‘Mind that paraffin heater!’ Bunty screams at Patricia as her coat flaps dangerously within two feet of the heater. Patricia turns to look at Bunty in disbelief. ‘It’s not lit,’ she says, slowly and with great emphasis.
‘That doesn’t make any difference,’ Bunty replies staunchly and busies herself with a tangle of dog leads, refusing to look at either of us because even she knows how ridiculous she’s being. Patricia makes a disgusted face at her back and turns to go upstairs. ‘Can I go upstairs with Patricia then?’ I ask hastily, spying a means of escape. ‘No!’ they chorus in unison.
Bunty’s edginess recedes after she’s raked around in the depths of her handbag and come up triumphantly with her bottle of tranquillizers. Bunty’s little helpers soon have her in a distinctly altered state and for a while she moves around the Shop like a twin-setted automaton, hauling out kittens, hamsters and mice for inspection and noisily ringing into the till the price of Pets until suddenly, in mid-sale, she clutches her forehead dramatically and announces that she’s ‘had enough’ and has to go and lie down and rushes to the back of the Shop, only pausing long enough to push an enormous Belgian rabbit into my arms as she passes. ‘Is your mother all right?’ the surprised customer asks, relieving me of an equally surprised rabbit. ‘Oh yes, she’s just remembered that she’s left a chip pan on the cooker,’ I lie artfully. Very artfully, of course, as Bunty would no more leave a chip pan unattended than she would mix her whites with her coloureds on washday.
I have a busy morning and sell – two kittens (one tortoiseshell, one ginger), a very winsome puppy, two gerbils, a hamster wheel, three bags of sawdust, six pounds of biscuit mix, a dog basket, one gemstone cat collar (diamonds, fake), and the aforementioned Belgian rabbit which I claim as my sale because it was me that rang it into the till, not Bunty. I think I have a decided talent for this and I report my success very proudly to George when he finally comes back (paraffinless, I notice) but he just looks at me blankly. Sometimes he seems to have the most enormous difficulty recognizing members of his own family.
I don’t go completely without honour though, because five minutes later he produces a Milky Way from his pocket and gives it to me and then allows me to take all the rabbits out of their cages (one at a time, of course, or heaven knows what kind of rabbit chaos would have ensued). I stroke their long, velvety ears and bury my face in their plush fur, listening to their rapid, rabbity heartbeats. I think if Jesus were an animal he would not be a lamb but a rabbit, a big, furry, squashy chocolate-coloured rabbit.
‘Where’s your mother?’ George says after a while. If he’s going to encounter ‘my mother’ he’d better be reminded about the paraffin. ‘Did you get the paraffin?’ I ask innocently. He gives me another blank look. Not only do I appear to be a stranger but I don’t even speak a language he recognizes. Ten minutes later he looks up from the till where he’s been counting pound notes and says in amazement, ‘I forgot the bloody paraffin!’
I make sympathetic noises.
He looks doubtfully at the Shop door, can he leave the weather-house unmanned? ‘How can I go and get paraffin if your mother’s not here?’
‘I can manage.’ ‘No you can’t.’ Who does he think took all the money he’s counting? It’s not worth arguing, he can be so confrontational that he would swear black was white for the sake of an argument. Bunty would go further, claiming it wasn’t a colour at all, but a piece of furniture or a banana. ‘Go and get Patricia,’ he says. ‘She can mind the Shop.’ My heart sinks a little at the words ‘get Patricia’. Getting Patricia is invariably my job and it’s a thankless task. As soon as I say to her, ‘Daddy (or Mummy) wants you downstairs’ a cloud of gloom settles around her head like a miasmic halo and she slouches unwillingly towards her summoner, blaming me all the while for this intrusion on her anchorite state.
I climb the stairs slowly and reluctantly, my bad knees complaining all the way. I pass Bunty’s bedroom; I can see her sitting at her dressing-table, gazing into the mirror and doing a subdued version of her ‘My Gillian, my pearl’ routine as if she might be able to conjure Gillian back up from the depths of the mirror. She catches sight of my reflection walking past and gives a start as if she’s just seen a ghost. But when she twists round to look she says, ‘Oh it’s only you,’ in a flattened sort of voice. ‘It’s just me! Just Ruby!’ I sing out in an inanely cheerful way as I hammer on Patricia’s door.
‘Go away!’ she yells, so I open the door. ‘Daddy wants you.’ She’s stretched out on her bed, arms folded across her sprouting chest and staring at the ceiling, rather like a thoughtful corpse. ‘Go away,’ she repeats without looking at me. I wait patiently for a while and then repeat my message. After another long period of silence has elapsed she finally turns her head slightly in my direction and says tonelessly, ‘Tell him I’m ill.’
‘What shall I say’s wrong with you?’ I know George will ask so I may as well have the answer ready rather than having to lumber all the way back up the stairs. Patricia returns her gaze to the ceiling and laughs mirthlessly. ‘I have a sickness of the soul,’ she declares in hollow, Gothic tones, closing her eyes and putting on the kind of sublimely bored expression that the Pre-Raphaelites were always demanding of their models.
‘Shall I tell Daddy that?’ I can just see his reaction if I say, ‘Patricia can’t come down, her soul’s sick.’ She laughs her Madeline Usher laugh and waves a thin, pale hand in the air. ‘Tell him I’ve got my period – that’ll shut him up.’
She’s right, it does. ‘Typical,’ he says under his breath as if the menstrual cycle had been specifically designed to annoy him. ‘Well, I’m going out anyway,’ he says, swinging round the sign on the door which announces to the outside world that we’re Sorry we are closed even for Vetzyme. When I’m sure he’s gone I turn the sign back so everyone can see that we’re Open for Vetzyme and spend a couple of pleasant hours selling and playing with Pets. I play catch and fetch with a peculiar looking white terrier (christened Rags by Patricia) that noone ever wants to buy even though George keeps sticking it in the window with a big red bow round its neck. Patricia and I are desperate for someone to buy poor Rags because George keeps threatening to have him put to ‘sleep’, a euphemism if ever there was one. (Is Gillian only counterfeiting death? Is she really just asleep and proving very hard to wake up? She never was very good at getting up in the mornings.) Rags features heavily in my prayers. Dear Jesus, Lamb of God, forgive me my sins and give us our daily bread. Make Gillian happy and give Rags a good home and I will never be bad again as long as I live. All my love, Ruby, Thy Kingdom Come, Amen. That kind of thing.
I’m glad to say that all the Pets received a lot of attention from me on the afternoon of that fateful day; the kittens were fluffed up; the hamsters were allowed to run along the counter; I even attempted a conversation with the Parrot – it was suddenly clear to me where my destiny lay – I was going to be a Petmonger like my father before me. In a few years the sign above the door would no longer read ‘G Lennox’ but ‘R Lennox’ – here was my vocation! It will no longer matter that we’re not allowed to have pets of our own (private, non-profit-making pets) because all the Pets will be mine one day. Dream on, Ruby.
George struggles through the door of the Shop, an enormous can of paraffin in each hand which he deposits with a clank and a slosh next to the big barrel of sawdust in the corner of the Shop. Let’s hope his cigarette doesn’t jump over here!
‘Careful!’ Bunty warns as I enter the kitchen. She is making sausage, egg and chips for tea – a Health and Safety nightmare of a meal for a woman in her chemically sedated state. Her entire attention is concentrated on the chip pan to the detriment of the sausages which are smouldering nicely in their bath of smoking lard not to mention the eggs whose whites are turning into crackly black lace at the edges. I scuttle around the walls of the kitchen to get to the fridge for a glass of milk, staying well out of the way of the perilous pan. ‘Tea’s ready,’ Bunty says, giving the chip bas
ket a cautious little shake. (She’d be much happier if she had a fire extinguisher in her hand.) ‘Get Patricia.’
‘She’s not very well,’ I tell Bunty. She raises an eyebrow ever so slightly. ‘It’s her soul,’ I explain.
‘Just get her, Ruby, don’t be clever.’ They really don’t want me to be clever, do they?
The rest of the evening is spent in quiet pursuits. George is out, as usual. Patricia stays in her room, also as usual. She is up to volume three of the library edition of À la recherche du temps perdu, which I see is about ‘the metaphysical ambiguity of reality, time and death and the power of sensation to retrieve memories and reverse time’. Exciting stuff – but how can time be reversible when it gallops forward, clippity-clop and nobody ever comes back. Do they?
I am also in my room, playing Scrabble with myself while Teddy looks on forlornly, no longer able to join in now that he’s too old for all that role-playing. Granny Nell is in bed where she spends a lot of her time these days. Bunty is down in the kitchen with only her Piles of Ironing for company.
When I’ve played three games of Scrabble with only minimal cheating I think it’s probably time to go to bed. In the AG era, all the little comforting routines are lost. noone checks I’ve brushed my teeth and washed my hands and face, nobody even checks that I’ve gone to bed at all, but I do, adhering to most of the BG routines and rituals. I say my prayers, kneeling on a pillow at the side of the bed. I pray fervently for Gillian to be very happy in Heaven and not be upset about being dead. The last of the advent candles are down to sticky red stumps but I light them anyway and watch as the gold angels bump and grind daintily against the bells, ting-a-ling ting-a-ling.
Meanwhile, down in the kitchen poor Bunty is forced to abandon the ironing with precipitate haste when she discovers what looks like Gillian’s pink Viyella blouse nestling amongst the Pile (although actually it’s only Granny Nell’s big knickers). She clutches her forehead all the way up the stairs, swallows a double dose of sleeping tablets and drops into oblivion on her bed. I hear George come in much later, tripping and cursing his way up the stairs. Then the toilet flushes and the lights go out and I drift into the night on a raft of prayers and a few cheering choruses of ‘How Much is that Doggie in the Window?’ sung softly under the covers.
I’m dreaming about the end of the world, a common dream that takes many forms. This night the dream is about huge clouds that have boiled up in the sky and are turning into rabbits. The great rabbit-shaped clouds hang in the sky like Zeppelins (see Footnote (vii)) and somebody standing behind me says, It’s the end of the world, you know.
And so it is in some ways. Downstairs the abandoned, forgotten iron was demonstrating its faults to the ironing board. Of course Bunty wasn’t to know that the thermostat wasn’t working properly and that while she’s snoring in a ladylike way in her bed the iron just keeps getting hotter and hotter, scorching the cheerful red gingham cloth that covers the ironing board, a scorch that gradually grows as dark as our neglected teatime sausages until the pad underneath begins to sizzle and burn. Then the flames find the wood of the ironing-board frame and are happy for a long time in a self-contained way, but then eventually the melting flex falls to the floor and finds the linoleum and one particularly energetic flame goes whoooosh! and stretches up and reaches the gay curtains that match the carbonized gingham pad and then there’s no stopping it as it greedily gobbles up everything in its path – even the kitchen wallpaper with its pattern of fire-engine-red tomatoes and dancing salt-and-pepper pots.
But in the end even that isn’t enough and the fire leaves the kitchen, popping its head out of the door and crossing the passage into the Shop where there are wonderful things to play with – paraffin, sawdust and the whispering, rustling noise of fear.
‘Ruby! Ruby!’
I open my eyes quickly, yet it’s not like being awake. The air is opaque and Patricia looks like a little old lady, veiled in smoke. There is a smell like burnt sausages. We have been swallowed by a great, grey rabbit-cloud. ‘The end of the world,’ I murmur to Patricia. ‘Get up, Ruby,’ she says urgently. ‘Get out of bed!’ She pulls back the covers and starts tugging me out of bed but I don’t understand until she doubles up with a fit of coughing and splutters, ‘Fire, Ruby, fire!’
We make our way rather unsteadily to the bedroom door and Patricia whispers, ‘I’m not sure we can go out there,’ as if she didn’t want the fire to overhear, but she’s not whispering – it’s the smoke rasping her throat that’s making her hoarse, as I discover when I try to speak. We open the door very cautiously as if all the fires of Hell were behind it, but there’s only smoke, not even thick enough to obliterate Nell’s bedroom door opposite. But when we try to leave my bedroom we immediately start to choke and have to stagger back inside, gasping and retching, hanging onto one another. We’re human chimneys and it can only get worse, for the Red Horseman of the Apocalypse is already galloping up the stairs of the Shop.
Patricia starts pulling covers off the bed and stuffing them underneath the door; then she flings everything out of my chest of drawers until she finds two school blouses which she wraps round our faces so that we look like the Lone Ranger. In different circumstances this could have been fun. ‘Help me,’ she croaks from behind her outlaw gag, as she tries to push up the sash window but it’s hopelessly stuck. I start to get hysterical and drop to my knees with a jab of pain and start praying frantically to the baby Jesus to save us from incineration. Patricia, more practical, grabs the Bambi-and-Thumper nightlight – once hers, now mine – and smashes it against the window, again and again, until she’s broken all the glass. Then she takes the bedside rug and places it over the broken edges of glass on the sill (Patricia really paid attention at Girl Guides, thank goodness) and we both hang out of the window gulping in great lungfuls of cold night air. I think it’s only then that I realize how very far away the Back Yard really is.
Patricia turns to look at me and says, ‘It’s all right, the fire brigade will be here soon,’ knowing that neither of us believes this. For a start – who’s called them? There is no sound of sirens, no sound of life at all in the street and the remainder of our family are probably little more than glowing cinders by now. Patricia’s features are suddenly convulsed by a spasm of pain. She lowers her gag and wheezes, ‘Pets. Someone’s got to help the Pets.’ We both know who that someone is (it doesn’t seem to cross our minds that we should be saving our family).
‘Here,’ Patricia says, pushing something into my hands which, on closer inspection, turns out to be Panda. Unseen, Teddy jumps up and down on the chest of drawers, frantically trying to catch our attention. Patricia swings herself off the windowsill and over onto the drainpipe in a very Robin Hood kind of way, pausing just long enough to say, ‘Stay there, don’t move!’ in a manner inherited directly from Bunty. She cuts a truly heroic figure as she climbs down, wearing only her white broderie-anglaise baby-doll pyjamas and two big pink sponge cushion-roll curlers in her fringe. Half-way down she pauses and I wave encouragingly down to her. ‘Stay there, Ruby, help will be here soon! I’ll get the fire brigade.’ I believe her, you could trust Patricia in a way that you could never trust Gillian; if it had been Gillian shinning down that drainpipe she would have forgotten all about me by the time she reached the ground. When Patricia’s feet finally find the far-away concrete of the Back Yard she raises an arm, half-salute, half-wave and I respond with an exaggerated thumbs-up signal.
Within minutes the Back Yard is transformed from a deserted arena of death into a place of safety. There are firemen all over the place, intelligent as ants – unreeling hoses, putting up ladders, shouting reassurance. Soon a stocky, jovial fireman is perched outside my bedroom window, like a budgerigar up a ladder, saying, ‘Hello, sweetheart – let’s get you out of there, shall we?’ and I am upside down over his shoulder and we are off down the ladder. I have to concentrate so hard on not dropping Teddy (did he really think I would forget him?) and Patricia’s Panda that
I don’t even have time to pray for our deliverance. From my excellent bird’s eye view I can see that the Back Yard is now buzzing with life. Patricia is there shouting encouragement; Bunty is screaming something incomprehensible, her mouth forming a perfect circle from which pours a river of glossolalia, while George, who is standing by her side, is shouting something to her (probably ‘shut up’).
Most peculiar of all is Nell, who is wandering around down there, wearing a navy straw hat like a Salvation Army bonnet without the ribbons (Blood and Fire!) and carrying her leatherette shopping-bag as if she was just off to the Petergate Fisheries and was trying to find out what everyone wanted. (We have been reduced from a ‘one-of-each-six-times’ family to a ‘one-of-each-five-times’ family. By as early as 1966 our incredible shrinking family will be down to a ‘one-of-each-twice’ unit. Plus scraps, of course.)
I realize with a little frisson of excitement that if everyone is down there, then I have been alone in a burning building! What a story I’ll have to tell in later life. As we descend towards Bunty this thrill is displaced by a sense of guilt – might I, in some unknowing, ignorant way have caused the fire (I suddenly remember the unextinguished advent candles)? Did a sleepwalking Ruby unwittingly set a fire? I’m waiting for Bunty to say something like I told you to be more careful! but to my surprise she says nothing at all and pulls me towards her, wrapping me in the shelter of her dressing-gowned arms and, for once, the invisible cord between us shrivels and shirrs to nothing as we bridge the three-foot chasm. Patricia meanwhile has been wrapped in a grey blanket by a fireman so that she looks like an Indian brave by a (rather large) camp fire. She is weeping hysterically and uncontrollably and making horrible noises, partly due to smoke inhalation and partly due to the fact that she has witnessed the reeking, charcoaled insides of the Shop and smelt the unforgettable smell of toasted fur and feather (no lime tisane and madeleine for us in future years, but it was amazing what the smell of frying sausage could achieve).