Читать книгу The House is Full of Yogis - Will Hodgkinson - Страница 12

‘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.’

He didn’t say anything.

The gerbil I chose was a tiny rat-like creature with a twitching nose and a nervous disposition. I knew when I saw him that he was the one: he was away from his little brothers and sisters in the cage, alone, clawing at the glass. He needed me. I called him Kevin. With the notes I took from Nev’s drawer I also bought a little cage with a wheel. Then, with the money left over, I bought Smash Hits by Jimi Hendrix. It was educational. Nev would have wanted it that way.

Kevin didn’t appreciate his new surroundings. My bedroom was large, and my now semi-permanent Scalextric track looked like a raceway that had fallen on hard times: a grandstand only half painted, racing cars in the pit stop desperately in need of repair, and spectators missing limbs, although the last detail was a punishment from Tom in retaliation for stealing and losing then lying about stealing and losing his Sony Walkman. I had imagined Kevin would feel powerful in this miniature society in decline, but to my disappointment he scrambled under the bed the moment I released him from his cardboard box. Even the exciting sight and sound of cars going around the track wouldn’t entice him out of his shadowy hiding place.

With Kevin unavailable, I made the most of my second purchase of the day. I put the two speakers of my little stack stereo system on the carpet, facing each other, and my head between them. The music was incredible. From the heavy rock of ‘Purple Haze’ to the tenderness of ‘The Wind Cries Mary’, it offered transports into distant lands. I closed my eyes and let the magic carpet ride of Jimi Hendrix take me on a journey.

‘What is this shit?’

Tom was standing over me, the sleeve in his hand. His mouth turned down into a grimace as he held his head back. ‘Good God, not Jimi Hendrix. This is the kind of hippy vomit the idiots at school listen to. I can almost smell the patchouli oil. Crap.’

‘That’s a matter of opinion.’

‘No. Fact.’

‘By the way, what’s happened to your hair?’

Tom had undergone a radical transformation. Earlier that day, he had a floppy fringe befitting a public school boy who liked to walk around the grounds of Westminster School in his gown, spouting Ovid. Now the back and sides of his head were shaved and he had a big sprout of orange hair puffing out of the top, like a prize mushroom. He was dressed differently too. An oversized black jumper, black drainpipe jeans and brothel creepers had replaced the velvet jacket and bowtie he usually wore.

‘What?’ he said, glowering.

I stared at Tom for a while. I made sure he noticed my eyes going from the top of his head to the bottom of his feet. Then I put my head back between the speakers and, after a little chuckle, said, ‘Nothing.’

‘What, you little shit?’

‘It’s ‘Hey Joe’. My favourite song.’

Tom attacked me. He knocked the record and the stylus made a horrible scratching sound. ‘You idiot!’ I screamed, in a much higher-pitched tone than I would have liked. ‘If you’ve damaged it you’re buying a new one.’

Tom got off me and turned his head in confusion. ‘What was that?’

‘What?’

‘I just saw some sort of animal run out of the room.’

‘Oh no. Kevin!’

As my terrible luck would have it, he ran into Mum and Dad’s room. At least Nev would be too severely ill to notice him, and perhaps even me catching him, so I crept in. Mum was in there, alongside a man who was taking Nev’s temperature and looking serious.

‘The problem is that it has reached his blood stream,’ said the doctor. ‘It’s rare to get it this badly. Has he been run down recently?’

‘He’s always had to watch his vitamin levels. He’s got a weak constitution.’ Mum crossed her arms and nodded, as if this diagnosis brought some sort of finality to the situation. ‘Everyone else recovered ages ago. He’s been overworked … By the way, this is my son Will. What is it, darling?’

I could see Kevin, twitching his nose underneath a small round table in the corner of the room. All I needed to do was encourage him to run back out again. Then I could grab him and put him in his cage.

As I moved towards the little table, slowly and sideways, like a drugged crab, I said: ‘I … I just had to see Nev. I’ve been worrying about him so much.’

‘Liar,’ came Tom’s voice from the other side of the door.

‘Will, if this is one of your pranks …’

This required extra effort. ‘It’s not,’ I cried, wobbling my voice and wishing for tears, although they never came. ‘I don’t want to lose him.’ I turned my head away. Kevin was no longer under the table. I had no idea where he was. I sat down on the side of the bed and hid my head in my hands while secretly staring at the floor, watching out for a gerbil.

The doctor gave a deep, low sigh. ‘This is a difficult time for your family. But I’d like to emphasize how in most cases like this the patient does pull through. The best course of action is to let your husband get as much rest as he can.’

Kevin was right next to the bed. It should have been achievable to just lean down and grab him, but I didn’t want Mum and the doctor to see so I lay face down on the side of the bed and sobbed while stretching my arm out and inching it ever closer to the gerbil.

‘Will, I know it’s upsetting,’ said Mum, ‘but we really need to leave Nev to get as much peace and quiet as possible.’

Then she screamed.

‘A rat!’ She jumped onto the bed.

Nev groaned. I managed to get hold of Kevin, who bit me. I put him in my shirt and dropped him into his cage. Mum had to wait for the doctor to leave before she had the chance to come in and start yelling.

My twelfth birthday came while Nev was still in bed, woefully thin and exhausted by trips to the bathroom but no longer on the verge of death. He and Mum got me a BMX bike, which I had long dreamed of owning. Tom bought me a record. He hadn’t bothered to wrap it up and it was second-hand; the album sleeve was ripped and over the price sticker in the top right hand corner he had scribbled ‘Happy Birthday Scum’. It was The Byrds’ Greatest Hits.

‘Who are The Byrds?’

‘Presumably you have heard of The Beatles? They’re the American version, ergo, better suited to your limited intellectual capacity.’

Reader, I hit him.

With Nev out of action and Mum working late whenever she got the opportunity, we relied increasingly on a local girl called Judy to look after us. One afternoon when Tom was out, an afternoon Will Lee and I had intended to occupy by building Kevin his very own adventure park out of Mum’s new Salvatore Ferragamo leather boots and a few toilet rolls, Judy turned up with three other teenage girls and a Ouija Board.

‘What’s a Ouija board?’ I asked.

‘It’s a way of contacting the spirits of the dead,’ said Judy. ‘You normally speak to people who used to live in the house you’re in, but you never know who you’ll find. We got the ghost of Jim Morrison once. Turns out he had a thing for teenage girls from Richmond.’

Will and I studied the board. It had ornate and slightly scary Edwardian etchings of a smiling sun, a frowning moon and some ghostly silhouettes. The letters of the alphabet were spelled out, and there were also the words ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘goodbye’, for the spirits to use when in a hurry.

I looked at this group of teenagers. Four girls, at a guess aged around seventeen, in pixie boots and legwarmers. They set up the board and argued about which one of them Jim Morrison’s ghost had been talking about when he said she was ‘well hot’. Will Lee and I hovered around them, poked our heads over their shoulders, and generally tried to get their attention.

‘Leave us alone,’ said one of the girls, after they turned the lights off and put a single candle in the middle of the kitchen table. ‘We need to concentrate for our séance to work.’

As we left them to it, they put all of their hands together on the plastic heart-shaped object designed to move around the board.

‘Voices from the Other Side, talk to us.’

‘It’s moving,’ one of them shrieked.

On the other side of the door, meanwhile, we did our best to listen in. They could hear us sniggering.

‘Go away.’

We stuck our heads round the door. ‘What’s happening? Found any dead people?’

‘We’ve contacted a Victorian man called Bartholomew,’ our babysitter replied. ‘He had two wives and six children, although three of them died in childbirth and one grew up to become a whore in Islington.’

‘What’s a whore?’ asked Will.

The girls refused to tell us, and for that reason we decided to play a trick on them. Nobody had got round to fixing the milk hatch that had broken off its hinges, so its little wooden door was simply jammed into position on the outside wall of the kitchen but not actually held on by anything. This would allow us our revenge. We went round to the side of the house and tried to listen to the girls’ conversation with Bartholomew. It was impossible; only when they giggled could we hear them. So we waited until they weren’t giggling. That would mean they were absorbed in a tense moment of Ouija board mysticism.

‘OK,’ I whispered to Will, ‘one, two, three.’

We pushed the door of the milk hatch as hard as we could. We heard chilling, terrified screams. We ran round to see what had happened. The milk hatch had landed right in the centre of the Ouija board, smashing the plastic heart. The girls were standing up, away from the table, with widened eyes and their hands over their mouths. Pasty-faced suburban girls, they were even paler than usual.

‘I’m never doing it again.’

‘We’re dealing with forces we don’t understand.’

‘We just asked Bartholomew a question,’ said Judy, ‘and that thing flew onto the table.’

‘What was the question?’ said Will.

The girls shuddered in unison. ‘“How did you die?”’

Without Nev to help me with homework, school became one form of torture after another. If it wasn’t games – freezing on the brittle mud of a football field as a defender after being picked last, apart from Bobby Sultanpur who had one leg shorter than the other – it was science, with Mr Mott threatening to whack us with his paddle stick if we did so much as set fire to the annoying kid’s blazer with a Bunsen burner. Music lessons were a waste of time altogether. Our teacher, Mr Stuckey, had a vague connection with Andrew Lloyd Webber, which meant that our school provided the boys for the choir in the West End production of Evita. About half of my class was in the choir. They got five pounds a night, they went up to Soho on a coach once or twice a week, and they had Mr Stuckey’s full attention. He sat around a piano and trained the chosen ones while the Evita rejects had to sit in a cold, grey back room and amuse themselves in whatever ways unsupervised twelve-year-old boys could.

Art was appalling, but not because of the art teacher. He was a man with red hair and a beard in a fisherman’s jumper who told us that Mrs Oates, our English teacher, who put on white lacy gloves before handling a piece of chalk and got emotional as she told us the word gay had been ruined forever, slept in the same bed as a cannon. It was years before we discovered her husband was Canon Oates, a high-ranking member of the clergy. Art was appalling because I couldn’t draw or paint. The concept of perspective eluded me. You had to have something in school to be good at, even if you were diabolical at everything else. I might have scraped through English with a bit of dignity if it hadn’t been for Mrs Oates and her horrific taste in literature. She considered A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin a masterpiece and dismissed The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, which I had read over an afternoon of uncontrollable laughter, as vulgar. And sooner or later it always came back to the Bible, surely the most boring book ever written. The only lesson that was vaguely bearable was French, and that was because Mr Gaff had a fascination with combustion engines which meant that once you got him on the subject he would spend the entire lesson talking about them rather than the clauses and declensions he was meant to be concentrating on. It felt like a minor victory.

Worst of all was the comment I got when another ink-blot-stained exam paper came back scrawled in angry red marker pen. ‘After your brother, you’re a bit of a disappointment. Aren’t you, Hodgkinson?’

If only those teachers could see the torments Tom put the rest of the family through. While Nev was still a silent and bedridden presence, Tom refused to wear the anorak Mum had bought him, even though the very air was soaked through. Fog and rain had turned the suburbs of London into a dark grey, mud-splattered pit of dirty concrete and squelching grass.

‘For a start it’s too big,’ said Tom, throwing the anorak to the ground. ‘Secondly, the zip doesn’t work. And thirdly, everyone will laugh at me. You haven’t been to school in thirty years. You don’t know what it’s like.’

‘It’s an anorak. Everyone else’s mums will have insisted they wear one,’ shouted Mum, picking it up off the floor and thrusting it back at Tom. ‘You don’t get picked on because of what you wear. You get picked on for not standing up for yourself.’

‘And I’m not going to stand here listening to you. You’re not sophisticated enough to know what it’s like to be a scholarship boy.’

A week after the birthday party, I came home from school with the intention of going straight out on my BMX and heading over to the woods, where there was a stream in dire need of being jumped over. Then I saw Nev, sitting by our kitchen table, nursing a cup of tea. Mum was next to him. He looked peaceful, serene and frail. It was the first time in two months I had seen him out of his pyjamas.

‘Hello, Sturchos,’ he said, his old familiar grin back in place. ‘How have you been?’

He looked older. Nev had always been a young dad, and young for his age – he was thirty-eight and he could pass for a decade less – but now he looked weathered, reduced. He was extremely thin, like a skeleton rattling about in jeans and a jumper, and the skin was stretched over his knuckles. His curly blonde hair was thin and neat; he must have had a haircut that afternoon. I told him I was fine except that on the day of my birthday the kids at school gave me the bumps – throwing you up in the air for as many times as match your age – and then, when the bell for the end of break went, they all ran off as the bumps hit twelve, leaving me to land on the ground with a thud.

‘I’m afraid the same thing happened to me,’ he said. ‘Boys can be terribly stupid. The most important thing is not to let it affect you too much. You can’t control the way other people behave, but you can control the way you respond to their behaviour.’

We chatted about how Nev had been feeling during his two months of serious sickness, as Mum looked at him in a way I hadn’t seen before. She wasn’t teasing and playful, as she had been with Nev when Tom and I were younger, and she didn’t show the resentment and competitiveness that had made the boat trip so tense. She was genuinely concerned about him. There was some kind of affection there, like he was a friend who had gone through a hard time and it was her job to make him feel better. She brought him a bowl of soup as he tried to explain what it had been like to be so ill.

‘In a strange way it felt positive,’ he said, lightly. ‘A lot of it was extremely uncomfortable, but all the pain, and being so sick, made me stop worrying about work for once. It forced me to take a breather. I realized how a lot of things that have been bothering me, such as not having a secretary or not getting my own office, aren’t nearly as important as I thought they were. I guess the most significant thing is that it feels as if this illness has been telling me something.’

‘Like, don’t eat chicken cooked by Penny Lee?’

‘I mean it’s shown me something about my ego,’ he said. ‘It was taking over. And at the height of my fever … it was either a flash of light or total darkness, but for a moment I felt a sense of release from the weight of the world. It was beautiful.’

‘Maybe you went to the Other Side,’ I said breathily. I recounted the tale of the Ouija board, and Bartholomew, and the milk hatch flying onto the table. ‘Now don’t tell me that’s a coincidence.’

Nev smiled, but in a strained way. He had been speaking in a slightly fey tone, which I found uncomfortable. It was like when I saw him talking to the burly dad of a friend and was gripped with the fear that he was about to challenge Nev to a fight.

‘Anyway, Mum and I have got something we need to talk to you about.’

They looked solemn.

‘You’re not getting a divorce, are you?’

Mum was sending Nev off to Florida for a month to recuperate, build his strength up, and relax in a stress-free environment. He was to stay with a friend of a friend in a house by a lake in a place called, appropriately enough, Land O’ Lakes. The friend of a friend ran the house as something of a retreat, inviting people to stay with them free of charge on the proviso that they use the time there for quietude and contemplation. ‘He’s not allowed to do any work,’ said Mum. ‘I’m not going to let him tell the paper where he is. It’s going to be a total rest.’

‘Sorry to rush off as soon as I’m able to talk to you,’ said Nev. ‘But this way I’ll be able to recover properly and then we can do all kinds of things together. We can climb trees. Have conker fights. Build dens in the woods. Play games on the Atari.’

‘I’ll tell you what I’d like to do,’ I said, thinking of a family ritual that hadn’t happened in a while. ‘I’d like us to bomb down to Brighton after having loads of spare ribs in the Royal China, spend the afternoon on the pier, have a pinball tournament, play air hockey and go on the beach and try to hit a rusty tin can with a pebble. And then we can stop off at a country pub on the way back to London and you can drink beer while me and Tom have a Coke and a packet of crisps. Can we do that again?’

‘Of course we can,’ said Nev, warmly. ‘That sounds like fun.’

But we never did.