Free Various Pets Alive and Dead by Marina Lewycka Page B

in that louche Gallic way, and the older fairer Hamburger, who are all heading off to a bar to drink to the beauty of life, the Hamburger’s baby daughter and Carla Bruni’s smile.
    ‘…
hyper mignonne
…
plutôt baisable
.
Qu’en pensent les Anglais
?’
    ‘Like a …
Comme une gazelle
?’ he volunteers.
    They laugh and he laughs too, suddenly engulfed in a warm gloopy wave of at-oneness with this beautiful young high-flying free-floating no-baggage global elite, whose title is wealth, whose passport is brains, whose only nation is money.

CLARA: The singing parent family
     
    On the car radio, they’re playing Bob Marley – ‘By The Rivers Of Babylon’
–
as Clara sits tapping her thumbs against the steering wheel in the Parkway traffic jam driving back into Sheffield on Friday night. It was her favourite song when they lived at Solidarity Hall, and it leads her thoughts back over the half-forgotten trails of her childhood.
     
… there we sat down, yea-ea, we wept …
     
    After the death of Fizzy the hamster, and her pasting by those horrible boys, she withdrew into herself; she stopped putting her hand up for the teacher’s questions; everything came to seem so muffled and far away, she just couldn’t be bothered. As time passed, she began to stumble over her reading. She often had earaches and skipped school to stay at home at Solidarity Hall, where there was always something interesting going on.
    ‘I want to go to a different school,’ she told Doro one day.
    ‘Why, darling?’
    ‘I haven’t got any friends.’
    ‘We have to learn to make friends with all different kinds of people,’ said Doro.
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Because we believe in cooperation.’
    How come nobody had told her this before?
    ‘Why?’
    Doro shrugged and gave her a hug. ‘Because it’s the sort of people we are.’
     
… when we remembered Zion …
     
    She sings along, remembering.
    People at her junior school used to pity them – the commune kids – because they wore each other’s clothes and wolfed down their free school dinners. Although they weren’t actually hungry, she remembers how they yearned for meat and for puddings, which were seldom on the menu in Solidarity Hall. What the other kids didn’t know, what they could never explain, was the advantage of having several parent-adults who looked after them in a benignly haphazard way, whom they could play off against each other. They didn’t know the freedom they had in the commune playroom, which they called Thinlandia because it was the ex-isle of Lennie the Leader. And Clara was its queen.
     
… carried us away … captivity … required of us a song …
     
    Once, when she was nearly eight, a couple of years after the hamster incident, she overheard Mrs Wiseman, her class teacher, telling the Head, ‘They’re all from singing parent families.’ She said it in a whisper, hiding her thin lipsticky mouth behind the pages of the register, as though the phrase was too shocking to be uttered aloud, but to Clara it sounded magical.
    Her confidence must have bounced back enough for her to put up her hand and ask, ‘What’s a singing parent family, miss?’
    ‘I wasn’t talking to you, Clara,’ she replied.
    That night, over dinner around the long yellow-painted table in the kitchen at Solidarity Hall, she asked, ‘What’s a singing parent family?’
    As usual, there were several conversations going, and everyone was talking so loud it was hard to get a word in edgeways. She had to repeat her question a few times and bang her spoon on the table to get attention.
    ‘Don’t shout, Clara,’ said Marcus. He and Fred the Red were discussing pirate property. (For some reason, they seemed to find this topic endlessly fascinating.)
    It was Moira Lafferty’s turn on the cooking rota, and she was a vegetarian who believed in balanced proteins, so beans and brown rice were on the menu again. Otto and Serge started flicking their bullet-hard beans at each other –