Now that was definitely the coat cupboard door being slammed shut. I know what she’s like when she’s getting really annoyed. I bet she even swung round and put her hands on her hips before starting in on him properly.
‘Now listen, Gerald. It’s good of you to bring the girls home and stay with them. I’m very grateful. But I’m not prepared to stand here and listen to abuse, and I don’t take kindly to being called irresponsible by you. I am not irresponsible!’ Her voice was rising now, louder and louder. She was working herself up. ‘I think very hard before I take either of my children on anything like this. I don’t take them anywhere the army is – I’ve seen how mean and rough and badly disciplined those boys can be! I don’t take them anywhere there’s horses, or razor-wire. I don’t take them anywhere at night, or anywhere things might get out of hand. So don’t you dare to call me irresponsible!’
She was shouting at him now. Shouting at him good and hard. I wasn’t at all surprised to see Jude float like a wraith through the dimly lit shape of my open bedroom doorway, and feel her climbing in my bed at my side.
‘She’ll stop in a minute,’ I whispered. ‘She’s just very cold and tired and hungry, and he said the wrong thing.’
She didn’t stop. She was so cold and tired and hungry she let him have it like a meat axe between the eyes. I’m amazed that the neighbours didn’t start pounding on the walls – or perhaps they preferred listening? They could have listened while she yelled at him that she was sick to death of having to pitch out and make such efforts. And she was angry – yes, angry – more angry than he could imagine or she could say! Angry enough to leave home and band with thousands and thousands of other people to pull down the miles of wire fences that hid these fiendish, stupid, cripplingly expensive weapons from all the people who were paying for them, and in whose name the lovely green planet we were living on might soon be changed into a smoking ball of rubble.
‘You say it’s kept the peace!’ she yelled. ‘Peace? Call this peace? Don’t be so stupid, Gerald! Don’t be so blind! This isn’t peace. Peace is security. Peace is living in confidence. This – this is like being six miles high in a tinny aeroplane thinking you feel quite safe, then, the moment a little bit of turbulence hits you, realizing you are actually terrified, and would sell your soul to have both feet firmly fixed on good brown earth!
‘You!’ she shrieked. ‘People like you are the dangerous ones now! People like you who are so thick, so stubborn, so gullible! Go on! Ignore the billions of pounds wasted each year on these terrible weapons. Go on! Ignore the risks the power stations might explode, or start leaking worse than they do already. Carry on, Gerald! Believe the government “experts”, though you know well enough they’ve lied to you again and again! And don’t forget to ignore the generations of children forced to grow up fearing they’ll blow up! Go on, Gerald! Go home and put your head in a paper bag! Keep goggling away at your important share prices and your important interest rates! Don’t act irresponsibly, for heaven’s sake! Don’t worry about our frail little green planet!’
I’m hugging Jude tight now, to stop her trembling.
‘He won’t yell back at her,’ I whispered. ‘He won’t, I promise. He won’t stay and fight. He won’t lose his temper and he won’t hit her. He’s steady and reliable and predictable. You can depend on Gerald. He will just go.’
That’s what he did. We didn’t hear a word – only the door as he pulled it closed behind him, and then, through the bedroom window, his footsteps ringing down our garden path.
You can depend on Gerald. He just went.
8
In the gloom of the cupboard it was hard to see Helen’s face clearly, but it was pretty obvious the idea of Goggle-eyes striding out hopelessly into the storm like Captain Oates was not her idea of a fairytale ending.
‘Poor Kitty! How awful! You must have been horribly upset!’
I told you back at the start that Helen is a softie. I couldn’t help teasing her a little bit.
‘Horribly upset?’ I repeated. ‘Is that how you’d feel if your mum and the grey-haired Whatsisname bust up?’
She shook her head.
‘It’s not the same,’ she told me firmly. ‘Goggle-eyes sounds quite nice really, underneath, once you’ve got used to him a bit. Toad-shoes is quite different.’
(So that was his name. I’d found out at last. Toad-shoes.)
Helen leaned forward, confidentially, to explain.
‘You see,’ she said. ‘Toad-shoes is awful. I’ll tell you what he’s like. He’s –’
A violent clattering on the door interrupted her. The knob rattled and the panels shook. Stray meteorites colliding with Lost Property Capsule? No, Liz. Her voice came through the panels loud and clear.
‘Hey, you guys! Have you any idea how long you’ve been in there? Loopy is definitely panicking. She says you must be running short of air. She’s sent me down with a message.’
‘What message?’ I yelled back.
Long pause. Liz isn’t all that bright. She has to run a huge computer search in order to locate a four-word newsflash. Finally, amongst some rusty slow-functioning components of grey matter, she found it.
‘Be out by lunch!’
Lunch? Helen stared at me, and clapped her hand over her mouth in horror.
Lunch? Yes, come to think of it, I did feel peckish. And peering through the gloamin’ at the face of my watch, I saw that, sure enough, it was already after twelve.
‘Helly, we’ve been in here nearly three hours.’ Behind her hand, Helly just giggled. Meanwhile, Liz the Galactic Intercom was yelling through the door:
‘You’ve missed a huge row about making a mess in the art room. And a surprise chemistry test. And putting chairs out for the senior recital. And angles associated with parallel lines.’
‘Good,’ I yelled. ‘What are we missing now?’
‘Now?’ Liz ran through one of her laborious brain print-outs. ‘Now you are missing French – revision of irregular past participles.’
‘You’d better hop along, Liz,’ I suggested. ‘You of all people surely don’t want to miss that!’
After the couple of seconds it took her to process this, Liz started beating on the door panels again.
‘Helly?’ she shouted. ‘Helly? Are you still in there?’
I ask you! What a stupid question!
Helly’s so sweet and patient. ‘Yes,’ she called back. ‘I’m still in here, Liz. Honestly.’
Liz tapped again. You’d think we were two miners trapped hundreds of feet underground behind tons of fallen rock-face. You wouldn’t for a moment think that all Liz had to do was stop her demented rattling of the door knob for one single second, and pull it, for all to be revealed.
I was just gathering breath to bellow, ‘Push off, Liz!’ when Helly called out:
‘Tell you what! Save me a seat at lunch, and we’ll sit together. I shall be out in a few minutes.’
There’s tact for you. And it does work. Liz, when she answered, sounded really cheerful.
‘Right-ho!’ she called. ‘See you at lunch-time, Helly.’
The mad rattling of the doorknob stopped at last. Suddenly it seemed very quiet in the cupboard.
‘Go on, then,’ Helly said (rather imperiously for her, I thought). ‘Quick. Get on with the story. What happened when Gerald turned up on the doorstep with armfuls of flowers? Did your mum forgive him, or did the poor old sausage get the Big Freeze?’
In as much as it’s possible to stare at someone through dimly-lit murk, I stared at Helly Johnston. So Goggle-eyes had been transmuted into ‘Poor Old Sausage’ now, had he? Honestly! If her sweet nature could, in the space of a morning, turn Gerald Faulkner into an object of tender sympathy, it probably wouldn’t be more than a couple of weeks before Toad-shoes, creeping warily through the back door, found Helly’s arms wrapped round him in cheerful welcome. My mission, clearly, was all but accomplished. It had been easier than I thought.