Living In Perhaps Read online

  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?

  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.

&nb
sp; 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.

  10

  Our Fortunes

  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?'