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  I don’t mind fondue. I just don’t like to admit it. Frank thinks it’s excellent, is happy to admit it, and regularly talks his way into being invited over with fondue in mind. My parents happen to like Frank and they’ve got no sense of boundaries, so he’s here a lot. I’ve discussed it with them, I’ve said that petrol money is the prescribed payment, and I’ve told them they should think this through. They should realise Frank’s parents will make me go over there for a barbecue. They’re totally into payback. To which my mother said, ‘They’re not gangsters, Philby. And you know how Frank likes fondue.’

  Since we have a guest tonight, we move into special-occasion drill. My mother has put the wine cask in the fridge.

  She squirts some into a glass for Frank and he turns to me and says, ‘Wine on a weeknight. Your family . . . ’ As if he couldn’t be more impressed. ‘This is like . . . France.’

  ‘Oh, Monsieur Francois,’ my mother says. ‘Fondue pour vous ce soir, peut-etre?’

  ‘Wow,’ he says. ‘Bugger me. Um . . . pretty much all the French I know is voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir.’

  ‘Frank, this is my mother you’re talking to.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. I don’t know what it means. Ca plane pour moi? That’s the other bit I know.’

  ‘Frank, meaning. When it comes to language, meaning is part of knowing.’

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘No, not whatever. That’s generally accepted. It’s a rule. At least try to be aware when you’re asking someone to go to bed with you.’

  ‘Hey, sometimes that stuff just happens.’

  ‘Well done Frank, then.’ My mother raises her glass, and clinks it against his.

  My father comes in the back door. ‘Wine,’ he says in mock surprise. ‘I turn my back and we’re entertaining. Evening, Frank. Phoebe. Philby. A good day had all round, then? I’ll just get changed. Back in a tick.’

  He stops to take his lunch box out of his briefcase, and he hums as he goes down the hall. He reappears in about a minute, his jacket swapped for his comfy green cardigan and his highly polished black leather shoes replaced by loafers.

  ‘You could lose the tie, Allan,’ my mother tells him, getting twitchy about the style crisis he’s visiting upon us.

  ‘Company,’ he says, and nods Frank’s way.

  ‘And Frank does so love a chap in a tie.’

  ‘Perhaps after the main. We’ll see. No one else has to wear one. Personal choice. That’s what it’s all about these days. Philby. Obstetrics. Like it?’

  ‘Dunno. Day two. We’ll see.’

  No one knows exactly what my father was like prior to his service with the British armed forces in India. He might have been just like this, but we don’t think so. He’s now an accountant for a cardboard-box manufacturer and he still, at times, speaks like a telegram. But it’s something that hovers on the uneasy boundary between a past life’s habits and self-parody, and I think that’s the way he likes it. He’s a military man, but then he’s not. He takes a lunch box to work, he prefers cardigans after hours, he whitens his moustache to play Santa at the office family Christmas party. He’s done that as long as I can remember, since his mixture of round-shouldered and avuncular, ready and willing means there could be no other choice.

  Frank calls him Big Al, since the name’s totally wrong for him, and my father likes it, since it makes him feel as though he’s in with the young crowd. Frank provokes him into telling rambling bullshit stories—already the closest thing my father has to a hobby—and then he hangs on every word, as if it’s Jesus and a parable. He can’t be getting his full quota of tedious parental experiences at home.

  We fondue, pronging our tiny pieces of meat and lowering them into the hot oil.

  Our fondue cooker is burnt-orange and also burnt, owing to its circa-1970 origin and years of much use. It was originally burnt-orange with a chain of white flowers around it just below the handles, but they’re now very off-white or yellowish or brown. Fondue, at our place, has never gone out of style. Frank says that the rest of the world doesn’t know what they’re missing and that, when fondue comes back, we’ll have people like my mother to thank for keeping the art alive.

  He and my father each lose a piece of meat at the same time, and end up fighting over one they both reprong at once. Frank likes fondue because it combines food and sport.

  There’s apple pie afterwards and my mother says, ‘You’ll notice you each get your own plate. So, no sword fighting.’

  ‘Speaking of which,’ my father says, ‘how are you going with the script?’

  ‘Pirates of Penzance,’ she tells Frank. ‘We’re doing it at the Arts Theatre in June. Rehearsals start in a week.’

  ‘Pirates of Penzance? I think they put it on at school once.’

  ‘I did try to suggest it wasn’t a very original choice, but I was shouted down. That’s part of its charm, apparently.’

  ‘And you get to do sword fighting?’

  ‘No, wrong gender for that in G&S. Wouldn’t it be much more interesting if we swapped the gender of all the characters around? I wouldn’t mind some sword fighting.’ She closes one eye, swishes wildly in the air with her spoon and puts on a rather bad pirate voice, demanding doubloons.

  ‘I could practically see the parrot on your shoulder,’ my father says, giving me a look that suggests he’s glad she’s in a non-combatant role.

  ‘From the way that voice sounded I thought it was the parrot on her shoulder.’

  My mother drops the piracy and puts on her famous look of disdain. ‘The artist is never appreciated in her own land.’

  ‘I thought it was just at home you weren’t appreciated, not the whole land. They quite like you at the Arts Theatre.’

  ‘Well, where you work’s a world apparently, and there’s only ever three of you there at once. So this can be a land then, here at home. A three-person land. Harris Land.’

  ‘Which leaves me with Greenland,’ Frank says. ‘So I’m looking pretty good.’

  ‘Honestly,’ my mother goes on, ‘that Ron Todd of yours. Him and his Worlds. What’s it about? What makes you have a world, rather than just a shop? And how do you pick what kind of world it is? Frank, if you had a world, what would it be?’

  He gives it some thought. ‘Well, the guy at the Royal who marked our long cases’d say Frank Green’s World of Mindless Copying, but we’re going to have a talk about that.’

  ‘What would I have? What would I have?’ my mother says, diving into her topic. ‘Phoebe Harris’s World of No Sword Fighting. Phoebe Harris’s World of Scrawny Roses. Maybe that’s too specific. Phoebe Harris’s World of Scrawn. What else have I got that could fit in with that if it was a shop? I could always sell you, Philby.’

  ‘Which begins to explain Phil Harris’s World of Bullworkers and Low Self-Esteem, but don’t worry about me.’

  ‘Or you could go for lattice,’ my father says to her, not worrying about me at all. ‘There’s an awful lot of lattice out there. You know your lattice, Phoebe.’

  ‘And pots. I know them too. Phoebe Harris’s World of Lattice and Pots. And what would you have, Allan?’

  ‘Well . . . ’ He’s part of the way through clearing the plates from the table but he stops to think about it, to think about the kind of world that might be his. ‘Allan Harris’s World of Cardboard, I suppose.’ There’s a pause, and he frowns. ‘Some things really are just jobs, aren’t they?’ He takes my mother’s plate, and mine, and carries everything into the kitchen. There’s a whining and thumping from the pipes as he starts to run water into the sink. ‘Ruddy airlock,’ he says, and then there’s some muttering that we can’t make out.

  ‘Go and tell your father you can’t imagine a world without cardboard,’ my mother says. ‘Be a good son.’

  ‘Blackberry Nip, anybody?’ he calls out. ‘I’m having one. Anyone join me?’

  4

  Friday gives us our first experience of large numbers of pregnant abdomens. It’s our turn at Anten
atal Clinic, our chance to put Monday’s checklist into action and to take an obstetric history in earnest for the first time.

  ‘Here’s how we do it,’ the charge sister tells us. ‘All the patients are here by eight-thirty. You’ll see a few of them as a group—all six of you, with Doctor Bellamy—if there are interesting findings. Then you’ll sit in with the registrars or consultants for a couple of consultations, then we’ll get you doing the assessments yourselves and you can present them to whichever doctor’s due to see them.’

  The word on Theo Bellamy is good. He’s about my parents’ age and scorn isn’t part of his repertoire. His private practice is always overloaded, but he keeps up his regular public sessions at the Mater too.

  ‘Mandy,’ he says, introducing us to the first patient, ‘is an example of things going very well.’ We’re in his room and Mandy is around our age, and lying with a drape over her lower abdomen. ‘I thought some normal findings would be worth a look before moving on to other things.’

  He talks us through the abdominal examination, and every move his hands make seems considered, a move you could trust to bring back information.

  ‘Warm hands. That’s the place to start. No one’ll thank you for cold hands. And with this examination, it’s with the whole hand. Don’t go jabbing in with your fingertips. Feel what’s under your whole hand, then glide it across and feel again. Feel this,’ he says, taking my hand. ‘Tell me what you feel.’

  ‘Okay, it’s firm, it’s quite firm, almost hard. It’s rounded.’

  ‘What do you think it might be?’

  ‘A knee?’

  ‘Think again about the size.’

  ‘Yes, sorry. A head?’

  ‘Good, a head. Now we’ll acquaint ourselves quickly with the other main features, if it’s all right with Mandy. Everyone watching. The others of you will be doing this after . . . ’ he turns his head from the abdomen to look at my name tag . . . ‘Philip. So, Philip, first we have the head, as you’ve found, then a shoulder lying in the midline.’ He moves my hand there. The shoulder is smaller than the head, I’m less sure I could find it myself. I’d find the lump, but I don’t know that I’d be finding a shoulder. ‘And limbs here. They’re irregular and they might even move while you’re doing the examination. And the limbs being here tells us that the shoulder we felt was the left shoulder. Which means that if you feel to the right of that . . . ’ I move my hand. There’s almost an edge to what I’m feeling, a firm curved border of a baby. ‘What do you think that’d be?’

  ‘The back?’

  ‘Exactly. And it’s curved because it’s flexed. So we’ve found a back here, and a shoulder here, and a head here,’ he says, touching each lightly, this time with the tip of his finger. ‘Do you want to have a shot at how we’d describe what we’ve found?’

  ‘Okay. Is it longitudinal?’

  ‘Yes, the lie is longitudinal. First do you want to tell me how many foetuses you think there are?’

  ‘Um, one.’

  ‘Good, always good to start with that.’

  ‘So there is one? It sounded like a trick question.’

  ‘No, there’s one. It’s just a good routine to get into. There’s one, isn’t there Mandy? It wasn’t a trick question?’

  ‘There’d better be one,’ she says. ‘Don’t want to go finding another one at thirty-two weeks.’

  ‘Which,’ Doctor Bellamy says, ‘brings us to our next point—what the examination suggests about the gestational age of the foetus. The first thing we look at is the height of the fundus which, in this case, is consistent with dates, at around thirty-two weeks. Then, as you said, we have a longitudinal lie. And the position? Remember, think about where the occiput and back are. And also remember where the shoulder is.’

  ‘Okay. The occiput and back are over on the right and the shoulder is in the midline, so right occipitolateral.’

  ‘Good. Now everyone else . . . ’

  I step aside and one by one the others check their hands are warm enough and put them on Mandy’s abdomen. We’re quite used to tumours now, used to all kinds of abdominal masses since we’ve just done surgery, so it’s odd to feel a mass that’s large and complicated and not a disease. Particularly odd to feel one with the parts of an undiscovered person and to be able to picture it in there, waiting its turn.

  We’re shown the Pinard obstetric stethoscope, and this time it’s Frank’s chance to go first. It’s a simple device—a truncated plastic cone, with the wide end placed on the abdomen and the other end for listening, supposedly, to the foetal heart.

  ‘It takes a bit of practice,’ Doctor Bellamy says. ‘What can you hear?’

  Frank tells him ‘the sea’ and none of us, when our turn comes, can claim with any confidence that we’re hearing more than that.

  We’re then shown how to use the Doppler machine and after some rustling of background noise we can all hear a heartbeat, blood whipping through the foetus at around 150 beats per minute.

  Having bothered Mandy enough we move on to other patients, other abdomens, and without expert guidance it’s just a bunch of lumps to me. ‘It’s all about practice,’ the registrar tells me. ‘And don’t prod too much.’

  *

  ‘Okay, you’ve seen me out there,’ Sophie says once we’ve done the changeover. ‘How am I looking?’

  ‘Good. Good. Would I be right in thinking there’s a little more performance going on now?’ It’s night, around eight, and I’m sitting in the chicken suit on the back steps of the World again with Sophie, talking about whatever comes up as the evening trains fly by.

  ‘I’ve gone for singing. That’s the difference, mainly. I can do most of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time”.’

  ‘Good choice. It does work better than most things a cappella.’

  ‘It’s quite motivational, too. Not that I know it all. I have to make up some bits, so I put my name in it then. That’s always motivational.’

  ‘That sounds like a trick you might have got from your father.’

  ‘Maybe. He’s got a few. I got the performance angle from you, remember. But Dad’s full of good ideas and, like he says, a good idea can come from anywhere, and then it’s about having the vision to see what you can make of it. It’s about vision, and backing yourself. It’s like what he did on the northside, when he took Lex Kellett’s Lawn Land and turned it into Ron Todd’s World of Mowers. You get the difference? The way Dad sees it, Lex was a good man, but he didn’t have the vision. He had a grip on the whole northside mower scene but his hand was shaking. Dad had vision. He knew that if he pushed it to a World he might take it somewhere. And the Worlds won’t end here. Just watch. He’s got plenty of new ideas bubbling away. Who knows what it’ll be next? When there’s vision involved, you just can’t tell. If you can pick where it’ll take you every time, it’s not really vision to start with. Just planning. You know what I mean?’

  ‘Sure. It’s not such a fine distinction as it first sounds.’

  ‘Exactly. Clinton doesn’t get that. Some people don’t. Hey, do some of that chicken stuff you do. The Shakespeare stuff.’

  ‘Well, I kind of make some of it up.’

  ‘So do some.’

  ‘It’s like—I can’t believe I’m telling you this—it’s like insults and things. In Elizabethan language. Plus some Shakespeare and other stuff. Poetry and things.’

  ‘So do some.’

  ‘Okay.’ She helps me stand, and I reverse my way up the two steps to the concrete. There’s no turning on steps in these chicken feet. I strike a pose that’s meant to be Elizabethan, feet apart, wings declamatory. ‘Prithee cockscomb, wherefore dost thou trouble me with trifles when there’s commerce to be had in fowl? There’s fowl afoot tonight aplenty, so be instead nimble of foot, and get thee to thy servery.’

  I manage a couple of shuffly dance steps, since the foot references seem to require it, and I bow.

  She laughs. ‘I suppose we should be getting back to it. Frank’ll be getting
lonely. Cockscomb’s rude, isn’t it?’

  ‘Only in a friendly way, I think.’

  ‘Dad really doesn’t know who he’s hired here, does he? You want to be doing other things, don’t you?’

  ‘I’m serious about getting into film, you know. I might be saying that out of a chicken’s head, but I’m serious. I think it was when I saw Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate that I realised how amazing it can be—what film can be like when it’s done really well. I really want to do it.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I don’t want to be one of those people who talks about it but doesn’t even try to do it. I want to do it like Woody Allen. He just does what he wants. He writes, he directs, he stars sometimes, and he doesn’t even have to leave the island of Manhattan.’

  ‘But wouldn’t he want to? Wouldn’t he want to see other things sometimes?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t think he needs to.’

  There’s singing from inside, Meat Loaf’s ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light’. I hope Frank’s alone, and not turning it into some haphazard kind of charm.

  ‘Hey,’ Sophie says, ‘Frank told me Phoebe Harris is your mother. Phoebe Harris the uni tutor. Is that right? She’s my tutor in one of my media studies subjects.’

  ‘That’d be her. Is this going to be embarrassing for me?’

  ‘I don’t know. Are a lot of things embarrassing for you?’

  ‘Yes. Including almost everything to do with my parents. My parents, coloured drinks, exercise equipment, the present Frank gave me for my twenty-first—all of that’s at least ninety-five per cent embarrassing. Other things less so.’

  ‘She was telling us the other day about how she was injured in one of the right-to-march protests a few years ago, and how she’s got a Special Branch file.’