The Friendly Ones

‘You could do exactly what it was meant for and grow vegetables in it,’ Catherine said. ‘I always think there’s something so lovely about a really well-kept allotment, even, with neat rows of things. And you could have a lot of exotics. Plant an olive grove. Make English olive oil.’

‘The children are using it as an awful sort of pet cemetery. I found a little array of crosses down there next to Moppet’s grave – it turns out to be Thomas’s gerbils and some dead birds that they found in the woods and christened posthumously for the sake of the burial service. I hate to think how the gerbils met their end. Olives wouldn’t grow down here. The trees might, not the olives themselves. What about a rose garden?’

‘So much work,’ Catherine said. She had had the bright idea, when they moved into the house in Brighton, of growing yellow roses up the back wall. The pruning and trimming, and the array of murderous insect life that had to be fended off with sprays and drips and feed had been exhausting. Jasmine grew there now, which nothing much killed.

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Blossom said. ‘I do think the children – they’re growing up wild, I know, but they have a sort of confidence. I worry about Josh.’

‘Josh?’ Catherine said, taken by surprise.

‘He’s so charming and delightful, but he’s just so – what’s the word I want? – different. No. Diffident. He doesn’t put himself forward, he goes along with things. It does him so much good, being in a gang of ruffians, running riot through the woods instead of being alone with a book. I really wonder …’

Blossom set down her pen and looked, with a frank, open, rehearsed expression, at her sister-in-law. Catherine had experienced this expression before when, for instance, Blossom had asked her whether things were quite all right between her and her brother, whether she might like to come and spend time with them in the country, whether Josh might have any idea at all (the gaze still fixed on Catherine, quelling any motherly gesture of defence) who it might be who had spilt most of a bottle of ink on the Turkey carpet in the sitting room. It was an expression that got its own way. Catherine looked instead at the life-sized china pug that sat by the fireplace, impertinently quizzing the world.

‘I really wonder, and I think Stephen wonders, too, whether we could do a little bit more for Josh.’

‘You do so much for Josh,’ Catherine said. ‘And for me, too.’

‘Let me explain,’ Blossom said. She placed the cap on her Mont Blanc pen, a present from Stephen two Christmases ago. He had got it from Harrods for a four-figure sum. There was a diamond set in the top of it. In time it would become the pen that Blossom had written all her essays with, the pen she would have inherited from some namelessly patrician great-aunt, the sort of pen that the family who owned Elscombe House had always had to write bread-and-butter letters of thanks and instructions in the morning room before luncheon. Now Blossom set it down. She clasped her hands between her knees. She began to explain.

4.

‘We shan’t shoot the proles,’ Tresco said. ‘We’ve promised Aunty Catherine – we’ve promised your mummy, Josh.’

They paraded across the lawn in front of the house. Tresco first, Tamara second, lifting up the skirts of her ball-gown. She had her Dr Martens boots on underneath, and tripped delicately, as if to a minuet in her head. Thomas came third, disconsolate in his Faunties, and finally Josh. No one had suggested that Josh wear anything in particular; he had been spared the full knickerbockers-and-frilly-shirt treatment inflicted on Thomas. He felt there was something sinister about this neglect, not kindness. They were heading to the woods, where in practice the worst things happened. Tamara had once crucified a vole there, using an industrial stapler, and left it hanging on the tree as a warning, she said, to the village not to come into their private domain. Last summer they had fetched out their catapults, a gift from Uncle Stephen’s father, and had tied Josh to a tree. They had said they were going to play Cowboys and Indians. It was a game Josh had never heard of anyone playing outside books, and he had known something dreadful was going to happen. For half an hour, they had fired acorns at Josh’s face, in silence broken only by knowledgeable, acute advice on catapult technique from Tresco. He had thought it would never end. Then, on some kind of agreed signal, Tamara had freed him and roughly wiped his grazed face of tears, mud and leaves, then announced that he, Josh, had passed the initiation with flying colours. Josh had not regarded this with much excitement. The initiation had made no difference. The cousins went on thinking up more and more events that might count as initiation ceremonies, and when knowledge was shared out between them, Josh was not often included. For the rest of time, he was going to be forced by his cousins to squat on the edge of a pit and told to shit into it, to prove something or other. He had no idea why Tamara and Thomas were wearing their party clothes into the wood, or what was about to happen there.

Tresco observed that there was nobody about. The woods had belonged so recently to the village – to the proles, Josh practised in his head – that it still possessed an old name. Bastable’s Beeches, like the children in The Treasure Seekers. He did not share this association. And then they started to have a lovely time. They ran off after Tresco into the little hollow, and poked sticks into the burrow where the badgers might be bringing up their babies. They went to the muddy bit where there was still a good four-inch-deep puddle, and took turns jumping into it from the tussock, Tamara’s ball-gown flying into the air, the mud splashing all over her skirts. They looked for the adder using Thomas’s head in the undergrowth, like a battering ram. They weed against an old oak, Tamara bending over almost into a crab position, pissing into her skirts more than on the ground. They dared each other to eat a toadstool still hanging around from last winter, and they threw stones at the old hut with the roof falling down. They managed to smash one of the remaining panes of glass in its one window.

It was a lovely time, Josh told himself. They hadn’t seen any wildlife at all and they hadn’t made him eat anything and they hadn’t tied him up. An expression of seraphic calm was on the faces of Tresco and Tamara, as of the desires of little drunks being fulfilled. It counted as a lovely day, even to Josh. They hadn’t been near the Pit at the far end of the wood, the one that Tresco and Tamara had last had a shit in two days ago, squatting over its lip, the one where everything lay in black confusion, of rubbish and poo and what dead animals they could find. The bodies were thrown here, though their burial took place somewhere else – the respectable theatre of the adult ceremonial took place under the approving look of the adult windows, in the kitchen garden with empty boxes as coffins. He dreaded the Pit most of all, but today, after all, was a lovely day, not like one of the bad days so far: they had not gone anywhere near it.

The suburb ran right up to the edge of the forest, and a sad concrete and tattered grass expanse opened up beyond the wall that Uncle Stephen had built. It was the Wreck. Only recently had he understood that it was not a Wreck like a disaster, but short for Recreation Ground. ‘Recreation’ was one of those words like ‘Amusements’ over the door of a dark seaside hell of blinking machines and staring old people feeding coins into empty upper sockets, pressing buttons and pulling levers; it described what wasn’t there. What was there was duty and miserable escape, sodden carpet and torn grass. He wanted to be on this side of the wall, in fact, in Uncle Stephen’s woods that he’d paid for and deprived of a name at all.

Something struck the side of his head with a blow; a cold wet thwack, a torn lump of soil and grass. ‘You berk,’ Tamara said. Her face was flushed pink, her eyes wide with excitement. ‘You unutterable berk. Standing there staring into space. I bet you were writing a poem in your head, weren’t you, about the forest and the babbling brook and the fucking wood sprites?’

‘We’ve got loads of fucking wood sprites in the fucking forest,’ Thomas said, plucking at his Faunties with gross, clutching abandon.

‘Or we did before Tresco shot them with his fucking rifle,’ Tamara said, gambolling off, lifting her skirts and skipping with fury. ‘Ow – I’ve hurt my ankle. No, I’m all right. I’m not going to sprain my ankle, not today, no fucking way.’ She ran off in the direction of the wall.

‘She’s such a fucking moron,’ Tresco said. ‘She’s no idea what wood sprites even are. I swear to God she thought we were talking about jays or magpies of something. They’re mythological fucking beasts,’ he called after her. ‘Before she starts asking Mrs Arsehole if she can make a wood-sprite pie or something. Well, go on, do your stuff.’

Thomas’s face took on an evil, set expression. He ran off after his sister. His white tights were falling down; the froth of shirt and the front of his Cambridge-blue velvet jacket were thick with mud where Tamara had pushed him into the puddle, twenty minutes before.

‘Here we go,’ Tresco said, his voice lowered and intense, egging himself on. ‘Here we go. Here we go. They go first, then we come as a lovely surprise. Yeah?’

Josh said nothing, but Tresco must have seen that he didn’t know which way was up, as they said.

‘Today’s fun and games. You’ll like this, Josh. It’s called Get the Proles. You watch. It’s going to be fun.’

There was nobody about but, fifty yards away, Tamara and Thomas, their spattered white and blue garments winking through the trees, but Tresco now hurled himself behind an oak like a commando and, squatting down, ran to the next one. He pulled a woolly hat out from his pocket and stuffed it over his shock of white-blond hair. He might have been concealing himself from a sniper. They dashed from tree to tree, Josh following. Ahead, Tamara and Thomas had reached the wall. Were there kids playing in the Wreck? It looked as if there might be. The proles. Tamara and Thomas paused, faced each other, and Tamara gave Thomas a sweet smile, raised the skirts of her ball-gown with a pinch of either hand. Thomas scowled, then made an effort and gave a smile that lasted no more than two seconds. He had been instructed. Tamara began. She gave a dainty skip, then another, then a twirl, a bow. Thomas said something – perhaps ‘Do I fucking have to?’ – then gave in, and made his own dainty skip, a second, a twirl, a bow.

Tresco and Josh had reached the edge of the woods. They would not be seen by the kids in the Wreck; only Tamara and Thomas, giving their courtly dance behind a wall in ball-gown and Faunties, only they would be seen by the proles. It occurred to Josh that in this part of the wood, they were quite close to the Pit. Tamara and Thomas bowed at the same time, advanced, took each other by the crook of the elbow and rotated; Tamara’s left hand rose above her head and twiddled, as if at a magnificent and embarrassingly beribboned tambourine. Over there, the kids sitting around on the swings and the slide weren’t playing any more, if they ever had been. They had noticed the palaver the kids from the big house were kicking up. They had seen something maddening: two posh kids, one wearing a big posh gown like a wedding dress, the other wearing frills and fucking knickerbockers, prancing like shit. Tamara lifted her ankles, delicately waggled her feet. Thomas’s knees leapt up almost to the foaming linen of his chest. The proles had seen them. They were watching.

5.

Blossom’s hand, its ring with the ruby as big as a pomegranate seed, went across the desk, spinning the Rolodex, as if thinking on its own. Blossom looked, open, sincere, happy, at her ex-sister-in-law.

‘What would you think,’ she said, ‘if we made the arrangement with Josh a touch more permanent? Do you know anything about Apford? The school? Tresco’s school?’

There must have been something that Catherine gave out, some physical withdrawal, some veiling of the eyes, because Blossom in a moment said, ‘I’m really only thinking of Josh’s welfare,’ in a mildly reproving way.

‘And in the holidays?’ Catherine said lightly.

‘Of course we would take care of the fees,’ Blossom said.

‘Yes,’ Catherine said. ‘It’s incredibly kind of you, it really is. I can see that. I need to think it over.’

‘Well, don’t take too long,’ Blossom said. She turned to her desk. ‘It’s a complete waste of time, writing letters, and three-quarters of them are nothing but thank-you letters, but there you are.’

For five minutes Blossom wrote steadily. Catherine could feel her face was flushed. Nothing that she wanted to say could be said. Blossom was thinking of Josh’s best interests. Catherine was thinking only of her own. After a while, Blossom looked up and, as if surprised that Catherine was still there, said, ‘It’s a lovely day – don’t let me be selfish and trap you inside like this.’

‘I might go and read a book,’ Catherine said despairingly, thinking of vodka.

6.

There were seven proles in the Wreck. It was school holidays for them as well. They were three girls and four boys, one quite small. They were wearing the sort of clothes that proles wore. They weren’t shiny shell suits, but jeans and T-shirts with some sort of writing on them. One was wearing the top of a tracksuit, a red one with stripes, as if they were ever going to do any exercise. There was another who had a pair of cream chinos on and a blue polo shirt. That was quite like what Josh was wearing. That was the funniest thing, really – that the proles in the village would look at Josh and think he was posh, that they wanted to dress like him.

The proles were sitting on the kids’ roundabout and chatting, about a hundred and fifty yards away. Another was on the swings, swaying gently back and forth. They were deep in conversation. A bark of a laugh came from one of them. Tamara and Thomas skipped to and fro, but they hadn’t seen them; the power of a ball-gown and Faunties and pastoral frolicking went over their heads. Or perhaps they had seen their wealthy neighbours and had no interest in it – that would be too bad.

‘What’s going on?’ Tresco said, squatting behind the tree where he couldn’t be seen. ‘Hey – you need to put a bit more welly into it. Go on. Up and over, dosie do –’

‘I’m doing the best I fucking can,’ Tamara said, out of the corner of her mouth.

The proles had noticed Tamara and Thomas, skipping and dancing around each other. They had stopped where they were, and were casting looks at the edge of the forest. But in a moment they turned away again, definite that the posh rich kids weren’t worth their attention. Perhaps it was a decision; perhaps they were unable to see the spectacle behind the wall, remote from jeans and Wreck and trainers and semi-detached houses in yellow brick. ‘Not working,’ Tresco said. ‘Wish I’d brought my gun.’

‘I can’t believe it,’ Tamara said, pausing and puffing with breathlessness.

‘I’ve got an idea,’ Tresco said. ‘They’ve not seen Josh, have they?’

‘I don’t want to,’ Josh said. ‘I won’t make them do anything. I’m not putting on Faunties or anything.’

Tresco took his branch – a two-foot club – and poked Josh hard. Josh stumbled upright so as not to fall into the mud. ‘Go on,’ Tresco said. ‘Just go and wave at them or something. No one expects you to do anything intensely dramatic.’

Tamara and Thomas started laughing. Josh felt tearful; he had forgotten that, sooner or later, the cousins would move on from being vile to him to being vile about Mummy.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ Tamara said. ‘If you don’t come up here now, this second, I’m going to come and drag you out.’

It would not work, Josh was sure; all he had to do was go and stand at the wall and be ignored in the same way that the proles were ignoring his cousins. It was as easy as that, and then the cousins would get bored and go and find something else to do. He stood up properly, and went to the wall where Tamara and Thomas had been dancing. Tamara, a firm look on her face, took him with a solid grip and pushed him forward. She raised her arm and pointed at him, grinning like a mud-spattered loon in a ball-gown. By their side, Thomas continued to caper.

‘Do you know what Josh does?’ Tresco said. He was talking half to Tamara and Thomas, and half for Josh’s benefit. Over their heads, the music of disdain in what Tresco was saying floated, across the Wreck, to be caught by the proles. ‘Josh touches things. He’s always touching things. Have you seen that? When he comes into a room, he can’t stop and sit down, like a Christian, until he’s been right round, picking up this and that, putting his hand on the Staffordshire dogs and the photos on the piano. Do you reckon he does that at home? Or is it just when he’s taken out? Do you think it’s a Brighton thing? They can’t stand it, the seniors. They bite their lips. They try not to say anything about Josh having to touch everything. I saw him once bend down and touch the tassels on the Turkey carpet in the drawing room. I bet they think he’s bringing his Brighton ways into the house.’

‘Stand there,’ Tamara said to Josh. ‘Just like that.’ She took Thomas by the hand, firmly, and walked back a few paces. The proles were standing now. They had seen Josh. One of them shouted something, and then the biggest of them was sprinting towards the wood, maddened, leading a ragged troop. They had endured and accepted Tamara in her ball-gown, Thomas prancing in his Faunties, but the sight of Josh, dressed just as they were, standing behind the stone wall within the purchased woodland acres, had been too much to bear. Their howls were terrible.

‘Run,’ Tresco said. ‘Fucking run!’

They ran, Josh jumping after Tamara, her skirts clutched in her fists. She was going towards the end of the woods where the Pit was. Thomas was already far ahead of them; Tresco had not moved an inch. The proles were over the stone wall now, and their howls within the estate. Somewhere behind them, through the trees, there was a confusion of movement and stumbling; somewhere behind that was Tresco. He must have armed himself somehow because quite suddenly there were shrieks of alarm within the roar of rage – a pitchfork, a gun? Josh stumbled, was grabbed by Tamara. He had almost fallen into the Pit. And here came the proles, with Tresco behind; he had smeared his face with mud, was clutching a terrible weapon; a glint of metal on the end of a pole, a kitchen knife. The littlest of the proles turned as he ran, placating with his hands, screaming, and one of the others seized him – was it the child’s sister? She tripped, stumbled, and two, three of them fell exactly as Tresco had wanted them to, into the mud and shit and filth of the Pit. As if nothing at all had happened, Tresco slowed to a walk, hoicked the pole underneath his arm and turned away. At the same moment, Josh found himself seized from behind, by Tamara. She had a plan for him. It was Thomas who started to bind his wrists; Josh surrendered himself to it. It would be easier. The morning’s task was over. Behind them, as they started to make their way to the house, the sound of some prole puking, or so Tamara jauntily observed. It was the sight of Josh they couldn’t stand, in the end.

7.

‘You won’t believe this,’ Blossom’s voice called from the great hall.

She was trying to find out where Catherine was, and Catherine called back, ‘Yes?’ from where she had removed herself to, the dining room. She had worked out that nobody came here in the mornings. It had a pleasant view out towards the woods that divided the house’s grounds from the village.

‘You won’t believe this,’ Blossom said, coming in, papers in one hand, her glasses in the other. ‘I’ve been tracking down my brother. He’s definitely in Sheffield. In the meantime, the arrangement about meeting you and poor little Josh – he’d never heard of it. But listen. When I tracked him down in Sheffield he was full of such alarming news I really think I’m going to hotfoot it up there. I could perfectly well take Josh with me.’

‘It’s not your mother, is it?’

‘It’s always Mummy,’ Blossom said briefly. ‘She’s not dying, or not imminently. Gracious heavens, what on earth have those awful children of mine been up to?’

A scene of apocalypse was approaching the house across the lawn. Their faces were smeared with mud and filth; their clothes, once party clothes, wedding uniforms, pageboy and miniature princess, were torn and smeared with earth or worse. They wore expressions of sheer joy, waving sticks that might have been meant for spears in a celebratory greeting. It was not directed at them, but at someone fifty feet to the left. Stephen must have seen them and opened the study window to call to them. Only at the back, trailing in his ordinary clothes, was there a dissentient presence; behind Thomas Josh came, his shoulders shrunk and beaten. Catherine saw with a shock that he was being pulled by the others; his wrists were bound together and he was being dragged along by a rope, or perhaps merely a thick string.

‘How adorable,’ Blossom said. ‘They’ve been playing captives, and Josh is on the losing side. He’ll be the pirate king or something. Conquered by the imperial forces, or by savage natives, one of the two. It’ll be his turn to rule and conquer next.’

‘Poor old Josh,’ Catherine said, attempting lightness in her tone. But something in the way she said it made Blossom turn to her, a half-smile of amused dismissal quickly forming. Poor old Josh, she was clearly thinking. A little bit less of that, a little bit less encouragement of Josh to stick in his ways and run from ordinary little-man savage pursuits that any child, surely, would like.

‘I have no idea,’ Blossom said, with dry amusement, ‘how – or if it’s even possible – to get mud and blood out of pale-blue velvet Faunties. I could simply kill Thomas for putting it on to romp around in the woods. They were for the Atwood wedding, those Faunties. They very sweetly asked Thomas if he’d be a pageboy.’

Across the lawn, like a cavalcade of shame, misery and death, came the children, panting, filthy and prancing. Their teeth glittered like those of carnivores, fresh from a pile of flesh and blood. They waved to the man upstairs, the father of three of them. He was yowling into the end of the morning over the lawns, lands, woods and gardens he had made the money to possess, singing his children home from a triumph, somewhere out there in the shadows of the woods.

MUMMY’S TIME WITH LEO

This would have been in 1969, or maybe 1970. It was just a bag – that was all it was – and ten shillings. What was it then that kept rattling around his head years later, occupying brain cells that could have been used for preserving other facts instilled at school, how to draw a box with perspective and what the chemical symbol for beryllium was and how the passive went in German – the consequences of the playground event that kept him in dread for weeks, just sitting there like a useful lesson for survival learnt at school? It must have been 1969 or 1970, but definitely it must have been after school, because that was when

Here

Here over here

Dave it’s to me

Run and grab it there there’s a

Stuart Stuart Stuart

Grab it then it goes to Stuart that kid from Crookes is

Grab it grab it then

The kid was standing there looking at what was in his hands. It was his sports bag – a black plastic one like everyone’s, with a sports-shoe logo on the side. He looked up in rage – it was that kid Gavin who was in Mrs Tucker’s class – and pushed Leo, hard, with his bag in his fists. It was almost a punch. Leo was sweating, though it was a cold day, the air puffing into steam from their mouths even now in the late afternoon. Around them the others loosened their scarves and dropped their own sports bags.

‘You did that,’ Gavin said to Leo, pushing him again. ‘You did that. You little dwarf, you bloody did that.’

‘Sod off,’ Leo said. But Gavin was pushing his bag into Leo’s face and the others were looking concerned, grave, worried as trainee oncologists in a small circle. The bag was torn at the handle, a raw gash of cardboard under the smooth black plastic surface.