Downtime - Marc Platt [37]
‘Soon as you like. Just throw his essentials into a bag. But you should come too.’
Kate shook her head. ‘No, I can’t. I must stay put. That would be like giving in.’
‘No surrender, eh Kate?’ said Beth. ‘Jesus, you’re a fighter.
Must be in the family.’
‘I don’t know,’ Kate said. ‘Look, thanks. I’ll have him ready by this afternoon. Thanks, Beth. We’ll see you.’
She clicked off the phone and almost ran the length of the narrow boat. ‘Gordy? Guess what? You’re going to have a real treat...’ She stopped. The main cabin was empty.
She flew up the steps out of the door.
Gordy was sitting on his swing on the bank. He lifted a stick and took aim. ‘ Kerpow! Kerpow! ’
Kate saw red. This was her family. This was what she hated. She yelled, ‘No, Gordy! Not that!’ And she was off the boat and grabbing the stick from him before he could even grin. He knew what he was doing. She forced her anger back in. She had to be reasonable. ‘Come on, darling. Not guns. I told you before. Please, no guns. Now play inside until Auntie Beth gets here.’
She bundled him unceremoniously back into the Mananda.
Across the oily water of the basin, the two watchers sat staring, unmoving. ‘Bloody Chillys!’ she yelled. She grabbed a piece of wood from the deck and flung it uselessly in their direction. ‘Leave us alone!’
They stared. Sshp, sshp, sshp, sshp...
Kate turned away in frustrated despair. ‘Leave us alone,’
she repeated to herself.
It wasn’t easy to wave him off. He had dragged Aloysius, his bear, round the boat, saying goodbye to everything as if he was going for ever. ‘You know how to play on this, don’t you?’ complained Kate.
‘Goodbye bath, goodbye bed, goodbye computer.’
‘Don’t worry, they’ll still all be here when you get back.’
‘Goodbye Grandad.’
Grandad sat on a shelf in a cheap plastic frame, schoolmasterish with a clipped militaristic moustache and a look that appeared preoccupied with business elsewhere.
Typical, Kate complained. She wasn’t quite sure why he didn’t live at the back of a bottom drawer. Yet she had even got quite upset once when Gordy had knocked Grandad to the floor with his football.
‘Sorry, Grandad,’ said Gordy, who was upset too, and gave Grandad a dried apricot.
Today, rather to her horror, Grandad looked terribly solid and reliable.
As she bundled Gordy off the boat with his bags, the four-year-old (nearly five!) looked across the water and said,
‘Goodbye...’
She clamped a hand across his mouth. ‘You dare!’
‘I was saying goodbye swing,’ he complained emphatically.
Not daring to look back, she prayed the Chillys would not follow. When she reached the car park at the top of the towpath, Beth was already waiting in the car with the demolition duo.
‘That phone call,’ Beth said. ‘You know which one. Just make it, will you?’
Kate hugged Gordy tight, both reluctant and relieved to let him go. He clambered into the back giggling with the others and didn’t even turn to wave goodbye to her as they drove away. Only Aloysius stared, button-eyed, through the receding back window.
Kate walked slowly back down to the narrow boat.
Aloysius had been her bear before Gordy purloined him. He was battle-scarred now, but she could remember when her dad had won him in a shilling raffle and he was as big as she was.
She passed the other boats on the basin, none of them occupied just now, as if there was a curse on the place. When she reached the Mananda, she was almost relieved to see the Chillys still in position on the other side.
So it wasn’t Gordy they wanted.
8
Eye Spy
tinny jingle erupted from the car radio, followed by a Agush of slushy background mood music, all of it with an irritating ground bass beat. The DJ was tying himself into knots of unctuous fatuity.
‘And it’s a Mega-morning to all you slickers out there.
You’re jacked into N Treble U – the ones who share –
bringing you our daily show on National FM Radio. I’m Anthony and this is where the jazzy bright day starts. A New World coming soon. The way it always will be.’
‘And I mean that most sincerely,’ jeered Sarah Jane.