Love and Happiness – G.I. James

Chapter One
It could mean anything.
Harriet, hair still damp, talced, slotted inside pressed pyjamas,
bound within a dressing-gown she will grow into soon enough, sits
cross-legged, leaning against pillows jammed into the corner at the foot
of her brother’s bed. The family edition of Swallows and Amazons lies
open on her lap. A finger rests on the page, snagged on a troublesome
word.
She turns to the near wall. Racing car wallpaper. Her brother is too
old for racing car wallpaper. She employs a nail to scratch away a
wheel then quickly imprisons the naughty finger deep inside her
dressing gown. Her reading finger remains pressed to the page. Four
button eyes watch everything. Hello Frank. Hello Ernest.
But it still could mean anything.
She lobs the troublesome word across the room towards Lucas, still
in day clothes, slumped over his desk. 'Lu? What are duffers?'
Her brother's head cranks up a notch. 'What are what?'
'Duffers.' Harriet spells out the word at the end of her finger. 'D-U-
F-F-E-R-S.'
'The whole sentence?' he asks, a stretch, a yawn.
Harriet's reading finger drags through the tricky phrase. 'Better
drowned than duffers, if not duffers won't drown,' she reads. 'It's a
telegram. It's from their dad. He's on a voyage!' She would hoist up her
eyebrows if Lucas were looking.
But Lucas is not looking. His head folds back to his desk. 'I dunno.
A kind of animal?'
'I dunno,' says Harriet. 'Might be.' She kicks both her donkey
slippers over the side of the bed. Frank and Ernest slide across the
carpet. 'Dad,' she shouts, slippers sliding through the bedroom doorway.
'Dad,' from the middle of the landing. 'Dad!' weight on one hip. 'Dad?'
weight on the other.
Peter appears in shadows at the foot of the stairs. 'Harriet, haven’t
we already spoken about you yelling from the landing?'
'Dad?' she whispers.
'Hello Harri.’
'Dad? What are duffers?' Harriet refocuses on where her finger
presses the page. 'Better drowned than duffers, if not duffers won't
drown,' she reads.
'Useless idiots,' says Peter.
'Who are?'
'Duffers are.'
Harriet does her best to appear baffled.
'A duffer is a foolish idiot,' Peter explains.
'A foolish idiot?' A fingernail scratches the page. 'I don't get it.'
'He's saying– I remember this bit –what he's saying is that if his
children are idiots, it's better they drown in the lake.'
Harriet smacks down the light switch. 'It's better his own children
drown?!'
Peter, suddenly spotlit, squinting, shrugs a shoulder. 'Only if they're
useless. But yes, that is what he's saying.'
Harriet taps the page, rechecks the sentence, scrutinises her father.
'But they're,' she whispers, 'they're his own children.'

Back among pillows, contemplating Commander Walker's dismal
attitude towards parenting, Harriet gives up reading before the end of
the first chapter. The Walker children will just have to look after each
other, that's all, she thinks, slotting a library bookmark into the
distressing story's snug gutter. She measures her progress, running a
thumb across the book's fore-edge, sneaking peeps into unread pages
before tucking the volume beneath a knee. She gathers up the yellow
blanket lying at her elbow, binds the loosely crocheted fabric around
her hand. A finger pushes through a hole made larger by the habit, and
through this hole Harriet strokes her top lip. She breathes deeply,
absorbs the blanket's scent – watching her brother.
'What are you doing?'
'What does it look like I'm doing?'
Harriet assesses the slope of her brother. 'It looks like you're dead.'
Lucas emerges from around his right shoulder, holds up an issue of
Buster and Jet. 'I'm trying to read.'
'Lu?' she says, before he can swivel away.
He sprawls back over the chair, closes his eyes. 'What?'
'Lu?' Harriet leans forward. 'Do you ever wonder about your real
mum and dad?'
I do, she thinks.
Sometimes, I imagine a man in a small house that has no stairs. He
shouts, but nothing happens. The next second, the man puts a hat on
and coat on and leaves. When he's gone, a lady leans her head against
a door and whispers. Sometimes the angry man comes back —
sometimes he doesn't.
Lucas gets to his feet, the comic drops to the floor. He puts on his
glasses, takes three steps to look at himself in the long mirror attached
to the side of his wardrobe. He runs two fingers across his cheek,
around his chin. 'Sometimes I do.' Both hands become busy exploring
features of his reflection as though they belonged to someone else. 'I
wonder if I look like my dad.' He presses his nose flat. Tugs on an ear.
Smiles an odd smile that Harriet has never seen before; his own smile
goes up at one side. 'What about you?' he asks. 'Do you ever think about
yours?'
She leaves Lucas pulling odd faces in his mirror, drifts into details
of the boyish wallpaper.
Sometimes, I imagine a man cupping a lady's hands as though he held
gerbils. The lady goes to a door and whispers.
'Every day.' Harriet scratches away the wheel of a racing car. 'I
wonder if I'm like my mum,' she says. 'I might be - maybe not much -
maybe a bit though - I don't know.'
Lucas has dumped the issue of his likeness, is pointing at damage
caused by his sister's fingernail. ‘Don’t do that.’
'Sorry,' she says, recapturing the runaway finger, placing it back
inside her dressing gown.
'Every day?' He peers at Harriet. 'Seriously? Every day?'
Sometimes, I imagine a teenager in a room by herself. She is sitting on
the floor. Hiding in her skirt. No one knocks the door. No one whispers.
'Every day,' says Harriet, scratching her ribs. She fixes on the button
eyes on her slippers until Lucas stops examining her. As Lucas turns
away, her eyes rise and track him to the window.
'That'd do my head in.' He looks out over their front garden. 'I
remember when you arrived – in your blanket.' And not for the first
time, Harriet is delighted by the story of how Lucas acted as lookout,
climbing up and over the back of their couch to perch on the
windowsill. He tells her he remembers pulling back the net curtains to
get a better view of the road; how it was just before Christmas, snow
piled up on the grass, right there. He can't remember how long he sat on
the windowsill but remembers the explosion of fuss when the green
Mini Clubman leaned into view. Harriet sniggers while Lucas mimes
their social worker, Mrs Greenwood, carrying a heavy bundle, the
bundle that was Harriet, up their slippery driveway, into their home,
setting her down in the middle of the front room, on the floor, like a
picnic basket. Lucas remembers Harri wrapped in her yellow blanket.
He describes his touch stirring her awake, recalls how she screamed as
though dipped in hot water.
'I screamed?' Harriet covers her mouth with her blankety hand.
'So loud, so loud Mum didn't know what to do.'
'Really?' clutches around her knees. 'No one ever told me that
before.'
Lucas tugs on a curtain. 'For ages you screamed. You stopped in the
end. You must have fallen asleep or something. I can't really remember.'
'Blimey.' Harriet flops back against the pillows. Lucas finishes
drawing the curtains then settles on the edge of the bed, one knee up,
one foot on the floor. Harriet pulls on a stray length of yellow wool.
'Every day, Harri?' he asks. 'What do you think about every day?'
Every day I try to imagine a happy story.
'I wonder about my mum. I wonder what happened, that's all... Do
you actually know why you were given up, Lu?'
Lucas hauls up his other leg, leans on an elbow, busies himself with
his bedspread. 'I know she was sixteen. That's about it.'
'She probably couldn't look after you, then,' says Harriet, helpfully.
Lucas nods. 'Maybe.'
'That's what Mum says about my mum.' Harriet scratches again at
the wallpaper. 'But she doesn't really know. Not really. So I still wonder
about it.' She covers her mouth, inhales through her blanket. 'I think
most about her though – my real mum, I mean.' She flips open the
book. 'Dad says a duffer is a stupid idiot, by the way.’