disappearing from view. She’d had the ability to grab opportunities when they arose. In netball, for instance, she’d used to leap around scoring goal after goal, while I’d lurked at the side, unsure of my position, wearing a green tabard that said WD or WA. I hadn’t known, for years, what WD and WA even meant.
*
Half a mile or so before my mother and I got home I leaned forward and switched on the car radio. Someone was singing a song.
‘All we are is dust in the wind . . .’ they were singing, ‘. . . dust in the wind . . .’
‘Cheerful,’ my mother said.
And I switched the radio off again.
We drove the rest of the way behind a magnolia- coloured ice-cream van. It kept stopping abruptly. It had a drawing on the back, of a huge flattened palm.
Mind That Child!
it said, above the hand.
‘I remember when you used to run out for the ice-cream van,’ my mother said.
‘Yes.’
‘What tune was it, it used to play?’
‘“Greensleeves”.’
‘Yes. Not a very ice-creamy tune,’ she said, turning the car up the hill and onto our street.
‘What is an ice-creamy tune?’ I asked.
We often spoke like that, that summer. It was like someone yelling something at you across a huge field: you could hear their voice, but you couldn’t make out what they were saying.
*
Our house was a bungalow with an upstairs. Technically, it wasn’t a bungalow at all; it was, as I’d once written in a school essay, an anomaly. It had retained its essential bungalow nature, though. It was low, and the windows were wider than they were high. In my childhood drawings, our house was the slightly mad, square building that small children often draw of their home. Only, in my case, the off-centre windows and the precipitous roof and the out-of-scale flowers were pretty accurate. My drawings had certainly captured something , my parents’ friends used to say politely, peering at my work over my shoulder. There had been something about them: yes, there was definitely something about the down-on-its-hinges gate and the oddly asymmetrical little willow tree. Unlike some people’s houses, our house did not have room for artful display. There was a lot of clutter and not much space to put it in. Even the introduction of quite a small bowl on the kitchen table would have taken up valuable inches. The people who’d lived there before us had put the staircase in some time in the 70s; they were also the people who’d given the house its name: it had once been plain old 37 Salisbury Crags Rise, but they’d decided to call it ‘Pumzika’, which meant ‘tranquillity’ in Swahili, apparently. As none of us spoke Swahili, though, I suppose it could have meant anything. It could just have meant ‘bungalow on a hill’ for all we knew.
Ed McRae came here, I thought, as we pulled up into the drive. And I thought of a visit he had made – one, solitary visit – in the innocent interlude between our terrible Bellamy’s veal pie conversation and the New Year’s Eve party.
‘Your bungalow has an upstairs,’ he’d commented, as we plodded in through the front door.
‘Well, ten out of ten for observation!’ I should have retorted. But I hadn’t, of course. I’d never said anything to Ed McRae that I should have said. And I tried now, as my mother turned off the car engine, not to think of the awful, silent ascent Ed and I had made up the stairs; or of the childish, cat-print bean bag he’d sat on in my bedroom; or of the sombre discussion we’d had about a film we’d both recently seen – some story about a Russian rock band who’d all sported quiffs and winkle-pickers. Or how, in the middle of this conversation, Ed had suddenly started to sneeze, having developed an allergy to something in my room – to the carpet, maybe, or the bean bag, or maybe to me. I couldn’t actually remember much else about the afternoon at all. I suppose I’d blanked it out.
I pulled the door handle and got out of the car. Some
*
Half a mile or so before my mother and I got home I leaned forward and switched on the car radio. Someone was singing a song.
‘All we are is dust in the wind . . .’ they were singing, ‘. . . dust in the wind . . .’
‘Cheerful,’ my mother said.
And I switched the radio off again.
We drove the rest of the way behind a magnolia- coloured ice-cream van. It kept stopping abruptly. It had a drawing on the back, of a huge flattened palm.
Mind That Child!
it said, above the hand.
‘I remember when you used to run out for the ice-cream van,’ my mother said.
‘Yes.’
‘What tune was it, it used to play?’
‘“Greensleeves”.’
‘Yes. Not a very ice-creamy tune,’ she said, turning the car up the hill and onto our street.
‘What is an ice-creamy tune?’ I asked.
We often spoke like that, that summer. It was like someone yelling something at you across a huge field: you could hear their voice, but you couldn’t make out what they were saying.
*
Our house was a bungalow with an upstairs. Technically, it wasn’t a bungalow at all; it was, as I’d once written in a school essay, an anomaly. It had retained its essential bungalow nature, though. It was low, and the windows were wider than they were high. In my childhood drawings, our house was the slightly mad, square building that small children often draw of their home. Only, in my case, the off-centre windows and the precipitous roof and the out-of-scale flowers were pretty accurate. My drawings had certainly captured something , my parents’ friends used to say politely, peering at my work over my shoulder. There had been something about them: yes, there was definitely something about the down-on-its-hinges gate and the oddly asymmetrical little willow tree. Unlike some people’s houses, our house did not have room for artful display. There was a lot of clutter and not much space to put it in. Even the introduction of quite a small bowl on the kitchen table would have taken up valuable inches. The people who’d lived there before us had put the staircase in some time in the 70s; they were also the people who’d given the house its name: it had once been plain old 37 Salisbury Crags Rise, but they’d decided to call it ‘Pumzika’, which meant ‘tranquillity’ in Swahili, apparently. As none of us spoke Swahili, though, I suppose it could have meant anything. It could just have meant ‘bungalow on a hill’ for all we knew.
Ed McRae came here, I thought, as we pulled up into the drive. And I thought of a visit he had made – one, solitary visit – in the innocent interlude between our terrible Bellamy’s veal pie conversation and the New Year’s Eve party.
‘Your bungalow has an upstairs,’ he’d commented, as we plodded in through the front door.
‘Well, ten out of ten for observation!’ I should have retorted. But I hadn’t, of course. I’d never said anything to Ed McRae that I should have said. And I tried now, as my mother turned off the car engine, not to think of the awful, silent ascent Ed and I had made up the stairs; or of the childish, cat-print bean bag he’d sat on in my bedroom; or of the sombre discussion we’d had about a film we’d both recently seen – some story about a Russian rock band who’d all sported quiffs and winkle-pickers. Or how, in the middle of this conversation, Ed had suddenly started to sneeze, having developed an allergy to something in my room – to the carpet, maybe, or the bean bag, or maybe to me. I couldn’t actually remember much else about the afternoon at all. I suppose I’d blanked it out.
I pulled the door handle and got out of the car. Some
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