Little Marvel and other stories Read online

She jumped. A tall man in a smart grey suit, with a Safeway’s nametag clipped to the lapel, had sidled up to her. One of the store-managers, no doubt, come to nab her as a shoplifter.

  ‘No,’ she muttered. ‘I’m, er, just waiting for someone. Ah – here they are, at last!’ She smiled broadly at a total stranger: a kindly looking matron in a pink padded coat and woolly hat, who was just entering the store. ‘Hello, Sally-Anne!’ she cried, tagging in after the woman, only to dart out of sight along the fruit and vegetable aisle, before ‘Sally-Anne’ could accost her.

  She stood trembling in front of a pile of clementines, struggling to compose herself. She must remember Duncan’s advice. ‘Ignore the panic. Accept the physical symptoms, but don’t give way to them. Fear can’t kill you, Dolores.’

  There, of course, he was wrong. Just yesterday she had read a piece in the Daily Mail about a young man dying of shock at London Zoo, because he’d ventured into the Invertebrates House in an attempt to cure his arachnophobia.

  None the less, she had to complete this exercise, especially now that she’d surmounted the first hurdle of actually entering the shop. She had sold half her mother’s jewellery – the emerald brooch, the diamond ring – in order to pay for Duncan’s programme, so if she backed out halfway through, it would be like chucking precious stones away. (And she had already wasted large amounts of money on a Jungian and a Rogerian, following the fiasco with Willow.)

  Still fighting for breath, she ventured down the aisle, looking neither to right nor left, in case she saw that dreaded word. Even ‘pears’ could induce the panic, or ‘peanuts’ or ‘pearl barley’, just because they shared three letters with the most terrifying food of all. And, as she approached the frozen foods section, she felt so overwrought, the floor appeared to be buckling under her feet, and the fluorescent ceiling-lights glaring down as ruthlessly as search-lamps.

  Within minutes she was face to face with the huge, swollen sacks of peas. It was all she could do not to turn tail and run, but somehow she found the courage to follow Duncan’s orders: stand her ground and examine them. Their hideous green faces were pictured all over the packets, accompanied by such wicked untruths as ‘extra sweet and tender’. At least she didn’t have to touch the things – that was next week’s challenge – but just looking at them brought on a pounding headache, as if a metal hammer was smashing into her skull. It was the sheer numbers that appalled – thousands upon thousands of peas swarming in the photographs, and actually reproducing as she watched.

  She tried to get a grip on herself and note down all the details, as Duncan had instructed. ‘A rich source of folic acid,’ she spelt out. Yes, acid was the word. Peas by their very nature were sour, acerbic, spiteful. Their sweetness was just a façade, like those smarmy people who wooed you with false smiles, only to stab you in the back. Spinach was more honest. It didn’t even pretend to be benign. And Brussels sprouts made no attempt to disguise their innate bitterness. Although, in actual fact, she ate neither sprouts nor spinach any more – ate nothing green at all, nor anything with scales or shells, eyes or feet or tails. Her preferred foods were swedes and parsnips, which were solid and dependable, not to mention cheap. She had lost a lot of weight, of course, but that was a small price to pay for avoiding extremes of fear.

  ‘From field to frozen in just two hours.’

  That she did believe. There’d been a programme on the radio about new blast-freezing techniques, which could reduce the temperature of a single pea to minus fifteen centigrade in less than sixty seconds. The process was clearly traumatic – the peas were subjected to blasts of freezing air at a very high velocity, which would make them even more neurotic than they were in their natural state. And neurosis bred maliciousness. She knew that from her own case. Easy to be kind and cheery when you weren’t assailed by continual panics, or forced to stay awake each night to avoid dread-inducing nightmares. And, of course, the more your fears increased, the more you feared fear itself, until you landed up with full-blown phobophobia.

  Summoning her last dregs of courage, she made herself proceed, inch by terrifying inch, along the line of freezers, all crammed to the brim with peas: Birds Eye, Findus, Safeway’s own, Oaken Farm Organic – each more vile and threatening than its neighbour. The names of the actual pea varieties weren’t printed on the packets, but she knew them off by heart – boastful and deceitful names, forever sneaking through her mind, however hard she tried to block them out: Perfection, Maestro, Kelvedon Wonder, Sparkle, Pioneer. Worst was Little Marvel, comprising two lies in its name. How could anything with such monstrous power be classified as ‘Little’?

  Stomach churning, she stopped to read a recipe for Pea and Coriander Soup, featured on a so-called ‘Bumper Pack’. The peas had first to be simmered with an onion and the herbs, then liquidized to a purée. She could actually see them whizzing through the mixer in a tidal wave of spitting green-hot fury, along with all the pests and grubs that pea-plants seemed to attract: aphids, weevils, midges, thrips … People claimed that peas were good for you, but they were in fact polluted; prey to vile diseases such as downy mildew, root rot, fusarium wilt and leaf spot.

  A surge of nausea was rising in her gorge. Clamping her hand to her throat, she careered along the aisle, desperate to remove herself from the source of the contagion, colliding in her frantic haste with trolleys, shoppers, children, prams, and only stopping in blind panic as she approached the canned vegetable section – more splenetic peas leering at her, mobbing her, trying to waylay her.

  ‘No!’ she screamed, veering towards the automatic doors, darting wildly through them, then running for dear life, away from peas

  peas

  peas

  peas

  peas …

  She slumped on a bench in the park. The snow was heavier now, shrouding her in white, turning the trees to shadowy spectres, closing in around her. Her feet were freezing, her fingers numb, yet the cold was nothing compared with the ice-sharp grip of fear. Duncan was over and done with, like all the other therapists. His tasks were just too perilous for someone of her temperament who might land up in a locked psychiatric ward if she pushed herself too far. Even going home posed a major obstacle, since it involved returning to the High Street and passing not just Safeway’s but Sainsbury’s and the Co-op, all of which sold peas. And there were at least four different cafés – Nick’s Diner offering chips and peas with every single item on the menu, and even the upmarket Dominique’s serving pea purée and mangetouts.

  An ordeal like that was beyond her failing powers. She would have to stay here in the park – all night, if necessary. Dusk was already falling, the park about to close, but she could conceal herself in the bushes until the park-keeper had done his rounds and padlocked both the gates. It would be terrifying, of course, to spend twelve hours in eerie darkness, with only ghosts for company and the relentless snow laying cruel hands on her heart. And what about the morning? Would it be any easier then to face that hazardous stretch of the High Street? Or would she be confined to this small municipal park for the remainder of her life, living like a squirrel on odd scraps and mouldy crusts?

  Well, if the alternative was death by peas, there wasn’t any choice.

  She tried to raise her head to look around her, but even the smallest movement seemed physically impossible. Where was she? Everything was dark and quiet, although she knew she wasn’t alone. There was a sense of other presences, a feeling of being gently squeezed both sides.

  Her thinking process had slowed to the faintest flicker, but she eventually began to wonder who she was – perhaps a more important question than ‘where’. But however long she pondered, she couldn’t seem to remember her name, apart from the vaguest recollection that it began with P. Or Pea, maybe. Certainly she had fallen into a vegetative state, in which the life force burned extremely low.

  She liked the state. It was restful, very soothing. Never before had she felt so imperturbable, so blissfully inert. Nothing seemed to matter any m
ore. True, she was rooted to the spot, but that, too, was a blessing. No more need to brave the shops or venture anywhere; no more threat from sunburn, thunder, crowds. She was exquisitely protected by an impregnable green envelope: wind-proof, rain-proof, fear-proof. In fact, fear was now impossible. Her mind was ticking over at such an elementary level, all exaggerated emotions were naturally suppressed. She couldn’t fret or agonize because she possessed a pea-sized brain.

  She let that fact sink in, although it seemed to take some time, Not that she was bothered. She had all the time in the world. There were no more pressures, no more colours, even. Everything was simple, everything was green. All she had to do was bask in her green pod in a state of blank acceptance: safe, and snug, and slow, and sweet – and completely free of worry for the first time in her life.

  Slowly, very slowly, a phrase was creeping into consciousness, a phrase describing her new state. At first, it failed to register. The letters were hazy, the concept indistinct, but gradually, eventually, and, with a faint twitch of low-key pleasure, she finally grasped the happy truth.

  She had become a … a … a …

  Little Marvel

  Germans

  Alice emerged blinking from the gloom into the cold stare of the December afternoon. The day seemed cruelly bright, the sun glaring in her eyes, mocking the glum nakedness of the spindly, shivering trees. The sky was an unseasonable blue – the blue of peace and summer; a smug reproof to the cold war in her mind. Almost automatically she crossed the road, turned right, then right again. How odd that she should remember the way after an interval of forty-four years, as if the directions from the tube station to her Aunt Patricia’s house had been indelibly imprinted on her child-brain.

  ‘Come back, this minute, Alice! If you go skipping on ahead like that, anything could happen.’

  Her mother’s voice, anxious and reproving; her father’s hand clamping her shoulder, as he steered her back to the family group. In those days, Clapham had been dangerous (or exotic, as she saw it), a different country from their own safe, salubrious suburb. There were no foreigners in Esher, and certainly no ‘darkies’, as people used to call them. Whereas in Clapham, in the fifties, you saw every shade of skin from butterscotch to Bournville. Aunt Patricia had half a tribe of Indians living right next door, and an Indian doctor who wore a yellow turban and had two gold teeth that flashed. Their own Dr Barnes seemed boring by comparison, with his balding head and tweedy jacket and off-white English teeth.

  Clearly, the area had been transformed in the intervening decades. The houses she was passing had been gentrified, upgraded, and were probably worth a fortune now, judging by the cars outside: Mercedes, BMWs, even the occasional Porsche. And chi-chi restaurants and wine bars appeared to have sprung up everywhere, a distinct improvement on the dingy caffs she remembered from her childhood.

  All at once, a wave of panic stopped her in her tracks. Was she crazy to have come? Suppose her aunt refused to see her, slammed the door in her face? The whole thing was Derek’s fault. Easy for him, as the beloved, favoured nephew who had always kept in touch, to take the moral high ground; harangue her about healing the rift before it was too late. It was already too late. She hadn’t spoken to her aunt for close on half a century, so how could she just pick up the phone and say, ‘Hello. I’m coming round’? In the end, Derek had done it for her, made the phone-call, fixed a date and time, and presented it as a fait accompli. Yet her overwhelming instinct was to bolt straight back home and abort this mission before it had begun. Except then she would have Derek to contend with – the sanctimonious elder brother bitterly disappointed in his errant little sister.

  Hardly ‘little’ now, she thought, peering at her reflection in a window. Would Patricia even recognize her, with greying hair and crowsfeet? The last time they’d met, back in 1963, she’d been something of a swinger, in brief mini-skirts and thigh-length silver boots, and with a mane of bleached-blonde hair. Rather different from her present attire: staid grey suit and ‘sensible’ shoes.

  ‘Look, get a move on,’ she muttered to herself. It was twenty-five to three, and Patricia was expecting her at two. Yet her legs had turned to cardboard, as if she had travelled not from Lincolnshire, but from Mongolia or Timbuktu, trekking thousands of dusty miles on foot, rather than lounging on a train. Normally, a rail journey was something of a luxury, but she had sat jittery and irresolute, barely reading a sentence of the new novel open on her lap. The drama on the page kept changing into the real-life quarrel she still remembered word for word.

  ‘A German? But you can’t possibly marry a German! Not after what happened to Tom.’

  ‘Look, Aunt, it’s peacetime now. The war ended twenty years ago.’

  ‘That’s not the point. Tom was killed by those bastards. And killed in the most inhuman way.’

  ‘I’m sorry – really I am. But you can’t expect me to give up my fiancé for the sake of an uncle I’ve never even met.’

  ‘He was my brother, Alice – and a quite outstanding man.’

  ‘Well, Stefan’s outstanding, too. You’d like him if you’d only agree to meet him.’

  ‘I’ve told you already – if you bring that fellow within yards of me, I can’t be held responsible for what I do or say.’

  ‘That’s totally unreasonable – an act of war in itself. You can’t blame Stefan for what his country did.’

  ‘I do. I blame them all. And the thought of my own niece sharing a German’s bed makes me literally sick.’

  Next, they had got on to the Holocaust. One of Patricia’s Jewish friends had been burned to a crisp in Belsen – horrific and unpardonable, but nothing to do with Stefan, who had been a babe in arms at the time. But her aunt refused to relent, and finally she, the execrable niece, had slammed out of the house, never to return. Her aunt was conspicuously absent at the wedding – and at the christening the following year. No card, no present, no congratulatory phone-call. She had pretended not to mind; gradually hardened her heart until she came to regard her aunt as a prejudiced old woman she was better off without.

  As she turned into Patricia’s road, memories came surging up again. When she’d first heard the name, Wildwood Grove, she had imagined it a scene from Sleeping Beauty: a magic forest, overgrown with briars, choking a royal palace full of sleeping, cobwebbed souls. She’d even pictured the handsome prince, hacking his way through the undergrowth to wake his bride-to-be. The reality had been something of a let-down – a boring street of sullen, squashed-up houses, with nothing in the way of vegetation save a few heroic dandelions in the scrappy squares of garden at the front. As for handsome princes, the only contenders for that role were a huddle of seedy-looking men, standing on the corner, arguing in some alien tongue.

  Once she’d been ushered in, however, by sturdy Aunt Patricia and scraggy Uncle Bertram, there were definite compensations: a massive grand piano, which took up most of the living-room and provided the perfect hiding-place beneath its black embrace. And a real parrot in a cage, with green and yellow feathers and black eyes like shiny beads, which always cried, ‘Don’t go!’ in a beseeching, almost frantic tone – even if you had only just arrived. And a fantastic spooky cellar, whose damp stone steps led down, down, down, to rats and thrills and shadows. And an attic crammed with treasures, where you could spend all afternoon admiring cabin trunks festooned with foreign labels, or rummaging through piles of ancient books, or nursing battered teddy bears, or dancing to an old musical box that played the Skaters’ Waltz. And no one said, ‘Don’t touch!’ or cared if you got dirty, or made you wash your hands. And she mustn’t forget the kitchen – a kitchen full of smells and foods they didn’t have at home – goulash, garlic, poppyseed cake and great cauldrons of red cabbage (which wasn’t red but purple, and had apples in and raisins, totally different from the pale soggy stuff her mother served at home).

  She stumbled on a loose paving stone and almost lost her footing, but at least it jolted her back to the present. Fixated on the pas
t, she had been blind to her surroundings, but now she noticed with surprise that even Wildwood Grove had definitely come up in the world. Burglar alarms bristled from the houses, and almost every door boasted solid brass fittings and elaborate holly wreaths. Bay trees preened in fancy tubs, and even pairs of smug stone lions lent status to the properties, whereas in her childhood, all that stood outside front doors were shabby prams or empty milk bottles.

  As she reached Aunt Patricia’s house, she could feel her heart pounding through her chest. Staring up at the brick façade, she seemed to fall into a time warp. The place looked just the same, its small square of cracked and dingy paving a shameful contrast to the terracotta tiling that graced the two adjoining homes. And instead of carriage lamps or fancy Roman numerals, a dirty, plastic figure 9 hung on the unpainted door, lurching to the left, as if drunk or incapacitated.

  She turned abruptly on her heel and made to walk away. Why try to make amends, when her only crime was to marry someone her aunt had never met but still despised? And she had no wish to confess that the marriage hadn’t lasted; that Stefan had gone running back to Hamburg with a younger female in tow. Or – hardest blow of all – that Stefan Junior had joined him, at the age of twenty-one. Her aunt would crow in triumph: ‘I told you so! You can’t trust bloody Germans.’

  The thought of her lost son and husband brought the usual flood of sadness, overlaid with guilt. Was something basically wrong with her, that she couldn’t maintain close relationships? If so, why scupper the chance of repairing one that, once, had meant so much? As a child, she had often secretly wished that Aunt Patricia were her mother. Her real mother was a stickler for small suburban proprieties: clean handkerchiefs and tidy rooms; hats and gloves for shopping trips; no elbows on the table or talking with one’s mouth full. Patricia, on the other hand, was a rebel and eccentric who carved her idiosyncratic way through the blazing jungle of life. Now, she was less convinced. Surely a rebel wouldn’t condemn the entire German race? Yet, however ambivalent her feelings, she had to go through with this ordeal and at least see her aunt once more.