Living In Perhaps (29 page)

Does this mean that they all report back to Lorna? I hate to
think so, to think of Mike and Moira and Trudy observing my
every word, my every significant silence, and telling tales. I try
not to think about that side of it at all – what the point of all
this stuff is.

'You do not – apparently – play a very full part in Group.' She
pauses to stare at me from under her thick pony's fringe. 'You
don't say much, you don't cooperate. And you don't say much to
me, either.' She pauses again. This must be the technique for the
day. Well, it's one I'm good at, too.

'Yet I would have thought you'd find it easy. To say something.
Anything. Anything that comes into your head. You can be very
articulate when you want to be, and I thought you were good at
making things up. That's something you
are
good at, Cora.'

All this comes with huge pauses in between. During which I
look at the dreary painting on the wall. Or I look at my hands, at
my fingernails rimmed with clay. As if this time it is I who have
clawed my way through earth and rocks.

'Do you bite your nails, Cora?' she says, following my gaze,
changing tack. Being wickedly cunning, so she thinks. And Dr
Travis jerks into life to write this down.

Do you bite your nails? Have you got a bike? How high can you
jump? Can you do this?
Can
you?

'I have it on good authority ...' (Oh yes? Whose?) '... that
you like to make things up. Do you like to tell stories in
your head?'

She leans back and folds her arms. Today she is wearing
the blouse with the necktie made out of the same material.
As she folds her arms the tie loops out like an enormous
single bosom.

I don't make things up. I just see things – what they are, what
they could be. If anything, I see too much, too clearly. That's
what they don't like.

She tries again, a new direction. I am getting so tired of this.
'Do you have a temper, Cora? Would you say you had a quick
temper? Do you sometimes react violently, before you've had time
to think?'

'No, I haven't,' I reply, just to surprise her. Just to keep her on
her toes. 'I'm easy-going,' I add, and to prove it I give her a happy
little shrug. An easy-going kind of shrug. You're not annoying me
with this line of questioning, you're not trying my quick-erupting
temper, that little shrug says.

'You know, it would be much better,' says Lorna, rather sternly,
as if she is a headmistress and I am the harum-scarum madcap of
the fourth form, 'if you could try to be more active in Group.
Don't hide your light under a bushel, Cora. Will you think about
that? Will you give it some serious thought?'

I nod. Serious thought is something I'm always ready for. In
fact, try and stop me.

Lorna gathers herself and I think we've finished, but there is
something else: 'You've led us a merry dance, you know, and so far
we've let you. Merry dances are always worth watching. But don't
think I don't know what you're up to.'

And Dr Travis gives her a sharp look. A quick flick of a look
before returning to his notebook, in which he is now writing
nothing. But a look all the same. I saw it. Nothing passes me by.

So I try. I really try.

It's Trudy's turn to run Group. She doesn't look well. She pulled
the short straw today, and she really doesn't look at all well. I
wonder if it's her period? I wonder if it's her time of life? I've no
idea how old she is – it's difficult to tell with very fat people – and
she has a permanently cross expression, which may be there
because she
is
permanently cross, tugging all that bulk around
with her, or it may be just the weight of her flesh that pulls her
facial muscles into a scowl. I hate fat people. And I hate short
people, like Lorna, like Moira, a minute ferocious doll of a
woman, and I hate thin people – no, that's not true – but I hate
gawky
people like Mike. They really aren't physically blessed, the
people here. It's no beauty contest. I bet Moira went round with
the straws, up there in the staffroom, and arranged it so that poor
fat wheezing Trudy would get suckered. Because nobody else feels
like doing it, for God's sake, and Trudy should pull her enormous
weight.

We sit in the usual circle and Trudy decides that we'll play a
new game. Picture postcard, it is called. Remember somewhere
you've been, something interesting you've seen. Let the image pop
into your mind just like a picture postcard. Tell us about it.

Fair enough.

I remember Tillie slamming down a lump of pastry on the
table. Not on the marble pastry board (a marvel, this, white and
cloudy grey and black, swirled through like a monochrome
version of Raspberry Ripple ice cream). I don't remember why,
just her tight lipless mouth, and her hand over the slamming
pastry. And the way all the plates jumped on the table top.

But the Old Crone has taken the stage and is yattering on about
something, a man and a car and a policeman, and everyone else
has to wait.

I remember Tillie saying, 'Oh, there you are, my little doves,'
and 'Let me in,' and kneeling up on the bed, her own bed, while
we tugged at the pillows and shuffled ourselves over. She switched
on the white lamp above her head and Barbara said, 'Oh,
Muh-um
! It gets reflected in the screen. We can't see a thing now!'
And Tillie turned it off.

It always disconcerted me to hear them call her Mum. To assert
that connection, that umbilical claim.

It used to disconcert me at first when I heard them refer to her
as Tillie and call her it to her face. As far as I knew, mothers didn't
operate in the realm of Christian names – they forfeited those at
the moment of giving birth. It seemed to trespass on the
boundaries between adults and children, tipping everything sideways,
to go flashing Tillie's Christian name about, using it as if
they were equals. The grown-ups whose first names I was
permitted to use were supposed to be strictly prefixed with 'Aunt'
and 'Uncle'. Even Bettina was referred to as 'Dad's Cousin', and
Mandy as 'Your Cousin'.

Oh, there I go again. Drifted away from the postcard, away
from the game. Must try harder, pay proper attention. Wet Lettuce
is lisping faintly about some incident fossilized in her past, and
Trudy lies there, beached, in her orange-upholstered easy chair,
eyelids half closed. Even if I came up with something creative,
chances are she wouldn't recall it by the time she gets debriefed.

Here's an image that keeps popping into my mind, bright as a
picture postcard: a sunny day; our street is jammed with fire
engines, and I can see Barbara running, with a dress like an old-fashioned
bride's yanked up above her knees, and her feet bare on
the bumpy tarmac. She's running like mad towards her house.

These are the kind of questions that Lorna asks me. She is getting
hard, and desperate.

– Tell me more about when you and your brother used to play
together as children. Who tended to choose the game? Was one of
you naturally the leader?

– Did you keep secrets from each other, or did you like to tell
everything?

– What about if there was a disagreement with the other
children? Would Brian stand up for you? Or did you, as big sister,
tend to protect him?

– Who would you say got on best with your mother, your
adoptive mother?

– Would you say you were closer to any of your aunts? Was
there anyone you thought you might have preferred as a mother?

It all sounded a bit too close to home.

And one day, when Dr Travis wasn't with us, she said, 'Do you
have any feelings about your
real
mother? Do you ever think of
her? Are you angry with her?'

Although what I normally did in response to her questions was
refuse to reply, or talk at length about something else, this time I
was surprised into saying, '
What!?
' because I really couldn't see
what this had to do with anything.

Because, honestly, I never thought about my real mother. Even
all those lunchtimes when I went round to Gloria's in search of a
friendly face, a source of information, the one thing we never
talked about was my real mother. She was of no interest to me.
The idea of her did not cross my mind. I had enough on my plate
as it was.

Lorna began to tell me about some changes in the law that were
being considered, that would allow adopted children, once they
were adult, to search for their real parents. If the new law went
ahead, adopted children would have the right of access to their
records so that they could trace, or have traced for them, their real
mother. The term she used was
biological mother
, which sounded
rather disgusting to me. A bit of my
adoptive mother
coming out
in me, I thought, and felt a smirk flit across my face.

Lorna glanced sharply at me. You have to watch them all the
time.
They
are watching
you
.

'Of course,' she said, 'this will only apply to those adopted
children who want to find out about their origins. Who choose to
seek the information. And it will have to be carried out very carefully,
with a lot of counselling and so on beforehand.' She's very
keen on the value of counselling. Well, it keeps her in paid
employment. 'And the biological mothers, they won't have any
rights to trace their children. It won't be a two-way thing.'

'Bit of a shock, I should think,' I said, pausing for a lengthy
yawn, 'to find the baby you cast off twenty years ago standing on
your doorstep.'

'That's why the legislation has got to be well thought out,'
Lorna said. 'These things could potentially be very traumatic.'

I wish Dr Travis could have been there. I would have valued his
silent opinion.

'I'm really not interested in my
biological mother
,' I said, pronouncing
the words in a way that showed her what I thought of
them. What I thought of Lorna and her crowd, and their revolting
jargon. 'I'm not interested in mothers at all.'

'Well, it's interesting that you should say that, Cora,' she replied,
'because that's what
I
think is at the root of all your trouble.'

I'm sure she would not have said that if Dr Travis had been
there. I have a feeling that she's overstepped some invisible mark.
Perhaps I've made her go too far. Perhaps I've driven her to it.

The time came when Brian was sixteen and my mother must have
told him. Or perhaps she delegated the job to Dad, to keep this
private matter in the appropriate purdah of the sexes. I don't
know.

I don't know because no one ever mentioned it.

I said to Gloria, the week after his birthday, 'Have they told
Brian yet? Do you know if he's been told?' And she said, 'Oh yes,
he's been informed.' So they had mentioned it to
her
.

I went home and kept a watch on them all. Nothing had
changed. Nothing had changed from before his birthday to after
his birthday to the time when Gloria told me, 'Oh yes, he's been
informed.' I looked at their bland impassive faces and found
nothing. Except that they were so stiff and impassive and bland
that anything at all might have been going on behind them.
Absolutely anything at all.

I thought they were ridiculous, the whole pack of them.

It's funny how your parents go from being the centre and limits
of your world to being almost irrelevant. When you are little they
are everything. They control the world and inform everything
that you do or is done to you. You know nothing beyond them,
and everything you
do
know comes through and by way of
them. Even things they know nothing about they have an opinion
on and
their
opinion is
your
opinion. This must be true of all
parents. They don't have to be megalomaniacs to achieve this – it
just comes about through raising small children, who will
unerringly tumble out of windows, wander under cars and fall
into water if left to their own devices. They cannot even feed
themselves, or reach a light switch or a door handle. They need
fresh air, regular naps and everything sterilized.

And then you turn twelve or thirteen and these lordly beings,
the sun and the moon, are eclipsed. Or just shouldered out of the
way. Your world extends to places they have never gone, people
they don't know and will never know. Their wisdom is shown up
for the sham it is. They get their information out of newspapers,
for God's sake. Might as well come off the backs of cereal packets.
You get yours from the real world. You do things you know
they've never done, and never will do. You become a denizen and
then an expert in a world completely unfamiliar to them.

It's like the reflection in the convex mirror on our chimneypiece.
They
are the people crowded to the edges. They're still in
the room but they are small and hopeless, and
you
loom big,
bigger, biggest, the centre of the universe.

Lunchtime, at the dry cleaner's. Not strictly lunchtime, more like
eleven fifteen, because that's when I'm allocated my lunch break.
The other assistant, Lois, who has ankles the same width as her
calves and has to wear special shoes which her feet melt over the
sides of, is holding the fort. Her lunch break is from two to three.
I sidle forth into the high street, not hungry yet. Whoever
is
hungry at eleven fifteen? These are the choices: a windy walk
along the prom, a gentle stroll through hosiery and handbags in
one of the department stores. Coffee in a thick cup in the Wimpy
(they had closed the Woolworth's tea bar by this time).Window-shopping,
wandering along pavements pocked with chewing
gum, pink and grey and black, like all the stages in a nastily
deteriorating skin condition. It was all right for a day, but not for
every day.

I go into the big stationer's. There's a blast of warm air at the
doors, and ahead of me a rack of ornate, pinky, primrose, silvery
greetings cards proclaims, 'Don't forget Mother's Day!' Daffodils
and bows and smirking kittens. Beyond are the shelves of notebooks,
address books, account books, hanging packs of pens and
pencils, ink cartridges, fluffy pencil cases in lurid colours. I stop
and survey them. I don't want anything here, but it wastes a
minute, two, three. I turn aside and read the 'funny' birthday
cards, which aren't funny at all. They're obsessed with sex and
ageing. I'm obsessed with youth and life. One of the sales
assistants, who is kneeling, slipping sheets of wrapping paper over
separate wire slats, glances sideways at me. Perhaps she thinks I've
got dirty fingers. Perhaps she thinks I'm soiling the goods.

Gloria once bought a candlewick bedspread. 'Shop-soiled, it
said,' she proclaimed proudly, unfolding it for us. 'Half price!' The
rose-pink fringing was fluffy with dust, an insubstantial, fine-textured
dust, a shop sort of dust, and a dusty-coloured panel lay
diagonally across the spread. 'It'll come out in the wash,' Gloria
said, the enthusiasm in her voice already draining away under the
steady examination of my mother's eagle – you might say
professional
– eye.

'You wouldn't catch me buying anything that was
shop-soiled
,'
my mother said. 'I like to have everything new.'

'Oh, I like to have everything new,' Gloria replied, catching the
wind in her sails again, 'but
want
can't always
have
.'

'It
is
new,' I wanted to defend her. 'It's just shop-soiled new.' But
I didn't say anything.

Want can't always have. I dabbled along the magazine shelves,
came to the books, paused. I never wanted those jammy jars of
coloured lip gloss, those bottles of nail varnish round and glowing
like Christmas tree lights. But these, slippery orange Penguins,
mind-provoking Pelicans with swimming-pool-blue backs.
Lovely little hardbacks, just the size of a one-person box of chocs
– what a treat! When selecting a gift for a friend, would you
choose (a) the latest Edna O'Brien with soft-focus cover? (b) a
fusty fawn Evelyn Waugh with jazzy jacket design? (c) an Agatha
Christie drawing-room comedy? or (d) any old thing that would
fit in your pocket without a fuss, or a giveaway bulge?

You may not be able to teach an old dog new tricks, but
old
tricks, now that's quite another thing. My sleight-of-hand amazes
me, when the motivation's there. Look, girls! Look, Jillian!
Watch me, Gaynor! My quicksilver fingers dipping and delving,
my casual expression as, instead of turning tail and guiltily,
flush-faced, hurrying off down the aisle, I slowly flick the pages of
a dictionary of quotations, peruse the index, make a mild mental
note of the price. And put it back. I am a customer, entitled to
stand here with a wasp-jacketed copy of
Teach Yourself Greek
in
my unpersuaded hand. I catch the eye of the assistant, who looks
enquiring, but no, I am decided now: not Greek, not this year. I
slide the book back into its proper place in the shelf, and walk
slowly away. Barbara, you would be proud of me.

I am not proud of myself. At home, in my bedroom bookcase,
I have a growing number of volumes, including a dictionary of
quotations, pocket-size edition, of course. My mother thinks I
buy them with what's left of my weekly pay after board and lodgings
have been deducted. I could. I
could
. But I don't. A little voice
at the back of my mind tells me I am entitled. Those responsible
for my parlous education whisper to me that I am a deserving
case. And anyway, I have read everything the Hennessys have to
offer. And I have a lot of time on my hands.

I know what it was that Barbara and her friends were after, too.
Not the stuff itself, not the
things
. But the lift, the buzz, the high.
I feel it. All dreadful words. Uncle Bob's thesaurus would be
ashamed of me. The excitement, then, the exhilaration, the fizzy
intoxication of that moment when an object of desire slips into
your hand, liberates itself, surrenders itself to the other side. The
sheer bloody thrill of it.

It was hot in the gardens this afternoon, thundery and overcast.
There was a brittle roar in the distance. More staff came hurrying
outside. I could see Mike trying to herd people indoors, glancing
up at the sky and making hopeless, beckoning movements with
his arms.

I said to Hanny, 'There's going to be a law to let adopted
children trace their mothers. Their
biological
mothers.'

'Oh yes?' Hanny wasn't paying much attention. She was too
busy watching Moira getting nearer to us, rounding up the sheep.
She fanned her face with a sprig of leaves she had torn off a
bush. 'I do hope it storms,' she said. 'I love watching the lightning.'

'Lorna told me.'

'
Lorna?
'

I'd meant her to say, 'Told you what?' I wanted her to say, 'What
was it Lorna told you?' and 'Why was that?' But she didn't. So I
didn't prompt her, push her. She wasn't really interested in what
I had to say, and I wasn't about to humiliate myself. I'm too proud
for that. And you have to look after yourself in here.

I'd forgotten. Lorna doesn't mean anything to Hanny. Hanny
doesn't see Lorna, has never had an interview with Lorna. All
Hanny's individual time is with Dr Travis. Now that's what I call
unfair.

'Look at them. What are they trying to do?' she said, letting out
a laugh, indicating Mike and the confusion of people hurrying for
the doors.

Hot, heavy spatters of rain fell on us, on our bare faces and our
knees.

'Here it comes!' sighed Hanny.

Moira stood before us. We were the last. 'It's raining. You have
to come in now,' she said.

'We like the rain,' said Hanny, smiling at her.

Moira was unmoved. Her tiny mouth – no bottom lip at all –
was a single cynical straight line.

'Too bad. Besides, Hanny Gombrich, you're wanted, inside.'

Hanny rose, and Moira turned away to go back up the path,
missing as she did so Hanny's little gesture, supplicating, lifting
her hands and putting her injured wrists together, ready for the
handcuffs.

Lorna asks me, 'What do you see in the future, Cora?'

Well, there's fun and love and life for starters, I could say.

She's got her sympathetic, syrupy voice on today, which always
puts my back up. I don't need her sympathy, thank you very
much. She's gazing at me with her head on one side, like a friendly
robin on a Christmas card.

'Cora?'

I live from day to day. I don't make plans. Plans only lead to
disappointment. I grub through earth and rocks just to keep my
head, as they say, above water.

If I were a Carolyn sort of girl, even now, even here, I'd have
things to look forward to. Because a Carolyn sort of girl would be
cherished whatever she'd done, would be forgiven, because a
Carolyn sort of mother would love her come-what-may. Would
feel that bond, that protective bond, from the very first moment
she saw her newborn baby's head, or, way back, when she was first
aware of that kicking inside her swelling body.