sorry but you will have to be made wards of court.’ My sister looked stricken and I took that to mean she thought the same as me.

But she didn’t, she was only worried about the ponies. ‘Well, we can’t keep four of them,’ our mother said, ‘we’ve got no money.’

My sister put her face in her hands and, however sad it was for her, I realized then that everything was going to be all right. We’d got no money. That was all. It was the norm – everyone had no money. That was the point, wasn’t it? We’d had money when no one else had. Now we were going to be like everyone else. Or even more so, one of the underdogs. That was how I saw it and it was like a weight lifting.

My sister wanted to know if our mother might get the police on to Charlie for cheating her. Our mother said that Charlie hadn’t committed any crime in law, only one of the heart, and the heart didn’t count for much in the law unless it was murder.

‘I could murder him,’ said my sister.

We had a tea break and then moved on to more practical things, and our mother said she would do her best to sort things out and my sister wondered whether our father might be able to help.

‘No, he can’t help,’ said our mother, and then she couldn’t really talk any more, she just wanted to get drunk and go to bed.

‘Why don’t you write a play?’ my sister asked.

‘I need to think about getting the house ready to sell,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow I’ll give Mr Lomax a ring and get him in to fix the banister.’

My sister and I left the room.

‘Does she know about Lomax?’ I asked.

‘No, I didn’t tell her,’ said my sister.

‘Should we tell her?’ I asked.

‘No, definitely not. We should let her ask him to come and fix the banister,’ said my very clever sister, ‘and see what happens.’

Mr Lomax came and fixed the banister. He turned up the next day and did a marvellous job and had a little go at other things too and when our mother asked for the bill, he said not to worry, she could pay him another time.

And after he’d gone we admired the fixed banister and the way he’d smoothed the dents in the parquet flooring and the lovely job he’d done on the slate floor.

‘What a lovely fellow,’ said our mother and, feeling better about mankind, went and wrote some of her play.

Later that evening we had the misery of acting it out. It was the trickiest bit of drama we’d ever attempted and quite draining. My sister insisted on playing herself (her being quite brave and heroic and saving us a couple of hundred quid, if not more) and because our mother was playing Charlie, the two of them had to choreograph a brutal stage fight – the result being Charlie dies from a bruise on the brain. It took ages to get the final kick right because my sister couldn’t get her leg high enough to reach his ‘greying temple’ and in the end they had to turn it into a punch. Also, our mother kept changing Charlie’s deathbed speech from ‘I’m sorry, Elizabeth’ to ‘I do love you, it’s just that I’m a rogue.’

I was playing our mother (as usual) and I swear to God I saw the whole vile situation clearly for the first time. Even though I’d lived right through it. That’s how brilliant she was at writing plays.

At some point, soon after the Charlie fight, Mr Gummo had been clearing up the wind-blown garden and our mother had gone out to offer him a cup of coffee and he’d said what he always said, ‘No, thank you, Mrs V, I’m happy with my flask.’

Our mother took her mug out anyway and told Mr Gummo she was going to have to let him go. He had to sit down on the garden bench and seemed to be blinking back tears. Our mother explained it was beyond her control – money was tight and due to be a lot tighter. Mr Gummo had of course heard rumours. The subject of the rumours he’d heard concerning our mother had only ever been about the financial situation within the business, and not about s-e-x as we’d assumed. Our mother poured her heart out to him and told him how stupid she’d been and that she should apologize to everyone for the mess she’d created.

‘I should apologize to his wife,’ she said.

‘Wife?’ said Mr Gummo. ‘Charles Bates isn’t married.’

‘He is,’ she said.

‘No,’ said Mr Gummo, assuredly, ‘really, he’s not a married man.’

‘But Lilian?’ said our mother.

‘Oh, Lilian,’ said Mr Gummo, with a sniff. ‘Lilian’s his mother.’

After a brief pause our mother took it well, she even laughed. Mr Gummo didn’t see the funny side, though, and he stayed solemn.

‘What a world we live in, Mrs V,’ he said. ‘Thank God for fauna and flora.’ And they sipped their coffee.

He’d got all sorts of things coming up out of the ground over the coming months that he’d be very sad not to see, he said, in particular some alliums and Mexican daisies, whose seeds he’d collected from a wall and sown the spring before. That was the thing about gardening, the garden isn’t about today but about tomorrow (his words), and he wondered if he might come and see how things were doing from time to time.

Our mother said of course he might and that she’d recommend him wholeheartedly to the new people. Hearing that she was planning to sell the house, Mr Gummo wondered if he might just keep the garden looking its best while she tried to sell the house and be in situ when the new owners took possession.

‘Yes, I see,’ said our mother, ‘you mean as a sitting tenant, as it were?’

And they agreed that he’d keep the beds ticking over and the lawns nice, and tidy the laid hedge etc. and very much exist in the eyes of any buyer.