Well. No point in holding back close to the goal. So I finished the story.
Big Freeze? Big Freeze? I tell you, what Gerald Faulkner would have met if he’d walked up our path was not so much the Big Freeze as the Original Permafrost. Good job he never risked it. There would have been icicles hanging from his silvery locks before he so much as stepped on our doormat (which might still say WELCOME in carefully woven and dyed two-tone sisal, but which definitely wouldn’t have meant it). I don’t think I’ve ever seen an expression as vinegary as the one on Mum’s face when she drew those miserable shrivelled chops and poor little blackened peas out from their overnight charring in the oven.
‘Take my advice, Kits,’ she said to me a shade incomprehensibly, but with unmistakable venom. ‘Never confuse a man’s concern for your physical welfare with his support for any of the rest of you!’
‘No, Mum,’ I said. (Best not to argue, I’ve always found, when you can see the bags under their eyes.) ‘Didn’t you sleep?’
‘Sleep?’ she snapped, pushing her tangled hair back from her pale face. ‘Of course I slept. Why shouldn’t I sleep, for heaven’s sake? Naturally I slept like a log, all night. What on earth makes you think I couldn’t sleep?’
And that was that.
What a cheek! I was so angry that I banged the door at her when I went off to school. Parents have such a nerve. If they decide it’s inconvenient for you to know things or have strong feelings about them, then you don’t know them and you don’t have feelings – simple as that! When she’s in love with Goggle-eyes, she doesn’t even notice that I hate his guts, he makes my flesh creep and I wish him dead. Then, over weeks and weeks, it becomes obvious to me that, if I don’t like him, I am going to have to lump him. And since I actually happen to live here, since this is my home if you’ve noticed, I’d rather not go on this way. It makes me miserable. So I make this jumbo-sized effort to come to terms with Gerald Faulkner, talk to him, see his good points, admit that he’s really important to Jude, and he tries hard.
And then – poof! Just because he gets right up Mum’s nose one night, Gerald is banished for good. And, once again, Mum simply goes and blinds herself to everyone else’s feelings. That can’t be Jude, you know, sitting so glumly on the sofa with her thumb in her mouth and Floss curled in her lap. Oh, no. That woeful little person can’t be Jude because, if it were, that might mean Jude’s actually sitting there missing somebody she actually cares for, somebody precious to her. And Mum’s decided that person no longer exists.
‘Look, Mum!’ Jude charges into the kitchen every other morning. ‘Gerald’s sent me another postcard!’
‘Gerald?’ (You know the tone of voice: Gerald? Gerald Who? Do I know someone called Gerald?) Not the response to encourage someone as shy as Jude to talk a little about how she’s missing him.
It makes me very angry. It’s very dishonest. After all, it’s not as if Gerald were just Mum’s, to keep or drop as she chooses. Jude had become close to him too, for better or worse. They spent a lot of time together. He helped her with her homework. She depended on him. You could say he was even getting to be a little bit like another father. I tell you, the day I wandered in the sitting room and caught Jude trying to read the stockmarket report to herself, moving her lips and using her finger to try and keep her place on the enormous page, I nearly burst into tears, honestly I did.
And I missed him too, if I’m perfectly honest. At first I only missed all the little things that you’d expect: the bright fizzy drinks; the boxes of chocolates; getting the radiator in my room fixed as soon as it went on the blink – that sort of thing. But then, as weeks went by, I started missing all sorts of other things, like Mum sometimes being in those really good moods that came from having someone standing around admiring her for hours on end. Oh, she did invite poor old Standby Simon round quite a few times (especially the week Jude started on multiplication of decimals!) But it wasn’t the same. How could it be? Simon is really nice, but he isn’t Gerald.
And I know Mum missed Gerald too. I could tell. Sometimes I caught her staring at the telephone. One day I even watched her sitting beside it for half an hour, wondering whether to pick it up and dial. But she never cracked. Even that Saturday morning when I told her I was going to the library, and I knew from the way her voice went all drab and flat as she answered that, like me, she was remembering the time she chased me round the kitchen table, laughing and trying to snatch my library card, and Gerald caught her in his arms.
I’ll tell you what else I missed – his little acid drop remarks. Like when we walked past a man shouting ‘Equal pay for all!’ and Gerald whispered to me: ‘Mark my words, there speaks a poor man.’ And when it was my turn to take the gerbils at the end of the term, and by the time I finally staggered into the house with the cage, it turned out the two of them had chewed up my report, every last. word. Mum’s face went dark. I think she thought I’d fed the stiff brown envelope through the bars deliberately. I reckon she was just on the verge of ripping my ears off when Gerald somehow got in first, sarcastically suggesting we try to sell the cage to CND Head Office as a cheap, efficient and ecologically sound shredding machine. Mum fell about laughing, and I was saved.
I wasn’t the only person he rescued, either. I’ve not forgotten that awful Sunday night Jude panicked utterly because she suddenly remembered she was supposed to learn a whole poem about ‘Winter’ for first thing Monday morning. The library was closed. Jude tore round the house half frantic, close to tears, begging us to stop whatever we were doing and just think, please! Somebody must remember a poem about winter – a really short one she could learn in time.
So good old Gerald sighed and laid down his paper, and sat on the sofa, pondering. And then suddenly the light of memory flashed in his eye, and, standing up, he grasped the lapels of his jacket like a town councillor in a telly serial, and solemnly declaimed the shortest winter poem he could dredge from his cultured past:
‘Ladies and Gentlemen,
Take my advice,
Pull down your knickers,
And slide on the ice.’
Jude thought it was the funniest poem she’d ever heard. She laughed so hard she stopped her terrible worrying altogether, and managed to learn the whole of ‘When Icicles Hang by the Wall’ before morning. (It turned out good old Gerald knew that, too.)
It wasn’t often Gerald could surprise you. But I was really surprised to find out how much I ended up missing having him around. So was Mrs Lupey. When I handed in my sonnet, ‘Gerald – A Lament’, she only raised her eyebrows a little. But when she gave me back my essay, ‘The Person I Miss Most’, she said she found it very moving indeed, and the sincerity of my feelings showed even through the rather tasteless jokes with which it was most unfortunately studded.
Give Gerald his due, he did his best to keep in touch without annoying Mum. The postcards he sent Jude came regularly; but each had some special picture or joke on the front that let him off the hook, as if he were saying: ‘I happened to notice this card, and I couldn’t resist it.’ (One was a cat that looked exactly like our Floss, for example. Jude used it to make Floss a ‘real’ passport. And another was a blackboard covered all over in terrifying mathematical symbols. Jude went quite pale.) And, on the back, though he wrote something different every time, he always somehow managed to imply his fondness for Jude remained unchanged, while mere force of circumstance kept him regrettably stuck on his side of town.