“Stop it,” says Edith Sorrel. “Stop that at once!”
“Don’t be afraid of the farmer’s gun!” squawks up Mavis.
“Right on,” says Niker.
“He’ll get by…” continues Albert in a gravelly lilt, “without a rabbit pie…”
“Stop the singing,” says Edith. “Don’t sing. I asked you to stop.”
“Ole misery guts,” mutters Albert.
“Run,” Niker encourages the Chicken, “run rabbit…”
Edith draws herself to her feet. She is tall. She reaches for her stick. For one insane moment I think she intends to hit someone. But of course she only means to walk away.
“Run,” sings Albert jovially to her stiff, retreating back, “rabbit, run, run, run.”
I follow Edith into the corridor. Each stride looks painful.
“Can I help?”
“No,” she says “No. Go away. Leave me alone.”
“Don’t mind her,” says Matron. “She doesn’t mean anything by it.”
But, as Edith shuts the door of her room, I have this horrible feeling that she does mean something by it. All of it.
I don’t go to Chance House. Not right after school anyway. But I find myself wanting to go. The whole walk home to Grantley Street I keep thinking, “I ought to be going to Chance House. Why aren’t I going to Chance House?” And it’s not just because I told some batty old woman that I would go, it’s because I feel, about as powerfully as I’ve ever felt about anything, that the house is standing somewhere close, waiting for me. Maybe being batty is catching.
Grantley Street is a thin strip of houses, wedged between two roads. Our front door opens straight on to the pavement of Grantley and our rear patio on to The Lane, which is lucky considering it could open on to The Dog Leg. The Dog Leg can be scary. More about that later.
Our back gate is a nine-foot barricade of wood with a deranged row of nails banged in along the top. It’s about two years since Mum made with the hammer, so the points are a bit rusty now. I perform complicated manoeuvres with the gate lock, the bolts and chain and then, once inside, remove a loose brick from the garden wall to get at the house keys. A moment later I’m letting myself into the kitchen.
“I can see you,” I announce in a loud voice.
I wish I could stop doing this. I’m not quite sure who I’m expecting to find in our kitchen. Niker. A burglar. Dad. But it’s part of the routine now, a habit, a mantra. Saying it protects me, gives me one-up on Whoever’s There. Proves I can’t be startled, taken advantage of. Trouble is, I have to do it in every room in the house.
“I can see you!” I yell into the sitting room. Then I thunder upstairs and repeat myself in Mum’s bedroom, in mine and finally in the bathroom. This little quirk started about three years ago, when Dad left and Mum took the extra shifts at the hospital. “No choice, now,” Mum said. The good news is I don’t do the cupboards any more. I used to shout into the larder, Mum’s wardrobe and the airing cupboard. This has to be progress.
Of course, I don’t yell if Mum’s home. Well, I did once, blasted into the kitchen shrieking, “I can see you!” at the top of my voice. Mum was sat at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee.
“That’s lucky,” she said, “or you’d need new glasses.”
They call it obsessive-compulsive behaviour. Or compulsive-obsessive or Chance House Bonkers or something. People do it with hand-washing. I read that in the newspapers. They wash their hands again and again and again, four times, six times, twenty times. Then as soon as their hands are dry, it’s back to the basin again, wash, wash, wash. Washing until they bleed. By comparison I have to be a mild case. Almost normal in fact. Norbert Normal.
Anyhow. I’m in the house. I’d like to tell you that I get a chocolate biscuit and then go straight on to the computer. Well, I do get the biscuit but then I go upstairs to paint my models. Niker, when he came round, called me a “Saddo”. I didn’t tell him we don’t have a computer because of the money. I told him I like painting model soldiers. Which, as it happens, I do. That was a little while after the Grape Incident. Which took place in The Dog Leg. Anyway, I didn’t tell Mum anything about anything. But she’s not stupid. She’d watched me avoiding The Dog Leg, even though it’s the quickest way to school. And one afternoon she asked:
“Is someone on your back?”
“No.”
“Someone bullying you?”
“No.”
“Do you want to invite anyone home for tea?”
“No!”
“If someone’s on your back,” she said, “you can always try to make a friend of them. Ask their advice. Get them to help you with something. Invite them home. It sometimes helps.”
“Right.”
How come grown-ups are always so smart about your life, but not quite so smart about their own? Slap, slap, slap. That was Dad hitting her on the landing. Well, hitting her on the face actually, out on the landing. Or maybe on the shoulders. I didn’t really want to look. I could hear plenty enough. Anyhow, I didn’t notice her trying to make him into a friend next morning.
So what happens? Niker comes home. I didn’t think for a moment he’d accept the invitation. In fact, it took me three weeks to pluck up courage to ask him, and even then I had to write the time and date down and pass it to him like some secret note. I thought he’d laugh. But he just looked at me and said: “Yeah. Why not.” Of course Mum had planned to be there, but she hadn’t reckoned on a juggernaut jackknifing on the A23 and ploughing into six other vehicles. Like every other member of nursing staff in Sussex, she was called into Accident and Emergency. So when we got home there was a note on the table and a lasagna in the oven. Niker doesn’t like lasagna.
“No computer and no food,” said Niker. “On the other hand – no parents.”
I had never intended to show Niker the lead soldiers – the ones that were my father’s when he was a child. Dad had bought them in Willie Sureen, Sloane Street, with his own pocket money on one of the rare occasions he’d accompanied my grandfather on business to London. No more than half a thumb high, each man is intricately cast, from the sharp tip of his spear to the insignia on his tricorn or the buttons on his spats. Highlanders of the ’45 rebellion who died at Culloden, French officers who fought against Wolfe in Canada in the Seven Years War, a single Grenadier guard on his knees with a bayonet, a little drummer boy. Each delicately painted in Humbrol enamel, every silver belt buckle, cross-gartered stocking, black sporran tassel executed perfectly, every soldier a tribute to the skill of my father, who has such large, ungainly hands.
No, I never meant to show Niker these soldiers, which I keep wrapped in tissue paper in the Huntley and Palmer Superior Reading Biscuits tin in which Dad presented them to me on my eighth birthday. I intended to show him the small, less detailed plastic models, also my father’s, from the American War of Independence. Cavalry, artillery, foot soldiers, painted more sporadically by Dad, and left in their grey or blue plastic for me to finish. And painstakingly, with my sable brushes and thinners, I have been finishing them. The rifles of these soldiers are flexible, durable, whereas the smallest, most accidental, tweak can snap the sword of one of the lead soldiers.
So there they were that day, the plastic models, on my desk. The horses, the riders, the gun carriages, the infantry and even one or two odd cowboys, a belly-scuttling Indian, a First World War soldier, titbits to entice. And the paint of course. And the