Living In Perhaps (31 page)

I hadn't got a Christmas present for Tom. It was difficult to get
him anything that was meaningful enough, without laying myself
open to ridicule. I felt unequal to any choice. Besides, any present
got from round here, anything small-town or suburban, would be
beneath Tom's notice. In the end I settled for a bottle of whisky,
bought as we sailed arm in arm past an off-licence, on our way
into town. I stepped out of the shop and handed it to him, in its
paper bag, pressed it into his chest, with a laugh, as if it meant less
than nothing.

He hadn't got anything for me, of course. No little London
knick-knack, nothing exotic from far afield. But then that's boys
for you.

In the last year Tom had developed a taste for pubs and clubs.
There weren't that many of them in town, but there were enough.
Or we borrowed Patrick's van and drove into the neighbouring
town, which offered more. We drank and smoked, and in the
seedy darkest ends of dark pulsating rooms, Tom bought all kinds
of pills and powders. There was always a fold of paper or a bit of
silver foil in his pockets, just like small boys who constantly have
twists of cellophane from boiled sweets or the gold wrappers of
cream-line toffees about their persons.

But now he found the brightly lit pubs and the dirty sweaty
clubs were not up to his new standards, or even as satisfyingly,
seedily bad as he recalled. He sat with us at a wet, brass-topped
table with his pint of beer and sneered over the top of his hand-rolled
cigarette. When I asked him how was London, he just put
out his lower lip and shook his head, as if he couldn't possibly say.
I think even Tom Rose felt left out, surpassed, as if, of all of us,
Tom had chosen the grown-up option, the world of London, and
glamorous emaciation, and unspeakable depravity. He was
certainly thin. When I lay next to him on his tartan blanket I
could play the piano on his ribs. His sexual technique had
changed. He'd learned a thing or two at university. I can't honestly
say that it had got any more tender.

Suddenly it hits you. You realize how stupid you've been. You
begin to understand that all those wonderful things you were
counting on to happen – because they must happen, mustn't
they? otherwise life would be unbearable – won't happen at all.
You won't come across ten thousand pounds just lying in the
road, and you won't get that beautiful snow-white horse. Nor will
anyone spot your special talents – do you even have any? – and
whisk you away to a future worth all that waiting. To fun. To life.

You begin to really grow up now. Childhood is over, finished.
Finito
. Sorry – no sneaking back to the safe confines of dreaming
how it might be one day. One day has come. You look around and
realize that this
is
life, horrible boring horizonless life, what you
see before you. Tough luck. Hard cheese.

It just took so long for the thunderbolt to strike me. Maybe I
simply didn't want to see.

Perhaps I shouldn't generalize. Maybe those amazing things do
happen to some people.

So Isolde never asked me, maybe never intended to ask me,
asked me only as an automatic part of her newly acquired social
graces. Or perhaps I'm being unkind. Perhaps she thought that
every
body went down to London sometimes – surely they must?
– and that when I was there I would surely drop in. Or that I
would be there as part of Tom's entourage. Tom would invite me.
Tom, who leaned his chin over my shoulder or put his hand
roughly through my hair as he was speaking to someone else, as if
I was his pet or part of his furniture, Tom would surely ask me
there.

Only Tom never did.

*

Lorna tells me Hanny Gombrich has gone. She tosses this remark
away like someone throwing a winter scarf off on entering a warm
room. She tells me – when I decline to ask – that Hanny has had
to go away. The treatment here wasn't working, she says.

I say nothing. I even give her a little smile.

But when I'm walking down the corridor away from her, I feel
sick. I hope that Lorna isn't standing in the doorway of her room,
watching me. My hands tingle. My feet keep walking but I don't
know how.

This is how it is with friendship. This is how it always ends.
They go away, they always go, because something else looks a
better option, and because they never loved you enough in the
first place.

My God, there is a library here!

You know who told me about it? Wet Lettuce. Of all people,
Wet Lettuce enjoys a good read.

Which means she'll be disappointed.

I have only just found it, a small room, shut away, windowless,
as if they were ashamed of it. There are two shelves of books,
half empty, and a trolley standing in the middle of the floor,
taking up most of the space. One of those trolleys they use in
the public library when they are putting back all the returned
books. It has upward-sloping shelves at the top so that the
books can lie with their spines to the ceiling, easily seen. At
the public library, people always hang around the returned-books
trolley as the librarian fills it up, waiting to catch a glimpse;
as if the books that other people have chosen are likely to be far
superior to anything they might choose themselves, from off
the ordinary shelves. Personally, I never use the public library,
not unless I need to look something up. Or if I can't get
books elsewhere.

This trolley is empty, except for a square biscuit tin and a blue
biro, the transparent plastic sort where you can see the tube of ink
inside. The people in here could do things with a biro like that. All
kinds of things.

And I've been subsisting for all this time on
Little Women
. I've
read it four times so far. Jo is the obvious favourite, the one you
identify with. Personally I think Marmee is a stinker. You're
supposed to like her but she's so kind and noble it positively reeks.
Laurie, of course, is lovely. He's made for Jo, you'd think. Laurie is
the boy next door.

So what kind of books might they have in here? Safe books,
neutral books, soft pappy comforting books, like the kind of food
that builds up poor undernourished bodies, damaged systems,
digestive tracts that must not be put under the slightest stress or
strain.
Complan
books.

Not something like
Jude the Obscure
. That might give people
ideas.

When I say ideas, I mean what my mother meant by the
word. She didn't mean things you might get from Plato or
St Augustine, or even Marx and Engels. Philosophical, political.
Her definition was more all-encompassing. She never liked
ideas. Ideas were matches in the wrong hands, fireworks
bought by under-age children from less-than-scrupulous
shopkeepers. Dangerous, potentially damaging, troublesome.
Ideas were not neutral. 'You'll be giving her ideas,' she might
say, or 'They've got ideas above their station.' Heaven preserve
us from
that
.

The whole point of books, it seems to me, is that they give
people ideas. They furnished me with ideas for years, ideas I
would never have picked up otherwise. Ideas philosophical,
political, sexual, metaphysical, ideas general and ideas specific.
They stretched the inside of my head like a very large foot pushing
its way into a very tiny slipper. And whosoever the slipper fits
... Well, you don't get to marry the prince, but it certainly is your
passport to other worlds, beyond the kitchen hearth and the
cinders.

No wonder my mother was suspicious of them.

So what do we have here? To lighten our darkness, to lighten
our burdens in this vale of woe? Well, there were several
romances, to judge from the vivid covers, but no doctor/nurse
ones, not very healthy in this context. Various animal stories,
a paperback autobiography of someone who moved from
London to Cornwall and had a happy life, an abridged book-club
version of the
Pickwick Papers
. Something uplifting about a nun.
And a book of light verse, covered in soft blue blotting paper. I
could feel the strawberry-flavoured nourishment smoothing its
way through my body already. I wondered if this was the kind of
dairy produce Hanny Gombrich was allergic to. I looked at my
arms to see if I was coming out in blotches. They all have that feel
of cheap books, too, books no one cared about sufficiently, when
bringing them out, to print them on good paper, with reasonable
margins around the blocks of text. The paper has that rough,
pulpy feel, as if it is made of pressed breakfast cereal, and already
it's turning yellow. The pages won't open well, they're stuck too
tightly to the spines. These books don't actually want to be
opened and read.

I have borrowed the volume of light verse. Someone has
written the title on the paper cover in the turquoise Quink we all
favoured in the third year at secondary school. The verse is all very
inoffensive. Still, it makes a change.

I borrowed it and I signed it out in the exercise book on
the library trolley. Someone had already ruled the columns.
I wrote the title of the book and my name and the date I
borrowed it. Well, no, not
my
name. I put Hanny Gombrich. Only
because she's the one person here whose first name and surname
I know.

Ever the dissembler.

The other night I saw an ambulance pull up. When there is
any urgent business to be seen to they don't bother with the
hundred and twenty shallow steps that wend their leisurely
way through flower beds to the big front door. There is a service
road that comes in round the back of the buildings. I can see
it from my room. An ambulance drew up and a couple of men
in uniforms sprang out, and opened the back doors, and
disappeared. After a bit someone was stretchered inside it. Doors
shut, driver jumps up in the front. Five minutes and it was
all done. The ambulance drove smoothly away. No flashing lights,
no sirens.

And now Rose is absent from Activity.

First Hanny, and now Rose. It's getting lonely in here.

I wonder if Hanny went home? I refuse to ask. Or have they
sent her to some far more specialized place, where they've
strapped her to a bed and plugged her with tubes and pumped
the very life force back into her? Where they purée roast beef
and Yorkshire pudding and proper gravy and flood her system
with nourishment? I can imagine the kind of stare she would
give them, a basilisk stare, full of the bitter knowledge of
humankind, that would turn them to stone inside their crisp
white uniforms.

Actually, I can't imagine Hanny anywhere but in this place,
on our usual seat, on the afternoons that were fine enough for
them to let us out into the gardens. Hanny only exists here,
and then.

Perhaps I made her up.

Question: you're redecorating your room. Would you choose
(a) a strong modern colour scheme? (b) pastel shades and pretty
florals? (c) plain walls and floor to show off your collection of
valuable antiques? or (d) keep to the same as before but freshen it
up – you don't want to spoil the homely atmosphere with its
family photos and mementoes?

This is what I wished I had: Mattie's picture of their house,
executed in thin lines with a hard pencil – 2H not 4B – a
technician's, not an artist's pencil.

Patrick's sketches of me. His paintings – sitting, standing, in my
jeans and naked, staring hard at him, bold as Manet's Olympia, as
if to say, 'What the hell is it to you?'

My photo-booth picture of Tom, ugly as it is.

The dictionary and thesaurus that Uncle Bob gave me.

My fluffy pyjama case.

That's probably all.

Not much to ask, is it?

Lorna has surprised me, appearing in my room. She has never
been in here since that first day. She stands by the window and
picks up my copy of
Little Women
between her finger and thumb,
like someone picking up an item of someone else's dirty underwear.
A shred of evidence. I'm sure she isn't supposed to be here.
She is supposed to see me in the room off the entrance hall, with
the dinky picture. She is overstepping the mark again. Out of
desperation, I like to think.

'You're very privileged to be here, you know, Cora.' If she had
an ounce of sensitivity, even an eighth of an ounce, she wouldn't
call me by that name.

'
Cora
.' I must have muttered it. I didn't mean to.

'What's in a name?' says Lorna in a sing-song voice. 'A rose by
any other name would smell as sweet.'

I look at her blankly.

She's in a good mood today. '
Romeo and Juliet
,' she says, with a
smile.

Oh. I never read that one.

She runs a fingertip along the window sill, almost flirtatiously.
Not looking for dust.

'While you're here, you have the possibility of taking advantage
of all that we can offer.'

She was talking about Group and Activity, I suppose. Making
the most of Mike's long shins and Moira's pointy toes. Learning
how to make snowmen and penguins out of clay. And finding out
just how badly off other people could be, people like the Old
Crone and the Young Crone and Rose.

'Benefiting from our expertise. While you're here.'

There seems to be some veiled threat in those last words. She
continues to look out of the window at the sunny fields. Her voice
is light, as light as a bit of thistledown bowling over the flower
beds, wafting over the grass. Of course, what an innocent piece
of thistledown is doing in the circumstances is letting the wind
cast it where it will so that it can land and in no time at all send
up a
thistle
.

Lorna remains at the window. There's more she wants
to say.

'I know you don't think much of us here, Cora. I know you try
very hard to despise us.' She pauses, maybe to let it sink in. 'I can
understand that.' Her voice is reasonable, so very reasonable.
Shockingly reasonable. 'It's not so strange. You need to think that
we don't know what we're doing, that we can't succeed. That we're
never going to get to the bottom of things. That you're cleverer
than us.' Another pause, like a lead weight in the air. 'Don't you,
Cora?' Nothing. 'Don't you?'

She takes a turn around the room, light on her feet, like
someone just dropping in to see what the place is like. As if she's
never bothered to visit these upper rooms before. Just curious.
She gets back to where she started, facing me.

'And you are very clever, Cora. You are. I'm impressed.'

Oh no. Please, no. Please don't let Lorna be the only person to
spot my special talents, pick me out from the anonymous crowd.
Please don't let her be the one.

She looks down at her empty hands. 'Such a pity, Cora. Such
a pity.'

After another long silent minute between us, she asks, 'Do you
want to know what I think we've got here?' I am sure she is not
allowed to do this.

'No. I don't. No, I don't,
thank
you,' I say. We are so well brought
up. Always say please and thank you. Never put our elbows on the
table because that would be bad manners; never put our shoes on
the table – even for cleaning – because that would be bad luck.
Always mind our Ps and Qs, not that I have ever known what they
were supposed to stand for. Probably something in Latin, which
was not on my curriculum. I am thinking all these things rather
hard, and rather loud, in order not to hear what Lorna is saying,
to shut her out. To shut her up.

It's July, and hot outside. Lorna is wearing her lemon lacy-knit
top and – hooray – not the brown check skirt but a new one in
fawn cotton. It's hot indoors too, and I'm sitting here in my jeans
and my washed-out mauve T-shirt, which was once a blazing
purple but is now the exact faded colour of a Parma Violet
pastille. Fugitive, that's what they call these colours that can't last,
won't last, run away.

It's hot, and through Lorna's peek-a-boo jumper I can make
out a salmon-coloured undergarment with a panel of lace
insertion which does not coincide with the lacy panels worked in
lemon wool. Here is someone patently unprepared to deal with
life, telling me I must deal with mine.

'I'm sure you do, really. I'm convinced of it. It will be such a
relief to get it out into the open, won't it? Finally unravel all those
made-up stories, get to the bottom of what's real and what's not.
And then we can begin working on that.'

She gives me a look, a sincere kind of look, as if to say
We both
know what I'm talking about, don't we?
Only I don't, I haven't a
clue what she's going to say. But I'm sure she is overstepping some
mark, and that this is a deliberate strategy, the latest move in her
campaign against me. I wonder if I should report her to the
authorities? Except that she
is
the authorities.

She sits down beside me on the bed, in that prissy way of hers,
knees and ankles together, hands clasped in her lap.

'So here's what I think happened, Cora. You tell me if I'm
wrong ...'

I will be forced to put my hands over my ears, which is probably
safer in the circumstances than putting my hands over
Lorna's mouth. Or round her throat. The last thing I want to hear
is her professional opinion.

So I turn the sound off. I sit here and watch her, and her mouth
moves. She is a frog, an alien, one of those puppets on TV whose
rictus mouth moves in no synchronization whatsoever with what
the human voice overlaid is saying. Lorna speaks and I listen, but
I can't hear her and I can't see the shape of the words her lips are
forming.

I sit here and I am a still life, a dead nature.