Rain's Fortieth

"This little girl inside me is retreating to her favourite place.

Go into the garden, under the ivy."

Kate Bush

Content Warning:

Moderate Sex References, Alcoholism Theme

Transcript

Rain's Fortieth

The sixteenth of April was Rain Whiting's birthday. That year, it was her fortieth. In her mind, it was a milestone, an age of greater significance than thirty, or eighteen. Accordingly, it was to be a large affair, a much larger affair than her thirty-ninth. It would be a larger affair than Ray's fortieth, (he was six years Rain's senior). Not that there was anything untoward or unexpected or inequitable about that. He disliked parties, big barbecues, populous get-togethers at the best of times, especially when they were in his honour. He was happy to give his wife a party, to slave away cooking and baking and grilling behind the scenes, keeping himself to himself, sipping his beer in the kitchen, armed at all times with a credible excuse as to why he couldn't stay and chat to particular people, couples, groups. He was rarely malign, but readily shy. 

The list of invitees was lengthy, and included a number of people who had never before set foot in the Whiting household: a few distant relatives of Rain's; a new acquaintance of Ray's made at the tennis club and who was bringing his other half; and Rain's brother, Ted. He was four years younger than Rain. 

Ted wasn't estranged, he had once been a familiar presence among his sister's family, especially when they all were young. Rain's youngest daughter, Pearl, who was eight, had been especially fond of Ted, once upon a time. However, Rain's birthday would mark Ted's first time, if he showed, in their current abode, (66, Bluefolley). There had been a few years during which he had disappeared from their lives: the six or seven months in which he had sunk deeper and deeper into cocaine, Percocet, and alcohol addiction after his ex-wife Stevie left him, and then the year, year and a half he spent in rehabilitation. He seemed to have been successful in the endeavour to rehabilitate himself and he looked healthier, fuller, redder than he had looked the last time Rain and the kids had seen him. A little haunted, fatter, but better. 
 
Rain was still haunted by the email she had received from her father, that day in February, last year. Don't let Ted in your house, don't lend him any money, don't answer his calls. It had been a terrible day, a dark day. Rain hadn't seen her brother at his worst, she hadn't encountered him in that same appalling state her parents had. But through the electronic ink of that chilling email, something had been communicated to Rain. She had looked into it, like a portal, and received some understanding: the abject terror of finding a loved-one suddenly unrecognisable.
 
Ahead of her birthday, she had sought and been given assurance that Ted was safe to be around. He was approaching the anniversary of his sobriety. Rain had seemed delighted to learn that he would be bringing a girlfriend, Sue, whom he'd met at Alcoholics Anonymous.

As far as children, only six were expected at the party. The Whiting daughters, Pearl and Aimee; two cousins from Ray's side, Toby and June; and two friends of Aimee's from her schoolyear, Martin and Esther. Four girls, two boys. Aimee was approaching the end of primary school, as were Martin and Esther. Martin and Esther were twins, though this unit wasn't a badge they wore with any pride. No-one called them, or even thought of them, as "the twins", though that is precisely what they were. 
 
Toby and June were a little older. Their mother, Ray's sister Margaret, was younger than Ray but had had children earlier in her marriage than he had in his. Toby was in the first year of secondary school. June was in the second, and the last time Pearl and Aimee had seen her she was a skinny, happy, diminutive little girl. Now Pearl and Aimee, more Aimee than Pearl, looked with a certain, complex terror and longing upon her bulging, sudden breasts and her recently inherited curvaceousness, and the glum, hormonal affect fixed upon her features, her temples lightly decorated in acne. She was a specimen of the form their girlhood would soon take. Aimee hadn't started her period yet, and this was a source of some distress to her. Such things registered only dimly at the edges of Pearl's consciousness.

In any case, while the adults were exasperated and stressed and apprehensive, the children were excited, especially the Whiting girls, though they weren't sure why really. Beyond the received truth that a party was a thing worth getting excited about, variety appealed, they supposed, feeling that a different sort of day was most welcome. Aimee couldn't admit it fully to herself but she did, in fact, have a mischievous streak. Her mother's fortieth provided her an ideal opportunity to commit some infraction, though what that would be she wasn't yet sure. The house would be crowded, the grownups distracted. She found herself in the peculiar situation of having the perfect opportunity for misbehaviour, but no scheme. As she began concocting, over cornflakes, she gazed with wild, animate eyes at the eight AM sunlight on the lawn, the waving shadows of the birches, long and cool. What could I do today that I couldn't any other day, she thought. What atrocities might I get away with?                                                                            

The lawn lay, luminous and appealingly mowed in the morning light- (Ray had mowed it about a week before the party). The shadows of the birches and the bamboo revolved and shifted as the sun clambered higher. At nine, the clouds parted and allowed the sun its usual place of prominence in the spring sky. Between two trees lay the hammock, smiling. A slung smile of stripes, tones of sorrel and sky blue and myrtle and teal and rusty red, like beach-huts or boat sails. The hammock was brand new, and a proud addition to the garden's furniture. Its erection had been hurried, eager. It would no doubt prove an invaluable part of the party's choreography. Without it the garden was cold, that portion less hospitable. A blue-tit, beautifully blue and jewel-like, picked preciously at the feeder that dangled beside the hammock.

In the lit quiet, birds began to alight. Untypical flocks of woodpigeons and magpies and jackdaws and blackbirds and even blackcaps began to settle in the trees, and on the lawn, and on various manmade perches like the hammock arms, the tri-sided washing-line, or the bench their landscape gardener had fashioned from found materials nearly three years ago.                      

Rain assembled the booze. Wine mostly, the occasional gin. As she laid out the festive battery of bottles on the patio table, she couldn't help wishing that Ted would cancel. He was known to pull out, make last-minute excuses, feign illness. She loved him and wanted to see him. But she couldn't help wishing that he'd stay away, just for today. She had invited him because she knew that he knew it was her birthday and he would feel rejected and insulted if she didn't invite him. If she didn't make this gesture of trust in recognition of the progress he had made, she knew that he would confront her, and it would be more hassle, much more, than if she just extended an invitation. So, she had done precisely that, hoping he'd say no, or abstain of his own volition. He had done neither, but she continued to hope he'd cancel, last minute. He was an experienced liar. He had a gift for plausibility when it came to fashioning pretexts and untruths. But, Rain reminded herself, in keeping with his rehabilitation, those were behaviours that he was attempting to put to rest, and so it was very wrong of her to hope to benefit from them. She wasn't, it must be said, someone who trusted easily, who willingly gave over responsibility. Accordingly, she knew that with Ted, and the girlfriend present, she wouldn't be able to enjoy herself, not completely, though she hungered to enjoy herself. She'd second-guess and self-monitor, over-monitor. She would be all the time looking over her shoulder, making sure Ted was alright. 

She went into her memories, to justify his welcomeness in their house. She remembered how sweet he had always been with Pearl. How he'd lie back-first on the floor and lift her high above him, making her fly. How he'd lift her up, and gently toss her and catch her again, and wheel her around in the air. Rain remembered the very particular childish laughter that poured from her, filling the apartment with its infectiousness. She remembered how, once the kids were in bed, she'd always invite Ted to stay over and he'd say no thank you, and walk out into the darkness.   

A jackdaw's spiky note broke her out of herself. She turned around and looked out at the garden. The jackdaw shrilled again. That's when she noticed all the birds, peculiarly amassed. There were thick clusters of them, multiple species, just standing, vigilant not idle, watching her, their wings folded away. Rain had nothing against nature but she had the queerest feeling of being bullied, of being harassed in her home by the birds. The garden, all grass and cowslips and foxgloves and silver-birches, became suddenly unwelcoming infested in this way, and she clapped, reluctantly, at first. Then she did so again, with greater confidence, and barked "Shoo! Shoo! Shoo!" at them, three times, dispersing them.   

Ray woke up after Rain. He came downstairs a little after nine, and made himself coffee. Then he set to work straight away making food for everyone to eat. He was a good cook. In a casserole dish, he roasted a beautiful whole chicken in Pernod and honey and oranges; he baked a celeriac crumble; he made a summer slaw. Then, while he waited for oven space, he began beating the eggs and folding in the flour for a Victoria sponge, his wife's favourite cake. When the time came, he'd get Aimee and Pearl to ice and decorate it. Maybe just Pearl. 

He suddenly found himself recalling Robert Altman's "Shortcuts", something he hadn't thought about in seventeen years...the storyline in the movie about the baker, and the child of the TV anchor who gets hit by a car and dies. He remembered with breathless zest, how the baker baked a cake which they never picked up. How this exasperated the baker, and he began and continued, throughout the film, to make menacing phone-calls while the anchor and his wife, played by Andie MacDowell, waited and hoped and waited for their child to recover consciousness. When he didn't, when he expired, they were heartbroken. Ray remembered how the parents confronted the baker, how they stood there in the morning light, in the closed shop, wailing the truth at this overworked, broken baker. When he understood why they hadn't picked up the cake, he was full of remorse. "Wait. Please don't go," the baker cried after them as they turned to leave. He persuaded them to stay, and gave them cake.  

Ray found himself thinking about cakes, about cake, about the futility and sadness of cake. And the redemptive possibilities of cake. He found himself thinking about how good people sometimes do terrible things; the resonating causalities within lives, between lives. He stood, dark against the gelid windows, looking down at the cake-mix in the bowl and thinking that the time it would take to take form, to take the shape that would enable his daughters to dress it, was somehow both unbearably long and unbearably short, the time both unbearably near and unbearably faroff. 

Forty years old, he thought, returning to the subject of his wife's years. He was with a woman who was now forty years old. Only yesterday, it seemed, she had been twenty-one. What a draught, what a potion, what a spell: love- within which she had transformed, every particle of her being, completely, and yet he saw no difference. None that would make him feel any different to the way he felt when they first met. For some reason, his wife's forty years amazed him more than his forty six, more than his own forty had six years ago. For just a moment, Ray apprehended the terrible flux of things, the well-oiled, unstillable progress of time, of life, of age. How small he found himself, how small all people compared to their moments. One could do nothing about moments, and the melting of moments into further, different moments. Too late was, to him, the worst thing in the world. He suddenly felt that he was doing everything in his power to be on time.   

And then, people started to arrive. Unfamiliar cars pulled into the drive, and manoeuvred without fluency on the gravel. 

Very soon the drive was at capacity, and those who had come to the Whiting house by car had to find places in the town to park their cars, or spaces along the street, in the section where there were no double yellow lines.   

With amazing immediacy, the house filled with unusual voices, voices Rain and Ray and their daughters all mostly recognised but which they had never heard in their house. People entered, reluctant and apologetic and awkward, in that way people always are in other people's houses, seating themselves on sofas or in chairs as though they had no right to sit in them. People noticed and were fascinated by things to which the Whitings had long been blind. The pictures on the walls, the photographs on the mantlepiece, the spines in the bookcases, the furniture and the decorations. Even the smell, the weight and feel of the air between those walls.

They all lacked direction at first. The event was unchoreographed and rudderless. Then Rain took on the role of hostess, guiding her guests into the garden, fixing them drinks. She had specified no gifts on the invitations she had sent out; but some people had brought gifts anyway. She received them with shrill, mortified gratitude, and made a pile of them in the living room. Ray brought out all the food he had prepared in attractive bowls, or on dishes reserved for special occasions. He also laid out all the food he and Rain had purchased a few days before on the big shop.

The garden filled with chatter and gradual laughter, courtesy that incipiently gave way to gladness, to gregariousness. A bird, solitary, unincluded, would occasionally settle at the periphery of the scene, this mortal, busy, mundane vision, and cock its head, and seem to frown as it watched the party through dark, enquiring eyes.

Rain was good at playing host, a brilliant social force. She was able to meander amongst her guests, in her light, pretty dress of navy blue, a glass of wine in her hand, and make people feel included. There was no-one with whom she could not converse. However little she had in common with them, however slight her knowledge of them, she was able to strike up and maintain a dialogue, for as long as felt right.

Secretly, Ray looked forward to the party's end. He looked forward to the supreme calm of a house vacated after an event. He looked forward to lying beside Rain in bed and running his hands up and down the entire length of her body. God, he swooned thinking about it, and discovered that he had never longed for anything with greater fervour, never anticipated anything with a more intense excitement, than Rain's fortieth birthday party being over. 

The children found each other, in that way children do. Their interactions were stiff at first. They weren't unfriendly, just reserved. Aimee was something of a self-appointed leader, a ringleader. Martin and Esther had a strong bond with Aimee, since they saw each other most days. Toby was sweet but insecure. June was especially stony at first. She mostly just scrolled through her phone, all compulsion, no enthusiasm. It was a kind of ornate spasm, nothing more. But after a while she began to brighten. It was as though, just for a few hours, she were being pulled back into childhood by the children around her. After initial scepticism and a feeling of sullen superiority, she saw that they were good, that they were nice, and she followed them. June was approaching the age where curiosity about alcohol typically begins. It wouldn't have been hard to steal a taste of wine, or Pimm's from the tall pitchr on the table, or even a swallow of vodka. But on this occasion, thankfully, her curiosity about drink, though not absent entirely, was far from her mind.

The children went out and piled paper plates high, mostly with breadsticks and cheese-sticks and chipolatas and crisps. Pearl tried some of the Pernod chicken with oranges and thought it was glorious. She sampled a few olives, two little brown, and one big green. She found them, all varieties, grotesque. Salami was very welcome; chive tahini even more so. Dolcelatte not so much. Caviar she couldn't make up her mind about. Not knowing precisely of what that strange, soft fuzz of orange spheres was actually composed had been an advantage in her case. She was very curious about food. Her palate showed signs of precocious sophistication.

Then they disappeared upstairs, leaving behind the garden, now dense with a loud population of adults. Their gregariousness rose heavenwards. From her room, into which she invited all the other children, Aimee listened to their din, rising like a chorus from the garden below. She wondered what it was they talked about, and puzzled over the paradox that such a mystery was somehow able to be both intriguing and boring. 

Ray found a new hiding place behind the movie-camera. Capturing as he went, he went roving through the party-guests with the little red machine thrust in front of him, his eye pressed right up to the lens of the little telescope sticking out the back.  

The children played Jenga, and various other board games like risk, and scrabble, ludo. Buckaroo was a source of some hilarity. At a particular point, the shiny, rictus-faced horse bucked with amazing suddenness, flinging its colourful shrapnel of pieces at June, one of which hit her right in the eye. 
 
Toby loved chess. Finding it a sport that, though warlike, suited his mild-mannered nature, he had become, in recent years, something of a chess champion. He wished to assert his veiled dominance by beating his companions, and then show magnanimity by teaching them how to be better, and strategize. But no-one shared his avidity for chess. He kept it from them. He was even private about it around his family; his sister's awareness of his fervour and his gift was minimal. 

As one hour and then another wore on, the children grew bored and restless. At around half-one, they began hearing thumps. It was a continuous succession of the same light, percussive thump, not unlike the popping of a champagne cork. Aimee went to the window and looked down. First, she noticed the ubiquity of the ivy, marvelled at its generative abilities. Then she gleaned the source of the thuds. In the centre of the garden was Uncle Ted. So, he had arrived. He had brought with him a swing-ball set which he had erected in the centre of the lawn. With a very tall woman whom Aimee did not recognise, Uncle Ted was engaged in furious, balletic combat, each of them swiping the tethered tennis ball back and forth, back and forth in a kind of competitive possession. 

"Look Pearl! It's Uncle Ted. Do you remember Uncle Ted? He used to do flying angels with you, and swing you around and around."

Aimee lifted Pearl up so she could peer over the window-ledge and down to the garden where the party was in full, measured swing. She squinted with serene scepticism at the ginger-haired man playing swing-ball. He had more hair on his face than on his head. His spectacles glinted in the sun. Pearl declared affection reluctantly, and she was confused as to what her big sister expected her to do with this man or to say about him. What use was he to her? In Pearl's mind, "Uncle" was a weak, pallid notion, with only meagre associations. 

One of the guests had a baby with her. The baby was on his mother's lap, receiving spoonfuls of lunch, a good deal of which dribbled down his bib. For whatever reason, the baby broke, quite unexpectedly, into huge crying sound. In floods of tears, he tossed back his head, and filled the air with a great screech. It invited coos of sympathy from the surrounding adults. Warily, they approached the grimaced complexion and the tremendous wail. Ted loved children. He longed for children of his own. He found the distress of children intolerable. Once he might have hurried over to the baby and lifted him high, and hugged him tight, and bounced him, bounced the worry out of him. Aimee and Pearl saw but didn't understand as he stood in a strange stasis of self-examination, took a strawberry from his pocket and ate it very slowly. Then he looked at his mobile phone. 

The children were already tearing downstairs at speed. The swing-ball set was like a magnet to them, and they were  drawn immediately by the promises of this amusing vertical, standing in the garden like the oddest tree. The magnetic pull the swing-ball set was able to exert upon the children was amusing to the adults. Ray swivelled, and turned the camera on this sudden rush of children into the garden. Ted stood, waiting, his game with the tall woman evidently abandoned. Aimee went straight up to him.

"There she is!" Uncle Ted cried out. "How are you, darling?"

"Hello, Uncle Ted!" she squealed.

Aimee was expecting her uncle to bend down and lift her to his level by her underarms. But, instead, to embrace her, he lowered himself onto his knees, and took her, soberly, in his arms. Her nose went into his chequered  shoulders and she smelt unfamiliar deodorant and cologne. They exchanged some words, mostly about the swing-ball set, which nobody heard but them. Then Uncle Ted stood up again.

Pearl appeared before Ted and she studied him. The expression on her face, hit by a beam of light that had somehow managed to penetrate the foliage above, made it seem like she was wary or disdainful of him. He stood there, towering over her, waiting those few special seconds for the glint of recognition, the sign of affection big in her small face. It didn't come.

"Hey!" Ted bellowed, bending down again. "Look at you!"
 
He took Pearl in his arms the same way he had Aimee, meeting her smaller body and its younger age with that added modicum of care. When she saw his eyes, very green and investigative, she felt a strange gush of comfort and contentment, and she yielded in his arms. 

Ted gripped her tightly and muttered something in her ear.

"Oooooooh, you're getting so big, little Pearly Way Shops."

Pearl had no idea what that meant but hadn't the means to enquire. (The Whitings used to live in Sutton). Her uncle put her down and she withdrew from him, suddenly shy. 

A magpie descended, in a sneeze of blue and white, and perched on the pillar of the swing-ball set.
 
Hello Hello! it rattled, in magpie.


 
The kids would play swing-ball for nearly forty-five minutes. Ted appointed himself umpire. Pearl liked swing-ball, but found it difficult. After just over a quarter of an hour, Ray re-appeared and asked the children if they'd like to decorate "birthday girl's" cake. Only Pearl came with him. 

He supervised. Other than capture a few minutes of it on the camera, he did hardly anything, as Pearl began mixing water and icing-sugar. Ray watched beguiled as she watched, beguiled, the marriage of water and powdery icing sugar, how it became a moist, tasty sludge. While Pearl worked at the summit of the sponge, Ray took care of the jam and cream sandwiched in the middle of the two cakes. Then he took a long, maroon-coloured basket from the baking cupboard. It was full of icing pens, bold, sweet-tasting reds and greens and blues that he had bought specially. The iced crown of the cake was a non-traditional embellishment, but Ray didn't care about that at all as he watched his little girl steal little fingerfuls of icing from the excess in the mixing bowl, and practice writing what she wanted to write with the icing pens on a floury bit of card. Ray went outside to fetch a big bowl of raspberries.

"Mummy loves raspberries," he said, returning. 

They collaborated, and decorated the top of the cake in both raspberries and edible writing.  

Meanwhile, Ted took a break from umpiring the swing-ball match.

"I need to sit down," he said. 

Hardly needing to think about it, he made use of the hammock. He fell back into the soft swing of the cloth, and into the cooling shade of the trees standing over it. He looked up at the blowiness. For nearly a minute, he remained like this, etherised in this supine trance, inside this breezy, foliate moment, and felt at peace. 

Suddenly, there was a crunch, and a terrific snap as one of the knotted arms holding up the hammock buckled and tore, slipping sharply from the steel ring bolted to the biggest of the birch trees. The hammock flipped over, like a little boat on a stormy sea. The large, low dip that was Uncle Ted completely upended and he was sent tumbling head over heels to the floor. The floor was rough with bark and brambles, and he got his elbow nicked by a stinging nettle.

The hubbub of the guests quickly quietened and there was a split second of concern, of enquiry.

"Fucking hell..." Ted muttered, in his disarray. He wasn't trying to be comedic.

Then, very abruptly, the garden filled with raucous laughter. Every guest- except for Ray and Pearl who were icing the cake, and somebody who was in the toilet at the time- was plunged into hysterical laughter. The children laughed especially hard. Half the booze had disappeared: the adults- except for Ted obviously- were all that little bit more uninhibited, their sense of responsibility, of decency eroded that small, significant alcoholic iota. The children took the adult's laughter as permission, and they laughed the hardest of all. 

Ted recovered and stood, looking out at this terrifying vista of laughter: the toothy, dribbling hyena mouths, and lolling tongues, and crazed whites of eyes. He was hurt but wouldn't allow himself to be. The communal laughter ran its course, and gradually diminished.

"Please tell me someone got that...on camera." Ted said. The camera was inside with Ray, left on the kitchen sill. Ray and Pearl were so engrossed in what they were doing that they didn't even register Ted's accident, nor the reaction that attended it. "I always wanted to be on You've Been Framed".

There was a polite murmur of laughter.

"'Scuse me a minute," Ted said, making for the house. He passed the waiting glasses, the seductive battery of wine and beer and gin, standing there in the sun, or in ice. He allowed himself to recognise that he was suddenly dark with longing, that he was seeing things through the prism of desire and unquenched thirst. The itch.
 
He passed his sister who was listening to a woman talking about the school play. In the same piece, at the end of the month, Aimee was due to play a grandiose, self-referential octopus. 

"...I mean, Timothy said he doesn't want to be on stage. He came to me after school one day and he was like- please, mummy, don't make me be on the stage. He said he wants to do backstage crew. And I was like, of course you can do that, darling, if that's what you want..."

"Yeah, yeah..." 

"I mean, there's nothing wrong with wanting to be behind the scenes..."

"Sorry, Deirdre, just hold that thought one moment. Ted!"

Ted stopped and turned. 

"Ted, are you alright?"

"Sure, Rain, yeah, I'm fine."

"You sure?"

"Absolutely. Few earwigs in the ear, few twigs in the sphincter. I'll live. I did get stung by a stinging nettle though. Look at that." He showed them his elbow, its three new little lumps. 

"Oh, Ted, you poor dear, let me find you a dock leaf."

"Really, Rain, it's fine. Don't. I don't want a dock leaf. See you in a bit."

He began to enter the house through the open French windows.

"Oh, Ted."

"Yes?"

"What's the story with Sue."

"Who's Sue?" Deidre asked. "Sorry, I'm Deidre by the way."

Ted took her hand. 

"Ted," he said, "Rain's brother. Sue's my girlfriend. She's not been very well recently. She woke up with a migraine this morning and said she didn't feel up to the party but that she'd come down later if she felt up to it."

"Still not up to it I take it?" Rain enquired.

"No, 'fraid not. Sorry Rain. You'll meet her some other time. Sorry, ladies, I'm bursting. See you later."

He went inside. He passed the kitchen and heard Ray and Pearl talking about candles.

He went into the downstairs bathroom and locked it. He felt the urge to start crying but knew that he mustn't. He stood, in the small cubicle, full of the feeling of not knowing quite what to do next, a paralysis. He opened the medicine cabinet. If he could just calm himself, straighten himself with a benzo or a Codeine, then the furious desire for alcohol might abate. He mustn't drink, mustn't drink. And yet, all the trouble that a drink would cause seemed suddenly luscious and erotic to him. He needed to be the worser version of himself, just for a while. He needed the animation, the interest of failure, of ugliness. He wanted the complex burning, the fulfilment of that promise that lay ever hanging over him.  The reacquaintance with all the alienation, and loneliness, and poor self-esteem, and self-loathing in his life was like a mirage of water in a desert towards which he felt utterly impelled. He deserved this, he thought, with relish. He deserved the falsehood of the mirage. He relished in the liquid illusion. Despite its vacuity, he couldn't bare to stand outside it any longer. He wanted in.   

In the medicine cabinet, there was nothing he could take. But there was alcohol everywhere, in this house, at this moment. Leave, he told himself, leave the party. He must leave. Yes. No. Yes. No. Leave and go where? What for? Sue? He took out his mobile and scrolled through his contacts. Jamie Sponsor. He didn't dial at first. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. He dialled. The outgoing ring was suddenly, to Ted, the saddest sound in the universe. It filled the small, dim-toned cubicle. Jamie-sponsor answered.

"Hello... hello...?"

Hello. The loneliest word in the language, Ted thought. Ted thought that Jamie had an attractive telephone voice, less harsh than in the flesh. 

"Hello...?" 

He was about to speak into the receiver. He wanted to speak. Why was he not speaking? Yes. No. Yes. 

"Hello...anyone there...?"  No.

Ted ended the call and put his phone away into his pocket. He flushed the toilet. The false flush sighed through the house. No. Yes. No. Yes. He went outside.


By this time, the children were tiring of swing-ball. The cake was iced and decorated. Ray decided that it was the right moment to take a nap. Pearl ran outside, and Ray went upstairs to the attic room, set his alarm for twenty minutes, and fell immediately into shallow, sensible slumber.  

"Let's go back up to my room," Aimee said. The children all followed, June last.

Aimee was struggling now to work out what she wanted from this day. She returned to her breakfast contemplations. Mischief. How could one get into mischief? What was the most mischievous act one could commit with impunity, without guilt, at her age, in this day and age? In her mind's eye, she revisited a time a few months back: her father had been at work, her younger sister had been in Scarborough on a school trip, and her mother had left her in the house alone for half-an-hour or so while she drove to a lamp shop. Aimee's mind went upstairs, up both flights, to the attic, with its sage ceiling and symmetrical skylights. Her mind went where she had gone that tedious afternoon, right into her parent's drawers. She knew, then as now, that one was not supposed to go through anyone else's drawers, much less her through her parents'. She found nothing interesting at first. Just clothes. Clothes and clothes and clothes. Coins, boxes of receipts and letters. Then, out of the banal sea surrounding it, something unusual appeared. A long, light blue, cylindrical thing, like a big cucumber-shaped finger. Of course, she couldn't ask her mother about it when she returned. Nor could she find a way of asking about it while concealing the source of her curiosity. So she shrugged, put the thing back in the drawer, and went downstairs, full of the curiosity this mysterious object had inspired. 

In the present moment, the clicking of June's fingers on the screen of her phone as she corresponded with someone over social media was constant and irksome.

"June...?" Aimee began.

"Yeah?" June replied.

"Have you ever...you know...with a boy?"

The other children had been chatting amongst themselves. They began to quieten and listen in with curiosity.

"What do you mean, Aimee?"

Aimee was suddenly insecure, knowing that she lacked the words to ask what she wanted. In fact, she wasn't sure what it was she wanted to ask.

"Made him come?" June aided.

"What does "come" mean...?" Aimee asked, intuiting that it had meaning beyond the usual. 

The two boys sat, mute, unincluded in this conversation about their anatomy.     

June decided, wearily, that she'd rather terminate the conversation than share her knowledge. Anyway, she thought, noticing that Pearl was suddenly attentive, Pearl was a bit young to be hearing about things like that. 

"You'll find out when you're older..." June said, as diplomatically as she was able.
 
"Oh, please. Please tell us." Aimee coaxed.

June didn't want to. But for some reason she started describing it:

"It's when..." She wasn't sure how she would get there, but her mind was full of the lukewarm phrase: "White stuff". She tried to plot a way to it, but gave up. She found that "white stuff" didn't cut it, descriptively. She drew the zigzag of her phone's unlock pattern. "Come here and I'll show you." She said.

The children all gathered round, excitedly. Aimee was delighted. Things were finally happening, she thought.

"Pearl, not you. Sorry. You're too young." June said. She wouldn't admit it but she took great pleasure in uttering that phrase. Being teacher, being looked up to, brandishing her superiority about like this. 

"What is it? I want to see," she moaned.

"It's fine, June," Aimee said. "Pearl's not scared of anything."
 
June yielded.

"Alright, Aimee, I mean she's your sister. But you cannot tell your parents about this and if she doesn't like it, or gets upset, then that's your responsibility, not mine. Okay?"

Aimee nodded vigorously.

June opened an odd website of black and orange tones. There followed a lurid bombardment of blinking videos, repetitive animated loops, strange advertisements. June typed something into the search bar which neither Aimee nor any of the others understood. June clicked on the first thumbnail. A video began playing, after a logo.

The children watched in stunned silence. There was hardly any noise from the video, just these occasional grunts. Nothing they had seen in school had ever commanded anything like this intense, taciturn respect. June began to feel uncomfortable as the video progressed, but some subterranean code forbade her from stopping the video. She knew that she must keep her word, keep the video running until it reached the spectacular climax that she knew was coming, any minute, any second. The children eyed the repeating but accelerating motions of the disembodied hand on the screen. What it held was confusing to Pearl. 

"Why is it so big?" she said.

"Sh. Just watch," Aimee replied.

Pouring out of the video, a loud moan, which sounded like a yawn to Pearl, began to fill the room.

"Why is he so tired?" she asked.  

June laughed at this, as, perfectly concurrent with the effusion of low, sustained sound, several very large threads of white sticky liquid leapt out from the central fleshy column and lay in shining ribbons on the dark hand.

The children, especially the boys, let up a wail of playful consternation. 
 
"Do you understand now?" June asked Aimee.

"It is wee?" Pearl asked. "It looks like icing..."

June laughed again.

"No, it's not wee, Pearl."

"What is it then?"

"Pearl, why don't you go downstairs? Help dad with the cake," Aimee said.

"I already helped dad with the cake. He's upstairs having a sleep."

"Pearl. Go away. You're bothering us."

"No I'm not."

"You are"

"No I'm not. You're an idiot."

"Pearl. Go away."

"You go away. You... I hate you!" 

Pearl fled. Behind her she heard laughter and knew that her eight-year old syllables bore no weight. She was a joke to them, cloutless. She was upset, but not with her usual proud sense of injustice. She felt stranger than that, odder than that. She didn't recognise the feelings called up within her, because they were new to her. And she realised, gradually, as she walked, that it was the video that was making her feel these things, not the silly little barney she had just had with her sister. 

She felt unclean, like her skin was caked in grease, in a film with the persistence of sun cream; she felt as though she'd just handled something incredibly sweaty. She was afraid of her own skin, her own fingers. The sensations were not physical, she knew that, and yet they seemed physical. How could something so transitory and so intangible, so conceptual as a video, something as abstract as the psychic imprint it left in a mind, feel so real, so realised, as realised as the swing-ball set, the cowslips, the birds in the trees, the wine bottles on the patio table...?

Pearl trudged outside. She looked like she was sulking about something trivial, but she was engaged in contemplation belied by her bright, youthful features. Spying her glumness, some of the adults she walked among looked down, took brief breaks in their conversations, said: Hi, Pearl; or, if they didn't know her name: Hi, darling; or perhaps: Y'alright, poppet? But Pearl ignored them all. 

For a moment, Pearl was guided by the primordial desire to go to her mummy. She was impelled towards her mother by an ancient force, as old and profound as the oldest part of her. But she resisted it. She noticed her mother, talking, and felt she could not go to her, that what she carried about with her at this moment could not be taken to her, brought before her. It was as though, Pearl hypothesised, she had a great stain of mud on a new yellow dress. If she sat down, waited for it to rain, for the rain to expunge the stain, then she could go before her mother again. She'd to wait to become worthy to stand before her. 

For now, all she could be was alone. She walked past the wounded hammock, so preoccupied that she didn't even notice the tear, the lop-sidedness, the damage that her father would have to fix. She found a quiet corner, down at the bottom of the garden, by the old, collapsing trampoline. It was heaped with white bird shit and fallen catkins and dead leaves. The springs were buckling, the frame was bowing. The surrounding net was green with a misty, natural gunk.                

Pearl sat on a tree stump by some daffodils. Beside her, there were two trees. The daffodils were beginning to hang their heads. But the trees looked healthy, their trunks strong. The party went on, faraway, behind her. The guests were hidden in an undulating screen of green leaves. She gave herself an acceptable reason to cry. Once she was able to be upset without admitting why she was really upset, she could let rip. She made herself a nest in which to weep, and nursed the desire to do so in her heart. She wished they would all leave, every single one of them, every soul that could not call themselves a sleeper in this house. Why wouldn't they all just go, all these friends and relatives? And where were granny and grandad? Her father's parents were dead but her mother's were both alive. Where were they? She began to cry.                   

What Pearl had seen panicked her. It stuck with her, sat stuck to her like a diseased mollusc, or an aggressive mildew. It amazed her...that a sight had this power, something sighted not in the flesh but on a screen, virtual, unable to reach her. It dazzled her. She cried more, with greater vigour. Why couldn't they all just leave her alone? When would it end? 

She felt such revulsion. At what? At the sticky discomfort one feels about any nudity, at being the intruder upon any privacy, no matter what sort? at the desire of this naked, blind, faceless, mindless mammalian thrust of flesh to be looked at? or at the reality that she had looked, looked at length, that she had desired to look in the first place...?

Birds began to descend from the treetops, and settle upon the situation. A stern senate of magpies and jackdaws, pigeons of every purple and every blue, even a few white doves stood on low boughs, on manmade obelisks, on the rockery wall, the washing-line, on the vine, on the ruin of the hammock, unnoticed by the party guests.

The sound of Pearl's crying climbed like smoke, mingled with the air, and disappeared. No-one heard it.

Sharply, there came a sound of stumbling on loose stones, and the disturbance of branches and leaves by a human figure. He hadn't followed the crying to its source. He had just texted Sue a succession of surreally worded texts. It was quiet and privacy he had been seeking. In this messy sanctuary, he found a small girl whom he recognised immediately as his niece, though her face was hidden in her hands. Clouds went by, and dimmed the sun in their dense lilac. In the moment before she looked up and saw who it was, he took a bottle, of green glass, from his inside jacket pocket and drank from it, quickly, ashamedly. He leaned against one of the trees, by the sorrowful daffodils, and the stump with Pearl on it. He felt the support, the sturdiness of the strong vertical girth against his unsteadiness. The tree threw a long shadow on the ground, on the tawniness. He took one more small, quick sip from the bottle and reinserted it, in his breast, as he approached. 

"Hey. Hey, hey, hey, hey," he began. "What's happened, little darling?"

She looked up, and found no way of telling him what the matter was. He crept closer, very close, and stooped down beside her. She didn't say anything. She was full of a communicative but untranslatable silence. She recognised him as he loomed, but detected the sudden onset of something different, something foreign. She couldn't put her finger on what was different, this new kind of deadened enthusiasm, this spectre walking beside him. Maudlin, sentimental, dramatic, perfervid, he closed in on her.   

He wrapped his arms around her and she smelt immediately the vile pierce of the spirits he had imbibed, and felt the hardness of the bottle in his pocket.

He lifted her high.

"Let me swing you, baby. You remember how I used to swing you when you were little?" he said.

Before she knew it, before she was able to consent to it, she was in the air. He swung her about in great, wild spirals.  

The others, those that were minors, were investigating an unusual smell. Not unappealing exactly, but unusual. There were a few guests, two men and a woman, smoking a joint around the back of the house, behind the shed, where the bikes were. They were laughing. They saw the children approach them, but didn't react, continuing to laugh. The children knew it wasn't tobacco they were smoking, but had no way of disbelieving or cross-examining the woman when she said "Hey kids, what's up? We're just having a smoke."

Then, there was a great thump. Whatever it was that had produced it, the deep thud, the crack, threw all the birds into life, just as though some great, invisible net beneath all them that had gathered in the garden were suddenly jerked upwards and shaken out. In a second, all the birds were moronically cackling, leaving the party in droves. The children and the three grownups behind the house all looked up. Over their heads, there were masses of birds.       
                       
"Are we going to be singing Happy Birthday soon?" the woman said. "Tell you what, I'm looking forward to cake now."