This was the juncture at which Doreen would compound her previous tactical mistake by doubting her own intellectual capabilities as an adult against those of her infant daughter. Mick’s mum didn’t think that she was very clever or well-educated, and would endlessly defer to anyone whom she suspected might have a more firm grasp of the facts than she herself did. Ruinously, she included Alma in this category for no more reason than that Alma, even at the age of five, pretended to know everything and made her proclamations with such ringing confidence that it was simply easier to go along with her than to resist. Mick could remember how on one occasion, his eight-year-old sister had come home from school demanding beans on toast, a dish she’d heard her classmates mention but which was a new one on Doreen. She’d asked how Alma’s school-friends’ mothers would prepare the meal, at which Mick’s sister had insisted that cold beans were tipped onto a slice of bread, which was then toasted on a fork held to the fireplace. Astonishingly, Doreen had attempted this, purely on Alma’s say-so, and had not thought to employ her own superior judgement until their whole hearth was smothered in baked beans and splashes of tomato sauce with coal dust in suspension. That, or something equally unlikely, was how things turned out whenever anybody took Mick’s sister seriously. He could have told his mum that, back there in the shade and sunlight of the upper yard, if he’d been able to say anything through the balloon of sandpaper that was then steadily inflating in his throat. Instead, he’d shifted on her slippery lap and grizzled slightly, letting her get on with the ridiculous discussion that she’d stumbled into. Alma was now nodding in excitement, backing up her ludicrous assertion.
“Yes! All of the animals that eat grass are turned green. They told us it at school.”
This was a flat lie, but was one which played on Doreen’s insecurities about her own substandard 1930s education. You heard such a lot of marvellous new ideas in 1959 what with the Sputniks and all that, and who knew what astounding and unprecedented facts were being taught in modern classrooms? Decimals and long division, things like that, which Doreen’s own school days had barely touched on. Who was she to say? Perhaps this business with green animals all being fed on grass was something new that people had found out. But still she harboured doubts. It had been Alma, after all, who’d told her that lime cordial poured in boiling milk would make a kind of hot fruit milkshake.
“What about the cows ’n’ ’orses, then? Why ent they green, when they eat grass?”
Unflappable, Alma had waved aside her mother’s hesitant appeal to common sense.
“They are green, some of them. The ones that ent will go green when they’ve eaten enough grass.”
Too late, Mick’s mum had realised she was entering the world of quicksand nonsense that was Alma’s centre-parted, pigtailed, butterfly-slide-decorated head. She’d made a feeble yelp of protest as reality gave way beneath her feet.
“I’ve never seen a green cow! Alma, are you making all this up?”
“No” – this in a hurt, reproachful tone of voice. Doreen remained to be convinced.
“Well, then, why ent I seen one? Why ent I seen a green cow or ’orse?”
Alma, sitting beneath the window of the living room, had looked up at their mother levelly, her big grey-yellow eyes unblinking.
“Nobody can see them. It’s because they blend in with the fields.”
Despite, or possibly because of the dead serious tone in which this was delivered, Mick had been unable to prevent himself from laughing. Luckily, his ragged throat had done this for him, and the laugh came out as an unlubricated squeak, exploding halfway through into a jumping-jack-like string of coughs. Doreen had glared at Alma.
“Now look what you’ve done wi’ yer green cows!”
Surprised by their mum’s sudden conversational manoeuvre, Alma had for once been at a loss, unable to come up with a reply. Irrationality: Alma could dish it out all right, but couldn’t take it. Doreen had turned her attention to her youngest child, hacking and mewling there upon her knee.
“Ahh, bless ’im. ’Aya got a poorly throat, me duck? E’yar, you ’ave a pep like what the doctor said you should.”
“Pep” was the Boroughs’ term for sweet, and as Mick thought about it now it struck him that he’d never heard it used outside the district, or outside the homes of people who’d grown up there. Keeping Michael on her lap with one arm round his waist, Doreen had fumbled in her pocket for the square-shaped foil-and-paper tube she’d bought at Botterill’s, finally emerging with the pack of cherry-menthol Tunes. Deftly and with one hand, Doreen had carefully opened one end of the packet with her generous fingernails, squeezed out a single cough-drop, then proceeded to unpick the envelope-tucks of its individual wax-paper wrapping, where the tiny word “Tunes” was repeated several times in medicine-red. With a polite “ ’Scuse fingers” Doreen had held up the sticky crimson jewel to Michael’s lips, which had immediately parted like a hatchling’s beak so she could place the square-cut crystal on his tongue. He sucked it slowly, with its blunted corners poking up against his palate and his gums, especially the sore white-tipped ones at the back where teeth were starting to come through.
Doreen had sat there looking down at Michael fondly, her big face obscuring most of the blue Boroughs’ sky that had been visible between the leaning housetops. She must have been in her early thirties then, still trim and pretty with long features and dark, wavy hair. She’d lost the ghostly and unearthly silent film-star beauty that she’d had in pictures Mick had seen of her when she’d been younger, with her huge, wet, dreamy eyes, but it had been replaced by something warmer and less fragile, the appearance of somebody who’d at last grown comfortable with being who they were, somebody who no longer wore those painful clip-on button earrings. He’d gazed back at her, the cough-sweet tumbling and turning over in his mouth, losing its edges in his cherry-infused spittle, gradually transformed into a thin rose windowpane. Smiling, his mum had brushed a stray curl from the damp pink of his brow.
And then he’d coughed. He’d coughed until the air was forced out of his lungs and then had drawn a great big sucking breath in order to repl
ace it. Somewhere in amongst this spluttering and confused bronchial activity, Mick had inhaled the Tune. Like a stray sink-plug dragged into the plughole of a draining basin to arrest its flow, the sweet fitted exactly in the small gap which remained in Mick’s absurdly swollen windpipe.
With horrific clarity, which made him grip the arm of the settee as he sat in the peaceful Kingsthorpe living room, Mick could remember the appalling moment when he knew his breath had stopped, a memory he had been spared until revived from his concussion earlier that day. He could recall his sudden and uncomprehending shock, his realisation that something was badly wrong and his uncertainty as to what it might be. It was as if he hadn’t previously noticed he was breathing, not until he found he couldn’t do it anymore.
The terror of the moment had been overwhelming, and he’d somehow drawn away from it, as if to a remote place deep inside himself. The sounds and movements of the garden seemed far off, as did the desperate, frightened tightness in his chest. His eyes must have glazed over, staring up into his mother’s overhanging face, and he remembered how her own expression had changed instantly to one of puzzlement and then mounting anxiety. He’d known, from his dissociated vantage, that he was the cause of her concern but couldn’t for the life of him remember what he’d done that had upset her so.
“Ooh Guy, ayr mam! Come quick! Ayr Michael’s chokin’!”
The receding porthole that was Michael’s field of vision had been jiggled frantically, turned on one side and then the other, with his grandma’s taut-skinned features suddenly protruding into view, alarm suppressed beneath the glitter of her bird-like eye. Shudders of impact came from far away, hard and repetitive, like someone banging on a television set when the reception went. That must have been his gran or Doreen, thumping him upon the back as they attempted to dislodge the cough-sweet, but it hadn’t budged. He could remember the sensation of an animal with a metallic taste like pennies that had tried to climb inside his mouth, so that he’d bitten down reflexively on his mum’s fingers as she’d struggled to retrieve the blockage from his throat. There had been voices in the distance, women shouting urgently or wailing, though he hadn’t thought that this had anything to do with him.
The picture of the garden he was seeing had turned upside down at one point, which, from what he’d heard about the incident from Alma and his mum, must have been when Doreen had shook him by his ankles, hoping gravity would do the trick where all her other efforts had drawn blanks. Mick had an image of a red inverted face, an unfamiliar thing between a dog and a tomato that he’d never seen before, a kind of joke-shop devil mask he did not recognise as his distraught and weeping older sister. His short life and all its details, as they’d slid away from him, had seemed like a strange little picture-story that he’d only been half-reading anyway, with all the settings and the characters forgot even before the book was closed and put aside. The sobbing objects in the dwindling illustration, he had dimly recollected, were called people. These were something like a toy or rabbit, in that they were always doing funny things. The bricks surrounding them, piled up in flat or bulky shapes, were something he was pretty sure was known as a back-yarden in the story. Something like that, anyway, although he didn’t know what such arrangements had been used for or to do with. On the blue sheet up above were big and drifting shapes of white that you called lions. No, not lions. Cabbages, was that the word? Or generals? It didn’t matter. All these things had just been silly bits and pieces in the dream that he was waking up from. None of it was real, nor had it ever been.
He had been floating through the air, presumably borne by his mother, and was gazing up at the unfolding forms of all the lions and generals above. There’d been a gruff voice in amongst the ladynoise, which he assumed now had been that of Doug McGeary from next door, the yard with the big wooden gates on Andrew’s Road and the ramshackle stable at the rear. According to what Mick had been told afterwards, mostly by Alma, once the situation had been hurriedly explained to Doug, the fruit and veg purveyor had offered immediately to drive Mick to the hospital in his delivery lorry that he kept parked in the leaking stable. The unbreathing three-year-old, eyes glazed and staring, had been passed by Doreen over the back wall into the sure hands of Mrs. McGeary’s eldest son, or so the story went. Now, though, as the event came back to him, he saw that Alma must have got it wrong, at least that bit of it. His mum had merely held him up to show to Doug, not handed him across the wall. That made a lot more sense than Alma’s version, now he thought about it. Doreen had been too upset to pass her choking baby to somebody else, and what would be the point, in any case? Doug had to start his lorry up and get it out the barn, to wrangle it around the corners of their L-shaped yard, out through the splintering and distressed front gates onto St. Andrew’s Road. He wouldn’t need a half-dead toddler in the cab beside him while he took care of all that.
No, what had really happened, Mick decided as he reconstructed the occurrence, was that Doug had told Doreen to meet him out the front in half a minute, when he’d had a chance to get his vehicle into juddering and coughing action. Christ, what would his mum and gran have done if Doug McGeary hadn’t been at home? There’d been nobody else along St. Andrew’s Road or nearby in the Boroughs who had transport, motorised or horse-drawn, and as far as calling for an ambulance went, well, you could forget it. No one in the district had a phone, there was a single public call box near the old Victorian public toilets nestled at the foot of Spencer Bridge, and anyway, there wouldn’t have been time. In Mick’s own retrospective estimate, a good two minutes must have passed by that point since the last occasion that he’d drawn a breath.
He remembered floating back up the stone steps into the top half of the yard, carried along in a soft cloud of hands, of red and tear-stained faces he no longer knew, a drift of frightened voices indistinguishable from the background twitter of the rooftop birds, the breeze that strummed the television aerials, the crackling of aprons. All the world he’d had three years to get familiar with was gradually unravelling, its sounds and its sensations and its images all turning back into the flat words of the narrative that someone had been reading to him, which was coming to an end. The person in the tale that he’d liked best, the little boy, was dying in a funny little house upon a street that nobody would ever hear of. He remembered feeling slightly disappointed that the story hadn’t had a better ending, because up to then he’d been enjoying it.
A bumpy current that had fingers swirled him from the light and space and blue of the back yard into the sudden grey gloom of the kitchen and the living room. Doreen, he reasoned now, must have been holding him face-up since he recalled a moving frieze of ceiling scrolling by above him, first the flaking and uneven whiteness in the kitchen and then the expanse of beige with the stepped beading round its edge that topped the living room. His mum had carried him between the unlit summer fireplace and the dining table, heading for the passage and the front door and her rendezvous with Doug. But then something had happened. His glazed eyes had been fixed on the decorative trim around the higher reaches of the room, coming to rest within the shadow-drinking recess of an upper corner. And the corner had been … bent? Reversible, so that it stuck out where you would expect it to go in? There had been something wrong about the corner, he remembered that much, and there had been something else, what was it? Something even stranger. There’d been …
There had been a little tiny person in the corner, shouting to him a voice that came from far away, and beckoning, and telling him come up, you come up here with me, you’ll be all right. Come up. Come up. Come up.