Living In Perhaps (9 page)

Right at the top of the house Patrick had opened the attics,
painted them white and made them into a studio. A long breeze
blew through all day, and here he painted, or in the garden if the
weather allowed it. It was Patrick I'd seen through the hedge that
day, preparing one of his big canvases. I often caught sight of him
down by the summer house, hammering and stretching and
sizing. It was what he did, while the children ran round him,
slamming tennis balls and jumping on molehills, playing poker,
swearing, kicking open doors. And while Tillie washed up and
washed clothes and squeezed dough and sat on the back step with
one of her home-made cigarettes (the type of cigarettes I thought
only men were allowed to smoke) and looked at books and taught
us things.

Now that she knew my name, Tillie sang out, 'Carolyn-nie,
Caro-lina,' when she met me in the hallway or the kitchen. She
always seemed cheerful, energetic, girlish. There was one day I
remember particularly, when she seemed so full of light, and
everything amused her.

Barbara and I were perched on the kitchen table, eating apples,
and Tillie was drying knives and forks with a frayed tea towel.
'Where do you live, Carolyn?' she asked.

'Oh, not that far ...' I said. I glanced at Barbara. I knew she
would kill me if I got any closer than that to my address. Heaven
forfend that
Barbara
should be the one to introduce something
suburban into the Hennessy household.

'You're at the Wren as well, then?'

'No. I know Barbara from piano lessons,' I replied, glad to tell a
truth.

'Would you like some ice?'

Tillie must have seen the perplexed look on my face, and went
into peals of laughter.

'Look, I've made some ice cubes. What do you think?'

She opened the fridge door. She had laid out the ice cubes on
three plates, blue and green. The cubes were made from frozen
orange squash, lemon squash and lime cordial. I thought her taste
in colour exquisite then. We sat on the veranda in the shade, sucking
ice cubes till our cheeks hurt.

It was that same afternoon that Tillie asked about my reading
matter and pulled out the huge book on Dutch masters especially
for me. She hefted it on her knee and said, 'I think, Carolina, that
you'll like this.'

And nobody before that day had ever consulted my tastes, or
entertained a single thought about what it was I liked.

I miss being able to go out here. I've heard that in time you're let
out on little journeys, though always accompanied by a member
of staff. If you're deemed fit to go, that is. I don't know who
decides. Or what
fit
looks like. As far as I can see there aren't any
prime candidates in this place – except maybe Hanny and me.

I miss stupid simple things like going shopping, and being able
to just wander about. I lie on my bed here and think about all the
shops I've known and what was in them, and I imagine the kind
of shops I'd like to visit and what I'd buy there if I could. If I
suddenly found ten thousand pounds lying in the road. And if
I could suddenly get out of this bloody place.

When Brian and I were little the shops at the end of our road
seemed the ultimate in adventure and indulgence. There was a
sweet shop on the corner, the wool shop, the greengrocer's, and
another one which every so often went out of business and
opened up again as something quite different. Our favourite,
Brian's and mine, was the sweet shop. We homed in on the
comics, the counter full of sherbet fountains and penny chews,
the rack of cheap plastic toys hanging by the door. As the streams
of trippers flowing past increased, the shopkeeper grew canny and
expanded his stock into ever new and fascinating lines until it
spilled out on to the pavement. Bottles of fizzy pop for thirsty
travellers, crossword puzzle books for the beach or the homeward
traffic jam, postcards, sunglasses, buckets and spades, inflatable
lilos, plastic boats and plastic cars to keep the kids quiet. Then
ballpoint pens to write the postcards with, straw bags to carry the
drink bottles and the toys in, rubber beach shoes, sunhats with
cheeky messages, ashtrays with plaster seagulls perched on the
rim. I'm sure most of his trade was homeward bound. This was
the last port of call to buy that hat, that postcard, that blow-up sea
monster they'd looked at and longed for down on the prom, and
then thought better of. Last chance to spend their money.

The wool shop was Mum's favourite. We never passed without
peering into the window, where the display was protected from
bright sunlight by a layer of cellophane the exact same colour as
Lucozade. Inside the shop it was shadowed and dim, as if the
contents were precious, easily disturbed. The balls of wool were
stored in little cells on the back wall of the shop with all the
intricate precision of a beehive. My mother understood
the mysteries of two-ply and four-ply. There were long conversations
about buying eight ounces now and having the rest 'put
by'. Mrs Drew, behind the counter, would store the other balls of
wool in a crumpled clear cellophane bag, marking it with a pencil,
to be claimed when needed, or not, as the case might be. She was
consulted over the glass counter about patterns and quantities
and needle sizes. Under the glass, which I was commanded not to
lean on, were rows and rows of cotton reels, in all the colours of
the rainbow and far more. Below these were glass-fronted drawers
of hair ribbon, lace, elastic and bias binding. Everything came in
a choice of colours. The sweet shop didn't offer rubber rings or
beach hats in every shade imaginable, just bright yellow plastic
and white cotton. But it was the prerequisite of the wool shop to
imagine that human beings liked to make a choice, a slow and
deliberate, tantalizing choice. Now should it be lilac, or should it
be mint? There again, the lemon was nice.

Brian didn't care for the wool shop. He couldn't see the point
of all that deliberation. He couldn't care less if his jumper was
grey or green, so long as it wasn't pink. It was a female place, a
quiet, careful, female place. Even more so in that, as I later discovered,
under the counter in discreetly thick white paper bags,
Mrs Drew kept the bulky supplies of sanitary towels her
customers whispered requests for. Kotex, and Dr White's. Twelve
luxury towels, the packet said, making them sound like an
indulgent treat, like a Badedas bath. When I was sent I always
bought Kotex. Dr White's, with that medical aroma, was a scary
name. Sickness, emergency, catastrophe was Dr White's arena of
action. Not swathing oneself in luxury towels.

Then there was the café. This was not on any of our usual
routes, being up the main road, beyond the roundabout, on its
way out of town. Also, we were forbidden to go near it. It was a
place for trippers, that hated category of humankind. Trippers
were common. And the road was busy, with no pavements. We
were likely to get sucked into the traffic and tumbled to bits, like
the unidentifiable, torn but still furry things we sometimes
spotted in the middle of the tarmac. 'Don't ever let me catch you
going near the café,' my mother warned. No, we won't ever let you
catch
us, we replied.

The café was a bungalow, too, of sorts: a low ramshackle building
with a wooden frame and an overhanging wooden canopy at
the front. It had a forecourt of muddy pink gravel for cars to pull
into in search of thick white cups of strong tea, and egg and bacon
breakfasts, and soup of the day (tinned). There were peeling
posters along the front, for long-gone circuses and firework displays
and somebody or other's big band sound which just showed
the mouth of a saxophone and lower legs of a musician in the
kind of trousers nobody wore any more.

The fact that the café was prohibited made it more appealing to
us. Mandy was always pining to go along there when she came
to visit us on Saturdays. Whether we would give in or not felt like
a matter of power, until she learned to threaten, 'If we don't go, I'll
tell that you did anyway.' So we usually went, creeping along the
roadside on the strip of dirty grass between the traffic and
the bushes, hoping no one who knew us was driving past. We
didn't ever go inside. We just hung around and peered in through
the grimy windows, and read the menu, which was fixed to a post
out front. Sausage and egg. Egg and chips. Sausage, egg and chips.
And beans. You could have beans with any combination. Mandy
used to stand nearest to the door, her nose raised to catch the
seductive scent of frying pans. Then we'd tear another strip off an
old poster and scurry home, out of harm's way.

In town there were the big shops. Behind the seafront was a
huge main street, with slabs of buildings: department stores,
offices, banks. Sometimes I would go in with Mum on Saturday
mornings on the bus, if there was something important to be
bought, like new shoes or a winter coat. It was the one activity
where Mum didn't find my proximity a nuisance. I don't remember
Brian coming with us, though he must have, sometimes. Even
he must have needed shoes, and school uniform, from time to
time. I don't remember us being driven in by Dad. Shopping, my
mother implied, was a female duty. 'Oh, I daren't trust your
father,' she'd say. 'Goodness knows what he'd come back with!'
Men were impatient, awkward shoppers: it made them choose
badly, neither wisely nor well. And they couldn't see the point of
the shops we preferred, where leisurely choice and comfort were
doled out in equal measure. Because shopping was also, just
possibly, a female
pleasure
.

I thought the department stores were heavenly. A world with
looser purse-strings was on display here, an arena of endless
things
. Everything was arranged to engage the senses. You walked
from place to place on patterned carpet, taking in the sights, the
scents. There were chairs at the end of the counters, not for
the sales staff but for weary customers, and on the top floor, after a
smooth upward ride in the lift, there was a tinkling restaurant. A
department store was like Mandy's bedside cupboard full of sweets,
repeated over and over on a grand scale, and catering to every taste.

The salesladies, dressed in black with white collars, had fierce
plucked and painted eyebrows and fiercer hairdos. My mother
never tangled with them, if she could help it. She liked to find
what we were looking for herself. It was purgatory if the right size
was not there, under our hands. She hated to ask, and if one of the
gorgons bore down on us with a 'Can I help you, modom?' she
would always put the item hastily down, muttering, 'No thanks,
we're just looking,' and hurry off to another department. Like
shoplifters almost caught in the act.

But I loved it. I would have liked to test the gorgon's mettle, and
mine. I would have said, if she'd let me, 'Yes, do you have this in
blue? In a size ten? Do you have anything similar, only
cheaper
?'
But that would have paralysed my mother with embarrassment.
These ladies were not to be troubled. They were formidable, like
headmistresses. They mustn't know what you were up to. What
were the limits of your purse, or the size of your bust. As far as
Mum was concerned, it was better not to be noticed at all.

Lorna doesn't ask about my brother Brian. Not at the moment. I
don't know why she's so circumspect. Perhaps she's saving him up
for a special occasion.

When he was younger, Brian was small but thickset, built like a
tortoise or an armoured tank. He had short dark hair, run
through with a wet comb until you could see its tracks across his
head, like plough marks on a field. He wore National Health
glasses with brown wire rims and his eyes were hazel. He wasn't a
thinking
boy; he was good with his hands.

There were only a handful of other children who lived in the
bungalows, and we often played with them, although they weren't
what you'd call friends. I think we might even have hated each
other. But it was a case of expediency. Children herded together
because adults expected them to, and what else was there to do?
'I'm playing out,' we used to call, following up quickly with a slam
of the front door, so that the words 'Don't slam that door!' always
pursued us up the path. Playing out was the main pursuit for
children of primary school age, an all-encompassing term,
slippery and useful.

There were two sisters, younger than us, who were often out on
the pavement, chalking squares for hopscotch or jogging up and
down to the slow slap-slap of a skipping rope. I'd get Brian to tie
them into harnesses of string, and then we'd gallop them down
the pavement, imagining they were our chariot horses.
Sometimes the string was under their arms, but sometimes we
made them hold it in their mouths and pulled it tight. And there
was a very small boy who rode a tricycle with a huge bin on the
back. I'd keep him distracted and Brian would sneak up and put
great heavy bricks in the bin, or rattling sticks and stones, for the
pure pleasure of watching him pedal away, stop, frown, go round
to the back and look inside. If it was bricks, he would take them
out and carefully stack them in the gutter, so that he wouldn't
bump into them; but if it was sticks or stones he would often have
a look and leave them in there, then pedal off again, noisily.
Leaving us in a helpless heap of laughter. He always fell for our
tricks.

We were forbidden to go into the fields or along the main road:
much too dangerous. We had to keep to the pavements outside
the bungalows. Neither Brian nor I asked anyone back to our
house – we knew without enquiring that our mother wouldn't
have liked it. Nor did we get asked into anyone else's. It wasn't the
done thing. Or maybe they just didn't like us.

At school there were groups of girls that I hovered on the edge
of, girls I would seem to get friendly with one day, but come the
next day I would be back at square one again, ignored, left out,
not knowing how I had got there. I used to look at pairs of 'best
friends' walking arm in arm around the playground, or sitting
side by side on the steps, and not know what it was that cemented
them together. Then Barbara came, loose and friendly, seeking me
out. She didn't seem to mind at first when, out of shyness, I
rebuffed her. She didn't seem to care whether or not I wanted to
be her friend, but she kept on offering. So that was how it was
done, I thought. You opened up like a flower, taking the sun,
taking the rain, the wind, whatever comes. I looked at the pairs of
girls with a new eye, cool and detached now, because I had a
friend, too.

I noticed that Brian had made a sort of friend as well, a boy of
his own age called Pete whose family had moved into the road
behind the shops. He and Pete didn't talk much. They rode fast up
and down on their bikes, or dodged behind bushes and made
machine-gun noises. They knew what they were doing, and they
didn't need to chat about it.

I don't know why we found this friendship thing so hard to do,
Brian and me. Why we hung back, and couldn't make ourselves
likeable, and didn't understand the rules. Maybe it was a hangover
from our years in the children's home, or getting adjusted to our
new family. All that time I just can't remember. Must have had
some effect on us. Well, that's one of my theories. It's almost
something I might welcome a professional opinion on, from
Lorna or some eagle-eyed colleague of hers. Almost, but not
quite. Not worth going out on a limb for. I mean, it's just a
theory.

Brian must have seen I'd started to go next door, but he didn't
comment on it, and he didn't tell on me. It was an unspoken
knowledge between us, something to do with my parents' hatred
of the hedge, with the frightening glamour of the shrieks and
laughter that came from beyond it, with my deep desire not to be
suburban and the deeply ingrained suburban nature that was in
both of us.

Or maybe I'm making all that up. Maybe he was completely
unaware. Which would account for his formidable discretion.

Barbara never came to call on me. As far as I know she never set
foot on our garden path. Maybe she didn't want to taint herself.
She'd drift past the front gate, and if I spotted her as I was gazing
out of my bedroom window I would hurry outside. 'I'm just playing,'
I'd call to my mother. 'Playing out.' Once, stooping to put
empty, rinsed milk bottles on the doorstep, Mum glanced up and
asked, 'Who's that?'

'What – that girl?' I sounded terribly innocent. 'Think she lives
up near the shops.' Brian's friend Pete lived
up near the shops
. It
was a useful address, nicely unspecific, by which anyone exotic
could be safely located and explained. My mother took no more
notice, went inside and shut the door. The windows of our
kitchen and our lounge looked out on to the back garden. If they
hadn't, she might have noticed more.

I'm glad I've got a friend in here. I'm glad I met Hanny. You
wouldn't want any of the others for your boon companion. I went
into the lounge this morning and there was a blonde woman
standing in the middle of the carpet, just wringing and wringing
her hands, scrubbing them with invisible soap and water. So I
backed out into the hall, and there stood Rose, with a bread roll
she must have stolen from the breakfast table, tearing it into
tiny little pieces without looking at what she was doing, and
scattering them all over the hall floor and down the corridor. A
trail of bread balls: Hare and Hounds, but nobody wants to catch
up with Rose.

God, it's just like being back in the school playground, except
that
everyone
's friendless now. Apart from me and Hanny.

The Hennessys, like kings and queens, didn't mix with common
folk. Or that was the impression they gave. They lived aloof,
certainly the adults did. Just as much as my parents, only in a
different way. Their home was their castle and they carried on as
if they'd been there for generations, ever since the house was built,
pretending that they couldn't even see the incursion of neat little
redbrick, red-roofed bungalows, creeping up to their very
doorstep. And like kings and queens they only consorted with
other royalty, ambassadors from foreign courts, a flock of
outlandish friends who alighted at intervals, arriving from
nowhere and departing at the drop of a hat.

'Whose car is that outside?' Stella enquired, one Sunday
afternoon when she was round to tea. 'That great big shiny
Humber?'

My mother flashed her a 'don't ask' look, but my father,
undoing the bottom two buttons of his knitted waistcoat and
settling back in his chair with a sigh, said, 'Oh, you know,
next
door
,' and tossed his chin and flung up his eyebrows in one
speaking gesture. I liked the way he could do that. It made me
think I knew what he had looked like as a boy, a schoolboy sitting
unimpressed at the back of the class.

'Next door?' repeated Stella, lightly. She knew all about the
hedge outrage. Not above a bit of stirring was good old Stella. 'No
– I was just thinking – I like the look of that car.'

'Blocking the road up with some visitors or other,' grumbled
my father. 'Causing inconvenience to other people. Ought to build
a proper driveway. They've got enough room.'

'More tea, anyone?' asked my mother, already filling Stella's
cup.

'And I liked his waistcoat,' added Stella, teasingly, plying the jug
of evaporated milk over her mandarin orange slices.

'Whose?' Dad asked sharply.

'Chap getting out of the car when we arrived. Red, it was.
Silk, I should think. Bit of a swagger, a red silk waistcoat.' And
she glanced at my father's grey-marl cable knit, handmade by
my mum.

'Give it a rest, Stella,' said Gloria, who had finished eating and
was sitting with her arms folded. 'Honestly, man-mad,' she added,
as if that was all it had been about.

One Saturday afternoon, in the summer after I met Barbara,
Mandy was at our house. As on every Saturday afternoon. It was
hot and overcast, and I suppose we were all irritable. 'Why don't
you go out?' my mother suggested. 'Mandy might like to go to the
sweet shop. You've had your pocket money.' Her voice was
wheedling and kind. Oh, thanks a bunch. Mandy has a temple to
confectionery in her bedroom, Mum. Mandy is a nutritionist's
nightmare. Mandy
is
dental caries.

Of course, we said nothing and sidled out, followed by Mandy,
who gave us a sly, opaque look, and wiggled her fingertips at the
adults in her version of a goodbye wave.

Outside the sweet shop, the mica glittered in the pavement.
We stopped to read the dirty postcards on display, hoping
to prolong the moments while we were still in possession of
our pocket money. Mandy rammed the bubble gum machine,
casting a look up through her lashes towards the open shop
door. 'This ain't much good,' she said. We went inside. We chose
the cheapest things – penny chews, red liquorice bootlaces,
translucent purple lollipops, gob-stoppers that left your tongue
ripped and raw – all so that we could control the sharing
out, handing over as little as possible to Mandy. She stood back,
empty-handed, in her pocketless pink shift-dress, waiting to
be given.

Back on the pavement, the sky was pewter and there was a roaring
noise in the clouds, maybe an aeroplane with engine trouble,
maybe thunder. Mandy gave the bubble gum machine a final
vicious smack on its top and a single egg-yolk-yellow gumball
dropped out. We walked home, not speaking.

Down our road came a four-legged hunchback on a bicycle. A
low screaming sound issued out of it. It was Mattie, on the back
of their old silver-painted bike, with Tom pedalling and steering.
They shot past us, Mattie's arms stretched out wide. They must
have veered round the roundabout, which was thankfully quiet at
mid-afternoon, and came back, following a serpentine path,
swinging from side to side on the sandy tarmac of our road.
Swerving a violent ninety degrees, they disappeared through the
gateway and were enveloped by the hedge.

'Who's that?' Mandy asked. Brian looked vague, as blank and
invisible as Mandy herself when the chores were being given out.
'You must know them, they went in right next door to you.' She
turned back to me, accusing. I shrugged.

The hunchback appeared again, tearing out through the
hedge, clearing the pavement airborne, and landing with a yell.
This time its back half was starfish-shaped, legs sticking out at an
angle, arms held up in the air. I recognized Barbara's brown
sandals, her tanned and scratched legs. Tom, hunched over
the handlebars, pedalled madly. They screamed in unison, a
pair of unmatched threadlike piercing squeals, as they passed
us. Brian clapped his hands over his ears. They seemed to be
doing it
for
us, or
at
us, this reckless display. They're claiming
me, I thought. Or maybe they're just teasing me. It was
impossible to tell.

Mandy turned, walked backwards for a couple of paces,
following them with her narrowed eyes, still licking at her
lollipop, the insides of her lips stained blue. Before she turned
around again she gave me one quick flicking glance, just the
way a snake's tongue darts out and in; and I knew that whatever
Brian failed to see or failed to remark on, Mandy had spotted
in a second.

After that, it was as if the rest of the Hennessys suddenly
became visible. Their magic cloak had been lifted. I quite often
saw one or another of them going up and down our road. The
Van Hoogs' insect-like car crawling along, with Mr Van
Hoog, who could hardly see over the steering wheel, peering
anxiously ahead, his hands on the wheel like two mouse paws.
Or Patrick's van pulling away, evil-smelling smoke belching
from the exhaust. He drove a van because it was better suited
than a car to transporting the large canvases and other pieces
of equipment he used. The art school he taught at was in
another, bigger town, inland. He turned off at the roundabout
and roared up the open road with his rude black smoke
pouring out behind, like Mr Toad, keen to get away. Once I
even spotted Tillie riding her upright ladies' bicycle with the
basket on the front, pedalling stolidly along on her way back
from the shops.

I never hailed them in the street. I was shy of presuming
too much. And the Hennessys, being Hennessys, didn't appear
to see me.

Although that's what it's like, being suburban. You think about
whether you are going to greet people. Will greeting them get you
in deeper, deeper than you are prepared to go? Will ignoring
them, and maybe pretending to have something in your eye, let
you off the hook, or will it cause offence? You're always weighing
up and balancing these tiny social commitments. You fear to get
sucked in.

With the Hennessys, though, I was prepared to go as deep as I
could. Deeper than I could see, or breathe.