The Liar

Lucy was no beauty, but if the looks she exchanged with Tony were anything to go by, Adrian guessed that she was no sprinter either.

The fact that he was expected to work at all in the Easter holidays had come as a blow. He was quite used to being told to find a job for the summer: waiting on tables at the Cider With Rosie restaurant, folding bolts of baize at the wool factory, treadling the cardboard-box machine at the ICI plant in Dur-sley, picking currants at Uley, feeding the birds at the Wildfowl Trust in Slimbridge.

'But Easter!' he had moaned into his cereal, the first morning of the holidays. 'No, Mother, no!'

'You're fifteen, darling! Most boys of your age like the idea of some kind of light work. Father thinks it's a good idea.'

'I know he does, but I've already got work to do. My school project.' Adrian was thinking of the article he had promised Bullock he would write for the school underground magazine.

'He doesn't want you wasting your time loafing around indoors.'

'That's pretty rich coming from him. He spends the whole bloody year cooped up in his sodding laboratory.'

'That's not fair, Ade. You know it isn't.'

'I've never had to get a job in the Easter hols before.'

His mother poured herself a fourth cup of tea.

'Won't you try it for me, darling? See how it goes?'

'Well it just means I'll have to write my essay over the Easter weekend, doesn't it? Or am I expected to pick bloody potatoes all through the most important sacred festival in the whole bloody Christian bloody calendar as well?'

'Of course not, darling. I'm sure you'll enjoy working for Mr Sutcliffe, he's a very nice man. And Father will be so pleased.'

She brushed his cheek with the back of her hand. But Adrian wasn't going to take it gracefully. He stood up and washed his bowl under the tap.

'Don't bother, darling. Betsy will do that.'

'It's a bloody swizz. I mean, it's cricket next term. I've got to get some practice in.'

'Well I'm sure you'll get nice and fit at the farm, dear.'

'That's not the same as practising is it?'

'Don't whine, Ade. It's a very ugly sound. And I must say I'm not sure I know where this sudden enthusiasm for sports comes from, dear. Mr Mountford said in your report that you failed to attend a single rugby game or a single PE lesson last term.'

'Cricket's different,' said Adrian. 'I mean, you send me off to school for most of the year and then as soon as I come back you can't wait to get rid of me. I just hope you won't both be surprised if I lock you in an old people's home when you're old and smelly.'

'Darling! Don't be horrid.'

'And I'll only come and visit you to give you work to do. Shirts to iron and socks to darn.'

'Ade, that's an awful thing to say!'

'And only then will you know what it's like to be unloved by your own flesh and blood!' said Adrian, drying his hands. 'And don't giggle woman, because it isn't funny!'

'No darling, of course it isn't,' his mother said with her hand over her mouth.

'Oh I give up,' he had said and put a tea-towel on her head. 'I bloody give up.'

Human spirit, or lack of it, is such that, foul as the work was, Adrian found himself so lulled by the routine that sometimes the hours would pass like minutes. He tried hard to concentrate on composing in his head his contribution for the magazine. But he was always being distracted by other thoughts. He found himself playing a drama in which he cast himself as God and the potatoes as humans. This one he hurled into outer darkness, that one he sent to be garnered home.

'Well done, thou good and faithful spud, you may go to your reward.' ,

'Sinner! Corrupted one. I pluck thee out, I pluck thee out. Look, with a spot I damn thee.'

He wasn't sure if it was better to be a rotten potato or a healthy one, whether he would rather be safely bunched up in a warm bag with the goody-goodies or be thrown over the side and ploughed back into the soil. One thing was certain, either of those fates was preferable to being God.

The green potatoes were especially interesting. Donald Sut-cliffe, the farmer, had explained them to him one lunchtime.

'Spuds have to grow underground, see. If they poke up through the soil and catch the rays of the sun you'll get photosynthesis and that gives you chlorophyll which'll turn them green. A green potato is a relative of Woody Nightshade. Not as poisonous, but he won't do you any good.'

This immediately made Adrian think that he was a green potato and Cartwright was the sun.

I have been kissed by the light and transformed, he thought. I am dangerous and God has rejected me.

He was always doing that these days. Everything he saw became a symbol of his own existence, from a rabbit caught in headlights to raindrops racing down a window-pane. Perhaps it was a sign that he was going to become a poet or a philosopher: the kind of person who, when he stood On the sea-shore, didn't see waves breaking on a beach, but saw the surge of human will or the rhythms of copulation, who didn't hear the sound of the tide but heard the eroding roar of time and the last moaning sigh of humanity fizzing into nothingness. But perhaps it was a sign, he also thought, that he was turning into a pretentious wanker.