And I was just as bad if we went out. I’d drag behind, desperately hoping that no one I knew would walk past and see him arm in arm with my mother, and think for a moment that he might be my dad. If we went to a restaurant, I wouldn’t speak to him. The waiter would stand with his little pad in hand, and ask Goggle-eyes,
‘Have you decided, sir?’
Goggle-eyes would lean across the table, and ask me, ‘Have you decided?’
I’d turn to Mum and tell her what I wanted. She’d turn and tell him. He’d turn and tell the waiter, who’d look as politely interested as he could, given he’d already written it down on his pad. It was ridiculous, but it was important to me. And I wouldn’t even taste anything Goggle-eyes ordered, or change plates with him if my meal turned out to be horrible and he was the only one willing to swap. Mum noticed. One time, when she was paying, she even leaned over suddenly and whispered sweetly in my ear,
‘I’m warning you, Kits. Leave that bowl of tagliatelle in black olive sauce just because you’re too stubborn to swap it for Gerald’s crispy chicken, and I’ll charge you £4.99 plus the V.A.T., and I mean it.’
She would, too. I know Mum. So I was forced to chomp my way down to the bottom of the vile lumpy sludge in my bowl, while he sat smirking at me over each golden delicious mouthful. I was so cross that when the trolley of desserts came by, I peeled the label off one of those exotic Ugli fruits and stuck it on the back of his jacket, so everyone in the restaurant would see it and snigger. And when we got home I slid his newspaper out of sight under the rug, and dropped dead leaves off the houseplants into his beer out of spite.
He tried really hard to be patient, you could tell. He spent an awful lot of time pretending he wasn’t even noticing how rude I was to him. He only really let his anger show once, and that was when I left one of my essays for Mrs Lupey lying on the arm of the sofa where he would see it the moment he sat down. I’d got a really good mark for this essay. ‘I hope that some parts of this, at least, spring from your very vivid imagination!’ she’d written at the end. It was the essay we had to write on Something I Hate, and I had really gone to town. Something I hate comes round to our house regularly, I wrote. Flabby and complacent, it acts as if it owns the place. When it breathes, all the little hairs that stick out of its nostrils waggle. Its teeth are going yellow from encroaching old age, but under its thinning hair, its scalp is mushy pink, like boiled baby. It has a really creepy way of looking at people, like a dog drooling hopefully over its food bowl. That’s why I think of it as ‘Goggle-eyes’.
I don’t think he can have read any further, because it was only a matter of seconds before he ripped the paper from top to bottom, and flung the pieces in the waste basket.
I didn’t mind. I’d made my point. But the look in his eyes warned me not to go so far so openly again. Oh, I kept handing in my little masterpieces at schooclass="underline" my Ode to An Unwelcome Guest, my notes for a class talk entitled Divorce Should be Forbidden Until the Last Child has Left Home, my descriptive essay called An Old Man Ageing. But, for home, I kept to another, safer way of bugging him, something that I could do quite innocently in front of Mum, and no one could even tell me off.
Chattering away about Simon.
It’s interesting, once you’ve decided to bring someone’s name into the conversation, how easily it can be done. And I became an expert quite fast. In fact, I got so good at it that, after a while, there was barely a topic in the world that I couldn’t, somehow, bring round to Simon. Imagine. It’s evening, and Jude has finally packed up the pieces of the game that Goggle-eyes has patiently been playing with her, and gone to bed. While Mum was upstairs tucking her in for the night, he’s gone through to the kitchen and made some coffee. Now Mum’s down again, and he’s trying to persuade her to leave the debris of the day lying all over the carpet, and sit down beside him on the sofa to drink it. Of course, Mum has to lean over in his direction to pick her cup off the little table. And, goggling away as usual, he starts to lay it on with a trowel.
‘That blouse completely changes the colour of your eyes, Rosalind. They’ve gone the most extraordinary violet.’
Op, plop. Pass the mop. I’d pluck at Mum’s skirt to make it perfectly clear that I was talking to her, and not him.
‘Do you remember that violet shirt of Simon’s? He often wore it when he came round here. Do you remember when he took us to the pantomime? He wore it then. And when we went to the stock car race, and the art gallery, and the flower show. And when we visited Granny last time.’
Goggle-eyes leaned back on the sofa, raised his eyes to heaven, and let out a barely perceptible sigh. Mum said,
‘Have you got any more homework to finish, Kitty?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve done it already. I did it after I helped Jude with hers. She’s stuck on fractions now. Do you remember when Simon used to help her with her homework and you said he had the patience of a saint?’
Mum gave me one of her looks. To be quite fair to her, she’s not at all the soppy sort of woman who goes around trying to pretend that she lived in a shoe box until the man at her side happened along. But still I could tell that she was getting really fed up with me going on and on and on about Simon, blowing it all up and stretching it out until it practically began to sound as if the two of them had broken it off about two feet away from the altar.
‘And have you finished your music practice?’
‘You heard me. I played Minuet in D and “Gladly my Cross I’d Bear”. Simon says when he was very young in church, he always thought that they were singing “Gladly, my Cross-eyed Bear”.’
Simon says, Simon says… Behind Mum, Gerald Faulkner narrowed his eyes at me, and drew two fingers slowly and steadily across his throat. From the look on his face I could tell it was more of a joke than a real threat. But I pretended otherwise, and stood up at once.
‘All right. I’ll go,’ I told them in a quiet, shaky little voice. ‘I see I’m in your way. I’ll leave you together. I’ll go upstairs and think of something to do…’
I let my voice trail off, trying to create the impression that I’d be sitting miserably twiddling my thumbs in a cold lonely room until bedtime, and you could practically hear the guilt in Mum’s voice when she said, ‘Don’t be silly,’ and patted the sofa beside her.
‘Come on. Sit down. We want you to stay. Don’t we, Gerald?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Goggle-eyes evenly, looking at me with an entirely expressionless face. ‘We want you to stay. It’s your home, after all, not mine.’
You wouldn’t think so. After a few weeks of polite sofa sitting, he practically dug himself in. He started to act as if he were one of the family. You know the sort of thing I mean. There’s all the difference in the world between a guest and someone who has a right to be in your house. Guests stay where you’ve put them, and carry on doing whatever you suggested they do, until you suggest they stop and do something else. If you leave them drinking a cup of tea and looking through your holiday slides, they’re supposed to sit tight till you ask them to come and string beans in your kitchen. They’re not supposed to get up the moment they feel like it and wander all over your house, rooting in your tool cupboard for hammers and wrenches, and nosing around people’s bedrooms.