his upper lip, stands back, and looks love-hatingly on his tiny, fenced kingdom. The beet-trench has thrown up a negative of itself: a long bulbous spine of earth.
‘What kind of creature, Dad?’
‘The elephant, I believe. Now help me with this root.’
‘And the elephant?’
‘From the pig.’
‘And the pig?’ I’m enjoying this; it’s like that game where you keep asking
why
until they give you some money for sweets.
Dad sighs. ‘There were little fishy things. They crawled out of the water and lost their fins and learned to breathe and eventually became pigs.’
‘And the fishy things? Where did they come from?’
‘From the sea.’
‘But how did they get in the sea, Dad, in the first place?’
‘They grew from plants. Plants that –’ He looks uneasily about, checking that no neighbours are in earshot, perhaps sensing that he is on shaky ground. He lowers his voice slightly, just in case. ‘Plants that developed from tiny underwater mushrooms.’
‘And the mushrooms?’
Dad looks up at the sky and frowns. A pigeon whizzes past, as though on a mission. ‘There was a big bang in space, and they burst out of nowhere.’
Even at the age of seven, I suspected that this was bollocks.
Norman’s still talking about DNA. I haven’t really been listening.
‘Anyway, this documentary I saw, on BBC 2 – no, I tell a lie, it was Channel Four – there was a bloke saying the mystery of woman is actually just a mystery of DNA. And once we’ve unravelled the conundrum, the women’s eggie things’ll get backto normal, and they’ll start getting pregnant again, and we’ll be laughing. But in the meantime –’
Here he threw up his hands and made a face, and I made a face, too, and laughed.
‘Crying, more like,’ I joked, picturing Holly and Mrs Mann huddled together over the complaint form, with a little urn containing Giselle’s ashes stood next to them on a plinth.
‘Anyway,
chez moi,
’ says Norman, ‘for mysterious, read infuriating. Take my Abbie: illogical is putting it mildly. She tries to set the video to record the Lottery, right, but she wants to watch something else while it’s on. So what does Madame do? I call her Madame sometimes, Buck,’ he confided, ‘cos she’s a French teacher. Well, French and home economics, actually,
pardonnez-moi, Monsieur.
Anyway, she records the thing she’s
watching
, then acts all surprised when she discovers she hasn’t recorded the
other
thing. And d’you know what she says to me? “Stupid machine,” she says, and I quote: “I thought it could record two programmes at once, but all I’ve got is a blank tape.” Woman’s the eighth wonder of the world, I reckon. Mind you, joking apart,’ says Norman (‘’Scuse I’) belching, ‘I’ll give credit where credit’s due. My two gals – Tweedles Dum and Dee, I call ’em, my daughters – they’ve never had any problems with technology. If there’s one thing they’ve learned from yours truly, it’s how to use an instruction manual.’
As I was to discover for myself, some weeks later, when they expertly demonstrated to me the workings of their vibrator.
I was in the middle of my Elvis impression – ‘Jailhouse Rock’, as I recall – when the barman shouted at me.
‘Hey, you! Shut up over there! Shut up!’
Norman and I whirled round on our stools; so fast, in my case, that I had to grab hold of the table to stop myself spiralling into lift-off. When I regained my bearings, I saw that everyone in the pub had suddenly congregated around the television above the bar, and was gawping intently at the screen.
‘Newsflash!’ mouthed the barman through cupped hands,and turned up the volume so that the television was blaring at full pitch.
The whole screen was filled with a scene of devastation. Dust falling. Firemen at work with hoses, shooting water and foam at the twisted metal-and-concrete armature of a multi-storey building in flames. A reporter in a hard hat and
‘What kind of creature, Dad?’
‘The elephant, I believe. Now help me with this root.’
‘And the elephant?’
‘From the pig.’
‘And the pig?’ I’m enjoying this; it’s like that game where you keep asking
why
until they give you some money for sweets.
Dad sighs. ‘There were little fishy things. They crawled out of the water and lost their fins and learned to breathe and eventually became pigs.’
‘And the fishy things? Where did they come from?’
‘From the sea.’
‘But how did they get in the sea, Dad, in the first place?’
‘They grew from plants. Plants that –’ He looks uneasily about, checking that no neighbours are in earshot, perhaps sensing that he is on shaky ground. He lowers his voice slightly, just in case. ‘Plants that developed from tiny underwater mushrooms.’
‘And the mushrooms?’
Dad looks up at the sky and frowns. A pigeon whizzes past, as though on a mission. ‘There was a big bang in space, and they burst out of nowhere.’
Even at the age of seven, I suspected that this was bollocks.
Norman’s still talking about DNA. I haven’t really been listening.
‘Anyway, this documentary I saw, on BBC 2 – no, I tell a lie, it was Channel Four – there was a bloke saying the mystery of woman is actually just a mystery of DNA. And once we’ve unravelled the conundrum, the women’s eggie things’ll get backto normal, and they’ll start getting pregnant again, and we’ll be laughing. But in the meantime –’
Here he threw up his hands and made a face, and I made a face, too, and laughed.
‘Crying, more like,’ I joked, picturing Holly and Mrs Mann huddled together over the complaint form, with a little urn containing Giselle’s ashes stood next to them on a plinth.
‘Anyway,
chez moi,
’ says Norman, ‘for mysterious, read infuriating. Take my Abbie: illogical is putting it mildly. She tries to set the video to record the Lottery, right, but she wants to watch something else while it’s on. So what does Madame do? I call her Madame sometimes, Buck,’ he confided, ‘cos she’s a French teacher. Well, French and home economics, actually,
pardonnez-moi, Monsieur.
Anyway, she records the thing she’s
watching
, then acts all surprised when she discovers she hasn’t recorded the
other
thing. And d’you know what she says to me? “Stupid machine,” she says, and I quote: “I thought it could record two programmes at once, but all I’ve got is a blank tape.” Woman’s the eighth wonder of the world, I reckon. Mind you, joking apart,’ says Norman (‘’Scuse I’) belching, ‘I’ll give credit where credit’s due. My two gals – Tweedles Dum and Dee, I call ’em, my daughters – they’ve never had any problems with technology. If there’s one thing they’ve learned from yours truly, it’s how to use an instruction manual.’
As I was to discover for myself, some weeks later, when they expertly demonstrated to me the workings of their vibrator.
I was in the middle of my Elvis impression – ‘Jailhouse Rock’, as I recall – when the barman shouted at me.
‘Hey, you! Shut up over there! Shut up!’
Norman and I whirled round on our stools; so fast, in my case, that I had to grab hold of the table to stop myself spiralling into lift-off. When I regained my bearings, I saw that everyone in the pub had suddenly congregated around the television above the bar, and was gawping intently at the screen.
‘Newsflash!’ mouthed the barman through cupped hands,and turned up the volume so that the television was blaring at full pitch.
The whole screen was filled with a scene of devastation. Dust falling. Firemen at work with hoses, shooting water and foam at the twisted metal-and-concrete armature of a multi-storey building in flames. A reporter in a hard hat and
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