Living In Perhaps (7 page)

In place of friends, we always had just family. There weren't even
very many of them. My favourites were Dad's two sisters. They
have wonderfully unsuitable names. Like me, really.

If you asked me to describe two women named Gloria and
Stella, this is what I'd say:

Gloria is one of those terrible names full of hubris. Like Victor.
Why do parents name their children like that? How do they think
they're ever going to live up to such a pompous name?
To the
victor the spoils. In excelsis gloria
. They give birth to a tiny red
screaming baby and say, 'I know! Let's call him Victor!' Or
Gloria.

Besides, Gloria is a barmaid's name. A woman who dyes her
hair an unnatural shade of red, like copper-beech leaves. A
bosomy woman with thick lipstick, which she leaves in a U-shape
on glasses and on the resting filter tips of cigarettes. A woman
who prefers men, and hasn't really got time for women. Sic transit
Gloria.

Whereas Stella, that's a prettier name. I can see why you might
go for Stella. That name would fit a baby
and
a grown-up.
Our
dear little Stella, our star
. Stella would be a finer-boned creature
altogether, with cloudy light-brown hair and a vague expression,
wide-set grey eyes. A Stella could never be forceful. Indeed some
people might say she was put-upon, she shouldn't let others take
advantage of her sweet nature. But Stella would smile, vaguely,
prettily, and say that it didn't matter. A Stella would be a magnet
for men, not consciously, not trying to attract them, but finding
them at her elbow in droves, falling for her sweet helplessness,
wanting to take care of her. Honourable men.

That's what I would have said.

Only
our
Gloria and Stella are the other way round. Stella has
broad hips and broad cheekbones, a kind of ox-like distance
between her eyes which doesn't lend to the impression of
intellect. Her hair might have been cloudy once, but now it's
whipped into a dry frenzy by a vivid chestnut rinse. She favours
knee-length pencil skirts, and sling-back high heels, and blouses
with a froth at the neck or all the way down the front. I can
picture them so clearly: thin nylon blouses of shell pink or baby
blue, which always show the line of her brassiere straps and the
way the flesh of her back bulges above and below the fastening.

Stella has never married. The right man has never come along,
or has never popped the right question. She's always got a
boyfriend
, if these huge men, determinedly peripheral characters,
could be called that. It's certainly what she calls them. There's
Dimitri, who I heard about but never met, and Wally, who drives
a van, and who once waved to us as we walked down the high
street, and Gerald, who travels in paint, and isn't in the area
much, due to the nature of his job.

Once, while we were visiting, Gerald called at their house to
retrieve something of his. He didn't seem like a boyfriend so
much as someone who was angry, and in a hurry. He stayed in the
hall, with one foot apparently nailed to the front step, and I saw
his hand gesture impatiently at Stella to cut the introductions
short. No one else seemed to notice this. They were busy craning
their necks and saying, 'Oh, is it Gerald? Tell him to come in.
Come on in, Gerald!'

I always seem to see the things other people don't see.

Gloria is older than her sister, smaller, thinner. She has doubtful,
worrying, washed-out blue eyes. Her mousy hair is lit with a
glamorous flash of white at her front parting. 'Oh, my awful grey
hair,' she says, sweeping it back with one hand, but I thought it
was the best bit of her. She never tries to dye it out.

Gloria is married to Eddy, who is in the merchant navy and
away for long stretches of time. She puts up with this very well,
but I know the rest of the family believe that it isn't the exigencies
of a sea-borne job that keep him from home so much, but other
girls in other ports that Gloria doesn't know about. Or even
suspect. (Eddy is a good name for him;
Eddy
sounds shifty.
Wriggling away, impossible to pin down. Not like reliable
Ted
.) I
know this because, as Stella says, little pitchers have big ears.
Because my parents never got the habit of telling us things, I
quickly acquired the habit of listening out. Listening in. You could
usually pick up something worth knowing when one of Dad's
sisters was around.

Stella and Gloria, and Eddy, when he's home, live together in a
little house in the hilly part of town, back behind the beach. The
old
part of town, my mother says, disparagingly. Beet Street, their
road is called. Something to do with the sugar beet, my dad says;
not that he knows what. The streets are short but meandering,
and the houses come in various shapes and styles, though all of
them are small. Stella and Gloria's house, in a terrace, is painted
brick-red with white steps and white window ledges. The front
door opens straight on to the pavement and above it there's a
sinister indentation where there was once another window, filled
in and painted over long ago. A lot of the neighbourhood houses
have them, I don't know why. The house once belonged to
Stella and Gloria's, and my dad's, parents. Every so often Stella
picks up some object and says, 'Oh, this old thing! It's about
time we got rid of this.' And Gloria always replies, 'Oh no, that's
Mum's, we can't just throw it out.' So everything stays there, just
the same.

The only relation we hardly ever saw was Uncle Bob. He was
our mother's brother, and he didn't live in our town. He lived in
Basingstoke, in a flat at the top of a three-storey block,
purpose-built
.
The fact that it was purpose-built seemed to make living in
a flat all right. He worked for a company that made pipes and tiles
for the building trade. He worked in an office with a desk and a
telephone of his own. That this was good I knew from the way my
mother dropped it into the conversation. Bob, you gathered, was
a step up in the world from hairdressers and flats over the shop,
and a husband who went to sea, and working in a fish-and-chip
shop as Stella did. It was a step up from Gough Electricals and a
blue boiler suit. All this went unsaid. But it was felt. It was
felt.

So – now I had a best friend. I hugged this notion to me. I carried
it round. It made me feel warm every time I remembered it.

Not only a friend, but a fully functioning paid-up normal
human being for a friend. Someone other people might want as
their
friend. Not just that desperate pairing up I'd seen in playground
and classroom, of two hopeless kids with nothing in
common, in order to stave off being absolutely on their own. I
hadn't ever done that; I had my pride. My strategy was hopeful
hanging, wistful drifting, pretending to the casual observer that I
was absorbed in doing something or just temporarily on the edge
of the crowd.

One of the good things about Barbara was that she didn't want
to know too much about me. Only: What's your favourite colour?
(Blue.) How high can you jump? (Don't know.) What grade piano
are you? I'm grade three. (Oh dear – grade one.) Are you righthanded
or left-handed? (Right.) Have you ever seen a ghost? My
brother has. (No, but I once saw a cloud in the shape of an old
man's face. Absolutely correct in every detail, even the hairy
beard.) Do you know what sign of the zodiac you are? (
What?
)
Can you do this? Look, I bet you can't. (No, I couldn't.)

These were the kind of questions I could answer without feeling
shame. These were not questions to trip the unwary, new
to the perils of friendship. These questions were not pass or fail.

Barbara said, 'Come round. Just come round. I'm always
bored.' She said it in the reasonable tones of a shopkeeper saying,
'We're always open,' or a generous host who promises, 'Just drop
in – we're always here.'

I knew I'd take her at her word. I couldn't resist.

So I got to know Barbara and her constitutional boredom. She
was like some fickle, spoilt princess in a fairy story: she needed
constant amusement. I soon discovered it wasn't to be a friendship
of equals. But then, is there ever a friendship of equals? I was
happy enough, ecstatic even, to be allowed in as the junior
partner. Barbara was a wonderful source of information, and she
made me laugh. She made us both laugh until our sides
ached, until the muscles of our faces assumed a jaded rigor, until
our leg bones melted. I've never laughed like that with anyone
else.

'You're Gemini, that's the Twins. Look.' She showed me a
picture in the back of a magazine. 'You're going to have emotional
problems this week. Don't think about throwing a party. You'll be
full of self-doubt, but try and look on the bright side, because
financial matters are on the up and up.' She rolled over, swinging
the magazine away from me. 'I'm Aquarius, the Water Carrier.
I've
got emotional problems too ...' She paused to give a belly laugh.
'The moon in Taurus – we don't want to know about the moon in
Taurus – blah, blah, blah. Wednesday is a good day for a party.
Time to make up quarrels with those nearest you. Financial
matters could cause worry. Well, that's OK because you can lend
me some of yours.'

I didn't know what to make of it all. We didn't have horoscopes
in our house.

'Is it true?'

'No, of course not. Whoever gives a party on a
Wednesday
?
They're for weekends, so that people have got time for hangovers.'

We didn't have hangovers in our house either.

Barbara chucked the magazine aside. 'What would you do if
you found a thousand pounds just lying in the road?' she asked.
'No – ten thousand pounds?'

'Take it to the nearest police station,' I said, without having to
think.

She screwed up her face. This was not a good answer.

'What if you didn't? What if you kept it? What would you do
with ten thousand pounds? Just lying there, all over the road, piles
of notes. And no one can see you picking them up.'

I had to admit it was tempting, when she put it like that. So I
bought loads of sweets, and a pair of fur-topped boots, and a
silver Rolls-Royce. Then she (who found herself in just the same
happy circumstances, coming across a stranded load of banknotes
lying in a deserted lane) also bought a car to drive alongside me,
and loads of presents for her family. I hadn't thought of my
family at all. The new-found wealth quite put them from
my mind. I felt mean beside her. But then she bought a snow-white
horse with an exceptionally long mane and tail, and I did
just the same, and while we were galloping around her back
Garden, prancing over low jumps and shying at tree stumps
and tennis nets, I forgot all about the presents for the folks back
home.

When we had collapsed in the grass, puffed out, due to the
high-strung nervous energy of our thoroughbred steeds, it
occurred to me that now I was part and parcel of those squeals
and laughter which back at home we heard issuing over the
hedge. I hoped my squeals and laughter were indistinguishable
from genuine Hennessy ones. Otherwise I'd be rumbled. I put the
thought away, out of sight.

Instead I said, 'But if you
did
hand the money in to the police
station and no one claimed it, they would give it back to you.
Eventually. Or some of it, at least.'

'Would they?' Barbara screwed up her face suspiciously. '
Would
they, though?'

A worm of doubt crept inside me. Barbara seemed to know.
She was so very worldly-wise. She had opinions and knowledge
and used big words, and didn't hesitate to exercise them all at
every opportunity.

I gazed at her. Her long dark curly hair looked as if it had never
seen a comb. The clothes she wore were her sister Isolde's hand-me-downs,
she told me, hardly worn, well cared for, until they hit
Barbara. They didn't suit her. She stuck on any old thing, and any
other old thing to go with it. Given a bit more flair, a bit of care,
she could have looked bohemian. As it was, she resembled the
child of neglectful parents, a mother too poor or too browbeaten
to notice her skirt had part of the hem hanging down, her
unpaired socks, her collar half out and half in. Today the blouse
she wore had a grease stain down the front. Her skin was slightly
olive, and there was a big bruise on her wrist, the colour of a
plum. 'My brother shut it in the door, the stupid nutcase! He
wants his brain seeing to. Have you got any brothers?'

But she knew. She already knew there was Brian. She had even
seen me with him, out on his bike on the pavement.

'Have
you
got a bike?' she asked, something else she knew the
answer to. 'We've only got one. It doesn't matter because we don't
like cycling very much. We used to have another but I think
Eugene took it down to London with him, or maybe he left it
somewhere and it got stolen. My mum's got a bike, too – it used
to be my grandma's – but we don't ride that one. It weighs a ton.
Does your mum ride a bike?'

Tricky ground, now. I was less keen on this line of questioning.
Was it suburban to ride a bike, or not to ride one? I shook my
head.

'
My
favourite colour's blue, too,' Barbara said. So I was saved
from answering. I could have rolled over and embraced her for
the flightiness of her brain, the way her thoughts short-circuited,
flashing here and there and here again, like a butterfly flitting
about a high-summer border, completely spoilt for choice.

Her next question was 'What do you want to do when you're
grown-up?'

We were lying under the fruit trees at the end of their garden. I
stared up through the thin curtain of leaves, floury and puckered
and twisted with disease, to the pure blue sky beyond. We liked to
chew on grass stems, something strictly forbidden by my mother.
('There are creatures in them. You swallow them and they get
inside your body and ...' But she never followed up on this
promising information.) So we lay and chewed the juiciest stems
we could find and contemplated what we would do with our lives,
should we survive the invasion of the grass-stem parasites.

'I was going to be a famous dancer,' Barbara said, with her air
of awful self-confidence, 'but Tillie said you have to start ballet
classes when you're about four to be any good. And I haven't
started at all yet. It was either piano lessons or ballet and at the
time I had a verruca which really hurt.'

I had never thought about the future. To me it wasn't a long
and tempting gallery with intriguingly labelled doors leading off.
With pictures of what might be at intervals along the walls, and
every so often diamond-paned windows letting you peep outside
at different views. The future was school stretching endlessly
ahead, with maybe the treat of a half-term holiday in the offing,
the final reward of the Christmas break miles on down the road.
Right then the thought of the summer holidays coming to an end
scared me. The future was new shoes to break in, a new class
teacher to get used to. The thought that I would one day be a
grown-up, out in the world, that I would wear shoes without
socks, shoes with stockings, have a job, have a husband, was
grotesque.

'I'm not going to marry,' Barbara said, writhing to get a stone
out from under her backbone.

'Oh, nor am I!' I said, with relief, finding that this was an
option. Of course it was an option; my aunt Stella was not
married. But then Stella's whole purpose in life – leaving aside her
career in the fish-and-chip line – was to Find A Man. A perfect,
or, at a pinch, less than perfect M-A-N with whom to
settle down
.
Settling down was what my mother called it, as if unmarried men
and women were dangerous and erratic, liable to set off chain
reactions of inconstancy in others, in settled married others.
People who were not married were unanchored, brittle things,
casting around hopelessly for a set of rules and regulations that
applied to them, and were liable to get cracked and damaged in
the process. More damaged as the years slipped by. The only way
to stop the rot was by getting married. The rules for married
people were quite clear. My mother felt happier when the rules
were clear. So settling down seemed to be the ultimate end
for everyone, no matter how old they got before it happened. I
couldn't really see how you
could
avoid it.

'I'll go to London and have fun,' Barbara said. 'I'll be a single
girl. But I might have children, in the end.'

'I won't have children,' I said, just to see if the sky would crack.

'No, Isolde's not going to have any children,' Barbara went on,
in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice. 'She says she doesn't like
them.'

So all things were possible in the Hennessy world-view. In their
best of all possible worlds.

When I got home, nobody said anything. My mother was busy
with the Hoover, then with the treadle sewing machine. So
perhaps the roaring of one and the clattering of the other – and
always in the background the cheerful musical tones of the wireless
– covered up all evidence of my treachery.