What the fuck is he doing? His wife and kid are downstairs and he’s asking me out for a drink and wanting to know where I live?
‘I only drink orangey-lemony-blackcurranty squash,’ Dr Pippity declared, initially irritating Zac until he saw that she spoke mainly to a young patient who walked slowly past them, ‘and that yummy stuff,’ the clown continued, pointing to the drip the child was trundling and managing to raise a hint of a grin from the patient in the process. ‘I have to be on my way,’ Dr Pippity told the man, adding sotto voce, ‘it’s good to see your son in Out-patients rather than the ward. I’m pleased for him. For you, for your wife.’
‘She’s not my wife!’ Zac declared, immediately regretting the urgency and defensiveness in his voice.
That’s as may be, thought Pip as she made her way towards the ward, but whoever she is or whatever she isn’t, she is the mother of your child and she and he are just downstairs.
‘Idiot!’ Zac cursed himself, as he returned to Out-patients.
‘Weirdo,’ Dr Pippity said to herself as she entered the ward. ‘I don’t think I’ll ruffle the hair of grown men for the time being.’
EIGHT
‘Gold is ill!’ Tom chanted. ‘Please? Gold. Is. Ill!’
Zac never tired of his child’s propensity to pronounce a word the way he heard it, even if the meaning became skewed. Tom was a master of this. He thought his grandpa was ill with Old-timers because he was seventy-five, after all. For Zac, Old-timers seemed to sum up June’s father’s affliction much more astutely and more sensitively than Alzheimer’s. And now, this Saturday afternoon, Tom was saying that gold is ill with great conviction and joy.
‘Golders Hill it is,’ Zac granted and was rewarded with a hug that turned into a full-on rough-and-tumble. Zac loved the park at Golders Hill, an annexe to the heath extension at Hampstead. Flamingos and wallabies and rhea birds and deer, not to mention excellent home-made ice-cream, too, were all on offer. Families commandeered this section of the heath; mums and dads with Mamas&Papas prams and Bebecar buggies and every Fisher Price toy ever produced. There was a delightfully old-fashioned feel to Golders Hill Park; it had none of the pretensions of nearby Hampstead High Street. The Barbour brigade, with their designer labradors and under-retrieving retrievers and aesthetically muddied Range Rovers parked in the pay-and-display in Downshire Hill, never ventured to this enclave of the heath near Golders Green. And the gays who cottaged and rummaged and flirted and felched in gloomy areas of the heath nearer Whitestone Pond also left Golders Hill untouched.
‘Do you think Mummy and Rob-Dad are having ice-creams too?’ Tom asked as he and his father strolled and licked their way over to the paddock to gaze at some goats.
‘Probably,’ Zac said. ‘Hey! This time last week you were performing your ring thing.’
Tom looked at his toy watch which permanently read 3.30. ‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘and I didn’t need sellotape.’
‘You were brilliant,’ Zac said earnestly, ‘and you made their day. You made everyone’s day.’
‘I hope that Mummy and Rob-Dad are having ice-cream at this very very very minute,’ said Tom, pulling his father towards the deer. Zac, who thought that the concept of time zones might be just beyond his son’s grasp, assured him that they most certainly were. The deer were Disney delightful; the goats, however, were pungent enough to make their ice-cream unpalatable so they meandered back towards the rolling lawns.
‘Good God,’ Zac said under his breath at the very same moment that Tom declared ‘A clown! A clown!’ The child stopped. ‘It’s the clown!’ He looked at Zac and beamed. ‘Quick! Let’s go! Come on, Dad.’
Shit. It’s only bloody Her. Clowngirl. She’ll think I’m stalking her. It’s not like I have a pair of sunglasses to hide behind. I’ll keep an eye on Tom from a discreet distance and bury my nose in the paper. But that’ll make me look like a comedy spy, of course. Anyway, Tom’s not even six years old. He has ice-cream dribbling down his wrist in high wasp season. I must accompany him, I’m his father.
‘Daddy, look!’ Tom went charging back to Zac, standing on the periphery of parents near the stage. ‘It’s Dr Pippity, isn’t it – but she’s got funny clothes on, and much more stuff on her face than at St Bea’s.’ He scampered back to the throng of children and heckled with the best of them.
Oh dear, what have we here? Pip said to herself whilst she made an expert mess of bendy balloons. It’s that bloke with the dandruff. Looks like I have my own personal stalker. Look at him, loitering behind his paper. I can’t see the wife anywhere. Well, he can look – but I hope he doesn’t linger.
‘See! Spaghetti!’ Merry Martha declared, holding aloft a scramble of balloons to much laughter from her young audience. ‘Blast and bootlaces! I’ve forgotten the magic words – does anyone know any?’ From the audience came shrieks of ‘abracadabra’ and ‘open sesame’. A girl at the front in an immaculate dress with matching hair ribbons was sitting patiently, cross-legged, with her hand held aloft.
‘Magic word?’ Martha asked her gently.
‘Please,’ the girl revealed.
Martha performed a cartwheel to signify her approval. ‘The best magic word of all,’ she declared with a nod to the cordon of parents, ‘a very pretty please from a very pretty young lady.’ Her hands worked this way and that, whilst her face contorted into a display of entertaining grimaces and pouts. ‘Voilà! No more spaghetti – a sausage dog instead! Oh! And another. Ah! And one more!’ She distributed the balloons carefully to the quieter children in her audience, thanked everyone for coming and gave a genuflection of prodigious proportions. ‘Time for you all to have a drink or a wee-wee,’ she proclaimed, crossing her legs as if that was what she needed to do, ‘before the puppet show. Ta-ta, ta-ra, toot-toot.’ Two flic-flacs and she was off the stage.
Tom made his way back to his father. ‘Did you see? Dr Pippity?’ Zac nodded and suggested they return to the goats now that there was no ice-cream to spoil. ‘No,’ said Tom firmly, ‘I want to go and say “hullo” to Dr Pippity.’ Zac tried to say she was going home, that she was only half Dr Pippity today. ‘No!’ Tom declared. ‘You can’t be a half. Let’s go and say “hullo”. She’s better than stinky goats. Come on, Dad, please?’
Why can’t she just bugger off quickly instead of meandering her way through the park, chatting and jesting with every child she passes?
‘We don’t have time,’ Zac tried to reason with Tom.
‘We only just got here,’ Tom protested.
‘She’s busy,’ Zac said, not looking at her, not looking at Tom.
‘She snot,’ Tom sulked. ‘All the other children get to talk to her – look. It’s not fair, it snot.’
You’re right. And why do I even care what she thinks of me? And why do I appear to care about it more than I care about Tom?
‘Go on, then,’ Zac said, ‘run. I’ll tell you how fast you are. Just say a quick “hullo”. I’ll catch up with you.’ Tom belted off. Dutifully, Zac timed him, to the fraction of a second. He’d never fob his son off with an estimate.
Pip was trying to extricate herself from a thuggish nine-year-old boy and his sidekick who were trying to pickpocket her for balloons.
‘Dr Pippity?’ Tom greeted her shyly.
‘Shove off!’ snarled the larger boy, pushing him. But then as he stared at Tom a look of horror crept across his face. ‘Yuck, look at him!’ His friend did. ‘His skin’s coming off – and I touched him!’
‘Flaky