endless brass wall hangings and crocheted doilies and make a mental note that next time we are producing a period piece the props department would do well to consider Mrs Smith as a source. Whilst the fixtures and fittings are old-fashioned and, frankly, ugly, they are immaculate. My mother could run her finger along any skirting board or wardrobe top and fail to find cause for concern.
At first I’d been embarrassed by Mrs Smith’s insistence that I stay in their family home. I don’t do family homes. I occasionally stay over at Josh’s but his parents’ houses (note the plural) are so big that there is never any danger of bumping into a parent on the stairwell. Anyway, you can’t justifiably call Josh’s places ‘family homes’. His parents are only together in a nominal sense, negating the term family. And the term home. They both take advantage of the size and number of their abodes to avoid each other. If his mother is in the country, you can put money on his father being ‘up in town’; if his father is in the country, his mother is ensconced in their Spanish villa. Married bliss. Yet despite my reservations about accepting Mrs Smith’s invite I do have an inexplicable, but overwhelming, curiosity with regard to Darren and so I am delighted at the prospect of sleeping in his childhood bed. I casually try to establish if the room I am about to be shown has always been Darren’s and Darren’s alone. Linda assures me that it has: ‘This room has seen everything from bed-wetting to’ – she hesitates – ‘well, bedwetting, I suppose.’ Too much information.
She pushes open the heavy wooden door and we both struggle to get my (extremely large) case into the (extremely small) room. Like a lot of parents, Mrs Smith has lovingly preserved the shrine of her eldest son’s childhood. I feel I’ve just been handed Darren’s diary. The room is a thumbprint. There is a skinny, hard-looking bed pushed up to the wall under the window. It gives the impression that sleeping was a low priority for the youthful Darren. I can’t help but wonder if the same still holds true. There’s an ancient wardrobe and a small hi-fi/dressing-table unit. It’s from MFI and I expect the twelve-year-old Darren demanded it as an act of rebellion against the fifties’ bedroom suites. There are posters on the wall that I would expect in the room of any male who had grown up in the seventies and stagnated in the eighties. Original Star Trek, the A Team and Starsky and Hutch, then Debbie Harry and Pam Ewing. These are the only nods towards a conventional bedroom. The rest is an Aladdin’s cave meets Treasure Island meets Batman’s cave. There are zillions of books. They line the windowsill and countless shelves, and the overflows are piled in precarious, wavering, waist-high stacks around the walls of the room. There’s everything from Beano Annuals to a Reader’s Digest collection of Charles Dickens’s work. His taste is wide but the thing that all the books have in common is that they are well thumbed. Lying on top of the books are a number of models that have obviously been made by a young Darren. I think his mother has arranged them in date order as the ones nearest to the door are childish (although charming in their naïvety) – rockets and submarines, made from loo rolls and cornflakes boxes. Then Darren must have introduced elastic bands and Dairylea tubs to make helicopters and combine harvesters. The models grow in complexity and size until finally, in the corner opposite the door, there is a massive Meccano model about three foot high and two wide.
‘It’s a replica of NASA,’ explains Linda. She must realize that I’m none the wiser because she starts dropping small marbles into buckets, which turn a wheel, which activates a pump, which motivates an engine, which launches a rocket etc. It’s fascinating and it’s more complicated than Mouse-Trap.
‘It must have taken him hours to build.’
‘It did.’
‘Didn’t he have any friends?’
‘Hundreds,’ she grins cheerfully, oblivious to my implied insult. ‘But he’s always been fascinated by ecology and wider than that, the universe, and—’
‘The reason we are here.’ I can hardly keep the smirk out of my voice.
‘Absolutely,’ enthuses Linda. She reminds me of the Americans – they don’t get sarcasm either.
She smiles at me expectantly and, unusually, I’m shamed. I’m forced to mutter, ‘It’s very good.’ Which is honest enough.