Fingers in the Sparkle Jar Read online

  The cinnabar caterpillars that had trundled so frenetically in their exotic ochre and black stripes whilst annihilating fronds of smelly ragwort had been emulsified and remained only as a brown soup corrupting the bottom of the jar. The last two-legged tadpole, which had bravely outlived so many hundreds of its spawn fellows since March, was now struggling through a mat of choking algae to desperately gulp for warm air. This year metamorphosis would be understood only from books, not witnessed in nature. A coiled bronze bangle gleamed, a tailless slow-worm, too heavily petted, perhaps too long confined. Fifteen minnows, a tortoiseshell butterfly, three male smooth newts and too many garden snails were already ‘gone’ and the worm jar was ominously still. However, a riot of glimmering life was exploding in the central Robinsons repository: between three and five hundred newly emerged queen ants were circling with a furious urge to meet and mate with the males who were somewhere outside, rising into the cooling sky, feeding screaming squadrons of happy swifts. These celibate spinsters were rapidly losing their wings, the glass base was already gilded with a fragile skin of golden tiles and the lumpy virgins were tumbling through the kaleidoscope of fractals with diminishing vigour. By morning they too would have all but expired, the last old maids just twitching before his next safari would set off to nonchalantly and excitedly replace them.

  Glitterlight sparkled through the dancing canopy and lime-lit the compacted soil with a jigsaw of chasing patterns, swishing and mixing as his eyes chased them trying to find regularity, snatching spots and smudges that almost returned as the branches bounced and shade fell for a cloud-bound minute.

  He waited, his knees tingling as the pins and needles sharpened, but he wasn’t allowed to feel any pain, he must see the patchwork woven again to match the mind map he’d made. He must pitch his template against chaos and critically identify motifs and ornaments of stability, predictability. And so the sun shot a shard of light, the leafscape formed and for a sub-second the soft patches and shadows projected on the smooth path conformed with a precise familiarity. Then he was done – it was measured, it had been essentially controlled.

  He rolled over and straightened his bloodless legs, his cheek on the warm earth, the grass soft on his face, stripes of fuzzy green through which he peeped with a squeezed eye and tingling toes.

  The vast savannah stretched away until it melded with a rising bank of darkness, glazing the middle distance … a lake, capturing a bright line of sky that lit the folded reeds and lilies and all the tangle that tumbled from its shores, flickering as rings rang out from the tickles of distant tiny things that twitched on its silver surface and fizzled in peppery swarms on the other side of the garden.

  He was lying on a tablet of riches, his wilderness explored: he knew the plains, the forests, the canyons intimately and where all its life lived and hid, the boulders that covered the scaly caverns of woodlice, where quick twisty centipedes were shiny and soft beneath his fingers, the lovely bark where tiny specks of crimson ran and stained those fingers dead red, the corners where secret spiders stood motionless on their soft handkerchiefs and the lake, pool, baby bath, a muddy cradle in which many miracles swam.

  On its banks he’d dip spoons for tadpoles and the twitching larvae of mosquitoes. They’d ziggle down in droves as the steel broke the surface and bent all the lines, then they’d relax their fear and drift slowly up, easier to scoop up and transfer to a saucer where against the white he could just see their eyes and bristles and snorkels. Others were fatter, like comma-shaped bogeys, and then there were the un-wettable rafts of eggs that stuck to his fingers or clung to the rim of his dish.

  In the stinky sauce that smoked in whorls from the bottom when he reached down to ransack the leaves there were fierce things with jaws that scissored as he squeezed them, with bulging eyes and robot bodies, creatures that sat still and then picked their way cautiously on legs that appeared from nowhere.

  There were maggots with long tube noses, hard tear-dropped bugs that flicked rapidly backwards and stabbed him when he grasped them tightly in his fist as they tried to flee into the tussocks he’d submerged to build a swamp at one end of the oasis. Wasps drank, newts gulped, skaters skidded … everything was new, everything needed knowing.

  The Pet Shop

  August 1966

  SHE SLID LAST night’s whisky glass across her dressing table and tipped the newspaper off her stool. The Sound of Music was showing at the ABC again. It was always on, either that or Dr Zhivago. Before he’d slammed the door her husband had bellowed from the kitchen that he wanted to see The Blue Max at the Classic, a scruffy little place on the high street that was small, smoky and normally ran saucy films. The trailer had been full of old war planes and of equal appeal to him … that woman.

  She’d go, of course, but wished it wasn’t ‘his’ Saturday night, then she could beg him to take her to the Atherley to see Born Free again. He’d watched it with her the first time and made a pretty poor job of pretending to have enjoyed it. Virginia McKenna was no Ursula Andress. It hadn’t helped that he’d scraped a line of red paint from the side of his precious Jaguar on the way out of the car park, flown into a furious mood and sulked for a week as a result. It was silly but this accident had completely coloured his take on the film so nothing was going to compel him to go again. There was little point in asking, it would only spark a row and there were plenty of those.

  She’d loved the lions, the cubs were so sweet and the scene at the end where Elsa remembers the Adamsons and comes back with her own litter had made her cry both times she’d seen it. A couple of years ago they’d had a pair of three-month-old young lions in the shop, just for a day and a night. She had been so excited, they were irresistible, she hadn’t been able to leave them alone, stuffing them with milk until their mauve bellies bloated and they fell into a fidgety slumber on her lap. There were some photographs but they all showed the poor little mites’ bald necks and backs, which looked awful and had cost her dearly when the buyer knocked her down supposing they were seriously ill. And although it was ridiculous she so wanted to go to Africa, the space, the animals, she’d stand in her shop looking out onto the dreary forecourt, with its dripping hutches and kennels, and dream of a safari, imagining she was Joy, jumping from a Land Rover, rescuing orphaned cubs, calves and chicks. She drained the dregs of the Scotch, which tasted of cigarettes.

  Jesus, Viet-bloody-nam, would they ever stop talking about it? It was either that or this week the papers had been full of those poor dead policemen. She leaned back, seized the wireless dial and twisted it to find some music; snatches of the Ike and Tina quivered and faded under the chirps and whoops and when she centred the red line in the prescribed spot the monotonous ‘la la la’ of ‘Yellow Submarine’ started up. Christ, they’d been playing it non-stop on that station, non-stop.

  Facing the mirror she found herself frowning but had to relax her face to arch her eyebrows; the mascara was still thick from last night and so was the powder. She drew on the lines and turned from side to side to check them, glanced at the clock, huffed, and furiously backcombed her bleached hair into a balloon of fluffy gold. Breathe in, beige polyester slacks, C&A, heeled sandals, a gold charm bracelet and hooped earrings; she sat back and plumped up her breasts, eat your heart out Ursula.

  The Broadway was still quiet as she shook the sticky door open, tinkling the bell. Jackie was knelt sweeping out a cage whilst alongside her a kitten sat idly wasting its moment of freedom and Jimmy was craning on tiptoe over one of the aquaria at the back, the electric green weed illuminating his concentration, tetras flashing over his specs. The thick, the musty, rabbity, papery smell of the shop instantly suffocated her generous bouquet of Guerlain. She left the door ajar, tickled the sulphur chest of Pirate the parrot, whose one dry white eye winked reluctantly, and edged into the space behind the till, careful not to stub her toes and spoil the fresh coral polish.

  Picking up a dried seahorse that had fallen from an overloaded bowl on the counter, she let out a
Saturday sigh. She dropped the fish back on the pile and it slipped off and rattled, a curious crust of ridges and spines winding into a spiralled tail, nice to touch. This was the shop’s busiest day and the weather was going to be nice so there’d be plenty of kids gawping into cages and hutches wishing that they could get a parrot to go with their budgie, a chinchilla instead of a hamster, a python to eat their sister.

  He’d be there, the boy with the dad in the shirt and tie who wandered uncomfortably around, dipping into his thick stack of library books whilst his son crouched or climbed to peer into every corner, studying each creature so, so seriously. The kid never smiled but came every week, and stayed at least an hour before the bloke nodded at him, politely thanked her, handed him back his own pile of books and then ushered him out.

  He’d meticulously examine all her stock but she could tell he wasn’t particularly interested in the mammals, except the fruit bats, nor the birds or fish. It was the reptiles that he liked best and his staring contests with the resident spectacled caiman had become a weekly source of amusement for the staff. He’d stand fixated with his nose locked about six inches from the tank whilst the static croc floated, dispassionately returning his gaze through the vertical split in its golden filigreed eye.

  Last week he’d bought another seahorse. She held up the spilled one and studied its horsey head with its funny little snout and then carefully positioned it back on top of the tangle in the bowl. As she moved her hand away it toppled out again so she flicked it into the bin as Jimmy told her that five more of the tortoises had died.

  The Mouse

  September 1966

  THE PREDATORY DINOSAUR stood radiating menace over the scarred patina of the ancient desk and defined the only true purpose for plasticine in 1966. As I rotated it clockwise to check its form was as perfect as my five-year-old fingers could fashion, I sneaked a glance leftwards. Karen Harris had made a snake. It looked as if it had been feasting on bowling balls and then been run over by my dad’s Ford Anglia. It was ugly but it was, I supposed, at least meant to be a reptile.

  It was my first day at school. True to my mother’s habit I was late, last to arrive at the red brick Victorian infants where years before my father had crouched doodling doodlebugs whilst they exploded outside. All the other children were already engrossed in shy silence, busy under the aged and benign Miss Beer’s delighted grin, fumbling things from modelling clay. Her granny fingers struggled, but tore me a chunk from a huge bolus, handed it to me and told me to sit down and make something, whatever I liked, and what I liked more than anything in my whole wide world was Tyrannosaurus. rex.

  My fifteen-centimetre-high dinosaur was shaped after obsessive scrutiny of all the illustrations in my own frayed collection of encyclopaedias, in comics, on tea-cards and the marvellous shelffuls of books in my hall of learning – Portswood Library, to which I was happily led every Saturday afternoon without fail. Here I would sneak out of the ‘childrens’ and into the ‘reference’ section, lower the heavy tomes silently onto the smooth honey-coloured tables and head straight for ‘T’, ‘T-y’, ‘T-y-r’, and if I got no joy, then back to ‘D’, ‘Di’ and ‘Dino’ where my beloved monster vied for page space with Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus and Triceratops.

  There was a satisfying degree of consistency in T. rex’s variously portrayed basic anatomies, its poise and pose, but precious little in its detail and this really annoyed me. Sometimes it was green, sometimes brown, grey … it had round, slit or frowning eyes, sometimes it had a crest running down its spine, in other representations it was smooth. How was I supposed to accurately sculpt the tyrant-lizard king out of plasticine if I didn’t know precisely what it looked like? What on earth were all these fossil experts and artists up to?

  After consideration and some fiddly scissor work to add jaws, teeth, claws, eyes, and to very precisely cut two fingers into the sadly drooping forelimbs of my model, I was moderately satisfied. It wasn’t my best effort, not as lizardy as the one sat at home on my windowsill; that was all green, this was a horrid blend of marbled tones, some idiot having mixed all the colours together so the resultant coagulate was mainly orange. Clearly T. rex was not orange.

  As instructed I positioned my dinosaur delicately on a table beneath the classroom’s tall arched windows amongst a terrible rabble of malformed and grotesque plasticine blobs. Some of the kids seemed to have made amoebae, others melted cars and planes and one fool had even tried to build a spider. ‘You can’t make arachnids out of plasticine,’ I thought, ‘they have stiff legs, that’s a job for Meccano.’ I grudgingly realised that Karen Harris’s mump-ridden mamba actually wasn’t so bad after all.

  When I returned the next morning all of the things we had made had gone. A large ball of plasticine balanced on the front of Miss Beer’s desk. Miss Beer had murdered my T. rex. School didn’t get off to a good start.

  The day we were all allowed to bring our pets into the classroom was going to be special. It was a nice sunny morning and Batty my black mouse had been spruced up for the occasion. He was in his new second-hand plastic cage, it was mustard coloured, had the mandatory wheel and sleeping chamber but had previously been a torture chamber for my cousin’s late hamster. Despite my best efforts to revitalise it the wire remained rusty in places but at least it was more secure than the wooden enclosure my father had made … and Batty had instantly, and repeatedly, chewed his way out of.

  Sadly the species list for the class was a meagre four: rabbit, hamster, guinea pig and … one domesticated house mouse, Batty. They all ignored him, they cooed over the ‘bunnies’ and those chubby fat-faced tailless things whose eyes bulged when you squeezed them a bit, and queued to offer carrot and cabbage to those cow-licked multicoloured freaks with scratchy claws, but not one of the kids wanted to see, let alone hold, my mouse.

  By mid-afternoon the teacher finally caught sight of the lonely boy whispering into his mouse cage in the corner and gingerly agreed to let the rodent walk onto her hand in front of the class. Batty promptly pissed and then pooed three perfect wet little pellets, the classroom erupted with a huge collective ‘urrgh’ and then a frenzy of giggling, she practically threw him back in his cage and then made a big deal about washing her hands. With soap. Then we were all meant to wash our hands, with soap, but I didn’t and no one noticed.

  With the mouse cage on my lap and Batty quivering in his favourite toilet roll tube I sat idly waiting for my tardy mother, wishing I had a friendly polar bear who would gobble up all their useless pets. I carried him up the hill, all the while tightly hugging the cage lest he attempt another escape, and as a treat was allowed to have him in my room until bedtime. Then it was judged that my obsessive desire to sit and stare at him might prevent me from sleeping so he was despatched to the dank seclusion of the downstairs toilet.

  In spite, I lay listening to the incessant trundling squeaks that he wrung from his furious nocturnal marathons until my parents stopped creaking and were asleep. Then I crept down and using my father’s sacred torch shone a milky beam through the door to spy on my remarkably athletic companion. He was relentless, he’d pause to sniff the air, whisking with a web of glassy hairs rooted behind his neat pink nose, and then run, run, run, his tiny feet too quick to see, his tail curved up behind him, all to generate a monotonous symphony of metallic squeals – no doubt also a contributory factor in his nightly solitary confinement.

  Batty was the most important thing in my life, but in truth, I didn’t really want a mouse; as the name suggests what I really wanted was a bat. I had spent hours pacing the garden staring skyward, hoping to glimpse one, had snuck out of the gate and crept down the road to be closer to a massive tree where owls sometimes hooted but these enigmatic creatures only ever fluttered over the pages of my Ladybird Book of British Wild Animals. On page eight it asserted that noctules, or great bats, ‘come out to hunt just before sunset’ and ‘you may be lucky enough to see them in spring and summer’ – sadly not in Midanbury.

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; Eventually, after exploring a number of what I decreed were definitely ‘batish’ locations – churches, an old school and our loft, which we clambered into several times a week – my father took me camping in the New Forest. We pitched the tent in woodland beside a stream and as it got dark peered over the bank. And then, as he stroked the searchlight slowly back and forth, we spotted some real live bats! It was amazing. I was allowed a go with the torch too, and one of the tiny superfast things flickered just in front of my face. I nearly burst, it was the best thing ever and it made me want one even more.

  I had owned a number of floppy ‘Made in Hong Kong’ bats, which wobbled on fragile cords of shredded elastic and whose rubbery smell was more enjoyable than my vain attempts to get them to look in any way realistic. These crude black blobs were a regular purchase from Portswood petshop, my favourite place on earth and site of a weekly pilgrimage when library duties were done.

  It was a short walk down the busy Broadway, if I wasn’t dragged into boring Woolworths or dingy Hills the toy shop, which was jammed with too many prams and bikes, past the very dull jeweller’s and the wedding dress boutique where my mother would inevitably pause to gaze wistfully at the display and across from Andor Arts where on rare occasions I would accompany her to buy a posh ornament for some luckless relative’s birthday. This emporium was carelessly cluttered with a polished fauna of precisely nothing interesting, ever, despite the fact that it was all obviously ‘very dear’. Thus I was strictly and repeatedly reminded that I was not allowed to touch anything, because if a vase, bowl, figurine, candelabra or any other gilded trophy were to tumble I’d have to pay for it forever out of my ‘pocket money’. Which I didn’t even get. In all the years of trailing my quietly ‘oohing’ and ‘ahhing’ window-shopping mother round this minefield of gaudy overpriced bric-a-brac I never once saw anything there I wanted to own myself. But across the road, past Alec Bennett Motors, I could have spent everything I’d ever earn, ever.