Sex and Stravinsky Page 5
Anyway, Zoe’s even tried doing something she’s never done before – i.e., going up to Mrs Mead on her own and pretending that her mum wants her to try and swap things round, so she can have a girl – but there’s nothing Mrs Mead is prepared to do about it. That’s except for producing a whole lot of soft soap in a letter that she tells Zoe to pass on to Caroline, which is really embarrassing. I mean as if it wasn’t hard enough telling Mrs Mead a lie like that in the first place.
Dear Mrs Silver
Please be reassured. Zoe is such a sensible girl. She is always so dependable and resourceful that you really need have no fear with regard to the French exchange. I know that she will cope splendidly.
Then she’s signed it ‘Regan Mead’, which is really weird. I mean for teachers to have first names at all, even though her own mother’s a teacher of course, but that seems different. Anyway, isn’t Regan one of the daughters from hell in that Shakespeare play where the eyes get gouged out onstage? The letter is burning a hole in Zoe’s pocket all the way home, so she walks round and round the long way home and finally goes down this little alley that leads to the back of a shop and she tears it up and puts the pieces into the shop’s litter bin, but even then she’s terrified that she’s going to be found out for reading somebody else’s letter. For ‘dependable’, she’s thinking, read orthodontic braces; read red hair that’s too curly; read freckles and nearly flat-chested; read second-to-shortest girl in the class. In others words, read not blonde and not boy-mad, with not underwired uplift bras. That’ll be why she’s got the French boy. Mrs Mead thinks there’s no chance that he’ll want to get smoochy with her. Still, at least if you haven’t grown boobs yet you can go on day-dreaming about becoming a dancer, like in Dream of Sadler’s Wells, or like in her current top favourite, Lola Comes to London.
‘Do I have to go?’ Zoe says to her mother, once she’s got home. ‘Please can I not go? I’ll work extra hard at French, I promise.’
‘Of course you’re going,’ Caroline says, and she’s sounding all upbeat about it.
Zoe can tell that her mum is really enjoying the idea of the French exchange. She’s making it into one of her eager educational projects. And it’s only because, even though she can speak French really well and she backpacked all over before she came to England from Australia as a graduate student, she and Zoe’s dad never have proper holidays now, like going to Provence, or Malta, or the Canary Islands, or somewhere else nice, like Maggs and Mattie’s families do.
They’re on a tight budget because of having to provide for Gran, who lives near them instead of in Australia, because of some ‘difficulty’ she’s had way back with Zoe’s Aunt Janet whom Zoe’s never met, but it wouldn’t be ‘kind’ to talk about it, Caroline says. So, even though they both go out to work full-time, they can still only ever afford to do stuff like taking tents to St Ives and walking Offa’s Dyke.
‘If I didn’t go to France, would it save enough money for me to start ballet lessons?’ Zoe says. ‘Because I’ll soon be too old.’
‘Oh stop it, Zoe,’ her mother says. ‘For heaven’s sake. This is all too silly and babyish. You’re far too old already. And I just know that you’ll love France once you get there. You’ll be half an hour from Paris. Just think how exciting that’ll be. You’ll go on lovely trips to Versailles and Fontainebleau. You’ll go to the Louvre. You’ll be walking along the Seine to Notre-Dame and peering into all those little art galleries and boutiques. And the food will be just wonderful. You can buy crêpes in the street. And think of the little brioches and pains au chocolat you’ll be having for breakfast. I expect at supper there’ll be all those delicious soups and terrines. The French are so much better about sitting down to proper family meals.’
But ‘soups and terrines’ are what Caroline makes at home from her French cookbooks. And, anyway, Maggs’s older sister, who did the French exchange two years ago, says that all her Maman ever gave her to eat was sort of instant chicken-nugget things and bags of cheap cup cakes with lots of vanilla in them, like those ones you can get in a plastic bag at the Co-op on special offer.
‘I want you to say I’m a vegetarian,’ Zoe says, ‘because otherwise I’ll have to eat liver.’
‘But you’re not a vegetarian,’ Caroline says. ‘I don’t mind writing a letter to Maman saying that you’d prefer not to eat intensively farmed meat.’
‘Please don’t write a letter,’ Zoe says in sudden panic. ‘Promise me you won’t write a letter, or they’ll think I’m a freak.’ Then she says, ‘How do you say “liver” in French?’
‘Foie,’ her mother says. ‘But it depends on the animal, of course. So calves’ liver would be foie de veau, for example, and pigs’ liver –’
‘And now,’ Zoe says, ‘how do you say, “I don’t like”?’
‘I’ll make you a list of useful words and phrases,’ Caroline says. ‘Oh, and I’ve ordered you some really good maps of your area. Ones like an Ordnance Survey map only bigger – and, don’t worry – it’s in English. Then there’s a really good street map. They’re from a special map shop in Covent Garden, and they’re very hard to come by in this country.’ Meaning that her mother has already done a whole lot of research into the French exchange project. ‘So, you see,’ Caroline says, ‘you can’t possibly get lost, even if the famous French boy gives you the slip and goes off with his mates to play football.’
Zoe can’t bear it that her mother can think it’s funny when the whole thing has been tormenting her for weeks.
‘Or maybe he’ll teach you how to play?’ Caroline adds, with a twinkle.
The maps come in the next day’s post. They show that she’ll be staying in a newish housing development on the outer edge of the town, between an ancient aqueduct that gets Caroline really excited and a huge area of dense woodland. Meanwhile, Mattie and Maggs will be staying miles away, right in the town centre, near all the shops.
‘The French have such amazing forests,’ Caroline is saying, as she pores over the maps. ‘There’s so much more woodland than we have here.’
The only thing Zoe really likes about the maps is that one of them has got a misprint that has turned ‘huts’ into ‘hats’. All the woodland hut-diagrams look like those little houses on the Monopoly board, and next to each one it says ‘forest hat’. Then, far up in the woods, it says ‘inaccessible forest hat’.
‘What’s the point of a “hat”, if it’s inaccessible?’ she says.
She knows that the edge-of-town housing development is going to be just like where Gran lives on the outskirts of Oxford, because it’s got the same kind of stupid winding roads, just like in Neighbours on the telly. Where her gran lives is called Garden Haven, even though all the front gardens have been turned into those crappy concrete spaces for parking a car. Her dad says that he needs a ball of string to find his way to Gran’s house without getting lost, because he can’t ever remember which winding road to go down next, and that all the houses look the same.
But they don’t really, because they’ve all got different replacement front doors and windows, and some of them have got concrete swans or concrete squirrels and rabbits in the front. Also they have different net curtains, so you can count three houses from the concrete squirrel and four houses from the net curtains that are ruched up in the middle, like when your school skirt’s got caught up in your knickers at the back. Then you go past the house with the oval in the front door that’s got a stained-glass sailing ship in it, and then, another two from that, is the one that never takes down the Christmas decorations in the front window.
It’s just that her dad really dislikes Gran, Zoe can tell, so he doesn’t ever want to get there – and Zoe’s not that great on Gran either, but just occasionally she has to stay there overnight when her parents are out and if there’s some reason why she can’t go to Maggs or Mattie’s, which is what she usually does. It’s always been pretty boring at Gran’s house, especially now that she’s outgrown the album of Invisible Janet’s wedding photographs, and th
e musical box with the ballerina on top that she used to like so much, but these days Zoe can tell that the way she’s got her arms and legs is all wrong. And then Gran has got all these little china figurines on shelves that Zoe used to like, especially the one of a lady wearing a china mob cap and lying in a little china bed, with a man in a china wig and china knickerbockers standing alongside her and holding her hand.
‘Since you’re so fond of that, I’ll give it to you one day, when you’re good,’ Gran said, but Zoe was always good and Gran never gave it to her, so eventually, one day when she was a lot younger, she stole it. But then she felt so much like a thief that she had to keep it hidden in a box under her bed all the time, and she never had any fun with it.
The French boy’s name is Gérard. Zoe knows this because on both sides of the Channel the children have had to spend a double language period writing letters to their partners, each in the other’s language. They have had to introduce themselves to their partners and say things about themselves and their families and their hobbies. By the look of the letters, they have all been written with heavy dependence on the dictionary. Zoe knows that her own letter was crap, but she’s pretty sure it wasn’t quite as crap as Gérard’s. And at least hers was quite a bit longer.
Dear Zoe
I am a tall merry fellow with brown hairs. The hairs, which are curled, are also short. I have twelve years and my sister has sixteen years. She is Véronique. She likes much the music pop but I like much to make the hunt with my father and with my dog also, which is called Mimi. I like also much the football and also much the football player Zinédine Zidane, which is called Zizou. Indeed to you.
I am your friend, Gérard.
The Tall Merry Fellow has sent Mattie and Maggs into fits.
‘He sounds like a stilt walker in a stripy top hat,’ Mattie says.
‘He sounds like a total nerd,’ Zoe says, secretly wondering if Mattie and Maggs’s insides are also turning to jelly over the French exchange, or if it’s only her. ‘And I bet his sister’s a cow,’ she says.
Caroline, as well as getting the maps, has gone to the trouble of buying Zoe a torch the size of a cigarette and she’s soon made that list of ‘useful phrases’, which she pastes to the inside of Zoe’s little backpack. Zoe wishes her mother wouldn’t always be so keen to enter into the spirit of school trips and outings, like the way, when they walked the Ridgeway, e.g., her mum went and bought her Puck of Pook’s Hill because it had Wayland’s Smithy in it. And then, whenever Zoe gets home from anything ‘educational’, she always wants to know about it. Like when they went to Cirencester on the coach, to look at the Roman ruins, and all Zoe could really remember about it was how she and Maggs and Mattie had got the giggles because there was a used condom in the amphitheatre, as well as lots of old crisp packets. It always ends up leaving Zoe feeling a bit stupid and inadequate, like she was letting Caroline down.
The class goes to France by coach, leaving at 7 a.m. with all the mothers to wave them off. Zoe wishes her dad was there so that at least she could say goodbye to him because she knows he’s going off to a conference in three days’ time. It’s in South Africa, and then he’ll be away for nearly a whole month, so there’ll be no sense in trying to phone home to ask him to rescue her from the Tall Merry Fellow and his sister Véronique. Anyway, she hasn’t got a mobile phone and she won’t understand how to use the call boxes, even though Caroline has taped the code for the UK inside her backpack along with all the useful phrases and she’s got Zoe some phone cards as well.
But Zoe knows that if she tries to use the cards there’ll be a recorded voice talking to her in French that she won’t understand, because that’s exactly what happened when they went on a school day-trip to Boulogne to practise ‘shopping’ in French. In the event, everywhere was self-service, so you never had to ask for anything. You just put your things on the counter and handed over whatever money it said you owed on the screen.
Zoe is always the last to get stuff like a mobile phone and she hasn’t even got a personal stereo, because Caroline thinks it’s not good for ‘the young’ to have things that rob them of their resourcefulness. Plus they’re much too expensive, and a mobile phone will fry your brain and a personal stereo will give you hearing loss and tinnitus later on, when you’re about a hundred and three.
And her clothes aren’t usually that OK either, though grown-ups are forever saying, ‘Oh Caroline, your Zoe’s got such beautiful clothes. She always looks so elegant.’ This is because Caroline finds these designer bargains at jumble sales and in charity shops, usually in snot green or chocolate brown, or black, just when Zoe is longing for baby pink and sparkles, but she’s never had the nerve actually to refuse to wear Caroline’s tasteful finds. ‘That green is so wonderful with her hair,’ they say.
‘But it’s Moschino, darling,’ Caroline says, about this black bomber jacket thingy. ‘Zoe, it couldn’t be more stylish.’
And then, just as her peers are beginning to get the black habit, Caroline will suddenly do an ironic take on Barbie gear and she’ll come back with a pastel fur-fabric dolly coat, or with little rhinestone shoes. Fortunately, right now, the black Moschino bomber jacket has really come into its own and Zoe can wear it with pride on the French exchange trip. She has to hand that to Caroline, but, even so, she knows she’ll never, ever be able to forgive her mum for that one-time floral take on Birkenstocks. Not ever.
All the cases go in the hold, while the backpacks with the packed lunches go with you in the coach. As well as her packed lunch, Zoe has a roll of freezer-bags with sealer clips in case of being sick, because she’s always sick on trips, which is another thing to be worried about. Once Zoe said to Josh that being car sick was her ‘cultural heritage’, because it’s true she gets car sickness from her dad, along with being short and having too curly chestnut hair. But her dad said that nausea on coach trips couldn’t be a person’s cultural heritage; it was more of a genetic heritage. He said that ‘culture’ has to do with beliefs and customs, so it had to be things like plate-smashing at weddings and wearing corks around your hat, and having to marry your second cousin when you’re twelve.
Right now, at least Zoe really likes her luggage, because her things are all in a beautiful black hat box with old luggage labels on it that she’s persuaded Caroline to give her for keeps. The labels say things like ‘Kaiser Hotel, Baden-Baden’ and ‘Deutsche Europäische Linie’, because the hat box once belonged to a piano teacher called Lottie Kirschner who came to England as a refugee in 1933 and started a bookshop. Then, when she was eighty, she put this spidery little notice in the newsagent about selling up her possessions because she was moving into a retirement flat. Caroline went along with Zoe, and they met this dainty, beautiful old lady, who gave them coffee and walnut cake and pressed a little brooch upon Zoe, which made her wish she could’ve had Lottie Kirschner for her grandmother, instead of Gran, who was a bit of a pain; and her other grandparents – that’s her dad’s parents – who sound a lot nicer, are both dead.
And she didn’t really know them, anyway. She just sort of feels she knew them from what her dad’s told her about when he took her to see them in Tanzania when she was just a baby and from a book of photographs she’s got that Josh’s mum gave her. And also, she used to send these funny little story books sometimes before she died that had been written for African schoolchildren – like her favourite one, A Little Red Bus Called ‘Take Me Home’, about this old bus driver called Mr Tumbo, who was sad because he’d been made redundant, but then he and this boy called Jonah find a little bus in a scrapyard and they secretly fix it up for weeks and weeks, and it becomes the village bus, so Mr Tumbo’s got a job again and so has Jonah, because he’s the ‘turn boy’, which means he puts all the bicycles and sacks of mangos and chickens and stuff on to the roof rack, and everyone in the village is really pleased to have their own bus.
Her dad’s mum died quite suddenly, when Zoe was five. She just went to bed one night and then in the
morning she was dead. It made her dad go very quiet for a long time and, after he got back from her funeral, he used to go for really long walks all by himself for ages and not talk much.
It’s quite hard to pack a case that’s round, but Zoe’s case is very neat. That’s because she gave up and let Caroline do it and her mum’s a packing genius. She’s even remembered to slip in a flat-pack zipper bag, because she knows that Zoe most probably won’t be able to fit her things back in the hat box when she comes home. When Caroline packs, she tessellates, like in maths, leaving no spaces at all, while Zoe and her dad use the ‘stuff’ method.
Each child’s case contains a small gift as instructed by Mrs Mead.
‘A small gift for your hostess,’ she says. ‘Nothing expensive or flashy, please.’
So Caroline has starched and pressed two antique white-linen guest towels with handmade lace trim that she’s wrapped in pink tissue paper from Paperchase. Zoe is really worried because she doesn’t think that a present should be second-hand and it must be that her concern is showing in her face.
‘Maman will love them,’ Caroline says firmly. ‘The French appreciate good linen.’
She’s also made the family a batch of fudge, which she’s bagged in Cellophane and tied with a gold ribbon, saved from last year’s Easter egg, but Zoe decides to pass the fudge round the bus, once they’re beyond the ring road, because presents, as well as not being second-hand, aren’t supposed to be home-made either. It’s that lovely crumbly fudge like you get in Scotland because Caroline has got the recipe from Gran, who says she’s Scottish, even though Josh says that she sounds like Dame Edna and she’s only ever been to Scotland once, in the year that Zoe’s parents got married. Bonnie Scotland is her heritage, she says – though she sometimes calls Zoe ‘ma petite’. Her name is Mrs McCleod. Mrs Catriona McCleod.