Читать книгу Execution Plan - Patrick Thompson - Страница 6

Where do I start? Things don’t have convenient beginnings, things overlap and collide.

Perhaps it started like this:

Veronica was on her way home, carrying bags of shopping. She was travelling by bus because we are back in the days when families had only one car, if they had one at all. She’d got bags of vegetables and foodstuffs we’d fail to recognize now. She was going to have to make them into something, not just empty one packet or another into the microwave. Microwaves aren’t even a rumour. Microwaves are still science fiction. We are back in the early seventies.

The bus was crowded, and people jostled. The young people didn’t hand over their seats to young women with heavy bags anymore. Everyone was smoking.

She’d left her son at home, but he’d be fine. He was old enough to look after himself. His father would be at work until six, and then doing office work at home until midnight. She’d be cooking for the three of them.

That was how it was, and it wasn’t likely to change. Germaine Greer might not think so, but Germaine Greer wasn’t living on housekeeping in the West Midlands. It was easier to be radical when you had enough money to give up the day job. It was no trouble to be a free thinker if you had nothing urgent to think about.

Sometimes she wished she’d taken after her mother, who had been in charge of her own household. The understanding had been that her father had been there to bring in money. He was subservient to the female line. They’d been emancipated before emancipation.

She hadn’t, though, and that was all there was to it. There was too much about her mother that was too uncomfortable.

If there was a genetic component to that – which seemed unlikely, as her mother’s brand of strangeness was unscientific and didn’t sit easily with concepts like genetics – then it might have passed, via her, to her son.

Perhaps it had. Perhaps he’d have abilities of his own. If he had, she hoped they wouldn’t hurt him. He didn’t need hurting. It’d happen, of course. Life was like that. Damage got done. The innocent came off badly. He’d get damaged.

Knowing that, she tried to prepare him. He wanted a pet. They’d talked about it.

‘We can’t have anything,’ she’d told him. ‘We haven’t the money for it.’

‘I could get a paper round.’

‘For how much? A few pence? A couple of shillings? We haven’t the room for a dog.’

‘We could have a cat.’

‘There are too many roads around here,’ she’d said, shivering. A cat would never survive.

‘A mouse then. In a cage.’

She didn’t want mice, or rats, or anything else. Animals cost money. You had to feed them, and clean up after them, and he’d lose interest in it and then it’d be something else she got lumbered with. When the holidays were over and he was back at school he’d forget about it.

The bus driver was in a good mood and stopped short of the stop so that she wouldn’t have so far to walk. She thanked him and heaved her bags out into the afternoon air. It was winter, and the air was becoming colourless and frigid. In some houses the Christmas decorations were up. She thought it was too early for that. It was still three weeks until Christmas; too early even to think about it. She wondered what he’d want this year. Everything, probably, and a cat thrown in too.

You couldn’t have everything. Not even her mother had everything. Visiting her now, in her dusty old house with the cobwebs clustered wherever she could no longer reach, that was clear. You couldn’t have everything. Her father had died, worn out looking after her mother, and her mother lived on in a house she could no longer keep clean. The neighbour’s cats popped in for food and a chat. In her mother’s trade – if it was a trade – cats were a given. When she dragged her son to visit his grandmother he’d be half afraid, half annoyed. Her husband would not go at all.

It took her a while to rescue her door key from her coat pocket, weighed down as she was by her shopping. Entering the house she knew at once that something was wrong.

Her son’s voice, for one thing. It was too lively, too animated, and he shouldn’t have been talking at all. There was no one to talk to.

She put the bags on the floor inside the front door, and of course one fell down and unleashed groceries.

Someone answered her son, and the chattering continued.

They were in the front room. Perhaps it was the television. She didn’t think there was anything on, but they’d watch anything. Everyone said so.

She opened the door and looked in. Her son sat on the sofa, with an orange kitten on his lap. It was sparring with his fingers.

‘Where’s that from?’ she asked, going in.

‘I wanted one,’ he said. As though that was an answer. ‘Gran always says if you want something hard enough you can get it.’

‘Gran says a lot of things she doesn’t mean,’ she said unconvincingly. He was young enough not to notice that. The kitten looked at her. She didn’t like the way it looked. It was perhaps too orange. It was perhaps in not quite the right dimensions.

She noticed that there was someone else in the room, a ragged little boy in ragged little clothes. A friend of her son’s, she thought, although you’d have thought his mother might have dressed him properly before letting him out.

‘Who’s this?’ she asked.

‘Who?’ asked her son, and when she turned to look at the new boy there was no one there after all.

She turned back to look at her son.

‘You don’t want to listen to your Gran,’ she said carefully, because this might all be reported back and there were things in that dusty old house of her mother’s that were all the worse for being neglected for years. ‘She doesn’t know everything. You can’t have everything you want.’

He looked doubtful at that.

‘I mean it,’ she said. ‘That isn’t your cat. Now just take it back where you got it from.’

He looked at her. He looked at the strange orange cat. He did something – and she couldn’t even have said what it was – and the kitten vanished, poof, gone.

‘And don’t do it again,’ she said, hoping that he’d take notice. And then she unpacked the groceries and made them a nice stew for tea.