“You couldn’t keep a frog inside a jam-jar. What’s it s’posed to eat?”
“Grass.”
“Frogs don’t eat grass.”
“Yes they do. That’s why they’re green.”
“Is it? I didn’t know that. Are you sure?”
This was the juncture at which Doreen would compound her previous tactical mistake by doubting her own intellectual capabilities as an adult against those of her infant daughter. Mick’s mum didn’t think that she was very clever or well-educated, and would endlessly defer to anyone whom she suspected might have a more firm grasp of the facts than she herself did. Ruinously, she included Alma in this category for no more reason than that Alma, even at the age of five, pretended to know everything and made her proclamations with such ringing confidence that it was simply easier to go along with her than to resist. Mick could remember how on one occasion, his eight-year-old sister had come home from school demanding beans on toast, a dish she’d heard her classmates mention but which was a new one on Doreen. She’d asked how Alma’s school-friends’ mothers would prepare the meal, at which Mick’s sister had insisted that cold beans were tipped onto a slice of bread, which was then toasted on a fork held to the fireplace. Astonishingly, Doreen had attempted this, purely on Alma’s say-so, and had not thought to employ her own superior judgement until their whole hearth was smothered in baked beans and splashes of tomato sauce with coal dust in suspension. That, or something equally unlikely, was how things turned out whenever anybody took Mick’s sister seriously. He could have told his mum that, back there in the shade and sunlight of the upper yard, if he’d been able to say anything through the balloon of sandpaper that was then steadily inflating in his throat. Instead, he’d shifted on her slippery lap and grizzled slightly, letting her get on with the ridiculous discussion that she’d stumbled into. Alma was now nodding in excitement, backing up her ludicrous assertion.
“Yes! All of the animals that eat grass are turned green. They told us it at school.”
This was a flat lie, but was one which played on Doreen’s insecurities about her own substandard 1930s education. You heard such a lot of marvellous new ideas in 1959 what with the Sputniks and all that, and who knew what astounding and unprecedented facts were being taught in modern classrooms? Decimals and long division, things like that, which Doreen’s own school days had barely touched on. Who was she to say? Perhaps this business with green animals all being fed on grass was something new that people had found out. But still she harboured doubts. It had been Alma, after all, who’d told her that lime cordial poured in boiling milk would make a kind of hot fruit milkshake.
“What about the cows ’n’ ’orses, then? Why ent they green, when they eat grass?”
Unflappable, Alma had waved aside her mother’s hesitant appeal to common sense.
“They are green, some of them. The ones that ent will go green when they’ve eaten enough grass.”
Too late, Mick’s mum had realised she was entering the world of quicksand nonsense that was Alma’s centre-parted, pigtailed, butterfly-slide-decorated head. She’d made a feeble yelp of protest as reality gave way beneath her feet.
“I’ve never seen a green cow! Alma, are you making all this up?”
“No” — this in a hurt, reproachful tone of voice. Doreen remained to be convinced.
“Well, then, why ent I seen one? Why ent I seen a green cow or ’orse?”
Alma, sitting beneath the window of the living room, had looked up at their mother levelly, her big grey-yellow eyes unblinking.
“Nobody can see them. It’s because they blend in with the fields.”
Despite, or possibly because of the dead serious tone in which this was delivered, Mick had been unable to prevent himself from laughing. Luckily, his ragged throat had done this for him, and the laugh came out as an unlubricated squeak, exploding halfway through into a jumping-jack-like string of coughs. Doreen had glared at Alma.
“Now look what you’ve done wi’ yer green cows!”
Surprised by their mum’s sudden conversational manoeuvre, Alma had for once been at a loss, unable to come up with a reply. Irrationality: Alma could dish it out all right, but couldn’t take it. Doreen had turned her attention to her youngest child, hacking and mewling there upon her knee.
“Ahh, bless ’im. ’Aya got a poorly throat, me duck? E’yar, you ’ave a pep like what the doctor said you should.”
“Pep” was the Boroughs’ term for sweet, and as Mick thought about it now it struck him that he’d never heard it used outside the district, or outside the homes of people who’d grown up there. Keeping Michael on her lap with one arm round his waist, Doreen had fumbled in her pocket for the square-shaped foil-and-paper tube she’d bought at Botterill’s, finally emerging with the pack of cherry-menthol Tunes. Deftly and with one hand, Doreen had carefully opened one end of the packet with her generous fingernails, squeezed out a single cough-drop, then proceeded to unpick the envelope-tucks of its individual wax-paper wrapping, where the tiny word “Tunes” was repeated several times in medicine-red. With a polite “ ’Scuse fingers” Doreen had held up the sticky crimson jewel to Michael’s lips, which had immediately parted like a hatchling’s beak so she could place the square-cut crystal on his tongue. He sucked it slowly, with its blunted corners poking up against his palate and his gums, especially the sore white-tipped ones at the back where teeth were starting to come through.
Doreen had sat there looking down at Michael fondly, her big face obscuring most of the blue Boroughs’ sky that had been visible between the leaning housetops. She must have been in her early thirties then, still trim and pretty with long features and dark, wavy hair. She’d lost the ghostly and unearthly silent film-star beauty that she’d had in pictures Mick had seen of her when she’d been younger, with her huge, wet, dreamy eyes, but it had been replaced by something warmer and less fragile, the appearance of somebody who’d at last grown comfortable with being who they were, somebody who no longer wore those painful clip-on button earrings. He’d gazed back at her, the cough-sweet tumbling and turning over in his mouth, losing its edges in his cherry-infused spittle, gradually transformed into a thin rose windowpane. Smiling, his mum had brushed a stray curl from the damp pink of his brow.
And then he’d coughed. He’d coughed until the air was forced out of his lungs and then had drawn a great big sucking breath in order to replace it. Somewhere in amongst this spluttering and confused bronchial activity, Mick had inhaled the Tune. Like a stray sink-plug dragged into the plughole of a draining basin to arrest its flow, the sweet fitted exactly in the small gap which remained in Mick’s absurdly swollen windpipe.
With horrific clarity, which made him grip the arm of the settee as he sat in the peaceful Kingsthorpe living room, Mick could remember the appalling moment when he knew his breath had stopped, a memory he had been spared until revived from his concussion earlier that day. He could recall his sudden and uncomprehending shock, his realisation that something was badly wrong and his uncertainty as to what it might be. It was as if he hadn’t previously noticed he was breathing, not until he found he couldn’t do it anymore.
The terror of the moment had been overwhelming, and he’d somehow drawn away from it, as if to a remote place deep inside himself. The sounds and movements of the garden seemed far off, as did the desperate, frightened tightness in his chest. His eyes must have glazed over, staring up into his mother’s overhanging face, and he remembered how her own expression had changed instantly to one of puzzlement and then mounting anxiety. He’d known, from his dissociated vantage, that he was the cause of her concern but couldn’t for the life of him remember what he’d done that had upset her so.