The Children's Writer Read Online Free PDF Page A

or twice I saw a woman go in the front gate, between the stone plinths, and I guessed by her age and clothes and the groceries she carried in plastic shopping bags that she was the mother, but this was only a guess. Only in my imagination.
    What was real were the games the boys played with their father. After he went inside, I suppose for a cuppa (or a beer?), he’d reappear with a soccer ball and his sleeves rolled up. The boys and the father would kick this ball in the street (too involved to notice me), up and down and back again, laughing and yelling for a good hour or so then, still laughing, they’d go inside, because it was dark, and shut the door.
    I would see nothing for a while (dinner time in the kitchen at the back? Bath time?), then a light would go onin the front of the house, behind a lace curtain there, and I’d imagine the father reading stories to the boys.
    This is all made up.
    Probably completely untrue.
    At best imagined (like that episode when I stabbed Chanteleer with the pen), but it would be good to be loved like that.

5
    S unday morning, just a week after we heard Chanteleer at the Redmond Barry theatre, it was time to get ready for the garden party at his house in Kew.
    (I really don’t want to write about this. I really don’t want to invite him back into my memory, my life, where once again he might hurt me, as he did, but if I’m going to tell this, and be rid of him I know that I must.)
    So that morning I got up, made coffee and toast, and took it in to Lootie.
    She sat up in bed (yes, Rory, we were sleeping together) and said, ‘Did you check on your coat? For the garden party?’
    I sat beside her, one hand on her leg, my coffee in the other. ‘It’s there,’ I said.
    ‘I’m sure that it’s there,’ she said, ‘but is it pressed? Is it nice?’
    ‘You’re nice,’ I said, rubbing her leg.
    ‘Charlie,’ she said, pulling away. ‘I asked you to check that it was okay. Did you?’
    ‘Why shouldn’t it be okay?’ I asked. ‘It just hangs in the cupboard. I never wear it.’
    ‘Get it out,’ she said. ‘Show me.’
    This was the second Sunday morning that Chanteleer had occupied our minds. So I said, ‘Why? Do you think Chanteleer might be keen on me?’
    (Being ignorant, it was nothing to make jokes in those days. Lard arse though I was, my assurance in my love for Lootie made me invulnerable. I believed that the might of my love for her, the all-encompassing certainty of it, guaranteed her love for me. I was, of course, a fool.)
    Lootie snorted. ‘You’re revolting sometimes.’
    ‘He might like revolting. Being so twee himself.’
    ‘I’m going for a run,’ she said. ‘We have to leave at quarter to eleven.’
    ‘How are we getting there?’ I said.
    ‘Cab.’
    ‘Cab? That costs. Can’t we ride our bikes?’
    She was rooting around in a drawer, looking for her running shorts, I guess. ‘I’m wearing a dress,’ she said. ‘My white linen shift. So bikes are out. And I’ll take that blue linen bolero, in case it gets chilly.’
    ‘This is a garden party, you say?’ I said to her back as she headed for the door.
    ‘That’s what he said.’
    ‘So, is that like a bar-b-que?’
    ‘No,’ she said, all snooty like. ‘It’s a garden party. So we present ourselves at our best.’
    ‘Meaning?’
    ‘No shorts and no T-shirts. Smart casual is the go.’ She yelled this from the front door. ‘Hence my linen and your coat. Get it?’
    ‘So there won’t be snags and tomato sauce?’
    Either she didn’t hear me or she couldn’t be bothered answering.
    I opened my wardrobe (Lootie was too neat to share) and took out my coat.
    We arrived a little after eleven. We had asked the cabbie to pull in at a bottle shop. Lootie chose the champagne. It cost $42.50, which was top shelf. For us, at least, on our income. I said nothing.
    I guess the episode with the coat, and the white cricket flannels that she made me wear, had prepared me. And the white tennis