Flour Babies - Anne Fine [36]
‘Why not?’
Put to the test, Mrs Martin couldn’t think of any reason. So while Simon used a clean pair of underpants from the laundry pile to try to wipe the worst of Macpherson’s slobber off the flour baby, she made the call.
And Sue, when she answered, didn’t seem to find the request at all strange. Even before Simon could snatch the phone from his mother’s ear, and put it to his own, he could hear her chirruping away down the line.
‘Toss all my burdens and woes clear behind me,
Vow I’ll not carry those cargoes again.’
Then, just like his mother, Sue broke off.
‘I’ve forgotten the chorus,’ she told him. ‘Something about sunrise, and being of good cheer.’
It was only the warning look on his mother’s face that turned Simon’s howl of frustration into a meagre grunt of thanks. Handing the phone back, he banged his fist against the kitchen door in sheer irritation, and then, when it flew open, felt obliged to walk through, because his mother was still watching him.
In the shared yard, Hyacinth Spicer was sitting daintily on an upturned bucket, dyeing her sandals green. Hyacinth probably knew the whole song, Simon thought moodily. Learned it at Brownies, brushed it up at Little Woodland Folk, and sang the descant in the Baptist church choir. But he’d be happily boiled in oil before he’d ask Hyacinth Spicer any favours. He already suspected her of being one of Mr Cartright’s spies: a good amateur turned professional. He was on the verge of turning back into the house when Hyacinth herself raised the topic spontaneously.
‘Was that your mum singing?’ she asked. Then, dabbing dye carefully on her sandal strap, ‘Not very good, is she?’
An idea struck Simon. Worth a try, anyway.
‘It’s a very hard song to sing,’ he said.
Hyacinth looked up in surprise.
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘Of course it is,’ Simon insisted. “The chorus is particularly tricky.’
‘No, it isn’t.’
And, her capacity for showing off undimmed since the day Miss Ness first pinned the huge tinfoil star of Bethlehem to her woolly in nursery school, Hyacinth threw back her head and sang:
‘Sail for a sunrise that burns with new maybes,
Farewell, my loved ones, and be of good cheer.
Others may settle to dandle their babies –’
Just at that moment, she glanced down and noticed the dye dripping into her sandal.
‘Oh,sh – ugar!’
Simon tried tempting her into singing what he could tell, from the sheer swell of the melody, must be the one, last, elusive line.
‘I expect you dripped that deliberately,’ he said. ‘Since it’s the end of the song that’s the hardest to sing well.’
But Hyacinth Spicer had completely lost interest. She was intent on mopping up her shoe.
‘Shove off, Simon,’ she told him, just softly enough for both of them to be able to pretend he hadn’t heard.
Simon went back inside. Shutting the door carefully, so Hyacinth Spicer couldn’t hear, he sang what he’d learned of the chorus to his mother. But though she claimed then, and several times later that evening, that the last line was on the tip of her tongue, she never managed to come out with it.
By morning, Simon was in the sort of mental state he associated with victims of the water-drip torture.
‘I’m going mad,’ he told his mother over breakfast. ‘It’s driving me insane.’
‘You could go and be nice to Hyacinth. She’d sing you the last line.’
The scowl Simon turned on her was prodigious.
Mrs Martin shrugged.
“Then you’ll just have to ask Mr Cartright.’
Ask Mr Cartright! Simon shovelled more cereal in his mouth, and used the freshly-licked spoon to poke the flour baby.
‘This is your fault,’ he told her. And it was. If it weren’t for her, he realized, he would never have started to take an interest in his father, and what happened years ago. Without this stupid, useless, floppy bag of flour, he’d never have ended up in the awful, shaming position he was in today – keen to get off to school to learn something, like a proper ear’ole.
He prodded the flour baby