The House is Full of Yogis
He stared at her.
She looked at him with big, wide, apologetic eyes. Her chin wobbled. Then she began to cry.
After assessing the damage, the harbourmaster told Nev that Mum had most likely got the propeller caught up in the ropes of the other boats. The only way to deal with the problem was to dive down and untangle them. Meanwhile, the man on the boat that Mum hit first came out to apply wood glue to our splintered hull. His wife offered to make everyone a cup of tea. The silver-haired lady watched from a safe distance and smoked a cigarette in a holder and turned her head slowly from side to side in a disapproving but satisfied way.
Nev, in his oversized red swimming trunks, lowered himself into the water. He dived underneath the boat and blindly did his best to untangle the mass of knots that Mum had wrapped around our propeller and, it turned out, the rudder. He would come up for air, gasping and spluttering, spit out a jet of oily green water, and head back down again.
It took two hours.
By the time the last stretch of rope was removed from the propeller, Nev was shivering uncontrollably.
Mum dared to reappear, to hand him a towel. ‘Oh, well done Nev,’ she said, breathily. ‘Good work.’
‘Go away,’ he said. For the first time, it really did look like Mum had broken him. But then he disappeared below deck, came back a few minutes later fully clothed, and said: ‘Right’.
He filled up the boat with petrol and, after thanking the couple that had helped us, glided it out of the marina just before the marina closed. That evening we moored near Hampton Court, where Henry VIII had chopped off the head of Anne Boleyn in order to make way for the significantly more docile Jane Seymour, and ate fish and chips on the bank of the river, Mum sitting a little apart from the rest of us. She stayed by the boat while Nev, Tom, Dominic, Will and me went walking along the Thames. We found a rope, attached to a high bough of a tree, hanging down at the point where the raised bank met the river. Nev swung out on it, manoeuvring his middle-aged but slender body onto the seat of the rope and taking off over the water. Dominic made French-sounding whoops. Will Lee, being small, shot out across the river as if catapulted. Tom somehow managed to step on and off the rope with the same air of indifference he might have had catching the bus on his way to school.
‘Suppose we’d better get back,’ said Nev with a sigh, after an hour of rope swinging and peace.
As Tom, Dominic, Will and I played a game of Monopoly that night, we could hear Nev and Mum talking in the cabin next door. This time, however, it was Nev doing most of the talking. ‘Look at the woman who made me a cup of tea, after I almost caught hypothermia untangling the mess you made,’ he said. ‘That’s the kind of woman I respect. Rather than interfering and criticizing the whole time, she was supportive and helpful. What good have you done on this holiday? You’ve gone out of your way to be as silly as possible; to try and do things you can’t do just to prove a point. And it all went wrong.’
‘I have to stand up for feminism.’
‘Where were your feminist credentials when it was time to dive under the boat? Or are you going to tell me that’s a man’s job? Why didn’t you prove the equality of the sexes when I almost froze to death untangling the ropes and drinking gallons of river water? It’s got nothing to do with feminism. It’s all about your ego and your silly, childish pride and your need to show everyone that you’re the boss, even when you don’t have a … a ruddy clue about what you’re meant to be doing. You don’t stand for anything. You just can’t bear it when the attention is on someone else.’
We sat in the uneasy silence that followed.
‘The main reason I wanted to get a scholarship to Westminster,’ said Tom, as he bought the first hotel of the game, ‘is so I can become a boarder and get away from these people. I was born into this family by mistake.’
‘My muzzer,’ said Dominic, ‘she was to make sex with all of London in the time of the ’ippy.’
For the rest of the trip, our parents communicated with each other through a series of grunts. Torturing insects lost its appeal for Will and me while Dominic cried for most of the following night, tormented by homesickness. ‘Imagine your family is just like ours, but a tiny bit worse,’ Tom recommended. ‘Then being here will become a whole lot more bearable.’
Nev let all of us boys drive the boat on the last three days of our water-bound adventure. Mum sat at the back, still with her nose in the air but now, if not exactly contemplative, then at least quiet. We never made it to the London of Dominic’s dreams, turning back before we got to Richmond, but his guidebook did feature Windsor Castle, and we were heading straight for it.
‘Regardez,’ said Tom to Dominic, as the castle came into view. ‘La Reine habite ici.’
‘And now at the last time,’ said Dominic excitedly, ‘I am getting to see ze real England. Ze England of terrible wars and battles for ze power of ze throne.’
Tom looked at him and said: ‘What do you think you’ve been getting for the last week?’
It was a bright day. Nev managed to moor the boat without causing any further damage. Dominic led the way towards the castle. A large boy in shorts walked past holding two Mr Whippy ice creams, which he took it in turns to lap at: Mum watched him go by, opened her mouth as if about to pass comment, and appeared to think better of it. An elderly couple in grey anoraks sat on a bench by the towpath, a foot away from each other, silently watching the river. Two boys played Frisbee with their father. A couple, younger than our parents, lay on the lawn outside the castle, throwing a gurgling, smiling baby into the air.
Dominic, at least, was happy. We were there for the Changing of the Guard, we went up the Round Tower that was built in the reign of Henry II, and we managed to get quite close to Queen Mary’s dolls’ house. A blue-rinsed authority figure shouted at me after I rapped on the breastplate of a suit of armour once worn by Prince Hal. Will Lee found a spider amidst the gilded splendour of the State Apartments. He picked it up by a leg and hurtled it towards a Van Dyck. Nev bought Dominic a guidebook. Tom informed the woman at the information desk that the guidebook contained an aberrant apostrophe.
Mum had a coffee and a cigarette in the café. She had taken up smoking again.
We arrived back at the boat harbour that evening. The man looked over the Kingston Cavalier III and kept saying ‘Oh dear oh dear oh dear’, shaking his head as he itemized the damages with Nev. He told Nev that the bill for repairs was likely to be around two thousand pounds. Nev raised a hand to his furrowed forehead and nodded. He looked at Mum, clenched his fist, and let it fall limply open.
As the man went into a small office to write an invoice we stood in a row, next to a poster on a shellacked fence that read: Luxury Leisure Boats … For the Ride of your LIFE!!
Will Lee tugged Nev on the shirtsleeve and said, ‘This hasn’t been an entirely successful holiday, has it, Nev?’
Nev wiped his brow, looked at Will Lee, and said: ‘What makes you say that?’
3
The Wrong Chicken
‘The Lees have invited us to a dinner party,’ said Mum, who was attempting to decipher Hugh Lee’s scratchy handwriting, written in fountain pen on the back of a self-portrait by Duncan Grant. ‘It’s in two Saturdays’ time. I think.’
‘Bugger,’ puffed Nev from underneath the kitchen countertop, where he was trying to plug in a new dishwasher. As a gush of water poured out of the wall and onto the floor, Mum continued, ‘Hugh Lee may be irascible, but at least he’s fun, unlike most old men. What happens to men when they reach sixty? It’s like they are wiped clean of what little personality they once had.’
‘I wouldn’t say that about your father,’ said Nev, emerging from the recesses of the kitchen with soaked beige trousers and a spanner.
‘In his case it could only be an improvement.’
Since returning from the boat holiday, the arguments between the parents had died down. Now they treated each other with cold civility. Nev got a promotion and Mum moved to the Sun. She cooked a little – she had learned how to put lamb chops in the oven – and they sat around the table and talked about work, colleagues, politics, newspapers, religion … anything as long as it didn’t reveal how they felt about each other. It took me years to realize most families only talked about the weather. Meanwhile, Tom held forth on his new privileged life at Westminster School.
‘The head boy has the right to drive a flock of sheep across Westminster Bridge,’ he said, bouncing his fork off a rubbery lamb chop. ‘And we have a massive pancake fight called The Greaze. The cook throws the pancake up in the air and we scramble for a piece of it. The person who gets the most wins a gold sovereign and we all get a half-day, and if the cook fails to throw the pancake up high enough we’re allowed to throw our Latin books at him.’
‘What’s the point in learning Latin?’ I asked. ‘It’s not like you’re ever going to go to Greece.’
Meanwhile, I was concerned that the topic of that lunch break’s conversation at school had been the various animals my classmates had. Everyone apart from me seemed to have a faithful dog, an entertaining guinea pig or, in the case of Christopher Tobias, a parrot that could say ‘bollocks’ every time it saw an elderly person. There was a tabby cat who padded about in our kitchen every now and then, but that was it. I was feeling particularly miserable after scoring one out of ten in a mathematics test, so the lack of an animal in the house contributed to a wave of melancholy I believed it was the duty of the parents to do something about.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ I said, thumping the bottom of a bottle of tomato ketchup until a tiny globule landed on my chop, ‘can we get a pet?’
‘No!’ screeched Mum. ‘What a horrible thought. What has an animal ever done for me?’
‘Provided you with a lamb chop,’ offered Tom.
‘Pets are a suburban indulgence. It’s not for the animal’s sake that you have it, is it?’
‘What about the smallest pet going, like a hamster, or a gerbil?’
‘Not even an ant.’
The following weekend we visited Nev’s parents. Min and Pop, as Nev called them, lived in Minehead in Somerset, in a 1930s house along a street so quiet you felt conspicuous walking along it. Before that they had lived in a similar house in Tadworth in Surrey. They moved to Minehead, on Granny’s insistence and against the wishes of Grandpa, after he retired as a tax inspector. He had stayed in the same job, in the same office, in the same chair, for forty years. He would have stayed in the same house too, had he been allowed.
‘Say what you want about Pop,’ said Nev, as we drove down to Minehead, ‘at least he sticks to his guns.’
Grandpa wasn’t one for change. He only ate two things: bananas and baked beans on toast. He only liked one piece of music (the Hallelujah Chorus). His chief reason for wanting to stay in Tadworth, beyond his conviction that change of any kind could only ever be for the worse, was that he liked his garden. Granny, however, was resolute, pointing out that the house in Minehead still had a garden big enough to grow all the fruit and vegetables he wanted. Not that he ate them. Neither did Granny. She only trusted food if it came out of a tin. A few years later she found a house with a smaller garden. Then she made him move into a first-floor flat. Then he died.
On that trip, however, he was still going strong. He pressed 50p coins into my and Tom’s palms, with the sense of occasion with which he had been doing it since we were four and six.
‘Thanks,’ said Tom, tossing the coin in the air. ‘I’ll open a Swiss bank account.’
‘Good idea,’ said Grandpa, tapping his nose with his index finger. ‘Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves.’
Sunday lunch consisted of cold meats and tinned vegetables in the pathologically neat dining room, among paintings of horses and scenes of rustic splendour, which was the closest Granny and Grandpa got to seeing the countryside; they didn’t actually appear to like it despite living in it. If they did go for a rural outing it involved driving to a National Trust car park, sitting in the car, eating sandwiches from a Tupperware box, and driving home again. Mum mentioned we were thinking of going abroad for our next holiday.
‘Wouldn’t if I were you,’ said Grandpa, cutting up his beans on toast into neat little squares.
‘Why not?’
He stopped cutting his toast for a moment and looked up. ‘Went to France once. Won’t be doing that again.’
I decided to attempt to alleviate the mood with a joke. The one about the hairy bum had got a big laugh at the fireworks party.
‘So she said …’ and I held out my arms for the killer line, ‘“… I’ve looked all over my Hairy Bum but I can’t find my Willy.”’
Granny made an indistinct humming noise. Grandpa poked bleakly at a tinned carrot. Tom shook his head. Eventually Granny held up a plate and said to nobody in particular: ‘More Spam?’
For the rest of the afternoon we sat in front of the television, as Granny chewed on an endless stream of toffees from a bowl on a side table and Grandpa dozed off in an armchair. Eventually I asked Granny if I could have one of her toffees. She turned to Mum and said: ‘May he, Mummy?’
They watched football. Granny complained about the way the players all hugged each other when they scored a goal. They watched Coronation Street, and Granny wondered why television always had to be accompanied by such awful pop music. (I think she was talking about the theme tune.) Mum got her talking about newspapers for a while. Granny told us she didn’t approve of the way men in the news wore their hair so long, but then journalism was not a place that attracted the right sort of people. Nev would have been much better off sticking to accountancy.
It was the night of the dinner party at the Lees’ house. Hugh Lee answered the door in a cravat and jumbo cords, clutching a dusty bottle of wine, while Penny could be spotted in the kitchen, briskly moving from oven to hob. As Mum and Nev, looking young and garish against the muted colours and matured sensibilities of Hugh and Penny Lee, drank wine downstairs and talked loudly about how awful their parents were, Will and I disappeared into the attic. I looked through the stack of records leaning against the record player. Most of them were jazz and classical but there were a few interesting ones in there too, not least Electric Ladyland by The Jimi Hendrix Experience.
‘Wow. They’re a bit rough,’ said Will, staring at the dank and gloomy cover of the album, with its photograph of naked women apparently made to look as bad as possible, as I took the scratched and dusty vinyl out of the inner sleeve and put it onto the record player.
‘That’s what I thought,’ I said. ‘Where did he get them from?’
‘He shagged them all. You could do that in those days.’
The Sixties was another world, a world of terrifying, beautiful women in multicoloured clothes and dark, visionary men on cosmic journeys. It certainly wasn’t much like the worlds I knew: of Granny and Grandpa’s unspoken resentments; or the interiors’ magazines-inspired colour schemes of 99, Queens Road; or even the discreetly wealthy good taste of the Lees. As the searing-knife guitar of ‘Gypsy Eyes’ was replaced with ‘Burning of the Midnight Lamp’s musical shrug detailing the end of a love affair, with Jimi Hendrix making heartbreak sound so very cool by the smiling way he says ‘loneliness is such a drag’, we sat on beanbags opposite one another, the record player between us, staring at the album spinning round and taking it in turns to hold the sleeve.
‘He died, you know,’ I said to Will. ‘I heard a radio programme about it. Apparently he was killed by The Man.’
‘Who is The Man?’
‘Generally it’s the government,’ I said with a sigh, hands behind my head as I sunk deeper into the beanbag. ‘In Jimi Hendrix’s case it was the record company. They wanted to wall him in. Imprison his spirit. You can’t tame a free bird like Jimi.’
‘The ‘suits’,’ said Will, philosophically.
We nodded, solemnly and knowingly. We heard the sound of footsteps on the metal ladder.
‘Is that The Man?’
It was Penny Lee. ‘Hello, you two,’ said Will’s mother, with a bright smile. ‘I thought I’d bring you some supper.’ Somehow she had managed to carry up the ladder with her a tray with plates of baked beans on toast, glasses of apple juice, two bananas and a stack of Bourbons. And she had a dinner party to host. ‘What is that bizarre music?’
‘Jimi Hendrix,’ I said. ‘Do you remember him from when you were young, back in the olden times?’
‘Oh, I was never one for the hit parade,’ she replied with a brisk shake of the head. ‘Do remember to clean your teeth, Will dear. They were rather green the last time I looked.’
For the next hour, from eating supper to listening to Jimi Hendrix to making a compare-and-contrast study of the women on the cover of Electric Ladyland with the ones in David Hamilton’s photographs, we were entirely unaware of the disaster unfolding twenty feet below. It was only when I broke a ruler by whacking it on Will’s head, after which Will told me it was the lucky ruler his elder sister had used to pass her A-levels and I had to go downstairs and confess to my crime, did we discover anything was amiss.
We saw Penny first. She was in the hallway on the telephone, eyebrows resolute as she gave the address of the house to the person on the other end of the line. From within the dining room, we could hear only groans.
‘Mummy, Will’s broken Catherine’s special ruler,’ said Will, poking her in the stomach with one of its jagged edges.
‘Not now, dear,’ she said, in a tone that was, for her, perhaps a little brusque. ‘We have a serious situation to deal with, I’m afraid.’
We went into the dining room. The guests, the women in Monsoon dresses and Liberty scarves and the men in tweed and corduroy jackets and tank tops, were leaning deep into old oak chairs, clutching their stomachs. Nev was laid out on the sofa, prostrate and sweating. At first I thought they had simply drunk too much red wine, as I had seen my parents and their friends do countless times before, but soon I realized this was different. Penny was rushing about making arrangements, and Mum was sitting cross-legged in a chair with a cigarette, but everyone else was in the throes of agony.
‘It was the chicken risotto,’ announced Mum. ‘It’s floored them all.’
‘You seem to be all right,’ I said.
‘It takes more than a chicken to take me down.’
It was only years later that I discovered what had actually happened. Penny had two chickens in the freezer, one for the dinner party and one for Christmas. She had taken them both out, put one back, and momentarily put the thawed chicken where the frozen one had been. The results were much worse than the upset stomach food poisoning usually causes. It was salmonella. Everyone apart from Mum (whose fussy eating habits meant she hadn’t actually had any chicken risotto) and Penny (who was too selfless to fall ill) was affected. Hugh roared and groaned and disappeared into the upstairs bathroom with a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. One woman went blind for a week. Another became delusional and thought John Inman was sexually abusing her. It was a good thing Mum resisted the urge to write about the whole thing. Penny was a top-ranking civil servant in the Department of Health at the time.
I leaned over the sofa and looked at Nev, his glasses steamed up and his tight, dry lips taking on a worrying blue tint. ‘Are you all right, Nev?’ I asked, but he merely reached a thin hand out towards mine and made a rumbling noise.
‘Honestly, trust Nev to get it worse than the rest of them,’ said Mum, as I leaned over my father and wondered if this would be the last time I would see him alive. She touched up her lipstick before standing in the middle of the room and announcing, ‘He’ll do anything for attention.’
An ambulance pulled up outside silently, its ominous flashing lights heralding the seriousness of the situation. Nev, unmoving, was raised onto a stretcher, and a utilitarian red blanket was pulled tightly and neatly over him. He looked like an Action Man in trouble. Mum told me she was going to travel with Nev to the hospital but that there was no need for me to go too. Ambulances came for two more guests, and the rest crawled off in various directions. With Hugh locked up in the bathroom, Penny was left on her own.
‘Oh dear,’ she said, still with a nervous smile, stacking up plates and putting them in neat piles next to the sink. ‘Dear me.’
‘It wasn’t your fault, Mummy,’ said Will, fiddling with a wine glass until he dropped it onto the floor with a yelp.
‘I rather think it was,’ said Penny, magicking a dustpan and brush and sweeping away the shattered glass. ‘It was frightfully silly of me to take the two chickens out of the freezer in the first place. I don’t know what I was thinking.’
‘I wouldn’t worry, I said, rifling through a box of After Eights on the table until I found one of the little paper sleeves still containing a chocolate mint. ‘Nev will be fine. It’ll be like the time we were in Richmond Park and he fell out of a tree and landed on his bum. He couldn’t sit down for a week, but after that he was right as rain. I very much doubt it will have any lasting effects.’
Nev almost died. He was so severely ill that he slept for eighteen hours a day, and the act of getting up and going to the toilet exhausted him so much that he had to go straight back to bed again. That night, as he lay feverish in a hospital bed, Will and I played a game of peashooter tennis, listened to Jimi Hendrix do his fifteen-minute version of Voodoo Chile, and went to sleep.
Nev returned home a week later. It was Tom who broke the news, one afternoon when he came in from school. ‘Nev’s back,’ he said, after opening the fridge and glugging orange juice from the carton. ‘And he doesn’t look good.’
Mum was out that afternoon, interviewing a celebrity, so I crept up to our parents’ bedroom. Nev was lying in bed, motionless. He was extremely thin, and without his glasses his face took on an incomplete, mole-like aspect. The room was hot and airless. On the dressing table were three aluminium tubes with little labels on them.
‘What are these?’ I said to Nev, holding up one of the tubes.
In a barely perceptible whisper he said what sounded like ‘I oo’.
‘You what?’
He tried again. ‘My poo.’
‘Yuck!’ I dropped the tube, and for a horrible moment I thought the top was going to come off and send Nev’s diseased stool all over the new beige carpet. (I later saw the same aluminium tubes in the Lees’ kitchen, where Penny had repurposed them as spice containers.) The effort of talking was too much for Nev. He looked worse for it. It was terrible to see my father like this. The man who built dens with us in the woods, who climbed trees with us, who slipped me £500 notes when I was losing at Monopoly, was wasting away. Too ill to talk, too ill to move, he was inching ever closer to death. This might be the last time I would ever see my beloved father. These might be the last words I ever spoke to him.
‘Can I have a gerbil?’
I think he made some sort of a grunt of affirmation. Or it might have been the bed squeaking. It was hard to tell.
‘Only I’ve been thinking about what Mum said about not being allowed a pet, and I’ve decided it would actually be a really good way for me to have some responsibility. And I noticed that there’s some cash in the top drawer of your cupboard, and gerbils only cost about four pounds, so if you have no objections I’ll just take a twenty and go and get one from the pet shop now. But it’s totally your decision. If you don’t think it’s a good idea, say something.’