Will Hodgkinson - The House is Full of Yogis

‘Jimi Hendrix,’ I said. ‘Do you remember him from when you were young, back in the olden times?’

‘Oh, I was never one for the hit parade,’ she replied with a brisk shake of the head. ‘Do remember to clean your teeth, Will dear. They were rather green the last time I looked.’

For the next hour, from eating supper to listening to Jimi Hendrix to making a compare-and-contrast study of the women on the cover of Electric Ladyland with the ones in David Hamilton’s photographs, we were entirely unaware of the disaster unfolding twenty feet below. It was only when I broke a ruler by whacking it on Will’s head, after which Will told me it was the lucky ruler his elder sister had used to pass her A-levels and I had to go downstairs and confess to my crime, did we discover anything was amiss.

We saw Penny first. She was in the hallway on the telephone, eyebrows resolute as she gave the address of the house to the person on the other end of the line. From within the dining room, we could hear only groans.

‘Mummy, Will’s broken Catherine’s special ruler,’ said Will, poking her in the stomach with one of its jagged edges.

‘Not now, dear,’ she said, in a tone that was, for her, perhaps a little brusque. ‘We have a serious situation to deal with, I’m afraid.’

We went into the dining room. The guests, the women in Monsoon dresses and Liberty scarves and the men in tweed and corduroy jackets and tank tops, were leaning deep into old oak chairs, clutching their stomachs. Nev was laid out on the sofa, prostrate and sweating. At first I thought they had simply drunk too much red wine, as I had seen my parents and their friends do countless times before, but soon I realized this was different. Penny was rushing about making arrangements, and Mum was sitting cross-legged in a chair with a cigarette, but everyone else was in the throes of agony.

‘It was the chicken risotto,’ announced Mum. ‘It’s floored them all.’

‘You seem to be all right,’ I said.

‘It takes more than a chicken to take me down.’

It was only years later that I discovered what had actually happened. Penny had two chickens in the freezer, one for the dinner party and one for Christmas. She had taken them both out, put one back, and momentarily put the thawed chicken where the frozen one had been. The results were much worse than the upset stomach food poisoning usually causes. It was salmonella. Everyone apart from Mum (whose fussy eating habits meant she hadn’t actually had any chicken risotto) and Penny (who was too selfless to fall ill) was affected. Hugh roared and groaned and disappeared into the upstairs bathroom with a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. One woman went blind for a week. Another became delusional and thought John Inman was sexually abusing her. It was a good thing Mum resisted the urge to write about the whole thing. Penny was a top-ranking civil servant in the Department of Health at the time.

I leaned over the sofa and looked at Nev, his glasses steamed up and his tight, dry lips taking on a worrying blue tint. ‘Are you all right, Nev?’ I asked, but he merely reached a thin hand out towards mine and made a rumbling noise.

‘Honestly, trust Nev to get it worse than the rest of them,’ said Mum, as I leaned over my father and wondered if this would be the last time I would see him alive. She touched up her lipstick before standing in the middle of the room and announcing, ‘He’ll do anything for attention.’

An ambulance pulled up outside silently, its ominous flashing lights heralding the seriousness of the situation. Nev, unmoving, was raised onto a stretcher, and a utilitarian red blanket was pulled tightly and neatly over him. He looked like an Action Man in trouble. Mum told me she was going to travel with Nev to the hospital but that there was no need for me to go too. Ambulances came for two more guests, and the rest crawled off in various directions. With Hugh locked up in the bathroom, Penny was left on her own.

‘Oh dear,’ she said, still with a nervous smile, stacking up plates and putting them in neat piles next to the sink. ‘Dear me.’

‘It wasn’t your fault, Mummy,’ said Will, fiddling with a wine glass until he dropped it onto the floor with a yelp.

‘I rather think it was,’ said Penny, magicking a dustpan and brush and sweeping away the shattered glass. ‘It was frightfully silly of me to take the two chickens out of the freezer in the first place. I don’t know what I was thinking.’

‘I wouldn’t worry, I said, rifling through a box of After Eights on the table until I found one of the little paper sleeves still containing a chocolate mint. ‘Nev will be fine. It’ll be like the time we were in Richmond Park and he fell out of a tree and landed on his bum. He couldn’t sit down for a week, but after that he was right as rain. I very much doubt it will have any lasting effects.’

Nev almost died. He was so severely ill that he slept for eighteen hours a day, and the act of getting up and going to the toilet exhausted him so much that he had to go straight back to bed again. That night, as he lay feverish in a hospital bed, Will and I played a game of peashooter tennis, listened to Jimi Hendrix do his fifteen-minute version of Voodoo Chile , and went to sleep.

Nev returned home a week later. It was Tom who broke the news, one afternoon when he came in from school. ‘Nev’s back,’ he said, after opening the fridge and glugging orange juice from the carton. ‘And he doesn’t look good.’

Mum was out that afternoon, interviewing a celebrity, so I crept up to our parents’ bedroom. Nev was lying in bed, motionless. He was extremely thin, and without his glasses his face took on an incomplete, mole-like aspect. The room was hot and airless. On the dressing table were three aluminium tubes with little labels on them.

‘What are these?’ I said to Nev, holding up one of the tubes.

In a barely perceptible whisper he said what sounded like ‘I oo’.

‘You what?’

He tried again. ‘My poo.’

‘Yuck!’ I dropped the tube, and for a horrible moment I thought the top was going to come off and send Nev’s diseased stool all over the new beige carpet. (I later saw the same aluminium tubes in the Lees’ kitchen, where Penny had repurposed them as spice containers.) The effort of talking was too much for Nev. He looked worse for it. It was terrible to see my father like this. The man who built dens with us in the woods, who climbed trees with us, who slipped me £500 notes when I was losing at Monopoly, was wasting away. Too ill to talk, too ill to move, he was inching ever closer to death. This might be the last time I would ever see my beloved father. These might be the last words I ever spoke to him.

‘Can I have a gerbil?’

I think he made some sort of a grunt of affirmation. Or it might have been the bed squeaking. It was hard to tell.

‘Only I’ve been thinking about what Mum said about not being allowed a pet, and I’ve decided it would actually be a really good way for me to have some responsibility. And I noticed that there’s some cash in the top drawer of your cupboard, and gerbils only cost about four pounds, so if you have no objections I’ll just take a twenty and go and get one from the pet shop now. But it’s totally your decision. If you don’t think it’s a good idea, say something.’

He didn’t say anything.

The gerbil I chose was a tiny rat-like creature with a twitching nose and a nervous disposition. I knew when I saw him that he was the one: he was away from his little brothers and sisters in the cage, alone, clawing at the glass. He needed me. I called him Kevin. With the notes I took from Nev’s drawer I also bought a little cage with a wheel. Then, with the money left over, I bought Smash Hits by Jimi Hendrix. It was educational. Nev would have wanted it that way.