Brian and Jack were off walking in the Cotswolds on Saturday. Tim ventured down to their front door in the vain hope that his Domain of the Undead entry had got in with their letters, because the postman couldn’t be bothered to climb the wooden steps.
Brian, in his tweed breeches with little straps and buckles below the knee, and thick socks like red drainpipes, opened the door briskly.
‘No, sorry, old lad, nothing.’ His beard was mixed up with the neck of his rugged sweater. ‘Going to the Cotswolds,’ he said stoutly, as if it were Kathmandu. ‘Want to come with us?’
‘On no – no thanks.’ He must have asked only because he thought Tim would say no.
‘Got something better to do?’ Brian’s eyes were like pale wet pebbles. His eyebrows, which grew upwards instead of sideways, were made of the same thick, soft hair as his beard. ‘Another time, then.’
‘Thanks. I mean, thanks.’
Tim would never be able to keep up with them. Even in the doorway in his socks, Brian already exuded fresh air and racing clouds and great waxed boots that were in charge of feet rather than worn by them. When he shut the door, it was as if the inside of the house were outdoors, and Tim on the porch were shut stuffily indoors.
In the afternoon, Tim went round to Gareth’s house in Rydale Road that ran uphill to the modern Catholic church with a girder for a spire. The house was near the top, with a view of what was left of the old town, and the new blocks and the factory estate and the slate roofs feeding down in jumbled steps to the life-blood artery of the motorway.
Gareth opened the door, looking as if he had just got up from lying underneath his brother’s van. Tim regretted his clean sweater and jeans.
Gareth, who was taller and broader than Tim, scanned him with narrowed eyes. ‘We didn’t think you was coming.’
‘You said yesterday. You said you’d have a game this afternoon.’
‘Well, we didn’t think you’d come.’
The other two boys were already there, Sean tall and skinny with a raw red area round his mouth and nostrils, Neil squat and pasty, like one of the underground trolls he always brought into the games.
They were their usual uninspiring selves. Gareth was a bit sullen, biting his nails and eating crisps at the same time. To show them who was top dog, after the grudging welcome, Tim created for himself the character of a feared and fearful riot leader, sponsored by a mage. ‘Like Merlin and King Arthur,’ he explained to the blank faces which passed for cynicism with Gareth and Sean. Troglodyte Neil was under the table, looking for the dice. He ought to stay there.
The game was terrific. Chaos and anarchy ruled the world, as it spun dizzyingly out of sync with the galaxies, and cannoned into moons to cause avalanches and fountains of red-hot lava, like a Channel ferry restaurant-bar on a rough crossing.
Tim’s character Tohubo rampaged about the stricken landscape, destroying and terrorizing with his enchanted scimitar, before which men and monsters quailed, Webster’s department store toppled, Mr D. collapsed into an empty bladder, and humanoids with the faces of Tim’s sister Valerie scuttled back into the yawning earthquake fissures that had spewed them.
‘I am thy inescapable fate,’ he told Gareth, who had put himself in the front row of the rock throwers on top of the cliff, just as he would be at a football match.
‘Who … are … you?’ droned Gareth, like a child reading its first book.
‘The imperishable Tohubo – come down, bastardly gullion! I challenge you to a duel of wits under the Carcadian rules.’
‘You what?’ Neil said, and Gareth tortured his brows and fingernails in what was supposed to be thinking. It was agony, waiting for them to figure out their next moves, but they were the only adventure players Tim knew, and you couldn’t exactly go up to people in the street and say, ‘I know this fascinating way of spending two or three hours.’
‘I bloody well drop this bloody rock on top of you,’ Gareth chanted, ‘an’ then, while your stupid head’s pinned down and squashed, I chop you with that axe I got.’
‘Can’t do that.’ Sean was referee. ‘You lost all your weapon points.’
‘Who says? I still gotta axe and a long butcher’s knife.’
‘The rules say.’
‘Sod the rules. I dismembered him.’ Gareth was into hack and slash. It was the only way he knew to play the game.
‘Perfidious swine!’ Tim was enjoying himself too much to be wiped out. ‘My spirit is unquelled!’
He saw himself, standing, head thrown back and legs apart, hurling a challenge at the sheer cliff, and all the voices of the great heroic ages rushing past him on the howling wind.
‘My magnetic field deflects your paltry rock, and I will live to see thee damned!’
‘Knock it off, for Christ’s sake.’ Gareth and Sean rolled their eyes. Neil was trying to puzzle out what he was supposed to be doing.
Gareth’s older brother, in full black leather, opened the door, said, ‘Jesus!’ and slammed out again.
Tim felt great, but the boys were fed up with him. They argued grumpily about whether Tim was dead or not, and when he proved by points that he still survived, Gareth said, ‘I’ve had enough of it anyway. Stupid kid’s game,’ and leaned his powerful torso over the table and messed up the papers, and the little dwarfs and gnomes that Neil had scattered about.
‘Why can’t we –’ Tim asked, as himself. As Tohubo, he would have been able to declare, ‘We’ll finish!’
‘Since you ask,’ Gareth said obligingly, ‘because you spoiled it.’
He jerked his chin at Tim and stuck out his lower lip. ‘You’re weird, you know. When I’m twenty-three, I won’t be doing this kind of stuff.’
‘No – you’ll be out hacking real people,’ Tim said brilliantly, and left.
Outside the front door, Gareth’s brother was doing something to the engine of his van. He straightened up and stared Tim out of the gate. Tim turned right and walked casually for a few yards, squaring his shoulders under Tohubo’s invincible armour, then sneaked a look back to see Gareth’s brother bent over the van again, and ran off down the hill.
It was too early to go to Rawley, where his parents lived. If he got there while it was still light, his father would expect him to go out to the workshop shed and hold the end of something, or sand a bit of boring wood. Tim went into the town and weaved his way through the shopping precinct, where women with double pushchairs charged him like charioteers, to the cathedral. It was a fairly famous Norman pile which attracted quite a few visitors, but not in the cold weather. It was almost as cold inside as out, because there were not enough winter visitors to justify heating it properly.
Pocket Pickups did not list cathedrals as places to meet girls. Tim made his traditional tour, with his hands in his pockets because he had left his gloves at home. Up the left side, behind the altar where the wedge-shaped chapels were fitted into the apse like pieces of cold pie, down the other aisle, to look into the ornate cage where Sir Leonard and his stone lady lay, side by side, both raised on one elbow as if they were expecting breakfast in bed. Then a side trip to the north-door transept, since it was not fair to come in here without at least acknowledging the eternal presence of the suffering Christ, waiting for the world to straighten itself out, so that He could come down from the cross and go about His business.
Tim sat down on the narrow bench opposite the mysterious figure, and relaxed the guard that he had put up against the knowledge of having made an idiot of himself at Gareth’s house. Weird, Gareth had said, with mean eyes, his fat, wet lip sucking what he thought was a moustache. But Tim was right and they were wrong. They were the idiots. Trouble was, they didn’t know it.
It was a very old and treasured crucifix: the wood paled to silver-grey and intriguingly worm-eaten, the mournful tilted face pitted like acne, the sad folds of the loincloth. He was always draped, on any crucifix. You could never see what He had. Did He suffer that little problem too, along with all his other burdens?
Tim spread his arms along the back of the bench, straightened out his legs and crossed his feet. He dropped his head and tried to feel the flaming agony of the wounds, the thrust of rusty nails through skin and flesh and ligament, crushing bone, and the dead weight of his body hanging there.
Footsteps came down the aisle behind him. He straightened up and put his hands in his lap, rubbing his palms to convince himself that he had felt the wounds. Two women walked past the end of the bench. One of them stopped and looked up at the crucifix, and the scarred wooden eyes looked blankly down at her. If Tim were up there on the cross, his living eyes would meet the woman’s upturned face, and she would nod to herself: Yes, that’s him.
She lowered her head. Turn it to the right, then, away from the pitted corpse, and see on the bench the living man. If he held out his hands and blood dripped from them, would she kneel in tears before the stigmata? She walked on after the other woman.
Tim got up and went to the back of the cathedral and out of the low exit beside the main door. Still a bit early, so he went into a coffee bar.
‘See the stunning blonde at the counter?’ In the world of Pocket Pickups, girls on their own were always stunning or smashing, although if they really were, they wouldn’t be alone. ‘The stool next to her is empty. Sit on it. Order what you want confidently (cappuccino is classy). Ask her to pass the sugar.’
There were no stools at the counter. Tim took his tea and Bath bun to an empty table. ‘She is sitting alone at a table for two. Ask her if she’s waiting for someone. If it’s no, you say, “Mind if I …” and sit opposite her. If she doesn’t look up, say something, anything, ask her about the book she’s reading.’ Pocket Pickups girls were always reading. Real girls were not, but if they were, it would take more nerve than Tim had to interrupt.
Read any good books lately? Read Pocket Pickups?
More people came in, and an elderly man with a wobbly mauve lump on his cheek brought his cup of tea to Tim’s table, slopping it over the biscuits in the saucer. Tim went to the counter and got him some more biscuits, the sort of gesture the man would not forget.
I met this delightful young man in the Coffeepot. Best sort of type. Pity they aren’t all like that.
Fetching the biscuits gave Tim the licence to talk. Because the man saw him as helpful, Tim told him that he was a psychiatric nurse in a London hospital, and elaborated briefly on the work and the dedication involved.
‘I admire that,’ the man said. ‘Couldn’t do it myself, but it takes all kinds.’
Tim felt restored. He forgot the eye-rolling and carping of Gareth and Sean, and remembered only the exhilaration of being Tohubo. It was like picking one coin up from a counter and leaving another behind. This was the great trick to life. He had the secret of the universe, if anyone cared to learn. Select your own memories. Throw away what hurts.
His mother was in the kitchen, waddling pluckily about among the preparations for one of her enormous meals. Her knees had become silted up with arthritis, but her arms and hands were fully functioning. She stumped the awkward distances between stove and sink and refrigerator with her knees straight and her legs rather wide apart, like artificial ones, mashing potato and slicing vegetables and making rich gravy as zestfully as she had done all Tim’s life.
Tim’s sister Sarah was in the house, but she was up in her room, so he sat at the kitchen table with a beer, because his mother would not let him help. He told her about his week, with a few added attractions to stop her saying, ‘I worry about you,’ and she told him one of her tall tales about a deliveryman who she imagined was a disgraced financier.
Tim was happy to let it wash over him, but he could not be bothered to join in with her speculations about whether the man had escaped from prison and stolen the van, or was working to atone. When Tim was a child with no sense of himself, he had shared all this with her eagerly. Now her endless romances about other people were boring and irrelevant. Let people invent their own dramas and dreams. The true romances were only about the self.
The back door opened wide on the cold evening air, and remained open while Tim’s father bent over on the step and coughed as if he had swallowed a hedgehog.
‘Come in and shut the door,’ his wife said.
No one sympathized with Wallace’s cough, since he was not prepared to give up smoking just to please his family and the doctor. No one told Wallace Kendall what to do. In his powerful days as Clerk of the Works for the Town Council, he had told everybody else what to do. Why should he change with retirement?
He came into the kitchen and banged the door hard enough to bring one of Annie’s silly little texts off its nail. KISS THE COOK. It lay on the floor and he stepped over it.
His son, the son he had wanted born first, not last, and strong and manly instead of – well, his size was not his fault, but other things were – was lolling at the table while his poor mother did all the work.
‘’Lo, Father.’ It was a current affectation among Wallace’s children to call him Father in a derisive way, as if he were something the cat had dragged in. ‘How’s it going?’
Before Timothy had even finished the question, he had obviously stopped listening.
‘I finished two salad bowls, if you’re interested.’ Wallace stood looking down at the irritating top of Tim’s small head. ‘Why didn’t you come earlier? I wanted you to do a bit of hand sanding for me. Was that too much to ask?’
‘You shouldn’t have stayed out so long, Wallace,’ Annie said, in the comfortable way she tried to soothe people down if she could see they were a bit upset. ‘It’s getting dark.’
‘I couldn’t see a bloody thing. Nearly cut my finger off, if you want to know.’
‘Oh dear, let’s see.’
You could come in with half your thumb hanging off, and she’d still coo at you as if you were a two-year-old with a scratched knee.
‘It’s all right.’ He snatched away his hand. ‘No thanks to working with sharp tools in that bad light, waiting for this young man.’
‘His name is Tim,’ his wife reminded him, ‘and he’s only just got back from working hard all day.’
Implying her husband had done nothing. But I’ve worked more Saturdays than my children have had hot dinners, and that’s saying something with this mother who buys love with food. Out all weathers on the housing sites. Mud and clay up over your boots, from cutting the first sod to tightening the last door handle. Everything that went wrong was always my fault, and I’d to answer for it. Floods, electrical blow-outs, poor workmanship, the lot.
‘Just back from work?’ he tapped the back of Tim’s head with the handle of his penknife. ‘You go to the shop in jeans these days?’
‘I went home to change.’
‘Must have clocked off early.’
‘One of us always gets off early, Fridays and Saturdays.’
‘How was it?’ Wallace did not sit down. He needed the height over his son.
‘How was what?’ When he looks up at you with those woolgathering eyes, and his ears and adam’s apple sticking out, you wonder whether your genes went astray.
‘Work, of course. Or don’t they call it work, nancying about with satin and scissors?’
‘It was all right.’
‘Was it, though? Funny thing. I was in Webster’s this morning.’
‘I thought you went to the library,’ Annie said.
‘I did, and when I’d looked up the Victorian napkin-ring design, I went on to pick up some socks, at Webster’s robbery prices. Walked right through the stuffy stuff department, for a laugh, and never saw my son.’
The subject blushed like an August dahlia. ‘I was on my coffee break.’
‘How do you know? I’ve not said what time I was there.’
‘Well, he must have been,’ Annie said, turning round from the oven – and she could hold her own in the red flush stakes too, but of course you were going to get that, at her age – ‘else you’d have seen him.’
‘I don’t believe he was at work.’ Something prompted Wallace Kendall to say that, although it could not have mattered less, one way or the other.
Tim got up. ‘I don’t believe you were in the store.’
‘Now, boys, you’re being very silly.’ Annie moved to stand between them, but she had to put down a saucepan first, and then it took her so long to come across the room that her husband had moved away to the back hall, and was stepping out of his overalls. He put his hand in the pocket of the old working jacket that he used to wear on site. It was on a hook under Tim’s anorak. (The boy always had to hang his coat on top of yours, just to annoy you, when there were hooks free.) He took out the new lipstick that he had picked up from the floor of the car after Sarah had taken it shopping.
‘While I was in Webster’s,’ he said loftily, ‘I bought a little present for m’wife.’
She was thrilled, poor woman. She smeared it on in the mirror that she had put up behind the larder door, because if someone was at the door, she couldn’t run upstairs.
Tim tried to say, ‘We don’t sell that – that – that brand.’
‘How do you know? If you’re doing such a slap-up job in Fabrics as you claim, what are you doing mooning about in the Cosmetics Department?’ Timothy was standing on the painted stool, getting something off a top shelf for his mother. ‘Looking at girls?’ Wallace gave him a jab in the waist with his strong craftsman’s forefinger.
Sarah asked, ‘New lipstick, Mum?’
‘Ye-e-es.’ Annie spread her full lips, now much too bright a red. ‘Like it?’
‘It’s a change from your pink.’
‘Your father gave it to me.’ She brought the new lipstick out of her apron pocket.
Mine. ‘Where did you get that, Father?’
‘In Webster’s.’ Sarah’s father gave Tim an ugly sly look. What was he up to? Tim, drinking sherry by the sitting-room fire, turned away and put the glass on the mantelpiece.
Leave Timmy alone. Sarah often wanted to pummel her father. In the past sometimes she had.
‘Wasn’t it nice of him?’ Whatever was going on, Annie was unaware of it.
‘If you decide it’s the wrong colour for you, Mum – no, don’t get insecure, I’m not saying it is – let me have it. It’s the same as the new one I bought the other day. And lost.’
Sarah looked at her father, but he had lit a cigarette and was bent double in the armchair, coughing.
‘Hot cooked celery is an aprodaysiac,’ Tim said, boldly for him.
‘Aphrodisiac.’ Valerie leaned forward and gave him her stare, framed in glasses with dark square tops, like eyebrows. She ran a play school for handicapped children, and went with a fellow who was working for a degree in psychology, so of course she knew.
‘How do you know?’ Sarah asked Tim.
‘I read it somewhere.’
‘Where?’
‘Oh, somewhere.’ Tim always went vague if you pinned him down, even if he had the answer, so you never knew if he was telling the truth or not.
‘In that book I lent you – London Lechery?’
Sarah’s father put down his knife and fork to pronounce, but he was hungry, so he picked them up again.
‘I don’t know. It said that the celery’ – Tim took up a limp length on his fork – ‘gives off these sort of pharaoh … chemical whatnots. Like dogs and insects, when they – they’re in the mood.’
‘Better not have any, then, Sarah,’ Wallace Kendall bantered, with amazing wit. Perhaps there was hope for Little Hitler yet.
‘I told you, the name is Zara.’
‘Oh, that.’
‘Yes, that. If you don’t want me to call you Wally, you can remember my name is now Zara.’
Sarah had been in trouble in the last few years. After she had finally left the bastard she was living with and been through treatment to get herself off drugs and alcohol, she had announced, ‘A new me, name and everything. I don’t want anything of the old one.’
Perhaps Wally was mellowing towards her because she was going to a friend in Australia for several months. She could go to pot Down Under to her heart’s content, and he would not have to know about it.
Tim did not want her to go. Sarah-Zara was the sister he needed. Valerie, ‘the clever one’, had always been a witch to him. Even after she cut her stringy black hair and had wires pulled round her teeth to make her look less like a vampire, Val had always made him uneasy with her stares and criticisms and general air of knowing more and liking less about him than he did himself.
‘You still content with your little bed-sitter?’ she asked him after supper.
‘It’s a flat,’ he said, ‘a studio flat.’
‘And you’re an artist. It’s a dingy bed-sitter. One of these days, I’m going to come up there with a pot of paint and do up those khaki walls in frosted white.’
‘I like it how it is.’
‘No, you don’t, it needs brightening up. Colin and I have been helping Helen Brown to do up her place. It’s done wonders for her.’
‘What’s wrong with her?’ Zara asked suspiciously.
‘Nothing. She’s a bit lonely, like a lot of separated women who think they want freedom, but then can’t use it.’
‘So Tim ought to meet her,’ Zara said. Val was always trying to fix him up with her stray dogs.
‘Why not? He can’t go on like this, not having any girl friends. He’s getting very introverted.’
‘Leave him alone.’ Zara, who Tim ought to have protected from all the evils that assaulted her, was always the one who defended him. ‘Don’t talk about my Timmy as if he wasn’t there.’
‘Well, half the time he isn’t. I’ll ask Helen round some time, Tim, and you can just happen to drop in.’
‘Oh, I don’t know, Val …’
‘Got sisters?’ Pocket Pickups asked. ‘Use them. Statistics show that 1.5 men out of 4 make exciting relationships with girls who were introduced by their sisters.’
‘You go, Tim,’ his mother said. ‘I’ve met Helen once, with Val. Her husband was in the merchant navy, wasn’t he? Perhaps she needs you.’ Her eyes brightened to a saga. ‘She’s been badly hurt by this dreadful drunken sailor and needs a white knight to rescue her. She sits alone’ – the relishing intake of breath – ‘alone at the window of her poor basement flat –’
‘Go it, Mum, she’s on the fourth floor,’ from Val.
‘Looking up to the sunlight and wishing she could live again. I daresay,’ Annie invented, ‘the poor soul cares for a crabby widowed mother, but there are dozens of perfectly comfortable nursing-homes about, I don’t know why people make such a fuss.’
Before he went home, Tim put his arms round his skinny younger sister, and hugged her.
‘I wish you weren’t going away, Zara.’ He always remembered to call her that.
Zara pushed back her front hair. She had thick curly hair that hung forward, so that she could push it back, and let it fall over her face again.
Holding her hair, she scanned his face alertly. ‘Shall we have a cry?’
He shook his head and looked away.
‘Tell you what,’ Zara said, ‘if you can pay the registration and insurance, I might let you use my car while I’m gone.’
‘Your car!’ Tim pulled away from her. He wanted to prance about hooting, with his knees up.
‘So much for brotherly love.’ His father came into the hall from the basement stairs, where he had been listening. ‘Won’t miss her now, will he? If he’s expecting to swank about in that little yellow rust-bucket, he’ll be scared to death that mongrel drug pusher from Barbados will come sniffing round again (hot celery, eh?) and persuade her not to leave.’
Zara threw a punch at him, and he caught her wrist and held her off while she tried to kick at his legs with a bare foot.
Her mother said, ‘Wallace – really!’ and laughed. Relentlessly thinking the best of everybody, she took him with a grain of salt, and believed everybody else did too.
She had never really rumbled Little Hitler.
Brian and Jack had gone to bed, but Tim still slunk past their front bay window like a marauding cat. He sprang up his own outside stairs like the lean runner going up those endless steps in white socks to, touch the Olympic torch into flame, with the whole world watching, and fell into his nest, his cave, his dun-brown burrow.
It was on the table. The envelope from C.P. Games with his play-by-mail entry forms, and a note from Brian on a scrap from the waste-paper basket.
‘Sorry. Found this in with ours.’
He had been up here. What had Tim left lying about? He took a quick look round. Nothing private.
Sunday tomorrow. Tim could sleep late. With an expectant sigh, he opened the envelope and settled down to steer cunning, persuasive Blch, silver-tongued story-teller with a despot’s heart of steel, through the perils and pitfalls of Domain of the Undead.