Living In Perhaps (6 page)

What amazed me about Barbara's family was that they all seemed
to really
like
each other. That made me think about my own
relations.

Every Saturday afternoon, almost without fail, my dad's
cousin Bettina visits us. Which means that Mandy visits us
too, virtually every week. We hate Mandy, Brian and I. It is
the one thing that we are united in – our hatred of Cousin
Mandy.

I've always thought the name Bettina sounds bouncy, like bedsprings.
Bettina is the fun of bouncing on beds, and
in
beds. She's
quite a bit younger than my dad and his sisters, and she always
seemed to me like
a woman of mystery
. She never mentioned her
parents, and no one ever mentioned her husband, if she had one.
She must have had one at some point, I always thought when I
was younger, since she had Mandy.

Bettina lives across the far side of town from us, in a district
that looks much like ours, with scrubby trees and sandy roads.
But it's just a bit more built-up, and a bit less respectable. She has
a flat above a hairdresser's in a short parade of shops. The
hairdresser's is called 'Charisse' and Bettina is the second
stylist. The first stylist is Maureen, who owns Charisse. I can see
why she wanted to call it that. I know what she was after. Sort of
French, sort of Hollywood, sort of glamorous. Sort of an uphill
slog, too, maintaining that image, since everyone else calls it
'Maureen's'.

Maureen used to work in a fashionable hairdressing salon in
London, and that's why she calls herself and Bettina, who do all
the cutting and curling,
stylists
. It costs slightly more to be
attended by the first stylist than the second stylist. The only other
person employed there is the shampoo girl, a woman of
about ninety whose name is Ida Carr. She sweeps up all the
fallen hair and writes names down in the appointment book
with a very blunt pencil, which she keeps licking to make it write
at all.

Occasionally my mother goes for a perm at Charisse. I go with
her, waiting for her on one of the plastic chairs, smelling the
smells and watching everything that goes on. For an ordinary
shampoo-and-set Bettina will oblige in our kitchen, but a perm
she considers more technical. Home perms, Bettina says, look like
something the cat's dragged in. Even in qualified hands. Better to
come to the
salon
.

This is why we've always hated Mandy. She's six months
younger than Brian and two years younger than me, but she
makes us feel foolish, and not because she's clever. In some ways
she's stunningly stupid. But she's one of those effortlessly knowing,
worldly girls who can mimic adult gestures and tones of voice
perfectly whenever she wants to. Mandy spends the hours after
school (late night Thursdays) and Saturday mornings in the
salon, flicking through tired magazines, sorting pins and curlers
into their different trays, and rearranging the artificial flower display.
Customers are always giving her sweets. They bring sweets in
specially for her. At Christmas they come bearing little packages
wrapped and labelled for Mandy. 'Put this under your Christmas
tree, darlin',' they say. At Easter she gets more chocolate eggs than
anyone I've ever come across. And on her birthday – 'Mandy's
coming up to seven soon,' Bettina would shamelessly advertise;
'Ooh, when's your birthday?' the customers would ask, and
Mandy would lisp 'Next Fwiday' – she has hair-slides and colouring
sets and tiny baby dolls in baskets, anything small enough to
be wrapped and slid into a handbag and then produced like a
magic trick when the customer is under the dryer.

'Just a little treat for Mandy,' they say. 'Bless her.'

What is it they know, or suspect, about Mandy? Brian and I discuss
this in low resentful whispers. We hope it is a life-threatening
disease that they nod and murmur about as they tie plastic rain-hats
over their fresh shampoo-and-sets. Otherwise, what is fair
about the loathsome Mandy, not even pretty, receiving so many
undeserved tributes?

And she's such a fraud. Our sense of injustice glows hot every
time we see this sly know-all give way to a wide-eyed lisping baby
as soon as any adult comes into earshot. Don't they notice? Why
are they taken in? Their voices turn to honey and they croon,
'What was that, Mandy, sweetheart? Won't they let you have a
turn?'

Haven't they heard the way she speaks to us out in the garden,
or seconds before they walk into the room? Don't they notice our
dropped jaws and scowling expressions? Or is it that they just
don't care? That they know something about Mandy that makes
them favour her above us at every opportunity?

She's younger, for a start, and that puts us at a huge
disadvantage.

'She's younger than you, remember,' they keep saying.

Which means that any cheating on her part has to be overlooked
by us – 'Mandy doesn't understand the rules yet' – any
dispute over whose go it is on a bike or a skipping rope is resolved,
in her favour, by an adult intervening. She gets let off any chores
that have to be done, by virtue of the fact that she's supposed to
be too little to be of any help. So we'll be drying the tea dishes or
sweeping up the grass cuttings, and there is Mandy, pausing
astride
my
bike, watching us with a glazed, soppy expression,
mouth hanging slightly open, as if she doesn't really know what's
going on. And then she'll ride off, fast and purposeful, standing
up on the pedals. Her jaw is set, and she's whistling 'Colonel
Bogey' as professionally as any station porter. And the grown-ups
never
ever
notice this bit!

Mandy is small and scrawny, with legs like sweet pea stalks, and
a little, baffled, white face covered in blotchy fawn freckles that
stand out as if they're half an inch in front of her skin. Her eyes
are very light grey with pinpoint pupils – she can look either
stupid or very, very mean. Her hair is a wispy aureole of red
strands that get sweaty easily, and stick to her forehead, which
turns pink after any exertion. Are these all signs of imminent
demise? We hope so. We don't mind weeping at her graveside, if it
means that our bikes are our own on Saturday afternoons.

The rest of the family routine goes like this. Every two or three
weeks we go to tea on Sunday with my aunts Stella and Gloria,
and every two to three weeks Stella and Gloria come to tea with
us. Sometimes Stella isn't there when we arrive, or leaves before
we do. The assumption is that Stella, being a single woman, has a
duty to see to her love life, while the rest of them, being married,
have a duty to fulfil family obligations. Sometimes, though less
often, Stella doesn't make it over to tea with us at all. Then Gloria
says to my mother, 'Stella's not with us today,' and gives a quick
flick of her eyebrows. She'll never say, straightforwardly, 'Stella's
out with Gerald this afternoon,' or 'Wally has taken Stella for a
drive.' It's always as if some plot or intrigue is taking place, some
I told you so
or
let's see what comes of this
.

None of the women in the family likes cooking – it isn't something
you
could
like. Cooking consists of toiling for hours in a
steam-filled kitchen. It means roast meat and boiled vegetables
and fried eggs and bacon and burnt toast. So, for a treat, on days
when the aunts are coming to tea, or we're going to them, everything
is shop-bought and served cold. Tins of ham and fruit
cocktail and evaporated milk are laid in. Battenberg cake in
perfect squares or fruit cake laced with fat red cherries is bought
from the grocer's in town. Sometimes boxes of cupcakes with
orange or caramel icing. I like these best because you can carefully
eat away the sponge from underneath, saving the thick layer of
icing for last.

After the meal they send us children outside to play, while they
drink more tea and talk. At our house it's fine, we can play French
cricket in the garden – if we're careful – or ride our bikes up and
down the pavement. But at Stella and Gloria's there is only a small
paved backyard. The shed and the coal bunker take up most of the
space, and there's usually washing hanging from the criss-cross
line. The only thing you can do is prise up bricks to find
woodlice and tease them, or climb on the coal bunker and
stare over into the neighbours'. Where what you see is much the
same.

We aren't allowed into the street. It's steep and there's a busy
road at the bottom. And besides, playing in the street in this part
of town is
common
. There are no wide grass verges here, no
tarmac paths perfect for bikes and hopscotch. It isn't children's
territory.

In winter we have to amuse ourselves indoors. At home we can
go to our own rooms, but at the aunts' we must be visible, sitting
on the scratchy brown carpet and playing Ludo or Monopoly
with sets which have lost most of the pieces. Or cards. They always
have packs of cards, often with new unbroken seals. But we have
to play with the old packs, where the corners are bent up. We play
pontoon or snap or sevens, in a lacklustre sort of way. It's hard to
fill the time. There is no question of whining, though, or asking
to go home. It's like being in the waiting room at the dentist's –
you just have to sit still and be quiet, while the time ticks slowly
away.

What they really want is for us to be out of the way so that they
can gossip. If we are in the room they lower their voices and spell
out certain words. Any hint of the alphabet and my ears would
prick up. I don't think Brian was tuning in at all, but I did, all the
time. They didn't seem to think that we could spell. And even
before I was sure what M-A-N did spell, I knew it was one of those
things to look out for; it meant intrigue and danger and suspense.
Whenever there was an M-A-N involved, you had to watch out.
How true.

Then there was Bettina's. We didn't visit very often, because the
flat was so small and the only place for children to play was on the
wide pavement outside the shop, which again was
common
.
Though we knew for a fact that Mandy played out there all the
time in the fine weather, from the familiar way in which she
shouted greetings to other kids outside, or shouldered the bubble
gum machine in passing, with the confident air of getting something
free in return.

When her mother was out of the room, she would lean
from the upstairs window and shout, 'Oyah! Derek! Give us
some!' to a boy riding a bike one-handed while eating a sherbet
dip, or 'Oyah! Phyllis! Saw you last night. Uh-
oh
. Not sayin' 'oo
with!'

We knew what
common
was, and Mandy was its living embodiment.
Only the grown-ups never twigged.

But every Saturday afternoon, almost without fail, Bettina and
Mandy came to visit us. Bettina, after a long morning in the salon,
would fling herself down in an armchair and shuffle her broad
squashed shoes off her swollen feet.

'That's another week done, thank God!'

We weren't allowed to take the Lord's name in vain, but Bettina
was never rebuked for it. My mother would hurry to fetch a cup
of tea and the biscuit barrel.

'Mandy, would you like a Bourbon cream?'

Mandy, with her roomful of girl-toys and hoard of sweets,
never brought anything with her.

'Go and get your new puzzle,' my mother would say to me, with
a little nudge, 'Mandy might like to see it.' Or 'Why don't you get
out the bikes and let Mandy have a go?'

Nothing in the wide world takes so long as standing by and
waiting while someone else has a turn. Mandy was a helpless
creature, needing to be entertained. We had to be the hosts. Not
that she ever showed hospitality to us when we visited. She would
take us into her bedroom, a boudoir with frilly pink curtains and
matching bedspread, a nature reserve of fluffy animals. Slyly she'd
open the door to her bedside cupboard and show us the store of
sweets inside, the Crunchies and Milky Ways and Love Hearts,
arranged like a shrine. Sometimes she would even take one out,
unwrap it slowly and put it into her mouth, her pinprick eyes on
our faces, disingenuously, as if she was looking in a mirror and
not terribly interested in her reflection. We'd swallow helplessly.

'I can't give you any,' she would say. 'Your mum doesn't let you
have sweets before tea.' Or, less truthfully, 'My mum doesn't want
me giving things away.'

Bettina didn't know or care, we knew that in our hearts. But we
had nothing cunning in our repertoire with which to answer
back. Then Mandy would itemize what was left, and rearrange
them, and slowly shut the cupboard door.

Brian and I plotted. We planned how we would distract her,
and then one of us would creep in and steal some of the sweets
from her hoard. We had it worked out down to the last detail, but
we never put our plan into action. Somehow we knew that when
Mandy found out that one of her Milky Ways was missing, even
one little Love Heart or Rowntree's Fruit Gum, a great convincing
wail would go up and all the grown-ups would rush round her,
cooing sympathetically. And
we
would get the blame. The blame
for coveting one sweet out of a shopful. The blame for
being
greedy
.

What was it she lacked that we had? What was it that made us
so fortunate? And Mandy so deserving of their all-out sympathy?
We just couldn't work it out.

I don't like to think about why I'm in here. There are quite a few
things I don't like to think about. So I have to find other things to
fill my mind with. There's a hell of a lot of waking hours in
the day to fill when you're only thinking careful thoughts.
Even the sleeping hours you can't rely on.

I read somewhere that old people can remember all kinds of
things from their childhood but they can't recall what they did the
day before. I can see why they might want to do that, might want
to dwell on the
then
and not the
now
. I hope I'm not getting like
that. I'm only eighteen. I've got to have something to look
forward to, haven't I?