How did they dispose of your siblings when they broke things? Flush them down the john, joint by joint? Doesn’t the plumber find their bones when he unblocks the pipes?’
‘Okay, not literally murder me, but they’d go mental. It’s like…my greatest fear.’
‘Uh-huh. And how long will they stay “mental”? The term of your natural life? Twenty years? No possibility of parole?’
‘Not that long, obviously, but—’
‘Uh-huh. Eight months?’
‘Several days, definitely.’
‘What’s that? Several days? Holy shit, Jason.’
‘More than that. A week, most like. And they’d never let me forget it.’
‘Uh-huh. And how many weeks can you expect to remain in your mortal coil?’
‘I’m—’ (Hangman blocked my ‘sorry?’) ‘I don’t quite get you.’
‘Well, how many weeks are there in a year?’
‘Fifty-two.’
‘Uh-huh. And how many years are you alive for?’
‘It depends. Seventy.’
‘Seventy-five years, unless you worry yourself to death first. Okay. Fifty-two multiplied by seventy-five equals…’ She tapped the sum into a calculator. ‘Three thousand, nine hundred weeks. So. You tell me your greatest fear is that Ma and Pa’ll be mad at you for one of these almost four-thousand weeks. Or two. Or three.’ Rosamund puffed out her cheeks, then huffed out the air. ‘Can I swap your greatest fear for any one of mine? Take two of them. No, ten. Help yourself to a barrow-load. Please?’
A low-flying Tornado rattled all Cheltenham’s windows.
‘It’s a watch you broke! Not a future. Not a life. Not a backbone.’
‘You don’t know my parents.’ I sounded sulky.
‘The question here is, “Do you?”’
‘Of course I do. We live in the same house.’
‘You break my heart, Jason. Oh, you break my freakin’ heart.’
Outside Hythloday Mews I realized I’d left my map on Rosamund’s table, so I went back to get it. The blue door behind the desk’d swung open, showing a tiny bog. Rosamund was taking a thundering piss, booming ‘Row Row Row the Boat Gently Down the Stream’ in a foreign language. Women had to sit down to pee, I’d always believed, but Rosamund pissed standing with her skirt hoiked up to her bum. My cousin Hugo Lamb says in America they’ve got these rubber willies for Women’s Lib women. Maybe Rosamund had one. Her legs were hairier than Dad’s, mind, which is pretty unusual for women, I thought. I was dead embarrassed, so I just took my map, quietly left and walked back towards Mum’s gallery. In an unfriendly baker’s I bought a sausage roll and sat down in a triangle of park. The sycamores’re tatty now August’s almost over. BACK TO SCHOOL posters’re in the shops. These last days of freedom rattle like a nearly empty box of Tic-Tacs.
Till today I thought replacing my granddad’s Omega’d just be a matter of tracking one down. But now the problem’s about getting hold of hundreds of pounds. I chewed my sausage roll, wondering how I could (a) lie to explain the watch’s disappearance and (b) make it not my fault and (c) make the lie invulnerable to questioning.
It can’t be done.
Sausage rolls start off tasting lovely but by the time you finish them they taste of peppery pig bollock. According to Julia that’s exactly what sausage rolls’re made of.
Mum’s friend Yasmin Morton-Bagot owns La Boîte aux Mille Surprises, but Mum manages it with an assistant called Agnes. (Dad calls it ‘La Bot’ as in ‘bottom’ for a joke, but ‘boîte’ means ‘box.’) La Boîte aux Mille Surprises is half-shop, half-gallery. The shop part sells stuff you can’t buy outside London. Fountain pens from Paris, chess sets from Iceland, atomic clocks from Austria, jewellery from Yugoslavia, masks from Burma. The back room’s the gallery. Customers come from all over England ’cause Yasmin Morton-Bagot knows artists all over the world. The most expensive painting at the moment’s by Volker Oldenburg. Volker Oldenburg paints modern art in a potato cellar in West Berlin. I’m not sure what Tunnel #9 is a picture of but it costs £1,950.
Thirteen years of pocket money is £1,950.
‘We’re celebrating, Jason.’ Agnes’s got a slidey Welsh accent so I don’t always know if I’ve heard her right. ‘Your mum sold a painting just now.’
‘Great. One of the expensive ones?’
‘One of the very, very expensive ones.’
‘Hello, darling,’ Mum appeared from the gallery. ‘Nice morning?’
‘Uh’ (Hangman stopped the ‘not’ of ‘not bad’) ‘fine. Agnes says you just’ (Hangman blocked ‘sold’) ‘a customer bought a picture.’
‘Oh, he was in the mood for a bit of a plunge.’
‘Helena,’ Agnes went stern, ‘you had him eating out of your hand. That bit about cars losing value but art always gaining. You could