The Museum of You Page 13

  ‘And did you have another boy?’

  Mum laughed. ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘Why would you think – no! There’s only you. You’re my only boy.’

  Dad never had friends round. He spoke warmly of people at work and occasionally went to the pub on a Friday, but more often than not he stayed in, content with Mum’s company. On a Friday or a Saturday, she would have a glass of wine after tea. And sometimes she would rehearse the story of how they met at Kwik Save. It was like a performance. She said her lines while Dad played supporting actor and Darren took the part of the audience.

  ‘I noticed your dad. He always came in on a Saturday morning. Early.’

  ‘I did,’ Dad would say.

  ‘I thought he was nice. Very smart.’

  ‘I was,’ he’d agree.

  ‘He used to come to my till, even if there was a queue. And we always had a little chat.’

  ‘We did.’

  ‘He noticed I wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘He kept coming back.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘The shopping wasn’t all he was checking out!’

  ‘It certainly wasn’t.’

  ‘So one day, after he’d bagged all his shopping and it was time to pay, he said, “I’ve got a special offer.” And I said, “Oh, what’s that, then?” “Tickets to the cinema,” he said. “Buy one, get one free: I’ve bought one and you can have this one for free.” ’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘It was meant to be. It was fate.’

  Dad would smile and shake his head, a mild, unspoken mode of disagreement, undertaken with a courtesy he’d struggle to muster nowadays.

  Darren attended to these performances, but he felt very little curiosity about his parents’ beginnings. Later, when he learned in biology that a woman is born with all the ova she’ll ever produce, it may have briefly occurred to him that this story, and all Mum’s stories, were in some ways his – that the egg of him was present at that supermarket checkout, and at the wedding to the man who wasn’t Dad – but he didn’t give it very much thought. There were odd occasions, as he grew older, when he slipped the picture of his mum and Paul out of the drawer and wondered about fate. Although Mum was a great believer in it (she was also a great believer in the royal family and a five-thread overlock hem), Darren remained unconvinced. The photograph did not make him feel as if his existence was fixed and fated. It made it seem as if he’d arrived on the planet by a hair’s breadth, by a whisker. And he felt lucky.

  He tucks the watering can back under the carpet. Next year he’ll put the peas here. There’s a notebook in the garden shed containing diagram after diagram of the plot, one for every year since Dad signed up. Crop rotation reduces the chances of soil deficiencies and keeps things balanced, healthy. If only you could do the same with people. Determine their requirements, identify their problems and pests, group them in the right families and keep moving them away from trouble.

  He pulls an empty carrier bag out of his pocket and begins to fill it with raspberries. They’re fat and juicy, the kind you pay extra for in the supermarket. He should probably save them up, stick them on trays and freeze and bag them, like Mum did. He could make jam or something. He remembers the things Mum used to make with the raspberries: cheesecakes, trifles, tarts, fools and mousses. They could have a go, him and Clover, she’d like that. He has had these ideas before but it’s a struggle to make them materialise; by the time he gets home there will be something else to occupy his thoughts – the detached radiator, the hall walls, the worry that there may be something else she needs. But time is passing and he knows it won’t be long before she’ll have better things to do.

  He pauses to eat some of the fruit, and pictures Mum, apron strings wrapped twice around her waist, sleeves rolled past her elbows, writing RASPBERRY JAM and the date on a roll of sticky labels. He remembers the hot smell of boiling sugar and raspberry juice in the kitchen. ‘I wonder what’ll have happened by the time we eat this,’ she’d say. She used to say something similar each time they put the Christmas decorations back in the loft: ‘I wonder what fate has in store for us in the next twelve months.’

  He can’t decide whether Mum’s belief in fate was stupid or stoical, a means of conciliation or consolation. Fate’s all right if everything’s going well. Makes you feel all important. Deserving. Like your happiness is meant. But when things are shit, you’re trapped by it, helpless, like those myths where the gods muck about with humans, for a laugh.

  He much preferred the idea of luck. It seemed different from fate. Better. A skin-of-the-teeth, relieved feeling; the way you feel when you’re playing dodgeball in PE and the air beside you whooshes, but you don’t get hit. Luck’s not so set as fate. Even when things are shit, you might get better luck, it could be just around the corner. Course, he grew up eventually and realised life’s a crapshoot and most things, good or bad, happen by chance and accident.

  His and Colin’s was an accidental friendship. They didn’t live on the same street and they didn’t sit next to each other at school; they didn’t even share the same table. Although Miss Richardson never said which of the tables was top, everyone knew it was the Lions. Darren was on the Tigers, which was second, but Colin had to sit with the Hippos. Darren assumed this was a mistake or a temporary measure. Some kind of punishment perhaps, because Colin was funny and clever and quick – sometimes he shouted out the answer before Miss Richardson had finished a question.

  When it was their class’s turn to do a school assembly, Colin had a really small part. During rehearsals he mucked about. After he took his shoes off, smelled his feet and pretended to die of asphyxiation, Miss Richardson moved him.

  ‘Go and sit next to Darren,’ she said. ‘He’s sensible, let’s see if it’s contagious.’

  Colin passed his words to Darren. ‘Bet you can’t read that.’

  Darren glanced at the sentence. ‘Can,’ he said.

  ‘Bet you can’t read it out loud.’

  ‘ “Seven local fishermen got lost on the marsh during the fog.” ’

  Colin folded the paper and put it in his pocket. When it was his turn to speak he stood up and said his line without it, which proved Darren right: Colin was clever and definitely didn’t belong with the Hippos.

  ‘Do you want to play Dukes of Hazzard?’ Colin asked at break time. ‘I’ll be Luke. You can be Bo.’

  Darren was up for that. The next day it was British Bulldog, the day after it was World of Sport wrestling.

  ‘You can be the announcer,’ Colin said.

  It was easy to be the announcer – Darren watched the wrestling on Saturday afternoons with Mum and Dad. ‘On my left, in the red corner, at six foot eleven, is the Masked Emperor,’ he said in a special announcing voice. ‘And his opponent, on my right, at twenty-four and a half stone, is Bi-i-g Daddy! Two submissions or a knockout decides the winner. Ding-ding!’

  Colin balled his jumper and stuffed it up his shirt. The other lads ran into him and he fended them off with belly blocks, just like Big Daddy.

  That was how they became friends. And they remained so, their roots forever connected by that early meshing. Colin was cheeky and often in trouble. He remained with the Hippos that year and graced the bottom sets in every subject except maths throughout his time at school. Eventually, Darren noticed his difficulty reading. Sometimes he helped him with his homework. And he chose to work with him when they had to read in pairs. But he never felt sorry for him. Colin was funny and he had a largesse that other kids lacked; he shared everything – sweets, toys, football stickers – with a casual optimism, confident that life would bestow more sweets, more toys and more football stickers. When it was bring-a-toy day he let Darren have a go on his Major Morgan. The hand-held electric organ was the first instrument Darren had ever touched. He matched the symbols and colours on the push-in cards and played the whatsit out of it. In return he lent his Rubik’s Cube to Colin, who got fed up when
he couldn’t solve it and peeled off some of the stickers to complete the red face. This pretty much wrecked it, but Darren didn’t mind. Not a lot, anyway. They were friends, after all.

  Colin’s dad had a Kawasaki bike and, according to Dad, a bad attitude. Darren had seen him shove Colin into a corner and attack him with his index finger: ‘You.’ Jab. ‘Little.’ Jab. ‘Git.’ Jab. Colin said it hadn’t hurt at all, but Darren wasn’t convinced. Colin’s mum was small and skinny with peroxide hair and a smile which she propped up with tense, bony shoulders. Colin’s parents were young. They’d been born on the cusp of the sixties. Dad was born just as Europe geared up for the Second World War, and Mum was born right at the end of it. The years between Mum and Dad and Colin’s parents, between war babies and the start of Generation X, made a world of difference. Dad remembered rationing. He didn’t talk about it often, but when he did it connected him to the war and gave him a past that seemed, to Darren, to have been shot in black and white, and slow-motion frames.

  Colin didn’t come round very often. It was always a bit awkward when he did. Mum fussed in the kitchen, cigarette lolling between her lips as she checked the microwave seal with her radiation counter, before pureeing the zapped vegetables in the Magimix. She called Colin ‘love’ and repeatedly asked whether he was enjoying himself. Every time she said ‘love’, Colin flinched.

  The soundtrack to tea was the scrape of knives and forks against china. In Colin’s house it was the telly. Dad didn’t make small talk at the table. Darren was used to this, but when witnessed by another person his silence seemed rude, as if he was cross with everyone or too ancient to have anything interesting to say. Of course, he wasn’t that old but, once noted, the differences between him and Colin’s parents stacked up: the way Dad’s skin bagged slightly, the rooty veins on the backs of his hands, the puff of his knuckles, his stiff-collared shirts, his paisley ties and his utter lack of strut.

  Once, Colin came round for tea in the early spring. In Darren’s imagination, the two of them were going to have a great time afterwards, helping Dad in the greenhouse. They helped, but it didn’t go well. Darren found himself stuck between Colin and Dad, uncertain how to accommodate them both. They trooped down the stepping stones and stood in that hot little space together while Darren bestowed kindness and condescension on Dad, speaking on his behalf and providing Colin with a running commentary of greenhouse-related information. When his helpfulness went unacknowledged and unremarked upon, he felt resentful. There he was, being kind to Dad because he wasn’t quite the same as the other dads, and Dad didn’t even have the good grace to notice either the kindness or the difference. Eventually, he ran out of things to say and Colin, who approached silences like swimming pools, dive-bombed the conversation with jokes. Darren had to laugh extra loud to make up for Dad’s silence.

  ‘Where do the Irish keep their armies? Up their sleevies!’

  ‘Ha-ha!’

  ‘What’s black and white and red all over? A sunburnt penguin!’

  ‘Ha-ha-ha-ha!’

  ‘Why did the one-handed man cross the road? To get to the second-hand shop!’

  ‘HA-HA-HA-HA!’

  Afterwards, he and Colin sat on the pink and grey sofa in the lounge, drinking ginger beer and listening to Mum’s time-worn Beatles singles on the record player, a novelty for Colin, who only had a portable ghetto blaster at home. While Darren changed the records, Colin made up silly songs.

  ‘Old Bob Qu-inn had a greenhouse, e-i-e-i-o.

  And in that greenhouse were some seeds, e-i-e-i-o.

  With a yawn, yawn here and a snore, snore there,

  Here a flower, there a plant, everywhere a frigging branch.

  Old Bob Qu-inn had a greenhouse, e-i-e-i-o.’

  ‘HA-HA-HA-HA! The greenhouse is so boring,’ Darren said.

  And, of course, Dad was standing in the doorway, wasn’t he? He didn’t even look cross. He just cleared his throat and disappeared down the hall.

  ‘Oops,’ Colin whispered.

  The following evening, when it was time to go outside, Dad said, ‘It’s all right, you sit down. I expect you’ve got better things to do.’

  ‘No – no, it’s fine.’

  ‘No, you’re all right,’ Dad said, and he stepped outside by himself.

  Darren ties the handles of the raspberry-stuffed carrier bag in a knot and places it on the carpet. He picks up the shears and crouches to trim the grass pathways that dissect the beds. It’s not long before his biceps and pecs are burning. It’s almost as good as going to the gym; perhaps he’ll wake up in the morning with guns like Colin – ha! Once he’s finished trimming the pathways he straddles the back fence; he’ll do Mr Ashworth’s too, it’ll be a nice surprise for him when he next manages to come.

  Colin was wrong – it wasn’t boring helping Dad and it’s not boring here. The sun and the soil are reliable, they do their jobs and he does his: if things look dry he gives them more water, if the potatoes get blight he cuts off the tops to stop it getting into the tuber. He knows where he is, here. Knows why Dad enjoyed it.

  After the incident with Colin’s song he still helped Dad sometimes. But he felt like he was imposing. He’d lost his share in the greenhouse. It couldn’t have been more obvious if there’d been an actual sign saying ‘Bob Quinn & Son’ and Dad had crossed through the ‘& Son’. It didn’t matter too much, because not long after Dad got his first cuckoo clock and they shared that, instead. Mum bought it for his birthday. It came all the way from Austria, where a friend of hers had been on holiday. Dad had to discover how it worked, and then he wanted another, and another, until there was a line of them in the hall: tick-tock, tick-tock, cuckoo, cuckoo; measuring out the seconds and the minutes, segmenting the hours into halves and quarters.

  Time passed. Unlike Colin, who couldn’t get out of bed in the mornings once he started puberty, so weighed down was he by his new carpet of body hair and the voice that had dived into his boots where it sat like concrete, Darren remained an early riser. As soon as he was thirteen he started doing a paper round. He loved his daybreak circumnavigation of the neighbourhood, Now 20 playing on his Walkman as he cycled on the empty pavements. Initially, his mind was occupied by memorising the route, then he graduated to imagining how he was going to spend his wages, but after a while he started to notice things: the waxing and waning of the moon; the different types of clouds; the wind direction and the warning of red skies, heralding wet and windy weather.

  Mum waited by the front door at 7.30 each morning to receive his coat as he returned. ‘Ta,’ he’d say and hurry upstairs. Each weekday when he got back, his bed was made and his school uniform was laid out on it in the shape of him. Like Flat Stanley – ha! He’d dash to the bathroom, shuck off his Air Jordans, his trackies and his baggy T-shirt and step into the shower. Two minutes was all he needed. He flung his uniform on and hurried downstairs where breakfast awaited him: milky tea with white-bread toast that Mum cut into triangles and slotted into a rack. The toast was served with Marmite, marmalade or home-made raspberry jam, while TV-am played on the portable telly in the kitchen and he admired Ulrika Jonsson.

  That was life. It consisted of the daily orbit of his paper round, six hours of school, a quick trip to Colin’s for a turn on his Sega Megadrive, tea with Mum and Dad – something home-made or Findus Crispy Pancakes for a treat – followed by Coronation Street, while Mum did her knitting and Dad read from one of the encyclopaedias or replaced the bellow top flaps on a clock. Afterwards, there might be a documentary that Dad had spotted and circled in the Radio Times, something about extreme weather or space, and then it was time for bed. Darren got glimpses of other lives and was aware that some people’s existences weren’t quite like his; some people were lonely, others were unhappy at home. But as far as he could see, things generally turned out for the best – it was less about fate and more about goodness, he decided. Good people, on balance, experienced good luck. One day, Colin’s
dad climbed on his motorbike and never came back. See? Things turned out.

  Back then everything was predictable, linear. He would follow a predetermined path: school, college and university. It was the way to get on, Dad reckoned – it’s what he would have done, had he been given the chance. And after college and university, Darren would be rewarded with a life not entirely dissimilar from that of his parents, only better: a bigger house, a nicer car and a more exciting place of work than the Philips factory.

  Like the potted seeds in the greenhouse, he grew into his surroundings, warm and fed and watered. And all the time he was growing up he anticipated the day when he would be too big, too important for his container, when a transfer would be necessary and he would be uprooted and transplanted to somewhere better, a place where he could grow without restraint. In the meantime, life was ordinary, unremarkable and occasionally boring. It was, looking back, wonderful.

  Exhibit: ‘Becky Brookfield – the Untold Story’

  Catalogue

  Object: Holiday brochures (numerous).

  Description: Brochures about beach holidays and winter sports holidays (in original sealed envelopes which were opened and then discarded).

  Item Number: 13.

  Provenance: Becky Brookfield (my mother) must have ordered lots of brochures because she and Darren Quinn (my dad) were planning to go on holiday together. It is quite likely that she enjoyed some epic holidays as a little girl and wanted to show Darren Quinn all the wonderful things she had seen.

  Display: Reversible collage of the two most popular types of holiday brochure: beach and winter sports.

  Curator: Clover Quinn.

  Keeper: Darren Quinn.

  9

  There’s an art book, Rubens’ Drawings. It’s turquoise, with a sketch of the head and shoulders of a thoughtful toddler on the front. Clover flicks through the pages. The drawings are of people. Black and white, mostly done in chalk, it says. The people are fleshy, soft. They have round shoulders and feathery hair.