Just a few feet away from him, struggling furiously with the net, Lucy, too, was on her feet. Flailing wildly with her arms, her legs planted wide in the water, she finally managed to disentangle herself. Indignantly, she cried, ‘Wasn’t it a moorhen you were supposed to catch?’
The next day they each had a ring on their finger drawn in magic marker. If you dared so much as think ‘Thomas Water-on-the-brain,’ you’d get a vicious kick in the shins from Lucy. His name was now Thomas the Rat. He came up to her chin, and the work on the ark was abandoned.
Toward the end of that drenched summer, a few weeks later, we all received an invitation to the engagement party. At home there was some uncomfortable laughter when our folks tore open the envelope and read the card to us. You could tell Lucy had told her mum exactly what to write.
‘Should we give them a salt-and-pepper set?’ our own mums sniggered to our dads. ‘Or maybe a toaster?’ To us they said, waving their hands, ‘Oh, run off and play, for goodness’ sake,’ which made us prick up our ears, because we wanted to report back to Lucy later what they’d said. But Lucy was much too preoccupied with Thomas to listen to our stories.
Enviously, we wondered what those two could be up to. At Lucy’s house just about everything was permitted, as long as her mum wasn’t disturbed while at work in her studio. She didn’t pay any attention to the kids that came over. She didn’t expect you to sit and have something to drink with her in the kitchen first, either; you could just go ahead and do whatever, she didn’t care. Lucy’s announcement of their engagement was probably the first time her mum had even noticed Thomas.
Maybe the two of them were busy building a cabin in the rectory hallway; maybe they were even finding out where babies came from! The latter was a mystery that had become of increasing interest to us of late, especially since we never seemed able to get a satisfactory answer at home. You came out of your mother’s tummy, yeah, obviously, there were pictures to prove it, a whole album full. But the way you got into that tummy in the first place—that was such an unbelievably gross story that you knew right off they must be pulling your leg, no matter how serious their expression. We were sure it involved a completely different scenario, something to do with gravity, or something. Didn’t our fathers always tell us everything had a scientific explanation?
Without Lucy to play with, the days were long and tedious. Every time we started some game with high hopes, it always ended up getting horribly bogged down, now that Lucy wasn’t around to fine-tune the rules if necessary. Afternoons that should have been perfect for a game of Ali-Baba-and-the-Forty-Thieves ended in chaos and angry tears. All our treasure hunts, races, and dress-up sessions went sour. And every time we snuck over to Thomas’s house on Shepherd’s Close to try kidnapping him, we got there too late. He’d already gone off to play somewhere, said his mother.
She was a short, squat woman, with beady round eyes that looked as if she was about to apologize for something, and she always had a rag in her hand to polish our fingerprints off the door jamb. According to our mothers, who were past masters at sniffing out information on newcomers in record time, she was dirt-phobic. She never set foot outside, they said, except to shake out her dust mop.
Why on earth someone with that kind of problem would marry a groundsman, who tramped home every day with mud on his shoes, was the sort of thing they loved to speculate about. ‘Maybe he’s really good at it,’ they whispered, covering their mouths. At what, Mummy? What’s he so good at? Oh, child, that’s none of your business.
Sometimes we’d catch sight of the man who was really good at none of our business, maintaining the grounds of the housing estate, or on the village green. He wore a broad-brimmed yellow sou’wester on account of the rain, that hid his face completely. There was something about him that made you think of a buffalo, the way he charged at the wild roses and barberry bushes. The kids living on Pitchfork Hill had seen him with their own two eyes (cross their hearts and hope to die) pulling out great handfuls of stinging nettles without gloves on or anything! We were terribly impressed. We decided that if we upset Thomas even in the slightest, the nettle-man would break every bone in our body, and suck out the marrow, too.
The engagement party was set for Sunday afternoon. It was supposed to be an English tea party. We weren’t exactly looking forward to that part, because tea always gave us such a woolly tongue. But at four o’clock our mothers firmly parted our hair with a wet comb or else tamed it with a couple of festive barrettes, they gave us the thoughtfully selected presents to carry, and told us to have a good time ‘and mind your manners and don’t forget to say thank you at the end.’
At the rectory, the door was opened by the Luducos, dressed in black tails and bowties. Their sparse hair was slicked back with gel, which made their kindly faces look even more clueless than usual. ‘May we take your coats, sir, madam?’ they asked us.
We stared at them open-mouthed.
‘Today we are the butlers,’ Duco whispered. He was still wearing his stinky sneakers; that’s how we could tell it was him.
In the hall Lucy and Thomas were busy tickling each other to death, so we stepped into the living room. Our spirits immediately rose. Such a spread of pies, cakes of all kinds and all sizes, and white-bread finger sandwiches cut into triangles! We were allowed to help ourselves to as much as we liked, said Lucy’s mum, and if anyone didn’t like tea, there was orange squash, too. She was padding around on bare feet and had a bright-red scarf knotted around her head, which made her look even less like somebody’s mother than usual. You couldn’t imagine her ever sacrificing herself for Lucy, or becoming invisible or anything.
The news about the orange squash came as a huge relief. We completely forgot to shake hands. We fell upon the food, ravenous.
As we were stuffing our faces, Lucy and Thomas entered the room, their hair all messed up. ‘I had him begging for mercy,’ laughed Lucy. Lovingly, she started pummelling his big round head.
‘But you peed in your pants!’
‘Not true!’
‘Do try to leave your fiancé in one piece, darling!’ said her mother. ‘And now, let’s raise our glasses to you two, shall we? Does everyone have tea or squash? What about our butlers?’
‘We’re having iced tea,’ said Duco, with a grin. He raised his glass.
‘Cheers!’ Ludo, too, waved his glass. When he looked at Lucy, all these little laugh-lines appeared around his eyes. He nodded almost imperceptibly, as if to say, ‘Ah, that Lucy!’ At home our daddies sometimes acted that way, too, if they were feeling particularly proud of you. It gave you the delicious feeling that you were capable of just about anything; fathers could do that just by gazing at you a certain way. That Ludo sure would make a great father one day. He sometimes gazed at Lucy’s mother with that same kind of look in his eyes—you know, the way mothers love to be looked at. Is that a new dress you’re wearing, darling? Have you done something with your hair? That colour looks great on you. No doubt about it: Ludo would definitely make the grade. Only he’d better get a move on with it. He was no spring chicken.
‘Right, my little turtledoves,’ said Lucy’s mother cheerfully. ‘Here’s to the two of you!’
We all cheered Hurray! at the top of our lungs.
Next came the opening of the presents. It was so embarrassing—our mothers had bought them things like a Barbie’s wedding gown, or toys for playing father-and-mother. There was also quite an assortment of Tupperware. Weird. We didn’t get it.
‘Oh you lucky things,’ said Lucy’s mother. ‘I’ll have to borrow those from you sometime. So tell us, Thomas, do you feel settled in yet? Do you like it out here?’
‘I didn’t, at first,’ said Thomas. ‘But now I do.’
‘You can tell your mum and dad that I’ll come over to meet them very soon. Oh blimey, I should have invited them, shouldn’t I!’
‘You can invite them to the wedding,’ said Duco.