Meeting the English (5 page)

‘Mum!' shouted Juliet. ‘Mum! What did you do to my dress?'

*   *   *

At Hampstead, Struan got out and was hustled into the lift. It was astonishingly hot. He was disappointed how old the machinery seemed, how low-tech and undersized. The air inside was like the steam from his Gran's pressure-cooker. If it was as hot as this in Cuik, no one would have mentioned anything else. The whole town would have been out talking about it, as if a flying saucer had landed. Surely, even here, it had to be unusual, had to be worth mentioning. ‘Boiling, isn't it?' essayed Struan to the lift, and no one replied.

*   *   *

‘I didn't touch your dress, Juliet,' said Myfanwy, on her knees on Jake's floor, dustpan in hand, vast arse in the air. She sat up, took an inch of the hem in her fingers. ‘Shrunk, has it? Cheap, was it?'

‘You washed it!' said Juliet, fat tears welling in her fat black eyes. She sat on the bed, raising more dust. ‘You shrank it just to make me feel bad, you're always doing things like that. And now I've got to spend the whole holiday with you, because Celia's cancelled Italy!'

‘Oh,' said Myfanwy (pleased, as she had been putting off paying Celia's mother the air fare), ‘that is disappointing. Is that because of her health?'

‘She's fine!' shouted Juliet. ‘She's fine, she's just got a boyfriend and wants to go on shagging him!'

‘Well,' said Myfanwy, ‘natural enough. When I was your age—'

‘Yeah, you were shacked up with a fifty-year-old pervert, bully for you, and I'm letting you down because I'm not shagging anyone, well you can shut up, OK! You can put a sock in it. 'Cos I'm not shagging anyone and probably I never will, and anyway, I'm probably a lesbian, I keep thinking about Celia's hips.' And Juliet collapsed on the filthy bed, and sobbed.

(Actually, this last bit was sort of put on. Juliet thought it would be horrible to have no clothes on with Celia, so scratchy and bumpy and yellow. On the other hand, it would be lovely and silky with someone like Shirin, like getting into a freshly made bed.) Myfanwy sat down beside her.

‘You can't,' she said very certainly, ‘be a lesbian, Juliet.'

‘Why the fuck not?' asked Juliet.

‘Because,' said Myfanwy, ‘you're too fat. You can't be a fat lesbian, see, because people will just think that's why you are one. Because you can't get a man, you see. Lesbians don't want lesbians like that.'

Juliet took one hand, then another, away from her face, and looked at her mother's pink plate of a face, angled towards her, perfectly sincere. It came to her very clearly then that Myfanwy had said a terrible thing.

Juliet got off the bed and backed across the room. She put her hands on her hips, wrinkled her nose up to her eyebrows, and her eyebrows to her forehead. She scrunched her shoulders like a small pig about to spring over a high wall. Myfanwy, recognizing the signals, stood up in a demonic cloud of plaster dust.

These were their starting positions: identical to the blockings of mother and girlfriend in Act 3 of
The Pit and Its Men,
arguing over the put-upon Pip. (Myfanwy had been the girlfriend in the original production, and had reprised as the mother an alarmingly small number of years later.) Now there was going to be a row.

*   *   *

Struan emerged from the Tube, consulted his map and compass. The air was shimmering and a snake of sweat crept down his back. He passed a shop called Whistles with women's shorts in the window, coloured ones, and silky halter-neck tops, no more than scarves. No one wore that sort of stuff in Cuik, those were abroad clothes, holiday clothes, but he could see that here, in the heat, they were maybe necessities. Down the pavement came a girl in just such an outfit, a girl with a little dog and a dandelion of gold hair, but when she passed Struan he saw she wasn't a girl at all: she was old, and her legs were wrinkled and orange as a party balloon gone down.

Then he started to worry about his own clothes. He'd no shorts. He'd grown out of the ones he'd taken to Lanzarote, and hadn't needed them since. He had a pair of PE shorts, but he'd left them in his drawer at home. Maybe Gran could post them.

*   *   *

The great thing about rowing frequently is: you speed up. In the attic, Myfanwy was already asking for the one thing that Juliet's father had ever done for her.

Juliet had been working on the answer: ‘Sports Day, when I was six. I lost the egg and spoon, and I really didn't want to do the sack race, and Daddy came and got me and took me to the pub instead. He got me chocolates.'

‘And drank himself into a stupor in a corner,' said Myfanwy, ‘and I had to come and get you. Did you forget that bit?'

‘Yeah,' said Juliet, ‘but you didn't. You're so bitter, it's just sad.'

‘Your father doesn't know how old you are, Juliet,' said Myfanwy. ‘He doesn't know what school you go to.'

‘He's ill,' said Juliet, squeezing out a tear. ‘Of course he doesn't.'

Suddenly Myfanwy put down the bag of ceiling and sat on the stained bed. ‘He's ill now, Juliet,' she said, without acrimony, ‘but he didn't ever know. He didn't ever care. Not about you. Especially since you turned out so plain.'

This was a new one. It made Juliet sit down. She looked down at her belly, sticking out over her jeans, and her tiny silly fat hands. She remembered her father saying, ‘Get her out of here,' at the dinner table. She couldn't remember why, or even how old she was at the time, just the bald head shining, the yellow eyes looking anywhere but at her.

‘Look,' said Myfanwy, ‘at Shirin. That's the kind of woman your father can see. He can't see the others. No body older, no body younger, no body fatter: we don't exist.' And for a bleak little moment, Juliet saw that was true, and, looking at her mother's matching belly and matching fat hands and matching despair, that her mother felt the same way. About women. About Juliet. About herself, too.

‘I can't stay with you though, Mum,' she said, ‘can I? Not all summer. Now I'm not going to Italy. We're driving each other nuts. I'd better stay here, with Dad.'

They both stared at the plaster dust, settling in the shaft of sun from the Velux. Often as Juliet had volunteered to move in with her father, it had never before been a real idea. Now Juliet said, frightened:

‘I could try and help, with Dad. I couldn't do the nappies, though. But I could do walks, maybe. Look, I'll sweep up the ceiling. I'll get the vacuum.'

‘Shirin doesn't want you here,' said Myfanwy, ritually. ‘You'll cramp her style.'

‘You haven't asked her,' sniffed Juliet. ‘It's not fair, you should ask her!'

And Myfanwy bustled past her out of the room, and leant over the stairwell.

‘Shirin!' she called. ‘Shirin!' until the door below sighed open, and Shirin slipped out, white as a candle, and gazed up the stair.

*   *   *

Struan reached Yewtree Row. Mr Fox was clearly wrong about it being a grand address. The houses were half the size of the Edinburgh lawyers' where his dad's will was read, and were made of brick, not granite. Some of them even had iron ‘S' braces on the brick and were surely near to being condemned.

Struan checked the number on the door against the note in his hand. He put the note in his front pocket. He put his sports bag on the steps. He took a hankie from his back pocket, and carefully wiped his hands: there was black on the white cloth, shiny, like boot polish. Struan thought about
Our Mutual Friend,
and
The Pit and Its Men,
and dust heaps, and the Chernobyl disaster the year his dad died, the radioactive birds flying in from the West. He thought about Cuik, so clean since the mines closed, and how fast the air moved there, dashing between the bings like Gran's feather duster. He thought about his life so far and the worn place in the doorstep and the squintness of the step and the heavy, overbearing smallness of the door case. And Struan stretched out a clean Scottish finger towards the tarnished bell.

5

The lady who answered Struan's ring was wearing a tiny dress, ruched like the bathroom curtains, and she had gold eye make-up on though it was only the morning. ‘Tarty,' said Gran in his head. But this lady was grown up, and she didn't look tarty, she looked foreign, the most foreign person ever. She was looking up at him with a pursed, firm, shiny gold mouth. She was holding a paintbrush.

‘Mrs Prys?' said Struan. And, when she nodded, he held out his hand. ‘I've come to help with your husband. I'm Struan.'

The lady placed her hand, golden, be-ringed and tiny as child's, momentarily in his white fist. Then she retreated inside the house, calling, ‘Myfanwy!' And a much larger woman with plump, pale, freckled arms waddled down the stairs, struggling with an immense dusty bin bag. A wee fat girl appeared at the top of the stairs, said, ‘I am too staying, Mum, so triple bollocks to you!' in a voice carrying as the radio's, and disappeared again.

The next bit was in slow motion. The large lady shouted, ‘Juliet!' and twisted up the stairs to shout louder, but the bag over-balanced her and she was precipitated suddenly forward, plaster and dust fountaining up the stairwell. Struan hurdled over his sports bag, and caught her, his two huge hands on her tweed bosom. Those were Struan's first handfuls of breast, and they felt like a settee. Hastily, he moved his hands under her arms, lifted her clear of the stair, and set her on the floor.

‘Sorry,' he said, ‘sorry, I was aiming for your oxters.' Both women stared at him, bemused. They didn't seem to understand him. ‘Armpits,' he essayed, remembering his English.

‘Peits?' said the pretty lady. ‘You are Dutch? I thought your name is Strew-anne?'

‘Uh-huh,' said Struan, ‘Struan, that's right, Struan Robertson. From Cuik. Ah've come to help out?'

The pretty lady nodded at him, blinking in the sun. Her eyes were long and amber-brown, and it wasn't just gold painted round the edge of them, the backs of them were gold too, textured, like the foil from a packet of cigarettes.

‘Super,' said the fat lady, dusting herself down. ‘Super to meet you, Struan.' And she held out her fat hand.

The beautiful lady waved her paintbrush. ‘My gesso,' she said, ‘will over-dry.'

The fat lady smiled. ‘Let me make Struan some coffee,' she said.

And she shouted up the stairs, ‘Fresh sheets, Juliet!' Then the fat lady opened a door, and ushered him through it, and the beautiful one disappeared like smoke.

*   *   *

The sunlight was in Phillip's eyes. No one had come, after the doorbell rang. He could hear voices from the kitchen: Myfanwy, setting someone straight, someone else joining in.
Juliet,
Myfanwy was shouting,
Juliet.
Or maybe it was the radio, or a dream of the radio. He had written a play like that for the radio, once; mother and daughter, having a fight. Women all hate each other, like cats. He'd said that at how many parties, got a laugh, usually, lots of laughs.
Juliet, Juliet,
said the radio. His daughter was called Juliet, but she wouldn't be old enough for such a part, not yet, she was a little thing in a round school hat, and he'd said to Melissa, what about a part for her in the films, you know, child star, and Melissa had said, too stout, darling, not enough range, and it was quite true, quite true, you could see the stiffness in her little face. Looked just like her Grandma Davies. Silly bitch, that one, he was fairly sure she was dead, her.

Phillip wasn't dead, him: he could still hear
. Juliet.
Banging on.
Juliet.
They were still banging on. He wanted them to come and move him. He wanted a cigarette. This was the bit that was a damn nuisance, the itch in his eyes, and not being able to do anything about it, the not being able to say. All the words accumulating like pee in the bag.

*   *   *

The fat lady made Struan a coffee in a fancy metal machine, but not a sandwich. Then she talked. Her mouth was very small and pink and her face very big and loose and the one wobbled the other. Her eyes were huge and a hard shiny blue-green, like glass beads. And her voice was sharp-cut too: big round ‘o's like an elocution teacher. She kept referring to herself in the third person. Mrs Prys.

She was saying the nurse was in the house 7:00am to 9:00am, and 6:30pm to 8:00pm, for getting Phillip up and putting him to bed. Apart from that, Struan was in charge, though he would have help at meal-times from Mrs Prys and generally in between from Mrs Prys who would be just upstairs, so nothing would really be at all burdensome, there was no need to really do much except keep Phillip clean, and Phillip was honestly not sentient, and of course Struan was absolutely free to amuse himself when Phillip was asleep, he could really do anything he pleased, except, that is, go out unless of course an adult, Mrs Prys for example, happened to be around and he'd asked and Mrs Prys didn't mind, and Struan could have Saturday evening off by arrangement and she expected that he could just make his own meals from what was in the fridge or the larder, and that the room was nearly prepared upstairs, a couple of things just being sorted out, Struan wouldn't mind helping. It was a lovely room, it belonged to her son really, but she expected Struan wouldn't mind camping out for a bit in the sitting room if Jake wanted to stay, that wouldn't be for a while and she was sure meeting Jake would be a real thrill, Struan could receive phone calls by prior arrangement but should make outgoing calls from the box on the corner—

Then she said, ‘I'm sure you've got a lot of questions for me.'

Struan put the earthenware mug back on the table, leant back on his Swedish chair. He was a terrible long lad: it was all he could do to stop himself swinging backwards on two legs, the way he did at home. There were so many things to wonder about, he hardly knew where to start.